Sixty Second Review

The revolution of the internet may see the decline of newspaper circulation as the way we choose to get our news fix evolves. With Blogging coming more and more popular outlet for anyone to report on anything. Businesses are now looking for new avenues to promote their companies and products. This gives bloggers the opportunity to quite literally get paid to do what they love - blog.

payperpost is a company which has emerged to offer this to bloggers worldwide. In a simple progress you are able to sign up and once you're blog is approved you are able choose the products or companies which you choose to blog about and be rewarded in return. Approval is straight forward, you must have been blogging for a set amount of time and have been an active blogger.

Once your post has been active for 30 days you receive payment. You also have given the option to donate your earnings to charity if you so wish. You are paid direction into you PayPal account.

Everything is straight forward and well explained on the payperpost site and there is help if required. Its a great opportunity to take a more direction action to earn money from your blogging efforts.

Technology / Analytics - Website Hit Counter - Visitor Tracking

"The clear leader of the pack."

The Good: StatCounter offer excellent visitor reports, the ability to track individual visitors to getting an exact picture of where they came from and what pages they viewed, you can even label them for easy reference. You can manage multiple sites from within the one control panel. Its free, you don't have to display their logo. Plus they can email you reports once a week or month. You can use a blocking cookie to ignore your visits or block IP addresses. You can even export the data.

The Bad: The only thing I could even suggest as being a negative is the advertising placed on the StatCounter website. But what website doesn't have advertising these days?

Summary: This is the clear winner with the detailed reports allowing you to know what is popular and produce more of that content. You don't have to display a logo, they email you reports and you can export the data.

Verdict: This is my pick of the analytic programs, but it is closely followed by Google Analytics who do produce more professional looking reports.

Links: StatCounter.

Technology / News Reader / Google Reader

Web feeds and Aggregators aren't by any means new. But basically they allow you to "subscribe" to your favourite websites and receive new content in one central location when it is posted. So instead of having to visit all of your favourite blogs, websites and so forth they are delivered directly to you.

A large percent of these have been software which you can run on a single computer. But with the launch of Google Reader and being a web based system you can now check your feeds from any computer with an internet connection. Which is handy for people who use multiple computers and is available on the road on your mobile.

Google Reader is available to anyone with a Google Account and it is easy enough to sign up if you don't already have one. It's extremely easy to subscribe to new feeds, you can also make it your default feed handler. It works with your Gmail account so you can spam interesting items to friends.

You can also share items, which produces a web feed for your friends to subscribe to or you can share it on your blog. The built in search feature is also very extremely handy. The reader will also give you a list of Tends about your habits.

Also in a very cool feature as it learns more about you and based on your current subscriptions it will suggestion other feeds you maybe interested in. You are also able to use keyboard short cuts for quick navigation and can make subfolders or categories for your feeds.

Google Reader is up there with the best of them! Why not give it a try today and subscribe to the Sixty Review Review Feed?

Technology / Analytics - Website Hit Counter - Visitor Tracking

"Far behind the leaders of the pack."

The Good: Its free, easy to sign up and easy to install the code on your website but that's where the good ends.

The Bad: The reports lack detail and aren't as easy to read as the competition. You must display a Site Meter logo to your website.

Summary: With strong competition in the market of free website hit counters Site Meter falls short. Visitor tracking is such an important marketing tool and Site Meter offers no real insight into what you're visitors like or where they came from.

Verdict: Look else where, two better products would be Google Analytics or StatCounter.

Links: Site Meter.

Technology / Analytics - Website Hit Counter - Visitor Tracking

"Great professional reports with extremely detailed information."

The Good: Google Analytics is free for starters and offers you private tracking without having to place any links or buttons on your site. The code is easy to install and gives you extremely detailed reports. They can be emailed to you whenever you wish, even in PDF. You can track and compare multiple websites.

The Bad: Things are almost almost a little too complicated. Although, you can make your own reports and have them displayed on your dashboard. I find that I have to dig through at least three pages to get at the information that I want. Also it appears that the reports are delayed by 24 hours. Google won't give you visitors IP addresses because of their privacy policy and they also report ISP information incorrectly (for Australian ISP's anyway).

Summary: A extremely great free offering from Google that you can't pass up. It generates extremely professional looking reports in which you can export in many forms. They can be emailed to you automatically. Simple and easy to use interface, you can monitor all of your sites in one place and compare them. Only down side is things are a little too complicated, you can't look at visitors IP addresses and results maybe delayed by 24 hours.

Verdict: Perfect, if you don't require visitor IP addresses and a slight delay in you're reports. (Google gives you the option of allowing them to use your information for their benefit but you can disable this).

Links: Google Analytics.

Technology / Analytics - Website Hit Counter - Visitor Tracking

"One of the best the web has to offer, only one downfall."

The Good: eXTReMe Tracking offers a great service for free. Extremely detailed tracking of visitors, where they came from, how long they stayed and so forth. Even gives you their IP address which is great for tracing individual visitors (last 20 visitors only). All of the reports are simple and easy to read.

The Bad: Unless you pay you've got to have an eXTReMe Tracking button on your website which also links to your reports. Which means your competition has direct access to how popular your site is. Also won't email you reports per week or month. If you run multiple websites you can't compare them within eXTReMe Tracking you would have to do this manually.

Summary: If you're in the market for a good free basic analytics program with the trade off of advertising them in the form of a button. Then eXTReMe Tracking offer a great service. Just beware that everyone can view your reports! Also you have to manually review your reports they cannot be emailed to you.

Verdict: Great price (free) and great service if you're happy to display their logo and your personal reports to everyone.

Links: eXTReMe Tracking.

Technology / Mobile Phone / LG KG290 (Optus Prepaid)

"Standard Mobile Phone, over priced and with two major faults."

This is your basic mobile telephone with standard phone features plus a built in 1.3MP camera, MP3 playback, FM Radio, bluetooth & expandable memory (micro SD). There isn't a USB cable included in the box so make sure you have access to bluetooth.

Now for the problems: You are unable to disable or change the sound which the phone makes when you open or close the slider. This becomes painfully annoying everytime you want to make use of your phone. Its enough to put it on silent permanently.

Secondly you are also unable to change the alert sound for incoming messages. Such a basic and simple function is unbelievably not enabled.

For the money its just simply not worth it. The phone has no major features which make it stand out in this price bracket and two basic features of personalising your phone are disabled.

Verdict: Avoid look at a Nokia.

Make: LG
Model: LG290
Price: $169
Network: Optus
Type: Prepaid

Links: Optus LG290 Homepage