I have not been to the Mid-Year Conference since 2003, and I do not envision myself to be there in any short-term future. This year the topic is back on “Guidance” again. Now all you students — go and sign up :)

Quite a few things happening afterwards. A few days after my previous “short review”, I actually deleted my account there, because I just cannot stand their aggressive tracking script that “rings home” whenever someone clicks on some links. I guess that is why they are called MyBlogLog — but I wasn’t there for the statistics, but just want to build a community of readers of my sites.

Anyway. Then they were bought by Yahoo! early last month. Well done man!

So at the end of January, I applied for an account again. Lucky I got my old URL back, and was able to claim back all my sites as communities. Phew. Since the actually quite enjoyed what MyBlogLog can offer to my sites. The best feature gotta to be the Communities — you get to see what other bloggers are reading your sites and build contacts. You also get to see who else are reading the same blogs that you are reading.

There are still many issues — some are publicly acknowledged, and some are just my personal gripe.

• Spams — just search Google, and you’ll see how severe it is. Every now and then there will be people I’ve never heard wanting me to join his/her community or adding him/her as my contacts. Then there’s also comment spam issue. There are many “popular looking” profiles up there, but how many are their real contacts? Don’t know.
• Stats Javascript — still one of my biggest issue. The “widget” that you added on your website adds itself to quite a few “events”. Well, they are necessary to track things like most popular links. However I don’t want need site stats. AWstats from the server log is good enough for me, and I would like to track just the readers. Too bad you can’t turn part of the tracking off.
• Add a Blog/Site — I was shocked how easy it is to claim a blog/site. Put in the URL, some description, click on a button, and it is yours! That makes Technorati and Google Webmaster Tools’ claiming process way too complicated. Now let me see whether I can claim Google or Yahoo…
• Lacks of Social Networking Features — I guess at the end it was the social networking aspect that drove me to MyBlogLog (I’ve stated that I don’t use the statistics). Now they have all member profiles, all the relations, etc, they ought to add more social networking functionalities on top. My secondary contacts? Find me someone in the system who shares more than 3 communities with me? Recommended communities from my current contacts? Etc…
• User interface — okay. It works. Just not pretty. Even Yahoo!’s homepage looks prettier.
• Lack of Feed Integration — it does not help when the majority of your “protential community members” are actually reading your blogs through RSS/Atom feeds. At least it is true in my case. I am reading through 300+ items in around 100 feeds everyday, but I rarely go down to the website unless I feel a need to comment. The end result is, I am hardly in any MyBlogLog community.

Well. That’s it for me. Still, it is a innovative service, and has been endorsed by the bloggers as it helps to build communities around our soapboxes. I am surprised that there hasn’t yet been an imitation with all the short-comings already solved (then again I don’t really read TechCrunch). But now with Yahoo’s money and resource, we’ll hopefully see more speedy development from these guys.

1. Pastor briefly introduce who we are and invite you to join our meetings.
2. A glimpse inside a typical church service/bible study fellowship.
3. One or two interviews of existing members on how their lives have been changed.

And have them hosted on either YouTube, Google Video, or any web host of your choice.

I know which one I would prefer.

But I think I need to fix up our church website first. Quite a ruin there.

… In order to handle the rapidly increasing load, I’ve had to experiment with a variety of server architectures. I ask for your patience during the coming weeks as I test out a few setups. The new and improved, vastly more scalable solution, will serve gravatars expediently and reliably

Gravatar has been very very slow over the past few months, and it has actually stopped working over the last few days. Almost all my sites use Gravatar in one form or another, and you can feel the degraded performance because of this dependency. Hopefully G2 will be much faster — I was almost tempted to start my own Gravatar alternative.

If you check Cube6Media’s blog (one of Tom’s creation), you’ll see that it has Gravatar on it, and is using a different URL syntax than the old Gravatar 1 URL. For example,

http://g1.cube6media.com/gravatar/5a0b7fce150f7bb9fdd2dd25fa9f80df/x/50/

URL is parameterised, and looks like it is in the form of /<md5(email)>/<rating>/<size>/ (I’ve just tested out by substituting with my own email address, and it worked). It’s nice when URL is parameterised — it allows the result to be easily cached (like my generic gravatar cache).

Now I just need to wait for the ching-ching to come into my PayPal account. Oh wait. There is a 200 words minimum. Let me try to squeeze a few more words…

What is ReviewMe?

ReviewMe is a new breed of advertisement, and just like all types of advertisement agency, the advertisers are their customers, whereas publishers are their suppliers. What sets them apart is that their suppliers are your average Joe bloggers, and the post content inside their personal blogs are the media where the advertisement will appear.

Advertising Model

Traditionally an advertiser has a few options to get more exposure online. She can go and buy banner ads or text links from agencies like Google AdSense or Overture if they like to pay on per-click basis, or companies like Text-Link-Ads (aff) with flat-rate monthly fee. She can also establish affiliation program with Commission Junction or clixGalore to lure publishers into marketing for them. She can even bribe compensate well-known journalists and reviewers to do a good write up about them.

It’s all good. However in the era of Web 2.0, we all know that it is the number of eyeballs that counts — otherwise YouTube wouldn’t be sold for $1.65 billion. More eyeballs, more buzz, more visitors, <skip a step>, more profit! An advertiser can longer count on the quality of major media shops, because we live in an age where quantity also matters.

So instead of paying $5,000 to have your product reviewed by a popular magazine (sorry I have no idea about the market price), ReviewMe allows advertisers to pay $100 to 50 bloggers to review their products (bloggers get $50 and ReviewMe gets $50). Suddenly your newly launched website receives 50 new quality incoming links, which might give you good boost in PageRank, good exposure on Technorati, make you more visible to Digg and Del.icio.us users — now we have a buzz.

What’s in for the Bloggers?

Dough, of course. Long gone is the day where people blog because they want a soapbox to rant about what is happening at school today. Put “blog” and “money” into Google Search and you’ll be surprised how many pages does it return. ReviewMe allows bloggers everywhere to sign up (as long as your blogs meet their criteria), start taking review requests, blog about it, and then just wait for the PayPal payment or cheque arrives at your door.

There are some simple guidelines on how you should write. 200 words minimum is easy to understand — you can’t just say “so and so is great” and demand your dough. However, what differentiates ReviewMe from their controversial competitor is:

• Posts must be fully disclosed.
• Positive posts are not required.

Readers of these blogs do not have to guess what motivates the post, it also helps the blogger to have a cleaner conscious (I’ll write something about it later). Advertisers on the other hand cannot demand their products to have a positive review — of course they can shop around for a happy positive blogger instead of grumpy one, but a good review is never guaranteed.

That does put advertisers in a situation where they must have a good mature product before launching their advertisement campaign on ReviewMe. This might hinder ReviewMe’s initial growth in getting enough advertisers. However I think in the long run it will make ReviewMe-affiliated reviews more creditable than any other non-disclosed reviews.

How Much Do I Get Paid?

All blogs are different (unless you are Splog), so payout varies as well. It all depends on how many stars do you have. A not-so-good looking site like this one only gets 2 stars, which translates to $30 payout per review (and ReviewMe takes another $30 from the advertiser).

A 4 star rating blog costs advertiser $250 per review, and $125 payout for the blogger. I can’t seem to find one with a 5 star rating, but my guess that it will be a $500 per review.

Once you sign up a review, the blogger has 48 hours to complete and submit the completion. Review will be “reviewed” before account is credited. 48 hours is a long time to write that 200 words, but might not be that long if the review requires extensive testing of the product.

So, Is It a Good Idea?

I personally like being paid (who doesn’t?) However I do not like to be told what to write, and how something should be written (more about that in a separate post), as this is really what blogging is about — personal opinions. What I like about ReviewMe is:

• It pays. Well, I haven’t been paid yet, but judging by many happy reviewers on the net, and their other venture (aff) which I had previously been paid, I don’t think they’ll just run away with all their advertiser’s money :)
• Write whatever you like. Of course I can’t write about foo when I am doing a bar review, but I have the freedom to put my thoughts into my writing. I have been a criticising guy, and the advertisers might be mad — but at least ReviewMe allows me to do so.
• Pick you own pace. Blogging is not work, and I do it when I have time. Reviewing technology products and websites isn’t my job either, and with ReviewMe I am not obligated to write x number of reviews a month. I can write as many as there are reviews available, or skip a few months when things get busy.

So overall, yes, a good idea for the bloggers.

A good idea for the advertisers too if all they want is the buzz. After all all reviews are “good” reviews, regardless whether the content is positive or not, as they bring more visitors to your sites, and they will form their own opinions afterwards. If you are selling a product however, you might be a bit worried when majority of reviews are negative. So I guess it is not for everyone.

Anything Negative?

Not yet. If what Jason Calacanis predicted is true, where online marketing budget is going to go skyrocket, then we’ll see a lot of them flowing to sites like ReviewMe. It all works on the principle of demand and supply.

However what if there’s not enough advertisers? Andy Hagans said they’ll focus on bringing in more advertisers next week, and I would like to see that happen. The reason Google Adsense/Adwords works is because there’s a good supply of advertisers and publishers, and the customers (remember, it’s the advertisers) feel their money is well-spent. I hope it will also come true with ReviewMe.

How Is ReviewMe Affecting This Site?

I signed up, and am waiting for the review requests to come in. For all the reviews I write for ReviewMe, I’ll put it under the ReviewMe category to easily disclose my affiliation.

However I don’t expect to write more than one review a month. Scott Yang’s Playground will still run as usual — technology, faith and everyday randomness, according to Scott.

That form is simple — a few fields that are linked to a simple PHP script which sends me the form data so I can manually add the feed into the aggregator. No Captcha, so I was occationally spammed by a few bots that are trying to sell me some kind of “medicine”. Oh well.

Then this morning this form was actually spammed by a real person! An email notification arrived, and…

Aargh! Bob Parsons from GoDaddy Software spammed me! Actually I believed that it is someone else who spammed it as the email address is definitely not Bob’s — probably one of his zealous staffs. However you’ll expect being CEO of one of biggest budget registrars, he would want genuine links than seeking links from link-farms or directories!

Maybe Mr. Parsons had some untold history where he has previously studied Down Under and gone to an overseas student church — maybe I can ask Josh to confirm that :)

Anyway. There are some interesting articles on Bob’s blog, where he explained the add drop scheme. Many called it “registrars’ taste test”, and he renamed it to domain kiting in his latest blog post. That pretty much explained why sometimes when you do a probing WHOIS on a dodgy registrar, and a few days later found the same domain been registered.

This is a brief review of their service. Note that eBible.com is still in beta (like most other Web 2.0 products) and I have an impression that they are under active development. So YMMV.

What I Like about eBible.com

1. Interactivity — combining AJAX and DHTML gives you interactivity over an otherwise static web page. In eBible.com you can do many things without reloading the page. You can go to next/previous chapter, load the commentary, etc. My favourite feature is hovering your pointer over a Bible verse in the left-hand-side commentary pane, and a pop-up will appear and load the text in the background. It reminds me the useful feature of many desktop-based Bible study software, where you can check the snippet of other verses without leaving your main passage.

   In the example here my mouse pointer is hovering over the Bible reference 4:16-18 (under 2 Corinthians), and a popup appears showing “Looking up verse…”. Then the verses got loaded and fill up the popup box. This feature also appears in other parts of the eBible site (like Answers) but somehow not very consistent.

2. In-line commentary — want an explanation on the verse? Instead of providing another link, you just click on the “C” symbol next to the verse number, and a popup appears showing the text from your default commentary on this particular verse.

   It is actually not a popup, but a floaty <div/> which pushes main text away. More on that later.

3. Short-cut keys — not everyone works on mouse, and having easy to use short cut keys is essential for accessibility. eBible.com listed out the short-cut keys available under the main passage pane. You can easily navigate around the Bible using the short cut keys.

4. Parallel Bible — eBible.com allows you to show parallel translations over the same passage, which is useful when you want to have a literal translation next to a dynamic translation to help you to understand the flow of the text. You simply click on a small icon, and it lets you choose which other translation you would like to display. Then it just loads that translation without refreshing that page. Neat.

   You can actually display more than two translations side by side. Actually I am not sure about the limit, as it appears you can keep on adding more translations (although the number of translations is limited, more on that later).

5. Integrated search — the search bar is always at the top of the page. It also allows you to specify a verse reference or search for a keyword. When you search for keywords, the result is actually quite good. In the example above I searched “rich young ruler”, and Luke 18 jumps out as the first result.

6. Answers/Bible Dictionary — eBible.com has a Bible dictionary search built in, which they called “Answers”. It is not integrated together with the Bible pages, and but can be accessed when you click on “Answers” at the top of the page.

   It searches through various Bible dictionaries and concordances, which gives you some relevant information over a specific topic and related verses. In case where there are more than one dictionary available, you can even use the select box to change the dictionary, and then extra info gets loaded and merged into existing window, without reloading the page.

7. Great community — how can a Web 2.0 production be without a blog and a forum? Well, eBible.com has both.

8. Extensibility — eBible.com is cleared designed to be extensible. When you go to your “My Bookshelf” preference, you can see your list of Bible translations, dictionaries, encyclopedias and commentaries. You can set default for each of these categories. Moreover, it implements rooms to let you purchase extra books and add them into library. Just like how you can “unlock” books in your desktop Bible software, you too can unlock more books and add into your on-line Bible bookshelf.

What I Don’t Like about eBible.com

1. Beta quality — there are actually quite a few rendering glitches. Interface inconsistency issues. Slow speed. Because of these glitches, eBible.com is still at the point of “fun to play around”, but will not be a suitable Bible study software until those bugs are removed.

   Then again might I emphasis that they are indeed labelling themselves as “beta”? Hopefully we will see it improve soon.

2. Limited resources — they only have 5 Bibles at the moment — New Century Version, The Message, King James Version, New American Standard Bible and New King James Version. I would probably still use NASB, but I still prefer the English Standard Version.

   Obviously there is no Bible translation resources on other languages. Will Chinese (CUV or NCV) ever going to be supported?

   Again the quantity of resources in other departments is poor as well. 2 free dictionaries. 2 free encyclopedias. 2 free commentaries. That’s it, and they are all very old material which you can find in many free desktop Bible software.

3. Not all resources addressable — I guess that is one problem with all those AJAX powered websites, that not all resources are addressable by URL. You can use query strings to address specific Bible verses, but there is no way to point to say, a specific entry in commentary or in Bible dictionary.

   Would be nice to have a permalink to those resources so they can be referenced on the web.

4. Too commercial — well, it is just a beta software, but it is already fully equipped with sponsored links, an on-line store to sell you books and a bookshelf ready for you to subscribe. Very obviously this tool was designed with a specific purpose, and that purpose is different from most other on-line Bible.

   Or maybe it is also an essential part of Web 2.0?

Conclusion

eBible.com has its cool factor. It is one of those nice shiny new web applications that help your web browser to leak memory like there is no tomorrow. It makes an on-line Bible study site to be as usable as a desktop equivalent.

However there really lacks content, and it just does not feel polished. Maybe we will come back a few months later to see whether it can really be a Bible Gateway challenger.