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I saw this interesting post today on a popular internet marketing forum. The question was: how would you invest $60? Many people replied they wouldn’t. $60 is simply too low of an amount to invest and notice any meaningful result. Others said to buy content and a web hosting package, and monetize it with Adsense. I say don’t listen to these people. Instead, start a good website. Hosting and a domain will cost you under $60 for a year. The software, WordPress, is free, and you can write the content yourself.

The problem with today’s internet marketing and make-money-online tactics is this – everyone outsources their work to India. This is the cheapest option for people who don’t want to or can’t write content themselves. Most people who can’t create content themselves don’t speak English. This creates a situation where the people buying content have no clue what they’re buying. The articles they are buying are written in atrocious English, with the type of grammar you get in Nigerian scam emails.

And this is polluting the internet. Someone hears about making money online. They go to a forum, read a lot of nonsense (and a bit of very useful advise), then go out and buy a domain, web hosting package, and hire a person through the forum to write articles for their new website. Then they plaster advertisements over their site, and expect money to roll in. And sadly it does. But it’s a small amount of money. Advertisers don’t want to pay much to have their ads displayed in India, which for some reason is where most of this is coming from.

I guess my point here is that if you are making a website, do not outsource to someone who can’t write in fluent English. Not only does it devalue your website and turn away potential advertisers – and private deals make you much more money than pay-per-click advertising – but it adds absolutely nothing to the internet. These people copy other people’s work, rewrite it in horrible English, and republish it. This cycle continues until the article makes absolutely no sense.

A lot of people promote this outsourcing as a cheap way of getting yourself started in the blogging or general web publishing, internet marketing business. But I say leave it alone and stay far, far away from it. It will only bring in short-term visitors to your new website. You will get no returning visitors, no feed subscribers, nothing but short term search result clicks. Once people start reading your cheap content, they will immediately leave the page, or accidentally click on an advertisement.

If you really want to invest $60 to make money online, you sure can. It is definitely not too small an amount. WordPlop was started with around $6. Yes, this website had an initial investment of $6, and that was for the domain.  The hosting was free, without ads, from 000webhost. Original articles were written, and here we are today making a 10,000% profit (almost).

So how would you invest $60 to start making money online? Start a quality website. Do not outsource. Write with perfect English. Spend less time reading forums and more time writing articles. Write only what you are interested about. Don’t copy content. Read some tips on ProBlogger.

Whatever you do, please, do not contribute to the internet trash can that is the world of re-written content with bad grammar.

Imagine being in disability leave due to a medical condition and having your benefits taken away because of a single picture that appeared of you on Facebook. Suppose you are somebody who is indeed ill in one form or another, and you’ve been on long term disability for eighteen months thanks to that illness, and then suddenly your only source of income is ripped away from you.

That’s what happened to Nathalie Blanchard, an IBM employee that was on long-term disability leave due to heavy depression. Nathalie was put onto disability leave when she became unable to work over a year and half ago, since then her insurance carrier had been paying her salary – until now.

Manulife Insurance, the carrier in question, recently discovered Nathalie’s profile on facebook and discovered pictures that were posted of her having fun with friends in social situations (“girls night out”), and also on a vacation she took to a tropical paradise.

“Her Facebook pictures were enough to prove that she is ready to return to work,” was the statement issued by Manulife when this hit the fan.

Going out and having fun was suggested to her by her doctor, as research has shown over the years that those diagnosed with severe depression will often seclude themselves to an extreme measure. By going out and socializing, it helps them cope with their situation while maintaining a social life.

In a statement issued to the CBC, Manulife stated “We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook.” However actions speak louder than words and it appears that it just takes a few pictures to make things more stressful than they already are.

Simply having pictures of you on a social network should not be enough to strip you of your insurance benefits. Not only can they be easily taken out of context (i.e. just because you see somebody happy and enjoying themselves for the 1 second that it takes to shoot a picture, it doesn’t mean they are like that for the other 3,599 seconds in the day), but it also invokes paranoia about using social networks because of cases like this.

Imagine if this was a life-or-death type situation where your insurance benefits covered special treatment or medications that are keeping you alive, and then suddenly that is taken away from you because of a few innocent pictures. What if you were on blood thinners to prevent clots, or you were about to go in for brain surgery to remove a cancer lump that was pressing dangerously on your brain stem.

The truth of the matter is that insurance companies look for any excuse to drop beneficiaries when they start to cost a significant amount of money. And unfortunately there is not much that anybody can do about it, as burried deep within your insurance contract there is almost always a tiny little clause that says something like “The insurer reserves the right to cancel benefits at any time with due cause.” Due cause has apparently shifted from medical doctor testimony and patient records to pictures posted on the web.

Google has partnered with Twitter to include Twitter updates in Google’s search results. This will have a big impact on both Google’s search results and Twitter. This deal has great potential for news applications, but it can also go really bad if not implemented correctly.

A lot of people use Twitter to post random thoughts, and probably even more use it for self promotion. Companies treat it as a free advertising medium. This means that a lot of the content on Twitter is unprofessional and not search result worthy.

However, the very positive aspect of Twitter can come from news tweets. Through Twitter, people can post news that have literally just happened a few seconds ago. Real news websites simply cannot do this due to lack of resources. With Twitter, there are millions of people who can act as news reporters.

Taking all of this into account, Google needs to find a way to include only real news tweets in their search results. They need to find a way to separate the advertising, promoting, and personal tweets from tweets that are useful and report something relevant. This sounds like a very difficult thing to accomplish, but if anyone can do it, it would be companies with huge budgets, like Google and Microsoft. Microsoft has a similar deal with Twitter.

Twitter being included in Google search results has great potential for real, unedited, live news. However, it needs to be implemented very carefully, or else Google search results will include a lot of garbage.

image copyright Twitter

Most employers block websites such as Facebook and Youtube from being accessed while you’re working. And when they do that, they also block proxy websites that would allow you to access blocked websites. Here is how to get past most filters without the use of any software or proxy-like web services.

Web filter software only filters the URL of websites – its address. However, websites have another address – the IP address. If you enter a website’s IP address into the address field in your browser, it will take you to the website, just like the normal .com address would.

All you have to do is find a website that tells you the IP address of a website. To do this, simply type “website ip lookup” into Google or any search engine, without the quotes. The first result here is Self SEO’s website IP lookup page. If this site gets blocked by your IT department, just find another one.

Now just type in the website you want to visit and get its IP address. For example, using Self SEO’s service, typing in facebook.com gives the IP address 69.63.181.12. All you need to do now is copy the IP address and paste it into your browser’s address bar, and hit Enter. You should now be on the website you wanted to visit, without the need for a proxy.

This simple method works most of the time. It probably won’t work if it’s a small website on a shared server – the IP address will take you to the hosting company’s home page. For Youtube, this method won’t work for watching most videos, because Youtube calls each video from a different server using the youtube.com address – this problem can exist in other websites as well.

WordPlop.com is not responsible for anyone being fired from their job as a result of visiting websites they were not supposed to.

Everything on the internet is free, right? At least there are like a million free games out there.

Who makes all those free games? Why would anyone make a game for people to enjoy and get nothing in return?

Well, some of the guys who make Social Games – games for social platforms like Facebook and MySpace – actually do get something in return.

It’s called money. Lots of money even.

One very popular social game is “Live Poker” from Zynga. You may not believe this, but Zynga’s poker game on Facebook attracts an absurd 2.5 million players every day.

Numbers like that make regular online poker look like a dying midget in comparison. In addition, poker in social media is still growing at an alarming rate, while online poker is kind of stagnant.

According to Business Week, Zynga will make $100 million in sales this year. That’s one hundred million dollars for you!

Most of that money comes from the minority of players who pay a few dollars to play premium games or buy virtual goods.

Virtual goods can be for example poker chips to be used in the game. In Live Poker on Facebook they come at the price of $5 for 75,000 chips, or less if you buy more.

If you buy Facebook chips you get a V.I.P. mark. It marks you as the sucker at the table.

image from Wikipedia

There has been quite a bit of talk on the internet about the Conficker virus that was supposed to wreck a whole lot of computers yesterday. People are panicking all over the place as if their computer is about to explode.

This is just another virus. It is hyped up to be something devastating, but apart from its ability to replicate and avoid detection, it is like any other virus. A lot of viruses already steal personal information from your computer. To avoid catching Conficker C, use the same methods you would to prevent any other virus.

Assuming you don’t already have Conficker on your computer, waiting to attack, here are the usual anti-virus tips you should follow.

• Don’t click on suspicious links on suspicious sites.
• Don’t download suspicious files, or most of the time, files that are around 900kb or 300kb (unless you know the file you’re looking for is supposed to be that size).
• Use good a good anti-virus program like AVG and make sure it’s fully updated.
• Don’t open suspicious emails and their suspicious attachments.
• Scan files before you open them.
• Make sure your operating system is updated.
• Use a firewall. Vista’s firewall is sufficient for most people, so just make sure that it’s enabled.

Use common sense and if you think a site or file might be infected, don’t open it. If you think your computer might already be infected with the Conficker worm, my suggestion would be to just reformat. You will lose all your files that you did not back up, but at least you will be 100% sure that your personal information isn’t being stolen. Just don’t back up your files if you’re already infected, because the virus will transfer along with your backups. Good luck and keep your computer safe. To protect your computers from virus infection, it is always best to read Antivirus Reviews to select the best product in the market.

For your enjoyment, here are ten random technology-related things that piss me off. I am not bashing products here, but rather pointing out incredibly bad and annoying things about them. Here are ten things that came to my head as soon as I sat down to write this post.

1. In Microsoft Flight Simulator X, when playing multiplayer, clicking on the “Players” tab doesn’t actually sort the sessions by number of players.
2. No search feature to find sessions in Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
3. The incredibly ugly menu screen with Windows 95 era bevels and designs in Flight Simulator X.
4. People looking at youtube videos while chatting with 10 people through IM at the same time.
5. People using Twitter for self-promotion.
6. Games taking away your mouse shadow once you exit, making you go to control panel / mouse and re-enabling it.
7. Being autokicked from a Counter Strike Source server because of Steam connection problems as you’re about to win the gungame match.
8. Flight Simulator X constantly opening on the wrong monitor.
9. Firefox opening on the wrong monitor if you ever maximize it on that monitor.
10. The new Comcast webmail that I have to use at work.

Note: despite all the small things that piss me off about Flight Simulator X, I still like the game.

Google Chrome was released only a few days ago and it has already gained more than 1% market share. But all this means is that people downloaded it to try it out, not to make it their new browser. This also shows why Chrome took away from Firefox’s market share and not Internet Explorer’s – because only tech-savvy users downloaded it, since Chrome is just a beta, and we all know IE users aren’t as tech-savvy (no offense if you’re using IE because of personal preference).

So the point here is that Chrome was downloaded and used so much in such a short time because people wanted to try it out. It doesn’t mean it’s better than Firefox or any other browser. It’s a beta with almost no features.

Chrome has a very high potential to become a superior browser. It is fast and very lightweight. But this might be because of its lack of features. It doesn’t even have middle click scrolling yet. Chrome is no where near ready for full time use. And by the time it gets features and addons, and goes out of beta, Firefox will probably be on version 4.

Final review – Chrome has lots of potential, but it’s not ready to be your everyday browser. It has gained significant market share because mostly Firefox users wanted to give it a try, since it’s from Google, so it has to be good. I will be trying Chrome again in a few months, after it gets patched and updated more. I don’t expect it to go out of beta for at least two years.

And for most people disliking the blue theme, this is how it looks in Vista:

Adobe has announced that they have made a deal with Google and Yahoo to make flash files indexable.

It’s great to finally see search engine technology progress into the modern web. Flash has been used for a long time to make menus and animations for websites. But until now, these flash files couldn’t be indexed by search engines, so web developers used normal text menus.

Flash content looks great on websites and gives sites more depth and a greater end-user experience. With today’s internet connection speeds, flash usually doesn’t take much longer to load than a site with images. Now web developers can use flash to make websites look better, make the customer more pleased, and still have the links, text, or even the whole flash site indexable.

This will be a great addition to Google search and Yahoo search.

image copyright Adobe

Today is Download Day 2008 for Firefox 3. So download Firefox 3 today to help try achieve the world record for most software downloads in 24 hours.