Love2Tag

With 60 Million Websites, WordPress Rules The Web. So Where’s The Money? – Forbes.

Fascinating article about the business end of the WordPress ecosystem. Mullenweg’s dedication to his original ideals is truly inspiring. So much recent press has been given to the tribulations of  twitter and facebook, as they try to squeeze every last cent out of their users. Mullenweg took quite a different approach and has now ended up with a vibrant, sustainable business that supports a vast network of freelance designers, developers, and content producers.

The Creative Monopoly – NYTimes.com.

Interesting approach to think about.

Up to 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies registered .xxx domains over a 52-day period starting Sept. 7, says Lawley, who declined to name the companies. Their goal: to protect their brands from falling into the wrong hands.

via What’s in a Domain Name? $185,000 for Starters – Businessweek.

I’ve been fascinated by the goings on of ICANN  lately (and the controversy it’s causing). I was of the mind that the new domains would be great for creating new business ideas. But 70% of the Fortune 500 companies registered to protect their brands? Starting to sound like blackmail. It’s one thing to spend $100 a year to withhold the .xxx, but spending 185K for the new domains is going to get pricey.

In Silicon Valley, Buying Companies for Their Engineers – NYTimes.com.

It’s like Facebook is just going to toss all of these great star-tups and great ideas into the Facebook funnel and make Facebook sausage out of . Also can’t help thinking that this is a Gen Y phenomenon. Gen X’ers don’t sell out quite as easily.

Man of the House | Advice for Dads | We’ll Make Men Out of You Yet.

This is interesting. Magazine/blog style site with loads of content that is owned by P&G (and produced by an outside media company). This is the first I’ve taken notice of something like this although I suspect there are lots of these lurking around the net. A corporation owning content just for the sake of advertising their own products.

This could bode well for small potato publishers (or slightly big time bloggers). The question is how do you pay for so many writers? And is that value ultimately transferred to advertising? I found it as a paid linked from USweekly.com.

Big Cartel – Simple shopping cart for artists, designers, bands, record labels, jewelry, crafters.

Good place to buy and sell. Free plan for 5 products or less, otherwise next plan up is 9.99/month.

Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation [OPINION].

Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation.

This 26-Year-Old Is Making Millions Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle.

Great example of how an indie writer self publishes on Amazon and makes money by selling for less and increasing the volume.

How To Launch A Niche Blogging Business – Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak.

There is something about this model that has continually intrigued me. The question is, what meaningful thing can you write about every day? Because if it doesn’t mean anything to you, it will end up being a bunch of junk.

And of course there are some flaws in the logic. 100 readers per day does not add up to 10 new email opt-ins per day. That’s just silly. If you have 3000 pageviews per month many of them are multiple visits from the same reader.

But it’s true that blogging about something every day, with certain keywords in mind will get you tons of organic search. The question is, can you convert? And do you have the creative energy (and talent) to create a new product each month?

(dv) 4.0 – High-Performance VPS Hosting for Businesses.

$50 a month business class hosting that can be resold at a profit. Large application list (including wordpress, joomla, drupal, and others) and a free billing system.