Alex Schultz

Author: Alex Schultz

  • Affiliate Marketing 2007

    I spent a lot of time in 2005 encouraging friends in the affiliate community to build apple widgets and get into the widget space. With Vista coming and live gadgets being a large part of that, I honestly believe that 2006 is the year to position yourself for entering the widget space.

    Widgets rock, widgets can make money, widgets can be link bait. If you aren’t already moving rapidly you will need a really good idea to beat those first movers.

    I will stick my neck out and suggest we are about to enter an era of back to the future and in 2007 push technologies will make a resurgence. VOIP is growing like crazy and instant messengers have never been larger. More products like sony mylo will launch and you will soon be reachable almost anywhere for free by instant messenger.

    So think about it… what can be done when you can alert anyone, anywhere to anything and how can you make money from that. In 2007 this will be a big new:old thing.

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  • del.icio.us API working PHP code for Https v1

    So I was very frustrated when all of a sudden my del.icio.us api tag cloud stopped working. I managed today to find out why – del.icio.us have a highly secret blog which warned everyone their del.icio.us app would break if they didn’t wake up and smell the SSL.

    So today I put together an SSL application for V1 of the del.icio.us https api using PHP. You need to create your URL to call, then throw together your CURL call to the API which is needed to connect via CSS and also send the user agent that del.icio.us requires from you.

    Now you should find that your API content is contained in the $xml variable and you can enjoy translating it via the XSL tool of your choice.

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  • Paying for community created content

    Postbubble has an awesome article today about digg, netscape, social news and remuneration for community driven content. I think this is a really interesting area since there is inherent value in content created by the community but there is also value in giving people a soap box.

    At the moment digg, amazon reviews, wikipedia and even webmasterworld run on a similar basis to speaker’s corner… I like the sound of my own voice, I love having an audience hence I contribute.

    There are however a new breed of sites out there that are starting to pay people to create content. Some examples are Google Video, forums.digitalpoint.com, Netscape Navigators and About.com guides.

    The old adage goes there is no better price than free but as a contributor, you know what? I want to get paid.

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  • Cocktailmaking.co.uk v3.0 Launched

    w00t it is finally out of the door, for almost 3 months now I have been playing around with how to launch a strong upgrade to my existing cocktail making site. I have been told at times that the design is grade school, it doesn’t work in firefox, it isn’t very intuitive, it’s ugly and so on. All the while it’s been unattractive visits have climbed and I topped 1/4 million page views last month.

    v1.0 launched in 2001 and simply consisted of a few hundred hard coded cocktails. In 2003 I upgraded the site to be fully user generated with approvals by me and this was release v2.0.

    For this release, I have totally changed the appearance of the site, the cocktail list is pulled in a new way with far fewer lines of code and most of the key pages are now cached. The site also works again in firefox but the key thing is the code is now clean, self contained and fully rewritten. I have an architecture and platform I can finally expand and build on with new modules.

    Over the next 3 months I am going to start adding some really exciting user functionality including membership of the site, site emails, the ability to store your bar and more.

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  • mySQL Left Outer Join

    So I don’t want to disappoint my friend who describes this site as everything geek… Earlier this week I was trying to work out an efficient way to find which cocktails in my cocktail making database had a certain set of ingredients and no others.

    The solution to pulling this data turned out to be what is called a Left Outer Join and is supported in mySQL 5.0. The best way to describe what a left outer join does is an example.

    What I could do is: SELECT Beauty.Name AS Name_b, Beauty.Sex AS Sex_b, Age.Name AS Name_a, Age.Sex AS Sex_a FROM Beauty LEFT OUTER JOIN Age ON Beauty.Name = Age.Name

    Then I simply select those rows where the Name_a variable is null to get the filtered results. Job done!

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  • Moving With Your PC to the US

    Moving to the US was a big pain for me in one particular regard… the frequency and voltage of US electricity was not what my computer needed.

    I then lived without my computer and in particular my hard drive for 8 months but earlier this week a colleague suggested that you can get an IDE to USB connector for your old harddrive. I searched for this on eBay and found the item I wanted.

    It is up and running and quietly humming away on my desk… I now have my university music collection (2000 songs) and all my university photos again which has made me a very happy boy this evening! So if you move countries and find your computer isn’t working, don’t fear, you can always recover the harddrive content using a IDE to USB 2.0 external harddrive connection.

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  • Releasing an API can make you more money

    So facebook have released an API earlier this week. I just can’t see the revenue upside for them. This is a neat segway into the flipside of my earlier post saying natural search APIs are poorly supported due to the lack of revenue upside.

    For me the power of a lot of sites is in the platform they offer and the fact that this platform is their revenue base. APIs that enable use of a platform to make the API owner more money are the best supported tools out there.

    I am writing this post through the typepad api using the great windows live blogging tool and Typepad simply don’t care since I pay them for using their platform. Offering out their API is helping to keep me a loyal customer.

    eBay’s API is awesome. Without the eBay API such companies as channeladvisor and marketworks probably wouldn’t exist. The beauty of this API is simple, eBay makes money wherever and however users buy and list so long as they use the eBay platform.

    I am a passionate fan of forward thinking corporations who use APIs to their advantage. In summary if you want to make money from an API make sure it’s users interacting with the platform that’s valuable for you and not visitors to your website.

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  • Great Analytics are Crucial to Website Success

    Google Analytics just received a round drubbing from one of my favorite blogs seomoz. The drubbing was somewhat fair and very true of all pixel/image based tracking tools. The pixel doesn’t load everytime, cookies used are deleted/read, sessions are lost.

    I agree that having analytics that aren’t perfect is annoying. I look at my server logs as well as my google analytics and addfreestats accounts and despite the fact that pixel tracker based tools do have some inaccuracies I will happily stand up and say that all these stats tools are similarly informative to me on user behaviour.

    For me data is a means to an end… for a deep dive into user behaviour you should study server logs. For big trends affecting your site, the major entry routes, the massive exit routes – I believe the free analytics software offered by google and addfreestats should be a useful port of call.

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  • Ripe for Regulation

    I spent a little time thinking about the whole AOL research fiasco where they released search records which although the user names were removed could be used to identify people from their search logs.

    I however am hoping this fiasco does bring tighter regulation of the search engines. In Germany any flattery of the Nazi party is banned. On Google.de you could however search for “why hitler was great” and see tonnes of neo-nazi results. Search engines are portals to this content.

    Television, radio and even newspapers are regulated to control access to this sort of information. Perhaps search engines should too.

    A number of the searches I saw on the AOL logs convinced me regulation is and should be coming. Questions about murdering your wife and people searching for perverted pictures of children closely followed by looking for local schools suggest that search engines have a responsibility to understand better what they are making available and to who.

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  • Why do search companies offer these Map APIs?

    Maps is a really interesting area for looking at the offerings of the large web companies. They offer out their maps API for free and get thousands of users developing and adding maps to their site. These resources developed by developers are fab for me as a user but I simply don’t understand the value they offer for the search giants.

    I do have one suggestion for why it’s good that the search engines are offering these APIs out. Perhaps they are trying to capture the future of search. Offering out map APIs for free gives them a huge R&D network. Let’s say they have 1000 developers each using their maps and each spends 3 weeks of late nights working on their cool mashup – that gives them 120,000 hours of free developer time from people near the cutting edge.

    Certainly geo-location and local search are important and will be of bigger and bigger importance as time goes on. Being seen as the provider of choice thanks to all the geeks using and exposing your product, and having 1000 applications in test to see which ones take off – that’s actually quite a good idea.

    Potentially these big search companies aren’t just having a random altruistic brain fart but are being very canny about capturing a future search channel.

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