Newsbites

Saturday’s News: Payperpost Campaigns, FaceBook, Forbes and NT$

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This week’s been quite an odd week for InvestorBlogger (and me!). It started off with me sitting under an A/C on a cold evening after an unusually warm day. Of course, the next day, I started to feel ‘blah!’… turns out I had probably a viral infection! That has kept me hacking away like a 20-a-day smoker over the last few days! I managed to struggle on, until yesterday when a class of eight 2nd-grade boys was almost too much!

PayPerPost Generates Interest

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Apart from that, I did find time to run my second campaign with PayPerPost. (See the graphic!). I ran it on a Friday, which may not have been the best decision. But I did note an improvement in the quality of the posts after making several tweaks to the language of the post: including a note that I would award tacks on the quality of the posting, and that I would review every post personally.

I was quite horrified by the first post in the first campaign, but the problems have been rectified and overall, I would say that the campaign was a good success. Did it produce any additional traffic? Well, one produced the lion’s share of traffic, but there were seven visitors so far, and over 450 views of the articles. These are the short term results, there will be an additional SEO benefit, and future traffic as well when articles are broadly syndicated and read.

There are some changes I would still make to the next campaign: first, I’d include an image for visual impact, second, I’d try to time it with an announcement, and third I’d definitely rectify the title of the posts problem.

Updated Feed: New Feeds included in the new feed

I’ve managed to find some additional feeds for my favorite Make Money RSS Feeds, which I’ve just added to the download file, but there are still two empty slots… So I’m looking for more suggestions, just drop a suggestion in the contacts page, and I’ll check it out.

top feeds OPML overview

If you’re puzzled who’s in this download, what are you waiting for? There are seventeen, yes 17, great bloggers with lots of things to say about Investing, Tech, Making Money Online, etc.! It’s all great stuff! If you use even 50% of the bloggers suggestions, you’ll be a richer man or woman than Croesus! And it’s free! So if you don’t enjoy the download, I’ll give you double your money back!

IP Rights vs. FaceBook

Yesterday one of my friends ran this great article on FaceBook and your IP Rights. It’s well worth reading if you use FaceBook or syndicate any content there with your permission, or plan to. Here’s a juicy quote:

Facebook forces you to grant it the same rights as you would if you uploaded the content to their servers. In other words, they can change, modify and sell the work without requiring the consent of the creator.

Do read the article. Though my own photos aren’t valuable like Craig’s, I’d like to know that I still have 100% control over where, how and when they appear. This is why I host my photos largely on my own sites, if at all. I don’t think I have the quality yet to show off commercially.

But still they are MY photos. Not Facebook’s. Speak about overarching TOS. If you are going to use FaceBook, limit your photos to very low quality pictures that can’t be used commercially, but look okay on a screen that size. If you don’t upload high quality images, you will not find them being used. So use your commonsense. Just as you wouldn’t walk down the street wearing your finest gold watch for all to see, dressed to the nine’s in your DAKS suit, etc.. so you should remember that being on FaceBook is akin to walking in public, and you can be robbed IP-wise in a number of ways. So don’t wear your finest!

Forbes’ New Billionaires: New Wealth vs. Traditional Industries

And in more general news, Forbes published a new list of Billionaires with some interesting changes. The developing world is beginning to create new wealth, and many of the wealthy-to-be will knock the socks off the old world wealth by the staggering size and speed with which their wealth was accumulated. More interesting, though, was how traditional businesses were overcoming tech wealth as tech fortunes sagged, and more diversified interests did well. Take a look at the latest billionaire’s report on Forbes.

Other changes include the number of billionaires who do not reside in their country of citizenship. But, in Taiwan, there were seven wealthy individuals, all of whom live here: Tsai Hong-tu & family; Terry Gou; YC Wang & family; Tsai Wan-Tsai & family; Douglas Hsu; Tsai Eng Meng; and Barry Lam.

NT$: Inflation vs. Exports

Also, recent weakness in the US$ vs the NT$ has meant a nearly 5% improvement for our undervalued currency here. This largely is the result of the current government keeping the currency weak as a way to increase exports and fend off competition from China. But the direct result has been that increasing commodity prices in many areas has resulted in inflationary pressure in Taiwan on many everyday products and commodities. Most recently, eggs jumped by more than 10% in a few days; flour has gone up hugely, etc.. The government is now strengthening the currency to ease inflationary pressure amid popular demand just before the presidential election on March 22nd. It’s going to be good for a number of reasons, though, as most commodities are priced in US$.

Friday News Bytes: Google, Greenbacks, Salaries, and more

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InvestorBlogger’s newsbytes for this week. We’ve been plugging our new download for several days. I have no idea yet how many downloads there are (I should be tracking that I guess… but I didn’t!). Anyway, we’re up with other news.

First, some great stories since my last newsbytes on the 17th.

Now, I’m making a big think about my new poll: Which of the blogs would you like to see included? To vote or find out more just read the post. Don’t forget you can add another website! I’ll conclude the vote when I have enough votes!

In other news, yesterday’s Taipei Times reported these interesting stories:

Google Reports Flat Ad Clicks

Hah! Well, knock me over with a feather… But when you alienate your advertisers, your web publishers and your bloggers, all within a few months, … it’s hardly surprising that you should begin to feel the effects on your bottomline within a few months. It’s not rocket science, is it? This is a quote that I wrote on a popular forum last night:

While Google may do as they wish with their own index, it seems that their actions are beginning to have a negative effect on their stock price.
Earnings fell short; Adsense has a lot of competition now; Yahoo and Microsoft together could bring significant synergies; PR has caused a huge stink; publishers are up in arms about their cataloging of books without permission; cell phones companies are now watching closely…
The lesson is quite simple: you can’t rub so many people’s noses in **** without their being payback at some point.
Recently Google has looked like it owned the Internet (at least in the eyes of the people who work there), but in reality, Google is just another BEHEMOTH company that has to answer to its shareholders first and foremost. And now the pressure’s on them… hehehe.

Greenback drops below NT$31 (Finally)

And let me say it again… FINALLY. The local government has been holding the exchange rate here at about NT$32.5 to bolster exports by making Taiwan’s products cheaper for the export market. However, this is really stoking inflationary pressure in Taiwan, as commodities (wheat, oil, etc.) are all usually priced in US Dollars.

I bought a loaf of wholemeal bread from 7-11 last month at $35 for a half-loaf. I just got sticker shock today, when I saw that the price had now risen to $45 in nearly one go. Watching the TV news on TVBS or similar stations, prices for many staples are jumping: eggs, noodles, rice, cooking oil, bread, … Unfortunately, for many employees, stagnating salaries are now butting into rising consumer prices, increasing interest rates, and slowing export growth.

So why aren’t we getting salary increases?

Part of the reason is that employers themselves are facing increasing costs and employee-related expenses as Labor Insurance, National Health Insurance, and Pension Costs have all risen in the last few years. Although employers and employees ‘share’ the contributions, everyone knows that this is a ‘fiction’.

Employers’ contributions are simply budgeted differently, and ultimately come out of the same pile of cash as every other expense: their revenue. Since companies need to make a profit, there is simply less money left over for salary increases as the money originally ‘earmarked’ for employees as a salary increase gets paid to the government coffers. It may be ‘accounted’ for differently, but that’s the harsh truth.

And, it seems, people are worried, if the story in the China Post is to be believed.

The majority of office workers in Taiwan are worried about their finances as their earnings are eroded by inflation, according to the results of a survey released yesterday by 1111 Job Bank.

While these facts may be true, the survey also recorded 40.45% of the respondents classed themselves as ‘being in debt’. Wow! With interest rates generally rising in Taiwan, this is not an enviable situation to be in. To help manage their expenses, I’d suggest them to start looking at ways to cut the owed debt, the interest rate, and repay as much as possible as quickly as they can. That tack alone would help to alleviate some of the pressure, and free up additional funds for lifestyle requirements, investing, or other purposes.

In Blog News

I took on a consultancy role this month, helping add a web 2.0 life to a static affiliate-based website by adding a blog. It’s been a whirl, and I’m still waiting to see the outcome. In short, though, I had to set up the initial blog, tweak the settings, choose the plugins, upload the themes, create and add content for the blog (including a blog carnival, posts, and more), create an initial statistics basis for the blog, and begin simple online marketing of the blog. You can take a look at the blog yourself, but I couldn’t get an entire screenshot in. I only had about a dozen hours to work on the blog in the month, but I was surprised by how much I could do in that time, as well as how much work setting up blog actually takes. The focus of the blog has been credit cards and much more .

creditswipes

InvestorBlogger, Plugins and a slowdown!

I’ve also restored the Twitter Plugin from Alex King, which you can see below. I’m trying out several other plugins in right now, but the blog loading times are slowing down. I guess you can take the survey I put out on Payperpost Boards about the number of plugins installed in a typical WP install. I think with 20 or more Investorblogger needs a little trimming again. And the amount of JavaScripts in the sidebar is also similarly increasing. What to trim?

And that’s it for Friday, 29th February. Have a great weekend.

Vote for your top money making feeds! Vote NOW

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Yesterday, I published perhaps my first download in recent years. It was an OPML file of my favorite twelve feeds about making money online. It’s been causing something of a stir on one of my favorite message boards.

In fact, you can still download the file here, and if you need more information, just click on the full post….

One kind poster suggested 19 more additions to the list, which you can find on the message board linked above. I’ve already removed the duplicate entries, and selected five more prominent blogs to be added to the OPML file.

To Vote

{democracy:2}

You can see the poll on the right-hand side of the blog, and there are ten or eleven entries. You can also add more entries as you wish. I’ll be adding the top three slots if they have a high enough number of votes. So, vote away for your favorite money-making blog feeds. And check back in a week’s time for the updated download! Then I’ll be updating the OPML file download, once the poll closes in 7 days.

Kenneth