Wondering if you should try in-image advertising with Luminate? Here is my review of using Luminate.com to make money on your website!

Want the just of it? I used Luminate for 30 days and with nearly 1 million image views, I made a whopping $0.11. Whew! At this rate, I’ll make the minimum Luminate payout of $25 in…19 YEARS.

I ran Luminate on a highly trafficed celebrity gossip blog, that gets several thousand unique visitors per day. I took the time to manually tag 100 of my photos, since I figured that the “product in the picture” feature would be the biggest earner on a celebrity website, and I installed the following Luminate applications:

- Annotations
- Image Overlay Ads
- Amazon MP3 Music
- Product in the Picture
- Share via E-Mail
- Share via Facebook

While Luminate looks promising with all of it’s fancy javascript and neat-o apps, I had an idea that Luminate would not be paying out much…but $0.11?! Come on. That is just ridiculous. The website that I tested Luminate on makes $XXXX with Adsense and $XXX with InfoLinks per month. Luminate is by far the weakest earner that I have ever used in an attempt to monetize the traffic my websites get.

I just got an email from Google in regards to their new “interest-based advertising” program, and it appears that Google is spying on it’s users…

“Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.”

From what I’m reading, Google is tracking which websites you visit and using that information to classify you (and your computer) with specials interest categories.

I checked out the Google Privacy Policy and it looks like Google recently made some changes to the policy (it was last updated on 3/11/2009) in order to start collection this information about your web activity:

“…To serve ads that are relevant and tailored to your interests, we may use information about your activity on AdSense partner sites or Google services that use the DoubleClick cookie…We use cookies, web beacons or other technologies to record information about what ads your browser is shown, as well as what ads you click and other actions you take on our sites and services…”

Big Brother is watching!

I’ve finally made the switch from blogger (weak) to WordPress (infinitely superior)! It was actually fairly simple to make the switch since WordPress has an “import blogger blog” button, that will import all of your content from your blogger blog.

Here are my top 5 reasons why WordPress is better then Blogger’s blogging platform:

1. WordPress has hundreds of thousands of cool plugins/widgets to customize your blog in practically any way imaginable.

2. WordPress is more search engine friendly then Blogger.

3. WordPress has a vastly infinite selection when it comes to themes/skins.

4. WordPress is more user friendly.

5. All the cool kids are switching from Blogger to WordPress. There has to be a reason why that is…

So my blog has been moved to its new home (complete with new look), redirects are in place, custom tweaks are mostly done, co-op is set up, cool plug-ins have been activated and I’m back to blogging .

So, let’s use one of these cool new plugins now, shall we?

n

{democracy:2}

I have a new iMac and quite honestly, I think the new Leopard operating system pretty much SUCKS. And that is pretty harsh coming from a die-hard Apple lover…

I have had nothing but problems with the Leopard operating system. It was so bad that I just went back to using my MacBook (which has the Tiger operating system), but I finally figured that I had better get some use out of my new iMac, since I just spent $2000 on it. So, I started calling Apple support and going through a bunch of bullshit trying to get the stupid computer to work properly.

First off, my Lexmark printer was not compatible with my iMac. I was having flashbacks of trying to set up a printer with our office PC. I finally searched through some forums and found some sort of patch.

Then, the bluetooth wouldn’t work. I had to call Apple support and they fixed it.

Then Stuffit Expander wouldn’t work. So I decided to make a list of all the crap that didn’t work before I called Apple support again. By the time I finally called them, these are the issues that I was having with the stupid Leopard operating system:

- Stuffit Expander immediately crashes whenever opened.
- Adobe Fireworks MX will open, but if you try to do anything it will immediately freeze up.
- Could not open Sims 2 because at least 1 MB of available disk space was needed (It’s a brand new, maxed out iMac, come on now…)
- Adobe Photoshop would immediately crash whenever opened.

These are all things that HAVE to be attributed to the Leopard operating system because I have several Macintoshes running every operating system for the past 3 – 4 years and I have had no problems whatsoever.

Apple support has fixed all the problems, EXCEPT for Fireworks MX. I did some digging and Fireworks MX is just not compatible with Leopard. I have no idea if Mac is trying to fix this, but Adobe doesn’t care. They are not going to release an update to fix the compatibility problem with Leopard:

http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/leopardsupport.pdf

(And by the way, I can’t even open that PDF. I had to check it out here.)

But realistically, Fireworks shouldn’t have to fix Leopards problem. Fireworks MX works on all my other Macs so I perceive that as a Leopard flaw, not a Fireworks flaw.

Oh, and for whatever reason my fonts are acting crazy too…They used to work just fine. Stupid. Apple shouldn’t have tainted their Macintoshes with PC parts (Intel processors).

Jump the shark: Phrase coined in 1997 to describe a defining moment at which a favorite television show has reached its peak, and can only subsequently decline; also describes the moment of decline for any pop culture reference. The phrase, used during the late 1980s, refers to the actual moment in the ABC series Happy Days when the character Fonzie went water skiing and literally “jumped the shark.”

Just yesterday, I was snooping around TheSuperficial.com and was checking out their official business site Anti Clown Media. This is something I always do when I find a website that I like, that has a successful web presence. I was checking out their advertising info and specifically though that this part was hilarious:

“…We believe in connecting special marketers with a special audience. Are you in the business of scamming people with a free iPod gimmick? Then shoot yourself in the face and never come back here ever again. Anticlown Media only accepts advertisers that complement our sites…”

I thought that this was particularly funny, since I’ve recently sworn off of myspace, because of their ridiculously obnoxious talking iphone and ipod gimmick ads.

So, I was catching up on my trashy celebrity gossip on The Superficial today and guess what I saw! A large, gimmicky ipod scam advertisement. Ha.

What a bunch of hypocritical tools…

My old iMac decided not to turn on the other day, so I went on the Apple website and was surprised at how easy it was to troubleshoot. I followed the instructions and I did not get a 2nd LED light which means I need to replace the logic board. I ran down to the Apple store, dropped off my computer and it was ready to go the next day. And I was charged exactly $0.00.

The simple fact that I was able to follow the instructions on the Apple website and troubleshoot the problem with ease is awesome. Plus, my iMac is 3 years old and I never purchased a warranty, yet I wasn’t charged a dime for the repair. How’s that for service?

If this happened with an IBM, you would have to take it to some tech geek to take apart your computer, try and figure out what’s wrong, wait and worry for 2 – 4 weeks and them pay a couple hundred bucks for the repair.

Apple is so awesome.

I just thought that everyone would like to know that Linksys wireless routers are crappy. Less then a year ago, the office started getting kicked off the internet more and more frequently, and the fix was to unplug and replug in the Linksys router, which would fix it for a little while. Then our computers started getting errors trying to connect to the wireless network. Then the router would kick us off the internet in 30 minute intervals. Finally we got fed up and bought a new Linksys Wireless-G Broadband router. That was less than 1 year ago and once again, the stupid new router is starting to kick us off the internet a few times a day again. What a piece of crap.

I’m going back to using the Apple Airport, which I never had a single problem with. I switched to Linksys because someone told me that they were really good routers. That someone apparently has never used an Apple product before…

(By the way, the Linksys router just kicked me off the internet again…for the 8th time today…)

I heard about RealDolls quite a few years ago, via The Howard Stern Show. Long story short, a RealDoll is the most realistic sex doll ever made. They are fully customized to the customers requests (you can pick the RealDolls features, skintone, cup size, tan lines and other things I won’t get into…) and they cost a few thousand dollars. They are so realistic, it’s scary. Here is an actual RealDoll:

Like I said before, RealDolls are old news and while I think they are creepy I can appreciate the artistry and engineering that goes into making a RealDoll. Now, HERE is what really brought out the creep factor for me…You have to see this documentary:

Guys and Dolls
“Guys and Dolls” is a documentary about guys that have “real” relationships with their RealDolls. Can you say mental illness much? My favorite parts:

Davecat from Michigan: “I think, um, the part my father finds really difficult about my realtionship with Chishann (his RealDoll) is the fact that she’s not alive, that she’s not a human being. He sees it as something unnatural and strange…When she first came into my life it was just sex, sex, sex, sex, but now it’s just tapered off so that we’re just there for each other. We’re always there for each other…”

Another good part is where “Gordon” starts showing off his collection of guns (a glock, a shotgun, a semi-automatic) and a twohanded broad sword. Which wouldn’t be so bad if the guy didn’t look/sound like a complete nut job. Here’s a clip of Gordon and his RealDolls, where he rattles off the reasons why RealDolls are better then women. Basically because prostitution is illegal where he lives and they’ll impound his truck….ooookay….

I was throwing together some graphics ( <---over there! ) for the "official" Vicious Enterprises blog and I realized this: I want a vintage typewriter!

Totally random, I know. Especially because this is a totally inappropriate time for me to want anything (in the past 3 days, I have donated or thrown away 90% of the things that I own in preparing to move to Puerto Rico). But, I still want a vintage, working, typewriter.

I remember using one at sometime in my childhood and typing on an old typewriter is actually fun. It’s like playing a piano. You hit the key, which strikes the thingamabobber, which hits the ink strip with the letter that you want emblazoned on the paper. And you can’t type too fast or else all of the key strokey thingys will trip over one another!

Old Typewriters are cool. And I want one damn it. Once I get one, I am going to write type Stefan love letters on it and type up my all important daily “To Do” lists on it…

I spent a good hour or so looking for some sort of widget that counts Paypal donations in real time and I FINALLY found it (so I’m posting it here, so others that are looking for the same thing can find it too!). The Paypal donation widget that I found is by Chipin.com and it’s pretty cool. The widget is super simple to set up and this is what it looks like:

Once the widget is created, it tracks donations and contributors and people that donate can leave comments as well. All in all, this Paypal donation widget is everything I was looking for and more. Cool!

I made the widget above for our CA2PR.com blog as a way for our friends and family to contribute to building our house. Check out the scoop here: