Startup fate

Published June 27th, 2008 in misc. 10 Comments

Ok, ok, ok.

It seems that I’ve been asked about this hundreds of times already — what’s going on with your startup?

Well, the idea was of RSS recommendation service — you provide feeds you read or credentials to your online feed reader, and our system provides you with feeds you may find enjoyable based on your current preferences.

We started developing it and in a week or so Google Reader rolled out a RSS recommendation system based on pretty much the same algo we had in mind, only based on a much, much larger dataset.

Thus, the site was scrapped, I was dissapointed and decided not to jump at Web 2.0 bandwagon for a time. That’s the fate of the project I was concentrated on for some time.

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It really never stops amazing me…

Published June 21st, 2008 9 Comments

…how people that take personal issue at sites not being made for Opera (that has 0.71% market share) or having glitches in Linux (0.68% market share) absolutely ignore Ask.com when it comes to search engine optimization.

What’s the market share for Ask?

1.27%.

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CPM/CPA ad networks

Published June 7th, 2008 in Internet marketing. 20 Comments

Ok guys, a question for you.

I’ve bought some web property today, and now fiddling around with display ads for it. Considering that I’ve last monetized anything not via affiliate or via paid links in 2006, my ad network knowledge is a bit… outdated (for me, Chitika is still hot - you get the idea).

So, question is - what is the new rage today? AdBrite? Bidvertiser? Azoogle? What else? What are pros and cons of the ad network of your choice?

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183 Comments Deleted

Published May 17th, 2008 in Internet marketing. 51 Comments

Yeah, it’s been like eternity since I’ve even visited this site, and what I do when I return? Right, delete comments.

Dudes, I respect your rights to yummy dofollow linkage, but it just seemed to be too much to me, so I erased some comments (the last entry alone saw 80 comments deleted).

Now, proceed to spam - dofollow blog comments is a hot way to make good links, so I encourage you to use my PR2 as much as you want.

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Startup?

Published October 21st, 2007 in Internet marketing. 33 Comments

So, I’m dead tired of SEO. Pay-per-click haven’t lost its appeal for now, but I’m looking more and more about creating a startup of my own.

Not Web 2.0 startup, that’s for sure. Something actually useful, something I would be able to support and something that will yield me nice bucks.

So, get ready to see some nice cool site from me in several weeks or months… and if anyone of you want to yield a helping hand, or brain, or whatever, go ahead. (remember? jadehat@jadehat.com)

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100 Hour Weeks

Published September 12th, 2007 in misc. 25 Comments

Due to popular demand, I’m (half)back. I have had two reasons of not writing anything:

  • not having anything important or useful to say;
  • having a 100-hour work week.

 And it is strange, because while I charge $X0 to $X00 per hour, I do not make as much as it would seem by a large margin. I’m bogged down by overtime, inefficient time spending, and complete refusal to organize my life. So, while I spend more time on various distractions than I’d like to, I’m still having no time on my own. When you’re trying to find a Getting Things Done guru, write me off the list. Immediately. 

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ping jadehat

Published July 3rd, 2007 1 Comment

Ping request could not find host jadehat. Please check the name and try again. Seriously, I’ve just returned and  going through great pains to check all the mail, feeds, nudges, IM messages etc that I’ve got. Please hold on. 

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Why I Love Irishwonder, Why I Hate Irishwonder

Published June 24th, 2007 in love-hate. 4 Comments

There was a reason why I’ve moved Why I Love Blue Hat, Why I Hate Blue Hat in a category of its own. Yeah, it was intended to be a regular post series.

So, today is a day I have nothing interesting in my feed reader to comment, and nothing insightful to say after a day filled with Google Analytics / AdWords crap, consulting stupid clients and building links for a site that shouldn’t have existed in a first place. And this is exactly a right time to tell you a few things about absolutely Irish black hat, the Irishwonder.

  • I love Irish because among quite a bunch of Irish SEOs (is it Google’s main overseas facility that influence this? I think that Ireland has highest SEO per capita in the world) that smell of Earl Grey and Big Ben, Irishwonder’s e-stench is one of Guinness and clovers.
  • I love Irish because when he writes, he writes either something insightful, or something funny. Well, or neither. In any case, Irish’s posts are often very useful.
  • I love Irish because of my love for contradictions. He bash white hats constantly, while using a plethora of white hat techniques himself.
  • I love Irish because I love when someone works, someone makes money, someone runs side errands, and don’t scream about it on each and every corner (quite unlike some boastful fools like myself).

But still, I hate Irishwonder because of:

  • I hate Irish because hey, you just can’t post once in two weeks and still think of yourself as a blogger. It is unrespectful.
  • I hate Irish because of my hate for contradictions (wow, I contradict myself. What a confusion.) If you mix black and white hats, please consider yourself gray, grey, blue, jade, whatever, but don’t call yourself blackhat, let alone the blackhat.
  • I hate Irish because he ought to take his old irishwonder.com/blog blog up. It had many of his best posts; it’s a shame it’s in perpetual downtime.
  • I hate Irish because this blog design is ugly. Oh my gosh, take it down! My eyes bleed!

Have anything to say, Mr. Wonder? :D

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Safari 3.0.2 Released

Published June 23rd, 2007 in misc. 11 Comments

I’ve downloaded Safari 3.0.2 earlier today.

Gosh, I’ve been waiting for a release, that will fix goddamn page layout hole, I was waiting a release to fix SSE3 issue for my AMD computer, I’ve been waiting for a release to make a browser, very good and fast browser indeed, to finally show something.

And what I’ve got? Yeah, security release.

In 3.0.1 for Windows, phishing sites could spoof address bar contents.

In 3.0.1, JavaScript could modify a redirected page.

In 3.0.1, XSS attacks could be made by Ajax pages.

What else we have in 3.0.2? I’m sure, even more holes.

My god, they call it safe from a day one? Yeah, I know it’s beta (better to call it pre-alpha), I know it will be good when released in Leopard, but…

but…

My Mac fanboyism is getting slimmer.

Anyways, rejoice. Safari 3 is closer to stable release.

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SEO Trick #1: Automatic Translation

Published June 22nd, 2007 in seo-tricks. 20 Comments

While waiting for Gengo’s developer to release version 0.9.1 for me to install it here, I’m going to share you with nice SEO trick for content sites. It is no secret, and was probably published before, but many aspiring SEOs don’t know of method to multiply quantity of your content tenfold without much work.

Let’s say you have a small niche site with fifteen content pages. You create a subfolder on your site for German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese etc versions, then go to the Google Translate (you can use other automatic translation engines to widen your language choice, translate each of your pages into each of the languages, and upload results to your site.

New pages get indexed, rank high for non-English terms, and voila - more visitors come from the search engines. Right?

No, not exactly. There is one mistake, which is done by most novices that attempt this method that can turn this useful trick into a huge mistake, and I’ll teach you how to avoid it.

You got your key terms all wrong.

While you don’t care about grammar, mild nuances and subtle vocabulary errors that machine translation will give you, you’re in big trouble if your main keywords get messed. For example you target keyword ’search engine optimization’ and you have some articles about it. Google Translate translates search engine optimization as Search Engineoptimierung, which is, obviously, rubbish (BTW, Google search for this phrase turns impressive 65,500 results). If you use it in your text, users searching for Suchmaschinenoptimierung (which is correct translation of SEO in German) find nothing on your site.

To evade such pitfalls, research translations of your main keywords and substitute machine-translated terms for them.

How to find correct translation? Hire a native speaker? Find friends that speak this language?

Of course, not.

Just head over to Wikipedia and go to the article about term that you need to research. In the bottom part of left sidebar, you’ll most likely see list of article in other languages. Visit these pages, and you’ll know that in Japanese, search engine optimization is 検索エンジン最適化 (and not サーチエンジンの最適化 as Google Translate says), and mortgage in Portuguese is hipoteca, not mortgage.

So, autotranslating your pages can give you quite a boost in visitors from non-English speaking countries… but always, always check your keywords there. #1 spot for Search Engineoptimierung just won’t do you any good.

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Credits

Credits for wonderful photograph in my header go to Angela McDonald.
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