Authors of the bestselling book, Wikinomics, explain how mass collaboration has changed the business scene and pretty much everything else today. The word WIkinomics is obviously a combination of very popular Wikipedia and the bestselling book Freakonomics.

In Wikinomics you will read about Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life and other successful online communities and how they are more than just a social network but ended up a successful example of how mass collaboration can revolutionize the world. And true to what it preaches the printed book is only the start.

When I was in high school, there weren’t many kids who were tutored. At least no one really knew of many who received home tutoring. It wasn’t exactly considered cool to have to sit extra hours after school with some genius student or adult. Nowadays, it’s a lot simpler to be able to excel in school without having to deal with being stereotyped or mocked.

Just as you can pretty much do anything online you can also be tutored online. It almost makes going to school a joke. Whether your young daughter or son is in kindergarten and needs help learning the ABC’s, or your teenager is having a hard time with Math, Algebra or any other subject, they could receive Online Tutoring twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. You don’t even have to help your children with homework every night if that’s your wish. These online tutoring services offer Homework Help as well.

There is no need to throw out hundreds of dollars a month on tutoring when you can receive a package deal for online tutoring which provides you with endless assistance.

The Experiment:

There has been a lot of speculation that if you are showing low subscriber count to your feed, people may be less likely to subscribe to it. I figured I would try to either prove or debunk that theory. I manipulated jetpacked.com’s subscriber count to be a few thousand subscribers more than it actually is, and after a little bit over a week, our subscriber count didn’t change much, and even lowered at some points. So through this experience, I wouldn’t listen to the bloggers who tell people not to show your subscriber count right off the bat. It’s all a matter of whether you want to show off or not. If you’re embarrassed to show your low count, then don’t. If you really don’t care, and are confident enough to think people will subscribe to your feed anyway, go for it. The bottom line is, if people like your content, they will subscribe to your feed regardless what the number of current subscribers is.

How to manipulate your feed count:

Part II

Back in April, I wrote an article called “How to manipulate your FeedBurner feed count.” The article described a process that was certainly one clever way to do it. But when I was doing the current experiment, I had to think of a way to manipulate the subscriber count, without actually adding fake subscribers. I didn’t want the count to be false forever. So I found a plugin, the same plugin used to show chicklet free stats. It’s called FeedCount by Francesco Mapelli. In the newest version of the plugin, you can show a subscriber count from one feed, while linking to completely different feed. Like so:

As you can see, I pulled the feed count from the 5thirtyone feed, but still linked to the jetpacked feed. This made it appear like Jetpacked.com usually had over 3000 subscribers, when it usually has around 80 or so. Please keep in mind that this was only for experimentation.
Don’t lie about your feed count, it may make your blog look popular, but it won’t bring more people to your site, or make your content any better.

My MacBook has seen better days. I’ve had to deal with everything from a dead battery, random shut downs, and a broken cd drive. My girlfriend has figured out that if the chord comes out, my laptop turns off. So if she thinks I’m spending too much time on the computer working and not giving her enough attention, she knocks my chord out, therefor turning it off, and losing anything I was working on. It’s definitely not a pleasant situation for me. I’ve decided that I want to destroy my MacBook, but it’s the only thing I have to work on. So I’m going to ask YOU, friends, to donate 10-15 dollars towards a new MacBook Pro for me. When I receive enough to purchase a new MacBook Pro, I will destroy my MacBook along with the only power my girlfriend has over me. (Destruction method by choice of readers via a survey, with video of course.)

Please help me.

In return I will laser etch all the donator’s names($10) or URLs ($15) onto the MacBook Pro. So, help me release the evil hold my girlfriend has on me, and maybe even piss her off a little bit. Get your name on my laptop to let her know who did it.

Content

Content is the answer to making money online. Think of this list as a graph, follow it down.

Content brings:

Traffic

from:

Search Engines

The more content on your site, the more pages, keywords, etc. get indexed in the search engines. When people search for something you’ve covered in your site, it’s a potential hit to your site.

Social sites.

After you write content, submit it to social sites, this will get readers to your site, and hopefully some of them will stick around and subscribe to your RSS feed and maybe even go to your site daily to read.

Here’s a list of social news and bookmarking sites you can submit your content to:

Digg.com
Digg, founded by Kevin Rose, is a social news site where users “Digg” stories, if a story has enough “diggs”, it gets bumped up to the front page of the site.

Twitter.com
You can use twitter to notify your friends when a new post is up.

Pownce
Send a link to you all your friends letting them know you have new content.

Netscape.com
Netscape came after digg, I know what you’re thinking… A little similar huh? Oh well, just another traffic source.

Reddit.com
I prefer reddit a little bit over digg, although you may not receieve the numbers you can get from digg, the users are a little more mature. (Oh, c’mon digg users, you know who you are.)

Del.icio.us
Delicious was one of the first, if not the first social bookmarking sites out there, it allows you to tag bookmarks and see how many other people have added the same bookmarks. It was bought out by Yahoo. It also has a frontpage where popular stories that have been bookmarked by a lot of people are displayed.

Stumbleupon.com
StumbleUpon is a social site that allows its users to “Stumble” onto sites they may be interested in. Don’t expect huge spikes of traffic from StumbleUpon, but expect slow but steady traffic, which most people actually prefer.

Technorati.com
After you write a new post, you’ll definately want to ping technorati. This will let them list you in their blog search. WordPress usually automatically does this.

Indianpad.com
Similar to delicious and digg. Decent source of traffic.

Socialogs.com
A Digg clone, but another source of traffic.

Wirefan.com
A digg/delicious hybrid.

Myweb2.search.yahoo.com
Similar to delicious, I’m not sure why yahoo has it, seeing as they own delicious.

Furl.net
Like delicious, more traffic.

Blinklist.com
Another social bookmarking site.

I’m tired of writing descriptions. (I’m only human.) But there’s more.

Smarking.com
Blogmemes.net
Bluedot.us
Simpy.com
Backflip.com
Spurl.net
Newsvine.com
Blinkbits.com
Shadows.com
Ma.gnolia.com
Scuttle.org
Netvouz.com
Folkd.com
Grupl.com
Blogmarks.net
Plugim.com

..I forgot where I was going with this, but heres the short version:

Content = Traffic = Advertising Revenue (Money)

Can’t decide between pownce and twitter? This should help.
Here’s how to post your pownces to twitter.

Go to TwitterFeed.com and login with your OpenID. Then create a new twitter feed and enter your information. When asked for a feed, type in http://www.pownce.com/feeds/public/USERNAME. Select the frequency of posting. Be sure to deselect “Include description”, everything should look like this.

Create the feed, and you’re finished. Your pownces will then be twittered upon the frequency you selected.

A few weeks ago I made a post about my thoughts on an ad-free, membership based blog. I have had a few more thoughts on it since then, and have decided a few things on the subject.

If you were going to charge for an ad-free blog membership, you would want to have two different versions. One would have to be a version where the ads are so annoying, someone would want to pay to see the content without them, Think JohnChow.com. Then you would have to have another version with no ads, that members would have access to after they paid the membership fee. You could also give special content, products, etc. to paid members. Although I am doubtful this model would work, it would be interesting to try, or to see someone try.

I’ve thought about this for a while, and I think it could possibly work, and work well. I’m not afraid to give my ideas out because innovation needs to be shared. The idea is to have an ad-free blog. Most everybody wants to monetize their blog these days, and they do so by selling or displaying ads on them. But what if you didn’t have to? What if you wrote good enough content where people would pay for a membership to read your blog? Think about it, you could have a completely clean site, free of any bulky and annoying advertisements, and get $1 a month from your readers which would let them free browse your content every month. Got 20 readers? That should pay for your hosting. Got 10,000? You would get ten thousand dollars every month. I think I personally would pay one dollar a month for a membership to blogs like TechCrunch, YoungGoGetter, PaulStamatiou, etc. This model has a lot of upsides, cleaner designs, no more annoyances, it’d be more like people are paying for an ongoing book. But on the downside we’d run into a few problems, like linking to your articles from social sites like Digg, only registered users would be able to view them. I may try this model later on with Massive. Anyone have any opinions on this?