I just checked one of my other blogs, because Wordpress is sending me tons of emails. Apparrently some idiot thinks its fun to spam my Wordpress blog. I had over 225 spam comments I had to delete.

If you have this problem, make sure you login to Wordpress (provided you are hosting it yourself) and go to the settings section and make sure that you make your readers register if they want to comment. Otherwise you’re going to get spammed big time.

This will cut down on some of the spam. I have already done this, but I have seven new users and they are spamming the heck out of my other blog. So I’m going to delete them clean.

Watch out for spammers, especially if your blog is starting to get some traffic or PR. They’re like Piranah that go after PR like its fresh meat in the amazon river.

Before I tell you about this, I really need to setup the background. My friend and I have this other mutual friend. He is always ragging us about how we have never been successful with any of our web sites. Now that’s not exactly true. We have been successful, but we have had a lot of failures. And for some reason he likes to rub it in our face.

So, my friend and I were talking on the phone today. I suggested that we setup a web site called “At least I tried”.com Now there is domain with that name already, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Anyway, my idea was to setup this site and let people post their ideas about how to make the next big site. You know the next YouTube or MySpace or Facebook, etc. We would then let our friend be the “Grand Master” who would give his nay or say on it. And then email the people back or just do a post on the idea. To let people know what he thinks of it. Then they could also sign up for a newsletter so they would be continually ragged about it over the next ten years. You know - just for good measure.

Stupid right? Well, I did think about that and it would be kind of cool if you had a place where you could post your ideas and let others vote on them and give you a thumbs up or down. But then you have the problem of people stealing other people’s ideas. So, I’m not sure if that would work or not.

But it would be a good sounding board to hear what kind of ideas are out there and what people are thinking about. I don’t think I would list any of mine. Just wouldn’t want to take the chance of giving up something that might be worth something.

But in the spirit of talking about it openly, here are some of my failures:

My Failures

Great Film Ideas - This was supposed to be a portal to compete with Movieweb.com and eventually take over hollywood.com. Now at the time that I thought about it I wasn’t that far off, because it was 1996 or 1997 and both of those websites looked terrible, so mine wasn’t looking that bad either compared to theirs. But I was more interested in creating different sections of the site than I was in adding content.

Biggest problem: I never had a plan to add quality content to my web site.

Rocket IPO - This was my great idea at the time when the DOT com era was going strong. Every other day you’d hear people talking about the next big IPO and these idiots on Wall Street talking about the new economy. My plan was to offer stock picks to investors that wanted to grab hold of all this new money being created. I mean it was almost every other week a stock was being sold for $15 a share and by the weekend it would be going for $90 a share. I eventually wanted to become a broker and in a sense become an underwriter for all these companies. The problem was that I wasn’t an investment banker, didn’t have the know how to pull that off or even understand it all, let a lone all the legal ramifications.

Biggest problem: I didn’t know enough about investment banking and or know where to get these stock picks. Too big of a project for my first one. It might have been different if I had already made several million from a previous company that I had sold.

TopPilots - I don’t know what causes people to think certain things. But for some reason I was convinced that there was a big enough market out there for pilots. A market that was so large I could easily grab two to three million pilots across the planet and force them to come to my website. The concept was simple enough. I would create an information web site for everything that pilots wanted. I would also create a shopping section where they could by anything that a pilot could ever want. But my dad wisely talked me out of it. I finally realized that the amount of time and effort that I would put into it may not ever pan out, because of the small market. I mean to really make it big on this site I would really need every pilot on the planet visiting this site.

Biggest problem: I didn’t think it through to make sure my market was big enough to warrant the time and effort that was required to build such a site.

The Solution

There are more ideas that I have had, but I can’t think of any more right now. It’s funny how I and maybe even you go to great lengths to come up with a wonderfully great idea. (Over thinking) Then you hear about some kid at Harvard building a web site where kids can be friends and posts different comments on each others pages. He called it Facebook. I mean that’s retarded, or so I thought. Who would waste that kind of time online. Well 100 million people would that have different interests than me. Oops missed that one.

So the next time you have a great idea for a web site try not to over think it. Dumb it down as much as possible. Hey, maybe you should even watch Dumb and Dumber to put you in a stupid mood. Then maybe you might be able to think about ideas that the average person would like and go crazy over. You never know.

I have a couple ideas that I am working on. I’ll let you know how they turn out.

Have you ever tried TipJoy. It’s a service that allows you to put a widget on your blog that asks your readers for tips. The readers pay tips via tipjoy. The readers are then later billed for the tips that they sent out. Payment can be made via PayPal.

I really don’t see the point in this service. I mean why not just put an icon of a cup that says tips at the bottom of every post and then when users click on the icon they are taken to PayPal where they can donate whatever they want. This way you get the money right away.

It’s amazing to me how many lame ideas are actually being funded with real money. This is just another example where someone was able to convince some venture capital guy of their idea no matter how crazy or stupid.

When you are first starting out with a web site or blog you will want to have some form of RSS feed. You will also want to check your stats on that same RSS feed periodically. Well, if you are not using Feedburner yet, you should be. They have a lot of free tools that you can use with your blog feed.

The picture above is seen on most web sites that have an RSS feed routed through Feedburner. But you don’t have to do this. You can still use Feedburner and have a regular RSS icon on the screen. The advantage of doing this is being able to track your RSS stats through Feedburner.

Now if you wanted to you could use the widget show above, but if you are just starting out you may not want to advertise that you only have 2 RSS readers. So it makes more sense to just use the icon and route your RSS feed through Feedburner.

This way you can still check your RSS stats and when you have enough RSS readers you can upgrade your RSS icon to the kind shown above.

There are only a few jobs that I would really want. Owning a company like Curious Office is one of them.

Curious Office is a company incubator for Web 2.0 startups. Their latest creation called Pressplan just closed $1.7 million in Series A financing. Some people in the know in the startup industry like Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, was a little surprised about it because he didn’t know exactly what it was they plan to do. And this guy seems to know everything that happens in the startup world. He writes, “I have no idea what it does but it seems like everyone who’s involved in startups in Seattle is in the know. Or at least I hope they are, because they just invested in the company.”

Curious Office has a list of six companies that they have already taken live and have actually sold. You can see a list of their founded sites on their web site. And if you are in the business of coming up with the next big site you may find this interesting. Curious Office has this to say on their web site concerning the next big application sites that will be founded:

Conceived in 2005, Curious Office was established in recognition of a new trend emerging in web development. Increasingly, small teams using emerging development frameworks, better tools and web services could deploy game changing new applications on small budgets and within extremely short periods of time. Around the same time, the term “Web 2.0? became synonymous for this evolution and for the ever increasingly popularity of user-generated content that drove all manner of new social networks built on these applications.

They go on to say that some of the big trends developing in the industry are:

1 - commodization of the core infrastructure of the technology business
2 - community powered development environments - ie open source
3 - software delivered as a service over the Internet
4 - a movement toward lightweight web services - ie web 2.0
5 - the globalization of technology development and consumption”

If you’re sitting around trying to come with the next big idea or web site, you really need to checkout Curious Office’s companies site. They have a good description of what they are looking for. If you can provide them an idea that they think is viable they could give you some seed capital of a couple hundred thousand dollars to build a proof of concept. From that stage you could then be eligible for series A funding of venture capital. It all depends on the idea and of course if you can build a proof of concept on a couple hundred thousand dollars. I know I could.

IT-Ideas reached a 10,500 member milestone today. We’ve got more than 10,000 pages indexed on Google as well. The site traffic yesterday registered just under 45,000 on Alexa.

We have other things planned to help proliferate and expand our userbase. My biggest problem is that I just don’t have the time to do it. It looks like I may have to outsource the work.

I saw this article today on TechCrunch’s web site. They have some interesting charts that have been provided by Technorati about blogging.

The charts show some interesting things, such as in order for you to be in the group of the top 100 bloggers you have to be posting a minimum of 310 times a month. That’s more than 10 a day. Wow, that’s a lot. Another interesting thing I noticed was that the way that most bloggers determine their success is by personal satisfaction, not revenue. Also very interesting. Take a look at the article and see how you rate.

I have been busy working on one of my other sites. We’re getting ready to launch it in beta version in the next couple weeks. I’ll keep you posted.

It is not my goal to rehash someone else’s work. Having said that I am planning on blogging everything that I have learned. So having said that here’s what I learned.

It’s best to use multiple sources of income. Instead of just using Google Ads, try using different affiliates, text link ads, and many more. John Chow has a good article on recommended money makers.

This is also a good idea in case you loose some money from your only source of income. With multiple sources you are like a well-balanced stock portfolio and can weather the up and downs of the traffic market.

So I’m checking my email right, and guess what I see. It’s an email from this guy named Arthur at SocialTwist.com. These are the guys that have the tell a friend tool that I blogged about a couple days ago. Anyway here is what he wrote.

I have used some of the other social widgets before and I never had anyone from the company that offers them send me an email to offer help. This just goes to show you how important good customer service is. And the funny thing about this is there is no sale involved. They are doing this striclty to show that they are a cut above the rest.

Overall, I say that’s pretty cool.