Google Knol The Wikipedia Alternative?

  Google recently launched the public beta of Google Knol on the 23rd of July.

Knol is similar and yet different to Wikipedia in some ways. Firstly, Wikipedia users can create and edit any article they like (although there are some restrictions to seniority) but Knol is has articles created by authors who can choose whether to let other users or specific authors to edit their articles.

What makes Google Knol so interesting is that it allows you to place Google Adsense advertisements on your Knol’s, which means if you have a very popular Knol, you can earn a decent bit of income from it. As I had experimented a few days ago, Knol’s are indexed by the Google search engine, which means that your Knol has the potential to rank very high in the search engines results (just like Wikipedia) and if you have implemented your Google Adsense code into the Knol, you might earn a decent amount of cash. Who would have guess Google Knol becoming into a money making opportunity whilst building up reputation of the author at the same time.

Anyway, after learning about this I was kind of sad as I had gotten banned from Google a few years ago and as Google Knol currently does not accept other kinds of advertisement code on it, I guess I’ll just have to pass up this unique opportunity.

I’m still experimenting with Google Knol and seeing how it works and what other functions it can play, but for now it looks quite promising. And as Google Knol is still relatively young, we’ll give it sometime and who knows, maybe it might become the next big thing since Youtube

I Just Got Paid $10 By BlogToProfit

I just found out that BlogToProfit had sent me payment for 2 posts I made this month, which is $10.00, $5 per post I made for them. So far I had 3 offers this month but I only took up 2 offers as I felt the 3rd offer to be too troublesome, but now on looking back I wish I had take up the 3rd offer too

I know some of the paid blogging networks out there are scams and don’t actually pay you, but I want to tell you that BlogToProfit isn’t one of them as I really received payment from them. I must admit I was skeptical at first, which was one of the reasons I didn’t want to take up their 3rd offer.

The 2 offers I had completed were confirmed by July the 14th and July the 16th respectively, I then received a message from them on the 20th of July stating that I would received my payment lastest by the 25th of July. After checking my paypal transaction I realized that I got paid on the 26th of July, hmm, one day late but still they paid.

Cheers to BlogToProfit, the paid blogging network that does actually pay you

Sign up here (please put ddkoh92@gmail.com as your Referral’s Email, I would really appreciate it), or leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation to sign up.

BlogToProfit payment proof:

Dropbox Invites Giveaway

Dropbox makes secure backup, sync and sharing look easy. Here’s my short review about Dropox with instructions how to get invites from me to Dropbox at the end of it.

I recently got an invitation to Dropbox a few weeks back, and after using it and playing around with it, I can see how invaluable a tool it can be for everyone as it does its job well and seamlessly. Dropbox is a backup, syncing and sharing services which lets you easily backup certain files to its servers or sync files with multiple users and computers or sharing pictures and other things with friends. Currently all invited users get 2Gb of free space and once it Dropbox which is still in beta is officially launched, invited Dropbox users get to keep a higher space limit compared to the free members but less then that of paying members.

Lets look at the backup service which Dropbox helps you perform. After installing the Dropbox client, which essentially places a folder in your My Documents (Windows), you just drag any folder you want to backup into the My Dropbox folder and it automatically gets uploaded and synced into the Dropbox server. Everything happens securely, all files are transported over SSL and are encrypted with AES-256 before being stored on their backend.

Green ticks are files that are already uploaded and synched while the blue icon is for files that are currently being uploaded and synched.

Dropbox isn’t just any old backup and storage service, it actually synchs folders that your Dropbox is linked to. Because of this, Dropbox is invaluable in the sense that team projects can be carried out with relative ease as project members can be sure that they are always using the most current version of the file without resorting to other members emailing back and forth the most current file. It also comes in handy for those of you who like to share certain things with your friends as all you need to do is just drag the thing you want to be shared into a folder on your computer and you’re done.

Dropbox also can be used as a file sharing service. Whenever you drag a file into the Public folder in Dropbox, you can right click the file, hover your mouse over Dropbox and actually copy the link of the file. This comes in handy whenever you need to share a file that is larger than what can be sent as email attachments and is much more convenient then using file sharing services such as Rapidshare as you don’t need to upload the file and then worry as to when the thing you uploaded might get deleted. By using Dropbox, you just need to drag the folder you want to share into your Dropbox Public folder and get the link to share it and then forget about it. . Simple.

Yup, you can virtually use Dropbox to substitue Rapidshare.

By using Dropbox, you can easily share your pictures and photos with friends. After dragging images into the Photos folder in Dropbox, you can get a link from Dropbox to a gallery of collection of pictures which you then can share with your friends. Cool huh

Images and photos uploaded into the Photos folder automatically becomes a gallery with a link.

OK, the Dropbox client is pretty cool, but we both know there are times when we can’t install the client for some reason and that is when the web interface comes into play. When you login to your Dropbox account, the first thing you see is your homepage which gives you a summary of recent events and shows the files you have including when you last changed the file.

Really helpful, what with all the information being shown.

Besides seeing a summary of recent events and files, you can also upload and download latest copies of files right from the web interface of Dropbox.

Upload without having the Dropbox client, simple and fast.

As you can see, the possibilities with what you can do with Dropbox is virtually limitless due to it’s versatile nature. In fact, if you even want to use to have conversation through a normal text file it can be done . The only thing limiting how you use it is your imagination and creativity.

As I mentioned just now, Dropbox is currently in invite-only beta, and those of you who get an invitation now gets to keep your account when Dropbox goes live with more storage than a free account but less than a paid account. So hurry up and get your comments from me.

To get your invitation to Dropbox, please comment here with your reason you deserve and invite to Dropbox and your email address. Invites shall be given out on a first come first serve basis, so don’t be shy

I’m Impressed By The Singapore National Education Show

I went for the Singapore National Education Show 2 of 2008(NE Show) a few weeks back on the 12th of July and I must say I’m really impressed with everything about the show, from the events to the way things were organized.

National Education show is actually a preview and rehearsal of the National Day Parade (NDP) and it aims to instill a sense of pride, patriotism and  sense of unity among Singaporeans. The National Day Parade 08 (NDP) celebrates the 43rd birthday of Singapore on the 9 of August and has the theme “Celebrating the Singapore Spirit”.

Usually if you wanted to get tickets to watch either the National Day Parade or even the NE Show, you usually have to go through a process called e-balloting by submitting applications through either sms, internet and phone and then have an extremely slim chance of getting the tickets. However, the Ministry Of Education (MOE) has kindly reserved a certain amount of NE Show 2008 tickets for scholars and I was one of the few who got nominated to go for it.

I took lots of pictures, a couple hundred of megabytes worth of pictures, many which I guess you guys won’t find interesting, so instead of posting everything, I’ll post the “cooler” pictures.

These are the Red Lions in action, they are a 12-man team of elite jumpers.

Some more pictures of the Red Lions, hmm, I have to admit I take pretty nice pictures.

Reds……

This was taken during the National Anthem, 4 helicopters flying the flag of Singapore over the Marina Bay.

These are the F16 airplanes performances and some of my favorite pictures here. I can’t remember what the squadron is called, but I think it was called the Black Eagles or something like that .

The 6 F-16’s.

This was one of the tricks performed by the squadron. 2 F16’s passed very close  by each other.

This one was pretty and cute. A heart shape thingy.

The rest of the pictures below are during the night performance.

Don’t ask me what performance this is, as I can’t remember, but it was quite nice.

This was near the end of the whole Singapore National Education Show, all the performers came onto the stage.

And the Singapore National Education Show ended with fireworks, quite nice ones mind you. This is just one of them.

Oh yea, during the National Education Show, each person who goes receives a funpack full of goodies. There was the Singapore flag, a bag, a whole book of coupons with discounts and stuff, drinks, food, a National Day Parade cap with blinking lights, wet tissue, and inflatable gaint glove and even a rain coat. Haha, the planners were good, they prepared for everything, even for rain.

One of the most creative thing I saw in a while was a lucky draw that had it’s “entry forms” on disposable waste plastic bags. The whole idea was to help encourage the viewers of the National Education Show to throw away their rubbish. You have to admit it was creative.

Let’s keep Singapore litter free. Yea

Well so this was the Singapore National Education Show for you, which is nearly exactly the same as how the National Day Parade would be. When all is said and done, I’m really impressed with Singapore and I wish I could see something like this during the Malaysian National Day.

Sorry For The Downtime Recently | I’m Now Using Wordpress Version 2.6

I just want to take this time to apologize for the downtime recently. Basically it was due to me trying out the InstantUpgrade Wordpress plugin to upgrade my Wordpress from version 2.5.1 to 2.6. The plugin broke my blog, and I stupidly didn’t make a total backup of my site -  I only backed-up the database. Anyway, to cut things short, my site was online off and on for the last few days and as the database had a bit of problems, I didn’t get to save al the comments during that period of time. Really sorry guys, I have learnt my lesson and am going to make full backups of my site from time to time now

One other thing,  I’m now using Wordpress 2.6 and it has quite a few useful features. The one I like most about the upgrade is that now when choosing a theme I get to preview the theme. It’s quite cool. For those of you who have not upgrade, I suggest do not upgrade yet as 6.1 is coming out soon (I heard) to fix some bugs in this version of Wordpress, and besides, Wordpress 2.5.1 works perfectly fine.

Oh, and for those of you who use Windows Live Writer with Wordpress, you have to turn on the XML-RPC option in Wordpress to able to use Windows Live Writer with it. To do that, go to Settings, then to Writing, and tick the enable XML-RPC protocol box. XML-RPC is now turned off by default in Wordpress 2.6, and to use Windows Live Writer with it, you need it to be turned on.

That’s all the site news for now guys.

Note: I’m still trying to get back my blog to how it was before the upgrading fiasco. So please bear with me. Thanks

Gilt Groupe Invites Giveaway

  Gilt Groupe is a private invite-only online community which is dedicated to providing its members access to luxury lifestyle brands and coveted fashion labels at a special and heavily discounted sales price.

The Gilt Groupe was even mention on Forbes and as of 25 of February this year has around 75,00 members.

Gilt Groupe sells these luxury lifestyle items during 1 day “sales”, which are quite often, where the prices Gilt groupe members pay for the items are more than 50% cheaper than retail prices. Some of the big brands that are sold here are brands like Gurhan the jewelry label and creations of Behnaz Sarafpour the fashion designer.

Look at the difference in retail and Gilt prices.

The screenshot below is what you’ll expect when you’re logged into Gilt and are doing some shopping and your looking around.

Note the minimalistic design.

Gilt Groupe has sales which caters to women, men and children. As seen below, these are some of the high end labels which caters to men that has sales in Gilt Groupe.

Note all the high end and luxury brands and labels.

If you want an invite to Gilt Groupe, please leave a comment stating your email address and why do you want the invite and I’ll be sending you some as soon as I can

As usual, first come first serve, so don’t procastinate and grab one now.

Tradd.Us Invites Giveaway

  Tradd.us is a contextual translator powered by Google translator and utilizes a range of other services which enables it to translate, analyze, identify and contextualize information in your content in an organized way.

When you translate content using tradd.us, it uses it’s semantical analysis feature to identify and tag important information. By following on a tag, you can see a host of information connected to the tag word, helping you learn and greatly improving the text comprehension. It even lists down the synonyms of words to help you understand the content even better.

Tradd.us would be a great tool for all those of you who are weak in English and frequently translate English into your mother tongue as Tradd.us is not a normal translating service, rather it brings the whole process up to a whole new level.

All in all, Tradd.us enhances the already powerful Google translator to make the whole process of reading from translated text much more easier with much better comprehension. If you’re interested to try out this new technology, then drop a comment here with your email address and a reason of why I should send it to you and you’ll be getting your invite real soon

First come first served though.

Get Your Harvey-Davidson Related Stuff At Team Latus Motors Harley-Davidson

If you’re one of those big fans of the Harvey-Davidson brand out there, then you might want to check out Team Latus Motors Harley-Davidson where they sell nearly everything you can imagine with the brand Harvey-Davidson stamped on it.

I’m not an expert on Harvey-Davidson motorbikes, in fact I don’t even ride but from what I see I’m pretty impressed by it. Team Latus Motors Harley-Davidson sells nearly every single part of the Harley-Davidson motorbike, which means for all of you guys who like to heavily customize their bike, then this would be a like paradise for you.

Some of the things they sell here are Harley Davidson motorcycle parts, the few different models of engines, different types of tires, lamp covers, fenders, fuel tank cover, auxiliary lamp covers, rails and racks, custom pillion and custom seats and even this thing called sissy bars.

Besides all these Harley-Davidson related stuff, Team Latus Motors Harley-Davidson does sell a bit of other things like clothing, gift cards and so forth.

If you’re a Harvey-Davidson enthusiast, then I highly recommend Team Latus Motors Harley-Davidson.

The Nuffnang Innit Effect – A Mini Digg Effect?

Hey guys, for the past 24 hours (nearly) my post of a list of paid blogging networks was shown as some of the most popular posts in Nuffnang Innit. Being one of the most popular posts, even though it’s only the most popular in the last 24 hours and not all popular, I received a huge wave of traffic and readers from Nuffnang Innit. I call this wave of traffic the Nuffnang Innit effect and it is a really welcomed effect by me as it brings in a swarm of traffic and new visitors.

Nuffnang Innit is a blog aggregator by Nuffnang which works like Digg where members get to vote and decide which are the more popular posts and only open to Glitterati members. Nuffnang Innit is also frequently used to drive traffic to member blogs although the success of Nuffnang Innit as a means of traffic driving has been questionable until now. In this post is all the evidence you need of the Nuffnang Innit effect.

The top 10 last popular posts are shown in Innit’s homepage while the top 5 last popular posts are shown in the homepage of Nuffnang bloggers. My post got into the most popular in the last 24 hours within 4 hours of submission and was displayed both in the Nuffnang Innit frontpage and the homepage of Nuffnang’s bloggers. Not too bad right?

See my post at the top there with 30 Nang’s.

The Nuffnang Innit effect brought me about 100 over visits within 24 hours. I never have gotten the Digg effect before, but it should resemble something like the Nuffnang Innit effect – only on a larger scale. You must admit that this is pretty good free traffic. Best of all, all this traffic originates from either Malaysia or Singapore. As you can see the average time on site is like pathetic, but then again I later found out that my posts permalink had changed and my visitors were getting a “not found” sign. What a waste of traffic, all thanks to Windows Live Writer which frequently posts my posts under a wrong timestamp as it doesn’t follow the TimeZone properly. Oh well. At least some of the visitors were enterprising enough to click on the paid blogging category and find the post.

Note: As the Nuffnang Innit effect usually lasts for about 24 hours (until it expires from the most popular in the last 24 hours category), I measure the Nuffnang Innit effect over 2 days, as I submitted quite late in the day, so the 24 hour period spills over to the next day. As the Nuffnang Innit effect also spills over the 24 hours period, some of this statistics in the picture might be an underestimate of the Nuffnang Innit effect. The statistics and figures might not be entirely accurate as it reflect some traffic from search engines and everything, but the main reason of the pictures is to show the dramatic increase in traffic due to the Nuffnang Innit effect on a macroscale and not a microscale.

See the spike in traffic?  From 20 visitors a day up to 80 visitors a day. 147 visits over 1 full day and another incomplete day (today).

Here are some more statistics of the Nuffnang Innit effect as seen by Reinvigorate . Look at the picture below, 76 from referred sites, about 70 of them from Nuffnang Innit and this only represents about 15 hours of the Nuffnang Innit effect.

Yup, the Nuffnang Innit effect is good for site traffic.

Look at the 2 tallest columns here. That’s the Nuffnang Innit effect over a period of just 2 days (the 15th isn’t a complete day as today hasn’t ended. Which means it should reflect more).From this trending data view you can easily see the difference and the impact of the Nuffnang Innit effect.

Nuffnang Innit effect again at work here.

Nuffnang Innit does indeed drive traffic to your site, especially if your posts is one the most popular ones, even if only in the last 24 hours. As the Nuffnang Innit effect is quite large for smaller blogs like mine, I suggest to you to be a Nuffnang Glitterati member if only just to be able to use Innit and gain the full benefit of the Nuffnang Innit effect.

If you’re here from Innit, please Nang me now!

So all your Nuffnanger’s, what are your thoughts on the Nuffnang Innit effect?

I Finally Got Back My Nuffnang Glitterati Membership

As the title says, today when I logged into my Nuffnang account, I realise I got back my Nuffnang Glitterati membership. . Actually I had been checking every single day since I got dropped from Nuffnang Glitterati to see whether I had been reinstated into the program.

The yellow Glitterati words are so much more comforting then the normal member’s one.

Remember I told you about how Nuffnang replied my support email after just 4 hours? Well I sent them back a reply and they only replied after 2 days, which to me is still kind of acceptable. According to them, I had a piece of code that I had placed in my template from Blog2U. I check my template and sure enough, there was the code from Blog2U. Actually the code is just a tracking code, but I think the Nuffnang Crawler doesn’t even like that.

Nuffnang says that their crawlers automatically adds your blog which does not contain advertisements from any other advertisement network originating from South East Asia into the Nuffnang Glitterati club within 48 hours, however, I didn’t find this to be the case. It took me up to 4 days, which is 96 hours before I got reincluded into the program. Not entirely 96 hours, as I might have been reincluded a couple of hours before that but I didn’t see it, but still more or less there. So for all of you out there who are trying to get into the Glitterati club, don’t panic too much if it’s already been 48 hours but you still have not been reincluded as it too me up to 96 hours.

Hehe. One of the reasons I wanted to get back my Glitterati membersip so badly was because without it I won’t get to use Innit, Nuffnang’s “Digg”. It seems pretty useful, that’s why I’m experimenting with it.