about ALEXA.COM

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites.

Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat.^[1] The company offered a toolbar that gave Internet users guidance on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. Alexa also offered context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated.^[2] Engineers at Alexa, in cooperation with the Internet Archive, created the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.^[3] Alexa also supplies the Internet Archive with web crawls.

In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock.^[4]

The company's premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of San Francisco.

Alexa began a partnership with Google in spring 2002, and with the Open Directory Project in January 2003.^[5] Live Search replaced Google as a provider of search results in May 2006.^[6] In September 2006, they began using their own Search Platform to serve results. In December 2006, they released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it is the first major application to be built on their Web Platform.

Alexa also provides "site info" for the A9.com search engine.

In December 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index and web-crawling facilities to third party programs through a comprehensive set of web services and APIs. These could be used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines that could run on Alexa's own servers or elsewhere. Uniquely, their Web Search Platform gives developers access to their raw crawl data. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to require comparisons be limited to 3 sites, reduced size embedded graphs be shown using Flash, and mandatory embedded BritePic ads.^[7]

In April 2007, Alexa v. Hornbaker was filed to stop trademark infringement by the statsaholic service.^[8] In the lawsuit, Alexa alleges that Hornbaker is stealing traffic graphs for profit, and that the primary purpose of his site is to display graphs that are generated by Alexa's servers.^[9][10] Hornbaker removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007.^[11] Nevertheless, it should be noted that Alexa expressly grants permission^[12] to refer its data in third-party work subject to suitable credits.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/

10 Easy Ways To Make Yourself Look Like A Blogging Newbie

10 Easy Ways To Make Yourself Look Like A Blogging Newbie

1. Don’t use title case. Using ‘Make money online like a champ’ for your title would make you look 100 times more like a newbie than ‘Make Money Online Like A Champ’ would. You may want to consider leaving all of the words of your title in lower case, for maximum affect: ‘make money online like a champ’.
2. Use the original URLs that look like this: http://courtneytuttle.com/?p=123. Bloggers that have more experience will use these: http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/02/27/not-using-permalinks-search-engine-suicide/. Make sure you don’t have URLs like that if you want to look like you started your blog last week.
3. Make 26 categories for your 26 posts. This is a very effective way to look like a blogging newbie so make sure you don’t forget about this one! Adding a new category for every post is a powerful, advanced newbie disclosure method.
4. Change your blog’s theme and layout every 13 hours, that way people will know with absolute certainty that you have no idea whatsoever what you want your blog to look like. Tweak your theme relentlessly so that your readers get a chance to see each ‘mess up’ you make in the process.
5. Admit openly in your writing that you have no idea what you want your blog to be about. Consult with your readers about what kind of things they would like to learn. Better yet, hold a poll to allow your 7 active readers to determine your blog’s main topic.
6. Spread yourself thin. Make sure to cover celebrity news, blogging, real estate, credit card debt, technology, programming, social media, home based business, fast cars, music, movies, books, computers, drug rehab, pet training, exercise, framing, construction, writing, photography, art, wealth, investment banking, and water balloon fighting. Definitely don’t become an expert at any one thing. That would make you look too well-informed and advanced.
7. Install your blog in a directory named ‘wordpress’. Using http://yourdomain.com/wordpress/ for the main address of your blog would look a lot more newbie than http://yourdomain.com/ would.
8. Use meaningless post titles. Titles like ‘Another meaningless Monday’ (You’ll notice that I’m ignoring title case for a double-newbie-effect.) and ‘Life sucks again’ are my personal favorites for looking newbieish. (Is newbieish even a word? Hmm.. Is newbie even a word?)
9. Post erratically. Write 7 posts your first day, and then don’t post for a month. Then come back and post 9 times in a day, and then don’t post for another week. Trust me, it works. Do this, and you will definitely look like a newbie - people will surely take note.
10. Beg every decent site you’ve ever heard of to link to you. Definitely don’t tell them about any posts you’ve written, just ask them to link to you without offering any reason at all why they should.

Source : http://courtneytuttle.com/

Adsense Tips

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

• You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
• You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
• You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Source : http://www.problogger.net/