You’ve all heard of the Digg Effect right? Well, I wanted to show all of you the Michael Crabtree Effect. Crabtree is a wide receiver for the Texas Tech Red Raiders. He’s pretty much the best WR in college football. On Saturday, Texas Tech played No. 1 ranked Texas. Thanks to an amazing touchdown grab by Crabtree with 1 second left on the clock, the Red Raiders upset to Longhorns.

Now, I own a Michael Crabtree fan site. So because of his amazing play (see video below), there were a ton of people searching for him online. Check out how my traffic stats increased just because he made that amazing play.

See normally, I get just over 100 uniques/day. However on last Saturday and Sunday my traffic shot up to almost 700 uniques.

I experienced the same thing last year on my Tim Tebow fan site. When all the Heisman voting was going on, my traffic just boomed. That is one of the positives of owning a fan site for a superstar athlete. One thing to note though… there is always a possibility of a reverse effect. Let’s say Michael Crabtree blows out his knee and can’t play football for a year or maybe even his career is done. Then you’re fan site becomes worthless.

“You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.” - Abraham Lincoln

I’m not going to spend too much time addressing this issue. This is not a political blog, and now that the election is over, I intend to return this blog back to its roots.

My loyal readers know where I stand on the tough issues that face this country. It’s my belief that the majority of Americans made a grave mistake yesterday in casting their votes for Barack Obama. I am dumbfounded about the whole thing. There will be a lot of disappointed Americans when Obama doesn’t deliver you free gas for your car or pay your mortgage.

Mark Alexander, publisher of The Patriot Post, said it best in his Publisher’s Note today:

Fellow Patriots,

Tuesday, 4 November 2008, is a date which will live in infamy. While most presidential elections are followed with calls for unity by both candidates, Barack Obama issued no such call in his speech last night, with the possible exception of his observation, “I may not have won your vote tonight, but … I will be your president, too.”

Of course, none was expected — liberals have elected a Socialist with deep ties to cultural and ethnocentric radicalism, and his executive and legislative agenda poses a greater threat to American liberty than that of any president in the history of our great republic.

Obama has twice taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” He has never honored that oath, and, based on his policy proposals and objectives, he has no intention to honor it after again reciting that oath on 20 January 2009. Obama seeks to, in his own words, “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

For that reason, this morning, the symbol of our national heritage of liberty, the American flag atop the 35-foot mast at our editorial offices, was respectfully lowered, inverted, and raised to full mast as a sign of national distress. It will remain inverted until next Tuesday, when we right it in honor of Veterans Day.

Today, at least 55,805,197 Americans are concerned for the future of our nation’s great tradition of liberty. Some 63,007,791 Americans have been lulled, under the aegis of “hope and change,” into a state of what is best described as “cult worship” and all its attendant deception.

One of our editors, a Marine now working in the private sector, summed up our circumstances with this situation report. It aptly captured the sentiments around our office: “It’s been tough, fellow Patriots; tough to stomach the idea that more than half of my fellow citizens who vote, have booted a genuine American hero to the curb for a rudderless charlatan. What a sad indictment on our citizenry that some are so eager to overlook his myriad flaws — his radical roots, his extreme liberalism, his utter lack of experience or achievement. Barack Obama is the antithesis of King’s dream: He’s a man judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character. If it’s God’s will that Barack Obama is our next president, then so be it. We Patriots will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and wade back to the war front, intent on liberty or death.”

This battle is lost, but the war is not. Let’s roll.

Mark Alexander,
Publisher

I just read an article on Sitepoint titled “Online Ad Prices Set to Tumble.” It talks about how the economy is affecting online ad prices. And it’s not just the US economy in trouble right now… the entire world is seeing issues.

Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, said “Anyone who isn’t prepared for ads to go down 40 percent is crazy.”

For those of you who make your living online, you should draw out a plan on how you will deal with things should the worst happen. Especially those of you who rely solely on Adsense or other PPC types for your earnings. Adsense could take a beating real soon. Those of you with private advertisers, try to get them to renew asap and pay upfront. Offer a discount if you have to.

So I’m asking you: are you prepared should online ad prices drop even further over the next few months? I’ve seen a drop in my earnings since the economy started going south, but luckily I don’t rely on my online earnings to live. It’s purely supplemental.

How about you… have you seen a huge decrease in your earnings over the past few weeks/months? What have you done to prepare yourself for the future?

I just purchased a new PC last night. After months and months of my current PC crashing and becoming as slow as a slug, my wife and I finally decided it was time to move on. I decided on the HP - Pavilion Desktop. I got it from Best Buy.

My old computer was a total piece of crap. It’s pushing four years old. It’s a Medion with a 3.0 ghz Pentium IV processor and 512 RAM.

For $569, I got a load PC that is very past. Sure there are plenty of computers on the market that are faster, stronger, and more powerful… but one of our biggest factors in determining which PC to buy was price. I would rather spend $569 now and be able to buy another top of the line PC in 2-3 years. If we had spent $1500+ on a PC now, in order to justify the price we’d have to keep it forever (like the one I’m currently getting rid of).

So here are some of the specs of my new PC, for all of them, click here:
# Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core processor E5200
Featuring an 800MHz frontside bus, 2MB shared L2 cache and 2.5GHz processor speed.
# 4GB PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM - expandable to 8 GB
For multitasking power, expandable to 8GB.
# SuperMulti DVD±RW/CD-RW drive with double-layer support
# 500GB Serial ATA hard drive (7200 rpm)
# Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 graphics
# Front-panel 15-in-1 media reader
# Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition 64-bit operating system with Service Pack 1 (SP1)

The only downside of this PC is the graphics card it comes with. I’ll probably upgrade that for Christmas. I also love that it comes with several empty PCI slots, some of the other HP models didn’t.

So for the next day or so I’ll be backing everything up on my current PC before I install and set up the new one. I can’t wait to load it up and actually run multiple programs at the same time.

Do you enjoy making money online? Do you value every dollar you make because you worked so hard to get it? You put in hours and hours of time to build your website, then one day at the end of the month you get a check from Google (or whoever) and feel rewarded for all your hard work. Maybe your check is for $1,000. Now, how would you feel if someone (ie: the government) told you to share some of your monthly earnings with someone who didn’t earn as much as you.  Maybe this person slacked off. Maybe he didn’t build as many backlinks. Maybe he used an autofeeder instead of writing his own unique content like you. Whatever the case may be, now the government wants to take some of your hard earned dollars and put it in the hands of someone who didn’t earn it. Doesn’t sound very fair does it?

Well folks, this situation isn’t some bizzaro scenario I just made up. This is what your world as an American will look like with Barrack Obama as your President. When having a conversation with Joe the Plumber, Obama said: “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too… And I think that when we spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Hello Socialism! IS that the “Change” we need in America? Spreading the wealth around? Barrack wants to destroy US Capitalism, something our forefathers fought so hard to establish. Capitalism is what makes America great. It’s what gives you the ability to make money online from websites, keep every penny you earn, and spend it how you see fit (with no government mandates).

You want a list of socialist countries? How about China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, and the old USSR. Does The United States of America look like it belongs in that list? Well Barrack Obama seems to think so.

“Spreading the wealth around” is NOT good for anyone, except maybe those few lazy people who just don’t give a damn and are always looking for handouts. If you value your online earnings and are proud of your achievements and hard work, then I ask you to not vote for a socialist Barrack Obama this November 4.

I ask you to vote for a man who still believes in Capitalism and the foundations that built this great country. Vote John McCain.

A week or so ago, I purchased a Nikon D40 SLR camera. My wife and I were sick of the quality of our little point and shoot digital camera, so we wanted to invest in a digital SLR. The D40 is the best entry level SLR on the market and we were able to get the camera plus a ton of accessories for only $475.

Now we are able to snap photos rapidly instead of having to wait 10 seconds for the camera to load after every picture.

I’ve only got to play with it for a little bit, but I highly recommend this camera to anyone looking for an SLR.