Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

This is going to be a real short post to introduce the new blog design, I am looking for feedback, what do you think? any thoughts? this is not a custom skin, but i found it while browsing around and loved it, looking fwd. for your feedback!

Its almost mid night here and I should head to bed, got an early day tomorrow!

Alright so lets check out what’s on today’s post:

• Myspace Sues CPA Empire.
• Pageflakes 
• Web2.0 design checklist 
• Google Adwords on Myspace
• Social bookmarking links
• Dates added! 

Myspace Sues CPA Empire 

If you haven’t heard the news, myspace.com is suing CPA empire as well as others for spamming Myspace with affiliate offers via email marketing campaigns and sending out bulletins, here is how the lawsuit described it:

” Richter and his associates “arranged for millions of spam ‘bulletins”‘ to be sent from MySpace users’ accounts without their knowledge by gaining access to them illegally, according to the lawsuit.”

CNN has the full coverage on the story.

I was surprised to hear the news, I’ve worked with CPA Empire on some offers and they looked good, they had strict rules for email marketing campaigns, I have no idea how this has happened other than it being delibarte! but how could someone like Richter do such a thing and not know the consequences, I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this case ends, I am just glad I didnt take part in any email marketing campaigns or any marketing on Myspace!

Pageflakes

I’ve started using pageflakes around a week ago, and I gotta say that I love it! I have no idea why didn’t I try it before, it saves allot of time and makes keeping up with updates on the internet way easier, I’ve added all the blogs I read in categories, added news, email and almost everything you can thing of that has an RSS feed, if only I can add the forums that I visit, I would probably never leave pageflakes. If you haven’t created an account there or on a similar service, I suggest that you do so now!

Web2.0 Design Checklist

Jon blogged today about his new website, tutorialvine in which he posted a nice tutorial titled web2.0 design checklist, the checklist is a bit short but it contains useful information for those of you who are interested in web design, you can find the tutorial here.

Google Adwords on Myspace

News Corp and Google have partnered, yep that’s right, Adwords ads will start to show up on Myspace.com and for its 27 billion page views per month, what does that effect Adwords advertisers? my guess that it would effect it negatively since most of the traffic on Myspace doesn’t convert well for advertisers especially the ones looking to sell something online, which is the case for most of the PPC advertisers out there, if I was a PPC advertiser, I would stay away from the content network and stick to the search network, I’ve always done that even before hearing this news.

My guess is that Google is aware of this problem, the advertisers are an important asset for Google and I am sure they are working on a solution for this situation, if your interested about reading more, check out Gray’s post.

Social Bookmarking Links

So how do you guys like them? they are the links you can now see at the end of each of my blog posts, they are a good way to attract more traffic if someone likes your posts and digg’s it for example, however others may disagree. Kim Cre8asiteforums founder explains her not so good experience with digg in her blog post.

Anyways I found those great plugins on this wordpress plugin site. The site has hundreds of cool plugins, check it out if your interested.

Dates Added

A reader requested in a previuos blog post that dates should be added, well I give you the dates, enjoy!

Google PR update seems to be finally over, allot of people following those updates including me thought that it was over around a week ago, then I read an opinion on DP saying that the PR update will probably be over by the end of Jan. and it seems he was correct, my blog for example jumped back to a PR5, which I am very happy about.

This was indeed one of the strangest PR updates I’ve seen, usually  the new PR starts appearing in some of Google’s DC’s and takes time to propagate over all DC’s, however, with this update, website’s that were planned to get a new PR, whether it was an increase or decrease in the PR, dropped to a PR0, and stayed like that for a while, so lots of us thought that was it, which wasnt the case afterall.

So anyways, here is the result of this update on some of my major websites:

• sohaibthiab.com 4 –> 5
• thewebdir.org 2 –> 4
• funnyvideohub.com 0 –>3
• uploadq.com 0 –> 3
• smsit.org 3 –> 4
• proxyheat.com 0 –> 3
• freewebproxy.info 3 –> 4
• anonyproxi.com 0 –> 3
• wallpaperfreedom.com 0 –> 1

Another strange thing I noticed on some of the domains that their PR didnt increase, that some of the inner pages have a higher PR than the main page, I wont be surprised if we see more changes in the upcoming few days.

Proxies

Proxyheat.com did it again, it nearly took my server down 2 days ago, I couldn’t believe how traffic grew on it so fast after leaving it offline for more than a month, I originally was hosting it on my server, then it started consuming too much server resources that I moved it to godaddy on one of their shared web hosting plans that come with 250GB bandwidth, so I thought it will never use that much, the next thing I know I got an email with a request to pay $70 in bandwidth overcharges, thing is the whole yearly plan i got was for $35, lol, so I just pulled the plug on the site for a month or so.

I think all of this is comes down to my proxy allowing hot linking, apparently phproxy allows hot linking! phproxy release a beta version of their new proxy with an option to turn off hotlinking, but I’de rather wait until they release something stable before changing all my proxies to it, till then proxyheat is offline!

Vbulletin License

I bought a vB license around a week ago for a project which apparently wont be needing it anymore, so if anyone is interested in a good deal, email me, its a leased license btw, are those transferable?

M4A

My good friend Paul who is my partner in this project has been pushing me to finish the site so he can start marketing it, I know that I’ve been way too late in finishing this site, but I’ve been extremely busy with other projects especially project F, which hopefully will be done real soon (I keep saying the same thing over and over) most of M4A has been finished, there isnt any development work that needs to be done, all that I need to do is figure how to add CJ and other affiliate networks to the website and were ready to go, I’ll do my best to finish the site this weekend Paul

EDIT:

After investigating the issue of proxyheat, it turns out that a number of porn websites were using my proxy to hotlink to images, no wonder the proxy used more than 250GB’s of bandwidth in less than a month!

I’ve been tagged by Zane Jamal I haven’t been tagged before to be honest, so this is a bit interesting! so here goes 5 things you didn’t know about me:

1. I am tall, at least to the middle eastern standards, about 193 cm’s, I am not sure how much is that in feet’s, according to the tool its exactly equal to 6 feet.
2. I am much into politics, this is a bit natural since I am in a region that is filled with big news, Jordan is to the east of Palestine, west of Iraq and south-west of Lebanon, so I guess were in the eye of the storm!
3. I am not into sports at all, I was never able to get excited about football, basketball or anything else to that matter, I wouldn’t mind watching a good game, but I don’t see the point of watching and memorizing hundreds of teams and team players, sorry sport junkies but that’s a waste of time and energy in my opinion.
4. I had to nothing to do with the internet 4 years ago.
5. 90% of the websites I use/visit are forums and blogs, I barely use sites like youtube, flickr or digg. But that doesn’t mean I don’t keep up to date with the new features the release etc. and doesnt stop me from starting similar sites.

hmm, so who should I tag, I guess I am going to tag Byan Le and JohnD.

Your probably wondering what did Yahoo blow up, this was the title of an interesting article on wirednews that Rand linked to in his last post, I am going to post the same interesting findings from the article that Rand posted since it is the most interesting part of the article:

Semel has been Yahoo’s CEO for nearly six years, yet he has never acquired an intuitive sense of the company’s plumbing. He understands how to do deals and partnerships, he gets how to market Yahoo’s brand, and he knows how to tap Yahoo’s giant user base to sell brand advertising to corporations. But the challenges of integrating two giant computer systems or redesigning a database or redoing a user interface? Many who have met with him at Yahoo say he still doesn’t know the right questions to ask about technology. “Terry could never pound the table and say, ‘This is where we need to go, guys,’” one former Yahoo executive says. “On those subjects, he always had to have someone next to him explaining why it was important.” One could have made a convincing argument two years ago that such deep technical knowledge didn’t matter much. But now we have empirical evidence: At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.

Rand from SEOMoz continues to mention interesting points in his post about why he thinks Google became a bigger brand than Yahoo:

• User interface
  Google’s clean UI was revolutionary and attractive; it’s still one of the elements consumers cite most about their use of the engine.
• Purity of function
  Google’s concentration on search (at least in the early years) made them first and foremost a search engine in people’s mind. Yahoo! was a directory, a portal, an email service, etc. and, oh yeah, also an engine.
• Appeal to Geeks
  Google appealed to tech geeks – the people who set the home pages on computers around corporate offices and at home for Grandma. When thousands of influencers in a field become obsessed with a product, it achieves mass popularity (just look at Apple).
• Viral spread
  Google’s marketing was nearly invisible at a time when invisible, viral marketing was being embraced by consumers, particularly those in the web world.
• Early quality advantage
  Perhaps no single factor is of greater import – Google’s early lead in quality was so large that switching to Google was an obvious choice. In my opinion, this was Yahoo!’s biggest failure – letting Google return more relevant results. The funny part – I honestly can’t say whether senior management was responsible for or could have controlled this factor. It could be that Google simply had a few people with better ideas and all the hiring and R&D in the world couldn’t have saved Yahoo!.
• Media obsession
  Being a media darling made Google incredibly well placed to get early interest from even the stodgiest of users. And, with no need to market or advertise (since press releases on the average consistency of Googlers snot got more coverage than a major media play from Yahoo!), Google could spend that money in R&D to continue their edge.

I can only say that I agree with Rand’s thoughts, Google did allot of correct steps towards creating the giant they are now, while Yahoo! did lots of big mistakes in my opinion.

Anyhow, all of you probably know that there was a Google PR update going last week, this update was particularly interesting to watch compared to other updates, 1st of all, it took longer than any of the previous updates took to happen, and the results were strange and it seems that i am not the only one that has the same thoughts, I did somewhat of a small experiment myself, i linked to a new site of mine from PR6 and PR7 pages only a month or so before the PR update, and the results came back just like I expected, no PR increase for that site at all, it seems that Google is now effectively denies a website any PR value unless the links your getting stay on those pages longer than a month (not sure of the time exactly)

I’ve been mainly working for the past 2 weeks on project F, its almost done now, needs a bit more work and it should be ready to launch, hopefully ill be able to share some good news about it in the coming week, the main developer I am using for the project was experiencing internet problems and this lead to a bit more delay, this sort of thing is expected when dealing with freelancers, I guess everyone using freelancers is used to this.

I know I haven’t been sharing lots of personal project news that I usually used to share and I apologize for that, I’ll do my best to write a post to sum up everything that has been going on for the past month as far as my websites are concerned.

btw shoemoney made a nice post about the wordpress plugins he usually uses, I’ve had the Akismet plugin added in my plugins folder but never installed it, its not installed and hopefully it will solve the blog spam issue I’ve been bombarded with for the past months.

I found this interesting piece of information today while i was browsing around, Adbrite is currently testing its new video ads service, you can read more about this new interesting service here:

http://www.adbrite.com/mb/about_video.php

I haven’t done much work this past week, mostly due to relaxing and enjoying the vacation, I’ve been reading a number of blogs and sites lately that I missed out on for the past month, I used to visit around 6 blogs per day and check them out for any new posts, so I have allot of catching up to do!

Project F will hope fully be online real soon, I am very excited about this project and see allot of potential in it, if things go as planned the beta release of the website should be done in the next 5 days.

That’s all i guess, I am leaning towards doing shorter posts on a more frequent basis, this way I’ll have fresh new content for you to read whenever you visit