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Why Dolphini Sponsors PodCamp Nashville 2009
Friday, March 6th, 2009
We are very proud to be a lead sponsor of PodCamp Nashville 2009. Dolphini feels it is part of our call to action to support the community that we host and to continue to help Nashville grow as a tech community.
BarCamp 2009 will be taking place in October and we are hoping that you and your company will be joining us as leaders and supporters of Nashville’s technology industry. We know that cash can be hard to come up with in this economy so if you don’t have sponsorship dollars, please make time to get involved on the BarCamp Crew, speak or participate in any way possible.
Giving back to our community is the best way to ensure that we have what Nashville needs to continue to grow.
Thank you to all the PodCamp volunteers who will help make tomorrow the most successful PodCamp Nashville event yet!
See you there!
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Some of the best things in life are free - PodCamp Nashville 2009
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
- Image via Wikipedia
Have you ever been to a conference that you have paid big bucks to attend and realized that you learned more at the trade show than the actual conference? I know the Dolphini team has.
This Saturday is PodCamp Nashville 2009 and I know if it is half as good as BarCamp 2008, I would pay twice as much to go to PodCamp as I would the conferences in far away cities with the extremely large price tags.
But some of the best things in life are FREE!
Although there is not the typical keynote speaker who is paid to present at PodCamp, there are at least thirty great speakers to choose from with sessions from, “Accidental Social Networks” to “Finding your Own Voice – a Female Perspective on Podcasting and New Media.”
If you are interesed in Web 2.0 Technology or want to become tech savvy, PodCamp Nashville 2009 is the place to be.
Join us this Saturday, March 7th, at Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management from 9am-4pm, ready to learn and grow with Nashville’s Great Tech Community.
www.podcampnashville.com | #pcn
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Seth Godin at CRS - Let’s Fix our Thinking
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Image via Wikipedia
Seth Godin is speaking at CRS today, and I am hoping to have two tickets in my hand this morning to see one of the “Top 21 Speakers for the 21st Century.” Godin has been known to speak for companies like Disney, GM and Walmart.
Motivational speakers like Godin have bigger shoes to fill in today’s economy. Many of us are blindly groping for answers to questions like, how long until we see an end in sight, am I at risk for losing my job, what can I do to cost effectively promote my product when the consumer is so cash poor.
Godin is a “back to the basics” man. If you have ever read his blog http://sethgodin.typepad.com you will see that his concepts are not farfetched but are often overlooked. David Bullock, social media strategist and marketing guru said last week at the NOBS Meet up, that if you want a new idea - go back to an old book.
How profound! That statement is still reinstating with me.
Fix our Thinking! As our economic bubble grew so did our expectations. Stop focusing on what is going wrong in today’s economic crisis and focus on the basics of what you do best. Ask yourself the question, what did I do at the beginning of my career, is it less complex than what I am doing now? How can I make less more, and maximize my resources?
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How Does WordPress Make Money?
Monday, March 2nd, 2009Editors Note: Orignally Written by AMIT AGARWAL on www.labnol.org
How can a company like Automattic make money if they are giving away all their products (including WordPress) for free? Someone asked this question to WordPress founder Matt at WordCamp India and he surprised, at least some of us, by saying that Automattic is profitable.
Here’s how WordPress makes money according to the creator himself:
1. Blog Hosting - WordPress offers blog hosting services at $500 per month to big publishers like Om Malik, All Things D and CNN’s Political Ticker among others. They use WordPress.com’s server infrastructure to host your blog and therefore the performance will obviously be great but unlike other web hosting services, WordPress VIP Hosting doesn’t accept everyone who applies so good luck.
2. Google AdSense - Free blogs hosted on WordPress.com may sometimes carry Google ads but these ads may only appear if all the following three conditions are met:
1. The visitor is not using Firefox browser.
2. He has logged out of his WordPress account, if he has one.
3. The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So a person reaching abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com won’t see any Google Ads.
Even with all these conditions, the revenue generated from serving Google AdSense ads on WordPress.com hosted blog may still be significant as do around a billion page views per month.
3. Automattic Kismet - You don’t see Viagra spam in your blog posts because it all gets filtered automatically by Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), the excellent spam protection plug-in available for WordPress.
Now Akismet spam catching technology is free for personal blogs but if you maintain a corporate blog or run a network of blogs, you are required to buy a commercial license of Akismet that starts at around $50 per month.
What may surprise you is that professional bloggers, or anyone who is making more than $500 per month in advertising revenue from a WordPress blog, also needs to pay a $5 per month fee for the Akismet license.
4. Premium Accounts - While anyone can host a blog on WordPress.com for free, they charge you a fee if you want to buy additional storage space for your multimedia files or want to use a custom web domain instead of the default wordpress.com sub-domain. These are premium features.
There’s also (unconfirmed) talk that WordPress may soon allow users to add AdSense in their free blogs for a subscription fee.
5. Web Host Referrals - WordPress.org suggests of list of third-party web hosting companies where you may self-host your WordPress blog(s) for a fee. Now all these are referral links so Automattic gets a commission per sale.
In fact, this hosting referral system may be extremely profitable for Automattic because if you search for “WordPress Hosting” on Google (a very competitive keyword phrase), the first sponsored link on the Google results page is paid by WordPress itself and it says - “Top 5 WordPress Web Hosts - Chosen by the developers of the WordPress blogging software”.
6. WordPress Support - If you need help with WordPress (or WordPress MU) but the free support forums aren’t solving the purpose, consider subscribing to the Support Network of Automattic. The WordPress development team will help you solve problems related to your WordPress system and the response time can be as low as 6 hours. This service is primarily for Enterprise users who are willing to shell out a $2.5-5k per year for support.
7. Poll Daddy - I am not sure if Matt discussed this but Automattic also provides a paid version of Poll Daddy where you can have unlimited number of questions per survey and there’s no Poll Daddy branding in your polls or surveys.
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Who are you on Twitter?
Monday, February 9th, 2009I was quite surprised to fire up a Web browser and check out my “Twitter Grade” (which I’m sure doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still an interesting statistic to know - considering just how many people are using Twitter these days).
Turns out, I’m in the Twitter Elite - outranking everybody else. I have no idea how the hell that happened, but I’m in some good company there.
Then again, I consider everybody on Twitter a part of the elite - one person’s tweet is equal to another’s (despite what some might claim). Just because you have more or less followers than me doesn’t make you any more or less important than you already are.
Twitter is instant gratification, instant validation, and a chance for you to tell the world what you’re thinking… before you’ve had a chance to think about it. Then again, maybe it’s more like an exclamation of feelings before you’ve felt them?
What is Twitter to you? Is it anything? Are you there? Is it a fad - like this blogging thing? Will Twitter be around in 10 years? Will you?
Oh, too many questions - but I dare not pose them directly ON Twitter, lest I be lashed with the 140 character limit. Beh.
It’s a firehose of information and emotion - a digital microcosm of life itself.
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Dolphini on Twitter: AdWords and Twitter, is it a good idea?
Monday, January 26th, 2009
- Image by Tamar Weinberg via Flickr
Michael Krause, CEO of Dolphini, decided to experiment with Twitter. The premise, use Google AdWords to add Twitter Followers. Was it a good idea and has the investment paid off?
First we want to clarify, yes this twitter experiment was an “un social” way of social media, but we were curious to see the affects of combing adwords with “social” tweets.
Dolphini prides itself on customer loyalty and relationships. We are not here for the fast, hard sell, rather we value the time we spend with our clients. Many times our customers become like family because they spend so much time in our datacenter or we have attended a few Predators games together. Could we build the same valued relationship with our tweets?
The amazing thing with twitter is that you can! Do our twitter relationships turn directly into business; we really can’t put dollar figure on it. But if people know who we are, what we do and can tweet to us and say, ”Hey I just put a support ticket in,” then there is something invaluable that twitter adds to our business: Communication and Relationships.
Check out what others are saying about Dolphini, AdWords and Twitter:
http://blog.socialmedia.com/grow-twitter-follower/
What do you think about using Google AdWords to increase followers?
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Facebook Connect: Changing the Way Users Interact with the web?
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Image via CrunchBase
Facebook Connect went live last Thursday and may usher in a new way to browse and interact with the Web. The program enhances the connectivity among the social network, its users and the Web pages users visit.
In addition, Facebook shrewdly increases ad revenue for itself and partners while cementing its reputation as the social network of choice for a long time. It does all of that seamlessly while appealing to our very basic urge to show and tell. And that is the distilled brilliance of Facebook Connect: It is the show and tell of the Internet age.
The idea behind Facebook Connect is deceptively simple.
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