Utube Followup: They monetized their website (Like I said they should)

Breaking news, Utube has succumbed to the better option (ie: my advice) and monetized their website with a search bar at the top of their homepage. Now you can get instant access to all the wonderful world of poker / dating & xtreme travel.

At least utube have chosen a smart, professional looking & unobtrusive option without losing too much integrity. The search bar only appears on the homepage & search pages. The only problem with this approach is that it appears this type of monetization doesn’t quite cash in on the video traffic they will be recieving. Thereare no video links or other various other video-targeted strategies I would have imagined. For example, if we were searching for a video of the latest internet hype, Chaccaron, the netflix results return a terrible no results page instead of something that may direct me to a video site, any video site. The only other results I get from searching with utube are Poker ads, which are like the scourge of the internet (even if they do pay well).

I think utube has succeeded in the look & feel of their monetizing efforts, but the execution will leave a lot to be desired. At the end of the day if they leave it like this, they wont make nearly as much money as I predicted they could.

Hosting Madness

Purchasing website/file hosting is sometimes like gambling. You win some, you lose some. (And in fact, some lose the lot) .

A few months ago I took a gamble and signed up to DreamHost, one of the most popular and widely used web hosting companies on the internet. I didn’t really know why they were so widely used and popular – they had a bad webpage and it all looked to good to be true.

I ended up signing up with a promo code and paying something incredibly low like $50 for a whole year of hosting with a free domain name thrown in. That price included 20gig of space and 1000gb of bandwidth! Insane. Not to mention every single week it goes up in gigabytes of space & bandwidth! Even crazier!

Now you wont believe what they did last week. Try: “Hey lets double everyones bandwidth” and “Hey lets give every 10 times more space.” No Kidding. I now have 200gig of space and 2000gig of bandwidth each month. Storage grows by 1gb a week and Bandwidth grows by 16gb a week. What’s going on here! These guys must be mad but it has happened. Some customers are even using this service as an offline backup hosting solution and just tranferring everything to their DreamHost account.

What now? Well I reccomend DreamHost if you truly want to host anything and everything you want on the web without having to worry about limits (this service is practically no limits with the amount they give you) & if you want a reliable large web/file host. They are even releasing new products such as files forever which enables you to store you files forever with a price that is practically for free! It’s just too good to be true – sign up before they raise their prices.

For those who are interested I have a promo code you can use to get yourself $50 off instantly. It just makes it even cheaper. Just enter the code: BLAZE50 when prompted on the signup screen and they will honour the discount for you.

Also if you can refer people in the future, you end up with cash in your back pocket or completely free hosting. So it helps to spread the word.

How’s that for Scalability

WordPress has really proven itself to be one of the most functional, best looking, easy to use and now scalable blogging applications out there. Here on wordpress.com they have superceeded 200,000 blogs.

Some interesting stats they have posted:

In the past 10 days, WordPress.com bloggers have….

• Created 14,100 blogs
• Added 30,300 static pages
• Tagged 188,259 tags on posts
• Gotten 267,490 comments
• Written 291,000 posts
• Have 779,325 feed subscribers
• Had 6,832,322 pageviews!

That's simply amazing to think that wordpress.com would recieve over 20million hits a month and still manages to handle 200,000 blogs.

Congratulations to Matt & the team for keeping the whole process here easy & painless.

I would reccomend anyone to get a blog here over blogger or any other service.

Why I Like WordPress.com

I am a designer. I believe i was born to be creative and I live to create. Here at wordpress.com though, I can actually forget about playing with that theme or tweaking this or that, because… I cant! This gives me more of a chance to focus on actually sitting down and writing out my thoughts. I'm still quite new to blogging but this is my playground and I love it.

Also another thing to keep in mind is the admins here keep everything running smoothly 99% of the time so I don't even have to administrate anything or worry about anything. Not to mention the fact they are really understanding here, they have a really good service, and someday they will let us put some ads on here!

This is just a quick outburst about why I am enjoying my time here and I highly reccomend it. 

New Digg Commenting System

Would you believe how complicated the new digg commenting system is. I have never been a fan of digg, but it seems this is just going to complicate things even further. I can’t even work out what is going on or what conversation is happening within the comments.

Maybe they did this to appease the tech users (which admittedly, would be most of their userbase) but this doesnt get me any more excited to sign up at all.

I think, at the end of the day, It all comes back to K.I.S.S.

File Hosting… Advanced

I had a look around today for a place to host my files and ended up coming back to a place I had seen before, box.net. So what’s the big deal here? Well let me tell you:

• These guys have really competitive plans for hosting files.
• They also have a free account one you can sign up for right now with 1gb of space.
• They have a load of more nifty features.

The features:

• Public Sharing:
  For example click here and see a bunch of files I quickly uploaded.
• RSS Integration:
  When you share things it provides RSS feeds for everything. Imaging integrating that into a website etc, it would be so simple, just a matter of uploading the files.
• Photo Slideshows:
  Not the strongest feature but you can quickly get a photo slideshow going with minimal fuss.
• And a whole bunch of other stuff like:

• Desktop Sync
• Private Sharing
• Work Groups
• Remote Access
• Mobile Access
• etc etc etc

Go Sign up for the free one today and tell me it’s not good, please I dare you. I’m going to be using this service a lot more now.