I am currently running a content for a twitter background for my profile on 99designs (which is a great site btw for design contests), so far there has been 28 entries, below are the top 4 I’ve selected between them, please let me know what you think is the best one and if you have any comments on any.

Entry #1

Entry #2

Entry #3

Entry #4

I am leaning towards the 1st entry, what do you think?

Online gaming in the middle east has been growing quickly in the past few years, something that makes sense with the explosive growth ( 1,648.2 % in the past 9 years) of internet users, there are currently 57 million internet users according to Internet World Stats in the region, the MENA region which includes north Africa (mostly Arabic speaking countries) has 85 million internet users! The Middle East region witnessed the highest increase in internet users compared to the rest of the world.

The  rest of the article is now posted at Arabcrunch, please read it here.

Ok, so the blog contest is over and its time to announce the winners of the 4 prizes, but before I do that, lets the effect of the blog contest on my blog traffic and RSS subscribers.

Before starting the contest, I had exactly 3 RSS subscribers and I currently have 44 RSS subscribers, thats 41 new RSS readers, not bad I guess, I was hoping for a bit more, I am still way behind my yearly goal of reaching 2000 RSS readers.

The blog contest post received 45 comments, and 36 contestants, some have blogged about the contest as well. This has plaid a big role in increasing the traffic on my blog, below is a screen show of last month’s traffic stats.

Not all of this growth can be attributed to the contest alone, I did place some banners on two blogs to jump start the contest as well.

Ok, now its time to reveal the winners, I took some images while preparing for the selection of the winners.

Names of the contestants written on paper

All the names in a bole

The 4 winners!

And here they are:

Winner 1 ($50): I heart contest

Winner 2 (Theme forest): Mhaye

Winner 3 (6 months free hosting): Marshal Prince

Winner 4 (Links): Manan Saini

I will be contacting the winners by email to arrange for the prizes, if you dont get an email from me today please do contact me.

I think that its very important to set your yearly goals, this is the 1st time that I set and write down my yearly goals to be honest, on one side this keeps reminding you and pushing you to achieve what you thought you could achieve at the beginning of the year.

Raising the value of Wizards Productions to $10 million

Wizards Productions is my the main business i am working on and have been working on for the past 2 years after the merger with Go3 Media, the goal is a bit bold but I believe it is achievable, we will see if we can make it.

Raising my RSS subscribers to 2000

I currently have 36 feed subscribers, I had only 3 readers when I started my RSS blog competition 5 days ago, I believe that jumping to 2000 readers is a bit high but I certainly think it is achievable.

Launching Site bidding and establishing it as one of the top Website marketplaces

I bought Sitebidding months ago and didnt really have the time to work on it, but I did change its design recently, allot more work still needs to be done, the original company that coded the site were horrible to work with, simple changes took weeks to be done, thats why I am on the look for another company, I contacted Interberry after a recommendation from Tyler and I think I’ll be moving ahead with them soon.

I will be posting more details about the progress of Sitebidding on a regular basis in the coming weeks.

Grow U4media’s blog network

U4media currently has 5 blogs under it, my goal is to hit 30 blogs by the end of this year, these are all blogs with content writers behind them and not auto blogs, I am not going to set any traffic or revenue goals for them right now but I am hoping that the network would generate around 1 million page views per month.

I am going to use my limited design skills and try and do a desktop background with the headlines of these goals and use it as a desktop background on my laptop, this should remind me on a daily basis about my goals and push me to achieve them!

What about you? have you set your goals for this year?

Its been almost a month since my last post, I can’t come up with a good excuse for not posting as I used other than saying its been really hectic in the past weeks, I should have made the time to at least post once every week, sadly I didn’t, that’s why I’ll be doing my best to get back to blogging again, so this is what this post is about, ill be posting some quick updates on my ongoing projects tomorrow.

Have a great weekend!

Quick post to let you guys know that my father started a blog a couple of weeks ago and its been growing nicely since then, my father has been working as a freelance IT consultant  for several years,I recently advised him that he should start a blog and post about the topics he is currently interested in, such as ITIL and project management and so he did.

He also recently started a Linkedin profile, you can view it here.

The blog can be found here:

http://www.mohammedthiab.com

I don’t have to go through the positives of  having an online presense in the form of blogs and social networking profiles, you guys probably already know it, right?

In response to Charl’s latest post in which he tagged me! I am obliged by the blogoshpere code of conduct to reply to his tag with my daily reads!

I am going to break them into categories similar to the ones in my pageflakes account and I wont be mentioning everything in there, only the ones that I check daily!

1- Social networking

- Rev2

A great blog for web2.0 news in general, you’ll find lots of news related to social networking there, reading their blog has always been useful and they tend to be among the 1st sites that break a new story.

- Mashable

Simlar to rev2 but focsues on social networking news, great marketplace section too!

2- Social Media

- Muhammadsaleem

Lots of useful posts in the social media category, check it out!

- Pronetadvertising

Good blog but they don’t update on a regular basis, good info though.

3- Search engine and SEO

- SEObook

Aron Wall author’s the blog, updated regularly with lots of useful information.

- SEOmoz

Probably one of the most popular SEO blogs, if your into SEO, this blog is a must read!

- Seobythesea

Another must read if your into SEO, the topics here are less SEO detailed and discuss SEO in the broader term and SEO’s effecs on the internet.

- Searchenginejournal

Good SEO tips and Search engine news.

- Cre8pc blog

Covers SEO and Usability topics. Great read.

4- Marketing

- Marketingpilgrim

Andy Beal’s blog, posts cover general marketing topics, SEO, affiliate marketing and social media.

- Toprankblog

General Online marketing blog

- Aojon

Focuses on affiliate marketing

5- Tech News

- Techcrunch

No need for introductions here, probably one of the most popular tech and web2.0 new blog on the internet. You probably need to check it multiple times per day as the guys over there never stop writing!

- Hitwise blog

Great to stay up to date with latest stats and press releases from Hitwise.

- Comscore

Want to know who’s leading the social networking arena in terms of visitors, page views and member loyalty, press releases from Comscore deliver this news.

- Webpronews Top news

Lots of channels on webpronews, top news is my favorite.

Edit: forgot to tagg! so I guess I am going to tag Khalid and Bob!

Another episode of funny video Monday, there were a bunch of videos for this week that have been rated at the same level at Funnyvideohub, so I took the liberty of selecting one of them, Enjoy!

Every Monday I’ll be posting the highest rated video for the week from my funny video clips website, this week’s selection is titled “Cool Job” and you can view the video below:

[tags]funny video, funny video clip[/tags]

A friend sent me this link, couldnt stop laughing for a whole hour afterwards