Sunday April 27, 2008

My first Google Adsense cheque

My first Google Adsense cheque has arrived in the mail. A grand total of SGD $156.34 based on accumulated earnings from end-Jan 2008 when I started monetizing my blog to the end of Mar 2008 when the payout was calculated. Based on USD $116.30 earnings at that point, the USD/SGD currency exchange rate used would work out to 1.34428. It's funny how I have been watching and blogging on the falling dollar, and how now my very first Google cheque has been hit by this. But of course I have been expecting this, and I also expect that the US dollar has further to fall.

Vagaries of the forex markets aside, I'd suppose $116.30 for 2 months isn't too bad, seeing how I initially set out to recoup my hosting costs of $12.85 per month. Or to look at it another way, the couple of dollars or so every day now helps to cover my tea-break expenses (a cup of tea or coffee and a bun at the local coffeeshop). My tea-break costs are hedged, as are my petrol bills with the monthly dividends of a couple hundred dollars or so coming in from my energy income trusts.

Talking about coffee, once the cheque clears, I will be owing shooperman a cup of coffee (as promised earlier) - he was the one who suggested to me to try to make some money from my blog. Though it's a modest start, I can say it has done far better than my initial expectations. Thank you, readers of lowem.log for your support.

See also :

1. Google Adsense - first month report, and thanks for the clicks

(2008-04-27 16:55:39 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [4]

Wednesday March 19, 2008

Writer Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90

news.yahoo.com :

Pioneering science fiction writer and visionary Arthur C. Clarke, best known for his work on the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," has died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at the age of 90. He died of respiratory complications and heart failure doctors linked to the post-polio syndrome that had kept him wheelchair-bound for years. Marking his "90th orbit of the sun" in December, the prolific British-born author and theorist made three birthday wishes: For E.T. to call, for man to kick his oil habit and for peace in Sri Lanka.

Clarke was born in England on December 16, 1917. He was one of the first to suggest the use of satellites orbiting the earth for communications, and in the 1940s forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000. When Neil Armstrong landed in 1969, the United States said Clarke "provided the essential intellectual drive that led us to the moon." Clarke wrote around 100 books and hundreds of short stories and articles, and wanted to be remembered foremost as a writer. Trained as a scientist, he was renowned for basing his work on scientific fact and theory rather than pure fiction and for keeping humanity at the heart of his technological visions.

He had also been working on the idea of a "space elevator." "The golden age of space is only just beginning," Clarke forecast. "Over the next 50 years, thousands of people will travel to earth orbit and then to the moon and beyond. Space travel and space tourism will one day become almost as commonplace as flying to exotic destinations on our own planet."

- RIP Arthur C. Clarke. I have read many of your books. You were a great inspiration. I look forward to space-based solar power as well as the space elevators that are required to construct them that, if built, will eventually put an end to our fossil fuel addiction.

(2008-03-19 13:33:43 SGT) [Musings] Permalink

Thursday February 28, 2008

Google Adsense - first month report, and thanks for the clicks

First of all, thanks to you, the reader, for your support of lowem.log, for your visits, and clickthroughs, and your comments. It has been just over a month since I have put up ads via Google Adsense on this blog. The preliminary report from the first month or so of operations : USD $44.32 in earnings, at an average of 5 clicks at $1.23 per day, which works out to about 24.6 cents per click. Google ads are counted on a CPC (cost per click) basis instead of CPM (cost per thousand impressions) so it's the actual clicks that count, not the number of page impressions or page views.

It started off, as with quite a few initiatives I have been taking recently, as part of my personal war against inflation. I wanted to say "fight", or maybe "struggle", but I decided that these were not strong enough words. So yes, I am declaring war on inflation. Here's my story.

In the middle of January 2008, my Java hosting provider, eatj.com, sent me an email telling me that they are merging with another Java hosting provider. As part of the transition, my existing hosting subscription plan of USD $9.85 would be invalidated and I would have to re-sign up at a revised rate of $12.85 per month. Okay, you might say, so it's just $3 but from a percentage point of view, that's a whopping 30.46% rate of inflation !! Did you get a 30% pay increase any time in the past year? I sure didn't.

It also helped that my friend and fellow fund manager, Hoo Shao Pin aka shooperman was talking to me at the time about "multiple sources or streams of income" and how he was going to set up a few blogs and write up stuff and bring in some money. So, in a fit of pique, I signed up for Adsense, went through all the hoops of registration, setting up the code templates, verification, and then turned to look into SEO ("search-engine optimization") techniques. No black hat stuff for me - I wanted to do this the legitimate way. So I tweaked my Roller template, fixed a bug in the <title> tag, added meta-keywords, and off I went.

So what have I gained so far? 3 months' worth of hosting fees in 1 month ain't bad. I've also learnt a few things about trying to run a blog in a rather more "professional" manner. If you're into the white-hat, legitimate side of the business, there's only one thing to know : content is king. And if content is "king", timing is "queen". People look for compelling *and* timely content, and Google's search algorithms appear to reward those who have the stuff, and, it seems, just as importantly, those who have the stuff out *quickly*.

Case in point : I am the #1 search result for "singapore airshow 2008 photos" - which brings you to my blog entry here. I got a trade day ticket for the airshow on the first day, I took the photos, the moment I came back, I uploaded the photos, added captions, and wrote the blog. So I had the content, and I put it up quickly. So if you want to get a high Google ranking, do the same : have good content, and put it up quickly. That's the trick, which isn't much of a trick, actually. It's just common sense.

Anyway. Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for the clicks. The Adsense terms and conditions stipulate that I'm not allowed to *ask* you to click on the ads, but if you like to do so, you are more than welcome to :)

(2008-02-28 12:55:15 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday February 19, 2008

Singapore Airshow 2008 - photo gallery

You could say one of the perks of working for a subsidiary company of Lockheed Martin might be the air-show trade day tickets they give out to employees. I went to the Singapore Airshow 2008 today and came back with lots of photos, videos and posters.

Here are some photos below and here is the entire photo gallery.

For the shots, I used my nearly 2-year-old Canon S3IS camera (dpreview) which has 12x optical zoom, attached to a Hoya circular polarizer filter via a Canon LAH-DC20 58mm lens adaptor. It's no DSLR, but the Canon S3 IS's 436mm-equivalent zoom was extremely useful during the aerobatic display.

See also :

1. Asian Aerospace 2006

(2008-02-19 18:34:39 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [1]

Wednesday December 26, 2007

"Energy sector is hot right now"

This was caught by a spam filter recently :

The Selloff is over
HUge Volume spike today all on an UPtick
This s t o c K is going to soar in coming days
XXXXX ...
Energy sector is hot right now, and everyone wants in

- Talk about spam catching on to the latest trends. Great timing too, as NYMEX crude oil has broken above consolidation around the $90 level, and the oil index has gone above its trading range as well.

(2007-12-26 18:14:07 SGT) [Musings] Permalink

Tuesday September 11, 2007

A sure sign that your country is overrun ...

... is when you receive a spam call for credit cards from a Chinese lady speaking with a Beijing accent. Yep that's just what happened *just now*. She asked if I understood Mandarin, I said yes, and then all the usual spam talk followed but in Mandarin.

I wonder how long it will be before the email spam comes in with Chinese characters embedded in images inside PDF attachments asking me to buy some China stocks on the Shanghai Stock Exchange which by the way seems to have been setting all-time highs all year this year ...

It's interesting to see how government policy, official or otherwise, is leading to evolving social dynamics here.

(2007-09-11 14:47:19 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [1]

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