Rice Blogger

An update on Microsoft acquiring Facebook found that it is only half true as Microsoft will buy into Facebook by investing 240million into the social-networking website. I am using facebook and it is pretty nice and not clutted up like MySpace, it would be range as an adult MySpace version while MySpace is for teenagers with the fancy templates.

It was claimed that Google was also negotiating with Facebook. I would assume that Google is trying to buyout Facebook and that may be the reason they are turned down. It always look like Google is trying to buyout the whole Internet World when thet never stop acquiring good pieces of newly created websites.

[Source LATimes]

I am seeing a lot of blogspot owner are starting to have adsense but my advise is always have you domain. Although blogspot allows adsense, it is always good to carry your own identity rather than carrying blogspot identity.

Domain is something like a property in the World Wide Web, it is valuable if you market it enough. It would be good to switch from Blogspot once you know you could earn USD7.99/year from adsense (I register mine from Domainsite).

One main reason I stressed on this issue is because of this few reasons:-

1. PageRank – Once you obtain some pagerank, you are more confident that you are able to earn some money from your website, but if you were to transfer to a new domain, you will be almost like starting all over again. A few months is lost for the page rank to tranfer.
2. URL- You may not even get your dot com domain anymore. Lets say, you got riceblogger.blogspot.com, but when you are thinking to change to riceblogger.com, it is taken, you will have to change to dot net or use another domain.
3. Visitor forwarding – Visitor will have to remember or bookmark another domain, and you have have a chance to lose your visitor
4. Flexibility – There is more flexibility, whereby you could host your domain or having blogspot host your domain. Although hosting your own domain using WordPress or MovableType is always better, blogspot is a cheaper alternative. There is also choice to look for free hosting which allows adsense and your own domain to start your blog cheaply for the first year.
5. Book your name/domain – Grab your name now before someone register them when they see the potential in your domain. There is too many people buying domain mainly to park and park. This is because they know that there is only one dot com domain. If you try to find a single word (any single word from dictionary), you will know that it is almost impossible to find a dot com domain.

This does not only apply to bloggers but to businessman, small business owners, restaurant owners and anyone who is interested to take part in the Internet race.  

It is quite shocking for me to see a clothing store with the ability to rent a ground floor shoplots at Bangsar, Malaysia unable to pay for a domain and maybe some hosting. If you passby or shop there you will know this shop call “Little Black Book” with their domain being http://littleblackbookmy.blogspot.com and having a gmail account. They are proudly printing them at every single tag on the shirt and in front of the shop.

There are times when I do not know what to blog and surfing through websites and websites, blogs and blogs but still could not think of something to write about. This is quite frustrating and I usually end up playing some game.

Usually what I do when I got no idea what to blog about, I will try to get inspiration from the followings:-

1. Google Reader -  One of the best source, as I have tons and tons of feeds added to my Google Reader.
2. Forums – I tend to visit Digital Point more often then others, but there is other similar Forums like v7n. At forums, you could start a topic by just providing a link to the post which is under discussion.
3. News – Visiting page such as Google News, Yahoo! News, News.com and PC Magazine Websites is quite useful to get updated on news.
4. Other than that reading people feeds, reading people blog comments would also give me some inspiration as some blog comments is constructive and could be a nice topic to talk about and share with others.
5. Search Engine – It is quite hard to find stuff from search engine if you do not have a term to search about, but it is always interesting what new stuff you could get and learn from different search engine.

If you have any other tricks up your sleeve, do not hesitate to share. I am very interested to know more and learn more about blogging.

It is always interesting to find out what people can do with photoshop, as everyone has their own artistic mind, Photoshop provides the tool to realize their thoughts.

This is not a tutorial but it is the after effect of photoshop with an artistic mind.


Amazing Photoshop – video powered by Metacafe

Picture worth a thousand words, and pictures taken with a camera is almost never perfect. Phoshop is always the best alternatives to have to picture fixed, framed and placed in your living room.

Since Google acquires Jaiku, now Jaiku is closed for registration. Jaiku have brought in some traffic into this website because of my feed attached to my Jaiku.

Also, Jaiku is like MyBlogLog in a sense that you could actually obtain PageRank for your Jaiku page, but in Jaiku, you could include your link on the right panel. Overall, it is definately usefull to have Jaiku to promote a new blog. I am getting 9.98% of my search engine traffic from my Jaiku account. Since RiceBlogger was started only on August, this is a fairly new blog and any traffic to this blog will be helpful.  

If you need Jaiku Invites, drop me a comment here.

There only condition is that you will add me in your friend’s list

(Currently I have limited invites to Jaiku! Grab them fast!)