Shanti’s Dispatches

Well, this is what happens when you run a weblog network and pay no attention to it.

Spam posts (not just comments - that’s normal) on every single blog and we didn’t catch it for 4 days! (this guy was clever - I’m sure the Turkey Day timing helped him a bit)

Of course, I expected this to happen a lot sooner. It just always seems to happen when you have the least amount of time & energy to deal with something like that.

Update: luckily we’ve got some great writers that can help out in this area. thanks guys! I just had to grant them all proper access to the blogs n stuff. hopefully the link above to the blogpost spam will stop working in a bit!

If you’ve ever wondered whether the author of this blog is an Indian, black female, or well, what kind of name is Shanti anyway?!?!… well, it’s now revealed. (hopefully the picture of me and my girlfriend next to each post gives it away, but perhaps not)

You can read more at: sablog.com/about/

But seriously, the sidebar was getting pretty cluttered and had incorrectly proclaimed that I was still working at a company here in Phoenix for the past few months.

When in fact I’ve been telecommuting with the awesome crew at SproutIt.com, who’ve been in Prague (Czech Republic), but are moving back to California (The Schwarzenegger Republic) soon.

People also ask me from time to time about the status of other projects like Niner Niner, etc.

My secret: It’s still alive, just all highly automated and run by a kickass crew of writers!!! (it’s all automated except for when things break, like last week when our server crashed and it was down for 2 days. oops!)

I (acting as benevolent guy behind the scenes of Ajax Blog) had a chance recently to sit down with the breakout team of vSocial.com.

We wanted to pick the brains of the vSocial founding team and learn about: starting a new social networking site, building a large-scale, high-bandwidth web app, developing with Ajax, building traffic/buzz, life hacks, and more.

The numbers speak for themselves: vSocial has gone from 0 to 71M+ monthly page views, 270K+ unique daily visitors and 45M videos served a month … all in about 120 days!

Brad Webb and Mark Sigal of vSocial were kind enough to sit down with Ajax Blog for the following interview. Enjoy!

Can you describe how the company or concept behind vSocial.com came about?

The core platform behind vSocial was developed over the past three years (with vSocial’s other co-founder, Brent Oesterblad) as part of a general purpose social media platform for uploading and sharing pictures, music, movies and other rich media content items. Looking at the market mid-last year, it was clear that Internet video was about to hit in a big way, and we felt that we had a lot of “secret sauce” to bring to the equation so we opted to focus there. The underlying platform is quite feature rich, and we expect to roll more of it out into the market in the coming months.

(Cont’d…)

Read the full interview: How vSocial Went from 0 to 71 Million Page Views in (about) 120 Days

I just came across this link via del.icio.us/popular.

It has a nice little list that purports to be the top 160 paying search keyword terms.

If you’ve ever googled for anything related to AdSense or SEO, you may have come across various top paying keyword lists for sale (see the sidebar ads).

I’m not too proud to admit that in my more naive days of Internet marketing (oh, about a year ago), I had purchased one of these lists.

Boy, what a waste of money!

It really is true what they say about sticking to what you’re passionate about. That’s why Ajax Blog has done well, now with more than 1,300 daily RSS readers.

High Heels Blog has also done well, with a team of highly passionate bloggers on the case! (It’s a pretty sexy blog topic, too, don’t ya think?)

My cox high-speed Internet was down over the weekend.

Talk about several hundred dollars in lost opportunity cost of working on my projects.

Luckily the cable guy came out and got it back online… only $59.95 for a new cable modem. Apparently my Internet connection had been turned off too by a cox technician. (Anyone else think this sounds a little fishy?)

O’well, I was just happy to be back online!

In unrelated news, Ruby on Rails had a very special birthday today, reaching 1.0 baby!!!

I’ve also been looking for some extra help on Niner Niner to help knock out changes to our various WordPress themes, etc.

I know that you get what you pay for… but when did $10 per hour become peanuts to do basic HTML work?

We’d love to pay $20 or $25 an hour, but what we need done just doesn’t warrant that kind of dough, even if we had it.

If you’re interested, or know of anyone, drop me a line at: shantibraford (at) gmail

Gabriel and I first started Niner Niner about a year ago after some initial success at collaborative blogging. (Our first was HIPAA Blog, a nice little niche.)

Since then, I’ve come to realize the biggest drawback of starting this kind of project, which is, you have to cater to the needs of three distinct groups of people:

• Your Readers
• Your Writers
• Your Advertisers

Yes, AdSense goes a long way, but you still need advertisers to make it a business as opposed to a hobby. (at least in our case)

Niner Niner has been an awesome endeavor and we’ll continue smoothing out its rough edges and working on it when we have time. Gabriel has also been doing some great work with customizing a WordPress Multi-User installation for a related project. (can’t talk about this one yet, I don’t think…)

But the appeal of subscription-based services such as Basecamp, Backpack, Flickr Pro and soon Mailroom is what drew me to Sprout.

These kind of apps also fit right into the sweet spot of Ruby on Rails.

Welcome, Steve Lord of the United Kingdom, to the Niner Niner blogging team!

Steve is the 200th writer here on this tiny but ever-expanding weblog network of ours.

It was just a little over a year ago that Gabriel and I put together the concept of Niner Niner and began flushing out our initial prototype of how things would work.

We had some initial success with our first experiment in collaborative, tag-team blogging with HIPAA Blog. From there, things expanded as we gradually added more blogs to the network.

I’d like to thank all of our writers so far this past year who’ve helped make Niner Niner possible. I hope it’s been a worthwhile journey for all!

Special thanks to:

Christy Patrick

Laurie Barak

Sarah White

Nancy Callahan

Chris Bunting

Georganna Hancock

Tom Simpson

Harry Fuecks

Jim Moser

May 2006 be an even bigger and better year for all of us here in the Niner Niner blogging family!

Whenever I keep hearing about a book, from multiple trusted sources, it’s always a clear signal to me that I should check it out.

This was the case with Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

It appears on Joel’s Book Recommendations page as well as the newly revised Personal MBA list by Josh Kaufman.

After reading the first third of the book, I’ve developed a nauseating feeling… thinking back on all the times I’ve been unwittingly duped by psychological mind tricks. (whether the parties knew they were using these or not… most likely not)

… that, as well as noticing all the times where I’ve attempted to use such techniques, not fully knowing what I was doing at the time.

This generally relates to working with people, such as our Human Capital Investment Group, Menlo Park 2.0, the Niner Niner weblog network, and other various ventures that involve recruiting, building and championing a team.

More and more… especially after reading this book, I’ve realized that I don’t want to have to resort to any mind tricks. (consciously or not)

I just want to do a few things, and do them well. These are:

• Build Something That People Love
• Build Something That People Use Regularly and Willingly (duh!), and Love to Tell Their Friends About
• Keep Making It (the Something) Better and Better Over Time

There. No jedi mind tricks. Just a simple formula…

… that’s incredibly hard to achieve in practice.

Assert(Simple != Easy);

The following is a roundup of the best posts these last few days on the Niner Niner collaborative weblog network.

Hope you enjoy!

Has Sony ‘patented an idea for transmitting data directly into the brain’? Scary.

Luckily Chris Bunting of Thumb Gods is keeping an eye on them for us. Unless, of course, this is all just a simulated Sony version of reality that we’re living in right now.

For techies: Prototype - an Object-Oriented JavaScript library (disclaimer: I wrote this… so treat ‘best of’ status as spurios at best)

Blogging Naked: Clayton Cubitt: not quite safe for work… but beautiful

Nandini Seshadri: Sex and the Baby Boomer - Can drug therapy help? (Sometimes you don’t like to think about these things as a young person… interesting though.)

Also, Become a novelist, boomer! Nandini says:

Long before he became a rock star and racked up two Top 10 hits and nigh-on a dozen albums, Greg Kihn loved The Twilight Zone. Skin-prickling episodes about apocalypses and phantom hitchhikers made him yearn, unlike the books he read in English class, to spin spellbinding stories all his own.

In class action news, Doctors back Bextra ban. There’s all kinds of class action news these days with the Pfizer / Bextra / Vioxx stuff going on. Hopefully we can make reading about this stuff not nearly as dull as the mainstream media does. We’ll see

Christy Patrick on the Diet Logs: How much is your diet costing you?

How much is your diet costing you? Well, according to a recent report from Forbes, it could be costing you over 50% more than a normal diet would. Forbes did research on ten of the major diets right now, from Jenny Craig to Subway, to find out how much it costs on average per week.

Patty Harder: More on calorie burning and what’s your resting metabolic rate

PS: did you know that dark chocolate does a body good? I certainly didn’t!

Thumb Gods: Police find crack cocaine hidden inside a PlayStation 2 game console

Feed Money: Darren Rowse makes a six-figure income from his blogging efforts. Find out how at ProBlogger.net.

Sarah White asks, are you in credit hell?

The tax man cometh right around this time of year. Christy shares some strange and unusual tax deductions. (See also the top 10 taxpayer mistakes.)

Nandini has scored a credit card search form to help you find the lowest rate cards. Sweet!

Nadini comes through again with an interesting chart on how much money you need to retire early.

More scary debt stats over on Fix My Finances:

$1.7 trillion
Total consumer credit.

$8,562
Credit card debt carried by the average American.

$50 billion
Total finance charges Americans paid in 2001.

78%
Percent of U.S. households deemed “credit worthy” by the lending industry.

1.3 million
Number of credit card holders declaring bankruptcy last year.

HIPAA Blog: medical privacy rules are confusing for patients (as well as medical staff!)

Over on Games for Money, we’ve got some Texas Low Limit Hold ‘Em tips.

Also, did your parents did warn you about drawing to an inside straight? If not, read the post for some (inside straight draw) poker tips.

Over on High Heels Blog, after dabbling in some $100+ heels for a while, now the bargain hunt continues.

Ladies (and drag queens, and boyfriends), Nandini has posted her Guide to Buying Heels - Part 3. See also part 1 and part 2.

Sarah White on Medcare Forum discusses alternative medicine:

A new survey indicates that three-fourths of all adults in America over age 50 use some kind of alternative medicine (for the purposes of this survey, alternative included accupunture, chiropractic, massage therapy, breathing exercises, herbal remedies and alternative medicine). The survey of more than 800 adults found the most-used alternative therapy was chiropractic care.

On Healthy Living: Boost your energy with power foods! Or, just eat a twinkie (ugh).

Love strawberry shortcake but hate all the calories? Here’s a healthier strawberry shortcake recipe.

It’s almost time to hitchhike. Haven’t read the book myself, but the previews look cool.

Laurie Barak points to some PayPal alternatives over on Powersellers Blog.

Nancy Callahan on The Single Life has some pointers on how to ‘read’ your date.

That’s about it for this edition of Massively Multiposter Best of Niner Niner Roundup, ‘05.

I’ve been trying to bait Jason Calacanis into responding for a few days now.

He’s just so high and mighty in his #2 position in the nascient Weblog Network market, that it’s tempting to try and get a rise out of him.

Looks like this post finally did the trick.

If you missed it, here goes:

Calacanis Makes $1,000 per day from AdSense, reveals CTR & CPM, violates AdSense ToS

It’s pretty obvious that Jason Calacanis was unaware of the AdSense ToS when he posted this entry, originally detailing his CTR and CPM.

Of course, once it’s out there, it’s out there.

A few feedster searches later revealed this article.

I’m not sure what the terms of service says about revealing other people’s CTRs and eCPMs, but I won’t even do that here, since AdSense is what’s keeping the lights on around here for the time being. The link above, however, reveals the CTRs and CPMs that Weblogs Inc is getting. Quite frankly, I’m not impressed.

I know several companies, that you would have never heard of, with networks much larger than Weblogs Inc (in breadth) and are making several times more than Calacanis and Co.

Their secret? They write content for the Long Tail of niche high PPC keywords.

——————

Jason’s response:

yeah, we could do more asbestos-based blogs… but i think that is a bad publishing model. great for short term revenue boost, so not a bad idea.

My response back to him:

We’re profitable. Are you?