Craigslist

Craigslist was started in 1995 by Craig Newmark. It has and continues to be a site that is ran explicitly by user interaction. One thing Craigslist has been known for is for its job postings. It is a huge leader of any classifieds section on the internet. Its classified section can range from buy/sell ads to erotic services. One area that i have heard alot of reviews about Craiglist is for apartment hunting. Many of my friends find their summer appartments outside of school by using Craigslist. They said it is easy to use and reliable.

We’ve Moved!!!

Our class blog now resides at www.internet-entrepreneurship.com

The transition went smoothly and hopefully everyone will be able to access it using their previous passwords. If you have having any problems email me and I’ll reset your password.

Any ideas for improvement of the blog (visually) or new features you’d like, please let me know!

TV Shows Whenever! | Hulu

TV shows have now (legally) joined the internet!

Today, Hulu was opened to the public. This new site offers MANY popular TV shows.

This project has the support of NBC Universal , Sony, MGM, FOX and over 50 other media companies.

The shows are accompanied by small commercials and they are doing something I thought was quite creative, they allow the viewer to select which of two commercials they want to watch. Nobody likes commercials but at least you get to pick your poison?

Here is a taste of some of the shows they have:

• The Simpsons
• Family Guy
• The Office
• Monk
• Psych
• Firefly
• The A-Team (yes, Dr. T!)
• Prisonbreak
• House
• Arrested Development
• Heroes
• 24
• Terminato: Sarah Conner Chronicles
• Saturday Night Live
• Super Bowl Ads
• I Dream of Jeanie

Here is an alphabetical list of the dozens of shows they have.

Its movie list wasn’t as impressive but included:

• Ice Age
• Master and Commander
• The Simpson’s Movie
• The Usual Suspects
• Man on the Moon
• Juno
• October Sky
• Live Free or Die Hard
• X2: X-Men United
• Speed

Here is an alphabetical list of all their movies

Jott - Email a Phone Call?

Jott might be the next big thing in note taking. Pick up your phone, call a number, say something, and minutes later you are sent an email saying what you just said. This is a great service if you happen to have a great idea, but can’t get to a piece of paper.

www.jott.com provides a voice to text service (by the way, all for free) which makes it much easier to stay organized. In addition to straight emails, Jott allows people to set reminders and make lists as well. Whatever you speak into your phone, Jott will translate to text and provide it to you via email or a web site.

Anonymous: Cyber Vigilantes?

This awesome post has now moved to our new blog please go there! 

http://www.internet-entrepreneurship.com/internet/anonymous-cyber-vigilantes/

The new Buzz on Yahoo

This past week, Yahoo pulled a fast one. After quickly turning down Microsoft’s bid to purchase the company, Yahoo launched a new advertising platform called Apex.  In a second announcement, Yahoo also launched a new site similar to Digg called Yahoo Buzz found at http://www.buzz.yahoo.com.

I have not had the time to personally look into these new Yahoo services, but figured it would be nice to let you all know what has been going on.

There goes the neighborhood…

Kentucky Lawmaker Wants to Make Anonymous Internet Posting Illegal

WTVQ-TV/DT - Action News 36 -Via Drudge

“Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.” Full article…

This is sad if this bill gains any traction. Agree? Why would this be a really bad thing?

Links: How Websites Succeed

When you have your own website there are a couple of things that are important for your website ranking. One of the most important things in declaring this is how many links you have coming to your site.

The first type of link you can get that would is the cheapest and easiest are directory links. These links are free to submit and they will put you in your database for free in order to link back to your site.

The second type of link would be more expensive but just as easy to get. The second type of link I am talking about is a link that you pay for as a website owner. If you pay for someone to link to you it is expensive but you can get good links if you have a relevant site linking to you.

Another type of link that a lot of people are willing to do is a reciprocal link. In doing this you put a link on your site and then you get one in return. These links are not as good for you on Google ranking but they still help.

Lastly, the hardest and the best links are the websites that link to you for free. These links are very important because they are relevant sites that are linking to your site because your site is a good site. So the key to getting these links is having good content on your site and lots of visitors so more people can see your good content.

A lot of people think that the only purpose of links is to get more traffic directly to your site. This can be true but the biggest key to links is that you can be rank higher on Google. I currently was submitting my site to databases and doing reciprocal links the other day and my site increased 3-5 spots on Google depending on the keyword. So all in all the way to be successful is to get as many links as you can to your site.

Thats My Mouse!

This is a pretty interesting idea…

 I like the thought of being able to show someone something using your mouse with the added advantage of being far away from each other. 

 I don’t know too much about this — I just went to the website and tried it though.  How developed is this kind of technology?  Is this something that could work with companies in regards to presentations (i.e. if someone was going through a presentation and needed some clarification on a certain part, another could show them where it was in the presentation and then they could go from there). 

 It could be a vital tool in sales, specifically for computer troubleshooting.  Instead of spending 3 hours sitting on the phone with the tech guy trying to figure out why a program won’t work on your computer - to open up your computer to allow him to see your screen and show you how would make service much more effective. 

Thou shalt not study on Facebook.

Student faces Facebook consequences

“Freshman hit with 147 academic charges for online study network at Ryerson University”

“Yet students argue Facebook groups are simply the new study hall for the wired generation.”

We find new ways to learn and what do they do.

Anyone else used Facebook for studying?

Digg for Sale?

I recently read an article about user-generated Digg.com being up for sale again (after nearly selling to Yahoo! back in 2006) and this time hiring influential investment bankers at Allen & Co. to search out prospective buyers. They would be aiming for nearly $300 million dollars, although speculation shows that they may now be contemplating selling for somewhere in the neighborhood of $225 million. Rumor has it that there are four “prospective” buyers in Murdoch’s News Corp (which owns MySpace), Google, Microsoft, and a fourth unknown.

Whether or not this decision to sell was affected by the potential sale of Yahoo! to Microsoft as a merger with MSN is unknown; If MSN were to merge with Yahoo!, Google may be more motivated to raise bids with regards to Digg and also to increase their involvement in the world of social media.

(Info on digg: Digg.com is an entirely web 2.0 user-driven site. One can submit videos, podcasts, articles etc. which others on the site can then browse. For more in depth information - the site describes itself well.)

“All the Charm of MySpace without all the Suck.”

I can’t for the life of me remember where I read that little blurb, but it’s a pretty good evaluation of the still young social networking site Virb°.

The folks behind the site call themselves Virb Inc. and are the same gang that created PureVolume back in 2003. (By the way, if you’re into the indie music scene and you haven’t ever heard of PureVolume then you need to go there now. I mean right away, forget the rest of this article for now, it’ll be here when you come back I promise.)

At first glance, Virb looks like just another MySpace clone, but upon closer inspection there’s plenty that sets it apart.

Virb breaks down its profiles into three categories at the moment. They are: personal, music, and organization. This comes in handy because, for example, I can choose to allow friend requests from personal pages, but block requests from bands. This brings back memories of spam-filled MySpace inboxes full of requests from guys who make techno in their basement. I can also choose to display my personal friends, band friends, and organization friends independently on my profile.

Virb has a couple other useful little perks like the ability to upload video with no quality restrictions and the option to link you profile to the rss/atom feed of your blog and have the posts automatically copied onto you Virb profile.

What Virb really does an excellent job with is customization. Virb provides you with several options to tweak the looks of your profile page. For the everyday user, there are two basic editors. One allows you to change some basic formatting options, simple things like fonts and colors. The other allows you to arrange the position of “modules” on your page. More on Virb modules in a moment.

<- Basic Syle Editor

For those who are a little more web savvy and want a higher level of customization Virb also allows you to directly edit the CSS and XHTML for your profile page. And the addition of Virb modules makes the editing even easier. Virb breaks down every aspect of your page into modules. They have several basic modules already set up for you, one for displaying comments, pictures, meta, etc. Now say I wanted to add a little RSS feed widget to my profile page. I could go to the advanced editor and code it in there, but I could also make a custom module and place the code there. That way, when I go to the editor I have the option of simply referencing that module rather than typing out the full code. This keeps the code incredibly organized and makes things easy to re-arrange.

Amidst all this customization, Virb threw in another little goodie that I just love. Remember all those MySpace profiles that burned your eyes with their bright colors, unreadable font, and general feeling that someone had up and vomited random HTML all over the place? (And by one I mean one in five…) Well guess what. Now you don’t have to look at it! At the top of every profile page Virb gives you a “remove customization” option that allows you to view the page with the default layout and settings and avoid any annoying colors you may encounter.

<-Custom  Removed->

Overall, Virb seems to have taken something old, kept what worked, fixed a few things that didn’t and added their own unique feel. It might never be the leading social networking site, but it’s a great place to advertise a startup band, get a new organization noticed, or just have an extra place to show your blog and get a little more traffic. I wouldn’t be surprise to see some real growth there in the near future.

Advertising opportunities

In creating a website and trying to make money through advertising there are multiple things that need to be looked at. Many of the presenters in the elevator pitch competition talked about using advertisements as a source of income. The first and easiest way to advertise on a site would be through Google Adsense or Kontera. All you need to do with these sites is put code on your site where you want the ad to show up and you will have ads. The problem with these ads is that depending on what your site deals with the ads may not be very relevant and you also may not make very much per click. I think I am making around 5 cents per click which isn’t making me millions.

Another way which could end up being a better way to advertise would be using an affiliate. In this you work with a company either selling a service or product. What happens is if you send people to the affiliates site and those people purchase the service or product you get a percentage of the sale. This can end up making you more money than the Google Adsense because you will be making much more per purchase.

The Last method that I know of is selling advertising space. This can by far be the most profitable form of online advertising. In order to get people interested in your site and sell ad space you need to have a lot of traffic and relevant content. This is probably the biggest payout but also the hardest advertisement to get because they will be paying per month or per year.

So all in all there are a lot of different ways to advertise on websites and blogs you just have to pick the right one for you. The key to success obviously is traffic, traffic, traffic. The more people you have come to your site that you can convert the more money you will make off of these advertising opportunities.

That’s My Mouse!

This is an incredibly neat little widget I stumbled across today. It’s only been live for about a month now so I figured it was worth a little write-up.

“ThatsMyMouse” is a tool that allows users on your site to see not just their own cursors, but the location of anyone else’s cursor who happens to be browsing the site simultaneously! Users have the option of enabling or disabling ThatsMyMouse and are even able to chat with other users on the page via a little chat window and little word bubbles that appear above their cursor’s marker. If a users cursor does not move for a certain amount of time the user will be designated as idle and the marker will show a little “zzzz.” The novelty of it all is certainly fun. You can check it out for yourself with a little demo here:

ThatsMyMouse Demo

I’m not really sure if this is actually something that will catch on. It brings to mind visions of popular sites cluttered with cursor markers, and I’m not sure how this would effect a sites performance. Of course there is always the option to turn it off, so if you don’t want to see those cluttering markers you don’t have too…

Something like this could perhaps have place if integrated with a network like digg or stumble upon. Sort of a “real time tagging” sort of thing. I’m interested how you guys think this will fit into the web 2.0 trend, so throw out some comments if you’ve got an idea!