How is Web 2.0 advertising different from before? So far, advertisers are simply increasing the amount of bandwidth used by their ads, rather than increasing their sophistication . People using advertising intelligently will not believe that Web 2.0 just means more. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night M got learnit up and running on Google Gadgets. This is great because the Orkut launch is in the last week of February, and seeing as the two systems share the same code, if it works on Google Gadgets, it’ll work on Orkut. Likewise it should be a relatively simple move to put it out as a desktop application.
On Monday I’m meeting with a telecommunications company who have a bespoke, secure VOIP system. They work with companies such as Siemens on a broad range of products, and are very interested in learnit. We would like to set up the text message part of the system with them - where users can choose to have their learnit list sent to them by text message once (or however many times they like) a day. This will create revenue for both of us. I need to find out if they can also organise the sound file to be sent to user’s phones, but this would be a later stage project. Currently users will need to come to our web site to hear sound to go with their list. Read the rest of this entry »
We had visitors at Nový Mlýn yesterday, a family firm of wooden roofers. I’m made up. They’re friendly, and professional and have provided a value for money quote. This is a complete contrast to last week: an installer arrived, swore in Czech when he came into the house (thinking I didn’t understand), assumed he didn’t understand what I said, grumpily shook hands with me while staring in a different direction and gave us a quote for a simple one week job which would cost me 4 months of my teacher salary. Read the rest of this entry »
The learnit project is shaping up nicely. As if by magic, we have a very Web 2.0 start-up on our hands. What to do, what to do.
With investment we could showcase the product in a broader variety of locations: for example where you’d have had plain old adverts on Web 1.0. One day it would be great to have the same list going out in print media or on displays in various public places. I mean, why shouldn’t we get organised about learning languages? Read the rest of this entry »
The story so far… M has been in contact with a Czech guy who is into the same kind of programming as M I think. Anyway they decided to put something together for the launch of MySpace applications today. They were talking about trying to make a useful gadget, because sites like Facebook are full of useless tat. As we were driving to Prague for our friend’s exhibition opening on Wednesday, he asked me if I had any ideas of what they could do… Read the rest of this entry »
We gave datemymate.net a bit of a haircut last week (as opposed to the makeover that’s so badly needed). I am, however, pleased that the site now features knitted cats as profile photos, which will stay there untill users can be bothered to upload a proper photo. I am well aware that I need a real designer to go in there and shake things up a bit. If only we had money coming in…
We’d been running google adsense on datemymate.net for the last few months & it hadn’t generated revenue. I’ve just switched the banner ads over to the Amazon world cloud. It looks far, far better and it’s nice having ads on that could potentially be useful and relevant… mostly books about relationships, instead of ads for dodgy singles sites, the last thing we’d want to be linked to. So, the set up procedure was very simple, but will it work?
I’m curious because the word cloud looks really good, yet I’ve not seen it in use on other sites. Why not? I hope that the word cloud works really well, and informs customers of useful products, then from this we make enough money to do a decend job of redesigning the site. That’s the plan, anyway.
After 48 hours of furious activity we’re on target to release a great new widget called ‘learnit’. This will be for English learners (and other languages).
I’m now looking for ways of creating revenue from it and am experimenting with Amazon. I’d love to try Kindle, for example, their paperless hand-held reader. The idea of the word cloud is that it picks up on the text in the page and supplies adverts to relevant products, so you can see how successful it is with that at the bottom of this post.
So, following the instructions from their website, a lovely word cloud should appear, as if by magic, here:
Here’e some advice for people learning a new language:
This is my guide on how to learn every day english in 10 easy steps. Read the rest of this entry »
Speeding our way through January we’ve seen a wealth of different weather conditions over the last month. The year started with snow and ice… specifically ice which we skated on as the Jordan reservior froze solid, providing us with a vast area to practice on in our new skates. We also tried snowboarding for the first time, there being just enough snow in the nearby mountains. All perfectly in line with our expectations of a winter season in Central Europe… however since then it’s been strange. The temperature has increased dramatically, up to 10 degrees c on sunday evening… so the snow has all but disappeared, and the temperature at Nový Mlýn has really thawed. Can I permit myself to be happy about this?
