“The newsfeed is probably one of the finest features in Facebook - it’s a centralized data feed system . . . The facebook team, as far as I’m concerned, are doing a great job marketing that advertising space and maintaining the value of it while preserving the quality of user-experience.”

As you guys all know, I am a major Facebook fan. They have the best interface. They have APIs, which sets the platform for them to become the new hub for online social communities. Their web pages are designed intricately using AJAX and Javascript in order to reduce the amount of pageviews, save bandwidth, and make the site faster for users.

OK, I’ll stop my prases for Facebook. Today I want to talk to you guys about the value of the advertising space that Facebook offers - especially in the Newsfeed section, which is the first thing you see at the homepage of Facebook (once you’re logged in, of course - otherwise you’ll see nothing much).

The newsfeed is probably one of the finest features in Facebook - it’s a centralized data feed system that organizes, summarizes the important activities that your friends did throughout the last little while. It shows you who was added as new friends (which makes it so much more viral - you can easily spot old highschool friends coming onto facebook through other friends, and you re-connect. It’s so nice to hear from old friends again!), and it shows your friend’s activities in groups, their notes, etc.

Basically, this is perhaps one of the juiciest areas of Facebook - this is where you see what the hell is going on to yourfriends and to yourself, who’s new, what’s hot, etc.

Take a look at this :

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By courtesy of a high-profile contact I have, I got approved for the Kontera Text Ads Program although my pageview threshold is below the minimum requirements. As you can see there are blue links being generated - apparantly this thing optimizes better over time, so it’ll take some time to work perfectly well, but it’s working now, and it makes my site look cool.

Although, some of the context links generated are total bogus, for example, this one that tells me to buy IE6 - it’s a free software anyhow.

In any case, I’ll let you posted on what this does to my website revenues.

Right now, it shows up sometimes, and other times it doesn’t - but Kontera did advise me it will take a few days to optimize completely to my site.

If you’re like me, you don’t get paycheques. Instead, you get cheques or cash from your clients whenever they want to pay you. The irregularity of the payment can be a bitch (like when a large company forgets to put it into accounting, and then it has to wait until the next week’s cheque-sending day) but overall I love the freedom and the thrill of being an entrepreneur (well, that sounds all fancy but I guess I’m more of a risk-taking freelancer, growing and striving every day to become a big gun in this town called Earch).

Anyhow. Some clients were asking me - “Jeff, do you take credit card payments?” Of course the answer used to be “No.” - it was too much hassle to have to set up a credit card machine and all, and plus there is the 2~3% bullet I need to bite in order to receive credit card payments.

Well, I grew to a point where some of my clients are far away. Getting cheques mailed from Calgary takes some patience. Hell, I don’t even want to wait a day for cheques, or have to go pick it up anymore. There’s always the added hassle of having to go to the bank to deposit it too. Oh, and since I’m young, anything over $1,000 deposited in one day gets held for 6 business days.

Last week sometime, I set up a Paypal account under payments@jeffkee.com. Once the bank account was confirmed I started using it right away.

I’m not selling any goods online or accpeting donations from random people, so the implementation was simple. I log onto Paypal.com, go to “Send and Invoice”. Once the client receives the invoice, there are links she/he can click and pay by credit card or through Paypal.

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Canon has a good reputation for good printers, although I stick with my Lexmark P6250, which is cheap, versatile, and gives me great value. All I ever do is print out documentation I need to read so I can read it on the bicycle at the gym, or print out invoices.

However, if you did want a high-quality printer, here’s a chance, because my friend Broc is holding a contest on his blog where you can enter to win this prize! You have a 1/500 chance to win, which is a hell of a lot better than the lotteries. Hey, it’s not a $30,000,000 prize but it’s something you can smile about.

Broc is marketing his blog through the MyBlogLog community, which I find is a great idea. I’m interested to see where he takes this campaign, and how the results are.

When I read through a magazine, I usually skim through it. I take a glance at this and that, read the bolder font here and there. When I find something catchy, then I’ll delve into the article. But even then, a lot of articles are skimmed over.

“In a recent survey, 3 out of 4 men answered that they feel vaguely uncomfortable when eating a banana in public.”

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