Experimenting with Smorty!

My buddies at BlogCatalog's Bloggers and Blogging group recommended Smorty to me. They said that it is a great service and I felt like giving it a try just like I always do with most of these online services. I do this simply because at present you cannot predict the next big online service. Some pundits have goofed badly in this area in the past. What they wrote off eventually became the big thing and what they recommended to be the next big thing folded up the next day. Such are the dynamics of the web!

For people who want to get paid for blogging, Smorty is a service for you. Just like several other emerging services, Smorty connects advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site. One thing that I like about Smorty is that the blog approval process is fast. They emphasize that the blog must be indexed in Google and Yahoo as one of the requirements. They recommend that posts must be more than 150 words and in correct grammar and English.

My smorty experiment has begun today!I will keep you informed as we go along. I just hope that it will a wonderful smorty adventure.

My US fan base is exploding!!!!

Of late, I have observed a huge increase in the number of visits from US residents to this blog. Last year, when I had just started this blog, UK residents were having an upper hand, particularly because a good number of my Malawian friends have moved to the UK (I guess it is is easier to move to UK than to USA for most Malawians). These UK based friends have been visiting my blog on a regular basis for the past one year.I just hope that they will continue doing so and even introduce this blog to their colleagues. Now, the great news is that after some SEO tweaking, my US fan base is exploding! Most of the US visitors land on my blog organically through search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Ask etc. I have also received some good traffic from US based friends at BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. Some of them have eventually become regular visitors. My Statcounter limit is 500 and, as of today, 190 of the 500 visits are from USA while 74 are from UK. This trend is so exciting considering that I am based in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Quechup spam

Last week, Jeremy Miller sent me an invite to join Quechup.com. My immediate thought was that he was returning a favor to me because a few weeks ago, I sent him a pownce invite (I am glad he joined and now he is one of my pownce friends). In light of this, I quickly went to the Quechup site and signed up for their service. After signing up, they offered to check my contacts to see if anyone else I knew was already on the service. This is not uncommon in the world of social networking, because Facebook, Myspace and many other networks do it in the same way, so I agreed.I entered my gmail info just like I did when I joined facebook a few weeks ago.

Quechup has now sent emails to everyone of in my gmail address book inviting them to join Quechup in my name. Now, my mailbox is being filled up with Quechup friend alerts from all over the world. Some people are even asking me why I invited them. Therefore, I would like to ask everyone who has received an invite to join Quechup from me to please ignore it.Please accept my profound apologies for subjecting you to these spam bandits. If you did sign up, please delete your account forthwith because you never know what these guys are going to do next.

If you have just noticed these messages in your mailbox, please delete them. If you have been used to Quechup-spam other people already, please do not send out multiple messages of apology to all your address book contacts, because that, in itself, might be construed as spam by gmail, yahoo and other mail giants out there. You account might be disabled just like Matt Staggs, who after being tricked by Quechup.com ended up sending all his contacts an apology. This resulted in an email blast which has caused Google to suspend his Gmail account.

As pointed out by Jeremy, Quechup may be a fine social networking site but their underhanded tactics to gain new members is unethical.

Popular search engines know me :)

As a blogger, I have discovered that search engine optimization can drive thousands of free traffic to my blog site. As a result, I have developed a huge interest in search engines. The traffic received from search engines is usually of high quality because it is organic. It is giverned by natural instincts of the visitors. Of late, I am receiving traffic from several other search engines besides Google. This makes me so happy. So far, the popular search engines that know me include:

1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. Live Search
4. Ask
   
5. ChaCha
6. Search.com

If you know other search engines, put them down in the comments section below so that I can find out if they know me.

Free Online Storage Services

As Google and Microsoft compete to deliver online storage services, it is interesting to see other lesser known players doing well in this business. Recently, I stumbled upon a Webaction posting which presents a list of free online storage services. Apart from reproducing the list here, I will provide the links to the their websites in order to save you from the hassle of googling or yahooing them out. Here we go:

Box - 1 Gb free space
4shared - 1 Gb free space
DriveHQ - 1 Gb free space
VMN - 1 Gb free space
Dropboks - 1 Gb free space, 50 Mb file size limit
esnips - 5 Gb free space
MediaMax - 25 Gb free space, 10 Mb file size limit
OmniDrive - 1 Gb free space

As the digital age continues to evolve, do not deny yourself. Utilize these freely available online facilities. They are meant for you. If you know other similar sites, place their links in the comments section below. Spread the word and let us all enjoy :)