I’ve been patiently waiting for the last three days to access my statistics on BlogRush. I’ve been interested in the service since I first heard about it, and I like the look of the widget.

Sure, the concept sounds a little like a pyramid scheme – but if no one is investing money (which I’m certainly not), then I don’t see how you can call it that.

Having said that, my patience is running thin. Three days of Internet time roughly the equivalent of waiting 4 to 6 weeks in the real world, and I’m about ready to pull the widget off the one blog I’ve been experimenting with it on. Before my stats page became “temporarily unavailable” I hadn’t received one single click for all the credits that I’d earned, and I’m beginning to doubt the ability of the team behind the project.

I understand that they were blindsided by popularity and scammers – but COME ON – can you really put something like this together and NOT expect scammers?

They’ve got to the end of the week to get my Dashboard up and running…after that, I’m taking the widget off the site, and I won’t be back. I love the concept and idea behind BlogRush, but I have yet to see any evidence of it actually working for a guy with smaller blogs like myself.

Originally posted on September 27, 2007 @ 1:32 pm

I just wanted to let everyone know that I have six five Pownce invites if anyone still needs one.

What is Pownce?

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.

In summary, it is a Twitter clone created by Kevin Rose and others. It looks nice and works well.

How to Enter

To get an invitation, please leave a comment telling me one thing you’d like to learn from eXtra for Every Publisher, making sure you put in your correct e-mail address in the e-mail field, and the first six to do so, will get an invite from me.

Note: Please do not put your e-mail address in the comment, or no invite for you.

Originally posted on September 4, 2007 @ 5:15 pm

New social sites are popping up every day, and while it is nice to have an account on each one of them, make sure you are not devoting a lot of your time to these sites, as the value is in the contacts you make, not in the sites themselves. They try to hold your attention and fascination for as long as possible by providing all kinds of little things you can do while they plaster advertisements all over the page, hoping you will click on one of them.

Many of the people who use the web constantly are already getting tired of such sites, and aren’t logging into them as much as they used to. I am included in that group. I used Twitter more than almost anyone I knew, but I quickly fell out of love with the site due to constant downtime, and the realization that Twitter was not providing me with anything.

I have accounts on pretty much all the “cool” Web 2.0 sites, but I find instant messaging, e-mail, phone and actually visiting with people to be a much better route of real two way communication. Two way communication is key to having relationships with people, and I don’t believe that Twitter and other such services truly provide that fulfilling experience that we require.

So, remove Twitter from your phone, stop logging into MySpace and Facebook. Focus on building relationships with real people that don’t include hiding behind sites built by third parties whose only focus is to find ways to entice more people to join so they can make even more money.

You will be amazed at how much time, energy and focus you can retake just by divesting yourself of all these time sinks.

Originally posted on July 17, 2007 @ 7:20 pm