What is it Number 2

Posted by stuart as What is it?

Congrats to Adnan at blogtrepreneur for guessing correctly the first of my “What is it” competitions. The correct answer was a Hard Drive (It was actually a 5Mb HDD from circa 1976). He’s now US$10 richer!

Now for the second installment. If you think you know what it is, leave a comment here. Once again, the first correct guess will have the opportunity to choose between US$10 into their paypal account, or a review of their blog right here at PimpMyPageRank.

This pic is part of a larger picture, which will be revealed once the correct answer is guessed.

Alexa ranking, feedreaders, and potential income loss

Posted by stuart as alexa, pagerank

It seems that with a lot of blog advertising companies out there, there are two factors which are taken into account when determining the value of an ad on a blog: Pagerank, and Alexa Ranking.

There’s not a lot one can do about PageRank, but with the growing popularity of feed aggregators and RSS feeds, Alexa Ranking can become problematic.

I, like most people I would guess, use a feed reader to keep up to date with all my favourite blogs. I rarely visit the sites themselves, unless something in particular takes my fancy, and I want to comment on a particular post.

This is a problem when Alexa Rank is used to determine advertising value. As the site itself is not visited, Alexa doesn’t know that someone is reading the content.

We now have the opportunity to advertise on our RSS feeds using the services of companies like text-link-ads, but this doesn’t really seem to have taken off yet.

Is the answer in writing highly commentable posts, so rss readers feel compelled to visit the  site itself?

Anybody noticed a drop in their alexa rank with the increase in use of feed readers? Any suggestions on how to combat this?

An interesting observation about blog readers

Posted by stuart as competition, blogging

In an effort to get things rocking here again after my recent absence, I thought I’d run a competition to get people commenting here again.

It’s a pretty simple comp, where the reader had to guess what a picture was of, and I’m giving away either US$10, or a review of the readers blog right here on PMPR.

I chose this kind of comp because it takes no effort on the part of the reader to enter, and the review, especially, is particularly good value, as reviewme.com are asking $60 for a review here.

The wierd thing is that this blog has around 50 feed readers, and between 150 and 250 unique visitors a day, and only two people have so far entered the comp in five days.

This has left me wondering where I might have gone wrong. I’m asking myself whether the prize was too low? Was the competition too hard? Do seasoned blog readers just not enter competitions?

I’m really after some feedback here from you, the reader. What would you like to see in a competition? I’d love to be able to offer more prize-money, but unfortunately this is not possible at the moment. Are there things other than reviews that I could be offering as prizes? Perhaps a months text link in the sidebar?

What is it?

Posted by stuart as What is it?

Here’s a chance for a quick US$10 (you need a paypal account), or a review of your blog here on PimpmyPagerank.com.

Simply be the first to correctly identify the object that the man is unloading from the plane, and choose between the cash and the review.

Think you kow what it is? Leave a comment!

What’s wrong with the Vista marketing push…?

Posted by stuart as Windows Vista

So Microsoft has launched a new operating system, whilst nothig like the media blitz we were hit with on the launch of Windows 95 (man, was that 12 years ago?) we’ve been hit pretty hard here in Australia.

Two things about the launch have really pissed me off:

1. A lot of computer shops are advertising in big bold fonts that you can pick up your copy of Vista for $129*. upon looking on the back page of the catalogue, we find that to get the $129 deal, you need to be upgrading from XP, and it’s an academic version. If I actually wanted to walk in off the street and buy a boxed copy of Vista, I’m looking at closer to $500! The version I’m getting at this price is also only the “Home Basic” version, which doesn’t have a lot of the “cooler” functions of Vista such as the Aero interface (which looks suspiciously like the Mac OSX 10.2.8 I have running on my eight year old G3 laptop 333MHz with 256Mb RAM - try running Vista on those specs!)
2. A lot of people are going to be sorely disappointed when they get their shiny new copy of Vista home, and discover it barely runs, or won’t run at all on their hardware. Microsoft says that you can run Vista on an 800MHz processor with 512 Mb of RAM. Gimme a break. My newish lappy has a 1.7GHz processor and 512Mb of RAM, and runs XP Home like a dog. It has a shiny sticker on it informing me that it is “Windows Vista Capable” - I call Bullshit.

This all reminds me of the saying:

A PC without Microsoft products is like a dog without a brick tied to its head

Has anybody out there actually tried Vista? Are those of us refusing to upgrade missing out on anything?