LwEEs.com

Pushing my luck and looking for an online change, I switched my blog to a social networking site. The blog functionality still on, the main difference now is that I’m focusing more in the users, my visitors, in other words “you.” I spend a great deal of time helping others, much of it commenting on other people blogs, forums, and social sites like Facebook. With that in mind I’m hoping to bring all these interface ideas, help, and tips and tricks to one place to bring you “in” and have you spend some time with us.

While all of this may sound like a great idea, social networking has its limits, you have to spend a lot of time monitoring your users, moderating their content, and is very hard to get new quality users. Automating most of the parts of your social experience within your site is part of the trick to not go crazy while trying to maintain your site. Thankfully, WordPress makes moderating easy and developers have made great plug-ins that help your manage your online experience even more.

The tools are just part of the problem and the solution at the same time, the people contributing are also hard to manage. Sometimes you get so frustrated trying to explain others to keep your vocabulary clean, I have kids and I would like them to be able to read my blog posts without having to worry about explicit content. Monetization of a social site is also very difficult, if you don’t believe me try asking the guys at twitter, they are still studying different ways to earn money from a simple social networking site.

To start, I added a simple Amazon add that changes depending where the user is at any point. Integration with twitter is done as well, so go ahead, create a profile on this site and link it to your twitter. My next project is to add Facebook to my site so that you can link to your Facebook profile as well. Do you have any ideas? Contact me at webmaster@lwees.com and let me know what you think, thanks for stopping by.

Taking the title from an album from my favorite band, The Cranberries, everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we. Let us talk about iTunes, they have just started selling songs with the variable pricing scheme they announced some time ago. As if they never said anything, the blogosphere has gone rouge about it, and yes, I’m trying to be funny about it.

As if everyone forgot that over year ago they started selling higher bitrates music for $1.29 only to realize what a bad idea that was and retracted from it a couple months after that. We need to wake up from the fact that the idea is not actually from Apple but from the music industry. I think that the variable pricing will not change the spending habits of most of iTunes users, while some may walk away from the Apple ecosystem, other will have them just as an option. Read the rest of this entry →

In a move that was expected by some, rumored by a bunch, and desperately awaited by me, Amazon released the Kindle software for the iPhone this morning (March 4, 2009.)

The application is free to download, you must have an Amazon account to be able to add books to it. I downloaded the application, logged into my account and head to Amazon.com to purchase a book.

When I got to the book I wanted (a free one to test the app), I clicked on purchase and I was surprised to see that Amazon had my iPhone listed on their list of devises already, pretty fast. Read the rest of this entry →

[amazonify]0470246677[/amazonify]I’ve notice that most of the bloggers that talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are getting too busy promoting their books, blogs, and point of views, that they are forgetting something, “Us”. Most bloggers don’t understand anything about SEO, we need to read about it and understand it one piece at a time.

I totally understand that SEO bloggers need communicate the reality of how page rank, bounce rate, and advertising works, but without asking anyone to give out what they sell, please help us a little better why all of these subjects are important and we may buy from you. Very few SEO experts actually talk about tips and tricks about SEO at a low level, some bloggers are not that savvy, including myself, and this is causing a big deal of confusion in me.

I read blogs about SEO topic day and night, the reason I read this blogs is because I don’t fully understand how to implement SEO on my website. Maybe the tools I’m using are not the correct ones, and the ideas behind my strategy are not correct.

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I’m not an expert on predicting things like mergers and sell outs, but I do listen to many podcasts, read many blogs, I try to keep up with technology. I did not see this coming. In a move that left some people speechless (me) Amazon posted a news release initiated by Business Wire, with details of Amazon to acquire Audible.com.

I don’t know about you but I think Audible has a tremendous influence in their line of business, I don’t hear of any other company announcing that their audio books are compatible with iPods or that have a direct link to the iTunes store. I’m thinking that Apple fans are going to be out of luck when thinking about buying audio books but I’m sure this will hurt Apple.

Amazon.com is positioning themselves is a digital distribution market with strong changes to become a dominant player in the digital distribution arena. Last year, Amazon.com announces that they will be selling DRM-free music on their website at significant lower prices than Apple’s iTunes. Then they introduced the Kindle, an e-book reader that looks promising with the ability to download books and newspaper from Amazon websites directly into the device.

With the addition of Audible.com to their lineup, Amazon has a strong catalog to move many people to their store and move people away from iTunes. Amazon.com already has a way to purchase other content other than just music and audio books, the problem is that most are not compatible with Mac. If they come to fix this small issue, I think that the Apple will experience a slow growth on new people paying for content on iTunes.

The merger still needs the approval of the shareholders and the SEC (Security Exchange Commission) to take place but no one is looking at any that will prevent this from happening. I’m intrigue on how this move will affect many podcasters that have sponsorships from Audible and the many people that have subscriptions downloading directly to iTunes.

Leave your comments here on this post, share with our community your thoughts. Thanks for reading.

Image from wordcast.audible.com

Radiohead completed its transition to distribution channels like iTunes and Amazon without any major issues. As of today, January 5, 2008, you can get the band album for $9.99 USD on iTunes or Barnes and Noble for $13.99 USD or even Amazon for $7.99 USD.

The price seem to be kind of high because up until a couple weeks ego you could get this album for free, well they requested that you pay what you think it was worth which for some people was nothing. Did you download it? How much did you pay for it?

Radiohead released their album In Rainbows for download around October 2007, the idea was to get people to pay what they though was worth with ended up being somewhere in the $2 USD per complete album download. The so-called “experiment” was a success according to the band, leaving this approach as a good option for other bands to follow their example.

The music industry has had problems keeping up with their traditional way of doing business, mainly because of new distributions channel like iTunes among others. These new approach combined with the digital right management (DRM) issues the music industry is having are bringing changes.

Apple is claimed to have a monopoly in the music download industry, hard enough to being sued for monopoly and have other companies taking their content else where to gain control again over their media. Add all these together and I see strong controversies on 2008 about distribution channels.

So far my music collection is made of 60% legally downloaded music, the rest is CD’s that I had and I ripped them to my Mac. In 2007 I didn’t bought a single hard copy of music and spend little over $200 on music, the trend is pretty much like that, less people are buying CD’s and more are downloading from the web.

I will be monitoring the industry and writing more about peak industry news that are driving changes and will affect us as consumers from now on. Stay tuned for more great content right here at LwEEs.com. Images taken from radiohead.com and barnesandnoble.com

I have seen many other online stores trying to compete against iTunes fail, after using the new Amazon MP3 online music store I think that iTunes finally has competition. On September 25, 2007, Amazon put out a press release announcing the “Amazon MP3″ beta digital music download store. Amazon claim to have over 2 million songs from 180,000 artists. The online store is featuring DRM free music, mp3 encoded at 256 kilobits per second compatible with every single digital music players available on the market.

The Amazon MP3 digital music download store launched with an aggressive pricing schedule, songs will sell from .89 to .99 cents, and albums start at $5.99. Amazon pricing schedule seem to be variable pricing friendly making iTunes looking like the bad boy of the industry with their set pricing, but how good or how bad is yet to be seen depending on the user base. Steve Jobs admitted in the last Apple event that while the iTunes software is the most downloaded software for PC or Mac to manage your music not everybody buy their music in the iTunes Store.

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