BigPond is Australia’s first major corporation to set-up shop on Second Life. Already, many major International companies are using it as a promotional tool so I am sure BigPond has the same objective in sight with it’s island, The Pond.

Although BigPond is the first major Australian company to launch a Second Life base, this is a growing trend globally, sparked by entrances from Dell, Toyota, Adidas, IBM, and Intel.

Second Life is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab in California. Initially, a client-program is downloaded to the users PC, then an “avatar” is created with a name, personality and other characteristics, to interact with others in the world. Your avatar can shop, spend Linden dollars, watch a movie, speak to others -all sorts of stuff.

BigPond didn’t make a terribly large investment to affiliate with Second Life but customers will see value in it, being part of their unmetred content network.

Some of BigPond’s support staff would help customers inside Second Life as part of their day-to-day roles, but BigPond had not yet committed staff to police it full-time.

Source: SMH

Pajago

When it comes to bookmarking sites I am so disorganised. I start out with cleverly titled folders and every intention to store each bookmark in an orderly fashion. Two days later, it’s a shambles again. So in this post I will plug a few of my favourite internet business blogs and it’ll also act as a means of me bookmarking these sites -some more.

Net Business Blog
Matt Coddington launched this blog at the start of 2007. Since then it’s grown and grown and gone from strength to strength. What I really like about Matt’s site is his case study on the rock’n'roll music blog he’s recently launched. Very informative and inspiring. (Stay tuned as i’ll be launching a new blog as a case study soon, myself!)

Entrepreneurs Journey
What can I say: Yaro Starak is a gun. I don’t know of a site more rich in information about internet business and marketing than his blog, Entrepreneurs Journey. Constantly, he fills us in on his success and progress with BetterEdit and many of his other endeavors. A must see!

College-Startup
College student, Ben Bleikamp’s blog intends to teach students how they can make money on the internet from their dorm-room. He should know; that’s what he’s done. I really enjoyed the article on 5 Steps To Jump-start Your Website.

Have Laptop, Will Travel
This blog isn’t really about internet business but it’ll get a mention as one of my favourite technology blogs. Always seems to feature something exciting. Now that I have “marked it” here I will hopefully check it more often.

Eli Burfords Blog
I stumbled across Eli’s blog whilst looking at an auction for a Photoshop Tutorial site he was selling. Again, not so much about internet business; more web development. He’s very talented, especially for his age.

That’ll do me for now.

Pajago

For those of you that don’t know, I run a tramping/trekking/hiking blog called Trampola. Of late, I have been very neglectful of the ol’ gal and haven’t really submitted any unique content. Having said that, I am still getting unique visitors and loads of page views.

Why is this the case? Few posts, non-unique stuff, shoddy layout, overall neglect and people are still liking it?

I must say, the search engines have nicely indexed the site so I am guessing that has something to do with it. I am even making a little revenue from the site.

In other news, I got an email from a gear company yesterday, wanting me to do a product review on the site.

I was considering selling the site due to lack of time and inspiration to carry on, but now I am thinking of getting the design done properly and concentrating some time on her.

Anyways, that’s my babbly for now. I’ll keep people posted on the progress and my decisions.

Pajago

Over the past few months I have been looking at buying a few websites and/or domain names. To check backlinks, that PR’s (PageRank) are correct and the general valuation of the sites I discovered dnScoop.com.

This is one nifty tool. dnScoop allows you to check domain age, PR, inbound links, traffic rank, indexed pages, site value and estimated Text-Link-Ad value. This is all completed on a cool, Web 2.0 looking website. The site also features a great forum.

To use the the dnScoop domain name value tool you enter the URL in the space it tells you, and a few moments later it will load up all the vitals. Something I love about it is that under, say, the backlink category you can click a hyperlink that will take you to “link:yoursite.com” at Google and show you all the backlinks to your site. Very easy to use, and to get that information that’s so important.

Stay tuned as in the next post we’ll go through what the key terms: domain age, PR, inbound links, traffic rank, indexed pages, site value and estimated Text-Link-Ad value mean to us!