Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Just to keep people updated on erik’s blog network here’s a small jaunt around some of the more active blogs lately.

Blogging On Empty has a post titled 3 Kinds of Successful Bloggers in which I break down what I think are the makings of the three types of successful bloggers out there today.

Financing Wealth has a post titled What is short selling? for those that don’t know and think some stocks might be a bit over priced.

For the golfers out there Getting to Scratch has a nice post about getting caught in no man’s land. No man’s land is that place where you don’t have a club do hit smoothly the distance with.

Sprint Rants is doing well, getting more and more visitors every day, and this month we’ve had our most rants about Sprint ever. Although it’s only 8 it seems the site is getting picked up by several other bloggers. If you have Sprint PCS or Nextel as your carrier and think their customer services sucks than this is the site for you. Feel free to leave a rant about what you think or what they did to you.

Just some easy reading to take you into the weekend. Don’t forget to check out the Geico Gecko doing the robot in my featured video.

Google announced early today that Google Checkout is live.

With the announcement of yet another service for Google to add to their empire, as well as the the Fed Raising Interest Rates Again made Google stock (GOOG) jump 11 points today. Man, if Google even makes a peep it seems like the whole world stops to listen.

What does this mean for you and I without Google Stock (GOOG). Well from what I can tell of the service it means we can spend money a lot easier on the web, without inputting anything into forms. Although Internet Explorer, IE, comes with a form filler, as does the Google and MSN toolbars, they don’t make managing your impulse buys quite as easy as Google Checkout.

For those of you in love with Paypal, don’t worry Google Checkout isn’t taking them over quite yet. The service is more for existing stores and to keep your orders tracked from one main site. Creating a bank, like Paypal, is going to take a little more time than what was spent on Google Checkout. But Google Checkout does offer a really nice one click easy way to shop at a lot of your favorite online stores; “Jockey, Starbucks Store, Levi’s, Dockers, Buy.com, Timberland, Zales.”

And for those of you who use AdWords to advertise you can use it there, although once you set up an account it’s pretty easy to have them automatically take the funds out of your account. But it’s there.

Just to check it out I decided to head over to Timberland and see what was new. I searched through some men’s goodies and found a nice pair of timbo boots, added them to the cart, and checked out my shopping bag. There it was, proceed with checkout or…. checkout with Google. Clicked on the icon, and it directed me to the wonderful white space filled touched up with blues, reds, greens, and yellows, that is Google. Simple checkout, sign-in, I’m done.

I’m not so sure this is a good thing though. Whenever I went to an online store, filled my cart with goodies, and proceeded to the checkout, the time I spent finding my credit card, typing in all the numbers, looking for the CVC code, was my time to decide.

“Do I really want this purchase?”

Now without that time, I fear I may purchase a few too many goodies from online stores. All I have to do is enter my numbers. Hmm. Maybe I should start a Betty Ford Clinic’esque, Over Buyers Anonymous Clinic.

Back to the bit about taking over Paypal and ruling payments on eBay. Could it happen? Yes. However, to do that you’d need to give every seller their own store like account to manage everyones purchases, allow real cash, rather than just credit card payments to exchange hands, and need we not forget… Take over Paypal.

Until then Google Checkout is what it is. An even faster way to auto fill your credit card info online. There’s no “money” exchanging hands, and you can’t fund your account through a bank account. It’s just an easy way for resellers to get you to use a credit card.

But we’ll all be waiting for the next version of Google Checkout.

I recently reported on joesgoals.com which is basically a really easy way to track your goals online from anywhere in the world. (That’s means you can’t count a vacation as a vacation from your goals.)

I have been using the software and it is still really easy, just sticking with the posting of goals and seeing how the website develops. Just yesterday Joe’s Goals added a 30, 60, and 90 day progress reporting chart for you to easily look at each goal, and they also added a timezones feature for those people not in the US.

Along with these big additions they changed the smiley and frowny face look and fixed some bugs that people reported. If you haven’t checked them out read my initial review and head over to JoesGoals.com.

I was sitting at lunch today reading the newspaper, cough, funnies section, and happened upon one of the best cartoons ever about blogging. Possibly this beats out that t-shirt I saw that read “I blog at Work” as funniest related to blogging.

To give credit where credit is due I found this via the Honolulu Advertiser and it is a copyrighted Family Circus cartoon. But I did take the ghetto picture of it with my digi-cam.

If you think others will enjoy this picture add it to one of the social bookmarking sites below. I think a lot of people would get a kick out if especially those fellow blogger/entrepreneurs. The icons below the picture will take you there. Enjoy!

Are you reading much lately? Too busy traveling around the blogosphere, reading what’s new with the virtual world and trying to make a buck or 100. I stumbled upon something a few of my readers may be interested in today from my Google Friends Newsletter.

Google recently pointed me to their newest collection of Book Beta goodies. Google, in their effort to make the world’s information searchable has cataloged and digitized all of Shakespears works. You can now Explore Shakespear from your desktop.I may be late to the show, but like you I too was searching the blogosphere for the next best million dollar idea. Every now and then though I need to take a break and read a little literature to keep my mind interested in words other than DIGG, technorati, and statcounter. (Not to forget AdSense)

The page has Shakespears works broken down into four categories:

Comedy
Tragedy
Romance
History

You can explore any word on any page as they have indexed everything. This would have come in handy back in the day when I was trying to write that report on Romeo and Juliet and needed to know who was a Capulet and who was a Montague.

Now take a break and go learn a few lines of King Lear.

The placement of AdSense. This seems to be a hot topic for any Internet entrepreneurial blogs. Google writes about it often at their AdSense Blog. People, bloggers, just can’t get enough of determining the proper, most click-through area, to place their ads.

Having a blog network that I will admit to posting ads on in the hopes to earn money from my blogging efforts I too spend a little time tinkering with ad placement. I am not into re-inventing the wheel so you may notice the layout of my blog network looks a lot like those networks already available. I try new things every once in a while but haven’t tried out any full on experimentation with ad size and placement.

Why would I when others do it for us?

Case in point is a great little AdSense experiment that Tom over at Nothing Ventured ran for two months on his AdSense sites. His theory was that the way he was posting ads, 3 large rectangles per post, beginning, middle, end, gave him a lot of clicks but the payout per click was low due to too many ad impressions. He decided to switch to one large rectangle at the top of the post in hopes to make more per click.

His results show that both number of clicks and cost per click decreased, a lot. He is going to switch back to the old way and report any findings he has to his readers. It’ll be interesting to see if it was just a low click through month or if blatantly plastering ads promotes clicking. Either way rock on with your bad self Tom, great experiment and thanks for publishing the article!

Well, just as I talk about the wonderful plugins I use one of them has to go and drop an egg. For some reason my feeds aren’t working and if any of you help me out that would be great.

If you click on the RSS icon to the right it is suppossed to take you to my feedburner feed but instead it comes back with a MySQL error. Not sure what the error is or what is going on but it would be great if this could be fixed. Let me know if anyone has had this issue with the plugin I mention.

hmm???

UPDATE:

I did a little work around by disabling that feedburner plugin previously mentioned. Let’s hope it works??? My Feed stats were bordering on 50 per day and then plumetted to zero. Hopefully I can get them back up there by the end of the weekend.

Part of the problem with sticking to your goals is keeping track of which goals you have set for yourself and if you’ve actually accomplished them throughout the day, week, or month. Excel is a great program, but if you’re on vacation, your goals may slip. Writing down on paper is also good practice, if you are over the age of 80. Who uses a pen and a pad any more?

In the new age of don’t save anything locally, you can now take your goals to the net and have someone else store, track, and make pretty. Like your email, or those office files that can now go Office Live you can put your goals on the net and access them from anywhere.

JoesGoals.com is an easy, very easy to use program that allows a user to track his or her goals from anywhere in the world. The interface has the look, sans white space, of Google, and also it’s simplicity. All you need to do is sign-up and you can start adding goals that are automatically saved and tracked. Presto!

Another great thing, aside from its simplicity is that Joe’s Goals allows you to share your goals and your progress with other people. This way you can become accountable for our goals and have other people cheer you on as you work towards an end.

You can also track negative goals, those things that prevent your from getting to where you want to go. Things like eating sweets, watching TV, sleeping in. You just tell the program if it’s positive or negative and then click. If you click too much for a day just re-click the same circle and you’re done.

I have attached a screenshot of my goals to show you how simple it looks.

Do you remember, about 3 o’clock after school, a two hour block of some of the best cartoons ever created. The Disney Afternoon??? Ducktales, Rescue Rangers, Talespin, and Darkwing Duck?

If you don’t then you probably didn’t grow up in the late 80’s early 90’s. For everyone who does then I have recently been tipped off to probably one of the best 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s nostalgia site out there. It’s called RetroJunk.com and has every cartoon, TV show, and sitcom intro from those 3 decades.

Some of the classic cartoon’s like those mentioned above, plus, GI Joe, Thundercats, Inspector Gadget, Transformers. And shows like Hey Dude, the A-team, Dukes of Hazard. It has every intro and them you can think of. Plus a few character references, costume references, some episode synopses. Everything you could want to take you back.

For those of you who grew up during one of these three decades be prepared to smile.

Plugins are great! For those of you who don’t use Wordpress or another blog software that allows you to solve problems easily and quickly with plugins then I suggest switching to wordpress. If you don’t and want to switch to Wordpress check out Darren’s post about how to install wordpress. For those that want some new plugins here are the Wordpress plugins that I use.

Adesnse Deluxe - A great way to easily insert Google AdSense into your blog posts. You can use it for AdSense, Chitika, YPN, or any other code snippet type ads. I don’t use it as much now that I’ve gotten the hang of php but it’s still a great add in.

Do Follow - Help your commentors gain page rank by eliminating the wordpress no follow for comments code.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Tough Plugin at times to get going but helps direct all of your feed traffic to your feedburner account. If you don’t have a feedburner account and want to learn more about it check out my using feedburner as a blog tool post.

Related Posts - Keep your readers on at your blog by giving them more pages to visit. Increase pageviews and increase earnings

Recent Comments - Promote commenting by promoting your commentors.

Image Browser - Came with the old Wordpress install and much better than the newest image browser available on Wordpress 2.0+.

I am working on ad rotator and Google Sitemaps plugins but I’m unable to really get the sitemaps plugin to work. I’d really like to get it going but am having some difficulties. If you have any hints let me know.