The whole PageRank issue is confusing for many people. A few weeks ago Google removed PageRank information from its Webmaster Tools service, and this went largely unnoticed by many webmaster and bloggers.

This is a quote from a Google employee in answer to a question about why the feature has been removed.

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

During the past few days Google has been in the process of rolling out the latest toolbar PageRank update. Despite many experts in the search industry discounting the importance of this information, there are others, such as those interested in generating links, either through link exchanges (yes, they still exist) or through “buying advertising”, that consider the PageRank of a site/page to be a significant indicator as to its quality.

It seems to that the only way to stop PageRank obsession is to remove the indicator from the toolbar.

Google rolling out toolbar PageRank update is a post from: digitalizes
NETWORK : Digital Desktop Wallpaper

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One topic I have been reading and hearing more and more about over the past few months is membership sites. A lot of people have been talking about how important membership sites are likely to be in the future. They will provide value to their members, and will also provide a continuous income stream for the membership site owner.

Advertising, AdSense and selling affiliate products are all good ways to earn an income through a blog, but none of these are as reliable as a guaranteed income from paid members. The business model has been tried and tested at many different levels, and, even if you create a membership site that charges $5.00 per month, you can still earn a good income if you have enough members and provide them with information or a service they can use.

Membership Site Mastermind

Yaro Starak is the author of Membership Site Mastermind, a course that will guide you through the process of researching, creating and running a membership site that could earn you residual income for the foreseeable future. The course is due to open its doors in just a few days, and once opened, they will only be open for a few days more.

The course has been designed to last six months in total. During that time you will learn how Yaro created his own membership sites which earned enough money to pay for his house. He will guide you through the whole  process and advise you on the services he has used and the tactics he has adopted to make his membership sites a success.

For those that do not wish to take the full course, or would like a taster of the advice Yaro offers, you can download his Membership Site Mastermind report and have a read of that (you need to supply an email address to get the report). I have done so and found it to contain lots of useful information and advice on how to set up and run a membership site.

At the time of writing this I am thinking about singing up for the whole course as I do have an idea or two up my sleeve. Just by reading the report I have been able to piece together a framework for running a membership site, but the course may just provide that extra bit of knowledge, support and experience I need to guide me through.

Yaro has made available two videos and a podcast. The first video is the Blue Sky video where he talks about ways to find out what the members of your site want before the site is launched, the second is the Slide Show video where he describes how he made $211,969 while travelling the world and the podcast is an interview with Daniel Scocco, who recently launched a $10,000 a month membership site.

Membership Site Mastermind

Membership Site Mastermind – are membership sites the future? is a post from: digitalizes
NETWORK : Digital Desktop Wallpaper

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A little while ago I wrote a short post about Evernote citing 10 reasons why you should use it. Since the post was published I have been using Evernote on a daily basis and believe I have become much more productive because of it. As a result of this (and because my first post was a little weak) I thought it would be a good time to do a more indepth post about some of the features of Evernote and what I like most about it.

The main benefit to me is its ease of use and the ability to store lots of useful snippets of information in one simple program. This includes links, screengrabs, notes, ideas for blog posts, random thoughts and anything else I come across during my working day.

An added bonus is that all of this information is regularly synchronised to a server which creates a backup of my data in case of computer problems and for remote access (one account can be accessed from anywhere as long as Evernote is installed on the device). This proved invaluable a few weeks ago when my laptop died a death and needed to be fully reformatted and configured.

Evernote is available for a number of platforms including Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Sony Ericsson X1 and Windows Mobile. I use it on a Windows Vista powered laptop.

Too use Evernote you need to create an account. The free account is suitable for the needs of most people, but if you require more storage space than the allocated monthly allowance of 40MB, or you would like to go ad free, you can upgrade to a premium account for $5 per month or $45 per year. This will give you a very generous monthly upload allowance of 500MB.

The free version carries a rotating ad in the bottom left hand corner of the sidebar but it doesn’t get in your way or detract from the user experience.

The Evernote interface is very clean, sensibly laid out and free from clutter. Across the top of the screen are the main icons, to the left is the navigational sidebar and in the middle is the work area. The layout is very similar to the classic web page layout of a few years ago. In the View menu are a few options which allow you to open and close elements of the page to suit your personal preferences.

Being an organised kind of guy, the first thing I did was create a bunch of folders (or Notebooks) to store notes for the various projects I am working on. Each of my blogs/websites has its own Notebook, I also have a Notebook for images and I have a Notebook for articles that have been published. You can create as many or as few Notebooks as you like. There is also an ‘All Notebooks’ folder which you can use to access all of your notes on one screen.

At the top of the window are the self explanatory icons which allow you to create new notes, view/edit the attributes associated with a note, email a note, print a note, add tags to a note and delete a note. There are an additional three icons; one is the synchronization button (this can also be automated), the second is the current monthly usage indicator (free accounts get 40MB, which should be plenty for most people) and the last is an icon which opens and closes a list of notes in the highlighted Notebook. The final area at the top of the window is the search bar. This will search every element of your notes including text, tags and titles.

To create a new note just click on ‘New Note’. The note can be edited within Evernote or you can click the grid icon in the top right hand corner to open the note up in a pop up style window. This gives you access to a TinyMCE like editing interface where you can change fonts, colours, add lists, toggle screen size, add hyperlinks, create to do lists and generally take full control over how your note looks.

You can assign tags to each post and give each post a descriptive title. If you do not enter a title, the note will take its title from the first line of text. Not always a great idea if you like to make notes that include snippets of PHP, CSS or HTML.

One of the best things about Evernote though is a cool little tool called ‘Clipper’. When I am writing blog posts I often have to do screengrabs or download logos etc. In the past I used to use a Firefox plugin, but after I shifted my default browser to Chrome I found creating screengrabs a little more difficult. Now, with Evernote and Clipper, it is a doddle.

All you have to do is hit the PRNT SCRN button and drag the Clipper to the part of the page you want to grab. The Clipper can be resized, and as you do so, the Clipper displays its size (and therefore the size of the grabbed image) in pixels. It can even stretched across two monitors!

Once you are happy with the size of the grabbed image, hit return and the image appears inside Evernote. You can then save it to your hard drive or leave it in Evernote for future reference. This little tool alone has been a Godsend. I use it on a daily basis and couldn’t live without it.

That is what I use Evernote for and I love it. But there are a people around who don’t like it and find it a bit buggy. I can’t say that I have experienced many problems with it apart from not being able to drag images to a folder, but after rebooting the app the problem was resolved. A bit of a niggle, but nothing major.

Below is a list of some of the other features of Evernote.

File import – this is something I haven’t used before but I will do from now on. The file importer allows you to import files of particular types (text, HTLM, PDF, MP3, WAV and images) into Evernote, and then automate future updates of those file types to specified folders. I tried it with a couple of PDFs and it worked very well. The only downside to the file importer is that it works at folder level only, and on individual files already stored on your computer.

Paint format – I mentioned a few sentences ago that I had not come across many bugs in Evernote, well, I just have. I am writing the tail end of this post in realtime. I found the paint/ink toggle feature for new notes and tried to get a screengrab using the clipper and guess what – it crashed. And not just Evernote. My whole system crashed and I had to reboot my laptop. Not impressed, especially as I forgot to activate autosave since my last system crash. Needless to say I have now done so and if it happens again I will only lose work completed during the last two minutes, rather than the last hour.

This is the screengrab that caused the crash. The white icon in the top left hand corner toggles the note between a standard note and this version, the paint like version, which allows you to write notes in freehand. You can choose from various pen sizes and ink colours and you get an eraser if things go wrong. This is not a feature I have used before and I don’t really see myself using it in the future, but other people may find it useful.

View in Google Earth – this sounds like a nice little feature but I couldn’t get it to work. The error message reads thus “No notes with geographical data selected. Select other notes and try again.” The problem is there is no guide to help you with the type of data required. I tried a few place names and zip codes but everything failed so I gave up.

Merge notes – another handy feature. To merge notes you have to hold down the CTRL key and highlight the notes you want to merge, then choose Merge from the Notes drop down menu.

File export – you can export notes from Evernote to locations on your hard drive. These files can be saved in one of the following formats – HTML, HTM, MHT or TXT.

To sum up; I have come across a few little bugs during the testing of some of the features of Evernote I don’t use, but I stand by what I said at the start of the review.

I will continue to use it on a daily basis and I would always recommend it to anyone who asked, but I can see room for improvement with future editions (version 3.5 is currently in beta release). But that can be said about almost every piece of software that has ever been released, nothing is perfect; there is always room for improvement and I am sure Evernote will just get better and better with each release.

Get Evernote

Evernote Review – my thoughts after using it for a while is a post from: digitalizes
NETWORK : Digital Desktop Wallpaper

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WordPress 2.8.5 has been released today and it is aimed at making WordPress installs much more secure than they have previously been. During the past few months a lot of WordPress powered sites have been the target of hackers, with quite a large degree of success. This update is meant to put a stop to those attacks. It is therefore recommended that you upgrade.

The main features of the update include

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

WordPress Exploit Scanner is a plugin recommended in the announcement post. If your blog was a victim of the recent attacks, this plugin will scan all files, posts and tables in your database to make sure all traces of the attack have been cleared from your setup.

WordPress 2.8.5 – Hardening Release

WordPress 2.8.5 – Hardening Release is a post from: digitalizes
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A little while ago I bought a domain name which features the name of a famous web application that allows you to tell people what you are doing in 140 characters or less. My intention was to blog about applications, developments and other activities based around the service. As with some of my other well meaning ideas, the project has never seen the light of day.

As a result of this lack of activity and a domain name portfolio that is getting a little out of control, I decided to offload a few domain names I now think I won’t be using. I have never sold a domain name before, so I thought I would play safe and go with one of the biggest players in the domaining market, Sedo.

As a tester, I placed four domains in its database to get a feel for how the system works. I wasn’t expecting the domains to be snapped up withan a day or two and I don’t want to make a ton of money from the domains; I just want to clear some of my clutter.

After the domains had been registered and on sale with Sedo for a couple of days I received the following email:

We are writing to inform you that Sedo has received a complaint of potential trademark infringement regarding the use of the following domain names in conjunction with Sedo services:
t************.***

Due to the famous nature of the trademark contained in the domain at issue, Sedo is forced to remove your domain from the domain marketplace and parking program at this time. This action in no way affects your registration or control of the domain, your Sedo user account or the other domains you have listed for sale or parked with Sedo. However, due to the potential of infringement of a famous mark Sedo must do the following:

- Suspend the domain name from our domain marketplace
- Suspend the domain name from our parking program

Sedo takes great pains to strike a balance between the legitimate rights of domain owners and third party intellectual property owners and require verification of legal complaints before taking any action against a domain listed for sale or parked with Sedo.

If you have any questions regarding this message, or if you believe this action was taken in error, please contact the Sedo legal department at legal@sedo.com.

My very first reaction to this email was utter shock and a feeling of impending doom. But I decided to do a bit more research to see if anyone else had received a similar email. It turns out they have.

In this forum post Mr Flynn has posted a copy of the email he receieved which says basically the same thing. It cites the two domains which have infringed the trademark in question as being featurewindows.co.uk and windowspecialists.co.uk

The part of these domains which is causing the issue is the word windows.

After I read this I felt somewhat at ease and realised that it probably wasn’t the owners of the potentially infringed trademark who had raised the complaint, but it was probably an over zealous in house script at Sedo which was picking up domains which could cause trouble.

I was now once again breathing normally and had had time to gather my thoughts. I decided to query the complaint and wrote to Sedo asking to see a copy of the complaint that had been made against me. I have yet to receive a reply.

There is a lesson to be learned here: I was stupid to have included a recognised trademark in a domain name and should have opted for a variation of it. Some big players don’t seen to care too much about trademark infringement, while others take it very seriously. My tip? Steer clear, company policies can change and building up a site on the back of a trademark may be a good tactic today, but what will to happen to you and your site if the company in question changes its policy a year or two down the line?

Sedo and their trademark infringement email is a post from: digitalizes
NETWORK : Digital Desktop Wallpaper

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For the past few days the internet has been all a flutter over Google’s newest app, Google Wave. The hype has been intense and expectations are high, but few people have actually been able to take it for a test drive, yet.

Google first announced Wave way back in May this year (2009) and since then a team of developers have been working hard on the project. The developer of Wave described it as “what email would look like if it were invented today”. Google describes wave thus:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

On September 30 Google started to send out more than 100,000 invitations to developers who have been involved in the project, the first users who registered and offered to give feedback and select business and university customers from Google Apps.

Chances are you won’t be one of the people to get an early invite, but sit tight, hopefully soon we will all have access.

Stephanie Hannon is the Google Wave Project Manager, she is known as twephanie on Twitter and is using the account to keep people updated with how the roll out is developing.

Some videos from the Google Wave team

Google Wave – will it be the dog’s bollocks? is a post from: digitalizes
NETWORK : Digital Desktop Wallpaper

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Picture Credit : Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

This blog doesn’t get a great deal of traffic at this time, and giving away the exact numbers will cause me a great deal of embarrassment. But if I spent more time blogging rather than tinkering with the design, looking for appropriate affiliate ads and experimenting with WordPress plugins, the visitor numbers could actually increase to something worth writing about.

Getting a small number of visitors does have one plus point – I don’t get many comments to deal with. I read a blog post a few days ago that talked about hiring someone just to handle comment spam. If only.

Most of the comments made here end up in the spam folder, and rightly so. They are just that; spam. It is not the Akismet plugin getting it wrong, it is the Akismet plugin getting it bang on. Most of the comments are along the lines of “great post, I have added your feed to my reader” and come from an email address which ends dot ru. A sure sign that the comment has been automated and the commentator has not really read my post and hasn’t added my feed to their reader. Perhaps these people are using Blog Comment Demon, which I wrote about a few days ago.

There are currently 18 spam comments waiting to be deleted, but before I do that I thought I would share some of them with you. If I were having to deal with hundreds of these every day I would not be a happy bunny.

I added your blog to bookmarks. And i’ll read your articles more often!

Good article, lots of intersting things to digest. Very informative

Please provide detail of funding by program.

Really nice posts. I will be checking back here regularly.

What’s another word for “thesaurus”?

Thank you for another great post.
I look forward to many more entries with high quality info.

Why is it that people say they “slept like a baby” when babies wake up 10 times every hour?

Very nice site!

Read with great interest, very interesting story. Begin to remember, I still started.

Hello, nice post. I just found your blog and I’m already a fan. :P

A couple of the commentators clearly have a sense of humour, but I am afraid their comments have not made it past the gatekeeper.

What is the best thing about running a blog with little traffic? is a post from: digitalizes
NETWORK : Digital Desktop Wallpaper

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People who have just a smidgen of knowledge of SEO (search engine optimisation) have long debunked the assumption that the META KEYWORDS tag offers any value to search engine rankings. In the olden days this wasn’t the case, but now Google has officially announced that it no longer uses the content of the keywords tag when evaluating how a webpage should rank.

Should you even bother having a keywords tag? Probably not. The tag must be close to being completely redundant as all of the major search engines consider many other factors before the keywords tag – title tag, meta description, page content, anchor text, filenames and probably even the humble alt tag are almost certainly given preference over the keywords tag.

Matt Cutts has written a short post on his blog about Google’s announcement.

Finally, confirmation from Google that the meta keywords tag is mickey mouse is a post from: digitalizes
NETWORK : Digital Desktop Wallpaper

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Google has announced a change to the way adverts are delivered to AdSense publishers.

In the past the sole provider has been Google itself, through the AdWords network. The change allows other companies and ad networks, which have been approved by Google, to compete with AdWords advertisers for the spaces available in the AdSense units.

All of the reporting and payments systems will remain the same for AdSense publishers. The same goes for the ad unit sizes.

As a publisher, this means nothing really changes, but it will hopefully mean an increase in revenue as more bidders are able to compete for space on the AdSense network.

The new system will be roled out during the coming months and will initially be available to publishers in North America and Europe.

Each publisher can opt out of the whole network and just accept ads from Google if they wish, or they can block out individual networks.

Some external ad agenices have already appeared in my AdSense account.

AdSense Setup > Ad Review Center > Allow and Block Google Certified Ad Networks > Change

The list I have in my account includes the Google Testing Network and eight others. Blocking any or all of them is fairly straight forward; just follow the on screen instructions.

Many AdSense publishers have experienced quite a severe downturn in income through AdSense during the recent (and current) recession. It will be interesting to see how this develops over time and if it does mean an increase in revenue.

Google allows more ad agencies to publish through AdSense is a post from: digitalizes
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I have just bought the Blog Comment Demon software. It cost $47. Setting it up was simple.

I did some research before I bought it; I read about 20 blog posts and watched a couple of videos on YouTube. Most of the posts had good things to say and the posts that did not have good things to say where not exactly scathing.

What does it do and how can you use it?
Blog Comment Demon searches for blog posts that are related to the search terms you are interested in. The returned results provide you with several pieces of information: the url, the top level domain (.com, .net etc), the domain PageRank, the post PageRank, the type of tag (nofollow, dofollow or unknown), the number of comments already on the post, the number of outgoing links on the page, the estimated publication date and the page title.

The main purpose of BCD is to help you locate blog posts where you can leave comments and gain an inbound link to your own website or blog.

Is it ethical to locate link opportunities using Blog Comment Demon?
In my opinion it depends upon how you use the software. Inside BCD there is an ‘Auto Form Filler’ area which can be pre-filled with your name, your email address and your comment. You can choose to automatically fill in the comment fields on the blog posts you come across or you can hit the ‘fill’ button when you find a blog where you just want to leave a generic comment. If this option is used I would suggest that Blog Comment Demon is being used as a spamming tool.

If, however, you take the time to read the blog post and make a related comment, I would say it is a very useful tool for a) finding useful links b) finding blogs you may not ordinarily come across c) extending your online network.

When I performed my first couple of searches I had a plan in mind; post a few comments to quickly gain an incoming link. What I actually found myself doing was spending quite a bit of time reading other posts. I did leave a comment on some of them, and I added a few of the RSS feeds to my reader. The number of people I follow on Twitter also grew.

This morning, not quite 24 hours after I bought the software, I have made a total of nine comments. Six have been accepted, two and are still awaiting moderation and one has been rejected. The one that was rejected was on a blog I really liked and hadn’t come across before. The blog is related to web design.

Choosing which posts to target
The problem with most blogs is that they use the nofollow tag on comment links, this stops link juice from filtering through to the linked to page. Blog Comment Demon has a ‘tag’ column. It tells you if the blog post page is nofollow, dofollow or unknown. In my tests so far I have come across very few dofollow blog posts (this doesn’t surprise me), but there are plenty that are nofollow or unknown. The nofollow/unknown tags shouldn’t stop you from commenting if the post is a good one, as you could still gain some traffic if you have something interesting to say.

I used the following method when selecting which posts to read – When there were no dofollow posts listed, I ordered the list by PageRank of the top level domain and then extended the ‘Title of Web Page’ column so I could read the full title. If the title sounded interesting and relevant, I followed the link and read the post and made a few comments.

Some of the features of Blog Comment Demon

• Create ‘projects’ for different sites/niches
• Make comments without leaving the program or open the page in a browser
• Change the preferences to make Blog Comment Demon more search engine friendly
• Change the search criteria to suit your needs (minimum PageRank, dofollow only, age of post etc)
• Choose to use a proxy server or use the same proxy settings as Internet Explorer
• Export the search data to Excel

In Conclusion
I was a little concerned that BCD wouldn’t deliver, but I have been very impressed with it so far. I have only been using it for less than a day and haven’t seen the results of its use in the long term, but, as this stage I would highly recommend it.

I will write a further article once I have been using it for a few weeks.

Blog Comment Demon

Blog Comment Demon software review – first thoughts is a post from: digitalizes
NETWORK : Digital Desktop Wallpaper

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