Do check out my post on how to make a newsletter, my updated download page, and the language of spending money .

Trades in my account: Trading for Dividends!

I recently noted FYI my own stock holdings. I’ve recently added to my own holdings by purchasing some shares in GAIN which has an attractive dividend. I also had a look at Bank of America, picking up some there. I’ve been looking at banking stocks for a while, and wondering if the worst is past or not. It’s impossible to tell. But there were a number of factors that I liked in BAC: it’s not the only bank I’ve looked at, I’m also looking at Citibank, and RBS and, of course, HSBC in Asia. Banking stocks are somewhat undervalued at the moment, and will come back in price. A friend was suggesting looking at picking up Citibank and AIG shares… Both of these recently took hits.

EntreCards: New Features, New Blogs and Free Credits!

I’ve been an EntreCard User for quite a few months, but the recent news about EntreCard has been quite interesting. Overall, in the two months since I started using EntreCard has become my second largest source of referral traffic. They aren’t always the best quality traffic clocking in an average of little over 60 seconds on the site! But that may be that my site isn’t well optimized yet, esp. for drive-by traffic like that!

Anyway, EntreCard are now allowing users to add a blog to their pre-existing account. I’ve already added an extra account, and I’ve funded it with some credits, too. It’s quite easy to do. They’ve also announced a new e-book that explains what EntreCard’s all about. And they’re promoting it by giving away 2000 free credits on their EC Blog ! I’m already in, as you’ve noted!

New President in Taiwan: Ma Ying-Jeou is the 12th president of the Republic of China

Two months after the presidential election in Taiwan, the new president was sworn in today. You can check the news yourself. Of course, the local stock markets are down on selling the news. You can read the Taipei Times article on his inauguration day nerves. He doesn’t mix metaphors very well: but I can imagine that’s just nerves.

Ma described his feeling yesterday as “treading on thin ice and standing on the edge of an abyss.”

Last.FM - How are you discovering music these days?

It’s not often the words on InvestorBlogger prove right, and I’m not really one to tell people that “I told you so!” But for those of you reading last year’s blog post on the changes at Pandora.

I have been following Last.FM for sometime, but hadn’t realized how much it had grown in scale, scope and funding. While it doesn’t have some of the finesse of Pandora, it is a very good social music discovery service, one that I’m enjoying very much. I’m glad that I will be able to add that to my online listening site. It also has great links to smaller CD retailers who are happy to serve those outside traditional continental US. While the founder of Pandora regretted that closing his sites meant cutting off loyal listeners (as I was).

He seemed to suggest that international listeners were listening illegally - well, it’s not that at all. International listeners are now finding other companies that can supply music legally through Streaming Radio, Legal Downloading (from smaller retailers), sites like Last.FM, and much more. It seems that, unless the Big Four music companies and their lackeys do something soon, they will lose a generation of listeners to their music, while empowering a whole rash of local, national and international music providers who are hungry, competitive and LEGAL.

So that’s it… Comment on this post or any of my posts (they’re all open)… I’ll comment in reply and follow you back to your blog! Good Luck!

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For more interesting articles on running a business, making money, operating your blog, and so on… It’s all in the Random Walk to Wealth on InvestorBlogger dot com.

© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

Dear Admin,

I recently found that you are republishing my content on your blog in its entirety. Since you have neither requested permission nor even contacted me about this, I must ask that you stop reproducing my content in its entirety IMMEDIATELY. You must also remove the content that is present on your blog, as this constitutes a breach of copyright. MY copyright.

You may produce 50 word summaries, if you wish. I have no problem with that, but you CANNOT reproduce my blog’s content in the way you are doing. I have already gathered evidence of this, and will press this case further if required to do so.

Yours,
Kenneth Dickson

Well, Markus wrote back and advised me:

I’m sorry I bought this address with hosting and never realised there was a blog on it. I’m truly sorry for any problems I may have caused you. It will be permanently removed. (spelling corrected).

The problem is now resolved due to the good graces of the blogger who inadvertently owned the blog after purchasing the domain from someone else. However, I also advised the hosting company through its ‘abuse@maiahost.com’ address, which turned out to be not working (very impressive, MaiaHost) and also through its support page. Less helpfully, their support suggested:

Dear Kenneth,

Can you please issue DMCA notice to us and the other website. With this we
can try to suspend him and make him clean it up.

Venetsian,
Maiahost Support

A DMCA, for what it’s worth, is a bit like opening an egg with a hammer… I thought it would be effective, but I would have preferred a quiet word with the customer first option. At least, I know what a DMCA is, and how to request one. I hope I never need it.

Feed Choices?

I’m now reconsidering my RSS feeds, and wondering whether I should let blogs (yes, blogs…!) reproduce my full feed posts including advertisements and et al., as long as the URLs are all untouched and in place. I already have a copyright notice in place… How do you handle your feeds? Have you ever been splogged?

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© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

David from Taiwan Guide visited the museum on several trips, taking these pictures and these. He was my inspiration to go, so we left. Unfortunately, we were delayed quite a lot by laziness. Then we

Taken in Keelung on the No. 2 Coastal highway, some kms south of Central Keelung. Of course, we hadn’t intended to be here at all, as we ended up taking the wrong route. To get to the area of the south of Keelung, we took the No. 1 Superhighway, and exited in Keelung City. We then followed the No. 2 all the way to the Jiou-fen exit. We had planned to take the No. 62 Expressway, but hadn’t realized that to get on that, you have to take the No. 3 Superhighway! So irony of ironies, to avoid going into the City Center, you HAVE to drive into the City Center on the No. 3, but you can avoid it. By avoiding the City Center on No. 1, you actually end up going through the City. But then we discoved this nice area on the coast, with impressive rock cliffs, low density of population and right by the sea.

Once you find a place to park you can enter the museum property and walk along this charming roadway which I’m told was used in a movie or tv show that I have never seen: City of Sadness.

This is the little Gold Nugget Store with real nuggets in the window. Of course, they’re not worth a lot! Each nugget has a little speckle of gold in it! Great souvenirs~!

By then, the Museum was closed so we headed out… Next time we’ll leave earlier, make a more detailed stopover and take a bunch more pictures!

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© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

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© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

• Upgrading vs. buying new: Bring a new lease of life to your PC experience
• Stimulus Checks: Are you going to go shopping?
• That’s $900 off! Twisting Language in the Stores of America
• Tools for Making Money With Your Blog

On blogging and Tech

• Flickr: My first photostream!
• Buzz #7: Strategist.org.uk - or how NOT to run a blog
• Portable Applications: Easy, Affordable and Portable
• Hacked? It could happen to your site!
• Lesson #2: Finding a Blogging Platform

In Business

• Profile: Ron Sim - Chairman of OSIM International Ltd
• 19th edition of the Carnival of Making REAL Money
• Success online and offline - or how to earn an extra $10K!
• Harley Davidson Launches in Taiwan

On InvestorBlogger

• Finding your publicity on InvestorBlogger!
• April Income 2008 on InvestorBlogger Dot Com
• What advertising works on this blog?
• In-print vs. On-line: What are you reading these days?
• Life on InvestorBlogger: What’s new?
• Little Notes on Life - April 25th
• Some Weekend Exercise: Don’t try this @ Home

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For more interesting articles on running a business, making money, operating your blog, and so on… It’s all in the Random Walk to Wealth on InvestorBlogger dot com.

© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

Splogging is STEALING - Photo***.com is STEALING my content!

Whatever the reason, I noticed two incoming links in my Wordpress this evening, and, out of curiosity, I checked them. This is what I found. You can check the link to the blog yourself.

Anyone recognise the top of the post… It’s one I just posted a few minutes ago! Hmm. So I checked through his archives, and was stunned to find that he has posted quite a few of my posts IN THEIR ENTIRETY…

It seems that the webmaster of Photo***.com/blog is SPLOGGING my blog, and not just my blog, but several others as well. He writes: “I Will try to keep you updated with the latest internet marketing and business news.” Not if I can help it.

Who can say SPLOG?

This guy is literally stealing my content, and reposting it on his blog WITHOUT any attribution, recognition or even polite request. Worse is, there’s no contact address, no way to politely request this guy to STOP or ask him to repost SUMMARIES only.

I know some bloggers are quite happy with this, as it brings extra traffic, extra interest, and extends your influence. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone gratuitously repost my content without a so much as ‘may I…?’.

What would you do?

I have three courses of action open to me this moment… I’m going to look at all of them.

• 1. Slip the feed to summaries only: which would work but would be inconvenient for my readers. (My current choice of action, I’m afraid!).s
• 2. Remove FeedBurner entirely. Although my subscriber isn’t great, I don’t think it would matter that much. I’d have to contact my subscribers to let them know, though.
• 3. Rename my feed, and republish it.
• 4. Accept, publish a ton of links in each header to my blog, and drive traffic to my blog (that would be delightfully evil!).

More Reading

• Spam Blogs and Stolen Content
• What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content

Addendum: This issue has been successfully resolved thanks to the intervention of the Blogger himself. Please read the follow-up post.

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For more interesting articles on running a business, making money, operating your blog, and so on… It’s all in the Random Walk to Wealth on InvestorBlogger dot com.

© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

This page will keep a record of my download and the current feeds that are in it. In edition 1.1 that is currently available for download you can find 20 feeds for downloading in the file.

Downloaded a total of 70 times

This page was last updated on Fri, 16 May 2008 16:29:04 GMT

List of Top 20 Feeds

1. AdesBlog.com (feed)
2. AndyBeard.eu (feed)
3. Blogging with Cents (feed)
4. BluePrint for Financial Prosperity (feed)
5. Caroline MiddleBrook (feed )
6. Consumerism Commentary (feed )
7. Dosh Dosh (feed )
8. *Genius Types (feed )
9. I Will Teach You To Be Rich (feed )
10. InvestorBlogger (feed )
11. John Cow (feed )
12. John Chow (feed )
13. Make Money Online with a 13-Year Old (feed )
14. *NetBusinessBlog (feed )
15. ProBlogger Blog Tips (feed )
16. Super Affiliate Secrets (feed )
17. The Simple Dollar (feed)
18. Timothy Sykes - Stock Trader (feed )
19. Tyler Cruz An Internet Entrepreneur (feed)
20. Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills (feed )

Currently the list is unsorted and I’m considering removing *two links (which I’ll archive here) and replacing them with two new candidates. Since the focus is on providing regularly postings with good quality writing, I’ll be reviewing members on the list regularly and updating the list.

More Recommendations

#1. The Dividend Guy Blog (feed)
#2. KCLau (feed)

Please feel free to drop me recommendations for inclusion, I’ll certainly take a look at them.

Other Posts About Top 20 Feeds

Introduction to the Feeds

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© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

Shifted to Dividend Bearing stocks

That was the biggest shift I made. And it now produces about $100 per month gross (before taxes) for my account, which is not a bad return on the current value. I’m currently holding these stocks in my dividend portfolio, some of which now offer very attractive dividend rates.

I actually don’t know how much sense this portfolio makes for other people, but somehow it is comforting when the stock market is being creamed to check your account and see a regular income in dividends from your stocks. After losing a lot in the dot com crash, I currently find this preferable to picking stocks out of thin air. This portfolio has varied been $11K and $14K in value over the past few years, but with me being over 15% still in cash, the returns have still been quite respectable.

Paying Off Loans

We’ve nearly paid off our car loan, and we’re likely to start making other changes to our personal finances in the coming months. We now are considering paying off our mortgage quicker than usual, and we have several creative options that we are looking at.

With about NT$2.3 million still outstanding, a rising interest rate, it is tempting to shift more money into paying off our mortgage. Clearly considering the opportunity cost is something we’ll have to look at. Do we need the money elsewhere? Our salaries haven’t increased much over the last five years, though our life quality has improved in many ways. Therefore, inflation hasn’t really helped to mitigate our mortgage payment much. Lower interest rates initially helped, but with higher inflation rates creeping through most people are beginning to feel the pinch with higher oil prices, utility and food payments, and mortgages.

In the Biz column

Our business is financially ticking along at a slightly higher notch than in the previous two years, but it still hasn’t generated enough free cash to really amount to much. I had the depressing experience of comparing our financials to a number of companies, and realized that our business, though light in debt, still is relatively under capitalized. We are profitable, we do manage to budget our expenses well, and we are consistently beating budgets, but we are still trying to make up for the last three years poor performance when costs jumped out of control, and sales stagnated (that’s a position I don’t want to be in again, I can assure you!).

So we’re looking at a number of options to boost our business’ coffers, including short-term lending, better term deposit rates, and shoring up income. This should help in the long term, but it’s going to be a few years, before we find ourselves in the ‘healthy financials’ column.

Online Business

It’s been quite exhilarating online to reach the US$10K mark in entire earnings. In fact, that money is now sitting in the bank, earning a pittance. I’m planning to start using the money to generate more money (it’s all part of a money cascade… part of my philosophy!) where trickles of income flow back to create waves, then torrents of cash! Who knows if it will work? Part of the money has already been used to buy a new stock in my portfolio - more details later. More of the money helped open a new CD in my bank at about 2.2% (the best available at the moment in NTD). But the bulk really is just sitting there.

The bigger challenge is finding a real product that I can sell: I’ve had some success as an affiliate for Amazon racking up nearly $1K worth of book sales, and other smaller incomes, but running this blog has proven that it’s quite difficult for me to convert clicks. How difficult? Well, I’ve yet to sign up a single affiliate for any of my hosting plans (BlueHost or Dreamhost); I haven’t any ClickBank sales either. I keep feeling that I should persist with this to figure out the way to do affiliate sales, so that future online business opportunities become possible…

Any suggestions?

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© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

When I first started online publishing, I remember slaving for hours over the HTML, trying to get documents that at least looked consistent. It was a nightmare. Then I tried Mambo (as it was then) now Joomla. I was impressed by the power, the flexibility and the sheer variety of mods. But I was also bemused: it just needed too much juice to do the long articles I had. So I was stuck doing HTML pages for a long time.

I liked Joomla/Mambo but couldn’t find a use for it myself, and it took much too long to do anything simple, esp. on a standard webhosting plan - a shared server. I never consided using it for a blog which is what Blog @ MaguireClan has done!

I am surprised at how far TimeShadowRider managed to develop the implementation of Joomla, including a blog, a forum, stores, and quite a few other features… I wonder how long it took to do all that! But I found that there are a number of limitations that bother me: 1. the site seems a little slow and uneven in download speed; 2. the overall theme/design just isn’t the best, some elements don’t show properly, links don’t work properly all the time, and iframes contents don’t usually match the theme; and 3. bullet points are in the wrong positions for some elements and lists.

I’m curious to know also why TSR didn’t install the Wordpress Joomla integration (which has been around for a while) which would have solved some of the problems that the blog has. There are also options to install MojoBlog. Personally, with WP getting more and more powerful, lighter than Joomla on its server resources, and well-supported, nearly everything you had on the site could have been done in WordPress. I’m sorry but Joomla just doesn’t make a good choice for blogging at the moment. But kudos for trying! I would recommend switching though, as I think you’ll find WordPress more satisfying in the long run. Just my 2c.

If you’d like a buzz, head on over to my BlogBuzz campaign, write your review and buzz me!

In 2007, I started doing a few BlogBuzzes for people, and in 2008 I am continuing my BlogBuzz. You’ll see it is a great way to advertise your blog around the net, and I get my blog seen on your blog… If you’re still interested, drop me a line in the contact form. Do complete the opp first. The buzzes can be short or long, but at least a minimum of 50 words, please!

Yes, it’s time for a BlogBuzz. This time I’m doing it for one of my own blogs:

Actually, most of the content at Obblogatory was originally found at this blog, but I moved it over in 2006 when I decided to refound the whole InvestorBlogger thing. Of course, little did I know what a PR5 meant at that time, and how moving the blog would blow the entire thing up in my face! Oh, well. Such are regrets.

Well, Obblogatory is a general blog with categories as wide ranging as Taiwan, Entertainment, blogging, Shopping and much more… it’s fun to write and I have no expectations it will ever be high profile like this one. But I enjoy writing it. Despite that, I know that there are a lot of improvements I could make:

• 1. Change that header image: I have no way for people to know what the blog’s name is!
• 2. The side bar is a real mess: I have reorganized it several times, and it’s still a mess. Worse: it leaves out important stuff!
• 3. I use almost no SEO stuff at all apart from the friendly URLs… I really have to use tags, summaries and much more. One day, I’ll get around to fixing that.

They say your worst critic is in the mirror, and that’s true! Oh, well. Anyway, if you fancy a more general blog on other stuff, that’s the one! Check it out!

And that’s it for Blog Buzz #11! Drop me a line if you want one! I’ve got two more in the pipeline right now!