Thor's Archive
Last week I received a letter from a girl named Courtney (her last name is withheld for Internet use) asking for sponsors to help her fund a rip to Washington DC for 2 weeks.
Courtney was selected from her peers as an excellent student to represent Nebraska. The trip will cost Courtney more than $2,000 - a huge amount for a girl of her age to raise.
Courtney will be my guest on my weekly radio program, Compute This today. I am asking my listeners to contribute whatever they can afford to help this smart and outgoing girl make the trip to Washington DC and show the nation what Nebraskan's are made of.
Please click the donation button below to contribute. Any amount is sincerely appreciated, but remember that Courtney needs more than $2,000 to make the trip!
Special thanks to Husker Access and Cartridge World for their corporate contributions!
So you decided to come back for the second installment? Thanks!
In this installment Shoe and I get into the DVD set a bit that Joel will be offering soon as well as my favorite and least favorite people from the show. Enjoy!
In a previous post I told you all about the exit interview I had with Shoemoney after I was eliminated from the Next Internet Millionaire in Episode 11. Shoemoney agreed that we should video the interview since we both live in Lincoln.
He uploaded it to his Google Video account, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be playing for all people. Shoe is a busy guy, so he didn't have the time to edit it and make it all pretty. The video Shoe uploaded was the raw video - a 58 minute view. I took some time and edited it down to three 10 minute segments and uploaded them to my YouTube channel. While you are watching do me a favor and subscribe to my channel, ok?
Here is the first of the three Segments. Come back tomorrow to see the next installment (oh yeah, it blows, but I can hopefully get three visits out of you instead of one!)
So you have a blog. You have read all of the posts about generating readership and making money from the eyeballs you attract. You are executing the techniquues you have learned, but not having any luck.
Your stats blow, you spend more time blogging than eating in a day, your children hate you and your wife is packing her things. What should you do? Take a shot at someone bigger than you. Ruffle some feathers and maybe, just maybe you will get some attention.
I was making my daily rounds to the blogs I read frequently and a post on Shoemoney's blog cauhgt my eye.
Jake Rinard was taking a shot at Shoemoney accusing him of cheating in his recent Feedburner subscription win over the infamous John Chow.
Shoemoney did what many bloggers of status do not - he responded. In a classy post, Shoemoney thanked Jake for the 112 new readers and 56 new Feedburner subscribers. In fact, he showed the sincerity of his comments with a backlink that others would pay more than $2,500 for through ReviewMe.
Over 24 hours later, Jake isn't doing quite as well with only six comments on his article about Shoemoney and slightly fewer RSS subscribers than before he wrote it, but never the less, he probably got a bit of a traffic bump from the article.
In another example, a professional blogger by the name of Garry Conn wrote a scathing post about online entrepreneur and creator of the Next Internet Millionaire Reality show, Joel Comm.
Joel Comm responded a bit differently than Shoemoney. Judging from a retraction post that replaced the scathing post from two days earlier, Joel Comm privately contacted Garry Conn and got to know him. In the course of their conversations, Conn became a super-moderator on the Next Internet Millionaire forum, received a number of free Joel Comm info-products, and was recently given a copy of Charles Trippy's Viral Video Fever DVD for a blog giveaway.
In a matter of a few days Joel Comm managed to transform Garry Conn from a vocal critic into an avid supporter without sending any traffic to his blog or responding to his criticisms publicly.
So what do these two examples have in common? Both Garry and Jake both received traffic they would not have otherwise had by setting their sights on people who rank above them in the internet hierarchy.
So the question for you struggling bloggers becomes who are you going to aim your verbal shotgun at? Take careful aim and you might just get some traffic, or at least a free AdSense Secrets DVD ;-)
Don't worry - I guard my Mac 24/7 and I caught my 15 month old son playing after everyone was in bed. Watch your Macs at night people!
Thanks for the secondary button tip, Trisha! I am SURE this will make my iMac a whole lot more fun to use!
I was messing around with Technorati yesterday evening and noticed some funny search results for blogs.
If you take a look at this search term it seems that someone is gaming Technorati's blog search system.
But what I can't figure out is why... It looks like whoever is doing this is hosting their own website on a local computer at home because when I try to go directly to the offending blog URL I get an OpenDNS error page.
I don't think this is a backlink game - the link text is WAYYYYY too long for Google or any other search engine to pay any kind of attention to.
Anyone have any ideas why someone would want to do this other than to be a pain in the a$$ to Technorati's coding staff?
Last Saturday I did something that I have not done since 1994 - I bought an Apple computer.
After editing more than 5 hours of HD quality video on the 12.4 inch widescreen of my poor little HP business notebook, I decided it was time to give the Mac Cool-Aid a try. I went to the Apple store in at Village Point in Omaha, NE to take a look into a computing world from which I had been absent for quite a while.
The last Mac I had was a Mac Classic 2 that I bought from a guy for $400 in 1994. I used the heck out of that little thing for school and some of the platform games of the time until it was replaced by the IBM Aptiva PC that I won in a contest in 1995. I have been PC ever since.
When I walked into the Apple store it was like a whole different world. The store was very nicely designed and just looked cool - kind of like the computers. I was approached by a sales guy and my first instinct was to dismiss him and say I was just looking. I have been selling PCs for more than 8 years, and I know my way around the jargon.
I knew I was going to be doing a lot of video editing, so I started off looking at the Power Macs. These are the more powerful members of the Mac family. But my confidence started to slip a bit when I saw some of the prices in relation to the hardware that you get with a Mac. For almost $2,500 I could get a mac with 2 GB of memory, a mid-range dual core processor, and a 500 GB hard Drive. Similar hardware in a PC would cost 1/2 that amount.
I asked one of the sales guys to compare the Power Mac to a similarly equipped PC running Windows Vista. I know what a PC can do with that hardware (which isn't much when it comes to video). The Mac guy was nice enough, but he was completely unprepared to compare a Mac to a PC and he seemed to get annoyed when I named specific features of a PC and asked if the Mac had them.
The longer I stayed at the Mac store, the more I felt like a Catholic at a bar mitzvah. As I compared a Mac to a PC, the associate seemed to become more and more curt. I decided to buy an iMac that had nearly the same features as the Power Mac at 1/2 the price (still $1700 for for what would have cost $900 in a PC). The only thing I didn't like about the iMac was that the hard drive was only 320 GB.
I jokingly said to the Mac Guy that as soon as I got home I would be cracking that puppy open and replacing the hard drive with a 750 GB. His face contorted and he said he wouldn't recommend that because its REALLY hard to do and it would void my warranty! I was stunned!
I thought Macs were for the cool people. The people who understood how computing was supposed to work. I thought Macs were intuitive and easy. Here is this Mac Guy telling me a process that would take 15 minutes (including the cloning process) on a PC would be next to impossible on a Mac? He even said their tech bench didn't like to replace hard drives. So what do Mac users do when their hard drives die (since Mac and PC use the same hard drives)? Do they just pitch it and start over?
No, they take it to the Mac Service Center to avoid voiding their warranty in a 1996-style strong arm tactic that almost all PC manufactures left behind in the 20th century. For such a cultured, socially superior company the whole no-touchy warranty is so draconian.
I got my Mac home on Saturday, and I am just now getting proficient with the shortcut keys, the lack of a right click on the mouse, the fact the hitting the "end" key jumps you to the end of the web page and not the end of the line of text you are typing, and a number of other small things that I had come to take for granted in a PC.
Undoubtedly having a Mac at my fingertips and learning the shortcuts and quirks will help me when Mac callers call into my weekly radio show as well as when I am producing video. But other than that, PC is probably going to remain my go-to platform when I need to get something done fast.
In the past using a Mac was like having an invisible shield which spyware and viruses could not penetrate. Mac users brag about the native security of the system's BSD-based operating system - Shelling out an extra grand for a computer is a social status statement, and that makes Mac users better than PC users.
Before you are wooed by Apple's siren song, you might want to save a few bucks for some security software. Thanks to the work of a Russian hacking gang, your Mac is going to need it.
ZDNet is reporting that a group of Russian hackers is disguising a trojan design to attack Macs as a video codec that is required to watch porn on the Internet. Socially superior Mac users are getting duped by the fake codec, bypassing their own security and infecting themselves.
Once infected, the Trojan modifies the Mac's DNS server to redirect traffic to websites stacked with pay-per click ads. (For all of you ignorant PC users, that means when you try to go to one website, your computer ends up at another one loaded with ads that make the hackers money).
While this is not the end of the Mac's security world, it is a functional proof of concept that the security God that was once Mac is just a lowly human after all, susceptible to the same social-engineering attacks as Windows Vista users are.
The bottom line is that these hackers are making money through their efforts to infect Mac users (as well as PC users) and because they are profiting, they will probably continue their attacks to keep the cash flowing in.
Maybe Mac should take PC's disguise after all.
**For the record, I own several PCs and a Mac that I use for video editing **
I am a bit new to the video marketing game online, but I can cut a clip when I need to. When I was on Next Internet Millionaire I met a guy named Charles Trippy and he had a way with editing that captured interest and held it.
It was new to me at the time, but I later learned the method was called "quick cuts." I didn't think too much of it, but after today I might be doing a LOT more "quick cut" videos.
I posted this video on YouTube this morning as a video response to Charles Trippy. To be funny, I edited it in his quick cut style - something totally out of character for me.
I was SHOCKED to find it has more than 80 views already from that one response alone - no additional marketing required.
Granted, most of the activity on the clip is because it was a response to Trippy, who gets thousands of views on his videos. But I am beginning to wonder how much of the response is because of the informal editing style.
I totally understand that 80 views is NOT VIRAL and is nothing to normally write home about. But for a Thor Schrock video, its magical ;-)
A few days ago Jeremy Schoemaker interviewed me on my elimination from the Next Internet Millionaire reality show for his blog.
Jeremy has a way of getting you to say things that are probably better left unsaid sometimes. The 58 minute interview i completely unedited - this is a 100% straight up, all natural interview.
Find out who Jeremy calls 'Whiny Pants" on the show, learn about how Nico alone got Jaime Luchuck into the final two with a brilliant but questionable technique, and hear the behind the scenes dirt that didn't was edited from Jaime's tell-all book to protect the innocent.
The cameras were off during our down time and all sorts of things happened from contestants "socially mingling" in private rooms to people being dunked head first into hot tubs by the very teachers who were there to instruct us!
Its a long movie, but one you will definately enjoy!
One of the things I learned while I was on the Next Internet Millionaire reality show was the importance of video on the Internet to deliver a message.
But what I learned from Charles Trippy was even more valuable. He taught me that packaging your promotional message is as important - if not more important - that the message its self.
One of the hottest, most successful ways to package your message is by creating video that spreads from person to person on the Internet - a viral video.
We have all forwarded those funny videos and pictures we find on the Internet. Now imagine if you created one of those videos, and imagine if everyone who saw it came to your website. It's FREE traffic that continues to pay over and over for years!
Knowing what viral videos can do for your website or business, and actually making one are two different things. This morning I bought a copy of Charles' Viral Video Fever and I can't wait for it to arrive! Its a 2-hour DVD that TEACHES you how to make a viral video.
There IS a formula and Charles just took the time to sit down and put on paper what happens in his head when he makes a video. I would strongly encourage all of my web development customers to take a look. If you have any doubts about the power of a viral video, just watch this sample that was made to promote Charles' Viral Video Fever DVD! It is going viral as we speak!
Charles Trippy can make viral videos at will, and if I can learn 10% of what he teaches in his DVD, I KNOW my already successful business will grow dramatically overnight. Charles, you have me watching for the FedEx guy for the first time since... wel, since ever!
Rather than stomaching what eventually became another embarrassing Husker loss yesterday, Jake, Kim and I decided to go see the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at the Pershing in Lincoln.
It had been many years since I attended an event at the Pershing, and anyone who says that Lincoln does not need some kind of new arena is insane. This place is old, cramped, and poorly designed for modern needs. But I digress...
Jacob LOVED his first circus. He is 15 months old right now (yes he is a VERY big boy) and we were not sure if he would sit through an entire circus. At first he looked a little dazed by all of the lights and things going on around him, but eventually he settled in and enjoyed the show.
I knew Kim had managed to get some good seats through Ticketmaster's website by choosing the show that was going on the same time as the game - but neither of us expected to be sitting in the first row, ringside!
At first I was a little worried that the circus would be less than I expected. I grew up in Omaha watching the Shrine Circus at the Civic Auditorium - a full three-ring production. This circus was only one ring and the auditorium was less than 10% full.
But as the show started, my concerns disappeared. The setting was actually very quaint, with the performers interacting directly with individuals in the crowd. At one point the ringmaster even walked by and looked at Jacob and said, "cute kid!" (Is is a good thing when a circus ringmaster expresses interest in you child?)
The show turned out to be the perfect size for Jacob and he was one pooped puppy when we got in the van to go back home. Check out the new Flickr badge I added to the sidebar to have a look at some of the other amazing images my wife captured!
My friend Browie is having a contest to drive some traffic to his bog, and it is your opportunity to win a 4 GB iPod Video Nano.
All you have to do to enter is go to Browie's blog and post a comment on the iPod Video Nano post. I entered myself in the contest this morning and at the time there were 11 comments, so your odds of winning are pretty good at this point.
If you have a moment check it out and post a comment. Even if you don't need the video iPod Nano, imagine how cool you would be if you dropped a $130 stocking stuffer in some one's Christmas stocking! Check it out!
**This post was approved by the producers of the Next Internet Millionaire**
It felt very strange to watch Episode 11 and relive many of the emotions I felt that day while in the Judgment room.
I went in to that competition as Thor Schrock and I walked out again as Thor Schrock and that was important to me.
What some of you may not know is that Joel’s politician comment was closer to home than he might have realized at the time. A few years back I flirted with a run for mayor of Lincoln, NE – a city of about 125,000 people at the time.
I was very young, less than experienced in politicking, and probably not the most qualified candidate in the field.
As I learned some of the ropes and met with people I found out how easy it is to lose who you are when people around you want you to be something you are not. If you are not rooted solidly in who you are and what you believe, you can be pulled off your moral compass a little at a time until you are a completely different person than when you started.
Joel Comm Is Not Handing Out Success
Throughout the competition I always wanted to win, and I hoped it would be me working with Joel on a JV project. But I managed to stay grounded by my core belief that no one in life is going to hand you success. Joel Comm can’t do it, Eric Holmlund can’t do it, even Donald Trump can’t do it. Success can be found in every day, and in every opportunity (which IS what Joel is offering) if you are determined, patient, and most of all, steady.
The most important thing to me in this competition (or game, or whatever word we can all settle on) was that I was not going to walk in there and be something that I wasn’t. I still had the opportunity to develop a killer idea and bring the right people together to execute it. There was no loss in my involvement with Next Internet Millionaire.
Your Questions Answered
Some of you have had some questions for me, and I have been unable to answer them until now. Here are three of the most common ones I have been asked over the past couple weeks:
1) Do you and Jason Marshall still talk, or are you two going to have a guest appearance on the next UFC match?
What many viewers may not know is that Jason and I were roommates for the last two days of the competition. We shook hands and buried the hatchet that day, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for who he is. In fact, Jason has a seminar coming up called Back to Basics Crash Course and I wish him nothing but the best.
2) If you had Episode 10 to do over again, would you do anything differently?
To those who have voiced question about my honesty, integrity, or actions on the show all I can ask is that you speak to me and find out for yourselves what kind of a man I am. I can tell you for certain that if a friend in my future asks me for an opinion about a situation, I will still give her my honest assessment regardless of who disagrees.
I can also tell you that my business partners know that I will not walk into a competitive environment and disclose all of our assets and liabilities to our competition before we compete just because my competitors ask for the information.
I did not do anything in the competition that I would not go home to my mother and defend (and after she watched episode 10, Lord knows that’s what I had to do).
It is very surreal to watch people saying such hateful negative things about you while you are unable to respond because of a non-disclosure agreement.
Once the show is concluded and I am free from the agreement, I could probably offer explanations that would change a lot of minds out there, but by that time I think the negative comments will have been long forgotten by everyone involved. If you still have questions at that time, please contact me and I will be happy to sit down and have a straightforward, unbiased conversation about what happened and what was emphasized.
3) If you have learned so much while you were there, what have you done with that knowledge since you were eliminated?
It has been a constant whirlwind of activity since my elimination both personally and professionally. My company has launched an awesome new computer system for the Christmas season. I also launched an awesome new online remote PC support service (SEE JOEL & MARLIN! IT WOULD HAVE WORKED J), and I have added more than 300 new customers I the past 2 months alone.
I haven’t earned that first million yet, but my wife does want a new Kia Rondo – everyone has to have goals J
Thank You to the NIM Editors and Producers
I was really happy that the producers left my thank you message to my supporters in at the end of the show. There were three charities I was sponsoring with my appearance on the show – the Lincoln Crisis Pregnancy Center, the Lincoln Lighthouse, and the Neil Schultz Gift of Hope Fund for ALS victims.
They, as well as many of my customers and supporters have diligently followed the show each week and have called or emailed to congratulate me on advancing through the ranks.
If it were not for their support I probably would not have been on the show at all, so I owe the entire experience to those who voted for me, those who promoted me, and those who rooted for me each week. You all have my thanks from the bottom of my heart.
With that, I am departing the Next Internet Millionaire stage a winner, and my son is thrilled to have me at home again doing what is truly important in the big picture. I will take my seat with each of you now and watch Charles and Jamie battle for the title. Don’t turn that dial, because something tells me this is going to get VERY interesting
That's right folks! Episode 10 has been released and in a head to head match up with Charles Trippy, I was the one who was eliminated from the Next Internet Millionaire Reality Show this week.
I have to admit, I have not watched Episode 11 yet - I plan on viewing it tomorrow. Christine Schaap called me and told me that it was not too bad, so it must be kinder to me than episode 10 was :-)
I have a lot of thoughts rolling through my head about episodes 10 and 11. A number of friends and customers have asked me for my thoughts since they have aired.
I can't say very much at all until the conclusion of the show, but I do plan on posting a farewell post on the NIM blog in the coming days. As soon as it is posted there I will link to it.
The main questions I am getting are do I regret doing the show in retrospect, do Jason Marshal and I still talk, who do I think is going to win now that I am out, and why was strategy such an important part of my NIM experience.
I will answer all of these questions in my post and I may elaborate more on them in the future as my commitment to the show allows.
I would definately recommend that you continue watching the show because a lot of people have ideas about who is going to win this thing, and while I can't say too much, I can say that what happens in the next episode may shock and surprise just about everyone.
The latest episode of the Next Internet Millionaire is online, and this episode features a clash between Jason Marshall and myself. I am bound by a non-disclosure agreement so I am holding my comments on this episode until after the final episode of the show airs.
What I will say is that I never lost sight of the fact that this was a reality show - a competition. In any type of competition, whether it is a football game or a Monopoly game, you need a strategy to win (unless you are the Huskers then you just don't win). You can cross your fingers and hope that you get lucky, but is that really being a tough competitor?
If you have not watched Next Internet Millionaire or if you have fallen off the wagon recently, this is a great time to get back in on the action.
In the mean time, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on my performance during the show, Jason's performance, as well as the unexpected and explosive judgement room scene. Let me know what you think!
Last weekend the Three Eagles Best of Lincoln Survey (formerly the KFOR best of Lincoln) results were publiclly released. The survey is a random telephone sampling across multiple demographics throughout Lincoln.
For the seventh consecutive year, Schrock Innovations was vote the #1 independant computer repair company in Lincoln. Best Buy took the overall top spot, and another local shop came in third.
Historiclly Best Buy has always won the top spot, but Schrock Innovations is happy to take second place to a company that spends over $30,000 a week on glossy inserts alone.
I want to take a momento thank all of our customers who voted for Schrock in the surveys. It is a huge rush for our staff to have their hard work validated each year with such an honor, and we will continue to work hard to earn your trust, respect, and business.
After The Cornhuskers embarrassing blowout loss to Oklahoma State last Saturday, many fans have been calling the call in shows demeaning some one's head on a platter.
Here is a cartoon by popular editorial cartoonist Paul Fell that is making the Email rounds as of this morning:
You just don't fire a coach in mid-season - its the most disruptive thing you can do to a team. But an Athletic director... That's a different story.
This afternoon WOWT is reporting that Nebraska Athletic Director Steve Peterson has been FIRED from his post.
There is a news conference scheduled for 4 pm. It should be interesting...
About 7 months ago I posted about the frustration my staff at Schrock Innovations experienced attempting to remove Windows Visa from a Gateway notebook and install Windows XP.
Since then, that post has been the single most commented on post I have EVER pklaced on my blog. With more than 63 comments and counting, it thrills me to see my readers helping each other.
In fact, I received this email yesterday from one of our readers, Rick Burney, offering even more help:
Hi. Came across you site while googling to find the SATA chipset drivers to install Windows XP on newer Toshiba laptops. You said you found drivers on Gateway's site. I wanted to let you know where to find the Intel drivers that are not vendor specific. They call the drivers Intel Matrix Storage Manager. I downloaded from there, and got IATA76_ENU.EXE file then used the -A switch to extract the files. In the driver folder are the following files iaahci.cat,iaahci.inf,iastor.cat,iastor.inf,IaStor.sys,TXTSETUP.OEM which will fit on a floppy so you can hit F6 during installs. Hope you find it useful. Links and stuff below:
RAID/AHCI Software - Intel® Matrix Storage Manager
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/ <--- Intel Matrix Storage Manager main page http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/CS-015001.htm <---- Chipset table to help select correct IMSM (Version I grabbed for the 965GM chipset) English: iata76_enu.exe Download Ver:7.6.0.1011 Date:8/2/2007 Size:5604 (KB) Time @56Kbps:12.97 min OS:Windows Server* 2003, Windows Server* 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition, Windows Server* 2003 Standard Edition, Windows Server* 2003 Standard x64 Edition, Windows Vista*, Windows Vista* 32, Windows Vista* 64, Windows Vista* Home Premium, 32-bit version, Windows Vista* Ultimate, 32-bit version, Windows* XP Home Edition, Windows* XP Media Center Edition, Windows* XP Professional, Windows* XP Professional x64 Edition
I mentioned on the radio last week that we have a big web development project in the works. Those of you who read my blog often probably noticed something was slowing my posts a bit.
Schrock Innovations went head to head against Washington DC design firms to win the bid to do Phase 1 of Mike Johanns' 2008 US Senate Campaign Website!
This is the first website we have done for a candidate seeking Federal office. Phase 1 of the website was pretty straight forward. We had four business days to complete an index page and a contribution page. The site had to be simple, yet appealing to the eye. It was to include a video as well as a form that allows people to subscribe for future updates.
This is the video we shot for the site.
Phase 2 of the website will be bid out again, and we are hopeful that our work on Phase 1 will give us a leg up on Phase 2. Please take a moment to visit the website and subscribe for updates. If you have a few dollars and you want to support Mike Johanns in his 2008 Senate bid, feel free to make a contribution.
Let us know what you think of the site by posting a comment below!
Paid for by Mike Johanns for Senate.
Last year we experimented with web casting the video and audio of my weekly radio program, Compute This, with mixed results. I am thinking about resurrecting the idea again - if you want to watch it.
The web cams were buggy and the software we used to syndicate the web cam event was less than reliable. The result was a hit-and-miss live web event. Needless to say we put the idea on the back burner for a bit.
Last week I decided to poke around to see if any of the web conference software out there might make life a little easier on us the second time around.
There were a lot of companies who had the lowest price, but bad service reviews. There were also a lot of companies who promised the best of everything - at a price. After some searching, I found a web conferencing company that seemed to split the difference called The Conference Depot.
The Conference Depot offers real-time live support through a dedicated support representative (they call it a Conference Coach). This is a huge plus because most of the companies I considered only offered email support - no live help :-(
This company got its start in the web conferencing and web seminars business. In a way, web casting our radio show each week would be like one big, weekly seminar. It was worth a look so I gave them a call.
The people there were nice to talk with. They quickly understood that my application was a customized need and they were willing to adjust the features of their product to address my unique needs.
The bottom line is that the Confrence Depot is running a special offer that just about seals the deal for me. If we sign up for an account with The Conference Depot, we get 1,000 free minutes to get us started.
Each radio show is one hour, so we would be able to do the show for about 4 months before we had to pay anything for the service.
So my question to you is, are you interested? Would you watch? Or are you ok with the week-delayed Google Video clips I have been posting?
I received this email today in my inbox asking for a reciprocal link from one of the websites I manage:
My names John Stevens, the owner of computerempire.org.
The reason I'm contacting you is because I am interested in doing a reciprocal link exchange with your site schrockinnovations.com, or if you have more than one just let me know.
If we do this link exchange it will help increase our search engine rankings so we would get more traffic. That's beneficial for both of us!
If this sounds like something you wish to partake in, then let me know and we can exchange details. If not then it would be great to let me know as well so I can stop needlessly bothering you.
Setting aside the fact for the moment that Google can easily spot and discount reciprocal links, I was stunned to see how many website owners fell for his idea.
I tried to visit his website to see what it was about, only to find that Internet Explorer 7 could not render the page! There was a link there to his "links" page, and there are TONS of people with completely unrelated websites who have exchanged links with this guy.
SEO 101 - Links from unrelated websites do little to help your search engine results. Links from pornographic websites, link farms, web rings, and other such sites actually HURT your SERPs placement.
Don't waste your time on scams like this. Just like "John Stevens" your resources are better spent making sure your website stays up and running and has good quality content. That is the only way to ensure longevity and good placement in the search engines.
That's right folks, in episode 7 I literally climb up (ok maybe hike up would be more appropriate) a mountain. This is not a metaphor!
In episode 7 of Next Internet Millionaire I avoid dangerous plastic snakes, help my team to a Foosball victory, and emerge as the king of useless trivia. Interested?
Watch Episode 7 below. Special BONUS!! Kristopher Jones, CEO of PepperjamSearch will give super secret bowel movement advice that you can apply to your Internet marketing activities. Don't miss this!
For those of you who have not been following the Apple iPhone phenomenon a storm is brewing that may give Apple the biggest black eye it has ever had.
A couple months ago Apple launched the iPhone, a phone that was supposed to be 5 years ahead of its time. The phone has a ton of great features, but was restricted to the AT&T cellular network and Apple gets a monthly cut of AT&T's plan billings.
People wanted to use the iPhone on their own cellular network because they were bound by contracts or because they simply didn't want to use AT&T. Soon an underground movement to unlock the iPhone's proprietary AT&T network surfaced and people were cheating Apple out of what the company thinks is its $3/month due.
Apple responded last week by sending out an update for their phones that would "brick" (render useless) any iPhone that was "unlocked" to work on another cellular network. The aftermath that followed blows anything Microsoft has ever done clean out of the water.
First, AT&T will gladly unlock any phone it offers after 90 days - except the iPhone. AT&T claims they are prohibited from doing so by Apple, who never disclosed the unlock prohibition to its customers at the time of purchase.
Second, Apple's update has unintentionally bricked some iPhones that were not unlocked, resulting is a surge of customers requesting warranty support for their wrongly bricked iPhones. Without local service centers, Apple is making these customers send in their iPhones for repair.
According to the Apple iPhone warranty, unlocking the iPhone voids your Apple warranty. This means that if you send in an unlocked iPhone, Apple won't fix it. In fact, an Apple spokeswoman said the only thing a customer could do to get an unlocked iPhone repaired was buy a new one.
First, never mind the fact that people paid upwards of $500 (after rebate) to get their iPhones. Think what would have happened if Microsoft had done this. Microsoft has thousands of illegitimate copies of Windows XP floating around the world, and they didn't zap them, even though Bill Gates could have pressed teh nuclear update button at any time.
Microsoft understood that the aftermath would represent a PR nuclear winter. Apple missed that point, and now they are paying for it. Protest videos have started to appear on YouTube, as once loyal Apple subjects are beginning to revolt under Apple's iron fist.
This war is unwindable, as Microsoft has learned over the years. It doesn't matter what Apple does to make nice at this point, short of restoring every bricked iPhone out there - and that is not going to happen.
Yes, Apple loyalists, for those of you who didn't know, Apple is a corporation, just like Microsoft. Apple needs to show return on investment, just like Microsoft. Welcome to the next generation of Apple - the iEvil generation.
Every week I try to bring you some neat piece of free software that is just plain neat. One thing that everyone appreciates is an unobtrusive and accurate weather widget for Windows XP!
Since the dawn of online weather, people have always been excited by a weather widget on their computers. Unfortunately, most of the widgets out there that provide accurate forecasts are also packed full of spyware and other nastiness.
Last night I found a new weather widget that was pretty unique. It actually changes the text on your Start button (Windows XP only) to be the current temperature and conditions outside. Everyone knows what the Start button is for, so why not make use of the space, right?
I ran a complete scan of my PC after installing the widget and I have confirmed that the installation is spyware free.
The only marginal aspect of this widget is the search bar it ads to your Internet Explorer browser. If you use FireFox, you will not notice anything different, AND you will get the awesome widget in your start button.
Go ahead and give it a try and let me know what you think. It does have an uninstaller, so if you don't like it, just open Add/Remove programs and remove it.
If you know of any cool free software you would like to have featured on this blog, let me know and I will test it out!
For those of you who have not read my original post, BlogRush is a pretty neat idea that has been generating some moderate (nothing stellar though) traffic to my blog.
There have been some issues though with people scamming the Blogrush system. John Reese, the creator of Blogrush has been upfront and communicative about the challenges as he and his team root out the problem blogs.
For the first time today I witnessed some evidence of their efforts.
This is a screenshot of a Blogrush widget that was displayed on 9/25/2007. I chuckled a little when I saw a link to a default "Hello World" WordPress post, so I snapped the shot and clicked the link to see what was on the blog.
As I suspected, the blog was just a shell designed to abuse the Blogrush system. Each time the Blogrush widget is loaded, the blogger owning the widget earns syndication credits. These credits are what gets the blogger's post headlines on other people's widgets around the web.
People were abusing the Blogrush system by reloading their own widget over and over. Rather than risking getting a real blog with real content banned, some bloggers created a fake blog to contain the widget and gather syndication credits for the real blog.
What was interesting was that the Blogrush widget was NOT being displayed on the fake blog anymore. In one of his previous emails, Reese had stated he was working on clearing fake blogs out of the system and in the meantime he was moving to a manual review of new blogs applying for membership in Blogrush.
The fact that the "Hello World" post was syndicated shows me that John still has some work to do to clean up the bogus syndication credits in the system.
But the fact that the widget did not load on teh fake blog also shows me that Blogrush is slowing the addition of new bogus syndication credits. That means every one's click through rates should climb.
Fewer bot-generated impressions means more human eye impressions, and that means more traffic for participants. Progress is slow in coming when so many people are gaming the system, but I believe Blogrush is well on its way to becoming a staple on my blog sidebar.
I have been a long-time fan of http://www.rss-include.com for some time. They *had* a free tool that would allow you to capture the contents of an RSS feed and output it to a web page as machine-readable content.
The only problem was that at times, Dax (the owner of the site) wouldn't pay his hosting bill or something and all of a sudden you would find porn links or huge PHP errors stringing across your website - not pretty!
Now his website seems to be offline, so I started looking for a better solution. I found an awesome tool called the MuseStorm Widget and decided to use it. I went to their website to create the code only to find that they will be discontinuing the widget today :-(
Designing the RSS Cross-Promotion Widget
I can't be the only person on Earth looking for something like this, so I decided to grab one of my Schrock Innovations coders and give him a "day project." I asked Adam if he could code a widget like this in a day and he thought he could.
I outlined what I wanted in basic detail so he could get a concept rolling and then I talked to a few bloggers about what they wanted in a widget.
Like all "day projects" they tend to suffer from poor planning and feature creep. When the dust settled at the end of the day, we had a widget that exceed the original scope of the project but was AWESOME for bloggers and forum owners who wanted to cross promote their content across multiple websites.
What the RSS Cross-Promotion Widget Does
The RSS Cross-Promotion widget is designed to capture items from up to 5 different feeds and display the titles of those items in a clean sidebar widget. The idea is to use the widget to move traffic between web properties that are related or commonly owned.
As a side benefit, the content, including links, is all machine readable. That means that Google will follow the links, index the content and pass page rank between the websites.
Where can You Get the Beta Widget?
That's the cool thing! The widget is free, and I even had Adam create a page that lets you craft your own custom widget with background colors and options to make it blend nicely with your website. Click here to create your own free Cross-Promotion Widget.
NOTE that this is BETA!! It has display issues in IE that we wll work out (but works fine in FireFox and Opera). Let me know what you think - I want some feedback if you have it!
Those of you who want to make money (or more money) online, sit up and pay attention! Jeremy Schoemaker (a.k.a. Shoemoney) is having a meet-up in Omaha, NE that is FREE if you register fast enough!
The meet-up will be on October 25th at 7 PM at the new Proxibid office in Omaha, NE. You can RSVP for the free event by clicking here. (24 spots are left at the time I am writing this)
Jeremy is a legend in the SEO/SEM field and I have learned TONS from him and his posts on forums around the Internet marketing world. He is an expert in driving traffic and hitting target markets online with the accuracy of a smart bomb.
Pizza will be served at the event, and is an awesome opportunity to get some face time with local people in the industry. After the last PMMOL event I attended I swapped some code with a couple people and got some awesome FREE tools that have helped me build my blog readership.
Don't miss this opportunity to get some free food, free networking, and free face time with Jeremy. RSVP now!
Ok, so lead toys from China are bad for kids, but Mattel says its not China's fault and that safe toys were recalled when they didn't need to be. This whole story is getting really confusing and it makes me wonder who in the world is actually checking up on these people?
Fox News is reporting tonight that Mattel is apologizing to China for recalling toys that were dangerous not because of their tasty lead coating, but because Mattel's designs were flawed.
Mattel, one of the leading toy manufacturers in the US, says that it was their faulty designs and not China's manufacturing sector that was to blame for the majority of the toy recalls over the past two months.
You might remember that some toys were recalled because they had small magnets on them that could be swallowed by children. If a child swallows a couple magnets, they can attract to each other in different parts of the digestive system, causing blockages that can be deadly.
Mattel added that the recalls they issued were "overly inclusive" and incorrectly listed toys that had acceptable levels of lead in their paint by US manufacturing standards.
I would be so ticked off if I was a parent who returned or shipped one of these toys back when there was no need to do so. First Mattel screws up by letting lead-coated toys out on store shelves, then they recall TONS of toys because of lead paint and magnets, they blame the whole problem on the Chinese, and now they apologize and say oops!
I wonder what the children of Mattel employees play with these days? My guess is Hasbro toys!