Warning - incoming rant.

Why, oh why, oh why does the standard template for Blogger not include a syndication link. There’s nothing - not an orange RSS blob, a ’subscribe to this blog’ link, or even some cryptic ‘Atom 0.1' text somewhere.

Each day masses of blogs are made in the web and this has become the simple way to make money on the web. Earlier blogging was employed as a source of spare time pursuit but at present there are countless millions of people that are earning big salary thru blogging. Here are four straightforward methods of blogging to make money.

1] Advertising - This is pertinent for the folks that have their own blogs. You can earn cash by publishing adverts in your blogs. For this you want to get adverts from diverse entrepreneurs. First you want to drive more audience to your blog. If your niche is related to the interest of the visitor product, then they are going to place ad in your blog. This is the simplest way of getting paid on the web.

In my research while blogging I discovered some very good news. My credit does not matter in order to get a cash advance! I have been doing my best to take care of my credit problems and I know that I am moving in the right direction. I have a good job and I am staying on top of everything now. The problem is that I was not counting on having a large car repair bill. That is why I need a cash advance. I have been trying to save a little bit of money each month but I don't have enough to pay the bill.

2] Google Adsense is each other method to get fast reply. You simply need to enroll for adsense and Google will start placing ads in your blog that's related to your blog. Google place adverts using a procedure and with this you'll get more visitors in your blog. 3] Review writing is an easy way of making money. You can write reviews for products, services and about top firms on your niche. This review writing will get you a major profit. There are countless business individuals who are busy in their business activities. Those folks couldn't do this review writing all alone. Such folk will take aid from writers by hiring them. While writing reviews, it is pretty much crucial to write both the negative and positive side of the services. Your blog should highlight the negative side but at the end should stress the positive aspects and the necessity to buy that product. This could electrify the onlookers to read your review and all also increase the trust on the product. Hence they'll have the aim to purchase the product or avail the services. 4] You can post ads in your blog on the services and products that has relevancy to the content.

Therefore when the onlookers clicks on the poster or advert you may receive some amount. Hence the best method of getting paid thru net is blogging. But you want to update your blogging at regular times for big salary. There are folks who've adopted blogging as their steady job as it fetches a decent income.

There is a feed for every Blogger blog - append ‘atom.xml’ to the end of the blog’s URL and it’ll automagically appear, but the default Blogger settings don’t have the syndication feed publicised by default. Instead it has to be selected as a configuration option - and a significant proportion of Blogger blogs haven’t had it switched on.

I’m daft enough to go Googling for a solution, but there must be countless others who don’t bother - so if you are using Blogger as your platform and you haven’t switched this on, you stand to lose many of your potential subscribers from the off.

I’m not sure how many additional nerd points you pick up by actually linking to a test designed to calculate your nerd score - but here goes:

How NERDY are You?

The flipside view of the “Google should pay us for using their pipes” argument…

This presentation, given by Dick Hardt at Etech last week is worth taking a look at for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, if you’re interested in online identity management then his company, Sxip (obligatory clever Web2.0 name, pronounced ’skip’) is working on technology that aims to balance the conflicting demands of authentication and privacy.

But if you’re not even slightly interested in any of the technology or the issues, it’s worth taking a look at for the presentation itself. To say it’s one of the more unusual presentation styles I’ve seen is a bit of an understatement - but it works. As an antidote to the corporate death-by-powerpoint style that most of us have to deal with, but secretly dream of subverting, it’s very effective.

When I first saw it, my immediate reaction was ‘great, but I’d never get away with that’. Then I had second thoughts. I’m convinced that at least part of the reason that I landed my current project was as a result of the presentation I gave - not the content, necessarily, but the fact that I was using an Apple Powerbook (which stood out a mile in an otherwise dull corporate environment); and also that I controlled the show with a bluetooth mobile talking to Salling Clicker. Then the content was also deliberately as far from a bland corporate presentation as I could make it - lots of big typography and colour images on a white background.

If I’d gone in with a standardised agenda-driven corporate clone of a presentation, then I’d have merged into the crowd of everyone that went before me, but the fact that this was something different made me stand out. I’ll never know for sure if that was the clincher, but it can’t have hurt.

So - Dick Hardt’s style might not be everyone’s taste for every occasion, but it could be worth a try now and again.

I’d always mentally pigeon-holed the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society together with the other analogue-era dinosaurs of the music business; but it seems that I got that wrong.   In an article in today’s Financial Times, the CEO of the MCPS-PRS alliance argues that the big four record labels don’t have much of a future left.

For the music industry, the new digital technologies with their vastly reduced recording and distribution costs are a harbinger of industrial restructuring. Their problem is not the oft-quoted piracy, the length of copyright term or falling CD sales. The problem is whether the intermediaries between artist and audience can change their cost base to fit this new world. This puts music in the same place as coal in the 1970s, steel in the 1980s and TV in the 1990s.

Link

Update: Charles Arthur puts a print-publishing angle on this

It didn’t take long for mainstream dead-tree publishers to catch onto the potential of turning blogs into books - O’Reilly and Microsoft Press to mention just two - and now it seems that the vanity publishers are following suit.

Via Springwise comes news of Blurb, an online printing outfit who offer Booksmart -  a means of transforming a blog archive into a preformatted book.   It’s a pretty logical extension of the photo printing model that sees sites like Flickr offer partnerships with offline fulfillment partners.

It’s not particularly cheap - $30 or so for 40 pages of 8×10 colour, but it’ll certainly fill a niche - and the added twist is the online marketplace that’s planned; so once you’ve transformed your blog into a neat pile of dead tree, you can flog it online (and presumably Blurb takes a cut of the proceeds here, too).

According to the FT this morning, plans are afoot to tighten the laws around hacking, partly in response to last year’s acquittal of someone charged with an email-based denial-of-service attack.  That loophole has been closed, but more worrying is the clause regarding “hacking tools”.  To quote the FT:

Types of activities that will become illegal under the proposed laws include making or supplying “hacking tools”- computer programmes or code that can help crack passwords or bypass security systems - and will be punishable by up to two years in prison.

The problem here is that one person’s “hacking tool” is another person’s means of doing their entirely legitimate job - for example, packet sniffing tools can be used nefariously to capture data as a prelude to encryption cracking; or they can be an essential diagnostics tool for resolving network problems.

Which when you think about it, is no different to carrying a hammer - I could use it for knocking in nails, or knocking little old ladies over the head.

Which suggests that intent to use the tool for nefarious purposes is a better measure (IANAL, or course) - but then we risk straying into a situation where mere possession of a certain piece of software can be presented as evidence of intent to commit a crime.

But with the current levels of government paranoia about the “terrorist threat”, it seems unlikely that a certain amount of common sense will prevail without some fairly vigorous lobbying.

David Milliband, the politician tipped as a future Labour leader, is to become the first member of the cabinet to set up a web log in which he will publish views that go beyond his ministerial brief.

Sunday Times, March 7th 2006

Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it.   I predict it’ll have the dead hand of ministerial spindoctoring all over it…

Once upon a time, Orange were different - they had one of the most innovative brand identities ever seen, and they made a point of being different when there was little or nothing to choose between the existing two incumbent mobile networks (remember children, once upon a time there was no such thing as a rebranded carrier - you could have your mobile service in two flavours, one Vodafone, one Cellnet.)  The future was bright, the future was Orange.

Then the suits took over, service declined and Orange ceased to be anything other than Just Another Mobile Network.   The other networks copied their tariffs and service packages, and their advertising agency dreamt up instantly forgettable campaigns featuring Hard-nosed Businessmen, annoying 10-year-old know-it-all geeks, and guru figures.

That process has reached its logical conclusion with the news of new Orange tariffs, which are named after animals.   Are you a Dolphin, a Panther, a Canary or a Raccoon?   None of the above as it happens, having abandoned Orange years ago, but it seems that their marketing department is staffed entirely by Asses and Peewits…

A long list of cognitive biases courtesy of Wikipedia - a list which should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in making decisions…

The pervasiveness of computers has resulted in the almost constant surveillance of everyone, with profound implications for our society and our freedoms. Corporations and the police are both using this new trove of surveillance data. We as a society need to understand the technological trends and discuss their implications. If we ignore the problem and leave it to the “market,” we’ll all find that we have almost no privacy left.

Bruce Schneier - The Future of Privacy

Confused about building a Linux server from scratch (let’s face it, who isn’t at times?)   Rather than battle your way through incomprehensible documentation, Euronode have come up with the neat idea of a web-based wizard that builds an ISO image of your chosen configuration based on answering a series of checklists: Build Your Linux On Demand!

Andrew Gowers, the man leading a wide-ranging review into the UK’s intellectual property legislation, has vowed to address the issue of companies abusing the patent system.

Speaking at a seminar in London on Thursday, Gowers acknowledged that there are concerns that the present system may hamper competition.

“There is an accusation of a rise of companies sitting defensively on patents,” said Gowers. “There are patent thickets, which are a complex web of patents which may stunt invention and discourage research and development.”

More at ZDNet

A controversial deal on the future of the .com domain has been approved by the net’s overseeing body.

[BBC News | Business]

The “100 Rules for NASA Project Managers” has been doing the rounds online for years, so much so that it’s probably reached the status of something of a classic by now. They’ve had their fair share of high-profile failures over the years (solid fuel boosters, Hubble mirror and so on) but these are the relative minority compared to the huge number of successful projects that the space programme has delivered. And while some of the rules fall into the category of the blindingly obvious, it’s a list worth re-reading every now and again.

[Rediscovered via ProjectSteps; the full list can be found here .]

Rule #1: A project manager should visit everyone who is building anything for his project at least once, should know all the managers on his project (both government and contractor), and know the integration team members. People like to know that the project manager is interested in their work and the best proof is for the manager to visit them and see first hand what they are doing.

Rule #2: A project manager must know what motivates the project contractors (i.e., their award system, their fiscal system, their policies, and their company culture).

Rule #3: Management principles still are the same. It is just that the tools have changed. You still find the right people to do the work and get out of the way so they can do it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Via the Unofficial Apple Weblog, I came across an interesting / mad (delete as applicable) art installation from the Universitat der Kunste Berlin, which suggests using a cross between a Mac Mini, LCD projector and a limpet mine to liven up journeys on the Berlin Metro:

Parasite is an independant projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads. Using the speed of the train as parameter for the projected content, the projection starts with the train moving inside a tunnel.

It would certainly make the average metro journey a bit more interesting, but I can see one fundamental flaw in trying this on the London Underground - the clearance between the train and the tunnel is a few inches at most. The first installation would likely end in a splintery crunch as the train left the platform…

Courtesy of Projects@Work:

You know how you feel when you have a ‘light bulb’ moment, when suddenly the solution to a problem becomes crystal clear. What if those were regular occurrences instead of elusive moments? Here is how to eliminate three bad habits (often mistaken as qualities) that can cloud your thinking and decision-making skills.

I told you so:

Silicon.com: EU attempting to legalise patents ‘by the back door’

The European Commission is attempting to legalise software patents through the introduction of the EU Community Patent, according to an anti-patent campaigner.

Inside Knowledge points out that good ideas tend to find their own spaces:

If you think that your organisation does not use blogs or wikis, then you may need to think again. Just as instant messaging appeared informally a few years ago, blogs and wikis are appearing as skunkworks projects across a large number of organisations.

 

[Inside Knowledge Magazine]