Well if you were wondering there are some keywords that you can use on your blog or website that will very likely get you more money per click. Of course, you won’t make money if you do not have any traffic or if people don’t click your Adsense ads but if those things are not a problem for you then you could potentially make a huge profit with these keywords.

Insurance – This is a high paying AdWords keyword. It is highly likely to find insurance companies and insurance aggregators paying $50+ dollars for a click. You would only see a percentage of this but it could range anywhere from $5 – $15.

Loans – In this economy a lot of people are searching for loans. This could be mortgage loans or refinancing, credit cards, student loans or even personal loans. That is why this keyword is so competitive. Average pay for a click on this could be $5 – $13.

Attorney – There is no doubt a lot of attorneys out there but how much are they paying for advertising? The question is a lot. You could make anywhere from $3 – $10 for just one click.

Spotify, a legend in the U.K. and now available in the U.S. has the features a good music service should have; unlimited streaming, a large catalog, a music storage locker, social features, offline mode, mobile apps for iPhone, Android, etc… and high bit rate sound quality.  So Spotify is a winner, right?

A Brief Look Back

I’m old enough to remember when people used records and cassettes.  In my early teens, we got the CD, which was a nice step for most.  A decade later I was occasionally downloading music, and five years later that became my near exclusive means of acquiring and dealing with music.  Aside from the occasional purchase at a concert, I haven’t purchased a packaged CD in years.

Napster is credited with the technology that changed everything.  I always felt it wasn’t just the free aspect of Napster, but the insane ease of use.  I could just type a name of a song, artist, album, whatever, and get the music I wanted.  For something so illegitimate in nature, it had a better user interface than many services even today.

It was around this time the iPod came out, and it seemed the circle was complete.  I ripped all my CD’s, downloaded stuff through Napster, put them to my iPod, and the world was great.  Except of course for the musicians.  The RIAA hired an army of lawyers and went after everyone they could.

One sad side note on this time.  I think we can all agree that Metallica has done well for themselves.  With their album sales and concerts, one can only imagine the fortunes they have amassed.  And since they are a metal band, I’m sure they consider themselves cool.  But when a group puts together a list of fans who downloaded their music from Napster, and hand it over to the RIAA lawyers, and law enforcement, they stop being cool.  Being part of Gen X, I understand our rules of cool, one of which is “the only thing worse than a thief is a snitch”.  Fans are fans, even if they didn’t pay for a download.  And a snitch is a snitch, Metallica.  And now back to the story at hand.

After the legal carnage of Napster, a few other services like Limewire, Bearshare and others popped up.  But most of these software packages came with extras, like spyware and viruses.  It got to the point where only the most dedicated and courageous music thieves would download anything.

Then along comes iTunes, the could be savior of the record labels.  At this point it was clear that the RIAA was asleep at the wheel, not thinking much about technology when Napster came along.  And now they were awake, and cranky.  They pushed back on Apple to try and get what they thought was the best deal.  And in the end, we ended up with a decent service, that worked well with our portable players.  We have seen Microsoft make laughable attempts at this market, only to crash and burn because Microsoft is not a consumer electronics company.  Sony, who is a consumer electronics company, has also made attempts, but the are not a computer company.  Apple has the rare advantage of keeping a foot in both the consumer electronics, and computer worlds.

Napster was acquired and re-launched as a music subscription site, and Rhapsody sprouted up with their service.  For $60 – $120 per year, you could get unlimited music streamed to your desktop, and mobile devices.  A couple years ago, they even started allowing you to download for offline listening.  These were great services, but the lacked  a few key elements.  First off, the sound quality wasn’t as good as an iTunes download on your iPod.  And second, these services were not well marketed.  Just a few days ago I mentioned Rhapsody to someone in the tech space who had never heard of it.  When I explained what it was, they were shocked they never heard of it because it sounded like a great service.  This smells of bad leadership and lack of marketing focus.

The Current Trend

I used Rhapsody for about 18 months, and a couple months ago switch to MOG, based on a recommendation from Leo Leporte.  And I purchased a Napster account for my mother to go along with her iPad and Sonos system I set up for her.

My personal set is iTunes and MOG hooked up to a Sonos system, connected to speakers in my ceiling.  It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to use your iPhone as a remote for music.  I play anything I want from my iTunes, and if I don’t have something new I’m interested in, I just play it through MOG.  MOG comes through at 320 bit, so the sound is good.  And all this coming from invisible speakers is even better.

Google and Amazon have been pushing out their new services, which I considered, but decided I don’t really need.  Which is a shame, because they are essentially free.  But why would I need to store my music on their servers?  I have them on my computer and phone already.  And eventually they will charge a fee for this service.

Add this to the fact that many younger people are getting used to the idea of not owning music.  I’m betting that less than 10% of teenagers under 16 have ever purchased a CD, and are now highly unlikely to do so.  Having their music through a service, like their mobile phone, won’t be an unusual idea for them.

One service I, like every other user, love is Pandora.  It fits perfectly into my Sonos setup.  I just wish the sound quality was a bit better.  But the personalized radio feature is one of my favorite new technologies.

And this brings us to Spotify.  Spotify has an emphasis on sharing music through social networks, and along with a large catalog of music, allows you to upload your music to your mobile devices wirelessly.  This is not the true cloud solution of Google and Amazon, or that Apple will push out.  But it’s a nice thing to have.

The catalog is decent, not the best from my personal tests.  And you can push up to 320 bit rate for good sound quality.  But Spotify is a few features short of being a killer app.

First, there is no radio functionality, like Pandora.  And no selection of Internet radio, which is surprising.  The mobile app is pretty bare bones.  And how none of these companies seem to have the ability to design a mobile app worth a damn, Spotify is especially lackluster.

So far the only thing I like about Spotify over MOG is the social features, but I don’t really see using those.  So I will put Spotify through the paces for the next month or two, and then make my decision.

One advantage to Spotify is that there is a free option.  Right now you need an invite, so feel free to leave a comment if you need one, and I’ll send one out to you.

Where It’s Going

Apple has yet to roll out their music locker service.  But I can already tell it’s going to be extremely easy to use and and well integrated into iPhones.  And I have a lot of faith in Apple’s Airplay plans.  I think it’s likely Apple will move into the music subscription space within the next year or so.  It would instantly be the most successful option in the market.

I also see Pandora getting into this space, as well as potentially a music locker service.

In the end, I get the feeling we will not be talking a lot about Spotify in a couple years.  What do you think?

When I purchased my new Apple TV, I was very confused as to what Apple was doing. I was disappointed that they were not allowing apps to be developed for the Apple TV, which ran iOS.  It seemed like Apple had yet again missed the bus when it comes to television.  But…

Apple has an amazing grasp of the Mp3 and mobile phone space.  The iPod and iPhone represent the lions share of those markets.  And third party developers have flourished in providing accessories for these devices.  Many consumer audio products, from high-end home theatre received, to alarm clocks, are iPod compatible.

Apple has also made big strides in bringing these devices up to iOS, so by the end of the year there may very well be 200 million devices that run iOS.

With the latest iOS update, Apple released AirPlay.  AirPlay allows an iOS user to stream their music and video to compatible devices.  Currently there is only the Apple TV and the Airport Express.  But Apple has deals in place with with companies like Marantz and Dennon, two of the most popular home theatre receiver manufactures.  One would think this an obvious next step, the ability to wirelessly stream music from your iPod to your home audio system.  But there is more to this.

Apple is allowing third party application developers to create AirPlay enabled applications.  So not only will you be able to eventually stream music to your home audio system, but so you should be able to stream movies, games and other applications directly from your phone to any television in your home.

When you combine this ability with a custom application from these manufactures, it’s easy to see where Apple is taking over the living room.  Imagine being able to scroll through films on iTunes or Netflix right on your iPad, and then send the film you chose right through your TV, without any box like an Apple TV.  Or imagine the ability for you and 3 friend to play scrabble on your iPhones, while viewing the board on your flat screen TV.

The 200 million iOS devices are Apple secret weapon.  They don’t need to fight Google, or other companies to try to get a box in your living room.  They are happy to use the box that’s already in your hands.

How long before a company like Blizzard makes an iPad version of World of Warcraft and makes in AirPlay enabled so that you can play on your television?  How long before you check into a hotel and can easily listen to your music wirelessly from your iPhone, or watch streamed to their television from your computer?  About 1 – 2 years I’m guessing.

Some will argue that Apple has a flawed strategy because they are not bringing the “real” Internet to the television, everything is run through apps.  But I would argue that part of the genius of Steve Jobs is that he knows most people don’t care about the “real” Internet, they just want to do cool stuff.  People want to watch movies, listen to music, play games, etc…  And if someone wants to display a webpage on a television, they can easily do that by just enabling the browser to be AirPlay compatible.

At that time Apple will be generating revenue from movie, music, games and other apps, all shared on the television.  Apple’s stock price is already through the roof, but it is likely undervalued considering they are about to become the default store for most movies, music and games in the world.

If you can solve this, you can work at Google. I’m putting my money on Matt Damon.

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I of course would tell you the answer, but I already have a job.

Most users who access Gmail via a web browser were receiving a “Unable to reach Gmail” error when they tried to login. According to the official Gmail blog users using IMAP or POP were still able to access their email normally. “If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime.”

Outages, such as the Gmail one, are not uncommon among industry and market leaders. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL have all had their fair share of problems in the past. Gmail is currently third on the list of most popular email services

Google has been reported saying the down time does not appear to be the result of a virus attack or other form of malware but the cause is still unclear.

The Internet and blogosphere have been abuzz with speculation about the outage. The Gmail outage has claimed the top ten spots in Google Trends for most of the afternoon and has also claimed the top spot on Twitter trends.

Now imagine where we’d be if both Twitter and Google both went down at the same time.

Have you started monitoring your online presence yet? Online presence is important because of the ease of obtaining information about someone. Just type a name into Google and you are sure to find pages and pages of results. Employers can use this in part of their background check and what they find may or may not get you hired. Sure, you could put your social profiles on private but the web is a tool and it should be used as one. Keeping public profiles gives you just enough room to show your personality and expertise.

The Basics
I have a pseudonym online. You can find me by typing in my pseudonym or my full name which usually brings up a few results. Everyone should have a pseudonym because you will often have to pick a username. Sure, your username could be just your name but where is the fun in that? My online pseudonym is chelseaCraze and my backup, in case that was is taken, is chelseaTKO. I kept my first name in both so people know who I am. I suggest doing the same for yours. Make it easy to remember and catchy. I also suggest registering for a free email using your new pseudonym at either Gmail or Yahoo.

If you haven’t started creating an online presence yet then you should start with the basics: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and a blog directory. These four things will get you started and provide plenty of search engine rankings for your name.

MySpace and Facebook are common and you might already have them. You should keep your profile visible to everyone. On these two social networks you should use your real name as your display name but you can include your new pseudonym somewhere in your profile. Facebook usually displays your first and last name by default while MySpace has a privacy option that allows you to turn it on. Whether or not you display your full name is entirely up to you. If you aren’t comfortable with it then display just your first name.

Twitter is another social network that has really caught on since their launch in 2006. Twitter is considered a micro-blog where people update their ‘status’ in 140 characters or less. Some update about their whereabouts, what they are doing, eating or seeing and others use it strictly to interact with others.

You’ve probably heard the term ‘blog’ being thrown around in conversations like a baseball. They are everywhere. Blogs are giving traditional media a run for the money. Why would you want to blog? Everyone should blog because it provides them an outlet to discuss their thoughts and opinions. They have a place where they can share what they know and how they do it with the world. Also, a blog provides others a glimpse into your life, thoughts and a look at your personality. Where does one get a blog? Well there are plenty of options for that. The first is to use a free blogging service like Blogger or WordPress. The second is to buy your own domain name, hosting and set up a blog. This isn’t necessary unless you are very web savvy and I would suggest using the first option.

Optimizing
After the basics, what’s next? After you have mastered the basics it is important to monitor what exactly your profiles and blog are saying to anyone reading them. If you wouldn’t want your Mom reading it then you shouldn’t have wrote it. You should write a bio or self-summary that is short, relevant and universal. Leave out all of the negative stuff and curse words. You should also check all of you updates on Twitter or your blog that might be negative to someone else. You can check out my article on how to answer the tell me about yourself question for tips on how to write a self-summary.

If you have your pictures visible to the public then you should also check those making sure that you don’t have any risqué or raunchy photographs of yourself. It happens to celebrities all the time so be wary.

Maintaining and Expanding
You should now be well trained in the word of online reputation management. Just make sure you maintain your social networking profiles and your blog. If you want to expand and give yourself even more visibility on the internet then look for other social networks or forums to join. MeetUp is really cool and you can meet others in your area with the same interests. Also try flickr, digg and stickam, each have their own unique services.

Installation wasn’t too difficult. When installed on a Windows Vista OS it didn’t take a while for the plug-in to actually work. This could be due to the fact that it is Vista OS (likely) or the fact that Google just started the roll out feature (still likely). Eventually, after countless reloads, all is right in the Vista world. Windows XP performed much better (what a surprise) and took a liking to the new plug-in.

In Gmail, the chat box clearly shows which of your contacts has enabled video chat. Which is useful, of course, you could always invite whichever of your lames friends hasn’t installed it yet.

Our favorite feature is the slight delay you have so you can make sure you look appropriate for a video chat. When someone rings you, you will see your webcam pop up so you can take a quick look at yourself before answering.

Try out Gmail video chat for yourself by downloading the FREE plug-in at http://mail.google.com/videochat.

To make the merger work YouTube would need to do some serious re-work of their video quality. Hulu has long been the dominating force in this video market and they offer high quality streaming. Not to mention Hulu already has contracts with NBC Universal and News Corp. Hulu only receives a small percentage of YouTube viewers and I think that is due to the fact most people don’t know that they are around. YouTube has so many viewers that they will easily and quickly become the dominating force in this market once this is introduced (yes, it is inevitable).

This is also a great opportunity for independent film makers to reach a world-wide audience. YouTube has long been against hosting any videos longer than 10 minutes so this would be a big leap for them.

Some industry executives have even said we could begin seeing movies on youTube in the next 30 to 90 days if everything runs smoothly. We’re hoping so.

I have spent the past few months working on a very search centric CMS that I could offer clients, and use myself.  So the idea of upgrading my WordPress is something I didn’t want to deal with.  I admit that WordPress 2.5 looked to be a great step up, especially since I was 3 versions behind with my personal blog.  But I have  a custom theme and some custom plugins that I didn’t want to break, and WordPress is not exactly well coded when it comes to upgrades.  But as fate would have it, the upgrade became more a necessity than a luxury.

About 2 weeks ago, I noticed some changes in my search rankings.  It wasn’t just a drop off, it was actually the wrong pages ranking for terms.  This of course caught my attention right away and I check the Google cache and found that someone had hacked my blog and inserted all sort of nasty stuff.  It’s interesting that I didn’t see this stuff in the page source, but it was being picked up by Google.  As a matter of fact, I think the only way I would have ever seen it is from Google.

So I asked my friend Russ to install the latest version of WordPress.  On the upside, it looks nice.  Media upload is much easier, the admin tool is cleaner, and most importantly the security hole seems to have been plugged.  I re-checked the pages today in Google cache, and it appears that all pages that have been cached since the upgrade are clean.  It will of course take some time for the entire site to get re-indexed, but all should be good by months end.

On the downside, my site is not a bit messed up.  My Asides are no longer…aside.  Most of my right column has been nuked, and a bunch of nasty characters have littered my posts.  It’s going to take some clean up.  Since I’m right around the corner from launching my new blog on the new CMS, I’m not really feeling very motivated to put the work into the clean up right now, so please bare with me for the time being.

[tags]wordpress, hacked, google[/tags]

If you haven’t checked it out yet, you need to. If you need an invite, let me know. I have a couple left that I will be happy to share. For those who don’t know, here are some of the features.

1. You get a phone number that forwards to all your phones. This means when someone calls, all your phones ring. This is of course controlled through the admin so that you can only have certain people reach specific lines.

2. You get a nice call transfer feature that lets you switch between your phones without the other party knowing. For example; you’re out and about and you get a call that goes through to your mobile. While you’re talking you get home and want to switch to your home phone. You just press * and all your phones ring. You pick up the home phone and hang up the mobile. You just transferred the call to your home phone and the other party probably heard nothing.

3. Everyone who calls you is identified. You have an address book on the admin that you can easily update. When someone calls from a number in your address book, the system alerts you who it is when you pick up the call. If their number is not in your address book, the system makes them state their name before the call is put through to you. This can be turned off if you want, but I think this is a great feature.

4. And speaking of screening your calls, you get a “Listen In” feature that lets you preview a real time voice mail. This is how it works; someone calls you and you pick up. The system says, “you are receiving a call from Whoever. Press 1 to accept the call, Press 2 to send the call to voice mail, press 3 to Listen In, and press 4 to record the call”. When you press 3, the caller is sent to voice mail, but you can hear what they are saying, and at any time press * to take the call. It’s like have an old school answer machine on your cell phone to screen calls.

5. I’m sure you took note of the Press 4 option mentioned above. This is also very cool. When you get a call and press 4, it records the call and keeps it as a WAV file on your admin. If you accept a call, you can at any time press 4 to start recording, and then press 4 again to stop. There are of course some legal issues in recording calls, so it alerts the other party that the call is being recorded.

6. You can give each caller their own greeting. I just started playing with this, and it’s actually pretty cool. So when your mom calls you can have a voice mail greeting saying, “Hi mom. I’m not able to grab the phone right now. Leave me a quick message and I’ll call you back”. Or as Shaun pointed out to me, when an important call comes in you can have a custom message for them; “Hey Kris, I’m actually out of the country right now. The best way to get through to me is email, but if it’s an emergency, I’m at Hotel Presidente in San Jose Costa Rica, the number is 011-555-1212. I’m in room 814.”.   I think that would let them know how much you value their business.

7. Finally someone is addressing the telemarketing issue as Spam. GC actually has Spam protection built in. You have two options when using their Spam protection. First, you can actually have them hear an “out of service” message when they call your phone (which of course doesn’t ring when they call), or you can have them go straight to voice mail. I’m guessing from what they are saying on their site that GC is going to use a Spam Assassin approach to this, leveraging what other people report as Spam to make a blacklist of numbers to block. The default setting is to no Spam protection, which I think makes sense until you need it.

8. You can change the ringing sound people hear when they call you. If you want to sound a bit more international, you an select from their different country ring tones like Japan and Brittan. You can also make your own. I don’t find this to be useful, but it may be fun if you’re into that sort of thing.

9. You can be alerted to a phone message by either email or SMS. This makes checking voice mail a little easer.

10. GC gives you a way to let people call you without giving out your phone number. You can put one of their Call Me boxes on your site, and people can actually click to call you. They have to enter their name and phone number first. This is nice, and obviously will lead to all sorts of mischief on MySpace.

The best part of Grand Central is the price…free. According to their website, they are never going to charge for the numbers. So when you sign up for a number, it really can be your for the rest of your life, or at least as long as the company is around. And since Google just acquired Grand Central, it looks like they will be around for a while.

There are a couple issues I’m seeing in my use. For starters all voice mail seems to go through Grand Central. Since I have a new iPhone, it would be nice to use my Visual Voice Mail feature, but it looks like I won’t be getting a lot of use out of that. I would also love to use a Grand Central account for personal and work, but the system doesn’t let you point two GC numbers to the same external phone number. This really makes it where you can only use 1 number. My guess is they will introduce the option of a second number as a premium service later.

Obviously Grand Central will have to release some premium services in order to make money. They currently have their Click-to-Call feature that allows you to call someone by just clicking the link in your GC Address Book. I don’t think this will really take off until they make something more integrated with the desktop, most likely a Firefox plug-in. (possibly an addition to the Google tool bar)

I can also see a lot of potential for making a business telephony service out of GC. They would just need to integrate extensions and they could have a nice little system for small companies.

This is definitely a look into the future of telephones. It’s pretty exciting, and for the time being, free!