901am

New Media News Every Morning

Billie Piper to star in Belle de Jour series

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billie piperFormer pop singer and actress best known for playing Rose in Doctor Who, Billie Piper, has been confirmed as the lead in a new TV series to be filmed in the UK “Belle de Jour” based on the book “Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl” which itself was adopted from the blog Belle de Jour, a “chronicle of the exploits of a high classed prostitute in London”.

All Head Lines said that the series is still at the early stages of development, and will show on Channel 4 in the UK.

Sky News reported that the series will be about “a sexy London prostitute who makes a fortune by describing her sexual acts on the internet”. Yep, the fortune came via the blog.

As far as I’m aware, this will be the first time a blog to riches tale will be made into a TV series, although there has to be some irony in the fact that the story centers around a prostitute.

Originally posted on February 13, 2007 @ 7:16 pm

Chris Pearson launches Celebrity Hack

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celebrity hackUber-designer and 901am contributor Chris Pearson has announced the launch of Celebrity Hack, a “celebrity set-up” blog.

In an effort to drive contributions to the site, Chris is offering the prize of a Video iPod for the best contribution of the week, as voted by readers.

That would normally be the end of my post on the site, and indeed I was about to close my tab with the site open in it, when I noticed the site had page rank. Admitedly PR 1, but page rank none the less, and new sites don’t have page rank. So I did a little digging, not only is the domain 7 years old, but it’s registered to Brian Clark, who was going to get a straight out source link for this post, but read how Brian reports Celebrity Hack on Copyblogger:

Chris Pearson and some snarky friends have launched Celebrity Hack (may offend delicate sensibilities), a celebrity gossip/humor site with a twist—funniest comment of the week wins a Video iPod. It will be interesting to see how sites provide incentives for “user generated content” as the year progresses, from You Tube on down. Derek comments on that topic here.

tuttutHmmmmmm…..you seem to have failed to mention that you own the site Brian.

That’s a 5 star finger waving from me :-)

On the bright side, at least the site looks a lot better now than it did with its previous owners :-)

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Originally posted on February 11, 2007 @ 9:29 pm

Linkblitz: Sunday Edition

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OK, so it’s actually Monday where I am, but given it’s still Sunday in the US and I don’t want to post anything that brings 901am down again right away, a quick rap up of some weekend goodies worth a read.

Smashing Magazine has a list of 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes you probably haven’t seen. I’ve seen some of them, but not all. It’s getting harder to find a good WordPress theme because there are soooooo many available now, it takes for ever to wade through them all. Some really nice templates on this list.

Daily Blog Tips has 30 Traffic Generation Tips. Wise words.

The Spin Starts Here takes a dance with Cha Cha, proving why the minimum wage is the US is woeful.

Trevor Cook points to an article at The Age on website accessibility. Are you still using Captcha’s on your blog? You shouldn’t be.

Barack Obama’s website is giving interesting suggestions to readers, according to TechCrunch, with a search example of “Gay Nigger Association of America -#@ for Obama”.

Originally posted on February 11, 2007 @ 5:51 pm

Yahoo blogs blocked by mistake: Iran

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iranThe Iranian Government owned monopoly telephone and internet provider Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) has said that blocking of Yahoo Blogs in Iran was a “technical error of [the] country’s filtering system”.

Asghar Ansari, Managing Director of the IT Affairs at TCI said that the error was caused by new Iranian filtering software that had “weak points [that] have not been fully eliminated yet”.

Ansari went on to say that “Any user who would face a problem regarding filtering can inform us through that fax number, or our e-mail, so that we would register the complaints, survey the matter, and unblock the websites and weblogs that have been filtered by mistak” and that “In some cases [previous] user complaints have been found to be righteous, but in other cases the filtering of the sites have been confirmed.”

Taliya News reported that Ansari declined to state however how many blogs and websites had been filtered by mistake, nor the number of complaints received to date.

 

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Originally posted on February 12, 2007 @ 5:53 pm

Selling your site: what is it worth?

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moneyLorelle VanFossen has a good post up at The Blog Herald today talking about what buyers look for in a blog. I do hope in all sincerity they are paying her well, you’ll need 5-10 minutes just to read it, but it touches on a subject I had planned to cover here at 901am anyway: what is your site worth?

Before we start, ignore every heart breaking, time consuming moment you’ve ever spent with the site from developing it, marketing it and writing for it. It’s normal for people to mix emotions with a site sale, but it’s not how the game works, and emotionally detaching yourself makes the process a whole lot more easier.

The value of your site, 99 times out of 100 will come down to one equation:

Revenue.

The number one thing a buyer is going to look at is revenue. Buying and selling sites or blogs is no different to buying and selling any sort of income producing business, they are given a value based on revenue. Generally speaking established sites are usually valued at between 10 to 12 times monthly revenue. For example if your blog was making $100 per month, it would have a value of between $1000-$1200. This can vary though, but usually in multiples. A new(ish) site without a proven income record over a couple of months can go as low as 3-5x monthly revenue. Buyers look for consistancy over time. An above average site, particularly ones with reasonable page rank and/ or design can go as high as 15x monthly revenue, although I’d note occasionally. It’s only at the very bottom end of the market will buyers not consider revenue, for example they might buy your site because of its unique design or layout. Usually these sales are less than $100. A WordPress blog with half a dozen unique posts using the Kubrick template might fetch $20-$30, the value of the domain + a couple of unique articles.

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Originally posted on February 13, 2007 @ 6:52 pm