OzWebMasters

This is not a topic I have seen very often. So much is written about creating, growing and maintaining an online business, but what if you want to cash in your tips. Mitch Bettis has written a few tips, but really a book on the topic would be worth investing in….

• Make sure you have seperate bank accounts for business and personal
• The best places to advertise the sale are online listings and brokers
• Consult an attorney for legal help.
• Plan for any potential tax implications.

I published a post back in January about how inept I thought RegisterFly were, and now they have been de-accredited by ICANN.

I’ve only just read the full story at Wikipedia. Seems this 10-year-old business, with 2 million registered domains, was run by a pair of gay lovers who recently broke up, accusing each other spending business proceeds on things like male prostitutes, liposuction, a penthouse apartment in Florida, and a $6,000 chihuahua dog. Now it is starting to make sense!

Even though the site has been de-accredited, and a court has ordered them to stop mentioning that they are accredited, the site has not changed, and appears to be still taking orders for domain names.

Supposedly ICANN will transfer all the domain names to another registrar arounf Mar 31st. Hopefully it won’t be too painful for their million customers

Now that the Copyright Royalty Board is changing the rules, most web radio stations will not be able to operate profitably, because the royalty fee will be on a “per song listened” basis rather than as a derivative of what the station earns.

My prediction is that there will be isolated instances of pirate stations broadcasting online - if only the listeners know the address, they can get away with broadcasting songs for free. If they get caught, they can change their address. If they get into legal problems, they could base themselves in Liberia or somewhere.

I use public transport in Melbourne. I regularly need to look up timetables. Each time I go to the official site - I can never remember if it is called MetlinkMelbourne or MelbourneMetlink - they have “improved the design and layout, and each time it is still overly complicated!

The latest version requires me to type in a destination, and then asks me if that was the train station, the bus stop or the tram stop I am after, and only if I spelled it correctly. What’s wrong with drop-down lists?

Anyway, the reason for the post, is for me to complain about the idiocy of owning metlinkmelbourne.com
and not doing anything with it!

Of course it makes sense to own it, that way you stop someone else from owning it - but how hard is a redirect to the proper site?

The few companies that dare make their basic product free, but sell the best version of it, are doing very well. Companies like NetworkMagic, ZoneAlarm and AVG.
Following on from selling a reduced function version of Photoshop, Adobe are now planning to launch a free, online, ad-supported version of it. This a win for users, a win for Adobe, but only if it works fast… I can’t help but think it will crawl & crash.

I call it IDE (I Do Everything), and others call it Flying Solo - running your own business without any staff. This is such a niche category, and like dating sites, appeals to the lost & lonely - so FlyingSolo.com.au exists.

Ultimately it is a weekly newsletter comprising of well-written, helpful (short) articles. Looking at a random article I discovered a local offsite backup product called DataMate - quite cheap at $240/yr for 10GB. I reckon I trust Aussies with my data more than services from foreign lands…

I wish FlyingSolo should get a forum running - it would be vey popular.

It will happen, it’s just a case of working out the best implementation…

Virgin Mobile UK have been showing ads in exchange for minutes of talking - that’s a good model. Other ideas fail because they rely on folk clicking on something, and we really don’t want to do any nore than is necessary on our phones….

That’s what you can earn from World Vision’s affiliate program via DGM UK.

Doesn’t sound quite right to me - paying lots of money to marketers for finding folk who will make donations. If World Vision are willing to pay me such a huge commission, who else are they bribing paying, and how much actually makes it to the intended destination?

Given the high cost of TV ads, and what they are offering affiliates, I dispute their official figures of:

“87% of funding went to programs, 8% went to fundraising and 5% went to management & general”

I suspect that some creative accounting is being used! I can’t help think of charity workers in Africa driving brand new Range Rovers and eating 4-course meals…

In stayed at Raffles in Mooloolaba, one of the smart accomodation providers that offers wireless broadband in their rooms. I was eager to get back to work when I arrived there (beaches don’t appeal to me), but I couldn’t get my laptop to connect…

…I phoned support, and within an hour a young bloke (the same chap who answered the phone) was at my apartment and fixed it for me - all I needed to do was change my laptop to look for the B version of WiFi as well as the latest, which I think is G).

The company is AccessEzy (not EzyAccess, which is what I keep thinking it is called) - they supply a few hotels in each Australian city, and based on my singular experience I thoroughly recommend them…

…although I have to say I couldn’t get a few sites (like signing in to eBay) working via their service, but that could’ve been my laptop’s settings FAIK.

Fairfax screwed up with their slow, clunky, overpriced, overly fancy financial site. And now they have made a mess of their second foray into real estate, PropertyGuru.

To start with, the javascript search button on their home page does not work for me, in either FireFox or IE6.

To make things worse, they have been accused of scraping the listings of rival site realestate.com.au.

And in my mind, the SEO effort at the bottom of the home page is more suited to little sites, not those with the backing of a massive media company