I knew it was coming. The MSN Direct service is like an old car that is sitting in your driveway. You’ve had some good trips with it. It’s been with you during those special times, those milestones. But deep down, you know it’s barely worth anything, and you know you should just donate it to Kidney Kars, but you just can’t let it go! Well, I guess it’s time to let go. Here is an article about MSN Direct shutting down.
The MSN Direct service was nifty. For a nominal yearly subscription fee ($50 at it’s peak), you could get movie times, weather, stock quotes, news snippets, traffic updates, new vocabulary words, and even instant messages delivered over FM radio to your smart watch (or coffeemaker or GPS unit). Of course, I could get all that on my phone, but still, it was a really cool show and tell item and conversation starter and ender.
I was going to wait until January 1, 2012 to write my fondest memories of the MSN Direct service, but I might not remember, so here are a few now.
I got my watch while working as an intern at Microsoft. They were promoting the watches at the Company Store, and I got mine for $99, which they said was a good deal. Here is a pic.
Over Thanksgiving, a few of my family members who will remain nameless put certain gases into a certain garbage bag and let a certain wind carry it in a certain direction toward a certain fire, and something certainly happened. Here is the video:
Well, VideoIpodAccessories.com has shown that with zero advertising, I can get quite a bit of traffic and actually make some money as an affiliate with Amazon. So, I’ve expanded my operation and made FooGear.com which is basically a collection of sub-domains (e.g. harrypotter.foogear.com) that allow visitors to browse products in a specific space. The original experiment has now become one of scalability. Check it out a foogear.com
A few months ago, I bought the domain name usbtoeverything.com with the intent to try my hand at affiliate marketing. However, with my full-time job at Sewell Direct and my side work with Sno Shack, I just haven’t had to time to tackle that project, mainly because of all the time it would require to write copy for all the products and keep tabs on the traffic.
Then, I found out my little brother’s Montessori school in Rexburg, Idaho, was looking for ways to raise money for their annual educational field trips. I thought USBtoEverything.com might be a good way for them to practice some technical writing skills and learn about affiliate marketing along the way. So I set up a Word Press blog for them to use to post products to the site.
Their first step was to sign up with affiliate programs like LinkShare that would give them an easy way to generate product links to sites like TigerDirect.com. Next, they started adding products. It’s been a little slow-going so far because the kids have had to get their bearings on what in world things like a USB to IDE adapters are. But they’re making progess. Hopefully in a few months they’ll start seeing a little income.
Just as a side-note, my similar site videoipodaccessories.com has brought in a whopping $5.27 since February 2006. Let me be clear that all I did on that site was write a little ASP.NET control that pulls down basic product information and pricing from Amazon’s associate API. I’m doing zero marketing. Anyway, I just wanted to highlight the differences between usbtoeverything.com and videoipodaccessories.com. First, the Montessori kids are writing their own copy, so instead of just copying TigerDirect’s product descriptions, they are rewriting it in their own words. This should help their SEO. Furthermore, as they add more products, they will be writing comparison pages that will show a list of something like USB to Serial adapters from different vendors. The list will include pricing and other info like shipping rates/times, etc. This should provide value to visitors to their site. Conversely, on videoipodaccessories.com, I am providing no real value above what Amazon already provides because I am only using the data retrieved from Amazon’s API. Hopefully, these “better” features of USBtoEverything.com will help them make more than $5 over the next year.
Of course, we might need to look into using Google Adwords to directly market the “long tail” products, but that is a can of worms that isn’t very tempting to open right now.
I got these pictures from Terry Crawford via my uncle Calvin. With all the negative coverage of the operations in Iraq, I think it’s good to be reminded of the good that is happening in that country. Here are the photos:
It appears that an update from Microsoft on 4/15/2006 caused a minor bug in Internet Explorer, but it also caused a major problem in Visual Studio 2003. The bug only exists if the computer has “HP Share to Web” software installed on it or Sunbelt’s “Kerio Personal Firewall” installed on it. The IE bug is simply that urls won’t resolve if they do not have an http:// in front of them. Microsoft has a recently published KB article about this bug and how to fix it:
However, in addition to the bug in IE, Visual Studio 2003 hangs when you try to open a project. I assume that VS.NET is trying to make a web request to some server using either an IP address or domain name without preceding it with http://. I suspected that the two bugs were related, and sure enough, when I applied the fix described in the article above, both the IE bug and the Visual Studio bug were resolved.
I suspect that any software that makes web requests without http:// or even ftp://, gopher://, etc., might experience similar problems as with Visual Studio 2003. However, Visual Studio 2005 did not suffer from this problem.
Thanks to Ask-Leo.com for pointing me to Microsoft’s KB article:
When Apple announced their iPod Video a few months ago, I was driving to work. As soon as I arrived I got on GoDaddy.com and did a quick search for as many domain name derivatives of Video Ipod that I could find. I ended up registering VideoIpodAccessories.com. Since then, I’ve let the domain sit as a lonely “parked” page at GoDaddy.com.
However, I recently got a tip that GoDaddy puts sponsored links (AdSense) on the parked page in hopes that when people type in my domain name, they can make some money off the ads. Hmm…smart. I never thought that anyone might just type the domain name in. How naive I am.
Anyway, I took advantage of President’s Day and threw together a web site that serves up ads from Amazon.com for iPod Accessories (using Amazon’s Web Services–cool). I’m not expecting to make much money, but I am mostly curious about how much “type-in” traffic I might get. I’ll report on it later.
Here is a brief bio at the time this blog was started. I am currently a masters student in Computer Science at Brigham Young University. My advisor is Phil Windley. I am currently trying to figure out a thesis topic.
I also work part time at Sewell Development Corporation in Provo, UT. I’ve been at Sewell for just over 3 years, and I’ve enjoyed the experience I’ve obtained. At Sewell, I was the principal designer of the public web site, SewellDirect.com, which sells hundreds of computer cables, accessories, etc. I also built the majority of the company intranet that manages our order fulfillment, reports, inventory, etc. If you ordered from Sewell Direct and have a problem with your order, please call customer service instead of me .
In addition to my work at Sewell, I am also an owner in Sno Shack Inc., the world’s leading supplier of shaved ice flavors, shavers, and other merchandise. I am currently developing a new site for SnoShack.com. I’ll post more when it’s released into production.
Besides school and work, I enjoy studying the Russian language, participating in our local ward of the LDS Church, and most importantly, spending time with my wife, Suzanne, and our little boy, Parley. See pictures of Parley at www.gaddio.com.
. 
