Jason Drohn's Scrapbook

Mozilla Songbird – Open Source Music Player

Saturday, September 30th, 2006

songbirdMaking my daily rounds, I found Mozilla’s new beta, Songbird. Songbird is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox, it is built from Mozilla, cross-platform and open source.

This should prove to be a good weekend experiment. I will let you know what I find out. In the meantime, check it out for yourself at songbirdnest.com. For anyone interested in the Mozilla projects, check out the development list. It’s always a good resource for new and exciting products!

The ‘Podscast’ below is just for testing. It is just a random song I pulled out the see how the plugin works.

30.09.2006 technology Comments

SEO Tools to Watch the PR Update

Friday, September 29th, 2006

Over at Tech-buzz.net, Thilak wrote that he thought a PR update was going on.  I didn’t think it would happen for another month or so, but here it is.

The servers are slowly starting to crawl sites and update the PRs.  I have also noticed in my toolbar and with SEO Quake, the PR seems to be shut off.  A lot of the sites that I was seeing a ranking for are not showing up. 

Anyway, here are the links to check your own sites.  Let me know what you find!

seochat.com

page rank prediction 

29.09.2006 technology Comments

SEO – Beating the Google Sandbox

Friday, September 29th, 2006

sandboxFor any of you familiar with Google and their page ranking system, you should be familiar with the sandbox. The sandbox is that mysterious holding place where sites seem to go when they first start up, when they do something bad (like copy content), or various other untrustworthy things.

I found a guide to help you beat the sandbox which I encourage you to read. It is a great reference and really spells out why some sites that should rank, don’t. It also clues you in on what Google wants to see in your site and how to achieve those things.

What is the Google Sandbox? Does it really exist? I almost didn’t include this little section, because the “Does the sandbox exist?” debate has become as annoying as the “white hat vs. black hat” one. But just to be absolutely clear, the sandbox does exist. No, it’s not just a straight aging delay, as originally thought; and no, you don’t have to call it “the sandbox” if you don’t want to. (In fact, I kind of prefer the term “Trustbox”.) But speaking as an organic-only guy who has launched a site every other week for the past two years (really), I can tell you that “this sandbox/Trustbox thingy” appears again and again independent of niche, type of site, number of pages, etc. As for what it is: The sandbox/Trustbox is a set of filters in Google’s search algorithm that together prevent new sites from ranking well until they gain trust.

The article can be found at linkbuildingblog.com. Let me know what you think! Are you in the sandbox?

Technorati Tags: seo, sandbox, google, websites, technology, bloggers, blogs

29.09.2006 technology Comments

Business Building 101 – Online Marketing

Friday, September 29th, 2006

typewriterIt is an interesting ordeal, online marketing. There really are not too many sources of information on the topic; viable resources anyway. Almost everything you see is published by a marketing company or the partner of the company, and it somehow touts their products as being the best. All with a cost involved. — For $99 we will stream 10,000 targeted visitors to your site a month… right, let me get my wallet out.. –

But somehow companies are pulling it off day in and day out.

When we sit down to examine the options of online marketing, they are pretty straightforward. Also, please excuse me if I start talking like a publisher, or someone who puts ads on a site to make money. I have to wear both hats pretty often and the fine line between the two skills can get muffled..

To yield the highest results, you basically have these choices:

  • Websites
  • Text Links Ads
  • Banner Ads
  • Keyword Targeted Ads (Adwords)
  • Email marketing
  • Press Releases
  • Viral Marketing (This is the big one)

Each of these areas will allow you to advertise your business, but some are clearly better than others. I want to take a second to define some implications of each area from what I see on the internet today. I also want to throw my two cents in on how it will be changing. (A hint: it is the last part of the above list. And for all you bloggers, that means you!)

(more…)

29.09.2006 business building 101 Comments

TitanQuest.net Sold at 46x Revenue

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

sitepoint

Looking through some of the site listings the other day, I came across this.  TitanQuest.net was sold at 46 times monthly revenue in 34 minutes! 

Basically, what that means is TitanQuest makes an average of $200 per month through advertiser content.  It was sold for $9,500.00.  The true value lies in the fact that there are 8,500 subscribers and 80,000 posts on the site already. 

The forum owner was none other than Lee Dodd, an absolute expert forum builder and domain monetization specialist.  If anyone has any ambitions to learn the domain and website industry, start with him.  You can check out his blog at revenews.com. 

A firm congratulations go out to him for his continued success and profit.

Giant Forum – TitanQuest.net – 200,000+ Visits Monthly – 8.5k Members – 80k+ Posts

Technorati Tags: forums, domains, ppc, ads, advertising, websites, titan quest

28.09.2006 entrepreneur stories Comments

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