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With a few noticeable sales in the MMO (Make Money Online) niche lately, one in particular got highlighted by some of the bloggers in the community, and lets just say the poor bastard didn’t get a warm welcome. Instead, there was a horde of angry villagers with torches and pitchforks assigned as the welcoming party, ready to publicly crucify a new blogger.

Marc Galeazzi is the new owner of OneMansGoal, which he bought for $10,500 from Bryan Clark. First things first, we’re looking at this discussion from the sidelines. We’ve never read OneMansGoal and we’ve only heard the name ‘Bryan Clark’ once or twice, perhaps he was/is one of our readers and we saw him in the comments, but whatever. What got our attention in the first place was the way that Vic from BloggerUnleashed cracked down on the new owner of OMG, without knowing much more about him than just the first video Marc had posted.

Within 100 words or so, Vic managed to directly and indirectly address to Marc as a dumbfuck once and a sucker seven times. Welcome to the neighborhood Marc, wherever it went. What annoys us most about the whole way this seems to have played out is that Vic has some sort of vendetta against Bryan Clark, and took this opportunity to rub it in one last time, not caring about crushing the new blogger that just got into the game. Everyone has an opinion as we’re all entitled to one, but to publicly start the name calling game, targeting someone from whom you’ve only read one post / seen one video, shows of poor judgement and lack of social skills if you want our opinion.

Its disturbing to see how all this negative ranting turns into a big hype, attracting tons of eyeballs that stick around. Remember when we posted about how Nice Bloggers Finish Last? Have a look at the following graph, which will show you how much of an impact foul mouthing others can have.

BloggerUnleashed seems to have had a 30% boost in subscribers since he took a shot at a newbie blogger, makes us wonder what his audience consists of. We subscribed a few weeks ago, when he had a rant about Caroline Middlebrook. Why? Because he was stirring shit, and even though he didn’t do it in a civilized manner (more name calling), we found Vic was very passionate in his reasoning why he thought Caroline was being naughty, and we were looking for the same passion in his other posts.

Going through the comments, it really does seem that there’s a mindless horde of followers, who are just there for the slagging and the ranting. This is obviously something Vic is aware of, and he keeps playing the cards right. He’s getting the traffic and the readers, bumping the stats, the exposure and getting his name out there. Kind of ironic if you look at the motto in Vic’s blog header:”Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”. Our opinion? Vic’s personality clashes with the projects he’s working on. How can you be such a rude, foulmouthed, self-proclaimed ‘asshole’ and run a social media website like bloggingzoom?

Marc, if you’re reading this - don’t worry, it all comes with the territory. We hope you achieve your goals with OneMansGoal.com and have some fun along the way.

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53 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Your momma, our momma, your friends, our friends, your neighbors, our neighbors, it seems everyone has a frigging twitter account these days, and everyone has something to say! We’ve seen interesting, lame, funny, silly, stupid, smart, helpful, spiteful, sarcastic and useless tweets fly by this week and we thought we’d share some with you, with some random back-linking keywords Here’s this weeks top ten twitter twat tweets:

10) aaronwall Ethical dilemmas… a friend of mine got a parking ticket on a rental car… pay it? or chance it? what happens if nobody pays it 08:19 PM April 10, 2008 from web

9 ) remarkablogger Well I am not getting anything done here. I have places to go and people to kill. 10:28 PM April 10, 2008 from twhirl

8 ) 45n5 what’s up with american idol going all jesus singing on us? uggghh “shout to the lord?” wtf? 10:08 PM April 10, 2008 from web

7 ) jimkukral Just occurred to me I have no idea how to set the alarm clock. The wife does it and she’s not here. Off to bed I guess. 01:19 AM April 11, 2008 from web

6 ) MrBabyMan SNAP! Arrington kicked out Cashmore and the Mashable crew! Bad form! 10:29 PM April 10, 2008 from txt

5 ) Mickipedia OH: everyone wants to put my bacon in their pants 01:56 AM April 11, 2008 from txt

4 ) shoemoney at the dentist numbed up 12:18 PM April 11, 2008 from web

3 ) ijustine Whoever signed me up for the multiple porn newsletters.. rest assured, I will hunt you down and then quite possibly kill you. End scene. 03:42 PM April 11, 2008 from web

2 ) Kevin Rose kevinrose just attacked by female crack addict on street, kevin = 1, crack lady = 0 06:51 PM April 12, 2008 from txt

1 ) doshdosh So who’s actually reading the stuff I’m posting on Twitter? If you’re there behind the computer or cellphone, say hello! 11:24 AM April 13, 2008 from twhirl

*PS these twitterers aren’t really twats but we tried to make a tongue twister title…FAIL*

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10 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

We got an email from someone that wanted us to take a look at some cool widgets that bloggers can use to enhance their blogs. JS-Kit has tons of handy, easy (just add a line of code in your site, that’s it!) to integrate scripts that can help your blog grow and attract new readers, something which will be welcomed by most of us. We’re just going to list up a couple of their most interesting stuff here, so you can decide if you’d like to grab one of them, for free.

1) Ratings - A lot of bloggers use Lester Chan’s plugin to show the 5 little stars at the end of a blog post, where readers can tell you how valuable they thought your post was. We took it out and have replaced it with JS-Kit’s script, which essentialy does the same thing, but it feeds the data to the navigator widget in the sidebar. This way the most popular posts (by ratings) can be seen by your visitors, most likely providing them with interesting stuff.

2) Score - This is pretty cool, it allows you to create your own localized Digg system within your posts. Every time someone “diggs” or “thumbs up” on of the posts they like, these will all show up in the navigator widget again, like ratings, but this time under the TOP or HOT tab. A simple yet effective way to make sure your blog’s top content keeps alive and highly visible for new visitors.

3) Reviews - This one could easily replace a blogs comment section because essentially it does the same thing, but it combines the power of ratings too. Besides that, it looks like there’s some sort of threaded comments built-in to the scripts. God knows, it’s so much easier to follow a discussion in your comments with some visual guidance.

4) Polls - A simple but powerful tool to add polls to your site and keep track of the results via your navigator widget. We never had any polls on our blog, but its obviously great to use to find out what interests your readers and what doesn’t. ThisWith this data you can make sure you keep pumping out interesting stuff (perhaps we should start a poll )

5) Navigator - Yes, the navigator. It doesn’t just look sharp in your sidebar, its essential to get your new visitors to explore and discover the hidden gems on your blog. Here is a short list with the benefits of the Navigator widget:

• decreases bounce rates, increases pageviews and simplifies content management
• incredibly easy to deploy (think minutes)
• viral distribution of content through “Grab It”
• unmatched run-time performance and full data backup
• seamless integration with your site using preconfigured design skins
• cross-browser compatibility

JS-Kit looks very promising, as they have recently been backed by a few large investors, raising $1.2 million to further develop themselves. We’re sure there are many more super widgets to come from these guys in the near future.

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11 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

We were wondering when the inevitable would happen, and it seems this weekend was the time. Murphy’s Law caught us with our pants down. As you all know, we had decided to sell the blog a few days ago, and this is where it all started. First we received a BIN of $50,000 on sitepoint, only to find out after a little googling that the bidder was a joker who has done it before - bidding BIN, getting the auction closed and never show up again. We rejected the offer and reported this to sitepoint staff (who are still to get back to us about it after three days.)

So with the auction re-opened, we went to the pub on Friday night, as you do here in Ireland, and halfway through the night we got a message on our blackberry that another $50,000 BIN was made (yay). Once we got home, we had a look at the buyer, who seemed legit, and after some talks on the phone, and messaging, it seemed the deal was done. He was satisfied with all the details and we accepted the BIN offer this time, thinking this wasn’t a joker like the first guy. Guess what, turned out he merely tried a bait and switch tactic. Once we accepted the $50,000 offer he made, we sent out an escrow payment request, only to receive a message on sitepoint that he now had some concerns about traffic and revenue and that he was only willing to pay $35,000. In the end offering $15,000 less then what he agreed to pay for at first. Probably hoping we couldn’t be bothered with relisting and sell the site to him. We’ve provided him with proof that show that his so called concerns about traffic and revenue were nonsense, and that we were/are infact doing even better than we had listed in the auction. Now three days later, we’re still to hear back from him.

Ah well, guess that’s just human nature. Moving on. Just before the weekend we figured we should upgrade WordPress to version 2.5 and of course on of our plugins started acting up as soon as we did. Unfortunately we had to disable the runPHP plugin because it was breaking the advertising engine plugin, OIOPublisher. So it took us not-so-technical cows a goof few hours to work around the problem, but in the end we’ve seemed to have fixed most of the issues.

But wait, there’s more! It seems someone wasn’t too happy to see us go, or make a good deal for the blog, so they decided to hack our server. Unfortunately they were quite smart in how they went about, it took a while before we even found out something was wrong. A lot of people asked us why the blog was down on their end, while we didn’t notice any problems other then connections dropping from our dashboard every now and then. We thought it was our own DSL connection, which has been acting a bit flakey lately, but as it turns out, the blog has been unreachable for a lot of people in the past few days, but we’re on top of it now. (well, the Top Hosting Center support team that is)

Anyhoo, that leaves us with having to re-list the blog again, as it’s obvious the bidder isn’t coming through for us, even though he’s bound legally to his bid according to sitepoint. What a weekend, glad we stayed in bed and watched season one and two of Battlestar Galactica, we love starbuck!

*Update* We just got off the phone with Matt (co-founder of Sitepoint) because we wanted to complain about the way things were going with the fake BIN bidders, and he instantly refunded our $65 we needed to pay for the re-listing, no questions asked. Matt, you rock!

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34 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Even with all the riots going on out there about our blog’s sale, its business as usually until we find a worthy heir to the barn. So guess what kids? You’re in for a treat today! How about a yummy sponsored review? We Got Paid To write this review about getafreeappleiphone.com (FAiP), a GPT (yes, Get Paid To) site with over 5000 active members that are really getting paid for doing stuff. FAiP has hundreds of offers for their members to complete, each offer having their own payout rate. By the looks of most of the rates, it will take a little while before you actually get your free Apple iPhone, but in the end, you are getting it for free!

This would have been a hard review to write, trying to convince you good people what a great site it is, because its quite messy in our humble opinion. For a site that is giving away free iphones, you’d expect something that just looked a little more…apple-ish. There’s too many colors, crammed text and overall a bit of a claustrofobic experience really. But that’s ok, and you know why? Because they are giving away free apple iphones! (did we mention that enough yet?)

When we signed up for free, we noticed that the site already gives you a $2 head start. All you do is collect points by clicking things or signing up for free stuff, demos and trials. There are a couple of offers that will cost you money, but if its interesting to you, obviously you should sign up through FAiP and collect the extra points you need for your free apple iphone. They’ve also got a referral scheme, where you can boost your earnings simply by signing up your friends because you will earn 30% of whatever their making. Before you know it you’ll all have free apple iphones so you can all iphone eachother!

Besides the free apple iphone (we won’t say it again, promise!) there’s a familiar ‘buy a pixel’ page, where you can buy cheap pixels to place your ads on. We’re not quite sure how this fits into the whole idea of the site, but people have already started buying spots, so there must be a good reason for it. Its probably a part of the contests they are currently running like the Paid to Click contest.

So anyway, FAiP says that they’ve shared $14,740.75 with their members (here’s the breakdown) and with 1471 offers available, there are about 510 apple iphones (sorry, had to mention it one more time) to be handed out for free to the members. We’ve signed up and when we get a bit of time on our hands, we’ll be sure to start completing the offers to get one of those…well you should know what you can get from getafreeappleihone.com by now.

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22 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post