Google seems to have a really rough time these weeks. First the issue with the adsense payments to some of those who selected payment via western union quick cash, and now the youtube issue again.

Youtube is down for more than a hour now, and yet again no one knows the reason. On 24th february Youtube was down for a few hours worldwide because of Pakistan’s attempt to block access to its population:

Ricardo Reyes(youtube spokesman)

“Many users around the world could not access our site. We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again”

I wonder what caused the downtime, and can’t wait for it to be back up again and see a spokesman’s statement regarding today’s downtime.

As usual i used Internetsupervision to check if youtube is down worldwide and that the issue isn’t on my side:

(click to enlarge) - Click here to check youtube

There’s nothing we can do, but wait till its back up, if your bored and want to watch some vids online till youtube is back visit Metacafe.

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You may have noticed that this page loaded very very slow(30 seconds). This slow load time is because the guys at servage messed up something again and the connection to the mysql clusters is slower than a snail. I argued with Scott(servage support) for a while, and got to this conclusion:

i highly doubt that this issue is affecting only my account and that its not fixable

one thing is certain, that the issue is on servage’s side and that i tried what i could to get the issue fixed. From this point the duty to fix the issue is the technical teams @ servage.

cheers,
Tom

Scott offered to move my account to a new cluster, but said that all my websites will be unaccessible for about 24 hours, so i told him what i wrote above. If the issue persists il start getting grumpy and most probably will have a chat with an admin at servage(again).

Exactly 2 months ago(on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm ) i blogged about the first PR update that hit my blog . Finally my homepage got the appreciation it deserves and got attributed Pagerank 5(iwebtool predicted PR 6, but who can trust it?)

Remember what i said in the first pr update post:

I really hope that on next pagerank update my main page will also get pagerank 4-5. The only problem is that i will have to work my ass off to get it:).

Now i can start monetizing my blog(i currently make about 120$/month from affiliate programs earnings), don’t worry i won’t fill every inch of your screen with ads. You won’t sense the difference, because there won’t be any, except the banners will change.

Once again i used the Google Pagerank checker tool made by SEO Junkie , and here are the stats:

(click image to see full stats)

In the stats picture i didn’t include the pages which didn’t get any pagerank value attributed, if you wish to see the full stats visit the stats page.

Releasing themes really got me a great value of IBLs(inbound links) which contributed to the high value of the index’s pagerank. Now the only thing that i have to do is to manage to keep it.

Technorati

Over at technorati thaslayer.com has 760 authority value and a rank of 5,251 with 847 blog reactions

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In other news Google still didn’t send the payment to those publishers who had their payments canceled due to a deposit payment technical error, and 10th may is arriving faster than the french TGV.

Today a friend asked my opinion about IX Web hosting. He told me that he saw a hosting package for $4.95/month which will give him UNLIMITED disk space and UNLIMITED bandwith along with 500$ worth of marketing tools and credits.

I told him that i have to check it out before i say my opinion.

The first things that got to my eyes were the following lines: Unlimited Domains Unlimited Data Transfer Unlimited Web Space.

I’m fine with Unlimited Domains, but Unlimited data transfer and Unlimited Web space sounds pretty fishy to me. I saw IX web Hosting’s offer last year, but back then they had normal values at the Web space and the Bandwith.

At this point i said to myself: “uuu…let’s chat a little with someone at live support”, what i did, and believe me i laughed a lot during my “small” chat with a Support representative. The most annoying thing was that Karina(the support representative) replied to my questions within minutes like she was working on something rather than chatting with me.

Here’s the chat:

Chat InformationPlease wait for a site operator to respond.

Chat InformationYou are now chatting with ‘Karina Zalavskaya’

Karina Zalavskaya: Welcome, this is Karina, how can I help you?
you: Hey Karina,
you: i have just one pre-sale question
you: How can you offer UNLIMITED disk space and UNLIMITED transfer?
Karina Zalavskaya: What do you mean?
you: Business plus plan
you: Unlimited Data Transfer Unlimited Web Space
you: unlimited doesn’t actually exist
you: Karina? Are you still there?
Karina Zalavskaya: Yes.
Karina Zalavskaya: But we realy provide unlimited webspace.
you: i get that
you: for example
you: if i make an image hosting website and fill up 400gigs of space and use 50TB of band width each month won’t that be a problem?
Karina Zalavskaya: You have to understand that we provide shared hostimg and then servers have limits.
you: i understand
you: but with the above sentence you just said the opposite of what you said before
you: Karina Zalavskaya: But we realy provide unlimited webspace.

I waited about 5 minutes and because she didn’t respond i just closed the chat. I have a feeling that all the unlimited disk space and band width thingy is just a marketing tool to gain new newbie webmasters to sign up who are tempted by all the Unlimited words that they see on the packages page.

If an experienced web master sees the packages page he will surely close the tab and go search for an other web host. As you can see in the chat UNLIMITED bandwidth and web space doesn’t exist. It’s true that in the chat i said a rough example which is almost at the edge but still they wouldn’t have the right to suspend my account if i would reach those levels.

I didn’t even look at the marketing tools(they most probably offer vouchers and stuff), i just closed the tab and told my friend: DON’T be an idiot. Go search a little more, and after you find a web host search for reviews before asking my opinion.

Here’s a quote from Findhosts.com

Reviewer: Anonymous 02-06-2007
I have websites hosted by expensive apollohosting, poor control panel bluehost and Cheap Easy Setup Ixwebhosting. While I have minor problems with the first two, IX is PATHETIC. In less than 1month, IX has been down for nearly 12hours in total. Right now as I type, my ecommerce site is down, my newly launched news site is down and IX is unreachable. A complete WASTE of my money!

I’m a member at smorty for quite a while(although i don’t really use it) and during this period i’ve seen improvements and fall backs.

Improvements:

One of the best features they implemented is Post Exchange(BETA):

Post exchange is all about writing positive posts about each others blogs. Bloggers from the same category and related star ratings will have the opportunity to review each others blogs. It works in the same way as a sponsored review, however this is completely free.

For every post you write for a fellow blogger, a different blogger will write a post for you. This means relevant traffic can be passed between similar blogs and a strong community can be built by helping each other.

Alright, this is a great feature, but we all know how many webmasters are: they will write a post and link t you and after a while they will remove the backlink from the post to gain IBL(inblound links). This is some pretty messed up stuff, especially if you will exchange posts with a guy like the one mentioned above.

I’m waiting for this feature to get out of beta, and i will write a complete review then.

The User panel

The user panel was greatly improved and offers a easy navigation system and a clean design(the main website could also use a new design, i suggested this but it seems that the admins don’t even want to hear about it.

Trust

Smorty gained a lot of trust by paying its publishers on time, and offering pretty good support to both publishers and advertisers. In some time it could become a terrifying contender for Reviewme and Payperpost.

Fall Backs:

Paid Post offers:

To be honest the advertising tasks SUCK. 90% of the paid post offers are either mortage or insurance or casinos or Bad Credit Loans or Shopping cart systems related.

And the stupid part is that you can’t decline them.

Here’s a suggestion for smorty admins:

Implement a feature where the publishers can select the niche they want to blog about, and implement a damn DECLINE button for post offers.

Standard banner sizes

Alright now this is really annoying, check out some of the banner sizes they offer in the Referral Program:

300×30, 125×55, 200×100, 468×60, 125×400

I don’t get this…why couldn’t they use standard sizes like 250×250, or 125×125? They probably taught that by making banners in some different sizes people will like them more. NOT!.

I’m pretty eager to see what will turn out eventually  and what the future brings for smorty. It will either have a great success and become a serious competitor on the niche of paid review or it will fall.

Entrecard earlier today changed the credit system. To be honest they did a huge mistake because this is just dumb.

Here’s how the new system works:

With some delay Wordpress 2.5 was finally launched yesterday. This is a long waited version and it features lots and lots of new features and even more flexibility.

The whole admin panel got a facelift, good bye old theme, welcome new web 2.0 theme. As you can see the most commonly used features are way more highlighted than the less commonly used features(like plugins for example: you activate the plugins once and you won’t have to use the plugins tab till you upload a new plugin.

The use of widgets also invaded the admin panel! The dashboard contains a series of widgets which you can easily edit.

Along with the new release wordpress achieved a great milestone and wordpress.org also got a facelift. It was about time you guys!

The new wordpress admin panel has some really neat features, but the thing that i like the most is that it’s organized and even more simple to navigate and manage your blog.

The boxes are completely reordered which are like a STEP-BY-STEP guide on how to write your posts.

For example:

- you start with writing the post

- after which you add tags

- you select the categories

- use custom fields

-set commenting/trackback settings

- select author

When writing a post the permalink is generated and shown, which you can edit in real time at a simple push of a button:

You can instantly add and delete tags without reloading the page using the Tags box features:

Adding pictures/videos/audio/media/ is just one click away using the Add Media feature:

Also the WYSIWYG editor got a new look, and the newest feature that i love is the REDO button, because sometimes when i messed up something i pressed Ctrl+Z by reflex and couldn’t redo it

Wordpress 2.5 is truly a revelation. It gives you the flexibility you need and the feeling that your using a very advanced CMS with all the settings at the tip of your fingertips.

Upgrading to wordpress 2.5 won’t really affect your blog, because 2.5 supports themes and plugins made for older versions of wordpress, although as i saw there are a few plugins that are incompatible with 2.5.

Currently i’m at college(damn…some classes are just way too boring), but tomorrow i will try to make a video overview of wordpress 2.5.

Till then here are some helpful links for you:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-rc2/

Overview

The Craziest Internet Marketing Contest started just 20 days ago on 8th March and will end in 5 days on 2nd April.

This is not any ordinary contest, the prize of this competition is $13,647 which isn’t an amount that you can just pass by of which most part is cash and the rest are marketing products and services.

Prizes

- Most of the cash prizes are offered by advertising networks like AzoogleAds, NeverBlueAds,Bidvertiser.

- Shoemoney sponsors the contest with an 8GB Apple IPOD Touch, which i’m sure anyone would like to have(in my opinion it’s the coolest Apple product after the Macbook)

- SEO memberships are offered by SEOBook,SEOmoz and RankSense

- Softwareprojects is offering $2,000 in email marketing services

- Lots and lots of affiliate marketing and website tools are put up to the grab by the winners

- Last but not least: Lots of advertising prizes are offered mostly by bloggers

To be honest i would have also sponsored the contest with a custom blog theme(i like contests ) so those of you who want to make a contest in the near future don’t hesitate contacting me, because i might offer my services(design) as a prize.

How to enter?

Subscribing to the newsletter is a must and will gain you 1 entry. If you blog about the competition and link back to the post you will get 10 extra entries. Also for every 5 comments you make on Winning The Web blog will get you 1 entry.

You have the chance to gain more entries by following the contest’s clues which range from stumbling the page to signing up to advertising network, and my favorite: by submitting your own clues!

The top 20 participants with most entries will also get a free Winning The Web T-Shirt, its value isn’t big but it looks cool!

Winners

There will be more than 100 winners(including the 20 shirts), this means that you have great chances of winning a prize. Heck!, it’s better than trying to win at the lottery where the odds of winning are like 1 to 1billion.

The random draw will be held on 2nd April(5 days from now), so we can say that this is a short term contest(if i would have held it, most probably it would have lasted at least 3 months)

Conclusion

So trust me on this: this competition is something that you just can’t miss. You can’t bypass a chance of getting free money/gadgets/advertising/premium services for free!

Fortune magazine recently published a list of top 20 most admired companies in the US. In the top 20 we find well known brands like Apple(1st place), Google(4th place), and Microsoft(16th place). What is odd that Yahoo isn’t part of this prestigious top 20 Most admired companies list.

Here are some informations about the above mentioned companies:

Steve Jobs really knows how to run a company.By creating high quality products like iPod, iPod Nano, iPhone, Apple Touch, iMac and ofcourse the MacBook Apple built up a great reputation. And the best thing in their products is the warranty and the quality. If you buy a Macbook for example you know that it’s not MADE IN CHINA and that you can rely on it. The prices aren’t too high, so even if you can’t afford to buy a iPhone for example then you can save your funds and buy it the next month knowing it’s a good investment. The other thing that gave Apple a good reputation is that you can connect one item to each other and link them together. It’s like expanding your PC with stand alone components.

Who doesn’t know the story of the no.1 search engine in the world? 2 Stanford university students - Page and Brin create a simple search engine in 1998 which today is the world’s no.1 search engine which offers other services like: contextual advertising, free mail, feed tracker(feedburner) and will soon break into mobile operating systems niche(with the OS Android). As i read on other websites life at Google is great and the employees are really satisfied with their jobs. Well to be honest, who wouldn’t want to work at google?

Most of us use their product(Windows) day by day and lots of times swear saying how much it sucks but yet we still use it to be able to play our favorite games, run our programs and enjoy the GUI. In my opinion Bill would never taught that his “hobby” will turn into a such big company. I’m really curious that will he retire this summer. You need an iron will to do something like that when your on top of a huge corporation. It seems that Microsoft gained the american’s trust and admiration which got it on 14th position.

All the 3 above mentioned companies are well known and solid names in the world of IT&C, and each one of them has made a great contribution to its users and will continue to do it.

Currently it’s 7:35 PM (GMT) and it seems that youtube.com is down for more than 30 minutes. No, its not because of my internet connection. It’s a problem at youtube 100%(see pictures below)

It seems that large sites can also have major problems, even if we would think that this is impossible. Who would have taught that this would happen.

I bet that many people are pretty pissed now and they are cursing their ISP because they can’t interact on youtube.

After asking some friends to check if youtube is working I also did a check using internetsupervision, just to make sure that i won’t write stupid things on my blog.

(click to enlrage)

Currently the only question is that for how much will the downtime last.

I noticed yesterday on digitalpoint and on sitepoint marketplace that John Scott (the owner of v7n) is selling the whole v7n network which includes:

- Forums ( http://www.v7n.com/forums/ ) with almost 40,000 members and 800,000+ posts. Running vBulletin with VBSEO.
- Web Directory ( http://directory.v7n.com/ )
- Affiliate Program ( http://partners.v7n.com/ )
- Host Ratings ( http://hosting.v7n.com/ )
- Scripts Directory ( http://www.v7n.com/scripts/ )
- SEO Blog ( http://blog.v7n.com/ )
- Survey @ V7N ( http://survey.v7n.com/ )
- Graphics Tutorials ( http://www.v7n.com/graphics/ )
- Job Marketplace ( http://www.v7n.com/marketplace/ )
- Tech Blog ( http://tech.v7n.com/ )
- SEO Insight Newsletter ( http://newsletter.v7n.com )
- Contextual Links ( http://contextual.v7n.com/ )

The whole network has 700,000 unique visitors/month along with 3 million pageviews/month. You can’t call that small traffic!

The v7n network exists for almost 4 years:

Record expires on 08-Mar-2016.
Record created on 08-Mar-2004.

It also has sitelinks displayed on Google along with Listing in DMOZ:

The starting BID is 400,000$ and the BIN is 500,000$. There are no bids yet, but the auction still has almost 2 weeks to run.

John claims that this is the real deal and he decided to step away from SEO and go back to school because “I must admit that SEO no longer holds my attention” - as posted on v7n Blog

The v7n network is a great money maker and the BIN represents 12-24 months of revenue:

“PayPal receipts: Nov: 12,349.05 Dec: 39,246.70 Jan: 27,660.40
Those do not include 2checkout, Adsense, or direct wire transfers. 2CO usually isn’t more than a couple thousand, Adsense is minimal, and wire transfers haven’t been too much these days. “

The main flow of revenue comes from directory submissions and advertisements on the network.

Many people critiqued the price and say that it’s worth more and i agree with what Colleen said on dp:

“Just cause people say it’s worth more does not mean John’s gonna run and up his price, he knows what it’s worth to him, he’s set a price and I am sure that’s where it will stay.”

If you have the $500,000 than this really is a great investment, since you can pull up the revenue to 40,000-50,000/month, just as John did last year:

“Last year the revenue topped $40,000 per month for the most part, until I was diverted by my studies.”

You would gain back your investment in a matter of a year, and after that just continue generating passive revenue(free money).