Google dependency

My internet connection is not great in Bali. I think now my internet bill is higher than my monthly rent! Partly because I moved to a cheaper place and now paying to have it in our office.

From time to time, Google.com stops working. They seem to have some serious problems with their proxy. The thing is that I just realized how dependent I have become on the big G.

Bing works fine as an alternative search engine, but that is only one thing I use Google for. I use gmail for my mail, both personal and business. I also store quite a bit of stuff in my gmail account.

I have been using Google docs more and more, as it is great to have your documents available anywhere and is ideal for group collaboration. Adsense and analytics are also important services for my websites. I also started getting back into using the blogger service.

Fortunately, I still like Bloglines to read news and blogs, even though Google reader might be better. I don’t want to be 100 per cent dependent on Google, but it is becoming increasingly difficult.

Problogger launches paid membership forum

I don’t read Darren Rowse’s Problogger so much any more, but I just got an email notification that he is launching a new blogging forum on the .com version of his website.

I always wondered why Darren never launched a forum on his blogging website, as I was always sure that it would be successful, because of the popularity of his blog. Most of his posts get a lot of comments, which is a good way to see if a website can support a forum.

I joined the forum, but didn’t pay the fee (sorry Darren!) The introductory fee is $1.97 a month, so I can imagine this will likely rise when the forum is more publicly announced. I couldn’t see any of the posts, but there were around 170 people already on the forum.

I am sure he will get some criticism for charging people to join a forum, but I suppose that is a good way to keep spammers out. Personally I won’t be joining. Forums are good up to a certain extent for learning about making money online, but you can spend too much time on them, which has a negative effect on your ability to make money online.

I wonder if I could charge people for the forums I run? My feeling is that many people would just try to find another forum that they can use for free. I can imagine the forums will make a lot of money for Darren.

Perhaps he took Brian Clarke’s teaching sells course? I can see the email now when the next edition of Teaching Sells comes out, “Darren Rowse makes $1,000,000 from membership site launch”.

Do you plan on joining the forum?

Using Google Chrome

My laptop is still going strong after a couple of years, but it is starting to get slower and slower, mainly when starting up. I am reluctant to buy a new one as this one has been so reliable. A reinstall of the Windows would help a lot, but I can’t bothered with that. I am happy to press the on switch, then just grab a coffee while it loads.

I have been using Firefox mostly, but found that it too can be slow and is a real memory hog. I still have IE6 installed and it loads faster than FF. Google of course have launched their own browser, Google Chrome and when I heard that it is faster than FF, I thought I would give it a try.

When I was having trouble with FF, I disabled all of the add-ons, as useful as they are. Chrome still loaded faster than FF with the extensions disabled. It has some nice features, like showing your most recently viewed sites when you open a new tab and being able to do searches right in the area where you usually type in your URLs. Suggestions are also displayed automatically and sometimes useful.

It does have a couple of glitches which I am sure Google will eventually get right, but overall I am happy with the experience, but I think it will be hard to move loyal users off IE and FF.

Wolf of Wall Street

I just finished reading the “The Wolf of Wall Street” by Jordan Belfort. It’s a good read and a book which is hard to put down. It is the story of Jordan Belfort’s rise in the stock market world and dramatic fall as he battles an addiction to drugs.

You won’t learn much about Wall Street or how he was able to make so much money, but he does have some great, but sad stories about the people in the industry and what he did while he was high on drugs. He was lucky not to have killed anyone and ended up only having to spend 22 months in prison.

It looks like a sequel will be out next year and the cover says that the book will be made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio with Martin Scorsese directing it. I thought there were laws against convicted felons profiting from their crimes by writing books about their misdeeds.

Are you going to stop selling links?

I can’t believe how much people are talking about the latest Google PageRank update! It even made the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in Australia (at least the online version).

It’s not going to stop me selling links, at least on this blog. I am still making money with Text Link Ads and Linkworth, so it is going to be interesting to see how this income goes.

One thing I can see happening is that there are going to be more sponsored posts in blogs and linking from articles rather than from links in sidebars and blogrolls. Google kind of made the market for buying and selling links and now they are trying to close the market. Perhaps it is a good thing, I am not really sure right now. Selling links has become a very good source of income for many bloggers, especially where Adsense didn’t work so well.

I agree with what Darren has written on the subject:

I think that what Google has done this last week means that we’ll see more and more of the text link selling go further underground. We’ll see it happen less using systems like TextLinkAds and more happening in less transparent ways.

And if Darren is right, which I think he is, the internet is going to become an even less trustworthy source of information.

The World is Flat

For the past month or so I haven’t read a single book. Traveling through Vietnam and Laos the pickings have been pretty slim, especially in the way on non-fiction.

I am in Bangkok now and I picked up a copy of “The World is Flat” after hearing it had some similar themes to the Four Hour Work Week. Most business books are usually slow going, but I have found that I can’t put this one down.

For people working in technology or internet related industries, a great deal of the information in the book is fairly common knowledge. Some of the stories however were picked up on the author’s travels to India, China and Japan. For anyone who thinks that India and China are taking away jobs in western countries, this book is a must read.

Since, I have worked in IT for several years, I was pretty much against the whole outsourcing debate, but since I have been working on the internet I have seen how outsourcing and globalization makes more and more sense.

He also writes how the internet is empowering individuals to be content producers, or “uploaders” as he calls them. Again, fairly common topics, but the author has some great examples of how this happening and he has a great way of explaining how this is going to effect how we will be doing business in the future.

Mail from a Forbes reporter

Back in April I received an email from Andrew Greenberg from Forbes. He was writing an article on Google’s supplemental index. He found me through a comment I made on Aaron Wall’s blog. He wanted me to call him to discuss his story. (I need to get a phone one of these days!)

I was in Cambodia at the time so it would have been difficult to call him. The finished article was published some time ago “Condemned To Google Hell“.

I at least got close to getting a mention in mainstream press, but the point of this post is that journalists are going beyond the usual sources of information to research their stories and you never know when you might benefit from something you did months ago.

The four hour work week

I have read some good reviews of this book and not surprisingly it has been getting a great deal of attention in the internet marketing and blogging world.

I am currently in Vietnam so I am not sure how I can get my hands on a copy of this book. Many of the topics the author raises in his book are things I believe in. His point of “less is not laziness” is something which I struggle with some of the time. I have achieved my goal of being able to travel full-time, but I do sometimes feel guilty that I can live a comfortable life, while working less than I used to and have almost unlimited free time to do the things I want to do.

Having worked in Japan for a number of years I have experienced working with people where their whole life is work. Even though they might get 3 or 4 weeks of holiday a year, most will only take about one week off. Many also work until their last train, sometimes around 11 or 12 pm.

I have a theory that most people, especially people working in offices only do 2-3 hours of real, productive work a day. The other time is spent attending pointless meetings, reading irrelevant emails, writing reports that no-one will read or take action on. People work to satisfy the demands of their bosses, bosses create work for their employees to make it look like they are doing a good job.

Maybe I am cynical, but I found that in Japan it was expected of employees to work long hours, whether they had work to do or not. If you have a long time to complete a task you tend to take your time and pace yourself so you won’t be completely bored while you have to be at work.

In his book he proposes getting your most important tasks done by 11 am. I think this is great advice for anyone. Most people are freshest in the morning. The longer you delay doing a task that requires some concentration the harder it becomes to complete. If you apply this to working on the internet complete your “must do” tasks in the morning and more passive tasks, like reading forums/blogs in the evening.

Life of Pi

I just started reading ‘Life of Pi’. I really like this quote from it:

I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he’s not careful.

I couldn’t agree more!

Blogger merged with Google accounts

I logged into blogger today and got a message asking if I wanted to merge my blogger account with my google account. I don’t use blogger for much these days, but I still have the original acccount where this blog started.

My old blog still has a page rank of 4, so it is useful getting links and getting Google to index new sites.

I always recommend people creating a new blog to use their own domain with Wordpress, but there is probably a good case for using blogger in some instances. For starters it is operated by Google, so there is a good chance they will rank their hosted blogs higher. It is very easy to apply for an Adsense account if you don’t already have one. A great deal of the blogs that appear in Google alerts seem to be hosted on blogger. It is also very easy to add images.

The downside is that you have little control over the blog and the database if you run into problems. Google has cleaned up a lot of the spam blogs out there, but it is a never ending battle. No-one is really going to take you seriously, especially if you are trying to create a professional, money generating site.

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