Beware – Domain Name Protection Scam

A month ago, I receive the following letter. At first I thought that someone wanted to buy one of my domain names and seriously searched for tips on how to deal with it. Eventually I found out that this email was one of thousands of scammed letters sent out ot trick people into paying for some bogus company to protect the domain names they are currently have.

You can find out more here.

Dear CEO,

We are the domain name registration organization in Asia, which
mainly deal with international company’s in Asia. We have something

important need to confirm with your company.  On the Mar. 25, 2008, we received an application formally. One company named “Company.” wanted to register following

Domain names: through our body.After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names “beyond sarajevo” applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and
trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of Jiedeng company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
…

Make Money from Blogging – 5 Monetizing Methods

By Cindy D. | Published 03/14/07 | Make Money from Blogging | #1

1. 5 Monetizing Methods
2. Brief Explanation

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5 Monetizing Methods
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Okay from what I’ve learned, currently there are 5 ways to make money from blogging.

1. Direct advertisers
2. Get a blogging job
3. Sell products through affiliate links
4. Place contextual ads on your blog (Google Adsense)
5. Get paid by reviewing products or websites.

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Brief Explanation
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#1 Direct advertisers – Advertisers pay you to place their ads on your blog.

#2 Blogging job – You get a job as a regular
blogger. Blogging job pays a bit low and requires a lot of commitment.
However, it’s a different story if you write for a popular blog. I
heard that political bloggers can earn a lot of money because they are
required to update news and write story almost hourly.

#3 Affiliates - Affiliate means to direct your blog’s traffic to online merchants and help them selling their products. For example, I sell tea pots online (haha b/c you are English). So I set up an affiliate program which you join. As a tea lover/drinker, you talk about tea and tea products, the joy of drinking and etc. And somewhere in those posts, you mention tea pots, so you place either my site’s banners or links to my products. If I sell products to visitors coming from your blog, I will give you a commission, either a percentage of the sales or a fixed price.

#4 Google Adsense – You’ve probably seen Google’s
ads every where on the net. If you don’t, let do this: google
something, let say “blog.” Now, do you see a vertical bar on the right
side? These are Google’s ads which are shown based on thecontent of
your search. Advertisers pay Google money for every single “click” on
these ads and every “impression” (ads appear on a site or search
result). This is Google’s core business; they make a lot lot lot of
money. Google has this program called Google Adsense. Once you join
this program and display them on your blog/site (s) along with your
content. If somebody clicks on these ads, you make money. The entry
requirement for GA program is rather low. If you have a site or a blog,
you can join. But beware that a click is only worth a few cents. (The
clicks will have more value if you have a specific and targeted blog.)
However, unless you get a lot of traffic–thousands of visitors per day,
you can not make very much money with GA. You probably make about two or three dollars or less per month.

#5 Review websites and blogs – You get paid for reviewing website and products. For beginners, this might be the best choice.

Google Page Rank Dropped

Google has dropped my Bosnia site’s page rank to 0. Zip! Understand zero! Because I have a couple of sold text links on my site. Geez! Am I supposed to spend countless hours researching for information, writing and editing my posts for nothing? Eh when I am rich, I will provide information for free.

Someone has to stop Google. Microsoft and Yahoo better catch up fast in the search engine competition, otherwise Google will monopolize the Internet just like Microsoft used to monopolize the computer industry way back.

Read Daren’s post about Google’s latest crusade on page rank.

Mind Mapping – Thinking and Organizing Creatively

Mind Map’s mastermind, Tony Buzan, developed the concept of Mind Mapping out of frustration for the ineffective traditional note-taking which was difficult create and review. Jotting down speaker’s words line by line or even summarizing keywords are done linearly and chronologically, meaning that notes relating to the speaker’s point X somewhere on page numbered Y can be on another page numbered Z. At the end of the lecture, we might not even remember the connection among related ideas. I have years of collection of useless college notes to backup this claim.
With Mind Mapping, a big-picture snapshot of your thinking process, your brainstorming session or your summary of a topic is laid out on one single piece of paper. Key points and important ideas are recorded in a way that show their ordered and connection to one another. The seen diagram is a summary of Michael Faraday.

I have applied this Mind Mapping technique to brainstorm my travel, to prioritize tasks for flat moving and to learn the grammar of a foreign language in addition to taking notes of horribly boring technical and procedural presentations at work. My work productivity increases as rehashing my knowledge and looking up forgotten points take only minutes.

I currently use are Concept Draw Mindmap, Mindjet Map Manager and free-version web-app MindMeister.

/>> See more samples of mind-map diagrams and view a list of mind-mapping software.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Picasa2 + Flickr = The Best Photo Management and Sharing Package

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Picasa2 and Flickr are not made for each other; in fact they are the picture-perfect brainchildren of two fierce competitors, Google and Yahoo!.

Picasa2 was designed to work with Picasa Web Albums, a Google web-application with similar purpose as Flickr although the latter is far more superior than PWA. Used alone, these gadgets are superb products, but coupled together, they are a match made in Web 2.0 heaven.

I’ve been using Flickr for years and completely happy with it. However, Flickr only serves the online need and overlooks the offline part of a complete photo management process. Up until yesterday, I have tried and used other desktop applications, Adobe Photoshop, Gimp and Irfanview to manage and edit my photos. These software are best for viewing and editing , but still leave the organizing of the photos to me.

So when I tried out Picasa2 yesterday, I was very pleased. Not only Picasa2 has all the necessary, basic features: cropping, sharpening, tunning and filtering, it has the extra collage
feature which proves to be extremely useful for many topics of my travel blogs. Last but not least, Picasa2 acts as photo library and explorer (think Windows Explorer), automatically searching for and collecting images on the computer.

Picasa2 and Flickr combo brings the best of both world: an easy-to-used and feature packed offline photo management tool plus a kick-ass online photo sharing website.

Flickr – Show off Your Pictures and Get Paid

Up until now, Flickr was simply a photo-sharing site where I showed off my pictures until out of the blue, Pricelss.com contacted me and asked to use some of my photos taken in France.

Wow! Was that for real? For a while, I’d been searching for photo competition and submitted my pictures to a few sites and did not get any response from them. Then now, without any effort searching for buyers, I earn from those photos enough money to pay for my Flickr hosting around 20 years.

Many of my friends have better cameras and accessories than I do, cost up to thousands of dollars. They also have far more technical skills and knowledge. However, in this information era, skills and talent though important but do not matter as much as the ability to marketing oneself. My photos on Flickr have far more chance to be noticed by interested parties than my friends’ photos which sitting on their computers.

Not only Flickr is an exceptionally cool photo-sharing website, it is an increasingly popular internet marketing tool which you should definitely try out.

Google Click Click and Tick off MSN

Google’s newest 1 billion-plus acquisition has been splattered all over the news. On many blogs I regularly read, I saw variations of “Google Bought Doubleclick.” The speculation, analysis and sizzling discussions reminded me of Google’s buying Youtube not so long ago. I did not care about this news becase at the time, it wasn’t relevant to me. Then I recevied a newsletter from Performics, an affiliate network I have recently promoted, spreading the same news and disclosing that it was owned by Double Click. (No matter what you do, there is Google. ;-D)

MSN, like Yahoo!, is desperately trying to compete as if they can even catch up with Goole when it comes to online advertising. I occationally read news from MSN site and sometimes peek down to the bottom of the screen to behold their ads. These financial-oriented ads are nowhere irrelevant. The much-anticipated MSN’ Contextual Ad Program has not yet opened to public.

So what was MSN’s next step? Well, it brought an … antitrust case against Google. Ummm, do you see the irony of this action or want me to spell out to you?

For the moment Microsoft is being a sore loser. Along with AT&T, it was quick to cry antitrust wolf upon hearing that Google had won the bidding for DoubleClick-sweet irony, given that Microsoft and AT&T have both fallen foul of antitrust regulators in the past for abusing their monopolies. “Advertisers don’t want a Wal-Mart-isation of digital advertising,” where one firm (like Wal-Mart in retailing) becomes so big that it can dictate prices, says Tom Chavez, the boss of Rapt, a firm that analyses online-advertising data on behalf of publishers and advertisers.

You might think that if other software and hardware companies could plays (they did) the same antitrust card against Microsoft and won handsomely, why can’t the former defendant do the same thing now?

Of course, they can. However:

That said, Mr Chavez adds, Google is still far from becoming a Wal-Mart-and even Wal-Mart is not facing an antitrust investigation. Unlike AT&T and Microsoft, both of which exerted a strong technological “lock in” over their customers, Google operates in a more open market that is easier for competitors to contest. Regulators will scrutinise the Google-DoubleClick deal, as they should. But Google is not a monopolist-just a company that is, for the moment at least, ahead of its peers.

I am not sure about the non-monopolist statement, but a deserving winner, definitely.

[The Economist, Apr. 21 Edition]

Giving away 3 Invitations to Use Customized TV, JOOST

I have 3 Joost invitations to give away to the first 3 bloggers who contact me. Joost is the newest technology which lets you customize and watch TV from your computer.

I downloaded it today, played around with it and couldn’t stop thinking, “Wow, these people are impressive.” The interface is dashing and easy to use. The picture’s quality is excellent.

By the way, Joost is the brainchild of the same people who created Skype.

WWW. or Not and Where Is My PageRank?

For over a month, I was baffled seeing my PageRank disappeared on and off, and didn’t know why. For example, just hours ago, I clearly saw the pagerank of 4, and then later 0. This happened over the course of a month until I discovered that the pagerank of 4 showed only with the full address: www.beyondsarajevo.com. Removing “www” reduces the pagerank to 0.

Will this affect your site? According to Dailyblogtips, it does pose a problem: “Having two different versions might damage you in popular lists and social bookmarking sites as well.”

DBT offers very simple yet detailed explanation on the www or no www issue in addition to provide an easy step-by-step instruction on how to do it.

I followed one of the approaches to enforce only one www. version of my site; everything worked great.

Remember that after the change, previous URLs without www. will be invalid. So if you submitted your blog entries, you have to edit the URLs.

Is Facebook better than MySpace?

You’ve betcha.

I have finally succumbed to the web 2.0 hype and joined Facebook, and am very glad for having done so.

1. I reconnected with my old friends after losing contact with them since college and many others whom I don’t normally keep in touch.
2. If everybody whom I invited accepts my invitation, I will save a lot of time for keeping up with personal emails. Of course, Facebook does not substitute emails for important and sensitive matters, however, it is perfectly suitable for short and simple “Hey” and “What’s up” messages.
3. I linked two of my travel sites on my profile; one of them doubled the unique visitor within a single day. Wow! Talk about exposure.

Using Facebook and studying how it works, I can not understand the MySpace phenomenon. I joined MySpace long ago and found absolutely no use for it. The interface is a complete mess. After a few months, I still have a hard time navigating the website.

I didn’t follow tech news closely, thus was not sure whether some company purchased Facebook. When it happened, it might be another Youtube’s $1B takeover.