My last post was actually post #300 on this blog; while that’s way behind many active bloggers, it seems like a lot to me 
So much has happened this past year and a half that it seems like an eternity ago when I first typed out those fateful first words at http://99zeros.blogspot.com. My blog has been really slow going these past few months since I’ve been really busy… how long will it take me to make it to another 300? 
I happened to look at Blogpulse today and I noticed that my rank is steadily climbing back up. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I posted about last time I checked Blogpulse.
The dynamics of the blogosphere are quite interesting… it sounds like a topic someone could write a book about… hmmmmm
According to blogpulse they are! Here’s the graph of my BlogPulse blog rank; clearly you can see a decline over the past month.
No big deal; blogging isn’t my day job The blogpulse tool is pretty cool though.
Some may remember that at the end of February, I had posted about wanting a tool that would correlate a conversation across multiple blogs into a “hyper-thread”. Well, looks like my requests has been answered in the form of blogpulse. It does exactly what I was looking for; it figures out a cross-blog conversation based on links and compiles it into one place. Now, if only the commenting system were linked into it too so that users’ comments could hang off of the conversation thread on blogpulse. Better yet, what if blogging system were hooked together so that users’ comments were aggregated into their own blogs, and the entire Blogosphere had a view like Blogpulse that included comments? You could then slice the content in the Blogosphere by ideas, hyperthreads or users.
Here’s the hyperthread from my termination post on 2/11.
well, here’s the updated traffic info from my blog. you can see a very slight traffic spike a few weeks ago when news that i joined plaxo hit the press. in general, things are settling down - which is quite nice! now, i can use this blog for its original purpose: keeping friends and family up to date on what i’m up to and my thoughts and feelings in general. looks like there might be a few thousand extra readers, but i’ll just count you guys as a few thousand extra friends 
in related news, since google has done some revision of their adsense rules, i can finally increase transparency of the advertising i’ve been running on this site.
i put adsense up on my blog on 2/9 and for the month of february, i made $194.21. at the time, the ads were only running on the right hand side so it was getting really crappy exposure.
for the month of march, so far i’ve made $133.22. sometime a few weeks ago, i added a second ad unit at the top of the page as an experiment. i figured that clearly the more prominent placement would net me better results; however, click through rates stayed approximately the same though. numerous people have told me how they’ve optimized their sites for adsense. i find it quite interesting that people spend so much time fiddling with the system - the way they describe it, it sounds like a full time job! fortunately, iâve already got a full time job, so i’m not too interested in optimizing my ads.
so in total, that’s $327.43 plus another $60 some odd bucks from amazon going towards celiac disease research
i’m blogging from flickr again; i hope this time the connection between flickr and blogger doesn’t get messed up, resulting in duplicate posts. with the performance of blogger lately, i’m keeping my fingers crossed!
update: well, it got messed up again and double posted. they need to make posting blog entries transacted! (props to my old co-workers at microsoft working on indigo)
many people have asked, so here are the stats for my blog. you’ll notice the huge spike around feburary 9th; i attribute that to news.com and slashdot. the little traffic bump in january was when i had originally unpublished and republished my blog entries. at the time, i was amazed at getting a few thousand hits - little did i know a few weeks later, i would be getting 100k hits.
surprisingly, i had to go to a third party site, statcounter, to get web metrics; blogger doesn’t have any sort of functionality built-in. i had to take a supplied snippet of code and put it my blogger template manually. while this is not a problem for tech savvy users, i’d imagine average users might get frustrated while trying to add a simple counter to her blog.
also, blogger only has built-in support for atom feeds and doesn’t give you stats on that either.
i want stats for my blog! i hope the blogger team is reading
btw, i’m posting this entry from flickr (and they are hosting the graphic above too). i’d heard a lot of great things about flickr and so far, i’ve been impressed. cool stuff, props to ludicorp!
just checked my adsense account today and i’ve already racked up enough money to get paid. as alekkomar mentions in my blog’s comments, my first check goes out to Celiac Disease research. looks like adsense really does work, although i wonder what the revenue share is. i’ve heard people around the web complaining that they don’t make as much as they used to and i wonder if that’s because google adjusted the revenue share or if advertisers are bidding less per click.
either way, my google ads are far outshining the amazon associates links i put up. so far, i think i’ve only made a few bucks on the amazon links.
Hi, my name is Mark Jen. I work for Plaxo. I used to work for Google and before that, I worked for Microsoft. The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here. Enjoy!
