HeeKyong Yoon from SpringNote.com, was nice enough to chat with me on their cool “wiki” product, SpringNote:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

FYI, SpringNote.com is a subsidiary of NcSoft.com, the creators of legendary online game, Lineage.

Well, I tried out SpringNote, here’s a screenshot:

It’s very simple to use, just like a real notebook except you have unlimited number of pages plus you get bunch of already-made templates like Bookshelf, Monthly Plan, Recipe, and etc…etc…

What I found most interesting was that it is a “wiki” site but you don’t need to know any wiki markup language and start editing your online notes right away. You also have the option to share your notes or keep them private.

As far as technology goes, I love the fact that SpringNote has incorporated a LOT of AJAX. (probably mostly AJAX)

I might start using it more real soon. The only downside I saw was that SpringNote’s servers are hosted in Korea. Although the site does fairly fast, I measured, 168ms ping times from my PC in San Francisco.

FYI, Zedomax.com get 41ms ping times, 4 times faster as servers are hosted in San Diego, California.

Although they could keep running servers from Korea, I think they can grab much larger audience in the U.S. by simply serving their pages from servers in the U.S. (Besides, it’s probably much cheaper to host it here.)

Other than that, I find SpringNote as the next generation online note web app. I will have to dump my MS Outlook all together and start using SpringNotes, way simpler and easier for mass collaboration.

David, an affiliate manager from Etology.com, has given me a $25 coupon for FREE traffic for NEW affiliates.

To test out Etology.com and get $25 worth of free traffic from their advertising network, you can sign up for an affiliate account here, then use the coupon code “01KLSY” at ad checkout to get the $25 of free advertising.

Here’s an interview with David from Etology.com:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

(Thanks again David for the interview and your time!)

Etology.com offers a wide range of advertising/publisher’s programs including text ads, banners, thumbnails, and more. They offer a wide range of banner ads, which I liked since I need to be flexible when I am offering advertising on my blog.

The greatest feature about Etology.com is that they allow you to set your own prices for your ads.

For mine, I chose a 125×125 pixel ad, I haven’t put it on this blog yet, but I will do that later this week to test out the effectiveness and also conversion rate of Etology.com.

You can also set your ad to be sold at market prices, which is great since there’s a standard price for the advertisers.

For advertisers, it seems like you will have tough time finding the right site to advertise on as there are so many sites at Etology.com as shown in this screenshot of their marketplace:

But Etology.com does offer personal support so you don’t have to do the work and let the affiliate manager find good ones for you.

Another great thing about Etology.com is that they offer 5% commissions on any affiliates you refer. So you can make 5% of any advertising that your friends sell.

I will be trying out Etology.com for banner advertising on my blog later this week and also a breakdown of all affiliate programs will be given at the end of all AdTech 2008 reviews.

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.

Check out this really cool “automatic ball throwing machine” for your dog. Set it on and your dog will play tirelessly while you can focus on working from home or doing your dishes.

We couldn’t find any sources other than this Tennis ball throwing machine patent and a simliar device called GoDogGo!. We think it’s basically a tennis ball throwing machine that can be used for your dog.

Even better, you could probably hack one up yourself if you were a good hacker.

For video, click below.

Continue reading ‘Automatic Ball Throwing Machine for your Dog!’

I have been experimenting with many 125×125 pixel banner exchange programs including Spottt, Nuacco, 125exchange, and etc…etc…

What I have found in my study is that these banner exchange programs don’t work and will fail in the long term.

Why?

Because this system has been in place for a long time, it’s not a new technology.

If you don’t believe me, you can even go download a free version of Easy Banner Pro, which Nuacco and 125exchange runs on.

Heck, I could probably start a 125×125 banner exchange tomorrow. Simply download the script then install it on your server, and blog about it.

Spottt, on the other hand, is exact same technology and exact same figures. They just have more money in their pockets to feed some Fortune journalists or maybe they know someone there. Props though for getting such “low technology” onto Fortune, they do have clever people who are good with words obviously.

Entrecard is probably the guy who “changed” that exchange by adding community interaction such as “dropping” cards. This is good and Entrecard will probably live a long life.

Lol…that’s why we made SiteHoppin Beer Widgets, it’s slightly different in that you get “clicks” exchange, not impressions. Plus, you get to earn Beer Credits and get to go play with them. (We should have some gambling games soon so hold on…)

Plus, SiteHoppin is not simply a banner exchange, it allows any internet users, to view the web like an iPod.

Anyways, enough rambling about our SiteHoppin and banner exchange systems that will never work, do you like our new Zedomax Wordpress theme?

Well, I am still working on it, well… “everything” is a work in progress, including this blog itself.

If these Spottt guys want to actually get some real traffic, they better start updating their site more and this is an honest opinion, not simply bashing on someone else’s business. If they take my advice and start doing something about it, they might live I guess…not that I give a ****.

Well, we did a lot of server hacking before with some MySQL, eAccelerator, and httpd.

There’s a lot of major blogs out there I have checked using Web Page Compression Tool that are not using compression. (For one, I checked John Chow’s blog)

Try to check one of your posts instead of checking your main URL as the tool is funky with root domains. (e.g. Check http://zedomax.com/blog/2008/02/23/never-give-up-especially-your-blog-dude/ instead of http://zedomax.com)

Here’s a screenshow of compression test I did for one of John Chow’s posts:

As you can see, John Chow’s blog does not use compression. As a result, he’s losing out on almost 5 times of bandwidth!!!

With level 9 compression, his site could be loaded on your web browser at 21K instead of the whopping 100K.

Now the compression might not be for all of you with slow CPUs. Our Zedomax.com runs on Quad-CPU server which has a lot of CPU processing power.

Here’s a screenshow of my server under normal load:

As you can see, most of the time, my CPU is idling at 80.8%! That means my CPU is pretty much sitting on its ass instead of doing work for me.

Now, if you have a similar situation, compression will help your site load faster and also bring your load down so you can handle more traffic.

Here’s how to enable compression if you have a dedicated or access to root on your server:

(Most servers have zlib installed, if you don’t have zlib installed, you will have to install that first, you can check it by making a test file and putting <?php phpinfo() ?> and search for zlib)

Add the following lines to your /etc/php.ini:

zlib.output_compression = on
zlib.output_compression_level = 5

and then restart apache! (of course):

httpd -k restart

Now, go check one of your posts on the Compression Test Tool here.

As you can see above, I just compressed one of my blog posts by a whopping 76.1%!

If you are using Super Cache plugin for Wordpress, make sure to go to options and do this too:

Now, your server will run faster since there’s less data being transmitted to your visitors, meaning you save bandwith, time, and most importantly, the ability to handle more traffic.

At 70% increase in bandwidth, that could translate to that many more visitors too as bandwidth is directly proportional to amount of time a visitor stays on your site. (Yes, I did take Calculus in college, I failed miserably before passing.) The less time a visitor takes to load a page on your blog or your site, the more time and bandwidth you have for other visitors.)

I was searching through the web for many ways to use compression for server optimization but I couldn’t find any so I sort put everything together here.

Hopefully, it helps you.

And one more thing, you can also check out this great tutorial on your httpd.conf setup.

You can always check out HOWTO decrease load on your server by 5 times also.

Check out this great blog post on how to maximize the use of your Firefox tabs. I personally use Tab Mix Plus on one of my (crappy) Vista computers and it helps Vista from crashing Firefox. (although it still crashes)

Every Firefox