Karlonia.com

Members of the Entrecard community experienced an unexpected interruption in their card dropping routines Saturday night when an electrical fire at The Planet, a major data center in Houston, Texas that houses the site’s servers, required all power sources (including generators) to be shut down according to instructions from the Houston Fire Department. This took the Entrecard site completely offline for a few hours while crews at The Planet worked to assess and repair the damage. Shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, the Entrecard staff emailed members to let us know what was happening:

Greetings,

Unfortunately, there has been an electrical fire at the data center housing Entrecard’s servers. The servers have not been damaged, but the site may be down for as long as 12 hours.

Entrecard is hosted with ThePlanet, and this fire has affected over 9000 websites, as many of the world’s most popular websites are hosted with ThePlanet. They are working around the clock to get their data center back online, and we are hoping that they get it back online fast.

Thank you for your patience and understanding with this rare and frustrating problem. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait for The Planet to get their datacenter back online.

Please check back with Entrecard in 12 to 24 hours.

Thanks,
Entrecard Team

Fortunately, the Entrecard staff was able to respond fairly quickly and managed to get a basic splash page up that informed visitors about the outage and restored the widget graphic on Entrecard-enabled blogs, which prevented us from having to worry about displaying server error messages on our sites where the widgets would normally be located. There was also a link on the splash page that directed us to The Planet’s forum, where we were able to learn more specific information about the extent and actual cause of the outage from their management:

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The website development and advertising company known as Take the Internet Back has updated their site with a fresh new look and has added some useful features, such as allowing advertisers to have a better view of their statistics and allowing regular members to see how much money they have earned and the exact sources of their revenue. TIB is also running another promotional campaign where they are hoping to entice marketers to purchase some advertising in exchange for free additional ad packages at the new WorldAdGroup.com site. As usual, the actual text of the latest update is posted below:

As promised a month ago, we have finished the new TIB website! It has a whole new graphical design and lots more new features for all users - Members, Advertisers and Affiliates. Please read below for more details about what’s new on the TIB website:

General Improvements:

1. New graphical design - more compact and user-friendly
2. The 3 user categories are now more in focus with the website i.e. Member, Advertiser and Affiliate. We needed to create the Advertiser category on TIB, as it was the only way to offer real-time statistics in regards to ads, banners and other advertisement methods. Joining TIB as an Advertiser is extremely simple and also totally FREE. For sending ads or to post a banner on TIB, you will need to have an Advertiser account and be logged in. Also, the new TIB has more accurate and real-time statistics for all users.

For you to better understand the upgrades and improvements, we will highlight them here for each user type:

Member upgrades:

1. Real-time statistics in your Member’s Home page i.e. points from reading mails, points from TIB Specials, etc.
2. Payout list to see how much money you earned

Advertiser upgrades:

1. Real-time statistics regarding ad progress i.e. ability to see how many e-mails were sent on a particular ad, how many members have read that ad, ability to change the subject and content of the ad (only if the ad has not already been sent), and more.
2. Real-time statistics regarding banners i.e. expiration date, number of clickthrus, ability to change the banner at any time, etc.
3. Delayed Confirmation Link for reading Members i.e. members that are reading emails from their Inbox get the Confirmation Link for the message after a period of time. This will ensure an even better response rate for Advertiser’s ads.
4. Advertisers can now choose the Sending Date for their Ad, and also the period of time that passes between the emails ( Only for larger email ads). We have introduced this since we had so many requests from our Advertisers to be given the possibility to choose the Sending Date for each Ad.

Due to the latest developments, we have an important update concerning all our Members that posted links to TIB site. A newer linking system is being developed with more appealing banners and an automatic validation system. Until the new system is implemented, we have disabled the old one. We will update all members when the system is ready to be used.

And last but not least, we will launch a new promotional campaign for all TIB Members and Advertisers, which is effective immediately and will last until the 1st of May:

1. Buy $100 or more and get a free Standard Marketer Package on www.WorldAdGroup.com (WAG)
2. Buy $200 or more and get a free Super Marketer Package on www.WorldAdGroup.com (WAG)
3. Buy $400 or more and get 2 free Super Marketer Packages on www.WorldAdGroup.com (WAG)

We only ask that you help us promote WAG just a bit. It is also a solid advertising program that pays out very generous commissions. Please be sure that you register at www.WorldAdGroup.com - and we will add the bonus packages to your account.

If you haven’t had the chance to go to TIB and see what we have done there, please do so now and let us know what you think? Better, huh? Also - please do not hesitate to report any errors that you may find there as this would help us improve TIB even more.

Thanks and together: “Let’s Take the Internet Back!”

TIB admin

Although I have long realized that the conditions of ignorance and stupidity have always been prevalent in human societies, today I ran across a recent tidbit of research findings that surprised even me. According to Jacob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox article at UseIt.com released last week, some 24 percent of Internet users could not even perform a simple Google search:

If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so.

The article goes on to point out that these were actually supposed to be above average Internet users who took part in the study. Participants were equally distributed among low, middle, and high income earners, effectively overrepresenting the most financially successful computer users compared with the normal income distribution found in the general population. People who failed the Google search test either ended up on a different search engine from whatever type-in fields they could find or simply gave up the search altogether.

For Internet marketers, this is important information to take into account when putting together an advertising campaign. After all, most of us who are in the business of trying to make serious money online end up focusing most of our efforts on designing our web pages for search engine optimization. But if a significant group of people cannot even find the world’s most popular search engine, our wonderful SEO skills are not going to mean much to them.

In my opinion, the takeaway lesson here is for us to remember that offline advertising still has its advantages, even in cases where our entire income is generated from online sources. That means getting those business cards, flyers, bulletin board leaflets, and old school classified ads out there so that people will remember our website address and type it into the browser bar even if they do not go through a search engine. Of course, good old-fashioned word of mouth doesn’t hurt either. After enough people have heard about our website, even the technically challenged will wind up at right place eventually. Once they get there, we will have the opportunity to teach them about these newfangled contraptions called search engines.

A review of the latest search engine marketing news today revealed that Ask.com has unveiled a new site that functions as a news gathering hub, combining traditional news outlets with newer “Web 2.0″ sources such as blogs and social media. The site, actually a subdomain of Ask.com, is called BigNews and uses a rating system known as BigFactor to determine which news stories are shown on the front page and considered most important during the particular snapshot of time when you are visiting.

The “BigFactor” is actually a composite rating calculated according to four components:

1. Breaking: This measures the “freshness” of a news story. Presumably newer stories are given more weight than older ones.
2. Impact: This is an indicator of how often the story appears in other articles and in various multimedia, measuring its overall impact on the Web.
3. Media: This is based on the number of images and videos that are associated with the story.
4. Discussion: This factor measures the number of mentions in forums, bulletin boards, comment sections, and other discussion-oriented venues.

The BigFactor rating is a numerical range from 1 to 100, and is continually updated as new stories are found and Ask.com recalculates its algorithms. If you mouse over the BigFactor number beside each headline, you can view a bar graph chart that shows the relative importance of each of the four components in that story’s overall rating.

In addition to the rating, each headline block also includes links to a separate page that displays relevant articles, blogs, images, and videos along with the headline and snippet of the story itself. There is also a “Day History” link to the same type of page, but with a little bar graph above the list of images that allows you to track the story’s BigFactor rating for previous days, assuming the story is more than one day old.

Both the front page and single story pages include a section at the bottom where relevant articles that have been submitted to Digg are listed. At the bottom of the front page, this section is subdivided into two columns; the left column displays the top five news items with the most diggs, while the right column shows news stories that have been submitted very recently and thus have zero diggs.

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Today marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year due to its derivation from the cycles of the moon. It is an important day of celebration for many people in the eastern countries of Asia and for many Chinese migrant communities living outside of China. According to the Chinese zodiac, 2008 is the year of the Rat, the first in a series of 12 cyclical animal-named years. It also correlates to the year 4706 according to the ancient Chinese calendar.

In most regions that celebrate it, the first three days of the New Year are considered public holidays. In fact, I have noticed that many calendars found in Chinese restaurants here in America have these three dates colored in red, as opposed to black for the other days. In China, the holiday is officially known as the Spring Festival, and is a period of various traditional festivities that continues for 15 days, culminating in the Lantern Festival on the final day.

Because the Chinese New Year signifies the beginning of the spring season, many of the traditional customs revolve around an “out with the old, in with the new” theme. In the days before the new year actually begins, many families will perform a thorough house cleaning, as this is supposed to sweep away the bad luck from the previous year. It is also a time for payment of outstanding debts and the forgiving of old grudges so that everyone can start with a clean slate and hopefully have plenty of good luck and prosperity in the new year.

Many families hold reunions during this period, often celebrating the occasion with relatively elaborate, multi-course meals in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of American Thanksgiving Day feasts. One custom that is unique to this particular holiday is the giving of little red packets called “Hong Bao”. These are small envelopes that contain various amounts of money ranging from a few dollars to a few hundred and have Chinese characters printed on the outside of them. They are typically given to younger family members by older ones and to unmarried people by those who are married.

Fireworks are also a significant part of the festivities, traditionally used along with the color red as a way of repelling the legendary monster Nian. Hundreds of small firecrackers wrapped in red paper are strung together and ignited with long fuses, making lots of loud popping noises to scare away evil spirits and perhaps a few unsuspecting bystanders as well. Unfortunately, in recent years sporadic accidents associated with the handling of fireworks has prompted governments in several regions to ban private ownership of them, although they can still be used in most rural areas and even in some cities where the rules are sparsely enforced, such as in this video of this year’s fireworks celebrations in Shanghai:

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The popular pay per click program AdBux released its February newsletter yesterday, signaling a commitment to longevity and new features while also showing signs of economic recession for the next few months.

At the end of last month, many members became concerned about the future of the program when the site was inaccessible for a few days after the owners decided to switch servers and hosting companies. The site itself has made a full recovery, but there are still significant problems on the financial side.

Around the same time as AdBux was making the server move, PayPal began limiting its accounts along with those of many similar PPC programs due to multiple chargebacks and problems with too many fraudulent transactions. Although the program has now implemented AlertPay for processing payouts and Google Checkout for handling incoming advertising purchases, many members who were expecting PayPal payments are left in temporary limbo until they can get set up with AlertPay.

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Unless you have been living under a virtual rock (or is the proper term “asteroid” since we’re posting in cyberspace) for the past week, you probably know by now that Microsoft has made a $44.6 billon bid to buy out Yahoo and merge the two companies. This article at CNET News.com has a pretty good recap of the relevant events if you need to catch up on the latest news.

Meanwhile, on the official Google blog yesterday, Google’s senior vice president David Drummond was less than thrilled about the merger proposal and expressed concern that another Microsoft acquisition could cause problems for people who want a more innovative, open market style Internet:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

This is not surprising because it is clear from Microsoft’s letters and statements that it seeks to compete more seriously with Google in the search engine market by essentially swallowing up Yahoo and combining the two companies’ market share. The combined company would have more resources to scale up its computing power and provide both search results and advertising markets that are more comparable to Google’s current services.

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Back in 2006, the U.S. Congress passed a law that has caused much confusion in the online casino industry. Titled as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, this provision was sneakily attached to an unrelated port security bill in order to win over key opponents and insure final passage. Contrary to what many people have heard, the law does not actually criminalize online gambling in the USA but instead prohibits money transfers from banks or other financial institutions to online gambling sites under the guise of preventing money laundering. Most people in the USA can still legally use online casino sites, although 11 states have severely restricted or prohibited the practice.

Because of the confusion surrounding the recent law (in addition to previous regulations regarding gambling in the USA which are also quite confusing but would take too long to fully explain in this article), owners of online casino companies around the world have taken widely varying actions. Some have stopped accepting players from the USA altogether for fear of running afoul of the law, while others have restricted U.S. players to non-money gaming (playing for tokens, points, etc.). A third group of online gaming outlets have not significantly changed their policies at all, except to avoid making money transfers to American banks and allow U.S. players to use other ways of funding their accounts.

This diversity in reactions to the law and concomitant confusion among many U.S.-based players has led to the rise of casino portal sites such as TopUSAOnlineCasinos.com, which offer convenient listings of the Top USA Online Casinos that still accept American players. The home page of the site lists their top 10 picks for such casinos according to a rating system that includes factors such as payout percentage, game selection, security, customer support, and payment options. From here, you can visit the casino sites themselves, download any applicable software, or go to a separate review page that gives an overview and some details about each program.

There are also links along the top navigation bar to access pages where eligible online poker rooms and online sports betting sites are listed. However, these pages are somewhat less helpful because there are only two casinos listed for each category, and these are the same two outfits as the #1 and #10 picks from the home page. Nevertheless, the site provides a convenient gateway to access some pre-vetted casino sites that are open to American players. Of course, as with any online venture, I would recommend doing your due diligence so that you know what you’re getting into before gambling with your beloved dollars.

One of the reasons that I have come to loathe most of American society is its overly litigious tendencies. For example, here in South Texas it has become commonplace for a certain segment of the population to make a regular income through the lucrative potential of personal injury lawsuits. People often collect unreasonably large sums of money from settlements with drivers or their insurance companies in minor accident cases where there was no substantial damage or injury.

Now it seems that professional sports organizations such as the National Football League are getting in on the over-the-top legal craze. In this latest story from Techdirt.com, the NFL is threatening possible legal action against a church for wanting to host a Super Bowl party and show the “big game” on a wide screen TV. Not only are they complaining about the use of the phrase “Super Bowl”, but apparently a television screen that is over 55 inches wide is technically considered part of a “public performance”. Here is the relevant excerpt:

The latest situation is perhaps even more bizarre — but tragically, seems to fall closer to a correct legal reading of a really poorly written law. The NFL apparently nastygrammed a church for planning to host a Super Bowl party. The original complaint was first that the church was charging people, but also that they used the term “Super Bowl” (as if people would somehow believe that the church was associated with the NFL?). After the church agreed to let people in for free and not use the term, the NFL continued to complain, saying that showing the Super Bowl on a screen larger than 55 inches represents copyright infringement.

While we, at first, doubted the reality of this, Ben Austro sent in the fact that it is, indeed, spelled out in copyright law that once you get above 55″, you may be talking about a “public performance,” though, as Ben notes, the wording sounds like it was clearly written by a lobbyist. No matter what the law states, this seems ridiculously short-sighted by the NFL. It’s hard to see how they lose out in any meaningful way by not allowing groups to watch the Super Bowl together. Of course, now that this particular quirk of copyright law is getting some attention, how long will it be until the MPAA starts cracking down on those of you with really big screen TVs from showing movies in your home theaters. What was a joke just a few months ago may become real.

This sort of over-the-top legal silliness has given me yet another reason to avoid having anything to do with professional sports. Although many sports can be enjoyable for good exercise or recreation (as I have experienced through participation in my fair share of backyard football games over the years), the corporatization of the major sports leagues, ridiculously high salaries demanded by players, lack of any real team loyalty, and overall prevalence of greed over common sense took much of the fun out of the games and made it seem pointless to remain a fan of any particular team.

Although I tolerated it through the 1980’s, once I started seeing things like Nike logos on the players’ jerseys and noticed that even college football had become infested with such tripe as the “CarQuest Bowl”, I knew it was time to get out. Sadly, now it seems that the lawyers are taking over as well and further corrupting what was once a relatively wholesome sport.

The original AdBux program released its newsletter for January today. It is fairly short content-wise, but it does contain some interesting tidbits about upcoming features. They are looking at adding a cash rebate shopping program to include in the already successful AdBux offers section that I reported on back in October. Also in the pipeline is support for AlertPay and MoneyBookers payment options; the program currently does payouts via PayPal.

Meanwhile, I can now confirm that the offers are crediting properly and being added to our earnings balances. I have had four such offers that have gone through the 32-day waiting period and have been successfully credited. I have also had two recent offers completed by referrals, which has added another 38 cents to my pending balance.

There never seems to be any shortage of available offers either. When I logged in this morning, there were 232 of them waiting. Not all of them were really feasible for me to do because they required credit cards or some type of hassle that would mean having to cancel memberships in order to avoid recurring billing, but there were still plenty of completely free offers there that were relatively quick and easy.

January 2008

Updates & Announcements

December was one of our biggest months, the payout is at over $40,000 with over 60,000 new registrations. The Cashback Shopping program is almost complete, we’re anticipating it will be ready by the end of this month. The AdBux team is diligently working on new methods of getting payouts on time for this year and we hope to introduce AlertPay and MoneyBookers soon. A lot of you have also asked about the status of the support ticket system and it’s slowly but surely coming. 2008 will be a great year for AdBux! Help us become the #1 “get-paid-to” site online!

December Jackpot Winners Announced

- First place goes to cootas who won 25% of the jackpot @ $199.00!
- Second place goes to pally
- Third place goes to maquessime

To find out the full list of prizes that each winner received, check out the jackpot page.

Incentrum, LLC
665 East Main Street
Lake Butler, Florida 32054

While searching through some Internet news articles, I noticed this article from Mashable.com reporting on a disturbing move by the Australian parliament that forces Internet service providers to block pornographic sites or any other material that the government deems “inappropriate”. Fortunately for freedom lovers, individual users will be able to opt out of the government censorship and still receive unrestricted access upon request.

Although no amount of State censorship could be considered a good thing as far as I am concerned, others have pointed out that this latest insult to our liberty is still not as onerous as restrictions imposed by other countries such as China, where the censorship is so widespread that it often suppresses opposing political views. However, it still gives the government unnecessary power to determine exactly what constitutes “appropriate content” and what doesn’t, while the possibility of governments tracking opt out requests could raise privacy concerns. It also sets a bad precedent that other governments may be encouraged to follow, especially since Australia is considered by many to be relatively free and democratic.

The bottom line is this: no government should be trying to block access to the Internet, period. Things like filtering pornography from children are simply not in the government’s purview, as these issues rightfully belong in the realms of parental choice and individual responsibility. Although the apparently sheepish Australians seem oblivious, it is actually the responsibility of the people in a so-called democratic society to determine what is “appropriate content” for the government, not the other way around.

Related article: Pornography, Free Speech, and the Internet

Although I wound up writing a “book” of an email to request it, I finally received my first payout from the Owl Post PTR program yesterday. It was not for my entire balance, but I did manage to get most of it:

In case you’re curious, here is the relevant excerpt from my email where I requested payment. The first (unquoted) part was some discussion about advertising and clicking through on the site support links.

Now that you seem to be caught up on November payouts, I would like to put in a payment request for December. Amazingly, I’ve never requested payment at this program since I first joined back in 2004, so this will be my first time. Part of the reason for this is that I have had problems with trying to request payment from the Owl Post site. Whenever I click on the link from there, it launches some sort of Outlook Express application that I can never get to work. I never use Outlook Express and cannot seem to configure it for sending mail, so I have never been able to get a request to go through from the site. It might be a good idea to set up a regular contact form for the payment requests so that we don’t have to worry about issues with different email clients.

Alternatively, you could just do a rotating random payout system where members who reach a certain minimum threshold are paid out for whatever is in their cash balance as long as funds are available. If there are not enough funds available to pay out all members, then those members who have waited the longest (as determined by the date of their last payout or the date that they joined the program for those who have never received a payment) are paid first, and everyone else is eventually paid according to date order.

This would save members the hassle of having to make actual payment requests and would give you a system that would insure an element of fairness even when funds are limited. Members who do not want to be paid their cash balances because they want to redeem for advertising in the future can indicate this in their interest section or profile (many programs allow members to do this by checking or unchecking a box).

Well, this email is starting to get longer than I had originally planned on, so I guess I had better wrap it up. Hopefully your recent progress with revenues and payouts will stimulate more interest in the program and lead to an overall increase in the active membership. Now that I’m running an active blog and getting more seriously into Internet marketing, I need all of the advertising potential that I can possibly muster!

Later that day Michele Ballard replied (again, this is only the relevant excerpt):

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Online business network Take the Internet Back, a division of WLPP, has announced the launch of its latest website venture, Bidsnarf.com. It is being billed as a “reverse auction” site, but after studying the program’s rules and FAQ, I have determined that it is effectively more of a raffle ticket and sweepstakes system. The way that the auction works is that the lowest unique bidder on each item wins. In other words, if two people both bid 1 cent on an item, neither would win because the bid is not unique; however, if only one person bids 3 cents on the same item, then that person would win.

The catch here (yes there has to be a catch, considering the value of some of the prizes!) is that in order for people to place bids, they have to register at the site and purchase “bid credits” for $10 each. Each bid credit entitles the member to place one bid. Therefore, in effect bidding on an item is much like buying a raffle ticket for $10 plus a small amount for whatever your guess is for the lowest unique bid price. There are also odds of winning listed for the prizes, which makes it seem more like a sweepstakes or drawing type of system than a regular auction.

Membership in the TIB program is free. Members are awarded profit shares for reading email advertisements and receive cash earnings based on the number of shares owned approximately once per month. Earnings are derived from the sale of advertising at TIB and other businesses that are part of its network. Here is the full update about their latest project:

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Today I received a rather unexpected commissions payment from a PTR program that I joined two days ago, Myster-E-Mail. Although the payment is only 14 cents (PayPal) because I haven’t had a chance to do much clicking here yet, it is always a good sign to see a program owner that is able to pay out so quickly and keep member accounts current:

Sue Roley just sent you money with PayPal.

Sue Roley is a Verified buyer.

Payment Details
Amount: $0.14 USD
Transaction ID: XXXXXXXXX
Subject: commission payment
Note: myster-e-mail

According to the site, the program has about 3,300 current members, which represents a significant potential advertising base. There are some country restrictions on joining; allowed countries include USA, Canada, and most of the European “search friendly” countries with the exception of Italy. For some unknown reason, members from Italy were banned from the program about three months ago. My guess is that there was some kind of cheating ring that was found to originate from this country, but I will probably need to contact the program owner to find out the exact reason.

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In a press conference yesterday, Google executives announced plans for their company to make its most significant investment to date in alternative energy solutions such as solar, wind, and geothermal power.

They have put together a project called “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal”, with the goal of eventually producing electricity from sources such as solar and wind power at a rate that is cheaper than traditional coal-burning plants. If successful, Google’s initiative hopes to reduce the cost of solar power by 25 to 50 percent. More specifically, their overall goal is to produce one gigawatt (one billion watts) of electricity from alternative energy sources over the next few years, which would be enough power to supply a city approximately the size of San Francisco, California.

Google’s recent foray into the alternative energy field is being motivated by a combination of philanthropic desire and the search engine giant’s need to power its ever-growing array of computing centers. By moving from a consumer to a net producer of energy, Google could also realize substantial profits by selling surplus power to other entities or by selling licenses to use any new technologies that are developed as a result of their investment.

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