Finally, after years of waiting, Technorati has given me something to smile about.
Look what turned up in the captcha as I signed up a new account for a site I’m working on!
Yep, you read that right! Technorati is now offering gropings for all those lonely bloggers out there.
Maybe this is how they intend to become relevant again?
Show me the money!
Recorded on my cell phone, I talk about how Technorati has become irrelevant, how much money the average blogger makes their blog, opening unsolicited emails and finally naming and shaming companies which use human spammers.
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It’s always fun comparing sizes, but this time it think this time the “Technorati State of the Blogosphere” may have popped one to many viagras.
I wasn’t even aware that the “State of the Blogosphere” had begun to be published until Sara pointed me to the TechCrunch article about it and immediately something jumped out at me like large silicon boobs at a swimming contest.
According to the SOTB (I’m not typing the whole damn thing anymore) the average blog generates $6000 dollars a year!
Yep you read that correct! $6000 dollars a year!!!
The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. Note: median investment and revenue (which is listed below) is significantly lower. They are also earning CPMs.
Um, er WTF? What the hell am I missing here.
Who the feck did they survey? Were these people all lying?
Lets do some simple math here.
If the mean annual revenue per blog is $6000 dollars a year, and 7.4 million blogs posted within the last 120 days.
7,400,000 blogs X $6000 dollars = $44400000000
Um yeah, like really. We’re supposed to believe that blogging is worth $44.4 Billion dollars a year?
Okay, maybe I’m being overly dramatic.
Lets look at the figures from the point of view of blogs which have posted in the past 7 days to avoid the risk of any potential dead blogs.
1,500,000 blogs X $6000 dollars = $9000000000
That’s a staggering 9 billion dollars a year which would imply that the blogging industry is 3 times bigger than the one handed brigade porn industry.
For some reason I don’t quite believe this. So, with your help dear readers, Sara and I would like to get to the bottom of this and get an accurate reflection of what you guys actually earn from your blogs on a yearly basis.
So, if you would be so kind, please fill out the poll below, and we’ll post the results on Wednesday the 1st of October.
I don’t know how I ended up on the SEO/SEM “Do Follow” Blogs list , which is currently doing the rounds of the crapper end of the SEO blogs but I want off the damn thing! Now!
If there was ever a reason for me to want to turn “no follow” on for all comments this list is it.
Ever since I’ve turned up on it this blog has been inundated with spammers who, while they take the time to actually write half arsed comments, are still little more than human spambots and hold about as much worth in my eyes.
The question now is what do I do? Do I put up with the fact that I will forever be plagued by these assholes and have to continually manually check all comments, or do I turn on “no follow” and punish everybody because of the behaviour of a few?
Why doesn’t the @replies button on Twitter show all tweets that contain @pauloflaherty?
At the moment it shows only the ones that have @pauloflaherty at the start of the tweet. If it’s at the middle or at the end then it doesn’t show.
I know I can search for tweets that have @pauloflaherty in them, but isn’t that just a little too much work?
I’ve generally been happy with Vista lately, since most of the driver issues have been sorted, but one thing that still annoys me is the inability to set which audio device is used by which program (apparently I am not alone either).
Here’s the crux of the problem. I listen to a lot of music and podcasts on my laptop but I also spend a lot of time talking to people like Sara and Scot on Skype.
When I’m talking to people I don’t want my music to come out through my headset, I want it to come out through the speakers on the laptop so that I can have it playing gently in the background.
This was actually quite easy to do under XP, but in Vista it appears that you can only set one audio device as the default.
I can actually achieve what I want but it is a rather complex procedure and has to be redone every time I turn my headset on or off.
The procedure involves the following steps:
So, that works, but the problem is that, as I said earlier, it has to be repeated every time I turn my headset on or off.
The closest thing I could find online that even vaguely resembles a solution to this issue is Vista Audio Changer, but while it makes the situation a little easier it doesn’t solve it because it only emulates what I as a user would do, and I still have to use it every time I restart my headset.
What I (and I’m sure many others want) is a program or means to automatically set which audio device is used on a per program basis and then be able to forget about it!
Is anything like that out there? Can you guys help?
Thanks to Rob for linking this one! Please, please tell me that they’re aren’t really people this stupid in existence!
I really do hope this video is nothing more than a joke or the woman whos voice is featured should have all rights to reproduce removed before she can contaminate the gene pool further!
I blame it all on a new skittles marketing campaign!
It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on make up artists, plastic surgeons, lighting technicians and air brush the final result, video can and will make you look like a complete tit!
I spotted this on the “Most active videos” part of YouTube today! (I added the zoomed picture of course!)
What can I say, “Shakira never looked so sexy?” ROFL
Maybe she sat down without looking to see where the microphone was?
So everybody (including me) is talking about Google Chrome.
Yeah, great big woop!
It’s simply yet another browser with a number of cool features which the big boys will rip off duplicate over time.
To anyone who truly thinks Chrome will beat Internet Explorer for market share over time. Get your head out of your backside. I respectfully disagree with that assessment.
Until Apple start making machines that are not just for the pretentious who like to live in walled gardens within the realms of affordability for the average person with a brain that equates value to expenditure, Linux becomes intuitive and friendly enough that ordinary people other than those with no social/sex lives and the social skills of a dead gnat like my grandmother can use it, and until Microsoft stops making operating systems and shipping IE (keep smoking that shit if you believe that’s going to happen because Elvis is still buying Taco’s. No really he is!), is that EVER going to happen!!
Lots of sites are reporting really high Chrome adoption rates at the moment. Some, such as Profy, are even as high as 18.99%.
Here’s the thing that most people are missing when they are talking about Google Chrome usage levels:
The people who are using Chrome are the same people who are using Firefox, Opera and the other browsers of the early adopter crowd. In other words it’s us, you and me!
That’s right, it’s the early adopters, like you dear readers, who are using Chrome and we’re all doing it just to check it out and see what it’s like.
Some sites such as Profy and The Inquistr are reporting this, for others it is conveniently or unintentionally ignored in their zealousness to report of the next “cool thing” or the next IE killer!
Will we stick with it? Probably a few of us will, but most of us will eventually return to our usual everyday browser until Chrome becomes more feature complete.
Look at it this way, can you honestly tell me that people who use Firefox are going to live without their extensions? Will users of other browsers willingly abandon all their plugins and widgets? I’d bet my left nut against it!
The only real place Chrome will steal market share from (for any considerable length of time) is Firefox, Opera and the like. IE will be safe on it’s throne.
Just look at the usage statistics for this blog according to Google Analytics.
The only browser, of any significance, that Chrome has more share than is Opera and to be honest I expect Opera to claw that right back as soon as the Chrome feeding frenzy has died down!
Oddly enough the stats for this blog are almost exactly on the button when it comes to the usage stats as being reported by Net Applications as they track global Chrome usage.
What I really want to see is the usage stats from some non tech site, which are frequented mainly by the “average user” who hasn’t got a clue what an extension is and thinks that a script is only for plays and films.
Then we will get a real idea of just how “hot” Chrome is in the real world, which is the world beyond the early adopter tech blogosphere.
Update: 07 September 2008:
Updated the post to remove the unintended implication that sites such as Profy and The Inquisitr had failed to mention that Google Chrome usages levels were so high due to early adopter testing.
An IM conversation with Sara from Suburban Oblivion about the new Microsoft ad campaign with Seinfeld and Bill Gates.
The conversation says it all really!
[15:50:12] Paul O’Flaherty says: 
[15:53:21] Paul O’Flaherty says: Did you see this yet?
[15:53:21] Paul O’Flaherty says: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/windows/default.aspx
[15:54:31] Sara says: the ads? no
[15:54:43] Paul O’Flaherty says: Don’t know what to make of it
[15:54:49] Sara says: let me see
[15:54:53] Sara says: hang on
[15:55:00] Paul O’Flaherty says: Take your time
[15:55:03] Paul O’Flaherty says: I’m not going anywhere
[16:00:28] Sara says: just watched
[16:00:34] Sara says: drugs..very heavy drugs
[16:01:08] Paul O’Flaherty says: LOL – am still undecided as to wether or not this is drugs as you say, or the beginning of a series (which it will be part of) that may broder on the edge of genius
[16:01:13] Paul O’Flaherty says: er.. border
[16:01:19] Paul O’Flaherty says: will need to think about it for a bit more
[16:01:26] Paul O’Flaherty says: btw.. my mouse mat burst
[16:01:30] Sara says: well, it’s off-beat, but smart
[16:01:41] Paul O’Flaherty says: sure is
[16:01:46] Sara says: shows Gates in a different light than you usually see him
[16:01:54] Sara says: a bit humanizing
[16:02:02] Sara says: able to laugh at himself
[16:02:08] Sara says: which is not how most people view him
[16:02:13] Paul O’Flaherty says: And how did they make BillyG seam more normal and cool and “fluid” than Seinfeld
[16:02:21] Sara says: Seinfeld, everyone knows and relates to
[16:02:50] Sara says: so I don’t know if there’s going to be a point to it, or its just a PR thing
[16:02:55] Sara says: but I’d go with genius
[16:03:02] Paul O’Flaherty says: Yeah me too
[16:03:08] Sara says: its going to get everyone talking
[16:03:14] Sara says: “wtf is it about”
[16:03:15] Paul O’Flaherty says: Already has
[16:03:20] Sara says: just like us now
[16:03:29] Sara says: so it’s working either way
[16:03:38] Paul O’Flaherty says: yep
[16:03:51] Sara says: I love it
Another sleepless night has passed, one which has been confounded by the fact that when I finally did start to fall asleep at 8am this morning, I was awoken by the sound of the contractors arriving to finish installing the new windows in the house.
I may have been able to glean a few hours sleep, but they are working today in my two places of sanctuary, my bedroom and my office.
Oddly enough, my office is more my bedroom than my bedroom is!
Anyway, thanks to my lack of sleep I’m a little cranky this morning and am going to take out my frustrations by giving out about the lack of an easy way to synchronize my Outlook (2007) and Gmail contacts.
In an attempt to make my email available offline, having again suffered an number of power and internet outages in the past few days (makes the cloud seem like less and less of a good idea), I decided to go back to a desktop client.
I finally settled on Thunderbird (free), using Zindus to sync with my Gmail contacts. Couple that with Lightning (for my calendar) and provider for Google Calendar, I now have a fully functional email, RSS, and news client, with calendaring that works in the cloud and offline!
The question I’m left asking is: “What the hell did I pay for Outlook for?”!
As it stands I’m happy with my Thunderbird solution but more than a little pissed that I can’t get the same functionality in Outlook which I have parted with hard earned cash for!
Anyway, for any of you who may be considering the move to an offline client, here is the list of extensions I’ve installed in Thunderbird to give me some cool functionality.
If you’re already using Thunderbird are there any cool/essential extensions that I am missing?
© 2009 Paul O'Flaherty
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