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Looking back on your life now, what have you done that makes you proud? Are you a parent? Do you have a husband or wife? Have you ever run a marathon? Have you got the coolest blog on the block? (scrap that last question, we all know who’s got the coolest blog, right kids?) Anyway, they always tell us that the best things in life are free and in this case, Andrew from Lyved.com won a free review with us, courtesy of the boys and girls over at jollyjo.com

Lyved.com is a blog. It runs on wordpress, so it has to be a blog! On first impressions, it could be a blog about anything. An image of a large plant greets you as the page first loads. Then there’s this quote:

“The greatest good we can do for others is not just to share our riches with them, but to reveal theirs.”
Zig Ziglar

We’re indifferent to a mention of Zig Ziglar. The tagline of Lyved is, “Lyved is about life and living it.” Right, we’re getting somewhere now. Navigation in the top menu is notably sparse. You’ll find “Home”, “About” and “Contact”. To the About page and there’s a lengthy biography of 19-year-old Andrew Galasetti, the author of the blog. Right at the bottom of his life story, Andrew writes:

But I want to use my thoughts and Lyved to help others to empower themselves and live the life they want. I hope to evolve Lyved from this site into a media company so that millions can be made reached and taught to follow their dreams.

It’s all suitably vague — and so we move onto Andrew’s posts. Categories range from business, culture and people, to quotes, Internet and technology. The first post we see is “Life Lessons from Snowflakes”. Moving on, there are lots of inspirational quotes and then we come to “7 Tips to Harness the Power of Digg”. The tips aren’t particularly useful, but it’s refreshing to see that Andrew blogs a little bit about everything.

You may struggle to find anything you want to read on Lyved, unless, of course, you’re into motivational, personal-development websites. Andrew blogs regularly enough to make an RSS subscription worth the effort if this is your shebang.

On the blog, there are currently only three posts about the Internet, two of which are guest posts. While the likes of some bloggers write about how TV shows relate to blogging, so Andrew tells us what dogs can teach us about life. The problem with such posts is that they contain zero useful information and could be written about anything. Obviously Andrew should have gone with cows here, instead of dogs.

Andrew seems like a decent enough bloke and we’d like to see his blog take on a new lease of life and become more focused with information we can actually learn something from. The potential is there to tap into a niche that is yet to be overdeveloped. A new theme would also serve Andrew well, as would the removal of the large Adsense block to the top right of the template.

The About page doesn’t need all the personal info, either. What it does need is a definitive statement about what Andrew is aiming to achieve with Lyved.com. Then again, it’s his blog and who are we to criticize it? We’re only getting paid for it

Lyved is pretty cool if you’re into the whole positive vibes, inspiring photos and self growth, but it doesn’t really appeal to us. Lots of posts are just pictures with someone’s quotes. It just doesn’t do it for us. We could go shopping and buy a “1001 quotes book” while browsing through someone’s Flickr photo albums. It looks like Lyved isn’t quite sure yet where it’s going, but it has potential as the blogger is a positive and upbeat person. We might have another look in a few months to see if the content becomes more informative and original. Until then, we’ll stick with making money.

Being cows and all, our greatest achievement so far has been the inventing of a keyboard with keys large enough for us to type blog posts like this with our hooves. We’re also proud of learning to swim and being able to sleep standing up. Can anyone top that?

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22 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Each of us is a fan of music, but the way in which we, as consumers, get our music is constantly changing. From 78s, 45s and 33s to cassettes, CDs and beyond, our love for music hasn’t changed, but the format we listen to it on has.

With the advent of music downloads, P2P filesharing and digital music, consumers are forced to make ethical choices based on how they get their music. So, be honest now, are you a clean music fan or do you ever use filesharing services like Limewire or Ares? As the cliché goes: You wouldn’t steal a CD, so why would you do it online?

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is forever on the rampage against people who indulge in filesharing and illegal music downloads. Jammie Thomas, the world’s most infamous and dumbest advocate of filesharing, was sued for $220,000 by the RIAA for using the filesharing service Kazaa. The landmark ruling last year sent ripples through the filesharing community.

CD sales are declining. While the record industry would like for legal music downloads to pick up the slack, this has not been the case thus far.

According to IFPI figures released recently, the growth of the digital-music industry slowed in 2007, increasing just 40% after doubling in 2006. According to IFPI CEO John Kennedy, for every one legal music download bought, 20 more are procured illegally.

The RIAA has consistently targeted American students for filesharing violations. Pre-litigation letters are sent out to universities based on the IP address of suspected filesharers.

The letters are then passed onto the students, who are given a choice: pay an out-of-court settlement of several thousand dollars or be sued and, more often than not, lose.

Illegal music downloads cannot be stopped; filesharing is a part of modern life. Technically, it is theft, but the music industry was so late in dealing with it that it is now an entity that is out of control. Furthermore, how many of those people standing against filesharing have, at one time, copied casettes or burned CDs?

Targeting students and suing people for hundreds of thousands of dollars will not solve the problem. The vast majority of people who use filesharing programs do not do so for profit, but for personal use.

When Radiohead released In Rainbows in October last year, it was a slap in the face to the music industry. The band asked fans to choose what they wanted to pay for a digital download of the album, thus underlining the fact that music is changing. However, when the CD was released at the turn of the New Year and went to the top of the album charts in the US and the UK, it proved that people do still want CDs and that, perhaps, record labels still have a role to play. There must be a middle ground.

The music industry is at a loss now. At least one positive step is the news that Last.FM will launch a service allowing users to stream the entire library of tracks from the world’s four biggest record labels. Users will be able to stream tracks for free up to three times before having to pay for them.

There was further hope with the news that QTrax was to relaunch and offer legal, free music downloads with the support of the “the big four” record labels. Sadly, the launch has been all but scuppered as three of the four have come forward to deny any involvement with QTrax. The relaunch looks set to fall flat on its face.

What is needed for the music industry to survive are not attempts to eradicate filesharing, but improved ways of capitalizing on changing consumer trends.

I’d like to open this up to the barn here because it makes for a healthy debate.

Is filesharing morally wrong and what, if anything, should be done about it?

Angel is a decent sort of bloke who took a hiatus from his pro-blogging dream to write for music-download blogs like officilares.com and filesharing blogs like iownmymusic.org.

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8 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Webmaster forums seem to pop up from time to time. Today, we have the pleasure of reviewing one. Bzimage.org is a typical forum in the mold of Digital Point where people can go to discuss all manner of webmaster topics. Although we can’t figure out what “Bzimage” means, we signed up anyway and had a look through the different forums.

There are heaps of forums to sift through. Again, similar to Digital Point, there are forums for all the major search engines, forums about marketing, business forums, tech and gadget forums, and so on.

There is also a marketplace where you can buy and sell services, links, websites, domains, content – basically anything to do with the Internet. Unsurprisingly, the marketplace forum is the busiest of the lot, although at the time of writing it contained only 453 posts.

Bzimage is a new forum and it’s gradually filling up with posts and users. At the moment, there are 2,072 users who have made 2,361 threads between them. As with most forums, you can add signature links, although we weren’t able to do so as new users.

You can also add your Adsense code into your profile and get a cut of money made from Adsense ads that appear in discussions you take part in. Trouble is, we couldn’t find any Adsense blocks throughout the entire forum.

Bzimage uses reputation and infraction systems. It’s really just a straight-up forum. As with all new forums, it is worth checking out to promote your websites and products to new eyes and make connections with new people.

The color scheme isn’t particularly inspiring and could perhaps do with sprucing up a little. It’s all a bit dull for out liking.

This new SEO forum is worth checking out, if only because it has a Page Rank of 6, which means that if you leave your signature links in a few places you might pick up some valuable juice for the search engines.

A plus point of this forum is that it is yet to be infiltrated with people out to scam you, as you find on Digital Point. One of the problems with Digital Point is that it’s incredibly hard to assess who to trust. For that reason alone, we cows don’t trust anyone on Digital Point and we are careful abut who we do business with.

Bzimage is obviously not going to become as big as Digital Point any time soon, but with a small group of honest users, it could be a resource worth logging into on a regular basis.

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35 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

“Catherine Gillespie of Artists in Buffalo says god-looking website are important.”

No, we haven’t gone mad after all the New Year parties. What you’ve just read was a shameful typo that appeared on the Buffalo News website. If the people who are paid to write the news make fundamental typos that end up in final copy, imagine how many typos the rest of us make.

Our Cow Department of Made-Up Stats estimates that across the Internet, there are more than 500 cowzillion typos that nobody has spotted. Scary stuff. How, then, can we put these typos to “god” use? Well, the subject of this review might just have the answer.

This baldy is Tony. He currently ranks as our third-favorite baldy because he has created the website Auction Intelligence. From the homepage:

Who Else Wants To Know How To Find, In 4 Easy Steps, Every Misspelled or Mistyped Listing On eBay, Which Cannot Be Found By Using Any Normal Search Tool, Therefore Attracting Very Few Bids By The End Of The Auction?

Despite being trigger-happy with his shift key, Tony has come up with a great concept. You can get started right away with Auction Intelligence.

Type in what you’re looking for, decide to include or exclude the correct spelling from the search results, choose a regional eBay (US, UK, Aussie, Canadian) and then search away. We tried searching for a “cow alarm clock”. To our disappointment, you can only search for one term at a time. We should have read the tip underneath the search box.

The error message we got told us to watch a demonstration video. To do so, you have to enter your email address and have it sent to you.

We think this is unwise. The video should be on the front page. If people want to sign up for updates, that’s all well and good, but having to sign up to watch an instructional video will put people off.

Saddened that we wouldn’t be able to find an alarm clock, we searched for “Playstation”. A window popped up with our eBay search results of numerous variations of the word “Playstation”. Sure enough, there were a bunch of games and gadgets with no bids and minimal time remaining. No real bargains yet, however.

Next, we stepped up our game and searched for “IBM” and “Apple”. These terms produced error pages; likely they were too short. How about “Toshiba”? Nothing worth writing home about.

Finally, we tried “Panasonic” and “Technics”. We found lots of Lego. Searching for a single term limits the usability of Auction Intelligence, but we have no doubt that if you play around with the website, you will be able to find some bargains. You should give Auction Intelligence at least a few minutes of your time after reading this review.

What we’d like to see from Tony is the ability to search for multiple-word phrases as well as some testimonials on the front page of cool things that people have found and bought. As we said, the tutorial video should also be on the homepage.

Overall, the site needs a relick - new logo, better colors and perhaps a picture of Tony wearing a hat. We made the last one up, but a new logo and colors would make a world of difference.

Tony is definitely onto a “god” thing with Auction Intelligence.

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11 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

After a successful launch, TNX.net has amassed more than 35,000 users sharing a gargantuan 30,570,876 links – and counting. We’ve been paying close attention to TNX and while we initially had out reservations about the service, we think it’s something that everybody should look into, which is why we’re going to have a little peak at it today to find out exactly what TNX can offer you. It’s all about links, baby, and lots of them.

The mission of TNX is outlined as follows:

• Assist website owners in attracting targeted visitors and clients from search engines and relevant websites.
• Reduce the dependence on search engines.
• Improve quality of the search results for those websites that join TNX system.
• Increase the income of every webmaster who joins TNX system.

Although at first the whole TNX system can be a little overwhelming, once you get into it, any confusion is outweighed by the enormous benefits your blog or website will receive. To get started, you need to sign up for TNX and then add a bit of code into your blog. Most bloggers add the code into their footers. For an example of what the code looks like on a blog, head over to World of Angel and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Once the code is installed, you add your blog to the system and wait for approval. TNX sells links on each individual page of your blog, up to four links a page. The value of links is based on the Page Rank of the page and you are paid in TNX points. The value is also determined by your chosen niche.

I’ve had TNX running on World of Angel for a while now, and I am earning about 11 points for PR0 links up to 5,625 points for PR4 links. I left my account unattended for a few weeks with a campaign running (I forgot about it, to be honest) and when I returned, I found that I had 69 active links on other websites and about 65,000 points as my balance. While it sounds like a lot, those points are worth only $0.68 per 1,000, which would mean I could cash out for about $40.

TNX isn’t going to make you rich because the links are so cheap, so you are better off using your points to buy links. As an example, on the TNX website it is pointed out that 20,000 points could get you for a month:

• 20,000 PR0 links
• 400 PR1 links
• 200 PR2 links
• 100 PR3 links
• 40 PR4 links
• 20 PR5 links

Those links could be very valuable. To get links on other blogs, you need to set up a campaign, which can be a little daunting at first. You choose your niche(s) and select how many Yahoo! backlinks the sites you are advertising on should have, as well as their Page Rank. You then choose which language sites you want to target. You then need to set up your creatives, including your anchor texts and which of your pages they will point to.

It’s recommended that you make at least 10 creatives. Once you’re done, you choose how many links you want to appear on different websites determined by Yahoo! backlinks, Page Rank and niche category. You then send your campaign for approval and wait for it to kick in.

Points can, of course, be bought, for an average of $1.3 per 1,000, although the price can be as low as $0.65 if you buy in bulk. I haven’t bought any points for my campaign because they seem to be racking up by themselves with the code on my blog.

TNX also offers an affiliate program that pays 13.3% of points generated by your referrals. You receive 5% of payments made by referred advertisers. We used out affiliate links in this post to try and test the system out.

TNX is a great way to get free text link ads and the system has improved greatly since we first took a look at it. Creating campaigns has been made a lot easier and our initial confusion was short lived. Sign up now and get linking.

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30 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post