BobBuskirk.com
Yes I Make Money Online

I’m writing this blog post because something interesting happened this past week when I was grocery shopping. I was at Walmart walking down the snack isle looking for some stuff and I walked by a large section of Great Value chips. At first I did not realize that they were the Good Value brand because of the new packaging. Usually when I would see Good Value I would just walk by and get something else, but because of the new packaging I decided to pick up a bag of chips. Its crazy that just because the packing was different I got chips that I would normally not get. I’m sure some of you have done that before too. This really shows how important your company logo is…

Identity
Your logo really is your identity. What do you think of when you see the Nike “Swoosh” or the Apple logo? When you see those logos you instantly think of the brand, whether it is good or bad. Usually when I would think of the Great Value brand I would think of the crappy food. Now with the new logo I think of sort of hip good priced food. The logo really helps the brand I think. That is why you see so many brands that will update their logo after a while to bring more people in.

Spend the Money
Getting a new logo or rebranding something can cost money, but if it is going to get more people interested in your product or service then it is definitely worth the cost. That is why Walmart invested some of their 250 billion dollars in sales and expanded and rebranded the Great Value brand. If you look at some of the before and after pictures of the Great Value brand you will see the difference, which is much more appealing to customers. Branding something is all about the logo so whether it’s for your company or for your blog spend some money on a good logo that when people see it they will instantly think of your brand.

Another month has gone by and as always it went very, very fast. This month was more like a chill month I didn’t get as much work done as I would have liked to, but I still worked pretty hard. Towards the end of the month I really started to get cold here in Pittsburgh that really made me realize that summer is over. I only managed to publish 8 post in September, which was an improvement from August, but still is not what I would like to be posting. Out of those 8 posts my favorite was My G20 Experience. It was a really crazy experience and I never thought something like that would happen in Pittsburgh.

Popular Posts
So what was everyone checking out this month? Let’s take a look…

1. ColorSplash iPhone App
2. Sponsored Tweets – Make Money with Twitter
3. Motivation: Movies
4. Get 1000 Followers on Twitter Easily
5. How To Redirect to a Website

Glad to see some of my new posts getting a lot of traffic.

Traffic Sources

1. Twitter
2. John Chow
3. Facebook
4. Nate Whitehill
5. What Happened at Pitt

Nice to see some new traffic sources up there!

Top Commentators
Looks like I forgot to do this again, I really need to make a script that does this!

Stats

RSS Readers 799 (+41)
Twitter Followers 5966 (+293)
Facebook Friends 1302 (+52)

All of the stats keep on going up!

On to August
Well it’s starting to get cold here in Pittsburgh, that means I will not be going outside as much which means I will be working more on this blog so stay tuned!

If you are anything like me you love finding a great deal online. I’m sure by now if you shop online you know about woot.com and I already talked about HoopStick, which is currently no longer offering items for sale. About a week ago my friend Brittany told me about 1saleaday.com. Which is actually exactly what the title URL says it is. 1saleaday.com offers 1 product a day at a great price and it is only available for 24 hours and they will not sell it again.

Sometimes I am a little skeptical of these types of sites, some can be rip offs others can be scams, but Brittany said she ordered stuff from 1saleaday.com all the time so I decided to give it a try. There was a kitchen set on there that had something like 15 knifes, a knife block, cutting board, 4 different spatchula’s, measuring cups, a bottle opener and more. It was only $7.99 so I figured what the hell, even if the knifes were crap $7.99 for all of that is a great deal!

Shipping for the set was only $4.99 and I was easily able to check out via PayPal. About 3 days later I received the set and for $13 I was very pleased with my purchase. Currently 1saleaday.com actually has 5 different things for sale each day now. They are in categories so you have the generic 1saleaday which can be anything, wireless which is obviously a wireless product, watch which is a watch, family which is anything family related, and jewelry which is of course jewelry.

So if you are looking for a great deal check out 1saleaday.com, they also have a Facebook page and Twitter account so you can follow them.

If you are a Pittsburgh resident you knew that the G20 summit was here last week. If you are not a Pittsburgh resident the G20 summit was a meeting between a group of finance ministers and central bank governors from 20 economies. So basically we had 20 world leaders including President Obama in Pittsburgh for a few days. Downtown Pittsburgh was basically shut down because the Summit was being held at the Convention Center. This was not really a big deal to me since I work from home and really do not have to drive through the city to get groceries or anything like that.

With any major summit like this there is going to be protestors and people who are against the government. Pittsburgh was ready for it bringing in police from many different states to help out and keep Pittsburgh safe. Also with the president in town the Secret Service, National Guard and Coast Guard was here.

Since Pittsburgh has never hosted an event like this I really did not know what to expect, some said there would be 25,000 protestors coming in etc. Well the day before the world leaders started showing up Greenpeace did one of the most creative and peaceful demonstrations that I’ve seen. They repelled down from the West End Bridge and hung a huge banner that said, “Danger Climate Destruction Ahead Reduce CO2 Emissions Now”. The 4 people hung from the bridge for 2-3 hours to get their point across. No one was injured during this demonstration.

Over the next few days I followed the G20 events on Twitter and the local news and it seemed that there were some anarchist groups in Pittsburgh demonstrating. Down in Lawrenceville they protested and were confronted by police, they then decided to wheel a dumpster into police! Things just went downhill from there.

Friday night there was a demonstration down in Oakland and many people were caught in it as the University of Pittsburgh is right there. Many students went outside to see what was going on and were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets by police. I’m sure police could tell the difference between students and protestors, I know that I could! Also Friday night many places in Oakland got their windows broken including Pamela’s which is a local family owned restaurant.

Saturday rolled around and I decided I wanted to check out the action myself. So during the day I went down to Oakland and checked things out. I was first surprised by all of the police in full riot gear on every corner of Oakland. We stayed in Oakland throughout the night and there was a small demonstration going on at Schenley Plaza. After just 15 minutes there had to be at least 300 police in full riot gear surrounding the Plaza.

Not wanting to get tear gassed we moved from the Plaza across the street by the Schenley Memorial Fountain. All together there were 5 of us, me, my 2 friends, and 2 reporters with official press credentials obviously visible. We were allowed to stand over there for about 15 minutes until around 100 police officers turned and started marching our way. Obviously when we saw this we started moving away, but couldn’t they just simply ask us to move? I mean there were only 5 of us, all not protestors and 2 official press.

From there we were told to go across the street and upon going across the street we were told to go back the other way. It seemed like they didn’t even know where to tell us to go. Like I said we were just obvious bystanders. One officer even pointed his shotgun at us and cocked it saying, “You better get out of here”. So we decided to get out of there, we walked across the bridge and cut through CMU to get back on Forbes. We were lucky to get out because everyone who was on Forbes from Schenley Plaza down was surrounded, tear gassed and even shot with rubber bullets. This includes Pitt students, people who were simply observing what was going on, and qualified press. The police even stormed the Pitt dorms and campus arresting anyone that was outside.

If I was a Pitt student I would be quite upset that the Police were able to just come onto my campus and go into residence halls without probable cause. Also the fact that they were injuring and tear gassing many students. And arresting anyone that was outside regardless of what they were doing.

I never thought I would see something like this in Pittsburgh, but it was quite crazy. I really did not feel safe with Police who had nothing better to do than beat up students and shoot rubber bullets at them. Some police officers even had the nerve to take photos with captured students. Overall I think the Pittsburgh Police did a horrible job in Oakland and as a resident of Pittsburgh I am quite upset at what went on. You can view my entire G20 FlickR set here, feel free to use any of the pictures.

Since signing up for Twitter I had used Twhirl as my client. I really prefer using a desktop client over Twitter’s website or other sites. It is nice since I’m running dual displays so I can have Twitter and other related clients on 1 screen and my work on the main screen. When using Twhirl I was only limited to 1 column, which was not bad but since growing my Twitter group it was really hard to follow my friends since I’m following everyone that follows me. It’s just too hard so I wanted a client that I could make a group with, well after asking a few people they all suggested TweetDeck. After 5 minutes of using it I was not impressed at all. So I did a little more searching and stumbled upon Seesmic Desktop.

Seesmic actually started as a video sharing service, sort of like a “Twitter for video”. Early in 2008 they actually acquired Twhirl then a little under a year later they launched Seesmic desktop, which actually integrates both Twitter and Facebook. Just like Twhirl it is based on Adobe Air so it will look nice whether it is on Windows or Mac. Moving from Twhirl to any other Twitter client would take some time to get used to, but after using Seesmic Desktop for just an hour or so I was pretty easy to use.

First let’s talk about the layout. If you like the 1 column layout of Twhirl you will definitely like Seesmic desktop as you can also use it as a 1 column or as many columns as you want. On the left hand side you have your “Home”, “Replies”, “Sent”, and “Favorites”. Then it lists your accounts, userlists, and searches. Moving over you have your main twitter timeline with updates. If you have more than 1 twitter account you are able to view updates from both accounts here. Now if you are a basic Twitter user this should suffice for you.

If you are following a lot of people like I am you know it is extremely hard to follow your friends updates, the timeline goes so fast you miss a lot of things. This is where userlists come in, they allow you to group your friend so you just have a timeline of their updates. In Seesmic desktop you can easily create a userlist then go in and add your friends, or even add friends from the main twitter feed. This was one of the main reasons I switched to Seesmic desktop because it offered userlists. You can have your friends list in a sperate column or have it overlay the main feed when you want to see it. I use it in a seperate column so I can always see my friends updates.

Another powerful thing about Twitter is a search functionality. Seesmic has the search built right in, you can just search at the top right and the search will overlay your main stream or just like the friends list you can make it have it’s own column. All of your searches are saved in the left side unless you close them completely.

All in all I think the Seesmic is one of the most powerful Twitter clients out there. I really haven’t gone over all of its features just the things that I use it for. So if you are looking for a new Twitter client check out Seesmic, you will not be disappointed.