Things have been pretty busy at the eBay offices recently.

Hot on the heels of their announcement of an in-house affiliate program (see you in hell, Commission Junction) comes word that they’re banning anyone from selling digital download products through auction.

I want to talk briefly about my opinion on each of these moves.

Commission Junction

The fact that a huge mega corporation like eBay ran its very lucrative and popular affiliate program through a third party provider for so long is insane. Nevermind that they picked Commission Junction who has one of the worst reporting systems known to modern man.

I think this move away from CJ and to an in-house solution is a stroke of genius and is an example of eBay understanding their users and trying to capitalize on their hot affiliate business. They aren’t wasting any time with this either. eBay’s new affiliate program will be live on the 1st of April.

Digital Downloads

This is probably a pretty devastating development for Internet Marketers who were using eBay as a mean of peddling PLR products and gaming the site’s feedback system. I personally think its a pretty great move that will, unfortunately, have some dire repercussions with people who ran legitimate business selling digital products.

This change also is coming quickly. By March 31st, anyone wishing to sell a digital product on eBay will have to buy a 30 day classified ad for $9.95 instead of posting an auction. This does open the door for someone else to come in and establish a marketplace to replace what eBay just slaughtered in an instant.

Only time will tell if this move backfires on eBay or just makes their site less trashy.

I’m on the record as saying the current WordPress admin and dashboard are white hot awful. So I’ve been keeping an eye on the impending 2.5 release with it’s brand new admin designed by the folks at Happy Cog.

Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg posted a short introductory video on the WordPress.org blog showing the new admin. It looks like a huge improvement over the current release so I’m pretty excited for 2.5.

The current admin is just so terrible that I’ve long been on the fence about switching to another blogging platform. In the end, I always stick with what I’ve got and just grin and bear WordPress’ faults.

This new look and feel for WordPress is a pretty big step for the project in my opinion. The easier WordPress is to use for the “common man” the better chance it has of finally crushing its competition like MoveableType once and for all.

I’m officially in the middle of the silly season as baseball is days away from getting started. Client work takes precedence over the blog so I apologize for the lack of updates recently. I thought I’d make a quick post today with some brief thoughts I’ve had on a variety of subjects.

• I finally found a newsletter winner for the Single-Use License of Adii’s Premium News Theme for WordPress. I had a really great response to that contest so I definitely plan on running another one soon.
• Along with client work I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a new side project that, unfortunately, I don’t plan on discussing here in any great detail. It’s basically a brand new type of content management system I’ll be using internally to manage a network of sites my friend and I will be launching. Again, I’m dying to talk more about this but in the best interest of the project I’m going to remain silent.
• Thanks to this intense workload I’ve started to dip my feet into the outsourcing pool for some help. This is a topic I’ll definitely be writing about more in the future but probably in a more general sense. It’s been a really interesting experience so far and I’m looking forward to using outsourcing again very soon.

I have two new WordPress themes I’m going to be releasing for free in the very near future. They both just need some tightening up (mostly in the markup department). I’ll probably be releasing one of them as an exclusive to subscribers of my newsletter and the other through regular channels and on WordPressings.

City White

City White is a widget ready, fixed-width WordPress theme with a right sidebar and a very simple, image less layout. It’s the first theme I’ve released without any images at all, as a matter of fact.

Since this theme is so minimalistic and white it’s going to be very simple for anyone to expand upon it and make it their own. I actually thought about using it as a base for a series of sports related themes but I’m putting that idea on the backburner for now.

Blue Gloss

Although it’s very simple like City White, Blue Gloss does have a bit more of a style to it. It’s also a fixed width, widget ready WordPress theme with a right sidebar.

Right now I’m leaning towards making Blue Gloss the newsletter exclusive theme. Future issues of the newsletter will have a special download code to give verified subscribers access to this and any other exclusive themes I release.

I’ve been spending some time this weekend going through the Buy, Sell or Trade forum over at Digital Point. I like to do this not only to spot some good potential deals but to also get my finger on the pulse of what’s doing well online. This is a great way to pick the topic for your next project.

So how do you use this as inspiration for your next web project?

The Secret

The sites that are doing well online are not being sold at Digital Point. Most people are selling their site on Digital Point because it’s an absolute failure and they want to get rid of it.

Look at what people are selling and if you’re considering doing something similar trash that idea immediately.

The seller will use excuses like he doesn’t have the time or doesn’t know how to promote it. Those are key phrases for “this web site is a failure.”

Examples of Bad Sites

The following types of sites are pretty commonly on sale right now. Avoid starting sites in these niches like the plague. They just don’t work.

• Image Hosting
• URL Shortening
• Sites with “Four Unique Sources of Income! Amazon, eBay, ClickBank and AdSense!”
• YouTube Video Aggregators
• WordPress Blogs Powered by Auto-Updating RSS Scripts

Those kinds of sites have been the main offenders for months now.

Examples of Good Sites

So those are the sites that aren’t apparently doing too well online these days. I’ll wrap this post up with a list of the types of sites you rarely see for sale. I take that as an indication sites of the following nature are reasonably successful for their owners:

• Established Blogs with Hundreds of Indexed Pages, Thousands of Backlinks and some PageRank
• Unique Content Sites in Niche Topics (again, with Indexed Pages)
• Membership Sites with Recurring Monthly Subscriptions

There are more, of course, but you’re going to need to do your own research. Again, use forums like the ones at Digital Point to find out what is and what isn’t working online. Most of the sites selling online just aren’t working which is why they’re being sold in the first place.

It took a long, long time but YouTube finally announced additions to their API that actually make it useful. With the release of the features listed below we’re about to see the floodgate open on third-party YouTube applications.

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

I hope someone combines this with the new iPhone SDK and makes a YouTube application for my iPod Touch that’s actually worth a damn.

I’ve never really written a post specifically about this blog. I thought I’d write a bit tonight about how things are going and about the upcoming changes I’m planning on making here.

The Stats

There are some good and some bad things to report about this blog’s statistics. For starters, the Alexa Rank has dropped to 135,680. Getting that score below 150,000 was one of my goals when I began a concerted effort to post more regularly here back in December. Mission accomplished.

I’m seeing around 150+ unique visitors come to this blog each day and the majority of those are from search engines. I think that has a lot to do with writing keyword rich posts and content on long tail topics. This site sees a lot of traffic to my posts on tech support problems and my programming examples. I have no opinion one way or the other if this is a good or bad thing in the long run so I’ll take a wait and see approach.

One disappointment here would have to be my stagnant RSS subscriber count. I won’t bother giving you the exact figures because they’re pathetically small and, quite frankly, I just don’t put a lot of stock in RSS counts to begin with. The actual number itself doesn’t bother me. What does bum me out a bit is how there doesn’t seem to be much growth from week to week.

Upcoming Changes: Subtractions

I’m going to be dropping my regular features on interesting links and the WordPress plugin of the week. This actually started this week as some of you may have noticed. My original intention with those posts was to make writing here easier but they ended up being more of a mental burden than I had planned.

Also getting the axe here is the Entrecard widget. In the last few weeks I’m seeing traffic from the Entrecard site dwindle into nothing as I’ve stopped actively dropping cards and buying my own advertising. I’ve also been noticing a pretty big difference between the Entrecard-related numbers I see on Google Analytics and the numbers Entrecard is reporting. It’s enough of a problem to cause me to decide to take the widget down.

Upcoming Changes: Additions

I’m going to definitely be posting more interviews with other web developers and freelancers who are doing interesting work. The interviews are personally some of the favorite posts that I do.

I’m going to write longer but less frequent posts as well. I like to ramble on (subscribers to Jack’s Newsletter should be painfully aware of that by now) about whatever topic is obsessively on my mind at the time and the traditional short-post format just isn’t well suited to that kind of writing.

I’m also tossing around the idea of adding some advertising options. I have the 125×125 banners on the sidebar but they currently go to sites I recommend or own myself. I might be offering those to the public sometime soon. The idea of doing paid reviews has crossed my mind as well but I’m not totally sold on that idea just yet.

Tighter Integration

The last thing I want to try to do applies to more than just the blog. I really want to make more of an attempt at unifying this blog, my newsletter and my WordPress themes site. I think the closer together I can tie all three of those sites the better chances of success they’ll all have.