Johan; thinking out loud.

As you have seen I have done some paid posts on this blog. I really hope I can counter balance those posts with more ‘real’ posts because it hurts me to see to many paid posts on the first page. To, potentionally, make that problem worse I recently joined PayPerPost.

PayPerPost is one of several companies offering money to bloggers for writing blog posts and helping advertisers with their blog marketing. As far as I can tell they pay a little bit more than those of their competitors I have joined before. That will hopefully keep me from writing more than one or two paid post per month. We’re not really talking about a lot of money so the risk of me getting greedy and making every second post a paid one is not so big. My goal is to move to another host and have all my web activities be self financed. Any money left after paying the web host and domain registrars will probably go into marketing jsiPodFetch, my podcast downloader.

When writing for PayPerPost not all opportunities require the blogger to disclose the article as a paid post. This is such a post, but I will always disclose a paid post in the title. If there are opportunities that require the blogger to NOT disclose it as a paid post I will not take it.

If I were required to disclose this as a paid post it would look like this:

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The current job is about defining/refining and documenting a system that is a couple of years old. I was a big part in building it initially but it has grown without much control since then.
As I see it, the main reason it is hard to get a grasp of it now is because there is (or has never been) a central role to consolidate the development. For each little project there has been a new project manager who only wanted to do his part at the lowest cost or him. No one has taken, or gotten, responsibility for all of it. This has led to more than one ugly hack to solve the same issue in different sub projects.
Now they have taken the opportunity to try to figure out what functionality there actually is, and what should be reused or refactored.

This is the first time my deliverables aren’t code. Starting with a blank sheet is always hard, but I remembered FreeMind, a free mind mapping tool. It helps a lot with the blank sheet syndrome since one can start dumping information in it and organize it later. Of course that is possible in any other text editor, but the graphical metaphor of FreeMind helps, at least me, get over the writers block.

I haven’t run FreeMind in Vista before so it was not very pleasant to discover that all file operations on new files failed. I solved it by copying one of the document that came with the install. When I double click it in my favorite file manager it starts FreeMind and I can save changes to ‘old’ documents. It is apparently a known bug so I will keep recommending FreeMind to any one who wants to listen.

I used to build my documentation for logview4net in a commercial competitor called Mind Manager. I think I will start using FreeMind for both logveiw4net and jsiPodFetch in the future.

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In my ongoing quest to find an eCommerce solution for my upcoming shareware title I recently got noticed about First Data. They offer shopping cart software as well as a wide range of hardware and software needed to accept credit cards in an ordinary physical store or restaurant.

There is almost no price information on their site, but they offer a free sign up until 25 July 2007 with a stated value of $495. (When I started writing this the offer was valid until the 21:st so it might move forwards a while longer.)

I don’t think I will spend more time investigating First Data for my shopping cart needs.

Here is a list of features for their eCommerce solution:

• LinkPoint® Central
  Process and manage credit card transactions and checks manually from any computer that has an Internet connection, web browser, and a user ID and password.
• Credit card processing online
  Accept major credit cards including Visa®, MasterCard®, American Express®, Discover®, for products purchased on your website and/or shopping cart.
• Accept Checks Online via ACH
  Give your consumers the option of paying via online check for products purchased on your website and/or shopping cart and over the phone.
• Recurring billing
  automated billing of recurring payments.
  Note: This offer is brought to you by CARDSERV.
• Membership / Subscription password service
  Add “premium” content areas to your web site that can only be accessed for a fee.
  Note: This offer is brought to you by CARDSERV.
• Fraud and Risk Management
  Customizable fraud and risk management system helps you maximize sales and minimize risk.
• Shopping cart integration
  We are compatible with many of the leading shopping cart vendors.
• 24/7 Experienced technical support
  7 days a week.
• Online reporting
  All the details of your transactions are available online.
• User Friendly
  Easy to use program with multi user interface.
• Process transactions
  anywhere around the world whenever you have internet access.
• Address Verification Service (AVS)
• Email receipts
  to both merchant and your customers.
• User Accounts
  Supports unlimited number of users Unlimited transactions from nearly anywhere in the world.

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I’m almost done reading The Long Tailby Chris Anderson.
It is the kind of book where I feel I’ve thought of the basic ideas presented before. Not that I could have written it myself though. Far from. Chris describes the long tail as all the small niches that doesn’t get any shelf space at Best Buy, but are very lucrative when exposed on the web. This is because web sites like Goggle and iTunes helps bringing niche consumers and niche producers together. It also looks like more and more people are turning away from being hit consumers when it becomes easier to find just the right niche products.

Anyway; this infinite range of products got me thinking about The Diamond Ageby Neal Stephenson. This book portrays a world where mankind has mastered nano technology so that it is possible to crate almost anything on a molecular level. It is a world where diamonds are cheaper than glass since diamonds are made of carbon atoms in straight lines as opposed to the internal chaos of glass. In the homes, of those that can afford it, there are machines that can create things. These machines are connected to a feed from which they get the materia needed. In this post information-industry world the feed is as much class barrier as internet for us today.

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I haven’t set up the online store I will need for my shareware application yet, but there is a donation button on jsisoft.com for supporting logview4net, my open sourced log viewer.

The main company in the ecommerce software space is DigitalRiver. They have bought a lot of shopping cart software and keep running them under their old names. It was quite refreshing when I heard about Ashop Commerce, a company that is not under the DigitalRiver umbrella (yet).

The main advantage I found with Ashop is that they do not charge any transactional fees. I sent them a support request wondering about fees for credit card payments. Even though I sent the question way out of business hours I got a quick reply. It seems handling credit cards requires a merchant account that probably will include transactional fees.

Ashop has functionality for managing affiliate programs. A feature I find very interesting a a marketing opportunity for my own software.

All in all I find Asoft a compelling alternative to roll my own store using PayPal for payments.

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In light of the recent controversy of using plugins in Visual Studio Express and getting some inspiration after listening to the DotNetRocks episode with Christopher Wille on SharpDevelop I thought I should give SharpDevlop a chance again. I am working on two utilities that I plan to release as shareware and as I do not want to rely on tools supplied by my employer I have been using Visual Studio Express until now. I haven’t done any real work in #Develop yet, but I’ve got both projects up and running.

The first thing that bit me was the lack of a typed dataset designer. I was on the way to move that structure into a List<T> anyway so it doesn’t bother me that much right now. I’ll write about the progress of each project this week.

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I’ve done my share of working in teams with people at different locations. It has never really worked very well and when trying to explain our difficulties to management we just sounded like bunch of whiners.

Maybe doing video conferencing would have helped a bit but I think the difference in time zones was the biggest issue. It forced each sub team to work for long periods without the guidance of a team. The issues we ran into was that we had to make assumptions in each team regarding functionality made by the other team. Some say documentation would have helped, but it was the undocumentable nuances that created the most frustration.

Anyway. MegaMeeting.com offers browser based video and web based conferencing. By using browser based software even smaller organizations can utilize video conferencing. The lack of software to install makes it possible to set up virtual meetings with clients very easy. It will not help much when there is a large difference in time, but distance can surely be overcome with a webinar.

Since computer screens can be shared between attendees thy can all participate with their own presentations and other computer based information.

The links in this post was paid by MegaMeeting.com

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Smorty is my latest finding in services offering me to get paid for blogging.

To be accepted a blog has to be 90 days old. There are other criteria but I think a blog that has been active for three months will fulfill them.

Smorty helps companies to advertise on blogs by gathering a large amount of available publishers.

Since this is the first review I write for Smorty I can’t say much about their service. The sign up process was easy and accepting review offers is not complicated though it pays to read the FAQ thoroughly. The first version of this review was rejected because it was to short. I did look for a minimum amount of words in the description of the opportunity but didn’t find it. The rejection mail pointed at information far down in the FAQ for bloggers.

I have read elsewhere that they do their payouts as expected, so this far I think Smorty is a good help if you want to blog for money.

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Seems like RIAA finally won the fight; AllOfMp3 has shut down.

… but there is a new site called Mp3Sparks up and running. Mp3Sparks looks like a clone of AllOfMp3 and is owned by the same company. They claim to accept credit cards so it is possible to actually buy from them. That was a problem AllOfMp3 had at the end since none of the credit card ompanies wanted to do business with them.

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Bloggerwave is a new service offering bloggers to write reviews (such as this) for payment and advertisers to spread knowledge about their offerings through the blogsphere.

As a blogger I found the interface easy to navigate and my blog was accepted well within the stated 72 hours. Payment seems to be withheld for up to 30 days to check the availability of made reviews, but there is no lower limit for payments to be made as far as I can tell.

I haven’t signed up as an advertiser but the described workflow looks equally simple. I’m not sure about the stated SEO opportunities though, since the search engines might classify these reviews as paid links.

Update: I’ve seen some scam rumors but I got paid today, well within the 30 days.

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