One person dared to dream and put together a fake Google News page with their vision of what a page of ‘good news’ might look like. Scanning the page, I pretty much agree with everything that caught my eye.
Notable headlines: “China Withdraws from Tibet, with Apologies”, “President signs single-payer health care into law”, “Faster Way Seen to Reduce Atmospheric Carbon” and for you sci-fi fans, “Lucas authorizes fan reworkings of episodes 1-3″!
Here’s a funny bit from an old Friends episode, where Joey is lamenting getting old (a.k.a. 30+). I sympathize. It sucks. Ever wonder how come life doesn’t come with a manual?
Oh yeah, if you go to http://m.youtube.com on your cell/mobile, you can pull up YouTube videos. Make sure you have a good data plan, b/c those videos ain’t small compared to text-based web pages or SMS/text messages.
Get paid to interview. NotchUp is a startup that matches up companies and candidates, and is really geared to folks are ‘happy’ at their current jobs, but that other companies want to get their grubby little mitts on. While you can dictate how much you want to ‘charge’ companies to speak with you, NotchUp has some algorithm that they use to come up with a price based on your experience, etc. It’s too early to sign up as they’re still in beta or alpha or something, but keep your eyes and ears open. You may not get a new job, but you could get some pocket change.
This could fly, but I suspect that the decent fees in the multiple hundreds of dollars will only apply to a small, proven successful set of individuals. If you make less than $100k, don’t expect companies to be knocking down your door and willing to pay over $1k. I wonder if I could make a living interviewing?
Not too long ago, Netbank was shut down by the Feds, and their main banking assets were acquired by ING Direct for a song. I was a loyal Netbank customer for about 10 years, and enjoyed it tremendously. While I became complacent with the (initially good) rates, and stopped looking for better deals, for the most part I got what I needed.
Netbank was probably the first online only banking entity to not only offer above average rates, but also free bill payment. One feature that I didn’t even knew existed when I signed up, but immediately loved, was the ability to write someone a check from within the website and have Netbank print out and mail the check. Free. When I told friends and family about this, they either didn’t believe me and/or were amazed that that existed, more so when I sent them a check!
Lots of banks now offer this feature, but my vague memory tells me that Netbank pioneered this. I’ve started the process of migrating my accounts to ING Direct, as they appear to have what I need for bill payment and have great interest rates, and I don’t really want to spend lots of time researching new banks.
BTW, for those of you wondering how this has affected, the short answer is not at all. My money was FDIC insured, and I think the Netbank site may have been down for less than a day while ING Direct did some tweaking in the background to get it all under their control, but other than that, everything still looks, feels and is the same for me and the rest of the Netbank customers. The only impending thing is that I get the distinct impression that ING is trying to phase out the Netbank services and bring us under their main umbrealla of services. Makes sense for them.
Thanks Netbank. It’s too bad you didn’t manage to stick around and benefit from the fruits of your pioneering work, but I was glad to be along for the ride.
About a month ago, we signed up for a new service called BlogRush for Gizmos for Geeks. BlogRush is essentially a networking tool where you earn credits based on how many times the widget is displayed on your site (i.e. pageviews) and in turn, links to current articles on your site are displayed in the widget on other similar blogs.
Since its launch, BlogRush has had tons of issues with spammer types signing up for the service to up their traffic, and so they decided to move from an automated sign up to a manual review process. We just got an e-mail saying that GfG was reviewed and that it did not meet any of their “Quality Review” criteria. I had to laugh; I may have even snorted. Reading through their list of 7 criteria, I found it rather ironic that we (our site) didn’t meet all of those requirements easily. I’ll post the “Quality Guidelines” below.
About the only thing that we could be faulted for is too much advertising on the site, but honestly, what blog out there isn’t trying to make some money, and how do you do it without advertising? We’re not blogging to drum up buzz for something else that we sell. Our blog is our product. But come on - we have 3 ads on the main page. Three, for Pete’s sake.
We found out about BlogRush from Shoemoney’s blog and guess how many distinct ads he has on his blog - 9 at least count. I’m not faulting Shoe at all. Actually, quite the opposite. God bless him for being able to stick that many ads on his site. If you told pretty much anyone that they could plaster their car with ads and never have to work again, do you think they’d stop to think about it for a minute? Hell no.
In case you’re wondering if we’re going to pursue BlogRush to get reinstated, the answer is nope. For our couple hundred thousand impressions, or whatever it was (since we can’t see our statistics any more), we did not get a single referral. Not one.
Guess what we’re going to do with our newly freed up page real estate? Yup, you got it - stick an ad there!
Read on for BlogRush’s admirable, but strangely enforced, list of Quality Guidelines.
Read the rest of this entry »
As you are well aware, airlines change prices all the time. What you may not know is that if after you’ve bought a ticket, and the price drops, you’re actually eligible in many cases to get a refund or perhaps a voucher. Since you’re probably not willing to go (re-)checking flight prices every day or even more often, it was just a matter of time before a bunch of folks just like you thought it was time to automate that dang thing. Enter YAPTA. Weird name. Great service. Just sign up for a free account, and every time you buy a plane ticket, just enter that info and YAPTA will track it for you.
Time for another plug for my side gig. This time, we’ve just stood up a Gizmos for Geeks version of Amazon.com’s extensive online department store. You can find it at Store.GizmosForGeeks.com.
In a nutshell, this is what’s called an affiliate site. Amazon.com was really the company that pioneered the whole affiliate marketing thing. Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find any online vendor that does not have an affiliate program. Oh yeah, so what’s an affiliate? Anyone out there on the Net that gets accepted to a vendor’s affiliate program can stick up links that go to the vendor’s site. If anyone clicks on those links and then buys something, then the affiliate (like me) gets a % of that sale.
Amazon.com has an extensive set of Web Services that allow affiliate to build sites that pull back data from them in real time, so what you see on our site is what you would see if you were on Amazon performing the same browsing or searching.
You lose nothing, Amazon doesn’t lose much, as they’re quite willing to have their affiliates push even more traffic to them, and we earn income to keep our biz running. It’s a win-win-win situation. How great is that?
So next time you’re thinking Amazon, think GfG instead. Now go bookmark and get shopping. 
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