I was just given a beta invite to Socialspark, which I am not sure why/how I got an invite. After a bit of looking around, it turns out that Socialspark is just a spin-off of PayPerPost. In fact, Socialspark is made by PayPerPost’s parent company, IZEA.

It is supposed to provide a social atmosphere that connects advertisers to the people who blog/talk about their brands the most. Mike Arrington did a review over at TechCrunch, he said this is just something that pollutes the blogosphere because instead of bloggers doing open-minded reviews of sites, they are paid to do it. Which I never liked the PayPerPost idea. A person I know, has half their content with PayPerPost sponsored posts.

Technorati Tags: izea, payperpost, socialspark

I don’t buy that fully. The welcome page, talks about how in restaurants you drop your business card in a box or something to win yourself a free lunch. The way Entrecard works is an user puts a small piece of [javascript] code somewhere on their blog, and other Entrecard users click the gold bar at the bottom to “drop their card.”

You gain 1 credit per card you drop, and another credit per card dropped by others on your blog. What then do is use your credits to buy space on other blogs. So you may see something other than an image saying my blog title near the bottom of the side bar, that means somebody paid to advertise on my site.

In the help section, they post a final note on dropping your card. They encourage you to read at least one post and comment before dropping your card. I know I try to read a few lines of the post before dropping my card.

Technorati Tags: entrecard, ad, advertising

I was just reloading my Gmail, and as you can see, something went wrong and didn’t load properly. I just had to laugh. It shows you how much manipulating it takes to have Gmail display the way it does.

At first I was like uh what in the world, then I did some playing around. Firefox has this built-in feature that allows you to wipe out all that fancy styling that is used, and let’s you see what the bare bones HTML looks like. Take a look at Gmail, it gets pretty nasty to look at. No wonder it fails at validation.

Technorati Tags: google, gmail, e-mail

Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I checked with a friend and they could log in fine, how weird is that? Is anybody else having an issue with it? I joined Facebook not too long after it launched, this is the first time I can recall not being able log in due to maintenance. Can you log in?

One thing people tend to not know very widely is that if your browser’s default search engine is Google, you can just type G in your address bar, and boom you are ported to GMail. Pretty snazzy trick, huh? (I actually removed GMail bookmark from my toolbar because of this.) It’s pretty nice if you have a notifier so you don’t have to monitor a tab.

Well, for some reason starting yesterday at work, this trick doesn’t work anymore. When you go to “G”, you are directed towards a search result of g. Yesterday when I started this post, I found nothing in my feed list about this. I am quite shocked. I am also a bit bummed that something occurred which made this nice Easter egg vanish.

Technorati Tags: gmail, google

However, I will probably let it convert some of my music to mp3 once I dig through my library and find the non-mp3s. For a while I was using iTunes for that.

Technorati Tags: conversion, file conversion, zamzar

Say I am a well-known programmer in some language, let’s just say Eric Meyer, I may have a book or two under my belt, but I found a new trick to do. Where would I probably put my finding? My blog. Pushing out a new book for one or two things may not be worth it. But then again we have textbooks with new editions for subjects that always doesn’t have new material, rather new editions that have a few errors corrected, maybe a few new problems corrected.

This could be extrapolated to a larger audience. If you think about it everything that is ever communicated, initiated as an idea. Yes, most things have been based on something from the past.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, jakob nielsen

Technorati Tags: second life

I noticed the search bar this morning, and of course my mind went blank as to what to search for. Just about 10 minutes ago, I sat down at my computer after lunch, and I am still waiting for it to load. I am not Scoble or anything, I have 120 or so feeds, which are mainly news sources, so what is up with the wait time?

Earlier today I did notice it was running a bit clunky, but didn’t think anything of it. Just minutes ago my browser timed out trying to load Google Reader. I am using IE7 on T1 connection. This is the first time in years I got a 404 error from Google.

Is anybody else having problems?

Technorati Tags: 404, 404 google, google, google reader, reader

Now I know I shouldn’t be talking since I don’t have a ton of posts or even a ton of comments on here. But then again, I am not really trying. Yeah, I hit a peak back in February ‘06 when I was blogging on a daily basis, and had a small group of followers. I killed that off because when I asked are you commenting to boost stats for a new comment service, they told me yes.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging