Ok, I’ve just recently discovered StumbleUpon.  I know, I know, it’s been around for a while now.  Up until a couple weeks ago, I was just too busy to mess with anything new.  Now I find that if I don’t have anything better to do, I’ll just open up Firefox, hit stumble and away I go.  It really is countless hours of fun.  My only complaint is that I can’t use it with Opera, my browser of choice.  So far I’ve found a few really addicting games such as copter and virus as well as the best web tool ever-well, probably not but it’s still pretty cool though.  Check out the Xinu backlink/PageRank/social networking/ect. tool here.

You can also check out my favorite sites on Stumble at http://sam2k.stumbleupon.com/

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This is kinda cool.  When I first started using Google Adsense a year or two ago, I was using a different online nickname.  Naturally, I used that nickname to sign up for a Google Account to use with Adsense.  Subsequently, I’ve started using Sam2k as my handle.  Yesterday, it occured to me that I should change my email address for Adsense from the old one to a new Google Account that better reflects my identity.  As I searched through the Adsense account settings, I discovered that an Adsense email could only be changed from a regular email to a Google Account email address with now way back. I was stuck!  Just now when I logged into Adsense to check my earnings for the day, I was prompted to update my Google Account if I wished as part of a sytematic cleanup on Google’s part.  This was exactly what I wanted to do in the first place!  And some of ya’ll out there thought Google couldn’t read minds…next you’ll be telling me that Google isn’t powered by pigeons.

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If you’re like me, having used dail-up for years because it “was the only thing available,” I’ve got news for you! Most desperate people living in a DSL-forsaken land turn to a satellite provider for their internet.  There are some problems with this, however.  First, satellite broadband has a high setup cost.  Equipment is fairly expensive and installation if done properly ranges into the hundreds of dollars.  Also, speed is dictated by how much you pay each month-for around $60 a month you get around a 512 kbps connection which you will only see in occasional bursts. Finally, latency is extremely high.  Latency is a measure of how fast data can be sent from your computer to your isp’s servers.  Using satellite broadband, your signal has to travel from your computer to a satellite miles above the earth and then back down to a datacenter. There is an alternative to satellite based internet from HughesNet or Wildblue. What is this solution you ask?

Mobile broadband from your cell phone provider!  I find that many people are not aware of this solution because most cell phone companies market mobile broadband directly to businesses without thought to the fact that many individual consumers would be interested in this as well.  Mobile broadband involves using the high speed data networks that cell-phone companies maintain for cell phones as a broadband connection.  It works by either tethering your phone to your laptop or home computer or by purchasing a standalone modem. There are several benefits to mobile broadband.  

The first benefit is mobility.  You can connect to the internet anywhere you can get a cell phone signal. Setup costs are low.  From AT&T you can receive a modem from free after MiR and you can receive a modem from other carriers for as low as $100.  Installation is as involved as following the prompts on an installation cd and takes as little as ten minutes.  The monthly fee will be around $60 per month just as satellite, but the speed of mobile broadband is not limited by the carrier based on your monthly payment. For $60 a month I usually get 1.5 mbps from Alltel-a connection fast enough for me to network and use on 6 computers at the same time. Also, latency is about half that of satellite based broadband.

Once you decided to give dial-up the boot, hard as that decision can be, you need to decide which carrier to go with. I am personally with Alltel.  I am in their Rev 0 coverage area.  When they upgrade to Rev A my connection will get even faster.  Alltel’s network is fast, but its coverage area is relatively small.  So most will need to choose from Sprint, Verizon, or AT&T.  I have no experience with Sprint or Verizon, so I won’t comment on them.  AT&T’s network can be as fast as Alltel’s in its 3G coverage area, but that coverage area is about the size of Alltel’s.   Using AT&T’s 3G network I see about 1mbps. The benefit of AT&T is that even when your not in a 3G area, you can connect to the EDGE network.  Very few people will tell you that EDGE is fast, but the fact is that it is much faster than dial-up.

So why don’t you join me in giving dial-up the boot!  It’s a wonderful club!

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Who says Google isn’t into practical jokes? Nice try G, maybe on this great day of April you will find your true love in Yahoo.

I haven’t updated in a while because I’ve had so much work to do at school. So much work in fact, that I had to sell Mlinkz because I didn’t have time to run it any more. I didn’t get what I wanted for it, but that is life.

I did do well with Adsense this month though. Roughly $70 total for the month which is a little over twice that of last month. I don’t think I’ll have time for very much over the coming month so it may be a while before I post again. I’ve only got a month and a half left of high school and my teachers are really piling it on.

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Everyone knows that posting on forums with a link to your sites in your sig is a quick and easy way to gain a lot of backlinks quickly. What they often don’t consider is their profile pages. Whether a forum allows guests or spiders to see sigs or not, every post you make has a link back to your profile. Also, most forums have a list of online users on their homepages which has the highest pr. So it is not that hard to get a nice PR to your profile. Just checking out a couple forums that I visit I found that I have profile page that is predicted to be a 4 and a profile page that is predicted to be a 3! Suppose that you visited and posted ten times a day on 10 different forums. In a TBPR export or two you could have 10 strong forum profile back links. You don’t even really have to keep posting to keep the PR. Just pick a new forum and start posting, it doesn’t even have to be a webmaster forum—any will do. There is one small problem, some forums use a robots.txt to tell spiders not to index profiles so check to see if any other profiles from that forum are indexed before going all out.

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U.S. judge in Google case sides with gov’t in part If you’ve seen this story or another one similar to it, you might be as disgusted as I am at the lenghts my American government will go to trample the civil liberties of its citizens. The government has no right to invade the privacy of its citizens in this manner no matter how good the cause.

If I’m disgusted at the government, I’m even more disgusted at the judges that are allowing this to happen. The job of a judge is to protect the american people from both its citizens and its government. It is a bad day indeed when the judges start choosing the government over the first ammendment.

Of course this isn’t completely the government’s fault. I am proud of Google for not bending over backwards when the real G demanded the info, but they should do anything to keep the search data out of the G’s hands. If the judges will not protect us then Google should. Destroy the search data Google, take one for the American people. You can always rebuild, we can’t without a long and bloody war.

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The next time that Google makes an earth shattering announcement on their blog, do your self a favor. When you spread the word by blogging about it, include a link back to Google’s blog post. What this will do is when Google next crawls your site they will find your link to that post, and they will add a link to your blog under thier “links to this post” section of their earth-shattering announcement post.

Now, not only is this going to get you traffic—maybe a lot maybe only a little—but, as far as I can tell, these links will pass PR as well. I just picked a random post from April of 2004 and it has a PR5. How’s that for a free high PR backlink? To get more traffic then pick a really good title for your post which is sure entice readers that are looking for speculation and answers ect.

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The Official Google blog has made a post about their payment processor that they will release at some point in the future. Although vague, there are a couple conclusions that we can draw from the post.

First of all, we can conclude that its not too terribly far off. Possibly even eminant. However, there are two ways of looking at it. Either this blog post was hinting that it will be released very soon, or it was a tease—just trying to get us hyped up over it. Either way it is probably a good strategy.

Finally, I’m going to guess from their description of what it will do, that its not going to do everything that many are hoping it will do. Many, webmasters especially, are already hailing it as a the payment processor that will kill Paypal—a permanent fix to all the evils of paypal’s transaction charges. However, since none of this functionality was mentioned, it suggests to me that Google isn’t interested in moving into that market, and so won’t include those features. If you’ve noticed, the only toes that Google has ever stepped on are those of the US government, and other search engines.

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Well, I’ve gone just about as long as I dare to go without mentioning the pagerank update that we are in the middle of. Let’s just say that its obvious that its not going the way it is supposed to. Either Google has made major changes to their algorithm and they’re in the middle of playing with it, or they’ve broken something and are trying to fix it.

Google has been dancing for more than a month now, but before Saturday it was dancing to Jagger’s tune. On Saturday it started showing new results for *some* sites. This has left many webmasters disappointed because it seems that for the most part only new sites or sites that previously had no pr are gaining anything. This is especially frustrating to the many webmasters who have put many hours into improving pr since the last update.

Some of the webmasters who have sites that have attained pr’s that they like will try to tell you that pr doesn’t really matter and that you are better off worrying about other things, but theirs no real doubt that pr does add value to your websites, plus it is a nice indication of how you are doing.

If the update is finalized the way things are showing right now: MLinkz would stay a 3, Proxert would remain a 0, MasterTheWeb would become a 2, StudentProxy would be a 4, and Display-Ip would become a 3. These results, if finalized, will completely disapoint me. I fully expect Mlinkz, Proxert, and StudentProxy to be 5s, and I expected MasterTheWeb and Display-Ip to be 4s. However, although this is completely inconclusive and just a general observation, my Adsense revenue has actually gone up since the PR dance started on Saturday.

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Elursrebmem-v7ndotcom is reporting in an interesting article—that includes an interview with John Scott and some reported “insider info” from anonymous Google sources—that the TBPR export, that has been long awaited and long overdue, is being held off because of v7n’s SEO contest.

The insider states that Google is using the delay to study the way that SEO’s are working and that is what “Big Daddy” is really all about. He says that the idea for “Big Daddy” came from “Big Brother”. How’s that for privacy?

It may or may not be true, but if Google can be this fickle and actually uses their search engine technology to spy on people, it might be time for Google to fall off their pedestal.

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