One of the best things a blogger in any niche can do is stay apprised of what’s popular in the topic they write about. If you write about laptops, knowing what the hot new machine everyone will be searching for will allow you to write articles that will help you become more noticed online.

Twitter is a popular service that everyone and their brother seems to be on these days, and there is now a way to track what’s popular on Twitter thanks to Twittermeter.

Enter in something like the MacBook and you will see that it is on a huge downward turn. This could easily show what isn’t in the mindset of those that use the Twitter service, as well as show trends arcing upwards that you might want to take advantage of.

I found out about this service from Read/Write Web.

Twittermeter uses the Twitter API to scrape the site’s public feed and creates a database of every word sent over Twitter. Though database overages have forced the site to display only results for the past week, they have data since November 6th, 2007 totaling over 14.5 million words from 2.1 million status messages.

Another tool for the ever growing arsenal of data we need to filter through to make the most of the content we produce as bloggers.

Originally posted on March 3, 2008 @ 2:31 pm

Wow, in a move that totally shocks me, the owners of the Million Dollar Wiki, one of the first money making Wiki sites, that even John Chow promoted is for sale.

The site has grossed over $100,000, and has had thousands of pages added to it for $100 USD per page. The owners are no handing it over to someone else because they can’t figure out a new way to market it to the masses, and continue to accrue their fortune.

This whole thing makes me a little sad, as a change of ownership almost always means a decrease in popularity, traffic and the other positive factors created by the original owners. And despite the sellers saying that the site must remain live until 2022, I doubt the new owners will necessarily honour everything the previous owners put forth.

Currently, the bid sites at $10,000, and has ceased to continue to climb, after an initial rush of bids.

I am one of the many people that own a page on the Million Dollar Wiki, and earlier in its higher popularity days, it drove a fair bit of traffic to this site, now it gives me nothing, and with this sale, I wish I could just get my $100 investment back.

Update: See what I would do with the Million Dollar Wiki.

Originally posted on December 3, 2007 @ 7:55 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

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