This is news to me, the LAPD has their own blog. Could this be a sign there really is a blog bubble?

Suprisingly comments are enabled. As the AP reports this has led to a few amusing comments. I wonder if they have discovered comment spam yet?

Last week I signed up for a cool service called GameTap. Its a cool service that only costs $9 a month but lets you play any game from their library of over 500 PC & video games on demand. If you enjoy classic games like I do, its a bargain. You don’t have to hunt down fixes to get the games to work on the latest version of windows; just click, download, and play.

I’ve stayed far away from gaming for over a year now, so unfortunately this has killed my productivity a little bit over the past few days. So what does this have to do with website publishing?

Gametap is a great example of an online business that repackages old content. Because it is old the original owners of these games aren’t making a lot of money from it, so the company can get the rights to use it at bargain prices.

I have used the same technique with great success. If you have content created for you, it is either expensive or cheap and low quality. If you can find existing high quality content you can often get it for cheaper than the custom low quality stuff!

This re-package/re-use technique can extend to your own content. Tim Carter is a home repair newspaper columnist. He republished hundreds of his old articles on AskTheBuilder.com and now makes more than $1400 a day. (Follow that link if you are skeptical, that comes from an official Google Adsense case study)

The internet is all about easy access to content. If there is something that is difficult to find in your niche, be it old books, articles, games, gaming rules, whatever, track down the copyright owner and see if you can purchase their content — chances are they are not making a lot (if any) money from it right now.

From the UPI — “The bill terms a social-network Web site as one that allows users to create Web pages or profiles about themselves as well as offers communications including a forum, chat room, e-mail or instant messenger.”

A vBulletin forum is simply a forum, but it also allows users to create a profile page about themselves. Several plug-ins are available that renders this profile page virtually identical in form & function to Myspace.

Other bloggers have pointed out that this could also include everything from blogs to photo-sharing sites such as Flickr.

Cnet’s News.com reports that this bill is part of a drive by Republicans to capture the interests of suburban voters in preparation for the fall election.

I was just alerted to some new Google features while reading Content Matters: Google Co-op and Google Trends. I’m taking a look at Google Trends and I am very impressed.
You can check out Google Co-op here. Google Trends is available here.

As an example I mapped trends for “Adsense” and “click fraud.” Google trends maps search volume all the way back to 2004. I am a little curious about the geographic data for results; for these two terms the top listed results are Kuala Lumpur and Dehli.

On example of practical use of this data would be finding out if your niche is in decline or building volume. This kind of data could also help predict seasonal traffic patterns (good example, duck hunting.)

I am still taking a look at Google Co-op. Overall, I am quite impressed by Google Trends.

Here are a few other interesting charts I’ve found, in case you are drawing a black on keywords to look at:
real estate bubble
gas
illegal immigration
new movies: mission impossible 3, an american haunting, united 93, silent hill, scary movie 4
luxury cars: rolls royce, bentley, bmw, mercedes, lexus

Jon from the Super Affiliate Marketing Blog made a post today talking about link building strategies.

“Don’t worry about pagerank either, because it’s fairly useless. Make sure the pages that are linking to you are ones that are visited often by the engines and are RELEVANT to your PAGES.”

If you are doing this part-time you will be anxious for the quick easy links. It is well worth it to spend some time building links from high quality related websites rather than chasing every free directory or spammy link exchange page. Building a quality content site will go a long way here.

One technique I have been using recently is including a backlink request in registration confirmation e-mail sent out to my forum members. In this particular niche many of the users have their own websites.

Be active in the online community surrounding the niche you are targetting. A few contacts will go a long way. The first blog that I started, which was a little over a year ago, is effectively dead. Despite this I get targetted link and advertising requesting regularly. Because this blog is linked to in the right places and already ranking for many keywords, the link requests come to me, not the other way around.

From the AP - “Authorities said he received more than $107,000 for downloading adware (software that can track a user’s Internet browsing habits and deliver pop-up ads) onto infected computers and selling access to hackers and spammers.”

I haven’t been following this story, but it appears he was also involved in for-hire DDoSing.

I was going to wait until tommorow to address this, but I am getting a lot of referrals today so I am going to do it now. A prominent blogger, Shoemoney, has called out Markus Frind over his $10,000 a day claim with PlentyofFish.com. Shoemoney called me, Rob Scoble, and anyone else who believed Markus’s story stupid.

Here are the facts:

• #1 I tracked down Markus myself and requested an interview with him. He never solicited the interview from me nor paid me for it, as Shoemoney implied Markus was doing.
• #2 PlentyofFish.com Alexa ranking is 837, Websearch is 374, and ranks #5 for dating sites according to Hitwise. Yes, these statistics can be faked. However, as Shoemoney claims in his post “..bullsh*t statistics like 5th largest dating site.” is false and makes me look like I did not do my homework.
• #3 I can not prove that Markus makes $10,000 a day from Adsense. No one can other than Google, so unless they choose to do so I don’t think anything can be concluded. Robert tells me — “No one ever questioned his numbers and I have a lot of readers over at Google.”

Those were the facts, now here are my opinions:

When I read Shoemoney’s post and comments it sounded to me like he was saying Markus was just making these numbers up to get backlinks from bloggers like me. Shoemoney said “I have to give it up to him. He now has a successful site that people go to. Its possible he makes 1k/ a day NOW from AdSense.” If my translation is correct, he is implying that because of these backlinks PlentyofFish.com got great search engine rankings and enough traffic to make $1,000 a day? Look at the traffic rankings, it went up a little bit in March, but not much.

If you choose not to believe Markus, fair enough. What I want you to understand is that I don’t buy into every random persons bullshit. I know very much about how creating fake news stories for backlinks work. Markus had the traffic rankings according to Alexa, online dating industry blogs were talking about him, people had talked to him at conventions, he had a very good reputation on multiple forums, and the numbers made sense.

I like Shoemoney, I read his blog every day, and I have followed his advice and made some good money from it. When I read his post this morning I thought “Oh shit I screwed up.” I have spent half the day e-mailing people, including Markus, and re-examining the data. I can not find any evidence that casts doubt on Markus or points him out as a liar. If I find it, I will post it here along with an apology.

Google’s official Adsense blog has posted a new case study featuring dogbreedinfo.com. After removing the borders from the ads revenue doubled from about $300 a day to $650 a day. If Sharon (the site owner) would have read my optimization secrets article a little sooner, she might have been making this much months ago.

I’ve heard people dismiss blogs as a fad, not worth all the effort, and discount their power because of “everyone on Myspace has a blog.”

Since creating this blog I have learned first hand just how useful blogs can be.

First, blogs are easy to get links to. If you are still bulk mailing the generic old link-exchange requests then I recommend you download and install Wordpress today.

Second, if your blog deals with a market that is filled with products be prepared to get free stuff. Right now innovative internet companies understand how important blogs are for free PR and buzz marketing. If you have an expensive hobby having a blog might not make you a millionaire, but it can be a gateway to trying out cool new stuff.

The biggest reason you should have a blog right now is because many blog markets are still very young. I have noticed that even in certain markets saturated by blogs (100+) there are virtually no high quality blogs.

As a publisher you can treat your blog like a business. Daily updates combined with existing content sites can give you a big edge on your competition.

Yes, there is a lot of hype about blogs — but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them.

Today is the day of trackbacks for me. This time it is a story from Shoemoney. After getting annoyed with Ask.com’s bot consuming massive amounts of bandwidth, he decided to investigate. First he broke down the search engines based off of how much bandwidth they consumed in their crawl vs. how many visitors they sent.

Today he broke it down by how much revenue they made/took. The results: Ask.com bandwidth, which sent few visitors, actually lost him $7.90 a day, in stark contrast to Google’s positive $227.44 a day.