Image via Wikipedia

Holy Super Mario Bros Bedroom Deco Batman!

This is every nintendo maniac’s dream come true. Now you can cover your walls in Mario restickable vinyl stickers. These stickers feature mario and his friends.

You can choose from the Donkey kong set, or the Super Mario Bros set.

Personally I’m waiting for the Legend of Zelda vinyl stickers, but my favorite is the Super Mario Brothers.

You can pickup these great vinyl stickers from ThinkGeek.com
, for only 74.99 for a whole room!

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He can heal the sick, raise the dead, make the blind to see, and turn water into wine, but can he stand up against the evil Windows error screens?

I’m a very religious member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon, or LDS), but this picture was too funny not to post!

From [Gizmodo via FailBlog]

Mashable has put together two really nice lists of places where you can find out more info on the current vice presidential candidates(Joe Biden and Sarah Palin), I thought I would combine them into one easy list for you to view.

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Image via Wikipedia

Debt is a problem plaguing Americans all over. With people losing their homes, and their jobs, debt is becoming an even bigger nightmare than ever before, but there is help…

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PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

The folks over at ThinkGeek.com
are at it again. This time they’ve created only the best RC Copter ever. Seriously.

This RC copter flies exactly where you tell it to go. It fits in the palm of your hand too..

This precise flying Black Stealth 3-Channel R/C helicopter is sure to be the stuff geek dreams are made of. The Black Stealth 3-Channel Copter features 3-Channels that allow it to move up, down, rotate left and right, and move forward and backward.

Unlike most 2 channel copters on the market which move forward with somewhat twitchy motions the Black Stealth is a lot smoother. You can fly it wherever you want it to go, and is probably the easiest to fly rc copter out there.

Hurricane Gustav which I picked up from google trends, as I’ve said for the past day or so has been a great keyword, and my site’s not even about weather related topics.

Jamie Meredith from OurBlogThing, asked to see some more detailed stats and perhaps some graphs, so here’s some of my stats from Google Analytics, this is really just the first few pages… as it has the most frequent traffic stats for the past few days since I started this experiment. The image is at the very bottom of this post – just click on it to make it bigger- as you can see from the pic, I did pretty well, without really exerting a lot of effort, it’s not like I wrote a 10 page article on hurricane gustav, it might’ve been 3 paragraphs.

“hurricane gustav track” 65 hits
“gustav track” 43 hits
“vancouver earthquake” 37 hits
“tropical storm hanna” 25 hits
“tropical storm hannah” 21 hits
“hurricane hannah 2008″ 19 hits
“mackenzie phillips” 15 hits
“hannah hurricane” 14 hits
“hurricane gustav” 12 hits
“hurricane gustav latest update” 11 hits
“latest update on hurricane gustav” 11 hits
“latest gustav track” 6 hits
“latest on hurricane gustav” 6 hits
“updates on hurricane gustav” 6 hits
“hanna hurricane” 5 hits
“hurricane hannah” 5 hits
“latest update on hurricane gustav” 5 hits
“latest updates on gustav” 5 hits
“gustav latest track” 4 hits
“track hurricane gustav” 4 hits
“hurricane gustav latest” 3 hits
“hurricane gustav latest updates” 3 hits
“latest updates of gustav” 3 hits
“storm hannah” 3 hits
“vancouver earthquake august 2008″ 3 hits
“hanna hurricane 2008″ 2 hits
“hanna+hurricane” 2 hits
“latest info on hurricane gustav” 2 hits.

“Hurricane Gustav” = 118 Hits total

“Hurricane Hannah” = 96 hits total

“Vancouver Earthquake” = 40 hits

“mackenzie phillips” = 15 hits

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Governor Sarah Palin : Image via Wikipedia

SARAH Palin – is she Ready to Lead?

- this post is brought to you by whitehouse2008.info

Sarah Palin is the current Governor of Alaska, and the presumptive 2008 candidate for Vice President of the United States.

If elected Sarah Palin will be the first female vice president. Sarah Palin is the first female vice presidential candidate ever representing the Republican Party, and only the second Female Vice Presidential candidate representing a major political party in America.

Sarah Palin is also the first politician from Alaska to be nominated for Vice-President.

Sarah Palin was born in Idaho, but raised in Alaska. Sarah Palin is an ex-beauty pageant runner up for Miss Alaska(1984). Palin used her beauty to land a scholarship at the University of Idaho, where she majored in journalism.

Sarah Palin worked as a sports reporter for an Anchorage tv station, then served two terms in the Wasilla, Alaska, City Council from 1992-1996. Sarah Palin was then elected mayor of Wasilla(population 8,470) in 1996.

Sarah Palin then ran for Lieutenant Governor in 2002 unsuccessfully and was finally elected Governor of Alaska in 2006.

Sarah Palin gained national attention for publicizing ethical violations of state Republican Party leaders.

My question is: Sarah Palin is supposedly for good ‘ethical policies’ then what the hell is she running for Mccain’s vice president? Mccain is as immoral and unethical as they come. How anyone could back a president known for perjury is beyond me..(everything he says is practically a lie, or what people want to hear).

Sure with Sarah Palin, he may get some of the female vote, but I think he might’ve gotten more if he’d picked the guy from Minnesota. All I can say is that it’s going to be easy pickin’s for Obama.

Of course Sarah Palin doesn’t bring much experience to the table, only leading a small region with 8,000 people for a number of years, and then being governor for a mere 19 months.

This is definitely one of the thinnest resumes of any vice president since Nixon chose Agnew. Not to mention the fact that Sarah Palin has some corruption policies herself.

Sarah Palin allegedly attempted to have fired a state trooper who was embroiled in a custody battle with her sister. (Does this sound like the kind of person we need as vice president of the United States?)

Of course Sarah Palin has previously said that her administration didn’t exert pressure to get rid of trooper Mike Wooten, and also disclosed that members of her staff had made over two dozen contacts with public safety officials about the trooper.

I think it’s funny that Mccain chose someone who doesn’t have experience as Sarah Palin shows, and who also is in the middle of a political corruption crisis herself, it apparently shows his lack of good judgement.

It’s going to be nice to see his poll ratings plummet from this move.

Another funny thing about this is how he hoots and hollers about Obama not being experienced enough to lead this country, but then picks the most inexperienced governor in the whole united states to run as his runningmate. This just proves that Mccain is incompetent and that Obama is way more ready to lead, especially since he actually chose a vp candidate in Joe Biden that will greatly aid his campaign and not hinder it.

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Image via Wikipedia

The past few days I’ve been experimenting with google trends.

Google trends are hot topics of the moment. I wrote one tiny post using the keyword phrase Hurricane Gustav track, and have gotten about 500 hits in two days.

Not too shabby, I can always use more traffic, and I have impression based advertisers who pay me for each view of my website, which is nice.

I was quite amazed at this technique myself, as I never expected it to be this valuable.

The more amazing thing is the fact that I was also able to round up about 35 new subscribers overnight. I didn’t think the traffic would be that sticky but apparently I’ve got myself some new readers.

I’m definitely going to be using google trends more and more to bring in more quality traffic, and keep you posted on the outcome.

One note- Hurricane gustav is still bringing in a lot of traffic, my advice would be to write a blog post about Hurricane Gustav track, and see how much traffic you get from it.

On a side note -I do feel bad for those in the path of Hurricane Gustav, and making money off a hurricane isn’t that great, but they’re used to hurricanes and if I went through something like Hurricane Katrina, there’s no way I’d move back to the gulf coast region. My thoughts and prayers are definitely with the people down there.

Lets hope Hurricane Gustav proves to be a let down as far as hurricanes go..

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• hurricane gustav track, get the latest updates on hurricane gustav

I’m sure we’ve all been faced with this dillema. No net and no sanity.

The internet is highly addictive, and sometimes when we have no access it’s hard to come up with productive things to do, so I’m going to help you build a list.

1. Exercise:

We spend tons of time online and hardly any exercising anymore, go walk the dog, take a brisk walk, ride a bike, or play catch with your kids, get out and do something. The fresh air will do you good, and you might not be so pale anymore.

2. Build your brain:

Read a book. Study. Go to a class. Watch discovery channel. Do something educational and just maybe you’ll stop being such an idiot.

3. Reconnect with friends. We all have friends or at least we all should – if you don’t then you go out and buy ‘How to win Friends and Influence People’ and apply it because you definitely need friends in life, or everything is meaningless.

Spend a couple hours and talk with the friends that you haven’t seen in a year or two, it’ll be a nice refreshing break from the internet.

4. Get caught up current events.

I like to do this daily anyways, when the internet is down is the perfect time – read the newspaper or turn on cnn, see what’s goin’ on in the world. Or you could just go watch Ghost hunters – I love that show…

5. Computer Cleaning.

No, it is not natural for your keys on your keyboard to be Cheetos Orange…Clean that damn computer! Now’s the perfect time to rip off the back of your computer and clean extremely thoroughly, and while you’re at it take apart your keyboard and disinfect it.

When you’re done cleaning the hardware, why not clean the software by defragmenting…When you do get your internet back your computer will be singing it will be so happy…

6. Play a game – but not a computer game. Maybe de-veg a bit. Cornhole is a fun outdoor game you could play, or play sudoku, or crossword, or solitaire, do something fun offline.

7. Build your finger dexterity. Write or Draw something, and do it on paper. You remember paper, right?

8. Get your chores done. My wife nags about chores all the time, but I’m always busy and don’t want to do them, I’m sure we can all relate – well since you can’t do anything blogging or business related without the computer anyway why not get your chores done now so you won’t have to worry about them when you do have your internet back? I’m a genius aren’t I?

9. Now that you’re done with chores, I always like to take a small nap..hehe… I’m sure no one would mind, would they?

10. Pray and Meditate. Take a moment to thank god (or whoever you worship) for all the blessings in your life. Think about things in your life, make goals, and just relax.

These are just a few ideas on how you can cut down on the frustration caused by not having your precious internet connection. Next time your isp is working on the lines get offline and have some you-time.

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Maybe you’re worried about the boss finding out what you’re doing online, maybe you’re doing things you’re not supposed to be doing, hey I’m not going to judge ya, if ya are *wink wink*

This little device might help you remain on the sneaky sneaky side of life – just maybe…

It’s a rearview mirror for your computer, now you can see someone coming before they get near enough to see what you’re doing, it gives you enough time to alt+tab your way away from the video game that you’re not supposed to be playing at work – I know, you know – but your boss doesn’t need to know. *additional Wink and nudge*….

(C) himp
(H) as
(I) nvincible
(M) onkey
(P) owers

When you are playing Quake on the local LAN against the support desk staff you need all the help you can get. C.H.I.M.P is an early warning system that will clue you in on when to Alt-Tab back to your spreadsheet when your boss suddenly appears. How does it work? You just look at it and it magically (with its invincible powers) produces an image of what is behind you. Just like a good C.H.I.M.P. should…

Sure it’s stupid, but it works. Tail and face and appendages not included. What’s included? A mirror with the word C.H.I.M.P. on it.

Convex mirror (3 inches diameter) fits easily on either corner of your monitor with accompanying velcro. Choose between black or our new iCHIMP in stylish

Get it your Chimp Mirror Now at ThinkGeek.com

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Using google trends to increase traffic…

Using google trends is pretty easy and straight forward, it’s also a great way to find new niches for new blogs and topic web sites.

1. First thing you want to do is go to google trends.
2. Next you’re gonna want to click on ‘More Hot Trends’ on the bottom right. This will give you a huge list of 100 hot trends.
3. Next you’re going to want to choose which trends to blog about, I think it may be best to only pick no more than 5, 2-3 per day should be good enough.
4. You can click on each trend to bring up a side by side google and google blog search on the topic, you can go to the blogs and just rephrase what they say, don’t copy and it’s best if you use more than one source.
5. When writing your post make sure you use the exact trend phrase that they give on the trends page. This is the keyword that you will want to get ranked for. You want to use it in your title, in a heading(h2 or h1) and at lease 4-5 times in the body of your blog post.
6. Be sure to link out to other blogs on the same topic, as you will get pingbacks and that will increase your rank.
7. A good tool I use to help me when blogging is called Zemanta and it makes it easy as pie to include related articles, and images.
8. On posts that you make on google trends that aren’t related to your blog, be sure to put up a disclaimer explaining what your blog really is about and giving people a method to subscribe easily – this is a good way to build future traffic to your blog, I’m sure many who visit will share some of the same interests that you do and will be interested in hearing more about them…
9. Don’t over do things, don’t do this everday, and don’t make it the only thing you do…This is a nice way to bring in some fresh traffic and increase your money however it’s not a great way to run a successful blog – use it sparingly and just as a tool in your arsenal, for example I’m planning on doing it one day per week, starting next week. I will keep posting updates on my successes and failures using this tip.

Follow these easy tips and I’m sure you’ll be successful using Google Trends to bring in more traffic.

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Yesterday, I gave an update on Hurricane Gustav, today it appears another tropical storm has developed. Tropical storm Hannah has been upgraded from a tropical depression 8. It’s days like this I’m happy I live in Ohio, we never see Hurricanes. Tropical Storm Hannah, is the 8th Tropical storm of this Hurricane Season.

It’s too early to tell but many are predicting that Tropical Storm Hannah won’t become Hurricane Hannah, but nobody can be certain at this juncture.

For more info on Tropical Storm hannah, be sure to check the related resources.

(This post is part of my google trends experiment – if this is your first time visiting I welcome you, and let you know this is the place to learn all you need to know about building a blog and making money from it…I’d be honored if you’d subscribe to my rss feed – it’s free!)

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Image via Wikipedia

Vancouver Earthquake will not bring Tsunami

A 6.1 earthquate rattled vancouver today. The 6.1 earthquake hit just west of Vancouver Island early this morning. The Vancouver earthquake hit near Port Hardy, but is not expected to cause a tsunami.

The 6.1 Vancouver earthquake was centered in the Pacific Ocean a little west of Vancouver Island. The Vancouver Earthquake pounded at 5:37 local time.

The Vancouver earthquake occured about 500 miles west of Vancouver, and 100 miles west of Port Hardy. Apparently the Vancouver earthquake was too far out to cause any real damage according to officials.

(This post is part of my google trends experiment – if this is your first time visiting I welcome you, and let you know this is the place to learn all you need to know about building a blog and making money from it…I’d be honored if you’d subscribe to my rss feed – it’s free!)

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Google Trends update:

Yesterday I mentioned delving into google trends as a way to bring new traffic.

Yesterday I wrote a post about Mackenzie Phillips, Del  Martin Dieing, and Hurricane Gustav track. Each of these topics were at that point in the top 5 google trends.

I know I planned to write 25 posts on google trends topics, however I had some errands to run offline and was unable to get back on – don’t worry I’ll be doing a lot more of these.

I found out that it’s a very wise thing to do, in fact I’m thinking about instituting a trendy wednesday. Every wednesday I’ll focus my efforts on google trends topics.

The results have been astounding – I got 131 hits to one blog post on hurricane gustav. All these hits were either from google search or google blog search, which definitely proves that the point is valid, perhaps if I’d worked on a longer post with more mentions of hurricane gustav I would’ve ranked even higher.

At any case this does prove something pretty remarkable, and that I’m going to be delving a lot deeper into, over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned for further updates on google trends.

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You know, this project of using google trends is seeming to be harder than I thought, I really don’t know what to say about hurricane gustav track. Plus I’m running out of time, so I may need to continue the experiment tomorrow. Rest assured though I will get to the bottom of the mystery on how to use google trends to build traffic.

But if you’re really interested in more info on hurricane gustav track you can visit the recommended links below…

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Del Martin was an infamous lesbian and gay rights activist.

Del Martin was a real pioneer for the LBGT.Del Martin was also known to eloquently support civil rights and liberties. Del martin died at age 87.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Mackenzie Phillips is the daughter ofthe Mamas & the Papas Papas founder John Philips. Mackenzie Phillips was born November 10th 1959

Mackenzie Phillips began her career when she was 13 starring in a tv movie called “Go Ask Alice“, then at age 14 she played the role of Carol in American Graffiti.

Mackenzie Phillips’ career hit the big time when landed the role as Julie Cooper Horvath on the 70’s sitcom One Day at a Time.
Mackenzie Phillips now age 48 made big news today though, because she was apparently busted at LAX for allegedly possessing heroin and cocaine. She’s currently in police custody.

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I just read of a study on getting traffic from google trends, and thought I need to get in on some of this action, so here’s what I’m going to do in my first experiment. I’m going to write 1 blog post each on the top 25 topics of the day.

Tomorrow I will check back and let you know what I’ve received in teh way of traffic. These won’t be extremely deep posts, just small ones with the intent to build keyword density.

Wish me luck on this experiment.

My list of trends to blog about:

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Collin Lahay has launched a service called RSSHugger, which is basically an rss directory meets wiki.

He allows bloggers the opportunity to promote their blogs easily just by adding them to the directory. You can add your own blog for only $20, or you can get it added for free if you blog about RSS Hugger.(Which is why I’m blogging about it. lol)..

Collin’s goal is for his directory to eclipse 50,000 blogs. The idea behind the site is to build buzz and receive new rss subscribers for members of the site.

How it works:

First you buy your page (or get it free), then your rss feeds are displayed on your own page in rss hugger, I’m a little skeptical about how this all works, but I’m always interested in trying out new technologies and marketing experiments. After all it couldn’t hurt, could it?

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Book cover via Amazon

If I had a Million Dollars….

Sure everyone dreams of owning a million dollars, of course John Mccain would still consider you middle class but for most of us a Million Dollars is the chance at having the American Dream.

Why a Million Dollars? Because it’s a huge number for most people, more than many could ever dream of.

I’ve always been a fan of David Bach’s Automatic Millionaire, and here are some tips I’ve learned from him that may help you along your journey towards becoming a Millionaire.

1. Pay yourself first. This is the biggest and most important step you can take to becoming a millionaire. Before you pay any bills or buy groceries, pay yourself. Put it in an ira or mutual fund and watch your money grow. It is recommended that if you want to become rich to save 10%, if you want to become rich faster save 15%, if you want to become rich super fast save 20-25%.With some mutual funds your money can double every 6-10 years which can mean a lot after compounding interest, no you won’t get rich today, or tomorrow but in 20 years you’ll be looking a lot better off.
2. With the current economic front it is now more important than ever to get your house in order, get out of debt, and you absolutely have to have an emergency fund. Before you invest 20% into your mutual funds its advised to have a savings fund that could pay all the major bills for at least 6-12 months. This isn’t an easy thing to do of course but when you get laid off from your job of 20 years, you will wish you’d had the foresight to build an emergency fund.
3. Find the little things that you buy that you could cut out. For instance many of us living in a fast paced life, eat a lot of fastfood and other junk food. Some people smoke, and could save a bunch if they quit, others drive a lot and could save by carpooling. The simple fact is the more you save, the more you can invest in yourself.
4. Become a homeowner. Right now is a wonderful time to buy, owning a home is a great way to build wealth and equity. My tip is to buy a house that you can fix up and resell for more than you paid for it. Buy one that you can pay off in 5-10 years easily. You don’t need a grand house from the get go that’s going to cost an arm and a leg and take 30+ years to pay it off. Once you own your home you can then sell it and upgrade, and keep doing that till you own the house you’ve always dreamed of.
5. Pay your tithes. If you’re religious of course, which I am – I always pay my tithes and I always seem to have more than enough to meet my bills, and if I don’t my church will pay them for me… If you’re not religious then it’s advised that you give 10% of your income to worthy causes trust me karma is a true principle and everything you give will come back to you more times over.
6. Learn to cook. Eating out is extremely expensive, and the alternative can save you thousands per year.
7. Ride a bike or take public transit. Not only will you be helping the environment, but you’ll be saving on gas, especially now that it’s around $4/gallon. You might also look into jobs that only require a 4 day work week, as that is becoming the norm, or even better would be to telecommute and work from home, if possible – I believe telecommuting will become the standard of the future, as energy prices soar and companies experience troubles recruiting.
8. Don’t worry about brands, brands don’t mean crap. Buy the non-name brand items and you’ll save a bundle over time. Everything adds up.
9. If you have the means invest in solar panels for your home. It is costly at first but over a 20 year period you will save a ton more than you paid for them, and may even be able to make money back off any unused energy.
10. Teach your children the value of saving money. Today’s generation is all about borrowing, and if something doesn’t change our children’s future will be even more bleaker than ours. The way to stop this is to start from an early age and teach them how to manage money and finances.
11. Freelance. It seems now a days everyone is moonlighting and freelancing is one of the top ways to do this. If you can pick up some extra money on the side why not do it? My suggestion is to immediately put all your freelance earnings into your mutual funds and investments to speed up the time it will take you to become rich.
12. Lastly but not least – study the best resources on making and saving money. There’s the Automatic Millionaire, and many more great books, audio and video on this subject, just do a search.

I hope perhaps this little info might help you as it has helped me.

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Read Write Web posted a article detailing three futuristic search engines, and I discovered SearchMe.com and thought it was a pretty interesting find. I even made a video on the features and uses of Searchme.com Check it out below. What are your opinions?

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My Tweeple.com is a pretty nifty service, it basically pulls all your friends from twitter and lets you view those who follow you, those you follow, and mutual followers, and you can follow or unfollow right from the interface.

This is extremely useful, especially since Twitter has instigated the new follower limits.

I will say that I initially followed many people as robert scoble had suggested as a means to build my network, and it did work out hugely in my favor – for every 4 people I followed, 1 person would follow me.

So with 19000 people that I was following, I’ve gotten 5500 followers of my own, not too shabby in the least bit.

But alas the face of twitter and social networks in general are a changing. Of course I got upset at Twitter for making the changes, and I’ve been using twitter a lot less and experimenting with other sites such as Identi.ca, Rejaw, Tumblr, Plurk, etc…

However, with tools like monitter I don’t really need to follow everyone to get new followers and to build my personal brand or community, now I can focus on keeping my current network strong and building up my blog.

I’ve been using MyTweeple to unfollow those who aren’t following me. The most important people to me right now are the ones that listen to what I have to say, in essence they’re the ones paying the bills. My thoughts are why follow anyone who isn’t willing to reciprocate, and I already have enough followers that I can just unsubscribe to all the rest and focus on my little group, and build on that.

One thing I’d like to see on Mytweeple would be an option to just automatically unfollow anyone who isn’t following me, I’ve been clicking unfollow on link after link after link, or perhaps a checkbox next to each item on a page, and a select all link, and another button that says unfollow all, or something easier like that.

But overall I’m quite impressed, and think the service will do pretty well. I definitely recommend trying it out in order to organize your followers, and friends on twitter.

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I’ve had the nightmare that would never end, I signed up about 3 months ago with computinghost for web hosting. Computinghost has been nothing but trouble. They claim to have 24/7 support, more like 3/6. Support tickets are usually answered about 3 weeks after submitted, and their servers are ALWAYS down.

99% uptime? Talk about maybe 10-15% at best.

I am so glad I made the switch to hostgator, I highly recommend that you take the plunge and join them as well, you could join from my aff link and I’d be extremely grateful.

Anywho I’m finally done transferring to my new host and just wanted to drop a note and let ya know that I’m not dead or anything – not yet.

Monitter: The Real time – Live Twitter Monitor.

Monitter is great. It’s pretty simple how it works. First you you provide 3 keywords, for instance social media, facebook, and twitter, then hit enter. Now every time a new tweet on social media, facebook or twitter hits twitter you are notified immediately. Monitter is definitely one of those tools that I keep wondering how did I live without this?(Yes, I am a geek)

Monitter uses ajax so it can updates continuously, in real time.

I personally love Monitter, as a blogger because I can keep track of topics I’m interested in most, and build relationships with those who share interest in similar niches, and Monitter makes it uber simple to reply, just click on the reply link next to each post, this is a great way to build your online presence and network with like minded people.

The simple fact is the more people you talk to, or talk to you the more people will in the end follow you. Monitter makes this as simple as can be.

If people see someone send an @reply to someone but they didn’t see the original, they might be curious and want to get in on the conversation as well – people tend to be curious creatures, just like cats. So they may not have been following you before, but now they are.

Also remember one more follower may translate into one more hit on your website, and they might be the person who ends up clicking on your $2 adsense ad, who knows? Or even better they might buy from one of your affiliate program, never overlook the power of just one relationship.

Another feature of Monitter is that ability to subscribe to an rss feed based on your search term, you can also embed a monitter widget into your blog or website.

Monitter also lets you choose which language to receive tweets in. The current options are: English, Spanish, Deutsch, and French.

As you can see the team at Monitter have worked hard to bring an unique tool to the blogosphere, I highly recommend if you haven’t already tried it to give it quick gander, and let me know what you think.

Reader Poll: If you’ve used monitter, what is your opinion? Also in what ways do you use it?

Your help in our poll is much appreciated!

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Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

As many of you are aware, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, went into retirement from blogging on July 11th. Claiming he needed to find his new voice, he set out on a quest to build an ‘intimate mailing list’ to host discussions on.

In a recent blog post, an update on his retirement, Jason says he is having a wonderful time writing his emails to his ‘intimate email group” (since when is 3000+ considered intimate?)…he continues: “I’ve been writing 2-5k word thought pieces on the email list, and I’ve found it to be very rewarding in a way that the mud pit of blogging isn’t.”

My thoughts are:

1. How is blogging a mudpit, and does that make us bloggers pigs? If so I feel a bit insulted.

2. Isn’t writing 2k+ ‘thought pieces’ the same as blogging just in a different format? I mean blog comes from the word weblog, which is a log of information on the web, a journal so to speak of one’s thoughts and opinions, whether it’s posted to a website or sent over email, in my opinion he’s still blogging.

3. It appears to me that this is somewhat of a scam like his twitter follower campaign, and other such to build a bigger audience for himself and mahalo. Everyone knows that the money is in your ‘list’. I’m not saying building a newsletter is bad, but if you want people to subscribe to your newsletter, don’t do it by trickery, just come out and say it.

Darren Rowse from Problogger says that before you do anything you need to build a list, and should start a newsletter on day one of your blog’s launch. There are just so many people who still don’t use feed readers that can benefit from your blog, and you can benefit from their visiting your site it’s a win-win.

Jason Calacanis continues his blog post : “Now I still love blogs: still read them, still comment on them…. but I’m trying to find my voice again–my true voice. There is something about the acoustic, intimate nature of email that is impacting how I write. I’m writing every sentence as if I’m looking someone in the eye and speaking directly to them. I’m thinking about the economy of words again. I’m trying to say things in as few words as possible, and I’m cutting sentences, paragraphs and pages more than I’m publishing them. I’m proof reading again, and C.K. Sample is proofing for me. It’s a new, slower and more considered process and I’m loving it. I’ve published ten emails or so and I’ve thrown away at least 30. Somethings happening, but I don’t know what it is.”

My thoughts:

When he says “I’m writing every sentence as if I’m looking someone in the eye and speaking directly to them.” I’m thinking, isn’t that how blogs are? That’s at least how I’ve always wrote my blog, as if I’m writing an intimate letter to a long lost friend…

He also says “I’m thinking about the economy of words again. I’m trying to say things in as few words as possible, and I’m cutting sentences, paragraphs and pages more than I’m publishing them. I’m proof reading again,” and I’m thinking economy of words?

Didn’t you say your ‘emaillog’(not to be confused with a weblog of course) are 2k-5k word thought pieces? How is that economical at all?

He continues:

“Over 100 folks respond to every email and I try to respond to every single person. Some of these emails are five pages and I read every single word. No one else sees these words–they are between me and the reader and that is also wonderful and true. Posting to the comment section of a blog is meaningless when compared to sending an email containing your thoughts inteneded for the author. Folks say very, very deep, true and honest things in one to one communications that they can’t say in a blog comment. I love that.”

Call my cynical, but the tone is that of perhaps a hippie(and I’m a very liberal person, hell I voted for Dennis Kucinich), or someone in a midlife crisis, or perhaps someone post stroke, maybe he’s been playing with model kits in a non-ventilated room, your guess is as good as mine. No offense but it’s like he’s living in a dream land. If he were writing blog pieces people could still email him from the blog if he so choosed to put up a contact form right at the bottom of each post or such.

Bottom line: Jason Calacanis if you’re really retired from blogging, more power to you, but why not stop blogging about being retired from blogging, seriously. I know blogging is addictive, and there are places that can help you with your addiction. (that last line was sarcasm, in case you weren’t paying attention…)

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