The new pricing algorithm calculates the price in this way: For every EC spot there are a number of adverts waiting to show (Of course, if they have chosen to advertise their EntreCard at your blog).2 EntreCard Credits is taken as the base price for any spot, & then for each of the adverts waiting in your queue to be displayed, the price for EntreCard spot is doubled.

Well, I must say that this is fairer than the previous pricing system in which the price of a widget was calculated on the basis of number of drops on it. But, I am not sure if this radical change will perform well in the long run.

The major drawback of the new system is that even if a more popular blog and a lesser known blog have the same number of adverts waiting to be displayed then the price for entrecard widgets at both the blogs will be same! Also, using 2 credits as the base price is not a very good idea either. As the price of popular entrecard widgets increase by powers of 2 it’ll become a lot harder for a normal fair-surfer (that is, who doesn’t chain surf, like me!) to advertise at such blogs because the credits you get for dropping your card or getting drops on your widget is just one credit. Earlier, many bloggers resorted to chain dropping in order to increase the credits as well as the popularity of their entrecard widget. Now they’ll resort to chain dropping to earn more and more credits to be able to advertise at high-priced blogs.

I’d have liked it if the price for dropping or receiving our card was also manipulated in some way according to our widget’s popularity. That would have also been quite fair and very justifiable. You earn credits using your card depending on your popularity! To me, this sounds just better than the way it presently is.

Anyways, we can just wait and watch. Lets see how it turns out. I’ll be posting more about it as soon as I gather some experience.

I started doing free blog reviews after I found some free time after my first semester exams were over. And the response on all the free blog reviews that I have done till now has been great. There are more than 100 blogs still waiting to be reviewed in the queue. Its quite some time now that I have reviewed a blog because I have been too occupied with other stuff – programming classes, Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance, Office, help my brother with studies… holy whack! Sometimes it just becomes impossible to sit on the chair in front of the laptop. I think I should get back into the free blog reviews thing as soon as possible. And that means as soon as tomorrow morning!

If you wish to get a Free Blog Review, all you need to do is drop me a comment using the comment form below. My review can be critical if your blog is in such a condition (read too bad!) but the intent of the review will always be positive. That is, to help you become a better blogger with an even better blog. The review will cover design, layout, content and overall presentation and I’ll insert a screen shot of your blog in my post.

I don’t ask any favors in reciprocation – all I wish to achieve with offering free blog reviews is to make the blogosphere a better place. Nothing will make me more happy than to help you. You should also understand that submitting such posts to Digg or Reddit is stupid because these individual blog reviews are not something everyone would be interested in. Whatever I point out in a particular blog review should be helpful to anyone who has a similar feature in their blog – and although it may help you and many other bloggers but individual blog reviews are not anything that interests most of the general online readership.

However, I encourage you to tell your friends about the blog review so that they can drop me comments whether my opinion is appropriate. Feedback is must for anything. Comments on your blog review will help you, as well as me. I also provide a “Reviewed @ Inspirit Blog” badge at the end of the blog review – and if you wish to send me some traffic, feel free to place the badge on your blog. You don’t have to place the badge, if you don’t wish to. All is your good will.

All of you must have heard of PayPerPlay by this time. Its not news anymore. For those who don’t know, PayPerPlay is an advertising program, that requires you to put your unique ad code in your blog template that will play audio ads for every visitor on your website/blog. There is no clicking involved at any point of generating revenue for you, as you are paid every time an audio ad is played on your website, that simply means each visit on your site pays you! Besides the audio-ads concept of revenue generation, you can promote the program using your referral link and earn more money by bringing in, more affiliates and partners for the program.

Should you be using PayPerPlay?

Talking about myself, I have never liked any websites that start playing music or “promotional lectures” when loaded. It is so un-cool to play voices when you are casually surfing with your own kind of music playing in your favorite media player.It will be such an irritation to keep on hearing coarse voices every time you visit a site of interest with PPP audio-ad code installed. And what when you visit 10 websites in a day and 8 out of them play these kind of audio ads?

While this can be a good source of revenue as no clicking is involved anywhere, but I wont like to hear silly voices that I will not be interested in, often. It would be impossible to tolerate voice ads when I view my own website again and again when I am playing with my theme and widgets. And certainly not possible to manually remove-and-insert ad code every other while!

Similar is the opinion of majority of people I came across in a discussion on PP, on various forums.

Will you be using PPP?

PayPerPlay wants me to be dishonest !

I had signed up for PPP a while ago, on the request of a friend through his referral ID. I got my own referral link on signing up and added one of my blogs and installed the add code, just for testing it as I am not going to use PPP in any way. Yesterday, I got an email from PPP that asks me to be dishonest with my readers.

PPP: You May Be Losing Your Sign-Ups

Hello Abhinav,

… some text … some text … some text …

The reason I bring this up is because the only way that
sellingppp.com would get any traffic is because of you.
With this fact in mind we find it interesting that we
continue to get sign-ups by the thousands under the main
account. Very little traffic comes from the search engines,
the rest is coming from affiliates.

The point I am trying to make is the only way we could be
getting that many direct sign-ups is because people are
ripping the affiliate ID off of affiliate links and just
going straight to sellingppp.com and bypassing the affiliate
all together.

This is a strong case for the fact that you should

“absolutely” cloak your affiliate link.

This is just a heads-up … If you are not cloaking then
you are losing sign-ups.

A free tutorial on cloaking your affiliate link is
available here:
http://www.seo2020.com/ppp/cloaking-your-affiliate-link.html

If you already have a web host then you should take the
time to get your affiliate link cloaked. It only takes a
few minutes.

If you don’t have a web host or your own PPP domain name
then we will set everything up for you at a price that
is lower than you can find anywhere else for similar
services. Further, we will set up your website, email and
cloaking for you.

PPP is in its beta currently and is gathering affiliates from the referrals its members are making. When I had talked about Getting 1 Million Real Visitors in NEXT 30 Days, I had clearly mentioned that the link I have used in my entire post is a referral link, to the T2000Ultra network.

I am not tricking my readers into a fraud that I should cloak my links. I have always been honest in everything that I have talked about on my blog. And it is certainly of no use to cloak links and push unwilling readers into any of the networks. And if they are willing to enjoy the benefits that a website talks about, they will even join with the referral link, no matter what… This is not a very appreciable approach to building a base, by PPP! And its discouraging me further from using PayPerPlay anytime in future.

Let me know what you think. Leave me a comment.

BrandMyBlog looked as promising a service as BlogRush promised to be, before it actually started and we could get an idea what it actually was going to do for our blogs. I made my mind to sign up for the service as it is FREE and I had just done MyBlogLog VS BlogCatalog VS BlogRush Comparison Test, so I thought of testing this service as well. The sign-up procedure took less than 3 minutes, and the code generated was a very short line, that when placed in the side-bar shows a widget as shown in the screen shot alongside.

How Does It Work?

Its all in the widget. The Learn More page of the website says,

The idea is simple; we provide a free opportunity for you being a blogger to refer your readers to other blogs which publish something related to your own blog. In return, you get more interesting content on your blog, and you get your own posts exposed on thousands of other blogs similar to yours. Our blogroll includes 3 blog-resumes which means that everytime a person load a page on your blog, you get your own blog-resume shown at 3 other blogs all around the world.

What Does It Mean?

This very clearly means that the widget installed by the code generated at the website should be a dynamic blogroll that displays different posts from blogs with relevant niches.

My Experience With It:::

Since the very day I installed the widget in my sidebar, it has been as static as dead. The same 2 posts get displayed with the same links to same blogs, always. This was enough for me to infer that the system actually did nothing more than just SUCK!

But still, I had to monitor if it was ever showing me at someone’s blog like the two blogs that displayed in my widget. So I didn’t remove the widget and didn’t delete my account from the service. I had been checking my stats periodically since a few days and what it shows me is presented below.

Damn! I gave the widget 2940 views, and gave 3 network referrers for a rather miserable ZERO received network views and referrers.

My Review:::

To sum up, BrandmyBlog is no more than a piece of SHIT! A total failure and waste of time.

If you are thinking about using any such service for Blog-Promotion to make money online by increasing the exposure to your blog-posts and/or your blog; DON’T USE BrandMyBlog!

In fact, BlogRush was far more loving and giving!

*****

Supported by ::: Pure Blogic

Also, Entering into 2008, I did not talk about my goals for my blogs that I wanted to achieve this year, like many bloggers around me did. In fact, I wanted to! But whenever I got to get online, I always had something else on my mind that I felt like talking about, before I had to get up and study for my exams. Well, I have uncovered it in a most generalized form to one of the questions that Nishu put to me.

In the end, I have a message for the readers of BaB and everyone who’s reading this post. Go read the interview and check it out what is the message I want to convey to you. To sum up, it was a great experience and I really enjoyed it. After that, David Airey’s response to the whole talk was a warm gesture. And I was glad to know my ideas could make a blogger’s day, like it did for A u d e e. Then I had some kind words of appreciation from Pulkit who finds my blog “neat enough!” Pulkit is looking for some fresh content apart from BLOGGING that he feels is found on an overkill number of blogs. I promise you’ll have a good diet here in the time to come, as soon as I am properly settled.

Read the whole Interview here

What the Radical Blogger really liked?

• Header and Footer designs: I am not a pro at Photoshop but I had a lot of time when I designed the header (the one I used at the very first!) and the footer. At that time even, I had felt that the footer looked a lot better than the header image and so, I wanted to change it. Before I could do another design, I came across Prashant of FreeLansing, who seemed to be a source of undiscovered talent to me. Indeed he was, and he did a free good-looking logo for me that I now use. Though he still fails to beat the footer by me , I’d like to thank him for his service.
• Feed Subscription options (i.e. in a reader or by email) are in just the correct place!
• Sidebars: Les describes them as clean and clutter-free.
• CSS: Les liked the well-written code and the use of relative units of measurement instead of absolute units, that implies the use of % units instead of exact pixel measurements.
• Content: The content was found to be pretty good and the radical blogger sees potential in my blog.

So, Where Do I Suck?

• English: Les had trouble comprehending some posts as the English was not great. English is not my first language! But excuses mean nothing when you fail. I’d like to thank the radical blogger, for without his pointing it out, I would not have known or understood the problem. I am in a process of gradual learning, and I try to learn with everything I can. I went through all of my posts today, twice, and recognized that I am not very good at the use of compound sentences. I will improve and try to give the best I can.
• Page-Width: I had recently widened the website to 1024 pixels because the majority of InspiritBlog visitors use a minimum of 1024 pixels wide screen resolution. And hence, I thought it won’t be much of a problem to do some changes and I’d even get more space for the content container. I’d like to know what screen resolution Les uses and will accordingly optimize the website.

Thanks Les Scammell:
Your kind words will be an inspiration for me to do still better and your suggestions are just as valuable and important for me to help in my self-improvement. I’ll try to improve in every way I can so that my visitors don’t face any hardships while using Inspirit Blog.

So I have decided to see if those 4 sentences or 350 characters, they ask for, need to be meaningful. Okay! I won’t exactly be making any such video now and but I have other means to find out. The urge to do this stupid but interesting thing arose when a devil, a product of his very own workshop [an idle mind I mean...] momentarily appeared to tell me to check out if there is any automatic detection or removal system for such submissions ? The devil insists that I submit this post with some stupid description, to BloggingZoom, filling the description with 350 (crap) characters and see if it passes through. The submission sure needs to be 4 sentences or 350 characters, but lets see what it can be in the worst case scenario and if BloggingZoom is another Digg in Vic-terms.

I have been instructed by the devil to update after watching the response.

Stay tuned!

*****
Update: The submission has been successfully made! It hasn’t been detected as irrelevant or removed [It can neither be! anyway!] automatically. Now, waiting for friends to ZOOM the post! Zoom it HERE.

SUBSCRIBE to Inspirit Blog’s RSS feed.

I have used the Alexa rating of these websites (graphical trends) and my own experience with the individual services to arrive at some conclusions that are purely personal opinions and hence, I have pointed out the positive and negative points of these systems that affect the position at which each of them stands today.

Here are the graphs that have been generated on the basis the analytical data gathered by Alexa till 26^th of December, 2007; drawn on a three year time-line.

The graphs clearly depict the traffic, rank and popularity trends for the three social networking sites we are talking about. And so, say more than I can express in my words.

MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog seem to be the potential competitors in their field. Analyzing the daily page views graph we can see that MyBlogLog started to gain momentum in the earlier part of 2006 as it managed to stay in the news with regards to its expected takeover by Yahoo! The service, otherwise also offered pretty good features like the detailed site traffic statistics. No doubt it became popular among the blogger masses. MyBlogLog saw a huge spike in its daily reach and daily page views when it was taken over by Yahoo and offered as a Yahoo service. But the peaks in the graph soon started to level and slope downwards ever since, the whole of 2007. Meanwhile, BlogCatalog has been moving with a healthy steadiness low below MyBlogLog but has ever been rising gradually even with its own shortcomings in the system. Daily traffic rank trends and daily reach of BlogCatalog indicate that its not far from equalling its rival MyBlogLog or even surpassing it. BlogRush saw only a one time rise in its lifetime at the time of its launch, that I believe was because of the hyper-hype that was generated prior to its launch. BlogRush failed to cast its spell as it miserably failed to implement its vision properly; Something that I would term improper and ineffective tagging.

Why MyBlogLog is on a decline?
MyBlogLog has implemented a cap on the number of messages that can be exchanged by a member in 24 hours, and has killed the very essence of socializing, by restricting social interaction terming it a “spam preventive measure” to allow only 15 messages in 24 hours. Less than 1 message per hour certainly doesn’t sound a very good idea if you are talking about community management or using the term Social Networking! Any member who aims at building a community at a social networking site won’t be talking to only 10-12 people sending at the maximum 2-3 messages in 24 hours. Wisest use of these limited number of messages doesn’t sound anything near “cool” to me! And if they call it a spam prevention measure, I say “C’mon! We know how to use the delete button and how to report spam!”

Otherwise, the detailed site statistics, ability to send messages to your community are exclusive features that MyBlogLog has to offer. MyBlogLog doesn’t compulsorily require you to display a widget on your blog to authorize your blog. You can simply insert a tracking code in your blog’s template and that solves the purpose. I recommend you use this social network for nurturing a community of your own as it still offers a wide and bright prospect for development, in spite of its negativities.

BlogCatalog is doing a good job!
BlogCatalog is not free from all the evils but it has been consistently serving its purpose effectively. It has emerged successfully as a good social networking site. The interface is useful and easy to follow just as MyBlogLog and it is quite neat. You can create any number of groups centered around various discussions that might interest a section of audience that BlogCatalog entertains. Group Discussions in these groups is an exclusive feature. BlogCatalog lacks the ability to send a group message to all your group or neighborhood members but it allows free interaction among the members leaving an almost infinite scope of community development. The notification system does a very good job when someone adds you as a friend, when someone invites you to join a group or when someone joins your neighborhood. Community building at BlogCatalog is a fun to indulge in. The widget is similar to MyBlogLog to use on your blog. you can show off your recent readers, group members and group discussions through widgets. I highly recommend you use this social networking service for effective blog promotion.

BlogRush is clearly out of the game!
BlogRush has miserably failed in its attempt to appeal to the audience. Improper tagging and hence miscalculated exposure at irrelevant blogs, I believe, is what caused its downfall. After a one time hit with the audience, it has been hardly hit with failure with everyone dropping the idea of using it. I personally don’t recommend you to use this service unless you are doing some research work, experimenting or another acid test like this one.