If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Tim McGrath from SackWear just sent me a Land Cruiser T-Shirt. Actually they have 3 types so far. The FJ45lv, FJ55 and FJ40 with other models to come in the near future.
Here is a picture of me wearing the “Safari Cruisers” T-Shirt.
You can view their t-shirt offerings online at www.sackwear.com (not all of them 4×4s)
A big earthquake with the magnitude of 6.3 Richter shook our parts of the word yesterday afternoon (2008-05-29 15:46).
The earthquake started about 50km south of Reykjavik, where I live. We could clearly feel the earth shaking but no damage here. In Selfoss and Hveragerði, small towns close to where it started, there were some damages - things falling and braking. Some damage to houses and bridges and a few people with minor injuries. Many got scared and slept in tents or moved to relatives. Icelandic houses are built to withstand quakes like this.
Earthquakes are common in this area where the continental drift makes two large landmasses rub against each other and breaking out in earthquakes every hundred years or so.
Google is working hard on a simple plug-in social networking solution for smaller sites. This looks really promising. Basically you can use the login features of the bigger social sites and have your readers contribute and add friends with the help of sites like FaceBook.com, Yahoo.com, Orkut.com and other sites that support OpenSocial standard.
This is all done with small code snippets, much like AdSense, that you generate easily without any programming.
The end result should help in attracting more visitors and added social features that visitors are expecting.
The idea is explained very well in this Google Friend Connect video:
From Google Friend Connect:
Everyone wins in a friend connected web:
You, the site owner - Google Friend Connect gives you a snippet of code that, when put into your site, will equip the site with social features, including the ability to run third-party social applications. Moreover, it enables your visitors to log in with existing credentials, see who among their friends is already registered at that site. It also gives them one-click access to invite friends from their existing friends lists on other sites, such as Facebook or orkut.
Your site’s visitors - Visitors no longer need to create a new account or develop yet another friends list just to use the social applications on your site. We create the infrastructure that allows one login to be used across multiple sites and the ability to reuse existing friend relationships that the visitor has already established elsewhere.
OpenSocial developers - With Google Friend Connect, any website on the web can become an OpenSocial container. Their social applications can now run on social networking sites and anywhere else on the web that uses Google Friend Connect. By placing these applications on sites where users already visit, these application will be seen and used by more users more often.
Social networks - With Google Friend Connect, social networks thrive as hubs of activity while giving their users more opportunities to bring their friend relationships to other websites while simultaneously bringing their friends and activities from outside the social network back in — with people having the ability to publish their activities across the web into the activity streams of their social networks.
To read more about this development or take part in testing it you can visit:
I’ll start you off with some pointers in how and what I do - just get some details down and add some meat to the bones…
Lets be clear about the fact that I am no expert in outsourcing. But simply running my daily live I outsource a lot of tasks, sometimes without noticing. You do too. Buy a pizza or take away chicken and you have outsourced COOKING.
Here is a list of a few outsourcing routes I have tried:
www.Need-An-Article.com - I use them for article writing when I don’t feel like writing it myself from scratch. Using the service is pretty straightforward - you get reasonable quality and can ask for one revision. I had one writer that was not up to par but most are ok and I found one that was very good. It is important to get your own voice into the article and make minor adjustments. The cost is a little over $5 for each article as well as a monthly fee of $10.
www.AbsoluteCovers.com - Ovi Dogar is a very capable and quick graphics designer. I used his service for the graphics for creating my eBook cover. The result was very professional. In addition to the cover he made the graphics for the sales page from a photo I sent and some text. Can’t recall the cost but it was less than $200 for the whole package.
www.SubmitEdge.com - I recently started using their services. For $15 I can get 100 one way links from directories. Pretty hard to do that by hand for less. I also am trying out the “Basic link building package” for $79. So far so good - except the first article I just got back is not acceptable. I am just now asking for a rewrite on that.
Photo Journalists hired - I currently have one guy who is writing articles for me on a regular basis. I asked for submissions in my newsletter and got a few responses. The cost per article is fixed and is of course way higher than NAA but the quality and relevancy is also much higher. This way I can have original and interesting articles from places where I can’t be. I am looking for more photo journalists (of both sexes) to take the website even further.
Hope that this list gets someone inspired to try some tasks. Like most webmasters I am sometimes a little too convinced that I am personally the best man for each job. However I think outsourcing is vital for healthy growth to increase profits and safe time.
