Nada Collar

BlogRush is a new traffic referral widget which is similar looking to blog referral widgets (ie MyBlogLog), but links to posts rather than people. Its been done before, and its nothing really new. But it has had some attention from the likes of ShoeMoney, so I expect it will take off.

The site itself seems reasonably well implemented, the widget looks ok, and the javascript code is nice and simple (so hopefully we don’t see to many security issues of the likes of the BlogLog ones).

BlogRush basically works by giving you credits for page views and using credits when you get a listing on someone else’s blog. You can also get credits by signing up new users. The referral credit goes up to 10 levels deep in a pyramid type scheme, so some people could potentially get huge amounts of credits by being at the top of the tree.

They have a few nice features like spreading credits amongst multiple blogs. Nice help for people with successful blogs that want to start another.

I’ve added the widget, so I’ll see how it goes.

I have been getting a strange message from iTunes for a few weeks now and haven’t had the time to look into it. The message was “iTunes has stopped working”, and the signature was listed as APPCRASH in the module “QuickTime.qts_unloaded”.

Looking around on the net it seems that its hurting a lot of people. Some were claiming that a QuickTime re-install would work, others were stating that it didn’t (and that was my experience too).

After playing around for some time I finally have a solution based on something that a “Carey Frisch” wrote in a forum. Note that some of these steps might not be needed, but I can’t back out and retry.

1. Re-install latest iTunes
2. Install MS update 938194 for vista reliability
3. Install MS update 938979 for vista reliability
4. Run QuickTime install, but choose repair.
5. if that didn’t work try a full QuickTime install rather than a repair.

That order worked for me. You might want to ignore step 1 and just try 2,3 & 4 (due to the large iTunes download size), although that might not work if you have a slightly older version of iTunes.

Update: I suspect this problem might be related to Vista Codec Package… or K-lite. Please post a comment if you are using either of these or not. Thanks

Update2: It seems that this solution doesn’t work for everyone. But unfortunately that means I can’t check for a better solution, since mine is working now. However I am curious to know if people that still have this problem can open Windows Movie Maker? I came across this MS Knowledge base article about “Window Movie Maker has stopped working“. It sounds like a similar problem and a similar solution probably exists for iTunes, however it looks like the iTunes related codecs are not accessible through Movie Maker.

But if you are having this problem with Windows Movie Maker or Windows DVD Maker, or Windows Photo Galler, then take a look at the knowledge base article.

Question1: If the first solution doesn’t work, does Windows Movie Maker start? or does it give this same “has stopped working” message?
Question 2: Does any one know how to see what codecs are installed on Windows Vista? It was available in Control Panel > Multimedia in XP, but I just can’t find it anywhere in Vista. (Apart from some codec information in the Windows Media Player > Help > About windows media player - but that only appears to be related to Windows Media Player).

My Guess: Try uninstalling any codec packages you have and then repairing QuickTime. It sounds like this “has stopped working” message relates to incompatible codecs.

I was just searching about CAPTCHA (pictures of letters used for human verification) for an idea I had been thinking about and noticed news from last month (I was busy and didn’t do much reading lately) about how some spammers have cracked CAPTCHA…. I think thats un-imaginative thinking. Of course maybe they have a program to beat the Captcha, but why go to that effort?

Anyone with half a brain can figure out how to beat Captcha.

Think about this… Anyone with half a brain can use a captcha. So now all I need is someone with half a brain!!!! Simple.

Still not getting it?

Ok. Create a simple website that uses Captcha, say: “play our game and win money” (or even better, prOn). Make the game a captcha… Give away some money. Now write your software for creating yahoo email accounts. When Yahoo asks for a Captcha pass it through to your other site. Instead of serving up a captcha that some software created, serve up the image that Yahoo gave you. Tada. Someone with half a brain is solving your captcha.

I guess you could almost say its a different form of social engineering.

As a footnote: Captcha Killer claim (and probably can do, I see no reason why it can’t be done) to automatically solve captcha, (for “blind” people using ocr techniques)

Some of the news articles about the “cracking”:

Techdigest

It even got slashdotted
Tech Blorge

Update: After writing all that above I came across the term “Captcha farming”…. If you just know what to search for its amazing what results you can find. Anyway this concept has been around for a while, and its commonly used in the prOn industry (just as I thought).

I’ve been crazily busy, so no time to write, then when I became “un-busy” I just wanted to do nothing. So anyway. Here I am again.

Ok, it has taken me a long time, but I finally got around to looking at Squidoo.

It looks to me like the first “Revenue Sharing Inside”(tm)  site that I think will be (is it too early to say “is”?)  a huge success. Apart from forums, most revenue sharing sites I’ve come across just seem to lack that little something. These sites are usually made by someone who:

• has the vision to see that user generated content could be huge
• The willingness to part with some revenue to help generate users
• But not the realization that those that really love a subject will create the best content and make them the most money.

These enthusiasts, are people are more interested in their subject than the money. And they don’t want to just quickly list a few things and hope that someone clicks on it so they make a buck. They want a site that they can use to express their love.

It seems Squidoo offers that.

Referrals

However what really intrigues me is the Squidoo referral system. As a lensmaster, you can refer new users, and when they make $15, both you and them get $5.

Getting Traffic from Squidoo

What prompted me to start looking at Squidoo (even though its been on my list of things to do forever) was this blog post: Using Squidoo for Free Traffic and Money.Dave Rigotti claims that you can setup a Lens with a RSS feed of your blog to get traffic and PageRank for your blog.  Seems like a great idea to me. The only downside I can see is that Google might flag the duplicate content.  I suspect that problem would go away if your RSS feed only included an excerpt.

Obsession?

This could lead to an obsession.  I’m starting to get ideas about Squidoo, topics etc. I really don’t have the time, so I think I might start listing them here as I think about them.

I’ve just checked out the new Google Analytics and while I haven’t really spent much time with it, I have to say that I like it. I was an easy convert, I really hated the Google Analytics GUI before.  But now it seems to be more contextual, from most reports you can click on almost everything and drill further down into the data.  I hated that about the old GUI, sometimes what you wanted was there, but other times it just really didn’t make any sense (to me).

I suspect the original interface was designed for a certain user (the marketer), but then when Google took over it suddenly became for everyone, and as a result the interface wasn’t quite what most people wanted. It seemed bizarre to me that it took me a ton of time and finally a help search to find who my referring sites where.  But on the new interface it took me all of 10 seconds to find.

Maybe marketer’s will be writing about how they hate the new system, but I’m hoping they got that right too as I am slowly (very) but surely creeping towards being able to call myself that.

I’ve just added a new blog to my Google Reader. Zac Johnson is a “Super affiliate” who has just started a blog about affiliate marketing. I enjoy Zac’s writing style as he often seems to slant towards a high level “running a business” article, as well as the usual affiliate news and ways to make money. I am a partner in a reasonably successful business in a completely unrelated field (but in technology) and I find that most high level business concepts carry over well, so its a nice mix for me.

My blog originally started as pure Revenue Sharing, but the more I look around and see concepts such as Zac’s Review Me and Make Money (taken from John Chow’s similar Link Love campaign), and his Top Commenters Competition, the more I realize that there are many, many types of revenue sharing. As I’ve mentioned before, even just removing rel=nofollow from your links is a form of revenue sharing.

Anyway, back to Zac’s blog. I am trying to learn as much as I can about the affiliate industry and so Zac’s site will stay on my RSS feed. Its well written and I am sure he will continue to write some great articles. Its good to get some fresh ideas if you have been reading from the same people over and over.

There has been a reasonable amount of noise lately about lead generation affiliates and their shady practises. Shoemoney published an article from an anonymous guest some time ago about how ValueClick seemed to be in some shady practises. They (Shoemoney wrote that he had done some due diligence and seemed to agree with the guest) seemed to be directly involved in the “Win a free iPod” deals.

I did some digging and discovered that the websites in question were run by the old 180Solutions team. Now it seems that analysts are questioning the state of the industry and what effect these kinds of deals are going to have on these companies.

We have already seen the Florida Attorney General take action against ringtone scammers. But I predict class action suites. There must be a lot of people who have been scammed by free ringtones, free iPods and other shady deals. And there must be a lot of Lawyers itching to make a fortune off them.

Start developing your sites explaining these shady deals and class action lawsuits. I suspect they will make create adsense or affiliate pages to get leads for the lawyers Ironic isn’t it.

Tumri Cornerstore launched some time at the beginning of this January. But there hasn’t been much information about it around the place. Perhaps the most information is over at 5 Star Affiliate Programs, especially in the forum there.

The idea of Tumri is similar to MyPickList and FavoriteThingz, although from an initial look it appears to be implemented better than those two. It also seems that Tumri is marketing itself towards publishers rather than social network users, so that might help them.

Apparently for users that signed up in January receive 70% revenue share, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is now.

User Experience

One thing I found interesting was that on signing up I had to select my target audience based on gender, education level and average household income. I guess this will help target the widget, but I would have thought that this information would be better to be added when the widget is created. It would seem that I can only have one widget per account, which is not perfect if this is being targeted towards publishers who likely have multiple places (with different targets) they would like to use this widget.

On signing up the site seemed to hang, but I got an email and was able to access my account, so just some small hiccup. On signup there was also mention of a conditions for a “widget sweepstakes”, but the link didn’t seem to have anything related, apart from a small box stating that every 100th signup would give me a free iPod shuffle. I assume a signup is a new publisher (found from my widget) who creates a widget, but who knows.

Once inside the publisher portal Tumri has a very clean looking user interface and creating a widget is fairly simple, however I found that I could not target my widget any closer than a category, unlike the write-up which said I could “select or block CornerStore offers by item, brand, keywords, product category, price break, location, and many other criteria”.

Conclusion

Overall it looks like a product that could be useful with some more work. But given the apparent success of MyPickList and FavoriteThingz they are going to have to work hard.

What does it need? Firstly a blog to inform people of updates (there is a news page on the publishers section which kind of resembles a blog), secondly some decent help (any help at all would be good), and finally and most importantly the ability to actually target certain products like they promised.

View my widget here.

Well that was painless. At least the basics. I switched to wordpress using Blogger RSS Import since I was using the new Blogger and wordpress says it doesn’t support it (although I didn’t look around to see if it would work).

Simple really.

1. switched my Blogger to publish on blogspot
2. deleted all the files on my server
3. wrote a quick index.html to say I was switching
4. setup wordpress using Fantastico
5. Changed permalink structure to match blogger: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
6. Activated Aksimo spam killer
7. installed Blogger RSS Import.
8. Imported.

The only issues I see are:

1. It doesn’t copy comment info (email addresses etc) - no big deal for me since I only have a few comments
2. I have to come up with a new theme and install anything else I had on blogger (Analytics etc)

Overall I’m happy. Just have to work on the theme now.

Update: Decided to remove the .html on the permalink. Changed custom permalink to remove the .html. Added mod_rewrite rule: RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/(.*)\.html$ http://www.nadacollar.com/$1/$2/$3/ [L,r=301]