Internet Babel

A little grammar rant coming up.

Like many of you I suppose, I’m unfortunate enough to get a couple of Joel Comm emails each day (or so it seems).

I don’t actually read them of course, but I was clearing out my inbox just now and I noticed a highly irresponsible overuse of the ‘!’ character in his messages. From all the Joel mails I had left in my inbox and junk folder, NOT a single one had less than 4 exclamation marks in it! I mean, that’s just incredibly wasteful! Sometimes there were even two exclamation marks placed together!!

Let this be a lesson to you all – overuse of the exclamation mark is neither big nor clever – as Lynne Truss says “In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is Daddy and the comma is Mummy…the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly”. Sound familiar?  

The ‘shout’ or ‘bang’ has his place of course, but overuse is just a cheap and easy way to draw attention in the hope that people won’t notice an associated lack of substance. It’s a tired old trick and in most circumstances shouldn’t be required.

Terry Pratchett has said that placing five exclamation marks in a row is a sure sign of insanity and I’m waiting for the moment when Joel sends me an email containing such a sequence – it surely can’t be long.

Apparently, there is a ‘Netiquette’ guide that actually recommends (incredibly) the increased use of the exclamation mark, on the basis that people viewing online material are so woefully short on brainpower and attention span that liberally sprinkled bangs and shouts are required to maintain their attention.

Ignore these idiots - show some respect for your readers and assume that they don’t need this kind of mental hand-holding, and remember these two guidelines:

• when you feel the urge to type a ‘!’, think carefully first (treat them as precious commodity)
• when you receive a Joel mail, read it with a smile on your face and file accordingly!

Cheers!!!

Comment during September to be in with a chance of a free domain and hosting…

Here’s my latest Adsense cheque – thanks guys…over 1 quadrillion dollars in a month  for the first time!

No – not really. It’s a real and genuine cheque though…unfortunately it’s a Zimbabwean cheque which means it’s worth sweet bugger all.

Mind you, if I ever did receive a cool but worthless cheque like that, I wouldn’t cash it – I’d blow it up and frame the thing – what a beauty!

Please – let me know if you can beat that.

Everyone seems to be into this link love stuff, so I thought I might as well post about a couple of interesting things as well (just don’t want to feel left out really). So this will be a regular-ish post of things I like, don’t like, updates on old posts etc – except I’ve decided to call the stuff I like ‘Babel-icious’.

This time around, I’ve got a couple of Blog posts, one forum thread and a couple of other goodies.

• Dealing with negative comments on Rajaie Talks – nice post:
• Some nice posts revolving around writing for a crust at Write on the Edge
• Somebody slagging off ShoeMoney at Digital Point. Not saying I agree or disagree, but I did find it mildly entertaining. Unfortunately, the mods closed the thread before it could get really interesting (wonder why).
• Getting Real – a no-nonsense ebook about no-nonsense software development. Absolutely worth a read and/or a bookmark. Read it here.
• An update related to the ‘Bad Grammar’ post. This has proven to be one of the most frequently read posts that Nick put up here, and it still gets some traffic. As a follow-up on the whole subject I thought I’d let you know about a good resource site that came to my attention this week -  http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm. This site has a whole heap of useful information, quizzes and tests all related to different aspects of good grammar like what I write

Anyway – that’s it for now. A few good posts are on their way, including part 2 of Domain Flipping, some cool ideas about niche and audience stuff and an interview related piece with a top bloke in the affiliate arena.

Cheers

A very nice little earner for me today, so I’m a happy chap.

I picked up two domains 3-4 months back, for $8 a piece. I didn’t do anything with them other than park them and collect a few dollars in revenue – but I wasn’t concerned because I KNEW that these were excellent pickups.

Both are three-word .coms, which still aren’t that fashionable but I knew they had the potential to do well their respective niches.

Sold them today for $380.

I can’t be bothered right now to work out the percentages but that is a nice return on an investment of $16.

I buy and sell at least a few domains every week. I’m quite happy to make just a few bucks on a sale, because at my end of the market its a low-investment, low-risk game. Make a quick profit of a few bucks on a sale, about10 times a month keeps the dollars coming in, and I know I’ll make a few bigger sales like these two pretty regularly as well.

Domain (and Website) buying and selling isn’t just for the big boys – it’s possible for any of us to make a decent, regular profit from it as long as you don’t think you’re going to jump straight in and make a million dollar sale – and that’s just what an upcoming series of articles will be about.

And No, I won’t tell you the two domain names in question…

Well – Internet Babel has reached it’s first birthday! It’s not quite 1 month since I took over but I’m looking forward to the next 12 months, when I hope to re-build the stats up to and beyond where we used to be.

July showed some reasonable figures:

Page views: just under 20,000
Subscribers: 178 (min 176 – max 184)
Alexa: 235k
Technorati: 63k

These figures are all somewhat below the peaks reached during the year and they give me something to aim at as a first major target, to get the numbers back up.

Thanks to everyone for the various kind words and messages so far – I’ve been made to feel very welcome and here’s to the next 12 months. Also – thanks to Jason and everyone at the Blog Premiere Forum.

Hey everyone – just a quick wrap up about a couple of things making me grumpy today:

Google PR:
After Nicks previous Google bitch slap incident, I had vague hopes that Internet Babel may start getting some of its PR back this time around. No such luck, and even Jim at The Net Fool confirmed my lowly ranking ;-(  It doesn’t really matter of course, PR ain’t that big a deal and I’ve just got to carry on with building the quality content and link building/SEO stuff.

Link-Lies/Link-Fraud:
The term ‘linkbait’ can cover a number of practices – WikiPedia breaks linkbait down into a number of distinct types, but something that really bugs me is the trend towards totally manufactured stories.

Of course, this kind of rubbish has been going on in the mainstream media for a while, and I guess there’s no real reason to assume it wouldn’t take off on the Web as well, but it annoys me when you see some of the people doing this stuff actually being proud of the crap they put out and getting some level of ‘respect’ from other people for it. It’s not as if fabricating a ‘sexy’ story and touting it to a gullible press is so difficult, it’s just that not all of us want to stoop that low.

More to the point is that the big G will start to look at ways of punishing fraudulent link-bait and people using legitimate teasers/bait/promotion methods may get caught up in the crossfire and get dragged down as well. There’s nothing wrong with building and promoting traffic and links but doing it with stuff that has absolutely no basis in truth (while trying to pass itself off as a legitimate ‘news’ piece on a respected site) is just plain wrong. A great short term result for the guy who placed it, probably not so good in the long run for everyone else.

Adsense:
This last few days, Adsense (on my other sites) has been performing  like an arthritic, three-legged nag. Very sad.

Waiting for people:
I put a bid in for some sweet domain names a few days back and the clown isn’t responding. It is annoying.

On the brighter side, I’ve got some nice ideas for upcoming posts about SEO, WP, domain speculation and parking etc – plus I have some Domain name giveaways coming up soon AND a neat little SEO project that I hope to start and that I will update about on this Blog.

On the even brighter side, I’m about to go and sink a few well-earned beers

All will be well soon and I hope your day is going better than mine.

Hi everyone – I just wanted to introduce myself.

As you will probably know by now, Nick decided to sell Internet Babel, and I’m in the process of taking over the reins. My name is Dave and you can find out a little more about me on the ‘About’ page.

I’ll make a fuller introduction soon, but I just wanted to say a quick hello to everyone out there. Moving the site and everything has been quite hectic but things should start settling down now.

First I’d like to thank Nick for the fantastic job he’s done in bringing Internet Babel this far – he’s done some great work and I just hope I can maintain the standard.

Internet Babel has a good community and I hope to continue providing the same mix of useful and entertaining content. Nick has kindly offered to continue contributing on an occasional basis so he will still be around.

Anyway – like I said, I’m looking forward to getting stuck into this, and welcome feedback and suggestions. So, if you have any ideas about areas and subjects that you’d like to see us cover in future please feel free to get in touch and let me know.

Cheers
Dave

Had a nice surprise of free stuff from Marketleverage.com the other day. Here’s a little thank you vid:

So, in total I got

- One hat

- Two t-shirts

- A Flip Video Camera with Tripod and case

- A 2gb USB Pen

So… Class.

Anyway, as I said in the video – I’ve sold this blog now so this is officially my last post here. Thought I’d end on a good note. I will be handing the blog over to the new owner right after this post so please welcome him

I will however be making 15 more posts before I finally leave you… But it will be under a new owner from now.

Thanks to all my readers who have stuck with the blog from the start or anyone who likes the content here.

Nick Sullivan.

Since yesterday I’ve been having seriously bad headaches / migraines. I mean, unbelievably painful. So I may be needing some guest posters for a little while.

If you would like to write a guest post, simply sign up as a contributor here.

Good news managed to get my Gmail account back as well as my AdSense account which was also compromised with the evil takeover of my main Gmail account!

I’m also nearly done with my ‘project’ I’ve been working on a while. I don’t want to release it, until it’s how I want it. But I’m sure it’ll most likely be… Friday or next week sometime.

Anyway, my project and Gmail takeover have kept me from posting as avidly as I sometimes like to but I’m back in business now so will start writing up to hopefully my usual good standards as apposed to the little rant / announcement posts I’ve been doing lately.