Charles Lau

Well, Darren has convinced me to buy his Problogger Book from Amazon because of his credibility to teach people as a problogger himself. I told everybody that his book was the first item I have ever bought from Amazon. But in just 2 months, I have bought a lot of books from there. And on top of the books I have bought, Darren has even bought me another book from Amazon again from his blog contest!

I have bought these books because I think they are valuable ideavirus to be picked out and apply as an Internet reviewer myself. And by the way, I am planning to spin-off a dedicated internet reviewer blog for my internet reviews. It will be better working around this way since I have non-internet-review-related items to talk about in my blog on the way. It also makes the focus of the blogs better, and thus setting up higher interest and readership for the people.

Talking about re-designing this blog, I have been telling you guys quite a few times already. Some of you even told me about my blog being simple in spite of being a reviewer to Carl Ocab’s blog, and also working on writing reviews for other bloggers.

Learning about internet marketing has been of great interest to me. Outside the realm of internet, I am a great fan of internet marketing and have been preaching everywhere I go. Now, I have a friend who has just branded me as Mr E-Marketing.

I simply love to read these kinds of books as they rush in a lot of ideas for me to try them out and see how they work for me and for anybody out there. It also gives me ideas whether these reviewees are adopting what kind of strategy which is known to be preached outside.

For example, I start to understand some of the things that Etienne Teo did to establish himself at a much faster pace than myself. He’s a great blogger, and I remember seeing him online working really late at night. He is very hardworking and seeks to improve.

Another blogger is Carl Ocab. He knows his stuff and I believe he has quite a good time management to release product launches and working on his online stuff, while having fun out there with his friends.

Another one is Darren Rowse. I think he is really hardworking in making himself to become where he is today. Looking through his brief history, and seeing him working on quite a couple of things online, his book is definitely worthy to become a blog reference.

Well guys, it’s going to be Friday! Have fun and enjoy your weekend soon..

Can you imagine the China earthquake causing so much trouble over there? There are so many people living in China, and an earthquake can take many lives away very easily over there. I just hope things will get better for them as they are going to recover from such a disaster in China. Google is doing its part by helping to raise money to be donated 100% to the organizations.

Here’s a series of photographs that the couple managed to shoot while taking their wedding photographs.

Source from lelandwong. There are more photos over there.

I have both accounts, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. I have been wondering which web albums I should commit myself with. I wouldn’t want my friends to go to flickr to see this album, and picasa for another album. It has been bothering me for almost a week when I was uploading photographs of myself going to Batam recently. While working on the comparison myself, I realize I can write something juicy from my findings to share with all of you here.

Picasa Web Albums
Limitation: 1GB space.
Upgrade Choice: USD$20 per year for 10GB for Picasa or any other Google applications you may have.
Able to display directly on external websites.
Software provided for managing photographs, and to upload to Picasa Web.

Flickr
Space Limitation: Allocation of 100MB usage every month, limited to create 3 Sets (aka Web Albums),
Upgrade Choice: USD$24.95 per year for unlimited space, unlimited sets (Currently limited to 3 sets, which is also known as albums), and video uploads.
Able to display directly on external websites.
Software provided for uploading purpose only.

My Analysis
Seriously, the winner is very clear between them. With a purchase of USD$24.95, I get to upload as much as I want. However, will any average photographer like myself use so much? I thought 1GB is enough to use for now. Anyway, Picasa’s 1GB with full features seems to be good enough for me to organize my photographs properly. Moreover, Picasa has a better software (than Flickr) installed in my computer. I have both of them.

Below is the Picasa software.

Below is the Flickr software.

In terms of software functionality, flickr is purely an upload software for you to upload with ease. No doubt for their upload to be smooth. But it is just for uploading. As for Picasa, it has a lot of functions. It even allows you to do simple editing of the photographs. You can do a slideshow for your photographs, a movie, or even create a gift CD to be burned out for your loved ones.

Now, I am going to talk about the website.

Below is the Picasa website.

Below is the Flickr website.

On the web, Flickr is focusing more on sharing photographs (and now sharing videos). Picasa is focusing more on keeping your photographs online. If you are only looking for storage to keep your precious photographs, I think Picasa will be a better place since they focus on security of your photographs. They allow you to share your photographs to people through emails only. Flickr is focusing on sharing with the community. Flickr is more like a social networking website where you share beautiful photographs. Looks like Flickr is a great place for photograph enthusiasts to gather and check one another out.

Conclusion
If you want to have privacy, picasa is the best choice for you because it allows you to manage your photographs in your computer and to upload to the web to share with the people you wish to allow. Picasa definitely also allows public access to your photographs if you want to. But as far as I know, public photographs are only accessible with the picasa web search. That’s not much of other activities other than to comment on other people’s photographs.

As for Flickr, it is more like a community of photograph enthusiasts. You may have taken a lot of interesting photographs to share in a group. It has a lot of restrictions in terms of creating sets (aka web albums) to store different categories of photographs. Limited 100mb of quota space to upload every month. Paid version simply removes all the restrictions, and allows you to upload video to share as well. Great if you have a hard disk of photographs you want to transfer to.

Google owns Picasa, while Yahoo owns Flickr. Seriously speaking, I believe Flickr might one day merge with Picasa and two will become one… For me, I kept on hesitating when I almost sent my money to Flickr because I kept on thinking of using Google first since I have not much photographs to upload and 1GB is enough for me currently. But anyway, it is really your choice now.

This is a book review of the latest book release titled “Problogger – Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income” from two prominent bloggers – Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. I have just managed to finish reading this book after reading it since 7th May when it was delivered to me. I was so happy that I took a photo out of it, and showed it to Darren and Chris. It seems like everybody is doing the same thing as Darren kept us informed about his readers’ problogger book arrival. And I can “see” them “smiling online” over my joy… Then one day, I saw Darren posting about sharing a photograph and win a prize, and I participated for it with a different photograph. In the end, I won a book of my choice! If you have been with me for a while, you know that I have been buying books since I bought Problogger book. But I have been thinking whether I should get Landing Page Optimization book. In the end, it’s a prize from Darren. Thanks Darren!

Two authors writing a single book is not easy.
First of all, it is not easy for the Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett from two different countries to write a book together. It requires a lot of coordination and getting things to work out nicely. Darren and Chris have written this book in such a way that they contribute individually in certain parts of the book. Although they sometimes identified themselves every now and then, I might as well imagine that there is only one author in this book because it can be confusing to find out who wrote which section. On one part, somebody could be saying about his website http://www.chrisg.com/. On another part, somebody will mention his site is http://www.problogger.net/. There is also one part where they may even cross-reference each another’s knowledge. Nevertheless, it is a good effort done by two authors.

Book Cover Design

This book cover is designed with the main focus of Darren Rowse’s Problogger website. It builds up the brand awareness of this Problogger logo. This problogger logo gives me a feeling that the bloggers are united because of the dots (representing the bloggers) are united by the circle (community). And they all embrace upon learning to become a better Problogger because of the word “P”. The color combination of red and gray is also very nicely matched with the assistance of the word emphasizing “PROBLOGGER” for us to understand. And because the word “PROBLOGGER” is only known to us who have been working on our own blogs, there is also a few words below to help the beginners to understand.

The thought of showing fading letters of a keyboard is supposedly good. But it somehow makes the digital photo on the web look quite “dirty”. But when you have the actual book, it blends very nicely with the whole book.

The whole book appearance is very much similar along with many other books from Wiley Publishing. Somehow, I can identify Wiley books quite easily because they always give me an impression of a very plain look on its cover, and the contents are very comprehensive. Though they may look plain, they have a kind of style which makes them look like a quality book. The rest is really up to the author’s ability to promise quality contents already… Which I think Darren and Chris have done a very good job at it.

When I first look at this book, it looks like a very thin book to read. But it actually contains over 200 pages to read. And the contents can be seen to have been well thought of before they actually write it out. Probably because Chris has quite an experience in writing books before this already? Or probably because Darren has a natural talent at it? Or probably Wiley Publishing gives them a help at it as well? It is simply a book which is perceived not to have been written by a first-time writer.

What I don’t like most about the contents
I took my time to read every word, to savor what they have to tell me. When they were going to explain about the different platforms, I had a bad feeling that the book is probably going towards the same direction as many other blog teaching books I have read. Because just be explaining about the platforms, it can take a lot of pages! I persevered on to read because I have faith in Darren that I can learn something out of it. Ahhh finally… that chapter is over… I am finally being spared from reading this portion. Actually, I am learning something even from the first chapter discussing about what a blog is. It clearly defines what I need to know about. I remember one year ago, I was trying to do my own blog for a while and I simply kept on knocking one wall after another. In the end, I gave up and buy a book to understand further… Frankly speaking, I think that blog author is not really a blogger anyway because I don’t know where he is blogging! And those are probably just theory…

What I like most about the contents
Seriously speaking, I like all the parts of the problogger book except that chapter about setting up our own blog. But I am going to narrow down and force myself to say only one part which I like most. I like the chapter about Blog Writing. It is giving a lot of ideas about writing a post. And guess what? This chapter is just right after talking about blog platforms. Thank God that I managed to pull through that “obstacle”. That chapter is made me understand some of the techniques of the posts which are written by the top bloggers out there. It gives me a very good idea about setting up my blog for the better. My blog writing has been with my experiment of doing trials and errors. I can still remember how I tried to understand the blogging style of Sunny, John Chow, Darren Rowse, Dave Taylor and many bloggers. I did try to imitate their way of blogging in the past. In the end, I don’t feel it’s my style. I tried to write arrogantly like an expert in the past… And I wouldn’t know when my original habit of writing will come back again. In the end, I put down everything and just be myself! Well after reading the problogger book, I got to know some of my shortcomings. Though there is no right or wrong in doing up a blog, there is now a set of things awaiting for me to fulfill that this book has revealed to me.

Bloggers have a different tone of writing
There is a very unique writing style that you will notice when reading a problogger book. Maybe it is just me… But I can feel the two blog voices between Darren and Chris. Probably I am getting used to blogging and reading blogs. I tend to be more sensitive towards the way the person is writing. On top of that, I have heard Darren’s video post. I can recognize his voice. So when I read the book, I tend to “hear” how Darren is teaching in front of me. I don’t really know about Chris’ blog voice, but he gives me a more technical understanding about blogging while Darren is more towards sales which is about writing a good copy. Interesting combination of two bloggers “blogging in a book”.

Conclusion
Some books must be read more than once. But if you are going to be a serious blogger, you have to read it twice or thrice. I took my free time to read this book for two weeks and 3 days. Reading it once, it is telling me about the Internet of what’s happening out there that is not happening in my side. I believe reading it twice will give me a clearer picture as I am still deciding on my blog design and working on building better contents.

Many prominent bloggers out there were mentioned inside the book. But one thing I know from this book is that Darren’s favorite blog is Life Hacker blog while Chris’ favorite blog is Scott Adams’ Dilbert.

Find out Problogger Book now in Amazon.

Google is going to introduce Adsense Ads from 3rd party companies. In Google’s point of view, this is going to help them to bring in more advertisements and thus increasing their income while they don’t have to produce those public ads when there’s no money to be made. It may seem to be a good idea and it is supposedly be a win-win-win situation for Google, Resellers, and our websites. I have some thoughts over it and think it may affect us in one way or another.

Introduction of 3rd Party Ads to Google network has a good initiative from Google and its ad resellers. They not only try to cover the times when there is no advertisements, they help to bring in income for all of us.

To Display Google Ad or Google Reseller’s Ad?
Though it is good to have a lot of advertisements to display throughout the large network of websites, which ad should Google show to the public? Whichever ad is paying more will go first since Google Adwords is a bidding game? As resellers, they are very much more concerned about their ads being shown more than Google’s ads. And as Google account holders ourselves, we would want our ads to show first. Does this mean the price will go up even higher because of bidding?

Is The Money Going To Be Good for 3 parties?
Now with the introduction of reseller, is the money going to be split between the reseller and the website owners so that we are going to make even lesser? Or Google is going to make lesser to give to its resellers? Or they are going to jack up the price to pay the resellers so that the sponsors might as well go to Google instead for a cheaper pricing? Or Google is going to jack up its own pricing so that resellers can make a cut? Or Google is going to increase the bidding game? Or probably the resellers are going to packaged it together with their own advertising resources so that they will make more or less from Google and other advertising resources?

Many growing websites have decided to go for private advertisements because Google Adsense is simply not making enough money for them. Google Adsense is like a number game. You bring in as much traffic as possible to your website, and you wait for those who found the interest in one of your Google ads and click it. While you can only put 3 Google Ads in your website, the money is very much determined in the clicking percentage which is proportional to the traffic you have attracted.

Well, I hope Google will be able to work out something win-win-win situation since they have released the news and implementing it.

Did you know? I won something over at Darren Rowse’s blog when I posted a photo of myself reading Problogger Book from my back. I tell you a secret… Problogger book is my first purchase in 8th April 2008 from Amazon! But since that day, I bought another five books in 2nd May 2008, and then another three books in 19th May 2008. Darren has indeed introduced me to Amazon indirectly! And I have spent a total of USD$200.80 on Amazon in the end…

I was asking my sister to take photographs of me reading the book on my bed and at my desk. After taking two photographs, she just took the book and put it at my back and took another photograph of it. Who knows that her act has caused me to win a $20 worth of book from Amazon! So I will be waiting a lot of books from Amazon…

This recently, I have just joined a company and I have been really busy building up a website proposal as well as working on its new internet marketing campaign. It is pretty interesting for me to work with the marketing team and it’s for me to work on building up my whole career as an internet marketing executive.

Reading through Darren’s Problogger Book, it has definitely brought me to a certain level of understanding of some of the things I have been trying to figure out. I must admit that there is no other blogging book better than his right now. It is just different from other books.

Life is pretty much going on the right track for me since I have joined a company to work on its website project. It seems like my life is more balanced up, though I have even more things to learn and to implement them all. Thank God that there are blogs and books out there to assist me along…

For those of you who have been wondering where’s the new design I have been working on, I must admit that I had a lot of hiccups along the way of my new blog design. And the new Problogger Book came in just in time for me to redirect my blog vision correctly.

Thanks to Sunny for his encouragement. And I wish him all the best in building up his blog credibility. He has all the experience, and I believe he will make it through in no time!

I must also thank the two newly known readers in my blog, NDS Games and Stand Out Blogger for their encouragement in my new design.

There are so many people teaching us how to make money online. Making money online is actually doing small online business in other words. I happen to come across this website called Small Business Brief which I would like to share with all of you about it. I have not really studied through this whole website, but it simply gives me a thought of doing a review on my first impression.

Yes, I have done quite a lot of paid reviews for those make-money-online websites. But this time round, I don’t know anybody from this website. And I think this website is pretty cool and worthy to be mentioned to all of you to find out more about.

This website is simply a bookmarking website where it contains quality contents from all around the world, focusing on small businesses education. Though its motto is to fetch the best small business news, it seems to be focusing more on online marketing news. The packaging is pretty good as a small business news since we are now leveraging a lot on making money from the Internet.

This website reminds me of Guy Kawasaki and his truemors.com. This is where we get to tell the world about what’s worthy to be mentioned about. Both have very similar-looking platforms. But in actual fact, Truemors is using WordPress while Small Business Brief is using Pligg.

Some Statistics
Small Business Brief is purchased for its domain since 30th October 2003. And it has been evolving for quite a while. It seems to be started off as a blog initially. We can see it from Way Back Machine in 2004. According to Google, it has about 123k pages being crawled! By the way, it’s a PR5 website. Alexa also shows that it has a pretty good traffic.

Forum
What really attracts me to this website is its forum. They seem to be talking about the kind of topics I would want to join in to give my share. With its over 26k forum members, we are bound to get to know a lot of people in common doing online business.

Well, they are just my first impression. We will know when I played enough of its things.

I have been reading Problogger book. I should be finishing my reading in 1 or 2 days’ time. But that will be next Tuesday because I am going out to Batam for a short holiday. I know I have been telling you guys that I will be modifying my blog interface. But when I read the problogger book, I do realize a lot of things along the way. I decided to stop my work, and to reorganize myself to do a better job.

This blog has a niche of being an Internet Reviewer to the bloggers and website owners. To some guys out there, I seem to behave like a reviewer out there trying to catch their mistakes, and reviewing them over my blog. Well, I seldom do that though. Some of them actually gave me hints that they enjoy good comments only.

As a niche of portraying myself as an Internet reviewer, I have the opportunity to read other people’s materials. They come freely for me to read, or sometimes I just wish to buy the materials to understand other people’s knowledge. My focus of knowledge surrounds around internet marketing as well as technical aspect of internet. As much as I can, I would like to outsource my graphic designs to the creative guys out there. The focus is more towards the marketing and what website designs suit the best.

Seriously speaking, this problogger book has changed some of my perspective about blogging. And I am going to work out the niches about my work. Initially, I ever thought of coming out an ebook to build up my income sources. Now, I think blogging is the area I wish to work it out to perfect my blogging skills.

Please keep a lookout for my new blog design and new plans as an Internet Reviewer.

Darren was interested to find out how I read his book titled “Problogger Book“. I have been taking my time to read his book. It was a really fun process of understanding problogging after learning and blogging professionally for almost a year myself. Well, I used to blog about my thoughts in the past which I realize it was attracting some interesting traffic which I didn’t know. My idea of blogging today, makes me really focus on my contents now.

These are the places I read Problogger Book.

While I am working, I read problogger book on my working desk. Trying to find out how it applies on my blog.

Before I sleep, I lie down on my bed, continue reading problogger book, trying to tweak my blog and improve on my review works.

While Carl is trying to chase after me for my reviews, I tried to take a quick break. I still dream about problogger book… Sorry, the monitor is too bright hence I off it.

Meatball Sundae is a unique marketing book, written by Seth Godin. I am going to write a review of my experience reading through this book. I was reading this book for the last two weeks whenever I am free. It has given me a lot of new ideas about marketing which many companies out there have been lacking of. This book is written with a lot of examples of companies doing their businesses in various ways which are out of synchronization in his opinion. After reading this book, I am totally convinced of his knowledge and have ordered another three Seth Godin books from Amazon. My first book was The Dip which gives me great insights about excelling in my field. You can find out about this book Meatball Sundae from amazon.

Is your marketing out of sync? This is the question which actually summarizes the whole book. In this book, he discusses about the new marketing and the old marketing. Just imagine when you actually invite somebody to your company for an internet marketing presentation, and he presents to you about blogging and Web 2.0 social media infrastructure which are waiting for your company to dive in. And this person is saying in a way that you should try this and the rest of your competition/structural/profit issues will be disappeared…

Over the last ten years, the Internet and the radical changes in media have provided the marketers with the toolkit to capture attention with seemingly little effort, planning or cash. In fact, the Internet has been seen as a child’s play for many seasoned marketers out there. This child’s play has grown up together with the Generation Y adults (aged between 9 and 31 years old) and it has the kind of exposure that the baby boomers (aged 32 and above) have always wanted. Those baby boomers have always been blocked by the old gatekeepers which became an entry barrier to get their exposure. The gatekeepers such as knowing the right person to tell the whole world, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to television and newspaper advertisements to gain that exposure and also on keeping their inventory. Back in those days, it has been taken for granted if they spent millions of dollars on a certain product which failed eventually, it will simply fold up and forget about it. And if that money was your last straw, you are probably bankrupt by then…

In Seth Godin’s latest book here, he discusses many issues around this marketing synchronization. In fact, it is a wake-up call for many organizations out there to understand the meaning of Internet and to embrace them in the fashion which was not so acceptable currently. Well, in fact, I feel that it is really not easy for these organizations to embrace such changes because of the comfort zone which they have established for so many years. This move involves a lot of employees. And if they have made a wrong move, it may become deadly to the financial situation and the reputation of the company.

Meatball Sundae was a good investment on my part when I was wondering about what is so good about Seth Godin’s marketing knowledge. My only exposure to his existence is with his famous blog which gives some really interesting insights about various ideas. I also enjoyed his marketing presentations in YouTube. This book has determined my interest to pursue more knowledge from him. Previously, I already know he is a great marketing guru. But I just can’t get myself to indulge in his books when I was browsing through in a bookshop. I simply can’t understand his way of presenting the knowledge in a book, but I really love watching his videos on YouTube. He wrote his books differently from other authors. It don’t seem to be really straightfoward, and you have to understand by his quoting of examples.

Meatball Sundae has a squidoo page which is started by Seth Godin himself. This squidoo page actually introduces excerpts of the book. This squidoo page must not be left out if you are a fan of Seth Godin, or you have read his book just like me. It’s like a follow-up of your new knowledge that he has imparted you.

Find out more about Seth Godin’s book about Meatball Sundae here.