John Cow dot Com » The Net

Lend $25 – Change a Life – Get the $25 Back!

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:13:11 +0000

…Lend $25 again, change someone else’s life; rise and repeat for as long as you want to.

It’s rare that I tell people that they absolutely need to do something. Sure I’ve recommended a lot of stuff in the past that I think are great products that I thought could help you make money, but I don’t think I’ve ever said flat out that this is something that you need to do right now. But this is something that you need to do – right now. And it’s not for you, it’s for someone else. By investing as little as $25, you will help change someone’s life forever. And the best part? You will even get the $25 back. So why wouldn’t you do it?

What I’m talking about is kiva.org, a non-profit site that helps get money for microfinance loans into the hands of the people in developing countries who really need – entrepreneurs who will use the loan to buy business related items like livestock or machinery that will enable them to support themselves and work their way out of poverty. These small loans will not only literally change these people’s lives, but will also positively affect their whole community.

Here’s how it works:

1) Go to http://www.kiva.org; select an entrepreneur that you want to loan money to. It could be anybody, almost anywhere in the world, and the amount can be anything from $25 to the full amount of the loan requested. It could be a dairy farmer in Kenya or a tailor in Bulgaria. Just click on the ‘Lend’ button on the main page and you can browse through all the applicants and choose the one you want.

2) Kiva then transfers the funds abroad to a microfinance partner who administers the loan locally.

3) Watch what your money can do; you then get to watch your entrepreneurs small business grow through email updates.

4) Get you money back. You’ll get your money repaid within months. Then it’s up to you to decide whether you want to withdraw your money through PayPal, lend it out again, or just donate it outright to Kiva.

Like I said above, I urge everybody who reads this to go to http://www.kiva.org and lend what they can. How often do you get the chance to really make a difference in someone’s life? And if you need it, you will get the money back. If you don’t, just keep lending it out to more people. Over time, think about how many people you could help with just $25.

And the great part about Kiva is that you get to see the results you loan has had – you see that you were directly responsible for helping someone get the means they need to get out of poverty and become financially independent. And all you need to do is lend someone $25. Do it now!

Happy New Years – And Some Free Super Cool Prizes For You!

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:49:12 +0000

First of all congratulations to…

Phillipe of http://prizk.com/ and Jan of http://www.janmiddleton.com/ for winning the $50 via paypal. Simply email me using the contact form and send me your paypal and I will send you $50 USD

The winners were picked using the cool free http://www.random.org/

Now if you did not win… worry not… cause i have another cool contest for you… and this one is focused on new years!

I am giving away…

2 months FREE access to the Web2Mayhem ($254 value) and if you are already a member i will simply refund you the charges you already paid

PLUS

One hour skype call with you and I to look at your business model and to come up with a custom plan for using Web2Mayhem based on your needs ($ not sure of value… depends on how much money you make from my advice)

PLUS

5 Custom and 100% unique “Spin Ready” articles for you to use

This is a short contest and i am picking the winner on Monday January 4th 2010 (will announce it in a blog post here)

How can you win?

Step 1: Retweet this message on Twitter by either copying and pasting it or you can just Click Here
“Get 2 Months Free of Web2Mayhem from @johncow Go to http://bit.ly/51BlWl to check it out and Happy New Years!”
Step 2: Sign up to check out the free video for the Magic Bullet System (Click Here)
Step 3: Comment below with a link to your twitter post, a quick post of what you thought of the free video Amish is giving away (make sure the email you use in the comment form below is the same you resgister for the video with so i can cross reference.. and if you already signed up you are good to go) and also in the comment simply say “Happy New Years”

That is it… but WARNING… your comment might not be approved right away cause 25% or more go into moderation. I will be checking every few hours and so please only submit your comment once.

Have a FANTASTIC New Years, Be Safe and Remember… Have Fun With Your Life!

XBOX Live -Wanna Play?

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:49:19 +0000

We’ve been spending countless hours on XBOX Live lately with our XBOX360. Obviously we could spend the time in more productive ways, like browsing the Internet for new torrents, blogging and sleeping in, but we seem to have a bit of an addiction. So we were wondering – how many of you boys and girls play on XBOX Live? Perhaps we could setup a few gaming sessions. You can find us under gamertag “JohnCowdotCom“. Our preference of game would be tactical shooters and normal first person shooters. Racing isn’t really our thing – we just keep crashing into stuff.

So here’s a list of the games we’ve been playing a lot lately (bold titles are played more often):

Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare.
Rainbow Six Vegas.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2.
Conflict: Denied Ops.
Gears of War.
Stranglehold.
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.
Need for Speed: Carbon.
Tombraider Anniversary.
Halo 3.
Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

A few of the titles we are eagerly waiting for are Rainbow Six Vegas 2, which should be out this month, and GTA4. Another awesome game we’re definitely going to buy is featured in the following trailer. Unfortunately that won’t be out till September…

Liar Liar, Pants on Fire

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:10:35 +0000

We just couldn’t help ourselves, after seeing how Mr NETGURU2525 (aka NETGURU on Digital point) is trying to lie his way out of the scam he pulled, by selling us a useless PR9 link, we just had to post this follow-up. The damage control isn’t working, in fact, we think he’s just getting himself deeper and deeper into the cow shit.

One of the threads on DP is about how people got scammed by him, and because he’s got a slightly different handle on there, he thinks he can lie his way out of this one. Unfortunately for him, we found more evidence, showing this liar for what he really is.

Have a look at the following screenshot, in particular the links in the thief’s signature. When we paid for the crap link via paypal, we paid to a certain admin@double-down.co.uk. So surfing to http://www.double-down.co.uk, we found this site:

Three of the links in the liar’s signature are exactly the same as on the double-down.co.uk website. Tsk Tsk, guess he thought everyone was as stupid as him and that nobody would see the connection.

And what an astonishing coincidence that Google knows you live in Edinburgh, UK. Same location as what the DP forum screen shots say about yourself!

Then someone finds a link on eBay, where Mr NETGURU happily continues to scam people out of their money – after all, he’s been outed on the Digital Point and Sitepoint forums, it was time for him to find new sources of trusting people to scam. Even though he “promised” to sell just a handfull of links on the forums, to prevent the PR9 forum from getting spammed and thus rendering it’s value wortless, he’s now put 20 for sale on eBay. And it looks like he’s already stole money from 4 new people.

Yes NETGURU, you do make us sick. And dear readers, feel free to stumble, Digg, Reddit, whatever this post, so we can warn more people about this scammer’s work.

*Update* Here’s the ultimate confession, he’s admitting to knowing that the link he sold was crap. Even trying to pretend to be helpful by warning others that the link was a fake!

Get Lost!

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:37:49 +0000

We’ve been busy setting up a nice little site again, just because we were bored. This time we had a look at what interests people on the net around the world, and it seems TV shows are a big thing these days. If you missed last night’s episode, and you’re stuck in the office where you can’t download it without your boss giving you the evil eye – why not watch the show from a free stream?

That’s exactly what we had in mind when we created this spiffy new website where you can watch lost online.

We chose WordPress for several reasons;

We’re used to it and find it very easy to set up and maintain.
It’s very SEO friendly, something that matters a lot if you want to be found with a site like this.
There’s tons of plugins available to make the site even more SEO friendly.
There’s also tons of free themes available, to give the site a bit of branding.

We’re looking into doing this for some of the other big tv shows too if this experiment proves to be worthwhile.

Anyway, that was our shameless self-plug for this week. Hope you will enjoy the new lost season 4 online! We’ll leave you with this youtube clip, that has nothing to do with lost, we got from someone who told us there’s a revolution coming in making money online…

Write Multiple Blogs? Create Your Own Plugin Depot

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 02:09:50 +0000

Most of us here are bloggers. Many of us write for multiple blogs, which is a great way to explore a number of niches. But where do you store your blogs? No, not online, offline?

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have a folder deeply buried on your hard disk called “blogs” or “sites” or whatever “blogs” or “sites” is in your directory. What mine contains is a copy of wordpress that the site is currently running (very important, as you if you switch servers you save time from finding the version of wordpress that’s compatible with your database), and the blog’s theme.

Each of my blogs has this, but there’s one more folder – plugins. This contains a copy of the essential plugins I use for my blog. Why do I do that? Well, three reasons stand out:

Saves Time: Instead of constantly directory hopping, I simply upload the wp-plugins folder to the wp-content subfolder on my server.

Handles Legacy Plugins: Suppose a site with the plugin you want on goes down? I’ve still got a backup, and – more importantly – I know exactly where it is.

Familiarisation - Before, I had 3 different plugins on 3 different blogs that did the same thing. Now, on any new blogs I create, I will only have one.

So, if you want to speed up the process of making a blog, spending more time blogging and promoting, why not create your own Plugin Depot on your hard drive? It’ll make your life a lot easier.

Of course, in an ideal world, all your blogs will use the same plugin depot online, but I’ll leave wordpress plugin writers to come up with a nifty way of doing that .

This post is written by Rhys Wynne – a five year blogger who knows the joys associated with multiple blogs. He writes at The Gospel According To Rhys, and has recently launched My Brand New Brand – a tool to help affiliate marketers find brandable domain names.

The Last Drop For Entrecard

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 00:01:28 +0000

We’ve had the entrecard (EC) widget on our blog for a while now and never really actively participated in their booming community. If you’re familiar with their forums, you’ll know there’s a select group of EC power-users. They seem to wake up, and go to bed with nothing but EC on their mind. Their blog’s are filled with post after post on how to increase your EC traffic, how to optimize it for your blog, how to network with the community,Top droppers MeMes, etc etc. That’s all great, but we think some are getting a little carried away with it all, unknowingly destroying the system.

Here’s the thing: The whole purpose behind EC is to get noticed in the blogosphere because your 125×125 ad gets displayed on other blogs that have signed up with EC. Obviously if your card is featured on a huge blog like Problogger (who gets sponsored by EC) or JohnChow, you’re bound get get a nice bump in traffic for those 24 hours. Currently the cost for these two blogs is 330 and 260. So why on earth would someone waste over 400 credits to get featured on a blog that has 21 RSS subscribers? You wouldn’t if you have your head screwed on the right way!

We’re not saying your blog is bad or crap, we’re just saying there’s no justification for such a high price, having compared the stats with the other blogs. It’s like us starting to ask $900 for a review, while you can go and get one for half that amount on JohnChow.com. We’d set ourselves up the bomb!

Now this is where the problem lies. The EC powerusers are so keen on getting becoming popular within the ranks of the community, that they are working hard in chain dropping their cards on all EC blogs each day, just to accumulate more credits and inflating their own advertising prices. Emails keep getting send around, asking for drops, reccomendations and whatever else it is that will get you popular on the categories pages.
Its really not doing any good for anyone. The blogs that get their cards dropped on are experiencing an increase in bounce rates. The bloggers that stops dropping quickly vanish into thin air. The bloggers that keep dropping, is happily inflating their own advertising cost. And for what? Just to get featured in the top 3 on their respective categories?

Bouncerates through the roof.

Unfortunately the current system “Effort=Reward” has become unusable since it has been encouraging this form of ‘gaming the system’ and the end result causes a distorted view of how popular a blog really is on the outside world. If you think you’re paying 400 credits to get featured on a popular blog, therefor getting high exposure to the blogosphere and receiving a bump in traffic, think again. You’ve just wasted your hard earned credits on a blog that might look popular inside the EC community, but isn’t all that popular outside the community – where it matters if you’re looking for traffic.

The only way to stop this is to alter the script so it won’t add to your ‘popularity’ when you’re dropping cards. Getting more popular because cards are getting dropped on your blog is a natural and organic type of growth, which would be a more accurate reflection of the popularity of a blog in the place where it really matters – the blogosphere. Until the EC team can find a way to prevent blog inflation from happening, we’re dropping EC.

(PS We’re waiting for Becky’s ‘told you so!’ comment).

We Won! Obviously..

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:28:49 +0000

So says Ryan Caldwell from Performancing.com! The polls are closed, the votes have been counted and nobody has demanded for a recount, even though the Big Beef has won in his category as most controversial blog of 2007 with a ~~manipulated~~ massive 98% of the votes (!) Its official, our humble selves have been bestowed with the honorable title of ;”Best Blog Name in 2007″ by you, the devoted readers of JohnCow.com, who happen to be sincere voters (and freeloaders that really wanted to win the entrecard credits and WordPress hoodies and tshirts ). If we had written a speech to use after we received the awards, we would have certainly posted it right now. Guess its too bad we didn’t, but thanks to everyone that voted anyway! We simply couldn’t have done it without you. Special thanks to XFEP.com, who nominated us in the first place!

Here’s the rest of the categories and their respective winners:

The Best Overall Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Zen Habits
The Most Influential Blogger of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Darren Rowse (ProBlogger)
The Best Blog Design of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Copyblogger (designed by Chris Pearson)
The Best Blog Typography of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Freelance Switch
The Best Blog Name of 2007
Readers’ Choice: John Cow
The Best New Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Freelance Switch
The Best Blog Community of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Freelance Writing Jobs
The Most Improved Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Mashable
The Best Blogs You’ve Never Heard Of 2007
Readers’ Choice: The Astonishing Adventures of Lord Likely
The Best Use of a Corporate Blog in 2007
Readers’ Choice: Prosper’s Official Blog
The Best Blog Podcast in 2007
Readers’ Choice: Freelance Switch
The Best Video Blog in 2007
Readers’ Choice: Daily Idea
The Best Writing/Blogging Blog in 2007
Readers’ Choice: Copyblogger
The Best Science/Technology Blog in 2007
Readers’ Choice: Pharyngula
The Most Controversial Blog in 2007
Readers’ Choice: John Chow
The Best SEO Blog in 2007
Readers’ Choice: SEOmoz Blog
The Best Celeb/Style Blog in 2007
Readers’ Choice: Go Fug Yourself
The Best Business/Money Blogs in 2007
Readers’ Choice: The Simple Dollar
The Best Photo Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: I Can Has Cheezburger?
The Best Sports Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: True Hoop
The Best Blog WebHost of 2007
Readers’ Choice: WordPress.com
Best Family and Parenting Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Parent Hacks
The Best Political Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Daily Kos
Best Food/Health Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: The Girl Who Ate Everything & 101 Cookbooks (tie)
The Funniest Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: The Sneeze
The Best Travel Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: The Cranky Flier
The Best Education Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: Study Hacks
The Best Entertainment Blog of 2007
Readers’ Choice: /film

Congratulations to all, and may the best cow win next year.

Right, back to business. We know you’re still reading just to see if you won one of the goodies we’ve bribed you with if you’d vote for us. Well here’s the winners of our little cowpetition™.

2×750 Entrecard winners are:

The first 750 Entrecard Credits go to – Affiliate Confession.
The second batch of 750 credits goes to – Charles from Nierva.com.

The three winners of either a WordPress T-shirt or a WordPress Hoodie are:

If you’ve won, drop us an email with your size and preference for a tee or hoodie and we’ll have the wordpress shop ship one off right away! And EC winners, give us the link to your profile page on entrecard so we can drop the credits in your accounts.

That concludes this important announcement, you can all get back to work now. Thank you.

Affiliate Summit ’08 Pass – Looking For New Owner

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 02:44:27 +0000

Interested? Of course you are! These Full Conference Passes are priced at a whopping $1,449 and loads of cool people will be attending the Affiliate Summit West 2008 this year. We know for a fact that Mr Gary Lee and Ms Danielle will be there, Hyper Mark from 45n5, ScratchBack Jimbo is going to be the EmCee, some guy called Calacanis (don’t know him, but he always seems to be on other bloggers bad side), Zac Johnson, Joel ‘The next internet millionaire’ Comm, and unfortunately, John Chow will be disturbing the peace in Las Vegas too. Again. These are just a handfull of the people that are coming, here’s the entire list. (extra kudos to those who know everyone on there!)

It just so happens that by pure coincidence, sheer luck, and a little smooth talk, the lovely Amy from AffiliateSummit.com was nice enough to give us a free ticket Too bad for us that we’ll be in sunny Australia when the Summit is happening, so guess what? We’ll be sending one of you on your way to Vegas!

Now here’s another of our homemade random cowpetitions™ for you guys because we know how much you love em! Don’t think it can get any simpler than this;

Write a small blurb on your blog, telling us why we should give you the Affiliate Summit 2008 pass worth nearly $1,500. Don’t forget to linkback to the awesome affiliates at affiliatesummit.com and your favorite blogging cows! (that’s us, incase you get smart and link to a certain johnbuffalo or johnycow!)

Oh. and you might as well sign up for the RSS feeds if you haven’t already. We’ll announce the winner in about two weeks in the feeds, so you’ll have another month to arrange your travel and stay in Las Vegas.

The summit would be a fantastic place to start networking with the right people in the industry. There will be light years of experience walking around and all you have to do is listen and mingle. Not to mention all the schwag you can grab! The pass also comes with complimentary breakfast and lunch if we’re not mistaking, and for dinner you just make sure you stick around John Chow – the man’s known to pick up the bill after dinner

Since we’re on the subject of affiliate marketing, did you guys know that our second favorite baldy has started the new Elite Retreat? The exclusive once-a-year, two day opportunity to sit down with some of the best brains in the business to see how they can help you improve or add to your current business plans. You’ll get plenty of invaluable 101 time with guys like Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, Guy Kawasaki and Neil Patel, to pick their brains and have them share their massive marketing experience with you.

Jeremy is so confident in the success of the Elite Retreat, this is what he mailed us;”I am also going to offer a BETTER THAN money back guarantee meaning I will refund the full ticket price PLUS all airfare and expenses if someone does not make their money back within 6 months. That is how confident I am in the Elite Retreat!”

Kicking off on the 3d and 4th of April, they’re only taking 35 lucky applicants on to join them in San Francisco for a once in a lifetime experience. So you’d better get in line before the doors are closing.

*for the affiliate summit pass, you’ll have to be over 21 to get in, and a resident of the US, unless you’re planning on flying there for the summit if you’d win the pass.

Brushing Off Blogrush

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:21:53 +0000

It’s time to do a little housecleaning and we’re starting with the sidebar. The blogrush widget has got to go. We’re sorry Mr Reese, but the fact that you haven’t been updating your blogrush blog for nearly two months now just gives us the impression that you don’t give a toss anymore. So why should we? We’ve accumilated way more credits than we could ever spend anyway, and since there’s no way to give them away or even sell them, you can keep all ten million of them.

And what’s this talk about a new site called trafficjam.com? We quote:

TrafficJam (which will be located at TrafficJam.com) will take the hottest posts from across the BlogRush network and rank them by category based on our “BUZZ” meter technology. This site will be another way for our users to drive more free traffic to their blogs — we expect many Internet users will start using TrafficJam to keep up with the latest news about the niche they are interested in

That’s been over two months now and there’s absolutely nothing but our IP address (!?) on that site. Got stuck in traffic?

Anyway, you’ve had a good run, and we really believed you were going to pull something out of that magic hat of yours, but it looks like the show is over and the time has come to stand up and walk away. Thanks for having us!

What We’ve Learned in 2008

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:09:55 +0000

The hangover really isn’t worth it..

Tracking Ad Performance

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:58:56 +0000

The OIOPublisher plugin has just added a new addition to it’s already impressive portfolio of features – a stats tracker. Absolutely a winner since we all love to dive into our metrics and see where we can tweak and tune our blogs for optimal money making performance. This module will show you how often an ad has been displayed, how many clicks it received and the ad specific CTR (click through rate). This way you can keep track of how much you’re paying for the traffic you’re buying from a site that utilizes the plugin. Advertisers will receive a weekly email with the all the statistics you see in the screen shot below. Publishers will get a good idea of how much they can charge for a spot.

Obviously banner ads don’t have a high CTR like they did in 2000 since most people nowadays are used to banners and simply don’t like to click them that often anymore. Banners today however are used for effective online branding. If you don’t have a “brand name” and if you don’t want to spend money on your brand’s name recognition, there are other, more effective advertising methods available that can deliver you traffic. Google Adsense will bring you cheaper traffic, but the name won’t have a face to stick to. Even though you might not get as much traffic from the banners, you will eventually become a know face to the public, who will probably associate you with someone that is an authoritative figure in their niche. The Internet business these days is all about branding baby!

That’s the stats page for one of our advertisers, logosamurai.com. Because they use a character, highly visible site name and highlighted price, people will remember this ad when then come across it somewhere else too. If they didn’t click on it here, chances are they will click it on the next site, even if it’s just to see who these guys are. Adsense ads are a dime a dozen, and it’s unlikely that visitors will remember you from these ads. If you’re serious about making online, one of the very first things you should consider is how to create your online reputation and build your image. A good rep will absolutely benefit you when you’re starting up affiliate sales for example. If you could buy product X for the same amount from someone you’ve heard of instead of a complete stranger, wouldn’t you go for the familiar face?

So anyway, as you can see, OIOPublisher is an ongoing work in progress and they keep developing and implementing new features on a regular basis. We’ve implemented this latest module and our advertisers will start to receive these weekly stat reports if they choose to.

(PS Here’s something totally unrelated, but we just couldn’t help laughing when we saw the following linked out from Technomoney;”how-to-give-your-designer-live-access-to-your-theme“. Oops, wonder if Caroline’s next post will be ‘How NOT to give your designer live access to your theme’ )

We Found Out Who Ruined Christmas

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:48:08 +0000

We just received an email from Mr X. (wishes to remain anonymous) who gave us the heads up about a thief who stole the JohnCow WordPress theme and is now offering it on his warez forum. Merry Frigging Christmas eh?

Just to show you how cheap this loser is, he actually asked if he could get a copy of the theme for free first which was obviously declined. Now we have a pretty good idea how he managed to get his hands on a copy, one of the PayPal transactions was done with an account that didn’t belong to the buyer – they stole those details too and we ended up refunding the account holder $79.

We get robbed of our content daily by tons of RSS scrapers, but we don’t really mind. Our posts don’t cost us money. The WordPress theme we developed and promoted however does cost us money. And nobody likes it when someone else takes away your money right?

We did a little investigating and with the info Mr X. provided us with, we found out that the little thief resides on the Digital Point Forums – his signature;”Get The Stuff Being Sold On DP For Free”. Bet once other DP members find out that this little turd is stealing their products to give away for free to build his forum traffic, they won’t be impressed. We also found the thief’s blog URL where he wishes everyone a merry Christmas. Bah Humbug!

After reporting him to abuse@rapidshare.com (not that it’ll matter since he seems to be selling premium rapidhare accounts too) we had a chat with the guy on DP where he bought his hosting from. Fortunately the hoster understood where we were coming from and agreed to remove this from his servers asap. We’ll have to wait for the outcome of this, but we’ll be watching things closely.

Anyhoo, lets not forget that we’ve got 750 Entrecard credits to give away. This weeks random winner is Reno from CyberStreetReport. Congratulations! The credits have been transferred to your account.

Merry Christmas Everyone

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 13:29:37 +0000

Sheesh, nearly forgot that it’s Christmas already! Just a quick post to wish all of you the best possible Christmas and we hope that you received whatever it is you wanted from Santa. We like to give away stuff too so there’s another 750 Entrecard credits up for grabs. All you have to do is leave a comment in this post and drop your card in our sidebar, and we’ll pick a winner in the next 24 hours like we did last time for smoking cigar Jack!

Another ‘present’ we’re giving away this Christmas is for Darin.CC. Even though we were planning on doing a monthly ‘reminder’ of the PS3 we won but never got at Darin’s blog, we figured since he’s totally ignoring us, moderating the comments we leave on his blog and not responding on IM and email, we’d do the same for Darin. As of now, we too will pretend it all never happened and won’t bother you with it anymore Darin. Merry Christmas!

Blogging Action Figures Out Now

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 11:15:31 +0000

We all had our heroes back in the day; He-Man, Transformers, Gi-Joe, Mask etc etc. All those guys had their own action figures and there weren’t many kids that didn’t have at least one of them. In the era of the Internet, the new heroes are the big bucks bloggers. Why nobody ever though of the idea…we don’t know. But Toni did and it looks like she’s already got quite the collection! Good to see we’re here favorite toy blogger though

Just for that, we now subscribed to her RSS feed – only 99 more to go Toni!

*Update* removed the flash because it was on auto play and it would start singing all the time since it was on the fron page. Click Toni’s link to see it anyway

Got Over Ourselves

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 17:24:23 +0000

Yes we we’re a little annoyed yesterday and therefor closed the comment section for a while. We got over ourselves eventually and figured that we can’t live without your comments! You’re good to go again. And Mike, thanks for the apology email you sent us after your comments. Merry Christmas to you too.

After our aspirin breakfast and two hours of house cleaning, we remembered why parties are fun – at someone else’s house! We had friends over from 7 PM till 5 AM and had a blast, or so we were told. After 11-ish, things are a bit blurry. But apparently we’re excellent poker players when heavily intoxicated. $300 isn’t a bad catch for a couple of hours of poker It just about covered the cost of the booze we provided.

Here’s a picture of the crap we faced when we woke up. Too bad we can’t show you just how frigging sticky the floor was everywhere!

Unfortunately something else we were reminded of is the importance of testing new code on your live website or blog. We went offline for a couple of hours at midnight, because there was a small typo somewhere in the awesome new statistics/tracker module the OIOPublisher plugin guys are developing. We’re lucky enough that we’ve got cool readers that ping us when there are problems. Thanks guys!

Apparently it caused a little stir, and many people are making a bigger fuss out of it then us. So we had a bit of downtime, shit happens.

How Important Is Robots.txt For Google?

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:46:22 +0000

Just how important is your blog’s robots.txt file if you want the world to find you and your blog in the search engines?

The robots.txt file is a file on your site that is meant to give instructions as to where search engine spiders may and may not go. This is not a wall but a permission system, which means that you can not force “bad” bots to listen to it. Bad bots are the bots that go all over your site but do not offer you any value at all.

The powerful reason for the robots.txt file is that it is listened to by the majority of all search engines and it helps to ensure that your site gets spidered and indexed properly. That means the pages you want to be found, can be found and the pages you want hidden will remain hidden.

We do not want to go into a long lesson on this, as there are loads of resources available on the topic that can be explained much better then we can explain them. What we will share with you however is that you want to use one and you want to upload it to the root directory on your server, located in the same place as your index page.

You can see the robot.txt we use at http://www.johncow.com/robots.txt

Out of curiosity weve been snooping around a little to see how others do it. Surprisingly enough, we found that there seem to be two different approaches to the system that are total opposites. We’re comparing 4 well known blogs here.

Shoemoney.com / PR6 / Alexa 2,988 – We know Jeremy is pretty tech savvy and he probably is the one with the most knowhow about how this would work. Then again, he might not give a poop about it and just let it be.

Here’s his robots.txt:

Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /sitemap.xml
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /wp-includes/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /link.php
Disallow: /gallery2
Disallow: /gallery2/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /pages/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed

JohnChow.com / PR4 / Alexa 3,071 – Mr Chow has been around the block and we’re assuming he’s quite tech savvy too. Why else would he run a site called TheTechZone for over 8 years? His robots.txt is quite similar to Jeremy’s:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /banners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

Problogger.net / PR6 / Alexa 2,600 – The Problogger seems to take a totally different approach to things. Being part of B5 Media, an organization that makes money by running blogs, we’re pretty sure that the technical knowhow of SEO is widely available in a team of professionals. A copy of Darren’s robots.txt:

That’s right. The Problogger doesn’t hold back any secrets for the search engines of this world. Anyone is allowed to crawl through all of Darren’s content.

MattCutts.com / PR7 / Alexa 5,059 – Matt has been working for Google nearly eight years now and is currently head of Google’s webspam team. Surely its safe to assume that Matt knows what he’s doing. Like Problogger, Matt withholds almost nothing for the crawlers, just a files/ folder:

Eventhough files/ won’t be indexed, Matt has put an index.html saying ‘Sorry’ in place to keep nosy cows like us out of there. Afterall, a robots.txt file is available for anyone to see. put one and one together and you can try to have a peak at the contents of a directory that’s specified in there.

As you can see, there seem to be two trains of thought on the subject.

Over 1000 Subscribers Under 6 Months – It Can Be Done

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:39:27 +0000

Woooo! Yay for us! We’ve finally managed to reach our first 1000 RSS subscribers milestone. The closer we got to this goal, the slower it all seemed to be going, but we’re there, thanks to you good people.

About 12 months ago, 6 before we started this blog, John Chow himself had just over 1000 subscribers, and look where he’s at now. Boasting nearly 15k! We wonder if we can achieve such an amount in 2008. According to Blogperfume’s cool RSS analyzing tool, we will get very close at least. (Make sure you enter other bloggers RSS feed urls in the tool, so you can snoop around and see what you’re up against )

Our growth rate is tremendous at 25.24% last month, potentially growing to a massive predicted subscribers amount after 12 months of 13,668. Higher than Mr Chow’s 6.59% or Jeremy’s 0.39% (wtf is going on there Jeremy?!) We’ll buy that for a dollar!

Here’s a few screen shots of our own stats:

The amount of new subscribers is in the lighter color of the columns

This is the amount of subscribers vs the hits they generate

Here’s a breakdown of the numbers

One thing that kind of slipped our mind were the free RSS links we promised to a bunch of you. We’re surprised nobody reminded us of it! Anyhoo, we’ve taken the liberty of adding ten of your links to our rss footer. Not in the same fashion we did it last time because that just made thing look messy.

Thanks again everyone for reading, subscribing and commenting on our blog. Guess the under~~cow~~dog always has a shot at the title

Oh, we nearly forgot something else too…announcing the winner of the $250 Amazon Gift Voucher from our generous sponsor Adtoll! After blindfolding ourselves, we pointed out the following winner with our horns; Can’t Get Rich, whom ironically enough, just became $250 richer! Congratulations, we’ll forward your details to Adtoll so they can mail you the Amazon gift voucher asap.

Thanks everyone that tried and failed this round, but don’t despair. We’ve nearly finished some negotiations with third parties and it looks like we’ll be throwing out some massive prizes next week! (yes, you read it right, that was plural )

We’re Selling a PR5 Blog

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:22:08 +0000

The time has come to part with one of our very first blogs. We’re just not spending enough time on it and it is starting to go to waste. Something you just don’t do with a PR5 blog thats in the technorati top 10K!
The domain is nearly two years old and has a pagerank5.

The blog comes with the following stats: There are currently 445 posts and 2,545 comments, contained within 66 categories.

Technorati rank 10,440
7,380 incoming links according to Yahoo

Even though traffic is down due to lack of updates, there’s still ~170 RSS subscribers. The main income right now is paid posts. With a Pagerank of 5, it fetches around $50 per paid post on payperpost. Sponsoredreviews fetches anywhere between $50 and $100 for a sponsored post.

Obviously you can sell links and make more money with a pagerank 5 blog, but we simply dot have the time/energy for it.

We will provide free hosting for as long as the new owner would need.

Even if you just do 10 paid posts per month, you will make $500×12=$6000 per year.

Happy Bidding!

Banned From FaceBook

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:36:19 +0000

We were wondering how long it’d take for us to get banned somewhere again. This time it came from a slightly unexpected candidate – Farcebook. It seems that after we’ve successfully managed to run our John Cow profile for a whole season, but the clever buggers now have put a new rule in place. People are only allowed to register with ‘real names’. Guess our John Cow pseudonym doesn’t sound convincing enough for them – after all, we might just be impersonating the ‘real’ Mr John Cow!

One thing that pissed us off though is the fact that we cant login to the developers section anymore, where we’ve got our $300 facebook app registered.

Anyhoo, we’re not the first ones that get the facebook boot shoved up our furry cowsbutts. Besides Jon Swift, who runs his blog under a pseudonym, who knows how many of us using a nickname on the Internet are an endangered species on Farcebook as of now.

Fortunately for Jon, some of his blogging friends stood up for him and Facebook reinstated his account, along with an apology for banning him in the first place. The fact that people actually created a facebook group called;”Let Jon Swift Back into Facebook” might have helped.

Here’s the email we received. We even tried the pretty please ‘but all our friends are on there’ card, but Kyle from Farcebook just wouldn’t budge. (note how we’re all supposed to give our first and last names, yet they seem to think it’s sufficient enough just to sign off with their first name.)

Looking at what Farcebook’s excuse was when they re-instated Mr Swift (down below). We feel that we’re in no different situation and that our facebook profile should get reinstated. And an apology from Mark ~~Suckerberg~~ Zuckerberg would be nice too

Hi Jon Swift,

Upon further review, we have decided to reactivate your account. Our Terms of Use, to which all users agree when they first sign up for the site, stipulate that you must not “impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity.” However, since others on the site seem to know you by this name, and since you don’t appear to be using the name to impersonate or to hide your identity, we have determined that you are not violating these Terms. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. Please let me know if you have further questions or concerns.

Thanks for your understanding,

Jerry
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

It looks like our superpoking days are over, but do feel free to create a ‘Let John Cow Back into Facebook’ group and let us see if we can stand strong together to make this injustice go away!

(PS We’d like to give Brian our best because he too has been done wrong by the big social media bullies today!)

*Update* Clever Ruchir from Technomoney.net has created a group to help us get back on facebook!