Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’ve just found my new favorite real estate site. I’ve always loved Zillow, but the last time I used it I had problems scrolling the page properly and the load times were too poor. I still like some of the data that Zillow has, but I think I’ll use it once I’ve found a place that I’m interested in analyzing its value.

Today I started playing with HotPads and I’m really impressed with their interface. Maybe I’m just more interested because I’ve started the job search and associated housing search that goes along with a new job in a new city. Regardless, I found HotPads really nice to use. I can still see a few parts of it that could be improved, but I love how quickly I can go through the map and see how much house I’ll be able to get for the price. I also really love the deep integration with what that size of mortgage will really cost me. There are so many variables involved and I think HotPads does a great job allowing you to change all of the various mortgage costs associated with purchasing a home.

A relatively new part of the site is a Rent vs. Buy heat map. I’m pretty sure this is just a really nice marketing item to get people to use the other parts of their site. Well, it worked for me. However, you can tell that the principle of rent vs. buy is more than just a marketing ploy for the company. This type of analysis is shown throughout the site to allow people to make more informed decisions.

I think that I especially love this part of the site, because when I moved to Las Vegas 3 years ago my in-laws nearly ridiculed my wife and I because we chose to rent and not buy. They said we were just throwing money away. Well, 3 years later that same in-law ended up selling their house at loss after paying much larger mortgage payments than our rent payments. Plus, if we had bought a house in Las Vegas, I wouldn’t be able to switch jobs, because I’d never be able to sell my house.

At the time I had no way of explaining these rather complicated rent vs. buy economic models to my in-laws. Now, I could just show them the nifty chart on HotPads. Sure, it’s based on certain assumptions about the market and inflation, but at least you can navigate best and worst case scenarios and make an informed decision.

I’ll let you know how it all goes once I finally land a new job (yes, I’m searching so if you know of any let me know) and try to find a house on HotPads. Right now it’s great visually. It will be fun to see how accurate and updated it is.

Today I was trying to click through to Facebook and got a screen saying “Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Of course, this all comes a day after Michael Arrington declared on Twitter that Facebook was loading faster than ever. I actually tried it myself when I saw the tweet and he was right. Facebook was zippy last night. Too bad tonight they decided to follow the twitter model and declare that “It should be available again within a few hours.” Nice of Facebook to leave it vague so that it can be down more than a few hours.

Seriously? Did Facebook actually post on their website that I have to wait a few hours for my Facebook addiction? Seems like Facebook might want to recruit a few more Google engineers that can find a way to recover/update in less then a few hours.

I’ve always been interested in the collaboration tools available on the internet. I’ve also always felt that there had to be something better out there. In fact, it’s been a topic of many discussions on Cambrian House. You see, Cambrian House is a website where people are trying to collaborate with a large crowd of people in order to build an idea. The question is how do you easily organize a group of people who are from all over the world?

Today I found something I want to try called Vyew. It’s an ad supported site with a premium service for those that don’t want the ads. I haven’t tried it yet, but soon I want to give it a whirl. I think that I might do it with the great group of people that have been working on my Spoil On website. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If you know of any other sites that are similar or better, then let me know.

Today at work I went to a farewell event for the VP of my area. She had worked for a lot of years at our University and had a number of very close friends. A few of them in their remarks were brought to tears. Someone next to me, asked why they were crying.

While I don’t usually admit this type of thing in public, I’m definitely a crier. My mom’s side of the family is happy to take the blame, but I’ll be completely honest that I’m not afraid to cry when something touches me. No, I wasn’t crying today for this departed VP. I didn’t know her that well, but I did appreciate the great food they had at the party. However, I did cry today reading this incredible sports story.

I have a big HUGE MAJOR ULTRA BIG favor to ask that I guarantee I won’t forget.

It will only take five minutes of your time and this isn’t some random request, asking you to spend any money or do anything more then register on a site and click a button to vote for me.

You’ll be helping me and a good friend out a lot and I’ll be forever in your debt.

Click on this link: http://www.youbethevc.com/users/new
Fill out the form. I’d suggest using your name as your username.
Use your real email address and for your bio putting something very short about yourself. You don’t have to get really descriptive. Just one line will do… it worked for me.

In the Do you want to section I’d suggest clicking “meet people” which is the very last option.

Once you’ve registered with YBTVC, I just need you to click and vote for two ideas. One of them is obviously mine and the other is a good friend who I’d like to see joining me in Boston.

Go here to vote:
http://www.youbethevc.com/finalists

Then look for “techguy” (that’s me) and rate it FIVE stars and “moshmobile” and rate it FIVE stars. The winner is determined by average vote, so the more 5 star votes we get the better.

I greatly appreciate your help and let me know if you voted. I will be forever in your debt. I promise you that I won’t forget it either.

Also, if you really love me, then I’d appreciate you asking everyone you know to vote about me. If you blog about it, send a trackback so I know you did.

Thanks!

I’m sure that many of you know by now that I have been with PayPerPost since nearly the beginning of Ted’s journey to make money for bloggers. It’s been quite the adventure for me and a true learning process. I’ve met hundreds of amazing bloggers and learned a ton about blogging. Oh yeah, and I made a bunch of cash along the way too. I personally call it my “date” money.

Well, back in November I attended Postie Con where SocialSpark was announced for the first time. It was a very exciting time to see what Ted and crew had been working on for so long.

I was invited into the alpha version of Social Spark and it’s been quite the experience. My favorite part has been the blog sponsorships. I can see why this might not fit right for many of the bloggers out there, but it’s perfect for a number of my blogs. In fact, I’d like to automate the blog sponsorship so that my blog always has a sponsorship with the highest paying sponsor (possibly with the option for me to block certain sponsors). Overall though, sponsorships are really neat and I haven’t heard any complaints from my blog readers. Granted I understand how I generate traffic to my blog and these type of sponsorships aren’t a problem. I’m still generating just as much traffic as before.

The next best part of social spark is the transparency and disclosure (ie. no follow). Here’s what social spark offers (which quite frankly was a problem with PayPerPost):
-100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
-100% Transparency
-100% Real Opinions
-100% Search Engine Friendly

Now that those problems are out of the way, I think that Social Spark can bring in some really large brands. Hopefully that means more revenue for us bloggers.

I think the most disappointing part of Social Spark to me has been the method of filtering, organizing and finding blog opportunities. It was bad in PayPerPost and is still bad in Social Spark. It should be much easier for me to know what opportunities are available and a way to sort them the way I want to see them. Plus, if I no longer want to see an opportunity, then give me an option to hide that opportunity forever.

Some of the social aspects of the site are interesting, but I would have preferred if Social Spark would have focused on more of the functional parts of the site and less on the look and feel of it all. I’m sure that hundreds of hours of design and development time were spent making it look pretty. When the reality is that functionality would have been more beneficial to all involved.

In the end, this is still the beginning of social spark, but I honestly had hoped for a little more after all the delays. However, it’s a good foundation for making bloggers a good amount of money. Especially with blog sponsorships. Let’s just hope the market will pay well for those blog sponsorships. They definitely can’t be missed by blog readers.

Today I received an email from eBay’s affiliate program. Basically they wanted to remind me that I needed to change all my ebay affiliate links to their new eBay Partner Network. The following is pieces of the email and my personal commentary.

Dear John,
As you know, eBay’s new global platform, the eBay Partner Network, went live on April 1st. We have gotten a great amount of interest and response to the new network’s new creatives, new single global registration, and enhanced reporting capabilities!

Note that eBay said they’ve gotten a lot of interest and response to this program. They didn’t mention whether this was good or bad response. My guess is most of it has been bad.

As a reminder – please register now and plan to complete your migration to the eBay Partner Network by April 30th, 2008 as we anticipate access to parallel reporting to discontinue shortly thereafter.

Note that unless you migrate your links, you will stop receiving commissions from eBay sometime shortly after April 30th.

This is really the core of this post. eBay wants users to go in and change all of their eBay affiliate links over to a new system. Sure, if you only have a few links this is not a big deal, but imagine if you have a few thousand links. I only personally have a few hundred, but even that has me overwhelmed at the thought of having to update them. I did some of them so long ago, that I’d have to try to remember what I was even linking to on eBay.

Basically a total pain and let’s be frank, hundreds of thousands of affiliate links won’t be changed because either the webmaster doesn’t get the notice, doesn’t care to change them, they don’t know where to find the links or they just have so many that they can’t change them all. I see most affiliate members doing like myself and only converting the links that convert well. The rest just aren’t worth the extra time to convert.

However, the real question is why should I have to convert them? eBay should honor those links as mine. It’s really a rather genius plan for eBay to be able to save a ton of affiliate money. By telling everyone that they have to update all their links, eBay can stop paying affiliate payments on literally thousand of old links that people don’t update.

Is this fair? Well, it doesn’t seem like eBay really cares. I mean, eBay isn’t doing this to save money. they’re doing it to provide better tools to their affiliates. Yes, that is a byproduct of this change, but I can’t imagine that this huge cost savings wasn’t part of the strategy too.

You can still receive an additional 5% bonus for all traffic tracked through eBay Partner Network in April 2008 (bonus applicable to traffic sent to Half.com and US, UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, India and Spain eBay sites). The sooner you migrate, the more you’ll earn! Just:
• Register at https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com and confirm your registration via an e-mail you will receive
• Obtain your new links in the “tools” tab, then update your eBay links on your websites with the new code. See our migration guide for more details: http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/english/ebay-partner-network-migration-guide/
• Enter your payment and tax information in the “accounts” tab

See, you can even get a bonus for selling more eBay products. I wonder how this 5% bonus will compare with the savings from old affiliate links.

If you still have questions, we have several additional resources for you:

• Check out our new blog (http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/), and specifically our step-by-step how to get started guide: http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/english/getting-started/

• Take a look at our cool new video tutorials for help! http://eyeview.vo.llnwd.net/o23/eBay/FullMode/Player/Player.html?Video=1&Lang=EN.

• Get help from our other users on our new Discussion Boards (http://forums.ebay.com/db2/forum.jspa?forumID=1000000047)

• Or visit the HELP section of eBay Partner Network, where there are links in each topic where you can ask questions to our dedicated support team (note that you have to click on specific help topics to see the “Contact Us” link).

At least they did offer a bunch of support options. In fact, so many that it illustrates how overwhelming it is to switch.

Thanks for being a valued partner. We’re excited for a successful transition, and the opportunity to grow your business through even more innovation, information and communication moving forward!

Thank you, but if you were a valued partner you’d figure out a way to have commission junction track our old affiliate links for a lot longer. Shafting your “valued partners” with a whole bunch of work changing links is not a good way to thank your partners. A nice big fat bonus check would be a better option. Maybe that’s just me.

Sincerely,
eBay’s Affiliates Managers

Cordially,
Overworked Link Changer

I just read that the Windows XP OEM will end on June 30, 2008. The fact of the matter is…I don’t really care. No, I’m not a Mac or Linux fanboi (although they are both very nice and workable offerings). I’m just not concerned, because Windows stopping the OEM license doesn’t mean that XP isn’t going to be around for a long time to come.

I still have a friend who swears by Windows 2000. Despite my personal dislike for Windows 2000, I’ve installed it on a few “throw away” laptops for my little sisters to use. Windows 2000 hasn’t been offered for how long? Eternity in tech terms. However, I had no problem finding a CD and license to install it for my sisters. Windows XP will be no different.

Until If Vista can finally get things together, then it might catch on and start to take some share from XP. If it doesn’t, then people will continue to use XP for the foreseeable future. It won’t be that hard to find an XP install CD, legally or illegally.

So, all those worried about Vista and not wanting to switch from XP, stop it. There’s nothing to worry about. Go back to worrying about getting the US troops back from Iraq, because that’s going to happen before Windows XP stops being the main O/S people use.

Update: This post on Techcrunch made me think about how much the O/S matters. It’s true that a lot of things can be done with a web browser. Certainly gives pause for thought, but realistically corporations have thousands of products that run clients on Windows O/S. The majority of people use the web browser, Office Documents (which the web still hasn’t completely replaced), and at least one other major application to do their job (and many more than one application). Microsoft will still be dominate on desktops for a while.

Tonight, twitter has been alive with the news that Andrew Barron is selling his twitter account on eBay. It’s already up to $455 at the time of this posting. People are hating on him for selling it, but I have to admit that I think it’s a great idea. We should have known that it was only just a matter of time until someone tried it. Techcrunch even covered the sale. Should be fun to see how much it goes for. It only has 1400 followers. I wonder what Scoble’s 20k followers are worth.

Email is still the most used application by internet users. I don’t know many people that are online that don’t pretty much go straight to their email when their online. Checking your email for new messages is an addiction for many (including myself). It’s my connection with my social life and it connects me to other things happening around the internet. In fact, one of the first things that new users of the internet do is get an email address.

Since email is so ubiquitous, then it only makes sense that getting your blog posts in people’s email box is one of the best way to drive traffic to your blog and encourage comments from users interested in what you’re posting to your blog. In fact, my wife has a friend that would manually send out an email to everyone telling them that she created a new blog post. That’s how much people like the idea of using email to “promote” their blog.

The crazy thing is that these people were sending out their blogs posts manually. What a pain in the butt. Plus, there might be some blog readers that aren’t on your personal email list.

If you’re manually doing it, then stop it and start using Zookoda. It’s a free service that basically turns your blog into a newsletter. Here’s a short list of features.

-Manage email newsletter subscribers.
-Enhance your blog with custom newsletter subscription forms.
-Design eye-catching newletters to match your blog design.
-Schedule recurring broadcasts for each day, week or month.
-View real-time open, bounce, click and unsubscribe reports.
-Access mobile users by emailing blog content in text format.

Did I mention it’s free? Trust me, that’s a good deal. I had personally worked on projects like PHPList to do the same things, and it was a pain in the butt. A hosted email newsletter service like this is so much better.