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Experiment #8 - Social Bookmarking

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You may have noticed that it has been a while since my last experiment.  Technically this experiment started 12 days ago, but I got sidetracked along the way.

WARNING: The same thing may happen to you if you continue to read this post.


All of my experiments to date had been a lot of fun, but they were all MY ideas of ways to drive traffic to the site and make money.  The results hadn't been too stellar so I decided that it was time to seek the advice of others.

There are literally thousands of "Top X ways to increase traffic...." articles on the web and I started reading them to find the topic of my next experiment.

Social bookmarking was a strategy that was regularly mentioned and it sounded interesting.  I had heard of sites like digg and del.icio.us, but I hadn't actually used them.

For this experiment, I decided that Reddit would be my Social Bookmarking site of choice.



The concept behind Reddit is simple:  The Reddit community is made up of users who are surfing the net.  When they come across something interesting, they share it on Reddit.  Other users will see their recommendation and can checkout the link (thereby driving traffic to your site).

Reditt users (called Redditors) get to vote on whether they liked the link.  When you submit a link, it starts out with a ranking of 1.  As other users read it, they can like it or dislike it.  This causes your ranking to rise or fall.  The higher your ranking, the more easy it is for others to find your post.

Sample Reddit post that had 38 people vote on it

I decided to take my Lady Gaga/Weird Al post and share it on Reddit.  Almost as soon as I hit enter on the Reddit site, my Blogger stats started going wild!  In the few hours after I shared the link on Reddit, I had received 161 page views from countries all around the world.

I did the same with another post and also got very good results (although not quite as good).  Then I started reading through the Reddit FAQ and came across the following...

Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that's all you ever post, and it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer.

I decided that I had to learn more about Reddit before proceeding.  I brushed up on my "Reddiquette" and started sharing links of other sites not related to this experiment.

Each time I went to Reddit, something interesting would catch my eye and the next thing you know 30 minutes had gone by.  I can definitely relate to this post made by opposite225...

I consider Experiment #8 to be my most successful experiment to date.  There appears to be great value in Social Bookmarking and I will be exploring it further; Reddit is just one of the hundreds of social bookmarking sites out there.

I have also come away from this experiment realizing that in order to use Social Bookmarking, I truly need to have quality content - otherwise I'm just a spammer.  Since spamming is not an area I intend to explore, it looks like a large part of my focus will be in creating good, unique content for this site.

Now, if I could only pull myself away from Reddit we might be able to move on to Experiment #9...

Countdown to the PSN Class Action Lawsuit

General Requirements For A Class Action Lawsuit

Enough Plaintiffs - There need to be enough plaintiffs in order to make the Class Action process efficient for the courts.  70 million should be a sufficient number of plaintiffs.

Commonality - All plaintiffs need to be affected in the same way.  The current situation seems to satisfy that criteria.

Class Representative - One of the 70 million impacted customers needs to act as the representative.  With such a large group to choose from, something tells me that this shouldn't be an issue. 

Adequate Legal Representation - According to the American Bar Association there are over one million lawyers licensed to practice law in the United States.  It should not be too hard to find one to represent this case.

Those Criteria Seem Easy To Meet - So Then What?

Once the Class Representative hires the Legal Representation, the Attorney will file a suit with the court and ask that the court certify the case as a class action.  Once the court agrees, the class action is established.

I predict that we will see our first Class Action Suits before the week is out.

>> APRIL 29th UPDATE:

>> It looks like my prediction has come true...

View Article

Timeline History

For those of you who haven't kept up with this story, here is a summary of the update statements made by Patrick Seybold.  I would not want to have Mr. Seybold's job this week.  He is Sr. Director, Corporate Communications & Social Media, Sony Computer Entertainment America.

April 22nd - An "external intrusion" was detected and Playstation Network & Qricity services were turned off the evening of Wednesday April 20th in order to conduct a thorough investigation.

April 23rd - Sincere regret that the network remains down.  Systems must be re-built and further strengthened.  People working around the clock to restore service.

April 25th - No Update on an eta for restored service.  "We'll keep you updated"

April 26th - Emails going out to inform account holders of a "compromise of personal information".  "Clear path to have PlayStation Network and Qriocity systems" restored sometime within a week.

How Serious Is This Latest Admission By Sony?

It is quite serious.  To put it in perspective, 70 Million people represents 25% of the entire population of the United States of America!


How Does It Compare with Other Similar Breaches?

According to datalossdb.org, this will rank as the fifth largest breach on record!

Source: www.datalossdb.org

Lady Gaga Nixes Weird Al's Parody - NOT!

Weird Al Has Been On The Gaga Roller Coaster

I've been a big fan of Weird Al since the very beginning of his career and I have a great deal of respect for his talent as an entertainer.  There are many popular songs from the past 30 years where I only know the Weird Al version of the lyrics - and I am sure that I'm not alone in that respect. 

As a kid I used to listen to his My Bologna and Another One Rides The Bus on the Dr. Demento Show in the early 80s.

In 1984, I was fascinated with the attention to detail that he put into the production of his Eat It video.  His parody was almost a frame per frame replication of the Michael Jackson Beat It video.

I recall interviews from back then where Weird Al mentioned that he asked for and received permission from Michael Jackson.  He didn't have to get permission, but I recall him stating that "his mommy made him".

Fast forward to 2011.  More than 12 million albums sold, more than 150 unique song parodies and Weird Al is still seeking permission from Artists before including parodies of their songs on his albums. 

Really, at this point in time, regardless of who you are as an Artist, it really should be considered an honor that Weird Al wants to parody your song.  In fact I remember one singer commenting that they really feel like they had made it in the business until Weird Al parodied one of their songs.



I've been a fan of Lady Gaga since Bad Romance.  I enjoy her music quite a bit and I appreciate the energy and creativity that she puts into all her performances.  I would stop just short of calling myself a little monster.

When I heard that Weird Al had released a parody of Lady Gaga's Born This Way on YouTube, I was excited to hear it.  The song was great and it was especially nice that the posting had the lyrics displayed so that you could fully enjoy all of Weird Al's creative talent.

Watching the video was a bit of a downer, as evidenced by the following four frames...

I had to find out what was going on.

Weird Al's Blog gave more details under the category GAGA SAGA.

From the Blog...

I was really hoping that this blog entry would be all about me announcing the release date of my new album. 

I wrote and recorded what I thought was going to be the first single off of my new album: a parody of “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga called “Perform This Way.” But after hearing it, Lady Gaga decided not to give me permission to release the song, so… it won’t be coming out commercially anytime in the near future. Sorry.


Have no fear, this story has a happy ending...

After Weird Al posted his video to YouTube, Lady Gaga came to know of the fact that she had decided to not grant permission.  Apparently it was all Lady Gaga's manager's fault.  He is the one who rejected the idea without even telling Gaga (or he's the fall guy once Lady Gaga decided this was bad press).

Either way Weird Al gets his permission and here is the updated post that he made this afternoon...

Well, this was a strange day.

After putting my Lady Gaga parody on YouTube this morning – and announcing that it wouldn’t be on my next album because Gaga didn’t approve it – there was a huge outpouring of disappointment from the Internet. 

Apparently the fact that she didn’t approve it was news to Lady Gaga herself!

Gaga’s manager has now admitted that he never forwarded my parody to Gaga – she had no idea at all. 

Even though we assumed that Gaga herself was the one making the decision (because, well, that’s what we were TOLD), he apparently made the decision completely on his own.

He’s sorry.

And Gaga loves the song.

I’m thrilled on many levels to hear this, because 1) I truly respect and admire Gaga as an artist and it pained me to think of her as having less than a great sense of humor, and 2) it means I GET TO PUT OUT MY ALBUM!

As promised, all my proceeds from the song (and the MUSIC VIDEO… I can’t wait…) will go to the Human Rights Campaign.

Thank you, Gaga. And thanks to everybody who had my back.

Whew!

Your pal,
Al

I think Weird Al is being very gracious.  Personally I think Lady Gaga's manager is a bit of a dummy...

Lady Gaga's Manager Even Gives Dummies A Bad Name

Experiment #7 - Begging For Money

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For this experiment, I decided that I would sign up for a PayPal account and give people the option to donate to this blog.

PayPal experiences vary by country, so what I am describing may not be exactly identical to what you will find.

Which Type of PayPal Account To Choose?

When I signed up, my first dilemma was determining which type of account to choose from.  PayPal offers three different account types: Personal, Premier and Business.  I couldn't find anything that clearly outlines the differences between each account type.

I did find out enough information to let me make my decision.

Personal accounts aren't able to accept credit cards and I wanted to be able to offer the convenience and security of donating by credit card, so the Personal account was ruled out.

Business accounts are geared more towards organizations that require a Paypal account.  This seemed to be more than I needed.

That left the Premier account type, and this is what I signed up for.

Hooking Up PayPal To My Bank Account

After creating my PayPal account, the first thing I did was to link it up to my bank account.  This was easy to do, and I actually made 63 cents doing it!  When you link up your bank account, PayPal will make two small deposits to your account as part of the account verification process.  They deposited 22 cents followed by 41 cents.  2241 became the code that I used to confirm to PayPal that the account was mine.

Creating My Donate Button

The next step was to create a button to include on the website.  PayPal has a wizard for doing this which was extremely easy to use.  Here is the donation button that I created.  You can also see it in the right hand panel of this blog.

Fees

I was impressed to see that if I wanted to transfer funds from my bank account to another person within my country that there should be fees involved. So if somebody donates $1 to me from their bank account or their PayPal account, I would get the full dollar.

If somebody donates from their credit card, PayPal takes a small percentage and they also charge a transaction fee.  The fee works out to be approximately 30 cents plus 3% of the transaction amount.

So for $100 dontation, PayPal would take something like $3.30 leaving you with $96.70.

For a $1 donation, PayPal would take 33 cents, leaving you with 67 cents.

I started to wonder...

What would happen if someone made a 10 cent donation via credit card?  Would PayPal take the remaining 20 cents from my bank account?

I had visions of thousands of people donating 10 cents and draining my bank account.

I looked into ways to enforce a minimum donation.  This definitely seems possible with Javascript and PHP validation.

That seemed a bit difficult for this experiment, so instead I did a test.  I donated 10 cents to myself through my credit card.  I found that PayPal informs me of the donation, but they don't actually put any money into my account for it.  The good news is that they don't take any money out either!!

How Much Do I Expect To "Raise"

To be honest, I don't expect that my donate button will contribute much to the total earnings of this blog - of course it is completely within your power to prove me wrong :)

Time will tell, and as the total money earned in my scoreboard increases, I'll provide a detailed breakdown of all the sources.

At the time I'm writing this post, the scoreboard shows a whopping $5 earned.  63 cents of that is from linking PayPal to my bank account.  The balance is money earned from Google AdSense.

If you're a non-profit with a cause people want to contribute to, this is a handy mechanism to allow it.  Certainly donations do work for some organizations.

Before PayPal suspended Wikileak's account, it had accumulated over $700,000 in donations.

Julian Assange - Founder of WikiLeaks

The personal appeal campaigns of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have also been successful.

Here's a cautionary quote I came across "avoid adding PayPal donation widgets on your website if it’s new or is not popular in its niche as that will only show your greediness for money".

Hmmm, I wonder if a 14 day old blog counts as "new"?

Experiment #6 - Yet Another Try At A Popular Post

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If you've been following the earlier experiments, you know that this will be my fourth post based on a topic that is currently popular on the Web. So far these posts aren't fairing well in terms of Search Engine ranking.

Unless you include the word "mikesblogexperiment" in the search, they don't rank anywhere near the top 100. As a result, traffic to this site remains quite low.

Search Engines 'discriminate' against new Blogs and Websites. To move up in the rankings, two things are important:

1. New and Unique Content

According to many sites on this topic, "content is king". Just do a search for "blog" and "content is king" - you'll find that you get over 1.8 million results.


It is important to continuously publish, and the information that you publish should be unique.  For the duration of this blog experiment, I intend to publish at least two postings per week.

2. Linkbacks

It appears to be a well known fact that quality links to your blog are one of the most influential factors in determining search engine ranking. Having links to your site from authoritative, highly ranked pages will dramatically boost your rankings. 

Once I create my new post, I will search for other sites on this same topic that have discussion forums.  I will post to those sites and include the URL of this blog in my signature line.  This way when search engines crawl those sites, they will see the link to this blog

One of the challenges of commenting on these sites is that you often have to register before you can leave comments. This makes it a very slow and tedious process.  It also means that I have a lot of new IDs and Passwords to keep track of!

3. Patience

Unless you're Charlie Sheen, growing an audience for your new blog is something that takes time.  This is a 365 day experiment.  We're only on day 11 with 354 more days to go - I'm not ready to give up yet.  

Today's Post - Rebecca Black and her Friday music video.

In case you are one of the few people who haven't heard of the latest viral music video, it is from 13yr old Rebecca Black. The video for her song Friday, has received over 100 million hits in the past month. With all these people searching for the video and information about it, this seems like it would be a good piece of content to have on the blog.

Another relatively new blogger tells me that they are getting lots of hits coming through from Google Images and they suggested that I include more pictures.  You will notice that I have included 15 images in my Rebecca Black post which you can view here.


UPDATE:  I recently created another try for a popular post.  This one was about Lady Gaga and Weird Al Yankovic.  I will be creating additional posts and they are really part of this experiment.  I will be updating this post with links:

View my Lady Gaga/Weird Al post

It's Friday, Friday...

Today is Friday April 15th.  Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday.

On Friday March 11, 2011, Rebecca Black's viral song and video had only 3,770 hits on YouTube.

A mere five Fridays later this video has surpassed 100 million views!

Official YouTube Video Just Before It Went Viral

The tune is catchy, but I believe it is the absurd lyrics that skyrocketed this one to fame.  Let's take a look at some of those lyrics...

"7am, waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal"

"Fun, fun, think about fun
You know what it is
I got this, you got this
My friend is by my right
I got this, you got this
Now you know it"

 

Huh??  If that wasn't crazy enough, it goes on to give us an autotuned lesson in the days of the week...

"Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday 

...
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after...wards"

View the full lyrics to Friday here 

Rebecca Black

 
 

So Who Is Rebecca Black and How Did She Get Discovered?

Rebecca Black is a 13 year old from California.  Rebecca's friend, Alana Lee, told Rebecca about a song and video she had recorded with Ark Music Factory.  Rebecca's mom paid Ark Music Factory around $4,000 to record the song Friday and produce the video.  Ark subsidizes the cost of the the production, but retains a portion of the publishing rights.

Rebecca now has her own website: rebeccablackonline.com 

The rapper in the video is Ark Music Factory owner and co-writer of the song Friday, Patrice Wilson.

Patrice Wilson

 

This massively popular video has spawned many parodies...

Conan O'Brien did a parody called "Thursday".

Even Darth Vader has a parody.  You can view it here.  

Darth Vader "wakin up in the morning"

 

I've saved the very, very best parody for last.  

This is much better than the original and I have watched it many times.


Stephen Colbert Performing Friday on the Jimmy Fallon Show

You can also watch the rehearsal here.

7am, wakin up in the morning...

I see my friends...

Which seat can I taaaaake...

Partying, Partying, YEAH!

So chillin’ in the front seat...

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday...

Ladies and Gentlemen... Taylor Hicks!

Yeah!

Ladies and Gentlement... The Knicks City Dancers...

It's Friday, Friday...