James Smith is a world traveled businessman and art collector. One of James Smith’s favorite hobbies during his travels is to search for exciting and evocative pieces of art. As an art collector, James Smith is often faced with the challenge of authenticating pieces of art and accurately attributing them to the proper artist.

There are some professionals, notes James Smith, who base their careers on authenticating and attributing art work. When verifying a work of art, there are many details and bodies of knowledge to consider. However, James Smith insists that even an amateur collector can look out for their interests by learning some essentials of authentication.

Most art for sale, notes James Smith, is accompanied by some form of documentation that purportedly verifies it as an original piece from a particular artist. In truth, these certifications are easier to forge than the art itself. James Smith says that many imitations art pieces are over valued because they are coupled with convincing yet false documentation of authenticity.

As an example, points out James Smith, be wary of “attributed” art. Attributed art is artwork that has been linked to a particular, usually famous, artist by little more than the word of the collector trying to sell it. James Smith warns collectors that any dealer can attribute a piece of art to a famed artist with little or no credentials. Once that attribution is printed on a piece of paper, the seller hopes buyers will take it seriously. James Smith cautions collectors against paying high prices for attributed art.

James Smith also advises that a prospective collector be sure to verify the qualifications of the person attributing the artwork. Are they scholars in the art industry? Have they published books or papers to establish their authority on the subject in question? Have they dedicated study to the particular artist they are attributing? James Smith urges art buffs to use a critical eye when shopping for art for their collections. Don’t be shy about asking a lot of questions and demanding clear answers.

Konrad Kafarski

Konrad Kafarski

Google wants to buy one of the sites of the moment…. again!

Google wants to buy Twitter according to techcrunch.  The aquisition value is unknown but some say it is around 250 millions in money and in stocks.

A few months ago facebook tried to buy twitter for 500 million and failed… What reasons can google present to be able to buy twitter for half of that price?

So far, none of the parts involved have talked about it, but the potential of twitter to become the world’s best real time search database is reason enough for google to want that power.

I am not a fan of twitter. I only use it ocasionally, but i have to admit that twitter is a phenomenon.

But with google’s takeover on twitter (if it is consumated) what consequences will it represent?

Twitter users:

What do you feel about this?

]]> http://bloggervenue.com/google-wants-twitter/feed/ 3 http://bloggervenue.com/blog-contests-of-the-moment/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=blog-contests-of-the-moment http://bloggervenue.com/blog-contests-of-the-moment/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:36:04 +0000 admin http://bloggervenue.com/?p=722

I managed to get a few minutes out of my forex trading (which didn’t go that good this week) to wirte tihs post.

There are 2 blog contests running now that i think they deserve your attention.

The first one is from my dear blogger friend Agent 001 from Greatest Reviews.

He managed to get a cool list of prizes worth of $1289,06! Good Job Agent!

Here is the prize list:

The Complete Prizes List

1. Two copy of Comodo Internet Security Pro from Comodo (2X39$ = 78$)
2. One eWebGuru Gold Web Hosting plan from eWebGuru (54.06$)
3. Four copies of Work Smart Get Rich e-book from Jim Regan of The Net Fool (4X15$ = 60$)
4. One Ultimate Blog Theme by Carl Ocab (67$)
5. One Text Advert at Retire @ 21 (60$)
6. One Blog Review (25$) and one 125X125 Sidebar Ads (10$) at Computer Talks
7. Two 125X125 Sidebar Ads at Tech Zoom In (2X15$ = 30$)
8. One Blog Review from FasBlog (50$)
9. Two125X125 Sidebar Banners (2X15$ = 30$) and one Blog Review (30$) at Greatest Reviews Dot Net and a Secret prize (xXxx$)
10. 795.00$ worth of prizes from CreWind our Super Sponsor (details below)

Details of prizes from our Super Sponsor CreWind

1. Get E-cover from illustrationwind.com worth $179
2. Get 2 Brochures from brochuremonster.com worth $158
3. Get Custom Banner Design from bannerwind.com worth $149
4. Get 3 Custom Icons from icongalore.com worth $150
5. Get Professional logo from logowind.com worth $99
6. Get 2 Web templates from buytemplates.net worth $60

The contest end in 30th April and to know what do you need to do to participate in this contest just visit Agent’s contest post.

The second contest is from Ben Pei from Pei Profit.

Ben Pei has come up with a no brainer contest on his make money online blog Pei Profit Dot Com. It only requires you complete four simple tasks like copying and pasting. The only reason that he is making it so simple to bring home those attractive prizes is that he wants to make winning easy for his readers. Prizes include $50 cash prize via PayPal, Atomic Blogging 3.0, Ultimate Blogging Theme, Banner Ad On GarryConn.com and 1 Year Membership On AdTracker.

Well if you are not heading over and grab your chance, others will! No more complicated reviews, no more linking to 10,000 sponsors. ONLY copy and paste and you could walk away with these big prizes!

Check out all the details of how you can enter the Ben Pei’s No Brainer Blog Contest now.

That easy!

This post was supposed to be published earlier but due to some complications i was not able to do so. My intership on the ER is not going so well and it is taking the majority of my time.

I have sponsored two contests.

The First one was at Brad blogging:

Platinum Sponsor

• Jay Green & The Balesio Team (http://www.balesio.com) donating:

1. 1 Copy Of “ALLCapture Enterprise 3.0? Screen Recording Suite – $344 USD Value
2. 2 Copies Of “ALLCapture” Screen Recorder – $466 USD (combined) Value
3. 8 Copies Of “PPTMinimizer” Powerpoint Compression (up to 98%) – $331 USD (Combined) Value

Gold Sponsors

• Fresh Never Frozen Web Design (http://freshneverfrozendesign.com) donating:

1. 2 Custom Blog Designs – $300 USD (combined) Value
2. 1 Hour Blog/Website Design Session Consultation – $49 USD Value

• Carlocab (http://carlocab.com) donating:

1. 5 Copies of Direct Response Templates for Minisite Design – $185 USD Value

• Logo Design Team (www.LogoDesignTeam.com) donating:

1. A Best Seller – Logo Design Package – $149 USD Value

• Scot (http://www.revvenue.com) donating:

1. 1 Hour “Adsense Tutoring” Session – $39 USD Value
2. $30 Gift Certificate to Starbucks – $30 USD Value

• Corey Freeman (http://www.deadlyclever.com) donating:

1. A Logo Design Package From Deadly Cleaver – $99 USD Value
2. Blogroll Link on Diligent Design – $5 USD Value

• Adam Pieniazek (http://www.adampieniazek.com) donating:

1. 3 Months of 125×125 Advertising On His Sidebar – $30 USD Value
2. $42 Cash Prize from the42ndEstate.com

• David Leonhardt (http://SEO-writer.com) donating:

1. Copy Of “Don’t Get Banned By The Search Engines” Ebook – $40 USD Value
2. Top 52 S.E.O. Tips Sheet – $10 USD Value

• Peter Lee (http://www.peterleehc.com) donating:

1. Copy Of “Quit Being a Wage Slave in 10 Easy Steps” Ebook – $49 USD Value

• Blogupp Team (http://www.blogupp.com/) donating:

1. 50 000 BlogUpp Impressions – N/A Value

• Hugo Santos (http://bloggervenue.com) donating:

1. 3 125×125 ads on his sidebar (1 month) – $20 USD (combined) Value

• Dan And Marsh (http://www.giveawaycity.blogspot.com) donating:

1. 2GB Kingston Data Traveler (USB Storage Drive) – $29 USD Value

• Pam Hawk (http://www.passitonplates.com) donating:

1. A “Pass It On Plate Lite” Edition (See This For More Details) – $29 USD Value

Silver Sponsors

• AnotherMMOBlog (http://www.anothermmoblog.com/) donating:

1. 1 Month 125×125 Sidebar Ad

• Lhurey (http://www.phblogger.net) donating:

1. 2500 Entrecard Credits

• Tim Johnson (http://www.yimto.com) donating:

1. 2000 Entrecard Credits

• Yan (http://thoushallblog.com) donating:

1. 1000 Entrecard Credits from Wpbeginners.co

• TH (http://www.twinshappiness.com) donating:

1. 125×125 Ad On Their Sidebar For A Month
2. 125×125 Ad On thereishappiness.com Sidebar For A Month

• Hussein (http://www.niessuh.com) donating:

1. 125×125 Ad On His Sidebar For 2 Months

• Marvie Pons (http://underscore30.blogspot.com) donating:

1. 125×125 Ad On His Sidebar For A Month

• Indo Contest (http://www.indocontest.com/) donating:

1. 468×60 Ad On His Header For A Month

• Multiply Themes (http://marviepons.blogspot.com/) donating:

1. 1000 Entrecard Credits

• Charles (http://piggybankpie.com/) donating:

1. 1000 Entrecard Credits

• NHC (http://themelib.com) donating:

• Rajaie AlKorani (http://RajaieTalks.com) donating:

• Sharon Hart (http://sharonahart.blogspot.com) donating:

Alright, now for the ways you can enter! Deadline is October 31st.

The second blog is ironblogger:

• 1x 125×125 ad for one month on (http://www.techtreak.com/) $15
• 2x 125×125 ad for one month on (http://www.ironblogger.com/) $10 ea
• 1x 125×125 ad for one month on (http://www.creadiv.com/) $5
• 1x 125×125 ad for one month on (http://www.teenblogger.net/) $10
• 1x 125×125 ad for one month on (http://nickthrolson.com/) $10
• 2x 125×125 ad for one month on (http://bloggervenue.com/) $10 ea
• A free blog review (http://www.ironblogger.com/) $15
• A free blog review (http://www.benjaminpatton.com/) $25
• A free blog review (http://nickthrolson.com/) $20
• 1x 160×600 banner ad for one month on (http://www.melvinblog.com/) $5
• A video blog review from (http://imwithjoe.com/) $50

Word Press Themes:

• 1x singles license of a Motion Theme of the winner’s choice (http://www.motiontheme.com/) $34-64

• 2x single use license of Revolution Theme (http://www.revolutiontheme.com/) $79.95 ea

• 1x Citrus Theme Multi-Use Package (http://www.uniqueblogdesigns.com/) $99

• 1x SuperPress theme (http://www.weborithm.com/) ( This theme is yet to be released so the above picture is not it)

Consultation Time:

• 2x hour consultation time from Static (http://www.ahnternet.com/) $25 ea
• 1x hour consultation time from Rob (http://www.ironblogger.com/) $50
• 1x hour consultation time from Benjamin Patton (http://www.benjaminpatton.com/) $50
• 2x 30min consultation time from Jason (http://theuniversitykid.com/) $30 ea
• 1x hour of consultation time from Matt (http://moneybites.com/) $50
• 2x 30min consultation time from Jim (http://www.thenetfool.com/) $50 ea

EntreCard Credits:

• 1000 credits from Melvin (http://www.melvinblog.com/)
• 1000 credits from Ganesh (http://www.teenblogger.net/)
• 3000 credits from JamGFX (http://www.wpthemedesigner.com/)

eBooks:

• 2x copy of “Work Smart, Get Rich” (http://www.thenetfool.com/) $15 ea

Other:

• 3x video package “30 Min Site” by Louis Allport (http://www.netstrife.com/) $24.95 ea
• 1x free member ship at Elegant Word Press Themes (http://www.elegantwordpressthemes.com) $19.95

The Contest will end November First.

To see what do you need to do to participate in these contests just visit the respective sites

Good luck to every buddy

Information is Power

Every wise webmaster knows that the key to success involves keeping track of their websites statistics. So we use tools like awstats and google analytics.

Usually webmasters discuss which of these two provides the most accurate and pertinent data of our  sites. Google analytics has advantage in many ways, but there are still strong supporters of awstats.

But forget these two… There is a more sophisticated tool for us to use. It is called Woopra.

What is woopra?

As they say in their website, woopra is:

[...] the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. [...]

I have been using Woopra for some time now, and i must say that i am a fan since the first minute i start using it.

Woopra is still in beta, and i applied several months ago to use the software while it was in a closed beta. Now everyone can register and use woopra services for free.

You just need to register, add your sites, download the software to your computer and wait your sites to get approved, and off course, add a given code to your website.

Woopra’s Interface

There are two options to use woopra. One is accessing the data on their website (it does not work for me though), and the other is to use a software on your computer. That’s where the true power resides.

The software’s interface used rocks! It is dark and beautiful, easy on the eyes. Simple to use and fast. The learning curve of this software is very fast. You will learn how to use it in a couple of minutes. All options are just a few clicks distance and it is all organized for you to not get lost.

Woopra’s Features

You can see a detailed list of woopra’s features here. I will mention only a few:

1. Ability to track over 40 statistical events and analytics;
2. Real time stats: live track of visitors coming and going and moving through your site;
3. No delays in response time. The software is in your computer, not on a server.
4. Flexible interface;
5. Deep analytic and search capabilities;
6. Ability to see who is visiting your site now;
7. Chat functionality: you know who is on your website now, why not start a conversation with him? With woopra you can do this.
8. Member tagging: you can tag your visitors so that you  can easily recognize them;
9. Real Time notifications
10. And much more!

You can know a wide variety of information. If you are used to google analytics you know what you can get plus a lot more.

What i like the most, besides the information it can give to me, is because it is a local method to gather information. I don’t need to login to a website to check the information i want. I don’t have to wait… i can have the information almost instantly!

Another aspect i think it can be very useful is the Chat feature. What can be better to talk with our visitors in real time while they are browsing our website?

Ok, using woopra is great but there is a problem… Don’t really know why, but to get our websites approved we need to wait weeks!!!! Months even! I don’t remember how much time i had to wait until this blog got approved, but it was more than a month im sure. I have added a new site 3 weeks ago and it was not yet approved….

Ok, maybe writing this post was a good thing because every site i add now is approved in the next day

So if you want to used this software, then register an account and add your sites, because you will need to wait a long time… Other than this, woopra is a very valuable tool for all webmasters!

Duplicate content is always a subject that interests us, because we (webmasters) are afraid of it. We are afraid to get our content duplicated, we are afraid to get caught by google for duplicate content either by articles that we get from an article site of for having duplicate content on our own websites.

Copyscape

I have mentioned before an excellent tool to seek for duplicate content that is called Copyscape. I used it every time i write an article, or every time a change the article structure. It only gives me 10 results but that is more than enough.

And im here again recommending it.

The myth about duplicate content

One  of the worst nightmares that a webmaster can have is being penalized by having duplicate content. At least most of us think that way.

You probably looked for ways to avoid the duplicate content on you website. You probably read somewhere that a good way to avoid this in your blog is to have excerpts in your front page instead of full posts. Or you are worried about having multiple addresses going to the same place like: mydomain.com/myproduct and mydomain.com/myproduct&white.

Recently google made an interesting article regarding duplicate content, and they say there is no duplicate content penalty at least in the way we usually mention it.

Duplicating content from other websites: sure, you will get a penalty;

Getting your articles scrapped from other website: google says they can identify the original content fairly easy, so no worries here…. hum…

Having duplicate content on your own site: there is no problem unless google detects it is intended to deceive search engines.

Final Consideration

While having duplicate content in your site won’t get you a penalty, it will affect your site’s performance. Google bot will spend more bandwidth while crawling your website and we know how much bandwidth google bot can eat!!!!

The next time you see someone saying that you will get penalized for having duplicate content on you own site then send them to this page, where i have taken information to write this article.

]]> http://bloggervenue.com/duplicate-content-penalty/feed/ 8 http://bloggervenue.com/create-unique-content-in-seconds/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=create-unique-content-in-seconds http://bloggervenue.com/create-unique-content-in-seconds/#comments Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:01:31 +0000 admin http://bloggervenue.com/?p=530

We all know that to succeed in getting traffic from search engines, and specially from google, unique content is the gold ticket for it.

So, webmasters in general, and bloggers in particular spend hours writing unique content  for their sites/blogs to get some traffic from search engines.

The process is long and tedious, and some simply don’t have the patience to do this. If there is money available, then hiring someone to write for you is an option. After all, it isn’t that expensive, and the results are good (if you hire a good writer).

What if, there is a way to get unique content the easy, fast way? And specially free?

Interested?

Unique Content in less than a minute

We will achieve this using translators. But how?

First lets get our hands on an article we are interested.

Second we use a translation site/software that we like. (I would recommend to stay away from babelfish. It sucks big time. I prefer the google translation tool).

What we are going to do is to paste the article into one of these tools and translate it to several languages and finally translate it back to English.

An example of translation cycle could be this: English->Portuguese->French->German->English

After the cycle is over you should confirm the final text is original.

Confirm the uniqueness of your text

A tool that i like to use from time to time is Copyscape. This site will crawl the web to find any text that matches yours. It will even highlight pieces of text that are the same. Do this and decide if it is unique enough for your, or do the translation cycle again.

After all this, congratulations. You have your unique content in less than a minute!

I often find articles that are duplicated on thousands of sites. Yesterday i came across a website that was selling already established sites with more than 1000 articles. Did a check on the examples and no article was original!

Optimize your content

This is a mandatory step, and will take you some time to do (not that much).

Copyscape may have said that your content was unique but if you read it there are some parts that don’t make any sense!! This is very truth if you used BabelFish.

This was something to be expected. But relax. Now is up to you. Just change some words to make the wrong phrases to make some sense, and since you are doing that, why not reinforce the keywords you want?

Conclusion

Unique content is not that hard to have using this “technique”. Copyscape say its unique and i believe it.But if you do this i just ask that you give credit to the original author. You can just write something like:

“Based on Hugo Santos article. Available at: http://bloggervenue.com”

It gives credit to the right person, he will be happy, and you are happy :p.

Since i have said this, i must say that i have learned this from Scot at Revvenue.com

On my regular reading throughout the blogosphere i see many writing types and ways to organize posts.

I like to feel that a blogger has put some effort on the post he just published. This can be seen on the way he structures the post, on the way images are used, if they fit well on the content, or if they are able to show the message he wants to transmit to his fellow readers.

The majority of bloggers do this, although i think bloggers shouldn’t be afraid of using images on their posts. Some even go to a different level of post structuring. In some posts we can see that the blogger organized a logical sequence to write his ideas, and they even divided the post in topics to make reading easy.

This is honourable, and im happy to see that many bloggers follow this, but 90% (estimated, not calculated :p) of bloggers fail to do/remember one thing, that in my opinion, will make their posts look better.

Text Justify – Bloggers simple don’t do it

That’s right, for one reason or another, bloggers don’t justify the text in their posts, for one reason or another.

I can only speculate, but either they don’t think justified text is important, or they simply forget to do that. I continuously forgot to do this. But not any more. For some time now, the majority of my new posts have their text justified (i may have forgotten 1 or 2, shame on me lol), and i really like the results.

College essays have rules. One of them is precisely the one im talking about. If we do this for college works, why not do it on our blogs?

What does it look better?

Left aligned:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin ligula. Nulla pretium ultricies diam. Vivamus a eros eget felis sodales tincidunt. Aenean massa massa, fermentum at, lobortis ut, elementum a, lectus. Fusce eget nisl. Duis varius. Aliquam neque sem, sodales sed, scelerisque in, pharetra id, diam. Nullam tristique tempus purus. Etiam ultricies, dui sed luctus ornare, turpis justo dictum magna, at tempus turpis arcu sit amet urna. Phasellus sed felis. Cras enim. Ut sed nisl. Suspendisse ultricies lectus in tellus. Nam a tortor eu eros interdum dignissim.

Justified:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin ligula. Nulla pretium ultricies diam. Vivamus a eros eget felis sodales tincidunt. Aenean massa massa, fermentum at, lobortis ut, elementum a, lectus. Fusce eget nisl. Duis varius. Aliquam neque sem, sodales sed, scelerisque in, pharetra id, diam. Nullam tristique tempus purus. Etiam ultricies, dui sed luctus ornare, turpis justo dictum magna, at tempus turpis arcu sit amet urna. Phasellus sed felis. Cras enim. Ut sed nisl. Suspendisse ultricies lectus in tellus. Nam a tortor eu eros interdum dignissim.

Align Full

Align Full is the expression used in wordpress text editor. You can simply use it with one click. The button is just right of Underline and left of Select Text Color on the second row of your editor. If you don’t see these you will need to click on the button that says Show/Hide Kitchen Sink.

“Bad” Examples

I could give many examples of bloggers that don’t do this, but as i said, 90% don’t, so i could be here forever and make you fall a sleep, and i don’t want that.

So here is a list of bloggers that don’t do this and i think they could earn something by doing it:

Chetan from Thewwwblog

Syed from Balkhis

Alan from Affiliate Confession

Mattaw from Moneybites

Lucas from Netstrife

Even big bloggers like John Cow, ShoeMoney and John Chow fail doing this :p (i wonder why the last two don’t don’t have a link? lol)

Good Examples

Javo from Mr. Javo

Jason from Jason Boom

Yan from Thou shall blog

Jason Pereira from The University Kid

Just my two cents Cheers everybody!

This was supposed to be launched yesterday, but as you may have read in the previous post, i had a bad weekend….

The problems that i am having are slowly getting resolved. I have spent several hours trying to solve them. I have mentioned some of them yesterday. The template update has been completed, but the problem with internet explorer remains. It seems that some errors with w3 compliance may cause the browser not load correctly the page… This may come from any of the plugins that im using…. i have a suspect but i don’t want to stop using it… let’s see what i can do…

Week in review:

This past week, i have finally returned to the creating a forum series, this time i talk about Recommended mods to use in your forum.

T3leads is storming the web and i explained why they are A new concept in pay per lead.

And finally, Viralblogads, a new PPC company, launched a new contest to celebrate their forthcoming opening.

Link Love:

Google Chrome to runover Firefox and IE from Balkhis blog.

Google’s Not The Only Search Engine That Brings Good Traffic from Dat Money – I wish this was true for my recently sandboxed Bans Store.

Brad is Looking For Sponsors For Upcoming Contest, interested? i am.

The Best Plugins For WordPress – Ben made a list of  20 of the best plugins for wordpress. These posts are always a success and can bring lots of attention.

10 Reasons Why You Should Be Focused On Informational Products brought to you by Robert from Flimjo.com

And finally, Scot talked about Choosing A Niche For Adsense. As usual, another great topic at revvenue.com

Thoughts

Last Friday, i was going to talk about Twiitads, but something came up, and i wasn’t able to do a post about it. SInce then, some buzz has been created and there is no point for me to talk about it, because every buddy else has done it, so no point to make you read another boring post about it, and secondly, i think it will fail.

Well, before i kick someone i have to say that is not what i have expected… I had some problems with my essay that… well… are making me a bit “uncomfortable”, but that is me being light with the situation… to say the truth, “very stressed” is the right term.

Me and my friends are putting a lot of effort on this work but we are encountering obstacles that seem to never end, and when i come home and think that we have spent around 10 hours this day working on the essay to do so little progress….its very, very frustrating. This research we have been doing is turning out to be a real “bitch”… sorry about the language.

To get things worse, i won’t be able to use my internet connection for the next days… I have exceeded my bandwidth limit!!!!! Well, not me… but one of my house mate. Bastard. lol

I guess i need to get some sleep…. but not until i kick someone… but don’t get me wrong… I’m going to kick someone but it will be from the Top 100 list. Someone, and you probably know who, is doing a great job and manage to pass the 1000 RSS subscribers mark, which btw, is the limit of the Bloggervenue Top100 blogs list.

So Jason, are you ready to get The University Kid kicked from the top 100?

Here it goes: lol

Jason, Congratulations on accomplishing this mark. You are now part of the Big Guys

If you don’t Know what is BloggerVenue Top 100 Blogs, you can read about it here.