Folks. I have a confession to make. I’ve been secretly cheating on all of you for some time now. Oh, and to make matters worse, I’m proud of it.

Yes, you already know that a few months ago I joined Layered Technologies as the Chief Marketing Officer… but I’ve got another on the side. And she’s called Woopra. I’ve been secretly working with Elie Khoury and Jad Younan on this project, and we just unveiled it yesterday at WordCamp, making Beta accounts available for the first time for all participants.

What can I tell you about Woopra? She’s hot, smooth, smart, and sexy. But don’t take my word for it… Here is what Cali from GeekBrief had to say after just a few minutes with Woopra.
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Today I’ll be attending WordCamp Dallas, which Charles Stricklin and I jointly organized. We’ve got a whole line up of fantastic speakers including Matt Mullenweg, Jonathan Bailey, Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell, Liz Strauss, Lorelle VanFossen, Chris Smith, Aaron Brazell, Jacob Santos, and Mark Ghosh.

If you’re one of the WordCamp attendees and you happen to be sitting in the lecture hall reading along as I stand here on stage, well… deja vu! Otherwise, for my normal readers here comes a list of 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog! If all goes well we’ll be recording the lecture and will be able to append the video to this post later.
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Some interesting data from Starcom MediaVest seems to indicate that the majority of clicks being purchased by the known world are being consumed by unemployed, Twenty-something, gambling, shop-a-holic, Internet addicts.

Hmmm, this tends to explain why those overpriced Google AdWord campaigns you are running don’t seem to be performing very well despite the mountains of cash you’re dishing out.

The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

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Folks, I get a lot of comments here on One Man’s Blog (nearly 7,000 at this point). Often there are well over 20 between times I check, even within one day, but the standard page view in the Edit Comments administration page only shows 20 thereby causing me to scroll from page to page in order to view / moderate more comments.

So, I just hacked mine to show 50 per page instead. Here is how you go about it.
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Lately I’ve noticed some new and disturbing trends in blog spamming techniques. Among the most prevalent are commenters who spend time building up a considerable number of comment back links on a seemingly non-commercial site in order to later convert that site into a commercial free-for-all.

This behavior is inherently unethical. Bloggers, like myself, only allow links to be associated with commenter’s names for the purpose of getting to know who they are, not so our visitors will follow links only to be subjected to commercial solicitation. Posing as legitimate is nothing new, spammers have been faking regular commenter names for a while now.

On this blog, my own Terms of Use specifically prohibit such activity - though I have to delete posts all day, every day for violating them. On this blog alone Akismet has marked 71,000 Spam comments. And that is nowhere near the total number of Spammers stopped.
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After the announcement that I’d joined Layered Technologies, several of you mentioned that you’d be interested in our affiliate program once I got it rolled out at work, so I wanted to let you know that we just launched it and invite everyone to sign up! Just sign up at Share-a-sale and join the Layered Tech program. (Oh, drop a comment that you’re an OMB reader when you sign up so the team will let me know!)

For those of you not entirely familiar with LT, we are a dedicated server hosting company. We don’t do shared hosting, though we do Virtual Private Servers starting at about $50 per month. Unlike shared hosting, VPS provides actual dedicated resources so some other person’s Web site on the same server won’t affect the performance of your own.

Anyway, we’re offering 30% commissions for all referrals that result in sales, and we routinely sell services that range from hundreds to thousands of dollars. So even referring just one sales every month or two could generate more money than an entire Google AdWords campain for most people.

I hope you guys will sign up for the program and help us grow Layered Technologies while also earning a little coin. Oh, and we’ve got a lot of banners available when you sign up, but if you need something custom just let me know and we’ll create it for you. You can drop a comment here, or use my contact form.
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If you’re running WordPress 2.3.2 or later, there is a new feature that allows you to to specify an error page for those times when your Database is not available. This often happens when there is a huge spike of traffic from Digg or some other social networking site, and it leaves visitors staring at an ugly WordPress database error message.

Well, no error page will take the place of having your actual site online, but you can at least try to make things a little better for your visitors, and I thought one way would be to give em’ a few videos to check out while the server was unavailable.
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If you were to generalize and describe who you believe to be the average Blogger, what would they look like? I asked a few folks and the concensus seemed to be:

• A single, white, 20-something male
• A bleeding edge, geeky, early adopter
• A college student with plenty of time on their hands

But if you tend to agree, you’d be wrong…. According to Gary Drenik, President of BIGresearch:

“Bloggers are a diverse group and not who you would expect.”

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I recently got the following question from one of my readers:

Dear The Man,

I’m a broke ass college student. And by broke I mean not only don’t I have any money, but I’ve probably already spent about 2 years worth of my expected salary after graduation. And that’s if I DON”T go to grad school!

What should I do?

Your fan,
Broke Dope

Well Brokemeister, don’t worry. Lots of people incur mountains of debt while attending school. Some of them even actually do it on tuition and books! But regardless of what you’ve blown it on, there are solutions for student consolidation of debt.
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Folks, as you can see from the WordCamp logo over in the top right corner, I’ll be attending, and speaking, at the WordCamp Dallas 2008 event being held here in my home town of Frisco, TX on Saturday March 29 and Sunday March 30, 2008. I’ve been working with Charles Stricklin of the WordPress Podcast to organize the event, and it’s going to be a very special weekend full of top blogging talent.

If you live anywhere nearby, or are willing to travel to Dallas, I highly recommend attending this event. But here’s the catch… we are limited to only about 300 attendees, so you really need to get your registration in quickly. It’s only $20 to attend, because we’ve got sponsors helping pick up the major ticket items. So given the fact that the speakers who will be here have tens of thousands of regular readers I want to encourage people to sign up quick - because once the slots are gone, that’s it! (View the current Attendee list.)

I can’t emphasize enough how valuable I found attendance at the WordCamp 2007 event. I made a whole bunch of new friends, like Charles, Lorelle, Matt, Donncha, Lloyd, and many more. And that was in addition to the new tips, tricks and education I received from the fantastic speakers. (By the way, I filmed those speakers, and you can watch the videos here.)

I got the following question recently from Arlina (sorry it took me so long to answer…):

There are so many “make money online” ads…can you recommend some? I have a blog and I’m using Adsense, but I’m not making any money on it (it’s really new, so not much traffic). There is so much info out there, it’s overwhelming!

Yes Arlina, you’re right. There is a lot of information out there, most of which is very misleading, and it’s hard to know what are reasonable expectations for advertising revenue as well as where to turn to for actual advertising dollars. So, I’ll try to answer your question by at least pointing you in the direction of some of the biggest Google Adsense alternatives out there. And hopefully this is one time when our fairly large and vocal reader community will chime in and share their cumulative knowledge as well.
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Yes, in case no one knew it, I’m blowing the secret wide open. Today (January 11) is Matt Mullenweg’s birthday, and I just want to wish him the best for the new year. For those of you that don’t know, Matt is the original creator of WordPress - the software that makes this (and over 2,000,000 others) blog possible.

So happy birthday Matt! And I hope all the other bloggers out there will pick up on this and pass along their wishes also. I would have sent you a cake, but the kid in the photo ate it before I could get it to you…