Browsing Category: "review"
Website Review: rssHugger
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rssHugger is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs and help visitors discover new blogs. If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for giving an review of the site on your blog. If you want to join rssHugger but do not want to review the site, you can pay a one time review fee of $20.
rssHugger has a top 100 as well as random page to let the visitors get to your site. rssHugger is all about generating buzz and finding new content. Much like stumbleupon in that respect.
Now for Free!
It appears that the community has spoken and now rssHugger does not cost a thing if you write a blog post about it. If you still don’t want to write about it then just pay the $20.00 and you’ll get your blog listed. This should help the site grow quickly without the fee.
Buzz works! It can work for small and start-up businesses, as well. Why wait, join rssHugger now!!!
Making Money Online
There are many ways to make money: a job, your own brick & mortar business, or even an online business. Many individuals are making a go at it online. Some are even doing it for their sole income. One such person is blogger Tyler Cruz. Tyler is an internet entrepreneur and operates a self-named blog - TylerCruz.com as well as some other sites.
While this blog is not intended as a money-maker, I do have a few ads that help support my habits such as golf.
One great aspect of TylerCruz.com is that he uses extensive case studies. He doesn’t just tell you do X. He does X,Y,and Z and then concludes that X is better. This is a very scientific approach and it also lends him more credibility in convincing his readers that his strategies work.
Productivity Tool: Pocketmod
I stumbled on a nice little site recently called pocketmod.
What is a pocketmod?
According to the website:
The PocketMod is a new way to keep yourself organized. Lets face it, PDAs are too expensive and cumbersome, and organizers are bulky and hard to carry around. Nothing beats a folded up piece of paper. That is until now. With the PocketMod, you can carry around the days notes, keep them organized in any way you wish, then easily transfer the notes to your PDA, spreadsheet, or planner.
The PocketMod is a small book with guides on each page. These guides or templates, combined with a unique folding style, enable a normal piece of paper to become the ultimate note card. It is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It’s best that you just dive in and create one.
My Pocketmod
I created myself a “pocketmod” with the week on the first page, 5 individual days, and a finance page on the last page to track expenses. Anyone that knows me knows I’m a post-it nutcase. This will be a nice tool to carry around and when I have more time transfer over to my PDA. Sometimes its just easier to use paper/pen.
Blog Tool Review: Buzzdash
I recently Stumble’d on Buzzdash a site to generate polls. I registered, created the poll found below in this post, and received the code via email in about 2 minutes. It is very easy to use.
Per the Buzzdash website,
BuzzDash is a site and tool for gauging popular opinion on a wide range of topics - from sports, movies and politics to relationships and philosophy. Built upon individual polling modules called buzzbites™, BuzzDash provides a real-time forum where people can solicit, measure and share opinions on nearly any issue.
With BuzzDash, people can:
- View real-time popular opinion on a range of timely issues
- Express opinions by voting or commenting on individual issues
- Post individual buzzbites to personal web pages, blogs or emails
- Create buzzbites for personal use, for submission to BuzzDash, or both.
You can quickly post your poll currently to MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, LiveJournal, Freewebs, Blogger, or Tagged user. For Wordpress you have to get the code emailed to you. It is slightly annoying. Why can’t they just display the code for cut ‘n paste?
Below is a working poll I generated and embeded using javascript.
What’s unique about Buzzdash is that your readers vote along with everyone else who visits the main Buzzdash website and finds the poll or anyone else’s site that embeds your poll. You get a good sample of people to conduct your poll in this manner. For example I posted my poll in the “Economy” category. You can see it here along with other “Economy” category polls. For example, the poll I embeded had 2 votes before I got around to putting it in this post. The votes came from other Buzzdash users finding the poll in the “Economy” category of their site’s polls.
Overall, I think it’s a great service, but the emailing of code to embed is a bit backwards. I’ll probably start using Buzzdash for my blog polls. The polls are clean and easy to embed. I like the fact that others from the Buzzdash website can also vote.
“Jump In. Be Heard” with Buzzdash.
Book Review: An American Hedge Fund
In an earlier post I mentioned that I received a request to do a book review on the soon to be published book - An American Hedge Fund by Timothy Sykes. Tim has been featured on CNBC, starred in “Wall Street Warriors“, and has been written about in several national magazines and newspapers.
I received my pre-release copy a few days ago and I read it over the next 2 days.
The Intriguing Industry
Per wikipedia “hedge funds generally exercise extreme secrecy and little is known with certainty about the activities of specific hedge funds or the industry as a whole.” Hedge funds have always intrigued me. Why? Hedge funds have more flexibility than mutual funds in their investment vehicles/mechanisms they use to invest. Also the manager of a hedge fund typically gets 2/20. That is they earn 2% of assets plus 20% of any gains. That’s big money.
The hedge fund is a very misunderstood area in the financial world and for good reason. The secrecy is in part caused by the burdensome government regulations to protect investors. Timothy sheds light into this otherwise mysterious world. There are few books on the topic and this is the first book I am aware of that gives a full account of a Hedge Fund from the inside - from inception to maturity. Timothy goes in great detail of how he got into trading, how he traded, how he started and operated his fund, and the slew of shady characters he met along the way.
Play by Play - The Trades
The play by play of his at time gut-wrenching trades and his huge wins and losses draws the reader into his trading world. Tim shows his youth and passion in his trading as well as the partying that goes with fast money. He shows a very honest account of the industry, its pitfalls, and difficulties. He also demonstrates the big money that can be made in the trading industry. Shedding light on an otherwise murky, mysterious industry Timothy has done a bang-up job. This is the first book I know of that covers micro-cap stock trading in such detail trade-by-trade.
The book is slated to be out on October 1 and I recommend you get it.
The ISBN# is 978-0-9795497-0-0
