It’s about time too… Full feeds for all! I’ve been promising in for weeks now and at last, I found the switch in my dashboard. Simple, huh? As stated earlier though, full feeds will mean monetized feeds. The ads we plan on having running will be small little text-ads at the end of every article. In addition, we plan to run a second feed which is not monetized, but only includes snippets of the text and will require you to click through to read the whole thing.

In other news - Text-Link-Ads will be replacing our old privatised Text-Links, with more and more people signing up, it’s got to the point where it’s time for a 3rd party to manage payments for effectiveness. That and the fact that I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Patrick Gavin, Text-Link-Ads & ReviewMe founder, and we had a little chat. In short - I’m convinced that TLA is the way to go… A little persausion goes a long way!

Anyhow - I might do a post later on, comparing my earnings and effectiveness with TLA as opposed to my own private deals. It’ll sure save me time - maybe even the odd headache, and being in the marketplace should bring in even more sponsors!

And for those of you who e-mailed me telling me that the site was down earlier today, yes, I know… We’re still looking into why it happened, but rest assured, we’re just as confused as you are. We think it was my less than admirable theme editting though. On that comforting note, it’s time for my bed.

PS - If you’re not already signed up with TLA, you should be, because now you can get $100 in free TechZi advertising by just signing up below. Wicked, huh?

And if you’re just a blogger, looking to make a little bit of extra cash… Clicky!

Featured Sites: Broadband Internet

As you all know, I love to post my blog ponderings up here, in plain view on my blog. I like to debate new methods of advertising, ways to monetize the blog, keep my RSS subscribers, attract new readers, improve my layout and design, etc.

So today - I’m leaving an open microphone so that you can all give me your thoughts on what needs to be improved. To kick-start things off, I’m considering applying to a few sponsored reviews agencies. Perhaps even offering some sponsored reviews outside these networks. What would you do, if this was the case? Stop reading the blog? Stop reading these particular posts? Send me an e-mail telling me that I’d won a hundred-million dollars?

All I have to say on the topic of sponsored reviews, is that if I was most probably going to write about a similar story anyway (Yes - I’ll be limiting reviews to realted-only products!), then so long as I maintain an honest opinion on the product/website/community/shin-dig, then I see no reason not. Especially if it means I can remove the ugly PPC adverts, etc. But again, I’m asking you for ideas. What better way to find out exactly what you guys want?

Anyhow - I have to wait until the Google Pagerank update later this month till ReviewMe will accept my blog. Once that is done though, you could very well be staring straight at a PR6 TechZi! I won’t get my hopes up…

Domo arigatio Mr. PC! The Japanese do “I’m a Mac” ads too, so it seems…

For those who are wondering, my limited knowledge of the Japanese language *cough* Google Translator! *cough* tells me that the Mac in the advert used the informal Japanese for ‘hello’, whereas the PC used the far more traditional ‘Konnichiwa’. That is how you spell it, right?

Moving back to the English language, it seems Novell have gone down the viral advertising root, spoofing the highly popular Mac ads that we see all around is, in now-a-days modern culture.

She needs a haircut! Anthony thinks she’s just a ‘cute chick’ though. The YouTube community seemed rather amused also with the comments they left the video.

I think the Linux girl should be about 40 pounds overweight to reflect the awful bloated Novell java apps.

And that’s the end of that… A Zi Media update is coming sometime today! Check the new poll and get yourself high on sugar-coated HTML tags before the launch on Friday!

Some of you may or may not know, that for several months now, I’ve been looking to launch my own blog media company. As of Friday, we hope to make the network live to the public and with the launch of Zi Media, a new ‘Zi Blog’ will arrive too. With four dedicated writers, excluding myself, the website is sure to be a great hit. The new blog (not yet live) will be focusing on everything automobile related. We’re hoping that with any luck, CarZi will get off to as great a start as TechZi has done and will evolve into a great community within the Zi Media Network.

I’m working with some of the best bloggers I could have hoped for and Nate, Anthony, Vinay and Matt are all out to make a name for themselves with the launch of CarZi. I’ll let them introduce themselves formally on the CarZi blog this Friday, as we launch, but till then, toodles! I’ve promised my mates I’ll meet them down at the park for a spot of football and I can’t realyl keep them waiting any longer.

Oh, and… (You didn’t think I’d finished, did you?)

Techzi has a new spiffy-ass Technorati ranking. Rank: 19,509 (555 links from 191 blogs) - We broke the 20k barrier! By the end of the year, I’m aiming for the 5k barrier, which if we can make, will be a real achievement. Looking back at the good fortune and progress we’ve had these past six months, I’m confident that we’ll be able to continue, full steam ahead on our way to blog-a-dom royalty.

The Zi Media Network - Media. Redefined.

I’m back writing again for Darren at ProBlogger, with my latest post due to go live sometime in the next week or two, whilst Darren is away. Quite a few other people, including the fabulous Wendy Piersall, Aaron Wall, Liz Strauss & Matt Coddington (Fellow infinFX geek!) will also be doing a spot of blogging at ProBlogger this coming month. Darren’s managed to get himself an amazing team of bloggers/writers, and I feel both shocked and honoured to be a part of the group.

My latest guest post at ProBlogger talks about attributes needed to become a ProBlogger, how to monetize your blog and also why sleep is essential. See you there!

I feel rather sad, at present. The past two or three weeks, (Ever since I moved to Wordpress!) I’ve found myself constantly checking out & referencing my Technorati statistics for Techzi.net… The teasing button in the dashboard doesn’t help the matter, and I’ve now bookmarked my Technorati statistics page for quick reference.

Chris evidently symathises with me.

Here are Techzi’s current statistics as of today, Friday 9th March:

- 257 links coming in from…
- 157 blogs who know they’re spiffy.
- All this in exactly a month!

That reminds me, it is exactly a month since we re-launched over at Techzi.net! I think that calls for some kind of celebration, don’t you?

Featured Links: Electronic Components | Aircraft Parts | Italian Property | Funny Pictures

In a blatant attempt to copy John Chow, Techzi is throwing it’s very own re-launch competition! There’s already a great piece of gear which you can get your hands on, with at least one confirmed other on it’s way! So how can you win one of these spiffy prizes?

Simple! Just join our MyBlogLog communtiy! Where can you do this? Right here of course! The Techzi MyBlogLog Community already has over 60 members, and we’re throwing this competition in the hope of increasing that number further. If you’re interested in expensive gadgets, a thriving community & the latest technology news, you know this is the one for you. Winners will be announced on April 1st. “What if I’m already a member?” Great! You’ll be automatically entered into the prize drawing! Winners will be selected randomly, and the judge’s descision is final. In the event that a winner becomes unavailable, a new winner will be randomly selected.

If you have any questions or queries, or simply want to do some flaming, e-mail us at Competition@Techzi.net, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible! I won’t be writing many, if any updates today though as it’s my Birthday, so make me proud and enter. This is just the beginning!

Featured Sites: Cheap Gadget Shops

Well, as you can see (unless your viewing this from an RSS reader), we’ve got ourselves a new layout! If you are using an RSS feed, come visit for the sake of seeing the spiffyness. I guarantee that you’ll be impressed.

Speaking of RSS feeds, we’ve updated our RSS area in the sidebar, to display our current numbers of readers who are subscribed to our main feed. Currently? 574. That’s gone up alot… Here are the stats.

Sunday - 59 RSS Readers
Monday - 71 RSS Readers
Tuesday - 141 RSS Readers
Wednesday - 574 RSS Readers

So as you can see, some pretty impressive progress! People clearly liked that post I wrote on ProBlogger, what with it hovering just under 1,000 Diggs and all.

We’ve also changed our advertising options, and now as you can see, we have space in the header for advertising. If you’re interested, just drop us a line at Sponsorship@Techzi.net, and we’ll chase you up. Thanks for your patience during this ever-changing time!

UPDATE: A fellow Blogger requested an interview, and seeming as his blog was fairly new, why not? It could turn on to be the next TechCrunch.

Here are the statistics after the Digg Effect struck us, after the ProBlogger article I wrote was promoted to the frontpage. Random, useless statistics live on! That said, there were some real shockers in stall, in both the browser & OS sectors.

Operating Systems

73.89% - Windows (Alot less than expected!)
19.19% - Mac (Incredible, in my opinion!)
4.93% - Linux (Still more than I’d expected!)
1.99% - Other (Wonder what, in this case?)

Operating System Versions

I only have the statistics here from Windows and Mac… Here are the CORRECTED Windows percentages. (My apologies for the original mistake! I had to copy these figures out by hand you know! )

77.55% - Windows XP (Expected at least this much.)
11.10% - Windows Vista (Really? Early adopters like myself I see, or beta users. )
11.35% - Other

And here are the Mac stats…

82.43% - Mac OS X Intel (Nice to see!)
17. 57% - Mac OS X PowerPC (Alot of people obviously still holding off updating!)

Browser Stats

70.30% - Firefox (300,000,000 downloads as of today!)
13.75% - Safari (More Safari users than Internet Explorer? WOW!)
12.38% - Internet Explorer (A decline in the market leader?)
1.98% - Opera (Very small amount of people using Opera.)
1.5% - Camino (Even less number using Camino.)
0.5% - Netscape Navigator (Pretty much nobody using Netscape.

Screen Sizes - Why? Dunno…

29% - 1280 x 1084 (An industry standard it seems now!)
23.5% - 1024 x 768
14% - Unknown (What happened here?)
7% - 1280 x 800 (My laptop’s screensize.)
6.5% - 1600 x 1200
5% - 1440 x 900
3.5% - 1680 x 1050
2.5% - 1280 x 960
2% - 1400 x 1050
1.5% - 1152 x 864
1.5% - 1920 x 1200 (The expected size of my new monitor… Still in the mail.)
1% - 1152 x 870
1% - 2560 x 1024 (Wow… Time for me to get an upgrade!)
0.5% - 2680 x 1050 (Sweet resolution man!)
0.5% - 1280 x 854
0.5% - 1280 x 768 (
0.5% - 800 x 600 (Nooo! The horror!)

I can’t be bothered posting the screen aspect ratio… Very boring, and about 80 different types. Another day maybe.

Timezones

The information is still incomplete, and flooding in by the second.

Language & Region

Again, we’ve not got the full data ready here yet.

Referring sources

Guess? Digg, via ProBlogger of course!

More information coming soon… Sorry it’s incomplete! Just thought that what we had was pretty surprising!

My favourite comment out of all the ones on Digg? “Nicely done on the article David. You certainly have a thick skin and a quick wit for all the garbage being thrown in these comments. I think your next article should be ‘a 12 year old shows Digg readers how to be mature’.” Why? They’re right… I never knew what kind of a place Digg was. Ah well, who cares. Their words, rants, flames, and general smitings have failed to deter me. The blog must go on!

Long as it lasted, we’re going to create our own new little theme. Again. We’ve found there to be far to many issues, bugs, problems & general badness in this current burger of code that you see before you. It may take a couple of weeks, but you can’t say that we didn’t warn you of potential turbulence!

I’m sorry about this… Not only to you guys, but to Nate, our programmer, who’s put so much effort in already. Keep it up man!