If you don’t know wikis, it might be a good time for you to get familiar as wikis have not been fully utilized as blogs have been. (Before you know it, the world will become a “wiki wiki” world…)

As a wiki fanatic myself as I have built the world’s first-ever MediaWiki based social networking site, I am a collector of any new books related with wikis in general.

One of the books that I haven’t gotten a hold of was, wikipatterns by Stewart Mader, creator of wikipatterns.com. I am a big fan of anyone who’s creating new sites with wikis so…

What intrigued me about his creation Wikipatterns.com, is the idea itself, not really the software built on it. I am still dumbfounded about what wikipatterns exactly is but Stewart was nice enough to explain it to me in plain English at Web2.0 Expo today:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

(Thanks Stewart, and thank you for the book! I love wiki books, make sure to check out my wiki creation too, SiteHoppin.com!)

Stewart also runs Grow Your Wiki blog, check it out as it has lots of interesting stuff for all you wiki lovers.

I will probably do another write-up after I finish the book so hold on while I get all that wiki stuff in my head and spit it back out to you readers in plain English.

Wikipatterns, btw, is based on Wiki software by Atlassian, a company who specialized in Enterprise Wikis.

We will have a short video re-cap by Atlassian’s president, Jeffrey Walker in a little bit, explaining further the advantages of using wikis to replace e-mails and documents.

What do you think, will Wikis be the future of mass collaboration? (If it isn’t already?)

Today, we will cover several ways that can help you to reduce cost of your printing, whether you are running a home business or a company with 1000 employees.

Make sure to Preview your documents before printing:

A lot of people might think this is something they do all the time but the truth is that most people waste a lot of paper printing out the wrong portion of their content, including myself.

Use that “Preview” button to preview what you are printing. Almost all applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and MS Word have this feature.

At least think about how many million trees would be saved if “everyone” used the Preview button?

Here’s an example of print preview on Firefox: (Yes, it’s so simple, isn’t it? Your actions can save a tree.)

Use Draft mode and Black and White mode for Drafts:

You can save additional time and ink if you are still working on your draft versions by using the draft mode.

Simply click on “Properties” and you should be able to set your printer to “Draft” or “Fast Draft” mode as shown here:

Save even more ink by printing in Grayscale:

Scan all documents “digitally” into CD or DVDs

Have you thought about all the stuff that could be digitized into a Jpeg or PDF file into a single CD or a DVD?

A lot of times, people will ask you to fax some important documents in order to verify your information when doing business.

By having all documents “digitized” and accessible from a single CD or DVD (or even your G-mail), you no longer have to remember where you left that Social Security card, passport, Business License, etc…etc… Although it is good idea to keep the original copies, I find it easier to e-mail my digital copies straight from G-mail.

I could be anywhere in the world and have access to all my important documents with just 1 CD or DVD instead of lugging all your documents everywhere with you, especially going over-seas.

Best ways to digitize your documents?

Get a good office scanner. I use an HP Deskjet F380, which cost me about $70 to do printing, scanning, and copying all-in-one. Although it’s slower than a laserjet, I can do most office work using it and it scans reasonably fast. I use it to scan all my invoices, receipts, and anything that can be scanned.

If you can afford it, there are some really nice laser version of the Deskjet, LaserJet M5025, which can scan hundreds of documents at a time and send them to your e-mail when its done via a single PDF file. This can prove to be very handy for all those POs and Invoices you have stacked up in huge boxes. I remember on one of my first jobs, I digitized about 20 boxes of POs (around 100,000 letter sized papers) from Wal-mart. (Think of how many trees I saved for their future POs!)

Nowdays, that company can simply access every one of their POs via a DVD-ROM.

Buy ink cartridges online from 3rd party suppliers

Buy cheap ink cartridges from 3rd party suppliers like DataBazaar.com. I find that their prices are much cheaper even if you are buying an OEM brand.

CD and DVD Labels

Now, just make sure to label them right using good CD labels, especially if you do have a lot of data to digitize. You can download free CD templates over here. These templates are great if you actually want to organize your digitized documents. You can even get some really good discounts on CD/DVD labels here.

Label Printers

If you like to spend more money, you can always get a label printer too. I have tried Dymo label printers before and these work really good with address labels or CD/DVD labels.

Print Labels and get your mail delivered faster!

Instead of spending time writing the addresses, I use my printer to print out labels so I save time on my frequent mailings and my mail gets there faster.
(Did you know that US Postal Service actually uses a scanner to process mail? If you have handwritten addresses, your mail will could actually take 1-2 days more due to manual scan by human workers. I did learn this through an executive manager I talked to at Pitney Bowes.)

By using labels instead of handwriting, you will save yourself hassle of writing and your mail will get to your destination faster. (You can even print out the US Postal Service address bar code on the envelope itself to ensure super fast delivery.)

You can also save some money by ordering labels from online label shops such as WorldLabel.com, which I have used before and found 40-50% cheaper than retailers. They even have popular “size-compatible” Avery labels, much cheaper than buying the branded ones.

Now, if you think this blog post will “change” printing behaviors of our readers, please leave a comment on how many trees you think we saved today.

VHi All,

This week we will be featuring review of affiliate programs from AdTech 2008 and try out 6 affiliate programs we hand pick and test them out over the next 2 months.

(AdTech is a tradeshow that covers the latest trends in online marketing, advertising, publishing, and social media.)

For the reviews, we actually went out and hand picked the smaller or less known affiliate companies among the bloggers, who provide better customer support while giving you better affiliate payouts.

We are also planning to gather about 200 bloggers over at Zedomax.Net to launch a big blog/affiliate network so stay tuned.

So far, we got about 50 bloggers so if you want to get in early, make sure to shoot us an e-mail at zedomax [at] gmail.com and benefit from our network traffic, SEO, and affiliate programs. (Basically in the long run, we will get better payouts from affiliate/advertising companies as a big network of blogs.)

At the end of all the video reviews, we will have a complete breakdown on who’s who of affiliate programs at AdTech 2008.

First up at bat is CX Digital Media.

Here’s a video interview with Winkie Lee, affiliate manager of CX Digital Media I met at the show:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

CX Digital Media focuses on high payout CPA affiliate programs, 2% publisher referral commissions, and offer Net-15 terms. Basically, you can write blog posts about any products you like and make commission if someone signs up for the product. (CPA = Cost per Action)

I found they have pretty good products, here’s a screenshot on some of their offers:

Although I am not too keen on offers like Bingo and Poker, I do like offers like $28 for Wall Street Journal and $250 Gas Card, which can be both very useful for the readers of your blogs.

What I like about the dashboard after you sign up for CX Digital Media is that you have a 1-on-1 relationship with the Affiliate Manager. In my case, it’s Winkie Lee and I can IM her when I need help:

I really like this as I have tried other big companies like CJ.com, and they don’t have this type of personal support. Besides, CJ.com is already too competitive and the payouts are low unless you are making a lot of money already.

Here’s some free/discount offers you can take advantage of and also help me make some money:

$99 for 1 year of Wall-Street Journal

Free $250 Gas Card for a little survey

Get a Free BLOW Energy Drink

You can sign up for a CX Digital Media affiliate program here.
(Make sure to write, “Winkie Lee” under the Notes section so Winkie will be your affiliate manager.)

By signing up through me and also joining Zedomax Network, you will be able to take advantage of even higher payouts later down the road.

There’s also a $750 bonus for any affiliates who can generate more than $7500 within the first 30 days of signing up.

More great affiliate program reviews coming soon so stay tuned!

Sorry everybody for lack of posts. I have been a little hairy dealing with MediaWiki code over at SiteHoppin.com.

Anyways, we’ve just launched the new Beer Stock Affiliate Program where you can make 25% on all our net-profit sales! You gotta check it out while I try to recover from all the crazy codin’.

These beer stocks are hot and you don’t want to miss out on our biggest IPO as we will be also incorporating Zedomax Inc. next week baby!

That’s right, we are going to go for the real thing now, no more bs. If you ever wanted to invest in Zedomax, this is the time. We will also be allowing some private investors to invest in our new corporation stocks so if you are interested in investing in the Zedomax Network, let me know at zedomax [at] gmail.com.

Oh okay, this one might be on the borderline of legalness but its actual use is to make backups of your HD DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. They have free trial download so check it out here if you need it.

Slysoft says the new version of its AnyDVD programme allows users to make “backup security copies” of high definition movies.

The claim is a blow to Sony which developed the Blu-ray format.

The discs are protected by an anti-piracy system called BD+.

When it launched in 2007, developers boasted it would not be cracked for 10 years.

Sony declined to comment!

via MarcLironBlog

Hi all,I’ve been busy building this “online stock” market over at SiteHoppin.com.

Go check it out as we just launched it…and I need some rest from 5 straight days of ridiculous coding…

SiteHoppin Beer Stocks are “internet stocks”, we call IUVC (Internet User Venture Capital), that allow you to buy into our new company without having to invest millions, unlike Venture Capital.

Basically, when you buy Beer Stocks, you become co-owners of SiteHoppin.com. We probably won’t let you run the site, but we are giving every internet user an opportunity to invest in one of the fastest growing web sites on the internet.

You can read more about it on our Beer Stocks FAQ.

I was site hoppin’ over at Gizmodo today and for some reason their posts were down but I had the pleasure of watching their flash ad.

Hope you enjoy and why are all computer dealers/manufacturers still shipping their PCs and laptops with Vista installed? At least let the people have an option to have XP pre-installed. (Yes, that means you Dell, HP, Compaq, Sony, etc…etc… why are you guys so dumb and promote a “dumb” Vista? Yes, you guys probably make way too much money to actually care about people. Stop hiding in your stupid looking grey suits and respond to me you dumbasses!)