Recently, in the sweepstakes category…
As part of my continuing quest to win an iPhone, here is my submission to the Mahalo iPhone contest:
This was fun to do, going through all the CSS links I’ve accumulated over the years and picking out the best for the page. It makes me think I might like joining their Greenhouse.
My wife’s Sony Clié died recently. Don’t feel too badly for it — it led a long and full life. The loss has been pretty hard on Angela, though. She kept track of everything on it. Once you get an organizational system in place, when it’s not there you feel like part of your brain is missing.
Good husband that I am, I have graciously offered to give her my Treo. Of course, I suppose if I did that I would have to get a new phone. I wonder if any interesting models have come out recently…
Actually, even though I feel the call of the iPhone as much as anyone else, the price tag is a little steep for me. So, while I wait for either the price to come down or my checking account balance to go up, I’ve been checking out various iPhone giveaways that have sprung up recently. If you’re interested in the different ways to get a free iPhone, I’ve posted a bunch of them on SweepsGoat.
(Side note: SweepsGoat just launched its own sweepstakes. If you like winning stuff, you should check it out, because it’s all about winning stuff by looking for ways to win stuff.)
On one of those sweepstakes, you enter by linking to ApplePhoneShow.com on your website or blog.
In another, you post “MeToday” videos on Viddler to enter. Here’s my most recent:
With apologies to anyone who watches it. Actually, I’ve had more fun with the videos than I expected. I don’t think video blogging is really my thing, but it’s a fun creative exercise, not unlike NaNoWriMo or Script Frenzy (Which I finished, btw. More on that later.).
Hopefully my efforts to do something nice for my wife will not be in vain…
I’m proud to announce the launch of the latest member of the Smart Goat family: SweepsGoat. SweepsGoat is a community site built for people to share online sweepstakes. Web 2.0 folks will recognize it as a Digg-style site — just like Web 1.0 folks recognize Digg as a Kuro5hin-style site. This has all happened before, it will all happen again.
Anyway, if you like entering online sweepstakes I hope you’ll drop by and give it a try. Right now it’s your basic “submit and vote” website, but we have some features on the way that will make it more useful to dedicated sweepers.
We had various motivations for creating this site. Angela’s something of a sweepstakes hobbyist, and we’ve talked from time to time about the various sweepstakes communities that try to keep some or all of their listings behind a pay wall. This is a topic for another time, but one of my main rules for business is:
If your business model is based on the scarcity of information, you’re doomed.
So we were kind of interested to see if a thriving sweepstakes community could be built around the idea of everyone sharing everything. Of course, we would like to make a little advertising revenue off the whole thing, but if the site can just pay its own bills, I’ll be happy. Basically, this is another business experiment, and it will either work or it won’t.
I should also mention we have other stuff in the works that I will hopefully get to announce soon. I’m almost done with a new design for this site, and we’re also polishing up a new design for Smart Goat. Gift Goat is still in the works, but I have no idea when that will be ready. As I get to work more on our various ideas I’ll be writing about them here. So you’ve been warned.
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