Blogs

I'm finding that StumbleUpon has been the most effective social button on the site. I've been consistently sharing my blog entires on StumbleUpon and other content sharing sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin, +1, Facebook, and maybe a couple other ones. It's mostly a waste of time except for StumbleUpon.

Demand Media, a content farm targeted by Google's Panda Update, is shifting focus from text to video. On its flagship site eHow, it's producing less written content and more how-to videos, moving from one ecosystem into another.

Last Thursday, Google launched another algorithm change to their search engine that rewards “fresher” content. For example, if you’re searching for a current event, the latest news articles would pop up to the top of the page. 35% of the search results are affected. I was thinking this should be great for a news sites like Wopular. I checked Google Analytics on Thursday and instead of getting a traffic boost, I got the opposite - a dip.

Talk about getting its ass-kicked by Google’s Panda Update, Mahalo’s been hit pretty hard. Jason Calacanis, the founder, has never been shy about how his site gets traffic - by paying writers cheaply to crank out content for the top Google keyword searches. In other words, an SEO play - a content farm.

The Madoff family’s in the news again. Ruth Madoff, wife of notorious swindler Bernie Madoff, did an interview with “60 Minutes.” Bernie was also interviewed in prison. Coincidentally, there’s a Madoff book coming out at the end of the month and one was released about a week ago. I’m not sure what to make of the two books, released within two weeks of each other.

Because Google’s Panda Update 2.5 has taken away a chunk of Wopular’s traffic, I’ve decided to try out web 2.0 link exchange programs. I read that they’re significantly more sophisticated than their previous incarnations. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never tried them with Rotten Tomatoes.

I just got Donnie Yen's latest in the mail about a week ago, so I reviewed it on MWB:

"Peter Chan’s “Wu Xia” is Donnie Yen’s best film since “Ip Man.” It might not be the fight-fest that fans expect from Yen, but it’s a visually striking film that engrosses with its unique take on the martial arts genre and entertains with Yen’s wuxia-style choreography."

I'm a Donnie Yen fan, so I may be a bit biased.

Last week, Google launched another Panda update. After I kinda fully recovered from the previous update, this one brough me back down again. I lost about 50% of my Google traffic. After each update, I'll change a few things around to make it a site that Google would like. And I usually recover. The only thing is I wonder if I would have recovered anyway if I didn't do anything, especially since each update always bring me back down.

I spent the whole day dealing with servers. The facility where Wopular and MoviesWithButter are hosted were having some network issues. I was able to get MWB up and running within an hour or so. Wopular was a whole different story. The Database is about 21GB. It's a huge db, so whenever there's a network issue, I can always count on at least one corrupt table. And it always happens to be the largest table, which takes several hours to diagnose and repair.

Long time no blog. Even I wasn’t expecting this long of a hiatus, but maintaining two sites does take a lot of time. I’ve made some minor tweaks to Wopular, but most of my work lately has been focused on MoviesWithButter.com. Here’s what Binh and I have done to promote the site since launching it a couple months ago.