Snow Leopard … is it a real OS upgrade?

I recently upgraded my notebook from Mac OS X Leopard to Snow Leopard. After exploring it in depth, I started to reckon whether I should consider it as a real OS upgrade or not.

There is no doubt in the fact that Snow Leopard has some really neat features like improvements in the assistive technologies, system preference pane and integration with Microsoft Exchange server. I also believe that Apple has made some under the hood changes to its OS X architecture to improve its overall performance. However, the question is … Does it really qualify for an OS-level upgrade?

To me, it is more like a service pack. Most of this functionality could have been provided via incremental updates over the past two years. It seems that the release of Snow Leopard is more of a marketing move to counter the upcoming release of Windows 7.

For those of you who haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet, I would recommend to wait for a couple of months. I am suggesting this because it has some serious compatibility issues with Adobe suite and device drivers. Like every new release, Apple would require some time to come up with the stable version. Besides that, it is not like real OS-level upgrade, so you won’t be missing a lot.

Making money is a dream for many, but it’s not as simple as many think it to be. It’s as hard as making money offline. There are always many ways you can make money online, you just need to find out what really suits you and where you picture yourself  working comfortably.

There is something for everyone on internet. Whatever you choose, it’s difficult to start earning good money straight away. Put some effort and reward would be furitful. We have included a few sites considered good for earning money.

1. Get Paid to Advertise

Image Credit:OneWeekplan

Google Adsense – World’st most popular advertising program. Make Money from $0.01 to $5.00 plus per click on site relevant ads.

Chitika – Offers various types of advertising to suite your needs. Rated 2^nd best after adsense by ProBlogger.

BulletAds – Performance based online advertising network. Sell ads from $20 to $2000 per ad depending upon the page impressions per day.

Clicksor – Offers Inline text link advertising, underlining words in your posts. We do not encourage new bloggers to use them as readers get irritated.

Text-Link-Ads – Offers you to approve or deny the advertiser links that appear on your site. They pay you 50% of the sale price for each text link sold on your website.

BlogAds – You can sell your blog ads here. To participate in this program you will need to get sponsored by someone in their network.

LinkWorth – Too many options to fit your advertising needs. Choose text based advertisements, sponsored ads and paid blog reviews to appear on your site.

Vibrant Media – Offers in-text based advertisements.

CrispAds – Offers you the access to over six thousand advertisers in their pay-per-click program. You can choose advertisers that suite you the best.

AdBrite – Allows you to approve or reject any ads purchased for your sites. Also gives you the ability to sell ads direct with “Your Ad Here” links.

Yahoo Publisher Network – Offers you to pay targeted ads on your site.

2. Get Paid to Write

PayPerPost – Get paid as much as $500 or more a month writing articles and reviews of their sponsors on your blog.

BlogToProfit – Make $250 dollars or more by writing new posts on your blog.

Creative Weblogging – Write 7 to 10 posts per week for their network and they will pay you $225 per month.

Smorty – Earn $6 to $100 dollars per post you write on your blog. Amount paid for each post depends on the overall popularity and page rank of your blog.

Blogsvertise – Their advertisers pay you to mention and talk about their websites, products and services in your own blog.

Review Me – After your blog has been accepted in their network, they will pay you $20 to $200 per post that you write.

Squidoo – Earn money by writing your new blog, or choose to donate your earnings to charity. Referred by some bloggers.

SponsoredReviews – Offers you to write reviews for their advertisers’ products and services on your own blog. They also charge some transaction fee for their services.

3. Affiliate Networks and Programs

Commission Junction – Offers you good commission on sales in exchange to product promotion by different advertisers.

LinkShare – Offers you the facility to use individual product links on your site and generate revenue from sales.

ClixGalore – Allows you to advertise products from 8000+ advertisers.

ClickBank – Allows you to promote 10,000+ products with huge commissions.

ThinkAction – This affiliate network claims to have the top payouts and the possibility of earning over $100,000 dollars per month which me to seem not real. But do give it a try if you like J

Avangate – Allows you to make money selling popular computer software titles through your site.

LinkConnector – This affiliate marketing network offers a zero tolerance fraud policy to keep you safe while conducting business.

4. Paid Social Media Programs

JustAnswer – Help others solve their problems and earn money for your knowledge.

MetaCafe – Upload your videos and earn money based on the number of views you receive.

Dada.net – Social site with a revenue sharing program that pays you for referring friends and driving traffic.

Jyve – Pays you to provide answers, advice and peer support to people in need of some help.

Cruxy – Specializes in social video, but serves as a venue to sell your digital media.

BitWine – Get paid to give advice and answer questions for people, on subjects of your interests and choice.

Ether – Make money answering questions for your peers over the phone. You set your rates and call availability.

UpBlogger – Social network site that pays you based on the amount of visits you receive to your uploaded content.

ChaCha – Get paid to offer support to members of their community.

AssociatedContent – Earn money by uploading your videos, text, audio and images to their site. Earnings are determined by the exposure you receive from your content.

myLot – Pays you for posting, commenting and using their social network.

5. Earning Money Everyway

Google User Research – Google Pays you money to participate in their user research studies online.

Microsoft Research Panel – Get paid from Microsoft for providing feedback on their products.

Amazon Mechanical Turk – Amazon pays you to complete simple tasks that their computers can’t understand. Payments are a matter of cents.

eJury – Earn $5 to $10 dollars per verdict rendered as a mock juror for practice trials.

WorkingSOL – Get paid to provide technical support for many large comapnies all over the world.

Mahalo Greenhouse – They pay $10 to $15 dollars per site you submit to their directory.

Focus Pointe Global – Get paid to join their focus groups and voice your opinion. Available to teens and adults.

Agloco – Sign up, download their toolbar and get paid to surf the internet. This site has been criticized as a “pyramid scheme”, although the founders deny the allegation.

Arise – Make online money providing support via phone, email and web platform for various companies on this site.

Tutor.com – Tutor people online and earn money.

ForumBoosting.com – Allows you to make money posting in forums.

Share-A-Pic – Share your pictures by uploading on this website.

SlashMySearch – Get paid to search the internet with their search engine.

Yesterday, Google has announced it officially that they will have their Operating System. Google has been competing Microsoft in many ways for quite long now. Google has started various projects over the years including Documents, Mobile, Search Engine and now the Operating System.

This shows that battle between Google and Microsoft is not new. Considering this, Ben Parr from mashable has performed some comparisons between Google and Microsoft, let’s have a look at a few highlights:

1. Google Search Vs Bing Search

Google: Google’s Search Engine is right now the most popular thing on web and has a page rank of 9 plus. There is no other search as popular as Google.

Microsoft: Microsoft earlier had Live search, which nobody really liked except Microsoft. But not long time back they brought the new cool “Bing” search engine. This so far has gone quite well and has made Google notice it.

Result: Google still wins from miles in search engine race.

2. Web Browser, Internet

Microsoft: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is running from ages. 90% of web users still use it. Its heavy and bugs are always easily noticeable. A majority of knowledgeable developer’s worldwide agrees that if people stop using Internet Explorer. Big revolutions can immediately be brought to web browsers. Personally using Internet Explorer sometimes reminds me of old ages in this very fast world

Google: Google’s Chrome is fast, live and growing every day. Google’s OS is also being said to as light as Google Chrome. This browser still misses some important features but Google believes to have a reason for that and will keep adding more taste to it.

Result: Google are ahead now in terms of technology, popularity makes IE win

3. E-mail and IM

Google: Gmail is Google’s best tool as far as instant email communication is concerned. Now with addition of Google Wave it is supposed to be much stronger. It is fast and brought revolution to communications worldwide. GTalk is also very light and is spreading fast.

Microsoft: While Microsoft still has the big picture they have the leading email communication service Hotmail, and the still most used IM “Windows Live Messenger”. So, Google still needs to go a long way to compete Microsoft here. Microsoft has also got the most widely used Ms Outlook Express with a lot of good features.

Result: Microsoft is still very ahead.

4. Operating System

Here comes the big fish now.

Microsoft: Most dominant since the arrival of Windows platform. They generate $60+ billion of their revenue each year from their Operating Systems. Microsoft has brought quite many fantastic GUI platforms to their users.

Google: Google so far has announced arrival of their Web OS. But it’s still to find out what would be so special and challenging in it for Microsoft’s Windows Operating Systems. Being open source for this operating system can be a big advantage over Microsoft in future.

Result: Microsoft is still big winner.

Microsoft vs. Everyone

These were the few main highlights discussed above but Google still have a long way to go, because Microsoft still has everything everyone needs today. Here is a small comparison of some of the other features Microsoft and everyone is providing:

5. Windows Live vs. Facebook

6. Microsoft Office vs. Open Office

7. Microsoft Expression vs. Adobe CS

8. Microsoft Silverlight vs. Adobe Flash Player

9. Microsoft Live Calendar vs. Google Calendar

10. Windows Live Translator vs. Google Traductor

11. Winows Live Mail (Feed, also in Outlook Express) vs. Google Reader

12. Windows Live WorkSpace vs. Google Docs

13. Windows Live Maps vs. Google Maps

14. Microsoft Virtual Earth vs. Google Earth

15. Windows Live Spaces vs. WordPress

16. Zune vs. iPod

17. Zune Software vs. iTunes

18. MSN SoapBox Video vs. Youtube

19. Microsoft Encarta vs. Wikipedia

20. XBOX 360 vs. PS3

21. WorldWide Telescope vs. Google Sky

and the list keeps going. If anyone really wants to battle Microsoft, they have a very long way to go.

Mozilla Firefox has already crossed 6 million downloads. How do we know this? Because Mozilla has launched a real-time tracker, where live downloads are being shown.

Additionally, you can also see how many downloads there have been by any country, currently United States, Japan and Germany lead in this download race.

As this is a big start again, it seems unlikely that the launch will match that of Firefox 3.0 which had 8 million downloads in its first 24 hours. These 8 million downloads also caused a couple of restarts to Mozilla Firefox downloads server. That’s not surprising given all of the hype for 3.0, but still the current marks shows the huge commitment Firefox fanatics still have for the browser.

More to Follow: Top Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Features

Facebook application development entails a very small learning curve. It has its roots in the contemporary Internet markup and scripting technologies. As a matter of fact, if you are a web developer, you only need a few more skills to develop your applications in Facebook. The required front-end skills include XHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Facebook uses its own markup and scripting languages known as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FBJS (Facebook Javascript) respectively. For backend, Facebook has its own version of SQL known as FQL (Facebook Query Language).

Other than technical skills, developers have other challenges when it comes to the social networking paradigm. In order to make their applications reach more users, developers have to come up with innovative ideas and marketing strategies to engage their users.

More to follow…

Germany, the regional court in hamburg has fined file-hosting service Rapidshare a huge amount of $34 million and has further ordered that rapidshare must now filtering certain content. GEMA a copyright protection association happen to be the ones who brought this case to court. GEMA believes to represent 65,000 composers, authors and publishers across the world.

Therefore, the hamburg court rules that Rapidshare is not allowed to make these all claimed music tracks from GEMA’s collection available on the Internet. They have also been ordered to remove all these tracks immediately from there servers and also to stop users from further uploading it to there servers. Now its a challenge situation for the Rapidshare to comply with this rule by court. Because 90% of such files are Zipped, compressed and password protected.

Rapidshare does run such search algorithms already which search through the ZIP files in order to trace copyright material. But since the quantity is in millions so the company will have to make some quick dicisions to further save itself.

Rapidshare is one of the most popular sites on web today, with an Alexa rank of 14 (huge) and millions of unique visitors per month

This is also not the first time such claims have been made against rapidshare, earlier in January 2008 the lost a smiliar case in german court. For this case, Rapidshare will appeal to higher courts and most likely restrict the scope of the decisions made by the Regional Court in Hamburg

]]> http://spyblogger.com/2009/06/german-court-slams-rapidshare-with-34-million-fine/feed/ 0 http://spyblogger.com/2009/06/twitter-marketing/ http://spyblogger.com/2009/06/twitter-marketing/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:23:35 +0000 SpyBlogger http://spyblogger.com/?p=303

A few days earlier twitter has announced in their blog that all twitter users now can only follow 1000 other users each day. This dicision is based upon the regular scam spread on twitter these days.

This dicision may not matter to normal users who just use twitter to get in touch with their family and friends but it will definately matter to marekters or self-promoters to rapidly increase their Twitter follower count by following many people.  Because the strategy of following excessive number of users does matter really. Unlike many may expect people do follow you back which is a positive sign for marketers.

People among who follow such methods are social media enthusiasts or consultants, some are internet marketers or bloggers. All of them are people who want to get something in return. Major focus of all such people are the following things:

1. Money. The goal is to monetize Twitter users by linking and recommending products or services, either their own or others if they are an affiliate. They do this by tweeting out links and sending automated direct messages with the same offers when someone follows them back.
2. Build their Name/Brand. Such followers aim to improve their reputation and build their brand. If you have thousands of followers on twitter that also gives the impression that you or your theme is popular. People tend to follow such people more.  They also use their followers to boost their prominence on other social arenas like Digg or Facebook.
3. Get more visitors. Followers = Visitors, more visitors means more subscribers, readers and contributors to your website. Once you have all these things, you do have a successfull website and more money.

It’s a simple strategy. The more followers you have, the more people listen to you, and the easier it is to spread your messages.

But do you really need a large number of followers to promote yourself successfully on Twitter? The answer is no. Not at all. But many people still persist in mass following users. Let’s look at some of the reasons why you don’t need to use this marketing tactic.

More to Follow ……..