Welcome to Something for Nothing

I had a friend who was interested in trying our PayPerPost for advertising his American Knitter Learn to Knit DVD lessons. I knew there were a bunch of bloggers that loved to knit on PayPerPost and so I thought it was a good match. A couple weeks after his opportunity was filled I captured the number of views he’d gotten from the ad campaign. Here’s the links to the people who took the opportunity and how many page views it had gotten.

Knit Wits - 447 Views
Letter - 124 Views
AdBlog:Learn to knit! - 26 Views
I Need These Knitting DVDs - 200 Views
Teaching Homeschool Economics Skills - 93 Views
Learning How to Knit - 133 Views

Now remember that these posts were done September 12th of last year. I just logged into PayPerPost to see how many more pageviews he’s gotten since the above numbers (somewhere in October). Essentially 5 months past the 30 days a blog has to leave the posts up.

Knit Wits - 662 Views
Letter - 141 Views
AdBlog:Learn to knit! - 32 Views
I Need These Knitting DVDs - 259 Views
Teaching Homeschool Economics Skills - 149 Views
Learning How to Knit - 153 Views

Essentially that’s something like 373 more pageviews over the 5 month period. I honestly thought that it would be more than that. Plus, the Knit Wits blog had 215 of those new pageviews.

I wish one of the advertisers would let me know how well my blogs are doing at this. Or even better would be if PayPerPost would expose the number of pageviews our posts have gotten. I know I get a number of searches for certain topics, but it would be neat to know the actual numbers. Are you listening PayPerPost? Probably not because giving me this information adds almost no value to their bottom line.

Today I found a reason to submit something to the Oprah Show. I’m not sure if anything will come of it, but it was well worth the time I spent submitting it. Here’s what I submitted:

I participate on a website called Robin Hood Fund (http://www.robinhoodfund.com) and I found a wish that you should absolutely help. Her name is Liesl and she needs a stem cell transplant. You can read her wish for a stem cell transplant here.

She’s already had 154 people comment on her wish and she’s had $808 donated to her wish directly. In 3 days she’ll win this weeks prize pool for $500. Unfortunately, that’s only $1308 and she needs $100,000.

I’ve only know her from online, but read her blog on stem cell transplants and you’ll see why she deserves your help

I hope that Oprah will listen and put her on the show. In fact, I think that maybe Oprah should feature Robin Hood Fund as a show in itself. That would be pretty cool.

I also hope that people will donate directly to Liesl’s wish for a autologous (not embryonic) stem cell transplant.

I’m currently working on the itinerary for my trip to Italy with my wife. Well, we are looking for Hotels and that is not an easy job. In fact, it’s kind of a pain in the butt. It’s not really hard to find a hotel, but it is hard to find discount hotel reservations.

I was pretty impressed with the cool Google Mashup that Hotel Magician has made of hotel maps. You can go to their site and search for hotels by location. I love this kind of web display. It really puts some perspective to the list of hotels.

Besides being able to search by address and find hotels near that address, Hotel Magician has another great feature that allows you to also look by Hotel chain. This is really important for me since I prefer to stay at Marriott Hotels and so I’d like to see where the closest one is to my desired location.

I guess I should also confess that I love Google Mashups. I love that you can put all this great data that is found in databases across the internet and put them on a very easy to navigate map. I wonder if they are using the enterprise version or if they are capitalizing on the free API for Google Maps. I only wonder, because I’m currently working on a project that uses Google Maps. I haven’t had much time to work on it, but I think it’s a pretty cool idea that could be very popular. We’ll see how it goes.

I only have two major complaints with Hotel Magicians maps. Their icon for a hotel is ugly and needs to be replaced with a good image. In the end, it doesn’t matter too much, but I’d rather have Google’s default image than that horrid looking hotel icon. Also, I don’t like how slow the mouseover events work on the map. They are too slow to respond and don’t always work.

All in all, I must admit that these complaints are pretty minor. Plus, the great news is that my first quick search for Italy showed about a zillion hotels. I guess now I just have to decide which hotel will get my business.

This post sponsored by Hotel Magician

I found this article on 6 games that we would have seen if the game systems existed during the 90’s. I thought it was a great list and a nice walk back through memory lane. I guess the 90’s was the majority of my childhood and so it was fun to look back at the list.

I think they were off on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Not because I think it wouldn’t be made. Actually it was made as a computer game during that time period. I remember spending hours at my friend Matt Crawford’s house playing the game. We pulled out encyclopedias and everything. I think we could do much better at the game now with Google and Wikipedia.