I was checking my stats and somehow it appears people are starting to read this blog. Amazing considering I haven't done any marketing and haven't posted anything in a while. But as long as people seem to be reading...

FriendBlastr is proving to be a tremendous learning experience for me. First there's the 'site admin stuff. Since I last reported, I've learned that even if you can enter the SQL queries necessary for the day to day running of a 'site, that doesn't mean you should. I learned this right before learning how to rebuild a database from the few fields remaining after you manage to toast your tables with a clever hand-crafted query that turned out to be missing a couple parenthesis in its 'where' clause. And then I learned how to schedule nightly backups. :-D

Besides that, I've learned way more about MySpace culture than I'd ever thought I'd learn. I know all the lingo now: sm, w4w, s4s, pc4pc, the alternate meaning of 'site...'
There truly is a subculture there. Right now it looks like I've been somewhat sucked in. I'm planning a layouts 'site and a layouts topsite. I'm also selling frontend code that interfaces with code on my server, allowing people to make 'sites like mine for a mere $50 setup fee and a 50% cut. (And it is indeed mere... my renter at www.manyadds.net has been going only six days and he's already generated $42 in sales!)

The most important thing that I think people miss when they decide to try to make money is that anything that has had labor put into it has value, even if that labor consists of clicking a mouse a few thousand times. It is my belief that there are thousands of markets online that have not yet been tapped. I'm currently in the MySpace market, which I admit is over-saturated to the extreme, but I'm looking to diversify. I can't say how yet, but I'll let you know when I get something going. ;-)

Anyway, yeah, anything that has had labor put into it has value, and this value can be translated into cold, hard cash if you're clever enough. I learned this from an excellent book I read last summer called Play Money. I highly recommend it, especially if you're at all interested in the emerging e-economy. The author of this book tried to do something I'm currently trying to do: make enough money online to live off of the income (or, failing that, just pay off student loans.) While I'm focusing on web apps, he focused on gold farming in various online RPGs. Again, a very good book, very engaging read. There's a link to it on Amazon at the end of this post if you're interested.
Aaand it's 1:45am and I have classes tomorrow plus a lot of homework. Good night all!