Just a quick word to the wise: AVOID NETWORK SOLUTIONS LIKE THE PLAGUE.
Sorry if I’m being a bit dramatic, but I tend to get a bit sensitive over companies that behave badly the way Network Solutions is. The DomainTools blog is covering the shady tactics that NetSol is now employing. It appears now that when you search for an available domain name at netsol.com, if the domain is unregistered NetSol will register it within minutes!
They will place a 4-day hold on the domain and then release it back into the wild. The major problem with this tactic is that it:
- Forces you to buy the domain from Network Solutions (they are expensive compared to most)
- Makes the domain you wanted available to any number of domain tasters and generally anyone watching expiring domain name lists waiting for good ones to drop.
If you lose a good domain name this way, the odds are against you that you’ll manage to recover it without having to buy it from Network Solutions.
I tried this just 10 minutes ago with a not-so-nice domain name with a few numbers thrown in. I made sure it wasn’t registered. I checked it’s availability on NetSol.com, and within 5 minutes it had been registered by Network Solutions. Unbelievable.
I’ve lost domain names by not registering them fast enough in the past, but this is to the extreme.
If you are using FireBug while using Gmail, it could be slowing down your browsing experience. If you’d rather not turn off FireBug completely, here are some simple steps to improve the speed of Gmail from the Gmail help files.
- Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
- Click the Console tab.
- Select Options.
- Uncheck Show XMLHttpRequests.
- Click the Net tab.
- Select Options.
- Check Disable Network Monitoring.
Unfortunately, there is no fix for Mac users other than disabling or removing Firebug completely.
I’ve often played with various to do list incarnations and usually can never find one that works exactly as I want. The problem is a to do list is a rather simple concept, yet most online to do lists are either overly simple or overly complicated. I need something that is in between. Or rather, lets me easily pick how complex I want it to be.
Today I discovered Todoist and I think I’ve found my last to do list app. The basic version (which covers most all you’d need) is free, with some extra features thrown in for a small fee. Things I love about Todoist:
- Nested groups and to do lists
- Tons of keyboard shortcuts to make list entry and management easy
- Built-in calendar system with intelligent date entry (I can type “every Saturday” and it knows what I mean)
- Full export of all your lists via XML
- iGoogle widget is awesome if you use iGoogle as your start page
- Easily customizable views
If I use this service enough over the next month, I might just spring the few extra bucks to get more features such as email reminders. Check it out at todoist.com.
This is the first post in a multi-part series on low-cost, high-return methods of hyper-local advertising.
Call it targeted advertising. Call it audience demographics. I call it hyper-local. One of the nice side-effects of this rush to create (and join) a myriad of social networks is all the user meta information that is being collected. The very premise behind most social (and even professional) online networks is connecting you with others like you. This, inherently, requires the user give up some key information about themselves. Seemingly innocent bits of descriptive data that marketers big and small drool over such as where you live, what college you went to, what professional industry you’re in, or even what kinds of things do you look for online. Increasingly, these bits of info are being used to sell hyper-local advertising opportunities to… anyone.
Sure, demographics-based marketing has been around forever. The key trend happening today is the combination of companies amassing this data in large quantities and then turning around and selling targeted advertising opportunities a la carte. Let my first example show you what I’m talking about.
Example 1: Facebook
With 39 million active users, Facebook has the potential to provide a wide range of options when it comes to advertising. If you visit their advertising section take a look at “Flyers.” Flyers are small ads that appear on the side of the page for users of Facebook. Facebook refers to them as self-serve advertising because you can put together a highly targeted ad in relatively short order. You can isolate your campaign by network (such as a specific city or university), and also by demographic data such as gender, age, undergraduate, graduate, etc.
What makes this advertising method so useful is the price point and the low barrier of entry. In a matter of minutes, I can put together a highly targeted ad and pay as little as $5.00 to distribute my electronic flyer to 2,500 Facebook users. Or, you can go much bigger and pay $200 for 100,000 flyer impressions per day. Facebook now offers a pay-per-click model that lets you set a daily budget and a top amount you’re willing to pay per click.
Example 2: StumbleUpon
Even at 1/10th the size of Facebook, StumbleUpon has a similar targeting scheme that allows you to really zoom in on the types of users that you want to advertise to. Their advertisers page gives you access to all the categories of pages that their users “stumble” through. They also tell you how many thousands of users are active in each category, which is helpful in trying to decide where to focus your campaign. Once you select a category, you can then further drill down and select users by country, state, and even a limited list of major cities. You can go one step further by specifying a gender.
You simply fund your account with as little as $5 and you can begin your campaign. StumbleUpon will automatically insert your specified URL into their user’s stumbles in the category you selected. An additional feature of StumbleUpon is access to how users have rated your site (thumbs up or thumbs down). This is great for a couple reasons. First, it allows you to better judge how effective your landing page is. Also, if your site gets enough thumb’s up, it can potentially make it into heavy rotation in the normal StumbleUpon system (for free).
Next time, we’ll look at a couple other hyper-local advertising methods and review some tips on maximizing the effectiveness of your campaign.
My blog was just activated for a sweet service I recently came across called Odiogo. Basically, the service runs the feed of your blog through a rather robust text-to-speech engine and generates a podcast feed automatically. There isn’t really much to it. You submit your site and wait for an activation email with all the info you need.
Text-to-speech has come a long way from my first experiences with it about 10 or so years ago. Listening to my own podcast, I’m finding that the voice is not annoying and I actually enjoyed listening (being that it was my own content may have helped). I’ve only noticed a few minor pronunciation bugs, such as “plug-ins” pronounced “ploo-gins.” It would be great if I could select from different voices or even somehow create a voice based on my own voice.
An important tip for anyone interested in setting up an Odiogo podcast of their blog. The service reads your RSS/ATOM feed, so if you have your blog set to only show an excerpt of your posts Odiogo will only read the excerpt. I made that mistake and my first few posts are only speaking the excerpt.
Like many of you, I am not a morning person. Paradoxically, I absolutely love the way early morning smells, looks, and feels in the spring and summer. If I’m awake, showered, dressed, and at work/coffee shop with my laptop and coffee before 7 AM, I feel like I can accomplish anything (and there’s a good reason).
But, the distance between your bed and your cup-o-joe can sometimes be daunting. I find that showering in the morning right after I wake up helps wake me up quite a bit. I’ve tried jogging in the morning, but I haven’t been able to do it regularly (and I’m out of shape, which doesn’t help). My wife and I recently purchased new bikes and have started riding again. She’s experimenting with taking a short ride in the morning. I might have to try that.
The only other routine I have developed is listening to “fast” music a little loud in my car during my commute. Currently, I’m wearing down a copy of Minutes to Midnight by Linkin Park. It helps keep me awake and focused during the boring 30 minute drive downtown. Plus, something about having a song in your head helps move the day along.
So, sleepyhead, how do you get ready for your day?
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