Do you think this will increase CTR? People love to interact with websites, and I think people would click out of curiosity. However, I also think this will draw attention away from the ad itself.

From an AdSense rep:

Unfortunately, as you suspected, the ******.info domain was
previously found to be in violation of our program policies and is no
longer eligible for participation in the AdSense program.

Should have checked before registering, but at least it was a .info domain and only cost me $3 instead of an $8 .com.

I asked for an exception since I’m a new owner and have nothing to do with the previous violations:

I apologize for the inconvenience. However, as was previously mentioned, since the site was found to be in violation of our program policies, it is no longer eligible for participation in AdSense.

You are welcome to place Google ads on other sites which comply with
AdSense policies.

Drat. Oh well, looks like I’m just putting YPN on this one.

• RSS readers increased from 650-ish to around 830 on average
• Within a few hours of hitting the front page, Digg users consumed almost 24 GB of bandwidth
• The story hit front page around 7PM, and traffic was higher the next day. I attribute this to the links back and distribution of the link throughout Digg
• AdSense earnings increased 250% for about 3 days and have slowly dwindled back to normal, or slightly higher
• Total Digg visitors for those few days: 34,186
• Alexa rank didn’t increase very much, possibly due to the fact that not many Digg users actually use the Alexa toolbar.
• The rumor about Digg users having a short attention span is mostly true:
  • Digg user’s Average Time on site: 35 seconds – Normal users: 51 seconds (31.16% difference)
  • Digg user’s pages per visit: 1.26 pages – Normal users: 1.57 pages (19.57% difference)
  • Digg user’s Bounce Rate: 87.28% – Normal users: 78.28% (11.5% difference) – Bounces are when the visitor leaves from the same page they entered (only viewed the one page)

Traffic Graph:

So what are the long-lasting benefits? Well, I got almost 200 more RSS readers (no email subscription offered, regrettably,) and I’ve noticed traffic is still higher than it was before. The links back from other reputable sources is great, but the effect that has on PageRank is questionable since Google’s last PR update. Revenue spiked during the few days it was popular (not proportionally though,) and has settled to a point slightly higher than it was before.

If you have a server that can handle it, it’s a great thing to happen. I use MediaTemple Grid-Service hosting, and the page didn’t even slow down during the Digg frenzy. That’s impressive. As great as that is, MediaTemple has been down and slow a lot recently, so I can’t fully recommend their service, but it seems to have handled a Digg better than other shared hosting would have.

Has anybody else been Dugg and had similar or different results? Please share.

The tags come into play when you’re doing a unique search such as “brown hair, blue eyes, San Francisco” to find people with those attributes in the San Francisco Bay area – Pretty freaking cool, huh? That’s where the tags come into play.

The searching can be amazingly flexible. For example, search for “2008 presidential candidate” – you’ll get a page with (you guessed it,) the 2008 Presidential Candidates with related sites, pictures, tags, description, and more. You can even create a neat little widget from your results. The widget for the 2008 Presidential Candidate search is displayed to the right. Hell, I might display that on my sidebar until the elections.

Remember Ego-Googling (searching for yourself on Google?) Start “Ego-Spocking.” It even sounds cooler. I searched for myself and interestingly enough, I found another dude on there that had my exact same first and last name, striking similarities in interests, looked kind of like me, and had my brother’s birthday. Kinda creepy, but cool, none-the-less. If you have a page on Myspace, LinkedIn, Facebook, or other sites with publicly available info, they should at least have some info on you. You can then sign up for an account and import or add information about yourself, if you wish.

Looking for a certain service in your area? Let’s say you live in Los Angeles and you’re looking for a local Web Developer. Just do a search for “Web Developer, Los Angeles.” How about old classmates from you college? Search for “Stanford University” or whatever your school is. Not only will you find other Stanford alumni, but since Wikipedia and other high-profile sites are included, you’ll find the Founder of Standford and other related characters. You get the point.

The design and layout of the site is very simple and easy to navigate. No overpowering ads (mostly just some Google AdSense in the right sidebar.) The home page gives popular and recent searches, and recent people in the news. After you search, the link to create the widget (like the one above) or email the search is in the right sidebar at the top in a small font. That’s really the only change I would recommend; I would put a “Create Widget” button in a more prominent place if they want people to use it.

I think this service is good fun, but it might have a while to go before being very useful for searching “normal” people – that is not famous people. Now at this point I usually start thinking of a way to exploit a new service, but I think I’ll hold off on this one for now

Check it out:
http://www.spock.com

Once you want to move up, they have more packages available, all the way up to a “Business Hosting” package with 10 Gigs of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth. Where MySite.com really shines though is it’s beginner packages, for folks just getting into hosting their own site.

They offer free hosting, but it only has 50MB of disk, and 1GB of bandwidth, and comes with ads on the site. Fine for people hosting a few Britney Spears pictures for their friends, but I suggest at least forking over the measly $3.95/month for the Starter Hosting, which has 1GB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth, with no ads, and still includes the $25 in AdWords credits. That is unless you’re planning to start a blog, in which case the Wordpress Blog hosting is for you; a great place to start, especially if you’re on a low budget and don’t have the revenue to start big.

MySite.com offers some decent hosting solutions for beginning webmasters, and seems to help along the way, letting the user bypass a lot of the technical aspects of hosting. And I bet they get a lot of unintentional links back just from their domain. I normally use “example.com/…” but I know some people who use other “dummy” domains like this one.

Check out their Hosting Comparison page to see which package you’d like to start with.

Sponsored by MySite Hosting

All-in-all, it might be a good thing. This would allow the people who are serious about marketing to come to one place and find quality posts, and not have to sift through all the bullshit that people come and post. I’m no Guru there (in fact I think I only have a few posts) but I read a LOT on Wickedfire, and have been around for a few months. Make sure to check out Wickedfire if you haven’t already, you’ll be reading it for days if you’re into this sort of thing.

Wickedfire Webmaster Forums

I’m really interested to see what exactly they are going to sell. The site says they contacted many “big name” internet names to sell their products at ridiculously low prices, so my hopes are they we’ll find such products as Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and other such popular material.

DealDotCom also has a great affiliate program, in which you earn 35% commission of your direct referral’s purchases for life, and 15% commission on your second-tier referrals. Pretty good.

The site launches tomorrow – Tuesday, September 18th – so make sure you’re there. I’m not sure if they’ll sell out as fast as Woot.com does considering much of the material is probably digital (PDFs, etc.)

For example, the “Search Results” image above is not fake, it’s from Epinions.com. Apparently, they actually expect us to browse through 51,828 pages, if we want to see all of the 777,419 items. And worst of all, they don’t let you view more than the default 15 per page.

Stop Pagination!

Not only that, but list items look kinda funny, transparent PNG images don’t look right, there’s extra spacing where there doesn’t need to be…I could go on.

Please read A Note to Internet Explorer Users. It’s a post I did a while back explaining why you shouldn’t use IE. Please read it.

In the mean time, please download FireFox and use it instead.

Sparky has some extra features included:

• Related Links: Find sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.
• Traffic Trend: A sparkline showing the traffic trend from the last four months.
• Reach Meter: An indicator that shows the site’s Reach.
• Traffic Rank: Shows the current site’s Alexa Traffic Rank.

Hopefully this evens out the playing field a little bit and starts to bring in more accurate results from Alexa, but I won’t be comfortable until all browsers are supported, including Opera and Safari. Even better, advertising companies should stop relying on a clearly inaccurate rating system.

I might download the toolbar to be sure my results are actually recorded, but for now I’ll stick to Search Status due to it’s incredibly useful features.

By the way, Sparky requires Firefox 2.0+ to run, so if you haven’t upgraded to FireFox 2.0 yet for whatever reason, be sure to do so before installing Sparky.

Download Sparky for FireFox

Woot! finally released “If You Don’t Know Woot By Now.” A great, quick explanation of what Woot is, what they do, and how they work. Now all I have to do is reference this page when I try to explain it to someone.

If you aren’t familiar with Woot, visit the page. You’ll likely become addicted to their awesome deals, catchy podcasts, weekly contests, and great sense of humor in each post. Not to mention become very frustrated when trying to buy something during the next Woot-off, especially if it’s a Bag of Crap. Last time they sold one they had a peak of 30,000 requests PER SECOND! I’d love to see their data center.

The “guide” explains the multiple features of Woot, including how to know when it’s a Woot-off, The Product Stats feature, the “Discuss This Product” section, wine.woot, Wootcasts, Bag of Crap, and Side Deals.

If You Don’t Know Woot By Now

Want to jump ahead of the others and see what your Page Rank will be during the upcoming update? Visit PageRank Predictor. It’s a tool by iWebTool.com, which any webmaster or SEO’er should visit frequently.

After running my sites and a few others, I was a little disappointed by the results. I decided to see how accurate it was, so I checked out Google.com and Yahoo.com, both of which have the coveted PageRank 10. To my surprise, these were the results:

Either Google and Yahoo are losing their touch, or something is inaccurate in the PageRank Predictor. I’ll assume the latter. Does this mean all the tests are inaccurate? By no means. Considering the enormous amount of power of Google and Yahoo, it’s probably difficult to assume a Page Rank prediction just from back-links, which I believe is the only thing this tool uses.

In other words, use this tool all you want, but don’t assume it’s right. If you see your predicted page rank as higher than the current rank, it probably will be. If you see it fall, it might. Have you been slacking? The predictor might be right.

Kevin from BloggingTips.com did a few tests of his own and will compare the results to the real update in about a month. We’ll see how accurate this tool really is.

Of course the big yellow slice is actually a bit larger.

On a related note, read my recent post: A Note To Internet Explorer Users