h0bbel.p0ggel.org

Sadly the server that powers this site as been down since the afternoon on Friday the 26th of January until now. The reason is basically a bad raid controller that needs replacement (there will be photos later...), and I'm waiting for a new one now. How long the server manages to stay up this time I don't know, hopefully it'll manage to stay up a while.

The downtime also affects my email, so I might not be able to reply to any emails until the problems has been solved. Don't worry though, all incoming emails are cached and stored at an external site and delivered to me as soon as my server is responding again.

Most of the time self-hosting is fun, but this proves not to be one of those times.

As mentioned a few days ago, I got an offer via reviewme.com and I had some ethical concerns regarding it. Basically I decided I would give it a try, and then see how I felt when I was done.

This never happened though, as it turned out that the buyers of the review wanted me to review a physical product, not a website. This meant that the product would have to be shipped to me, from the US to Norway, which pretty much makes it impossible for me to complete the review in the stipulated 48h. I contacted reviewme about this, and got the following reply:

Our system can't support reviews of actual products -- it is designed so that bloggers can review websites, designs and content.

I did, however, get contacted directly by the people that wanted a review and subsequently made a deal with them. I said no to the payment, but agreed to review the product if I got a copy. So, at least I'm home free regarding payment for reviews and I really don't think that I will take up any offers through reviewme again.

The thought process this has stimulated made me realize that I really shouldn't get paid for reviews, but if I were to review a product I should at least get a copy of the product to play with. Reviewing products I haven't tested would make no sense after all.

Insipired by Alex King, here are some quick statistics:

Other stats (based on awstats):

• Traffic increase in 2005 vs 2006: 185%
• Bandwidth decrease 2005 vs 2006: 20%
• Most popular post in 2006: The Blond Joke

Interesting to note while general traffic (unique views) is up, bandwidth usage is down.

A while back I signed up for reviewme.com, a "service" aimed at advertisers that want to get site owners to review their products for a price. Unlike others, reviewme has a full disclosure policy so that it's all out in the open. You don't even have to endorse the product, you are supposed to get paid even if you are highly critical of the product/site you are being paid to review. Reviewme then forwards 50% of the payment to the site owner that wrote the review, and everyone walks away happy.

Or do they? I hadn't really given this much thought until I got an email today stating that someone was interested in having me write a review for a product related to virtualization topics.

Sure, I could review the product at hand and get an easy payment, but thats where my qualms begin. How would being paid influence my review? I would not consciously let it have any bearing at all, but how could anyone reading it be sure that I'm not just singing the praise of the advertiser?

In this particular case, it's a product I would very much like to see as well as try out, but the payment bit is putting me off somewhat.

I'm not a purist that want to keep advertising and monetizing of sites like mine off the internet, in fact I have both Google Adsense and Text Link Ads in my sidebar and other places, and yes I do make the occasional $$ of my site. That doesn't directly influence what I write about though, it's just an added bonus that helps feed my increasing photography equipment habit.

So, what do you think? Should I do this initial review and see where it leads and possibly hurt the little integrity I might have, or should I stay put on my high horse and "just say no"

At the time of writing I have 29.9h left to decide if I should do this or not (and no, this is not a paid review of reviewme.com).

The last week as been interesting, at least for me. First the feed for my virtualization category was added to VMware's Planet V12n on the 8th of December!

To be listed on that site besides virtualization sites like RTFM Education, DABCC, virtualization.info and the others is really inspiring and a real treat.

Then, today I suddenly got a comment from Ralph Dagza stating that the site had been added to 9rules as well. I submitted the site to 9rules a while ago, for consideration in Round 5 but never really expected it to be added and to be honest I hadn't been following the announcements regarding which sites had been added. But true enough, there it was.

I guess this means I really need to keep up to speed, continue posting regularly and hopefully improve the quality of my postings as time passes.

I've also updated my about page to give a better overview of who's responsible for this site.

So, all you visitiors from the 9rules network; Welcome!