I should ask this question probably to Mr. O’Reilly, but since he is not a reader of my blog (anyone who refers him will get a prize of umm….err…US $100! ) I’m happy asking this to you.

How many of you really like those lengthy signup forms? To be honest, I really hate them and I’d love to see someone disagree with me.

Every time I get an invitation to join e a web 2.0 service, the first criteria for me to help decide if these guys are here to stay or not is their length of the signup/registration form. I know what you firefox fans are thinking right now. “Mani, there’s a plugin that will help you fill in all those regularly asked details on any sign up form.”

My friend, you may be right in all senses, but I’m someone who looks at testing services from the most un-coolest perspective. When I test a web 2.0 service, I know no Firefox, I ain’t no CSS guy and I know no Social bookmarking. All I know is that when I use youtube, I can upload my video in “n” number of steps.

Click>Browse>Upload>Tag>Share - that would probably be the shortest process layout I’d accept in a web 2.0 service. Or else, I prefer call it Web-1 or beyond that. Hey I can give you a reference point. Commission Junction, which has been there for quite really a long while, is very web -1. I agree that their concept is awesome and they are one of the premiers for click fraud..errr..I mean affiliate marketing. But have you ever had a look at their signup form?

Man, that is one signup form you don’t wanna fill. It could ask you anything from your grandmas middle name to your first car model. Honestly, that is not anywhere near the web 2.0 bracket.

At the same time, I just love the new concept of short..extremely short sign up forms, where it asks for your email id and name, that’s it. There are cool sites like this one, which doesn’t even require those bare minimum information. 

I think it’s high time companies realized that surfers don’t have that extra time to sign up those lengthy forms, no matter how good the service is. I mean, there is no need for those details it’s just a waste of time.

When we are thinking of innovations that will elevate the user friendliness of a website, elements like this one are missed and spoils the whole show. User friendliness starts right from a visitor landing on a page, it’s not just limited to having a nice shopping cart or price calculator, as many so called web 2.0 services like to believe.

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Have you noticed that Indian SEO’s are looked at with doubt by the rest of the world? A fact it is.

Just to get an idea how serious this issue is, first check out Mr.Seo’s(Joe Balestrino) podcast where he talks about SEO’s in India, and the “problems” he thinks you can run into hiring one.

Joe had a client who had initially outsourced his SEO work to a SEO firm in India and he ran into problems(which is why he approached Mr.SEO). The client complained that the SEO firm in India did not submit projects on time, and did not really communicate anything to him on what is being done. Joe adds on later that outsourcing SEO work to India may not be a good idea.

Well, if you ask me, I can’t agree completely with Joe because he’s talking from a single client’s experience. I think this is a one-off case, and Joe should not completely label Indian SEO firms(outsourcing) as non-credible.

The problems he found with the Indian SEO firm were..

They ere not on time with projects
Were incredibly cheap (So he suspected it was a fraud company)
Did not communicate with the client
Failed in on-site optimization, and rather emphasized more on link-building

Joe’s client was unfortunate, to having selected a poor SEO firm in India. This is not a problem faced due to outsourcing SEO work to India or any other company.
The real problem lies in un educated clients.
Clients sometimes may not know anything about SEO except the fact that they need their site on the top of SERPs. Many a times, they do not agree to the time  we suggest we require and wants to hurry things.

As you may be aware, SEO is not a miracle doer, it takes time, lots of time. In fact it’s an on-going project may a times rather than a “Start, okay, done” project. Search Engine rankings does not stand forever, they change as algorithms change. Unfortunately many clients are not aware of such things and blindly need SEO firms to..

- Get their site on the top asap.
- Make it stay there forever.
- Cannot stretch on time and
- Need guaranteed results.

I think with such unfair demands from an ignorant client, black hat SEO’s can grow easily. And which is what might have happened in this case.

As Joe’s observation goes, the client had copied articles from Amazon and other sites (which explains his motives), so there were lot of supplementary results in the site, which the Indian firm did not find out. And they rather focused only on backlinks. Joe further says that the Indian SEO firm did not let the client know as to where the backlinks came from. Which is a fair comment. SEO’s should let the clients know where the backlinks are from and firstly, why they need backlinks.

When ignorant clients are a reality (like this case), it could also be a fact that, Indian SEO’s don’t communicate well with the clients, making things tough.

But I don’t think it’s a healthy practice to label “outsourcing SEO work” as dangerous just because they are cheaper. Rather, efforts should be made to educate clients on why they need SEO, what can be done to help them and what cannot be.

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Okay, everybody is complaining about the new Safari for windows. We have to wait until the full patched version of Safari gets out. Meanwhile, here are a few things you can do with your Firefox browser to make it look like Safari.

1. iSafari theme for Firefox - This is a cute safari like theme for Firefox, that will mask your favorite firefox in Safari skin. So much for the wait. Safari theme for Firefox
   
2. Jumpback feature of safari on Firefox - Safari has this cool feature called Jumpback where you can follow as many links to pages from a search result, and when you want to jump back to where you started, just click the small jumpback icon on the url bar.
   With this little addon, you can incorporate the same feature on Firefox.
   
3. Progress bar on URL bar - Another feature about Safari is that the progress bar is combined with the url bar. With this little plugin you can create the same effect on Firefox.
   

That’s it. The above three steps will help you convert your firefox browser to sleek Safari. There may be a few glitches though. It should keep you busy until the all new patched version of Safari is released.

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Tired with all those monetization techniques? If you’ve tried pay per click, pay per impression, pay per reference etc and is making nothing more than a few cents daily, then good news! You have one more option to try - Pay per link advertising.

Well, the method seems very impressive. You place links on your blog/site, and advertisers bid for your ad spaces(link -spaces may be) and just for placing the links you get the money(80% of the revenue). Yes, not for the clicks on them or the referrals you generate but merely placing the link. This sounds more like the text link ads right? In fact it is. Text link ads works in a similar manner but they dint have this fancy name. Did they?

Now let’s see how effective this model is.
It took me 3 tries to get registered because every time i gave in my website name as “http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com” the AJAX powered registration page couldn’t identify it as a valid url.So i ended up with two invalid domains under me(dailydoseofinternet.com,www.dailydose4me.blogspot.com). Finally i made through - and the first impression i got was that the AJAX code should be sharpened at the site. This has nothing to do with the advertising part - still a valid point.

Your applications are subject to review and will appear on the list of publishers. Your google pagerank and daily hits will be flashed to the advertisers as well.But i could not find any criteria that will allow you to search for a publisher(if i was an advertiser that is). All it gives me is a search bar that will allow me to search for websites by url,pagerank and category.If you remember the url,isn’t approaching the webmaster directly a better option? Anyway we all are in the game, so kudos to the idea.

Now, i managed to get the code to place the links on my site only to realize that this is just not possible and i’m gonna make no revenue whatsoever.They gave me three different codes for the link - one is ASP,one in C#, one in PHP and one in VBnet.Which one would you pick? No matter what, it wouldn’t work on the blogger code.Let me know if it does on the wordpress ones.

Nevertheless, the idea seem to be cool - to be paid 80% of the revenue by just placing a few links on your blog (after all you got lots of blank spaces there). If the guys made a better platform, it should work out very well.
====================UPDATE========
I just happened to talk to their sales rep/client service team(regarding some difficulties/errors on the site), an email tennis basically - proved that they are awesome guys there - they included the blogger code option in just hours after i reported it to them.Good guys to be doing business with.

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Meet Hamad Darwish - called “Ehh Dee” out of love - he is the man behind the stunning Windows Vista wallpapers. He’s basically from Kuwait and has done his Bachelor’s Degree in Radiology from the US. He’s just 24 and is a professional photographer wit some lovely piece of equipment.See his entire photo set collection on Flickr.

Read this interview with Hamad by Long Zheng- where he admits that he was reluctant to take up photography at first, but carried on the legacy from his dad who was a photography enthusiast. And yes, he’s also a Manchester United fan(biggest of them!).

We us appreciate Microsoft for encouraging and selecting less popular creative artists like in this case, and it proves that it is no mistake.

Photo courtesy - http://www.istartedsomething.com

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January was a fruitful month for me. Received the best traffic ever, and most number of links, and a technorati rank boost. Pretty cool. Can i tell you what factors aided it?

1. The iphone theme collection - This post was the best one ever, it pulled the maximum traffic, more than any other post on Dailydose. Everyday atleast a few 50+ landings on the page, from Google searches. (See traffic stats above)I trust that this post was made in the right time, right after the iphone - hype. Techcrunch had reported that Apple is chasing bloggers who are reporting iphone themes, but i have not been contacted by anyone so far. Moreover, this post helped Dailydose break out of it’s Niche, and for the first time got readers from Greece, Europe, Finland, Brazil, and many more fresh territories. An evergreen hit if you ask me! I’m equally disappointed that there had been almost no comments at all despite the good traffic.
2. The second best thing that happened in January is the “Site specific ads” served on Labnol, that caught many bloggers attention. And they wrote about it on their blogs - meaning more links! A few gentlemen(like John TP) didn’t quite think that linking is important - so they just reported it along with John Chows’ ads - I’m still happy - May be i should prune my PR skills so that they link me next time.
3. The third best post in Jan was the Google Translator plugin option - No big deal here, but the post was neat and clean, it really helped a few those who came searching or it. So no big traffic there but very good turn around ratio - a few read it, almost all of them commented, wrote about it/used it.
4. The Adsense Collector’s series also generated decent traffic and got a few links too. Disappointingly only few comments.

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