Ash K. Gilpin

Now here is a true blogger.  On www.johnchow.com you will find many interesting articles on investing, technology and the internet in general.  Many of his posts offer some pretty insightful material into the Dot Com industry.  You will find useful information on making money from the internet, new web sites getting a lot of buzz in the industry, computer product reviews and much more.

I personally have gained a lot of experience in overall internet marketing from posts found on www.johnchow.com.  An example would be how John will review a new service that may be getting a lot of a buzz and then he will take you step by step through the process of signing up to making money.  He will also compare and contrast that service with others in the industry to give you an idea of how it ranks amongst the competition along with his two cents on whether it is worth pursuing.

If you are like me and would like to learn how to start making money off the internet, be sure to check out some of these postings that I came across on John’s site:

http://www.johnchow.com/category/agloco/
http://www.johnchow.com/most-profitable-ad-network-for-a-low-traffic-blog/
http://www.johnchow.com/150-into-15000-in-30-days/

Wengo a subsidiary of 9 Telecom, France’s second largest telecom, has a well designed chat widget for bloggers. It’s called Wengo Visio and is like MeeboMe but with video chat. Visio runs in Flash through a bit of embedded JavaScript and CSS, with SIP as the communications protocol. Check here for some bloggers that have it implemented.

When you have your widget installed, you can make yourself available to chat by logging in through an admin menu. While online, readers can solicit you for chatting by typing a little message in text box that shows up on the owners side. The owner can then initiate the chat if they choose. Chatting is currently one-to-one via mic and optional web cam, which makes it less overwhelming than the flood of texting that can happen with MeeboMe. Although, the group video chat of PalTalk and ability for readers to listen in could make for an ad hoc “Gillmor Gang” style meeting of the minds right on your blog.

But Wengo Visio isn’t intended to be a standalone program, rather it is an effort to expose Wengo’s other products, Wengo Talents community and Wego Phone to a wider audience. Wengo Phone is their own chat client that lets you text chat, call other VOIM users, call landlines, call cell phones, set up audio conferences, and make video calls. It also runs on Win, Mac, and Linux, with Google Talk, Yahoo, ICQ, and GAIM compatability. Similar to Skype-out, they only charge for calls to landlines and cell phones, but have a free trial with € 0.50 of credits until January 4th. So far, over 72 million minutes have been shared over Wengo.

Stepping back a step further, both Wengo Visio and Wengo Phone are part of their long term plan of building a pay-per-call expert network, Wengo, where people can sell their time on the phone via PayPal or credit card. This may sound a lot like Ether, sans the 1-800 number, and it is very similar. Wengo, however, has opted to build their offering around their own Wengo community site, where users have categorized themselves, received ratings, and posted profiles. Ether has opted for a different strategy by relying on users to promote services on their own.

News from Del.icio.us has been slow the last year - a couple of controversies and some solid overall growth. It’s an example of something the Internet really needed, but it’s also a bit of a one-trick pony. You bookmark stuff, tag it, and share it. Good data comes out of aggregrated user generated data. That’s pretty much the end of the story. I love Del.icio.us, but there isn’t much else to say about it, and the Yahoo team seems to be focused on getting del.icio.us, Yahoo Bookmarks and My Web onto a single back end platform.

Today, however, there is a bit of news. They’ve launched a widget website that displays the how many times that site has been bookmarked in Del.icio.us, along with popular tags. You can find the widget script below in this post.

To add the widget to your site, see the instructions here. It’s a one line script.

Today, ExpoTV, a site focused on user-generated reviews and product demonstrations, announced a $6 million Series A round of funding led by Masthead Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks, including existing investors. Brady Bohrmann of Masthead and Will Kohler of Prism are joining ExpoTV’s board.David Beisel, with Masthead, writes on his blog that he feels the ExpoTV investment is a promising investment because of ExpoTV’s focus on the “intersection of online video and social commerce”.

ExpoTV is best described as a YouTube for product reviews. Users can peruse or upload video opinions by category. They also have their own reviews branded as ExpoTV on demand. To reward their users for their content, ExpoTV currently has a “Pay-per-Play” program where you will receive $0.01 each time any of your published Videopinion reviews is played. Payments are made once per month via PayPal. ExpoTV also has several holiday promotions on right now as they focus on collecting holiday gift reviews.

Zudeo, the new “100% legal” content sharing site launched by popular BitTorrent company Azureus two weeks ago, just nailed a distribution deal with the BBC. That just took them from a theoretically cool product to a player in the online video space.

Under the agreement, BBC will license a number of television shows to U.S. users, including Red Dwarf, Strange and Invasion Earth, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal.

It is a tragedy that they didn’t include the only BBC show worth watching, The Office. Of course, that show is readily available on Azureus’ BitTorent client.

The benefits of Zudeo are pretty clear to publishers, who can leverage P2P networks to substantially decrease bandwidth costs and speed downloads for users.

This spells trouble for Pando and Red Swoosh, which offer competing products to publishers. Zudeo probably isn’t focused on those companies, though. There is a multi-party war brewing for IPTV eyeballs between iTunes, Venice Project, Zudeo and YouTube.

Google announced the acquisition of part of a business called Endoxon, an Internet mapping company located in Switzerland. This deal looks like it’s part technology and part team. The Google blog says Endoxon has developed “compelling technology that will enhance our Google geo products worldwide,” as well as “we’re also excited about having a dedicated team in Europe.” Nothing is being said about acquisition price, or what will happen to the three Endoxon business units that Google didn’t acquire.

Later today, Digg, which just celebrated its second birthday, will release a number of new features. 

The primary release is the first content area of the site that isn’t news-focused. Users can now Digg their favorite podcasts (feeds and individual episodes). The podcasting homepage will list the most popular podcasts by category (comedy, gaming, health, etc.). Their aim is for Digg to become the first stop for people looking for good podcasts, which will have standard Digg voting, discussion, etc. The Digg team isn’t putting it this way, but it’s clear that this is an experiment to see if users will adopt the Digg model of voting on things to non-breaking news. If this is successful, look for Digg to launch new types of content areas on the site. Technorati has a similar feature ranking blogs.

The other big new feature will be the relese of “Top 10 Stories,” and area of the site where users can see the hottest stories at any given time, including stories that have fallen off the home page but are still seeing lots of votes and discussion. A separate Top 10 area is designated for each category

Other changes today include:

• Digg is now Widescreen: They’ve moved from a fixed width page to a flexible layout allowing users to make use of bigger screen real estate. Navigation links have been moved to the top of the screen.
• Video Enhancements: The main change here is a way to view videos directly on Digg in a lightbox. See screenshot for visual.

It’s the most asked question concerning AGLOCO; When will the Viewbar be available? Well, we finally have an official answer.

We expect to be able to release the first phase of the Viewbar in 7 to 10 weeks. There are many reasons why the release of the viewbar has to be managed carefully, server planning, partnerships and operating systems are just three examples of why the process is long. We shall also keep updating the website and making it better for our Members to refer others.

In addition to given the estimated Viewbar release date, AGLOCO also set a goal of having 10 million members by July 1, 2007. That’s a pretty ambitious goal when you consider it took AllAdvantage 18 months to hit 10 million members, and AGLOCO wants to do this in 7 months. If they can pull it off, the company would have a value of $250 - $400 million based on current Internet valuation metrics.

Akshay Mavani wouldn’t say how many members AGLOCO currently has but we can figure it out based on the member ID. The company started at BBBB and the latest code I can find is at BBBJ. Each change in letter represents 10,000 members so going from B to J means AGLOCO has at least 90,000 members. If you sign up, please let me know your referral ID so I can get an exact member count. I am pretty sure it has moved beyond J.

Facebook, having turned down at least one verified $1 billion buyout offer, is now saying they aren’t for sale. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and board member Peter Thiel aren’t stopping there, either. They’re also saying the company may build towards an IPO, and is worth at least $8 billion today.

Mark Zuckerberg:

We are not necessarily focused on what the exit is going to be - whether it’s selling the company or an IPO or when that’s going to be,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “But we obviously think that there’s a lot of potential to keep growing.”

Peter Thiel:

“It’s going to remain an independent company,” Thiel said in an interview last week. “The plan is to actually build it, maybe at some point take it public, but definitely not to sell it.”

In July, the messaging coming from YouTube was nearly identical:

“Right now we’re just concentrating on proving the best user experience possible,” [CEO Chad] Hurley said. “We have no plans to sell.” As for an initial public offering, Hurley said, “If we have an opportunity to go public in the future that would be very exciting for us.” He also brushed aside reports that the value of the company jumped to $1 billion from $600 million because of his appearance at the Allen & Co. confab. “We’re not even focused on that,” he said. “There’s a lot of people talking about that in the blogs and in the media. A lot of this is news to us.”

Google has entered the domain business with partners GoDaddy and eNom. An already crowded industry, Google has begun allowing people to register ‘.com’, ‘.net’, ‘.biz’, and ‘.info’ Web site addresses. Web sites that register their domains directly with Google for $10/year will automatically be setup to use Google Apps for Your Domain, which includes Google’s Page Creator (for easily making a Web site), Calendar, Email, and IM.With this move, look for Google to tap more into the domain parking business using their Google AdSense for Domains product a bit more.