John Cow is having a COWPETITION to see who can launch a new blog and sell it for the most money on SitePoint. The Cow is cowpeting against Garry Conn, who looks like he needs to upgrade/pay his hosting:

Some really good prizes are being given away, like the Affiliate Elite Enterprise Edition, PLR Pro membership and more. To win, you have to subscribe to the blog (which I have), and you can get more tickets for the random drawing by performing other actions, like writing this blog post, or signing up for Twitter and then tweeting/twitting/twittering about it…

The Cow is using the cowpetition to go through a ‘how to’ series of posts to show everyone just how exactly the Cow makes mooney. He’s really milking this for all it’s worth. Oh, the puns. Good luck to all!

Damn, I wasn’t going to get into this Twitter business…

Wordpress.com announced yesterday that they have upgraded everybody’s WordPress.com free upload storage capacity to 3,000 MB, or 3 gigabytes - for free! The previous limit was just 50 MB.

Of course, those of us that host our own blogs get what we pay for, but for those on WordPress.com, that’s a pretty good deal.

It wasn’t that long ago that I mentioned the release of the beta version of PHPLD 3.3, but the final version is already out! Good news!

Check out the release.

Well, I saw that I had an ever-so-small pickup in traffic on my real estate directory, with some hits on the submit page. So I decided to login to the admin panel to see if anyone submitted sites or not, even though I haven’t ‘officially’ launched the site, nor am I nearly close to being done with design, features, etc.

To my surprise, I actually had two submissions, one for an actual realtor, and another for Property Hogs, a real estate portal. I’m sure that sumission came from the DP forums, as I mentioned my site in a thread there. Not a big deal, but I was pleased to see that someone submitted.

Unfortunately, I had to also delete two links, one for a skin care site, and another for gift baskets, both MFA (Made For Adsense) sites.

Sigh.

John Chow emailed me today (he emails me every day) and let me know that the Pepperjam Network launched today. John’s got a great review of their offering, so I’ll let you head over there to see what’s what, but here’s a few tidbits:

• They’re attempting to fill in the gaps left by existing affiliate networks - poor communication and transparency - with tools such as live chat and an info-packed interface.
• They’ve launched with over 100 merchants such as Blockbuster and SEOmoz Premium.
• Inc. Magazine recognized them as one of the fastest growing privately held businesses two years in a row.
• They have their own affiliate program that pays out $7 per approved signup.

They look really promising. I’ve signed up, so I’ll hopefully be able to check them out (need to be approved). If you want to skip the John Chow review, you could go straight to Pepperjam’s Blog or just sign up.

It looks like yet another Page Rank update has ocurred in the past couple days - did you get the PR you wanted?

If not, you could always buy links. Why? Because they work!

Of course, you should know by now that Page Rank doesn’t matter.

The Beta version of PHPlinkdirectory 3.3 has been released. So far, the comments have been positive, and a few people have installed the beta (check the thread for details). This is a beta release, so there may be some bugs. Apparently, the full version will be released in a few weeks, so established directories may want to hold off until the full release. The beta release also gives developers and designers a chance to generate templates and mods.

This version incorporates several features that I was looking for for my real estate directory, like google maps and user submitted articles. This looks to be like a good release!

iGuides.org ran a contest for the Best Directory of the Year 2007, and have just announced the winners:

• 1st: Dirjournal.com $150 prize and bragging rights as Best Directory of the Year 2007
• 2nd: AuthorityDirectory.com $100 prize
• 3rd: Zorg-Directory.com  2 domain names and cpanel hosting for a year

Those are some very nice directories, so I think the winners were well chosen (even though mikey bribed his way into winning a prize ). I think there’s a lot to learn from these directory owners and the directories they operate.

What exactly were the contest criteria?

Design (Template) and Development (Script) of Directory

Quality and Original Content

Strength of Directory (Back Links, Popularity, Search Engine Friendly)

Any additional useful and extra Mods in the Directory

User Friendly Directory

Well Categorized

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to iGuides for the contest!

This DP thread (thanks to smub) lead me to the preview of PHPLD 3.3 which is supposed to be launched “in the next few days.” It’s got some really nice features that will make setting up my real estate directory much easier. Features I like:

• Google maps
• Users can add articles
• Article comments and ratings
• Admin can build pages (like About Us, etc) using WYSIWYG editor
• Add content to the home page and categories from the admin
• and more!

All in all, pretty good stuff. Exactly what I was looking for actually (at least I think so; haven’t seen anything live yet). This will cut down on the development cost of the directories I’m planning, which makes me happy. Can’t wait to see it in action.

I just picked up www.cypernopolis.com from Sedo.com - I haven’t paid for it yet, but that will get resolved in the next couple days. It’s a nice, old domain name, although it doesn’t have a lot of links and no PR (not worried about that, I wanted the aged domain).

I plan to make Cybernopolis a general web directory. I know, I know, I said I was going to trim down my projects this year, and I’m working on a real estate directory right now, but I wanted to snatch up this domain. I also put several domains up for sale on Sedo, too, so hopefully that will clear up a few unused domains. I’ll probably let a few of my blogs go as well.

Don’t look for anything on cybernopolis soon, I’ve got that RE directory to set up first.