BobBuskirk.com
Yes I Make Money Online

I have not talked about BlogRush since it launched back in September. When BlogRush was first launched a lot of people jumped on, but it had problems. Many blogs were gaming the system and just using BlogRush to get traffic and using it to get traffic to low quality sites. Because of all this BlogRush has improved their system rolling out what they call as Phase2.

A lot of things have been improved with Phase 2. I really like the new dashboard. You get to see syndication credits earned from your traffic, syndication credits earned from your referral network, where your credits come from, referral network, credit balance, credit earnings report, and the stats on your last 12 posts. The 2 things that really come in handy are your Referral network, which shows what level you are at, total referrals, referrals you’ve got in the past week and month. Also I like the last 12 blog posts at the bottom. This shows you your last 12 blog posts, how many times it was syndicated, and how many people clicked the link from the BlogRush widget.

Also they have added reports so you can search a specific time range and see the credits earned, traffic, referral traffic, bloggers in your network, and new bloggers added during that time period. Also it will list the stats for the specific posts during that given time period. This will help greatly to see what people are clicking.

With Phase2 BlogRush has also added more colors and styles to the widget. Before we only had the 175px widget, now there is also a 120px one. With each size you are also given 13 different colors to choose from. What is really cool is with most things if you change the color you have to retype in the code on your blog. With BlogRush all you have to do is click on the add flavor you want and refresh your blog and it will be there.

Finally there are filters. You can stop your posts from being syndicated in the widget by using keywords. You can also do the same for posts that will appear in the widget on your blog. You can also ban blogs entirely from appearing in the widget on your site.

With all of these new features it seems like BlogRush is more useful and they are trying to make it better for the users. If you want to take an in-depth look at Phase2 of BlogRush you can check out the video here, but remember if you want to signup go through my referral link!

Another busy week! As you may have noticed I sort of resurrected this blog. I was not updating that much at all, taking 3-4 day breaks between posts, but that is over. I will be making at least 4 blog posts a week if not more. Once again my biggest problem is time management, but I’m slowing learning to manage my time better. Also I now have a spark of motivation, hope it lasts. Let’s see what’s going on this week…

iPhone used the wrong way on TV
I was reading Pittsburgh’s own Justine Ezarik’s blog and she has a great post about how Hollywood is using the iPhone the wrong way. I’m many shows they are holding up like they are talking, but they are holding it the wrong way! Nice one Hollywood! This also happened on Bionic Woman too!

Crazy Hotel Perks
One of the main reason people pick certain hotels is for the perks, especially if money is not a big deal to you. Luxist has a great list of some of the craziest perks at some of the best hotels out there. Here are just a few, helicopter transfers between the airport, hotel, and shopping (Hilton Sao Paulo Morumbi), an end-of-the-year gift from Tiffany’s for repeat customers (VX Beacon Boston), technology butlers available for handling every gadget crisis from cell phone chargers to internet crashes (Ritz-Carlton). Those are some crazy perks, hotels will do anything to keep you coming back!

The Wii Turns One
The Nintendo Wii is already a year old and it does not look like that Wii craze is going anywhere. It is really a great system and makes gaming fun for anyone not just gamers. It will be exciting to see what new things Nintendo has in store for us in the upcoming year. The holiday season has already seen some great games come out for the system, Guitar Hero, DDR, and Super Mario Galaxy. Happy Birthday Wii!!!

Apple Gets Creative with their Ads
Apple has always been creative with their ads and their latest one is great, you can see the video of it below. I have never seen anyone use the side skyscraper is conjunction with a top ad like Apple has done, great thinking. But I with exception of the iPhone and iPod’s I’m not an apple fan. I love this Dell XPS vs. Mac video! And yes I am a Dell XPS owner!

If you live in the northeast you have probably heard of Quaker Steak & Lube. If not Quaker Steak is a restaurant that is mainly known for their wings. They have a bunch of different wing sauce flavors and you can even buy their wing sauce in grocery stores. The first time I went to Quaker Steak was when I was in high school. Everyone talked about their wing night, where you get unlimited wings in any flavor you want. After that first time my friends and I went there A LOT! Their wings are awesome!

As most of you know I lifecast on Justin.tv. It is a great way to network and meet new people. Through Justin.tv I met a guy named Chris and his brother. They both also lifecast. Chris goes to Virginia Tech, but is originally from Akron, Ohio. He is home for the holiday so last Friday Ashley, her sister amber, and I met up with him. We decided to meet half way and that was in Sharon, PA. We of course decided on Quaker Steak & Lube as the place to meet up.

We left on a Friday afternoon and it had to be one of the worst days to go! It was frigid cold and snowing! I rarely drive, so an hour driving is kind of annoying to me, but we got there alright. The original Quaker Steak is sort of in the middle of nowhere! Like you drive into Sharon, which is like an old run down town and it is just there.

Anyways meeting Chris was really cool. It is weird meeting people you have met online because it does not really feel like you are just meeting them. It feels like you have known them for a long time. I felt the same way when I met John Chow, you can just go into conversation, and there is no weird silence or insecurity. For lunch I had some Louisiana Licker flavored wings, which have to be one of my favorites. Chris also got wings, Ashley got chicken fingers, and Amber got a salad. We all had a great time and hopefully Chris can stop down on his way back to school.

I wanted to take the time to wish all of the readers of BobBuskirk.com a Happy Thanksgiving! While Thanksgiving means food and giving thanks to most people a lot of people see it as the day before Black Friday. This year there are a ton of deals so make sure you check out BFAds.net. Now I am debating on whether or not to go out tomorrow morning but if I do here are some of the things that I would be looking at getting…

Logitech MX Revolution Mouse – Best Buy

Sony Vaio NR-Series – Best Buy – $499.99

Acer AL2416WBsd 24-inch LCD Monitor – CompUSA – $249.99

Sharp Aqous 52-inch 1080p LCD TV – Circuit City – $2199

It seems it is just one thing after another with Google. First off a while ago Google slapped people’s pageranks who were using Text Link Ads on their websites. A lot of sites got huge penalties some even going from pagerank 9 to 4! The thing about pagerank is people will pay for that. It is how a lot of advertisers look at your site and how it is gauged. Just this past week Google once again slapped people who use another service rather than adsense, this time it was PayPerPost. It seems they are dropping the pageranks for these sites down to 0!

Then just recently Google has changed their Adsense ads as well. Before the entire ad and surrounding area was clickable, now only the title and URL are! You can see what I mean from the picture below. So if you are an Adsense publisher it is likely that your CTR and overall income will go down. This is killer for people who are dependent on Adsense.

So how do I feel about this? Well I was slapped by Google! ThinkComputers pagerank went from a 5 to a 3 and this blog’s pagerank went from a 4 to a 0! For the longest time I thought Google was the good guy, but now since more of their business is online advertising rather than search it seems like they are becoming that bad guy. They have about 60% market share in search and I guess they think if you are not using their advertising solutions and are using someone else’s they should penalize you! It seems like foul play to me.

Even people who have done link trains and contests on their blogs are being hit, even de-index by Google! So what to do? Should I drop Text Link Ads? I don’t see Google giving me that extra income each month! And if I replaced TLA with one of Google’s stupid link units it would not make anywhere near as much as what TLA makes me. But a lot of bloggers are dropping these services. I’m sure that pisses off TLA and PayPerPost. It seems like Google is forcing people to use their service instead of these alternative services by doing things like lowering pageranks to stop people from using these other services.

Anyone could say stop using Google for search. Even if a lot of people do that they will probably still uphold their market share and c’mon we all know they do have the best search out there. I think their actions will make their pagerank system obsolete and people will really start looking at what they are doing and see the foul play. As you can see from their stock it fell when they implemented the new ads.

I think what I’m going to do is become less dependent on all Google services. I’ve already dropped the main Google ad on this site and I want to drop Google on ThinkComputers. Also I’m not that worried about rankings for ThinkComputers as most of our traffic comes from affiliate sites. If you are pissed at Google you might want to try to use other sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to get traffic. In closing all I have to say is bad play Google…