Automating Show Recording

We have a customer who has a radio show, which we’ve been recording and posting up to her website for a while. We were using a Windows box with an ancient version of Replay Radio to do the recording daily, and then every few days we used an audio program to compress the files down in size, and then ftp’ed them up, after which we had to manually go into the database to add them into a list. As you can imagine, a bit time consuming.

I finally got around to automating the process using Linux.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Create a shell script that records the show using mplayer
  2. Create a shell script to stop the recording
  3. Create yet another shell script to upload the file using ftp
  4. Create a php script to check the remote upload folder, and add new files into the database
  5. Create a shell script to run the remote batch checker using curl
  6. Set everything up in cron

Took me a bit of time to get it all right, but that’s going to save a whole bunch of time later on.

I’ll give details in another post if anyone is interested.

QR Tags

QR Tag
QR Tag

The odd looking image here isn’t a Rorschach blot.

Its actually a QR code, something that is old news in Japan, but never quite managed to take off in North America.

In this particular case, assuming you had a QR code reader (in Japan apparently most cell phones do), the image encodes a link back to this website.

If you want one of your own, you can go here to get one: http://www.qrtag.net.

Now I just need to figure out how to get my phone to read them…

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Books You Wish You Hadn’t Read

Ever read a book and then wish you hadn’t? Not because the book is bad, but rather because you realize that somebody has already beaten you to the punch?

What Business Would You Want To Be In?

Quick informal poll:

If you were going to start a business today, what kind of business model would you use?

My personal answer: currently leaning towards some form of software as a service, utilizing some type freemium model. But then so is everybody else, right? I have more to say on this, but want to hear what you think!

40th Anniversary of First Lunar Landing

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon for the first time. The last lunar landing took place in 1972, before I was born. Here’s looking forward to a return.

Quick Boost to Your Twitter Followers

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

#Google: This is amusing and probably unlikely to last. I’ve found that every time I mention Google on Twitter, it gets picked up and retweeted by some automated services, which in turn results in a few more followers. Like I said this probably doesn’t scale and if everybody starts doing it then it will quickly become useless. I just thought it was interesting.

Talk To Me – Sort Of!

I just created a “Cyber Twin”. Basically its a (slightly snarky) chat bot that is programmed to mildly ape my mannerisms.

You can talk to it here: www.mycybertwin.com/jeremylichtman.

It isn’t well trained yet though, so don’t expect too much.

Their more sophisticed commercial level AIs are pretty good at holding down the fort while all of the sales people are busy. Its an interesting idea. Takes a lot of work to train them though.

Google Up To Something Large?

We’ve been noticing a few odd things lately with Google:

  • New sites aren’t getting spidered – or not as quickly as earlier this year. Webmaster tools gives a generic message about the website not being listed in Google’s index, along with a link to a video that seems to mostly be about websites that get themselves banned for violating Google’s terms of service. Also existing websites that are growing aren’t always having the new content added as quickly as before – or rather it happens inconsistantly lately.
  • Google PageRank tools don’t seem to be working any more. I’ve tried a number of them lately.
  • While we’re on the topic of PageRank, it seems to be even less relevant than before. In one controlled scenario where we have many listings showing for a specific search term, a PR5 page is showing on the third page, while much lower PR websites are showing on the first page. Sorry, I can’t be more specific, but it is a fairly controlled scenario. All of the pages involved are similar in size with similar numbers of occurrences of this keyword.
  • Searches are often slow. As far as I can tell, this isn’t just my internet connection. Its been years since I’ve had the Google homepage time out on me.
  • Search listings sometimes change dramatically in short time periods.

All of the above seems to indicate that Google is gearing their entire system up for something big. Speculation among my staff says they’re going to try to make everything realtime (or close to it) in order to compete with Twitter. That means that they’re going to try and reorder all of their indexes very quickly (rather than weekly or possibly daily) in order to try and provide something closer to the immediate zeitgeist that one can obtain through Twitter.

Having some idea of the size of Google’s indices, and a vague notion that the number of servers in their demesne is in the low millions, the scale of this boggles my mind.

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How to Setup a WordPress Blog Properly

Image representing WordPress as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

Over the past few months, we’ve averaged around one new blog setup per day.

Recently, Nathan (one of our SEO experts – see his article on Buddy Press) and I started putting together a list of the standard things that we do after we install a WordPress blog.

The following assumes some familiarity with WordPress. We’ve started playing around with the latest version (2.8), and I suggest that you use that unless there’s a pressing reason not to (i.e. incompatible plugins).

1. General Config

  • Make sure that you have configured clean URLs in Settings -> Permalinks.
  • Under Settings -> Writing, put in additional locations to ping whenever you update your blog. There is a decent list here.

2. Themes

  • We try to make small changes to all stock themes that we use. This means that search engines are less likely to group your site along with every other blog that is using the same theme.
  • Even better: use a premium theme, or make your own one.

3. Plugins

Our objective with plugins is to automate the process of creating quality meta information for blog entries to the largest extent possible, and to make sure that our blogs talk nicely to search engines. We install the following set of plugins:

  • TagThePress
  • TagMeta
  • PingPressFM
  • Google Sitemap (there’s a few good options)
  • Ultimate Google Analytics

Make sure you configure all of the above. You may need to create some accounts in various places in order for some of the above to work.

If you’re running Firefox, we highly recommend installing the Zemanta plugin.

We used to put tag clouds into the sidebars of all new blogs, but if Sitemaps is working correctly that isn’t necessary (and it can take up a lot of important real estate).

4. SEO Stuff

  • Make sure you have accounts for Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Use them. Play around with them. Learn how to use them inside and out.
  • Make sure every new blog has one or two posts containing YouTube videos.
  • Getting the right number of tags per post is critical – we try to hit a sweet spot between 10 and 15 tags for each post. This may change depending on search engines.
  • Make sure that your blog is configured to use different page titles and meta tags for each page. Use HeadSpace if necessary to automate this process.

There’s probably a ton of important things I’m missing here (please let me know!), but this is a minimal list of things that you should be doing whenever you setup a new blog (if you want it to perform well).

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How Much Can a Blogger Earn?

I saw an interesting article via Slashdot today on how much bloggers make. Couldn’t resist throwing in my two cents. The numbers below are based on a wide range of websites that I’ve either run myself, or helped in the creation thereof.

To reiterate something that Evan Carmichael frequently talks about, the amount earned from Google Adwords is equal to the number of click-throughs, multiplied by the dollarvalue of a click-through. Sounds obvious enough, but there’s a huge divergence in the quality of ads, and that is somewhat dependant on the blogger themselves, since Google tries to place ads topically. You’ll see what I mean below.

Let’s talk about traffic quickly first. Building traffic to a website takes a lot of hard work and tremendous patience, which is why many website owners simple throw up their hands and accept whatever comes their way (or try to drive revenue by paying for traffic themselves – which is a tricky proposition for a blog). I’ve seen many websites that have built up to the low thousands of unique visitors per day though, through a ton of sweat equity. Anything beyond that may be a black swan event, so let’s set that as the upper bar of what the average individual can achieve through hard labour.

The value of an ad on a website is largely driven by topic and industry. There are people making higher than average rates using other ad placement systems (or by selling ad space themselves), but Google AdSense is the most accessible system to the average blogger, so let’s use some examples from there. The majority of click-throughs that I get on this site (and others I’ve run in the past) varies between $0.10 and $2.00. In one extreme example, I think I once received $5 for a single click-through. I know of specific topics that pay significantly higher (life insurance being one such).

Click-through rates tend to depend a lot on where people place ads on a page. Having high quality ads can help as well, but since Google tries to tie ads into the contents of a page, bloggers have some control over the sorts of things that generally appear. Spending some time experimenting with placement can have a large payoff. Editor’s Note: I’m guilty here; I do have ads, but I really can’t be bothered where they show up, since ad revenue isn’t what I’m after.

Therefore, the expected average earnings for a statistically significant number of hard-working bloggers could be calculated as being in the following range:

Low End: Assume 1000 visitors per day, 3% click-through rate and $0.10 per click = $3/day or $90/month.

High End: Assume 5% click-through rate and $1 per click = $50/day or $1500/month.

Bear in mind that the above figures are for somebody with average knowledge of how search engines work, a good work ethic, a willingness to experiment, and the patience to build things up over time. I don’t know how many people this covers.

Like I said before though, there’s a black swan or power law effect that’s at work here. What will typically happen is that the vast majority of bloggers will earn next to nothing through ad revenue, a small but well defined set will make enough to make it worthwhile to do full time, and a tiny (and exceptionally well-known) group will make a fortune. Similar to other kinds of creative efforts right? Think authors or musicians.

Disclaimers (I think they’re needed here):

a) I use Google AdWords on this site. I’ve made $10 in the past 6 months. I’m too busy with other things to care too much. I’ve run sites that made $50 to $100 per month in the past, with minimal effort on my part.

b) I know of several people who make a decent living blogging (by decent I mean more than I make!). There are some interesting differentiators between them and other bloggers. They all approach it as a business. Most of them seem to have found ways to make other people do the hard work for them. They also all find real-world outlets (i.e. seminars, consulting, selling product) that neatly tie in to their blogs, in such a way as to create a reinforcing upward spiral of activity. Believe it or not, only a few of the ones I know are “famous” or are active mainstream journalists. The people I know aren’t a big enough set to be statistically significant.

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