You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

To me it’s not clear that you have to publish your privacy policy on your Web site, but the privacy policy proposed by JenSense seems quite simple and clean so I will give it the benefit of the doubt. So without further a due, here’s Da Vinci Planet’s privacy policy.

Understand the Best Practices for Upgrading

The WordPress upgrade instructions are very good and include details on how to backup your WordPress database. Now backing up is probably the single most important best practice and the upgrade instructions includes a specific step to verify your backups, but you need to make sure you know how to restore your backups. I have been using the MySQL Administrator to do full daily, weekly and monthly backups, but when things went wrong with the upgrade I was surprised how unintuitive the restore process was. In fact, restoring seemed more risky than resolving the upgrade issues I decided to rather figure out the upgrade incompatibilities. Had I known how to restore – with confidence – I would have been able to recover much quicker. A blogger is likely to have upgrade issues at some point in time and it will almost certainly be caused by a plugin, so please think about that before you go plugin crazy.

Reactivate Plugins Very Carefully

The upgrade instructions explain that you should first deactivate all your plugins, then do the actual upgrade and then reactivate your plugins. I followed these instructions, but it’s with the reactivation where things went wrong for me. The Jerome’s Keywords plugin like many others makes database updates when it’s activated. What I didn’t realize was that when I reactivated it, it apparently conflicted with some of the WordPress 2.3 upgrades. What I should have done was to run the new Jerome’s Keywords import feature, which can be found under Manage, Import in the WordPress admin interface and not reactivate the plugin. While that in itself wouldn’t have made the upgrade flawless because I also had to make theme updates, it would have prevented my blog data from becoming partially corrupted. The solution to my specific problems with the Jerome’s Keywords plugin was:

1. After I had upgraded and reactivated the plugin, I deactivated it again.

2. Reran the Jerome’s Plugin import in the admin interface. It returned zero records this time, but it seemed to fix the database structure.

3. Updated my theme to use WordPress’ tag functions rather than the plugin’s.

4. Created Apache rewrite rules to convert plus signs to dashes. The Jerome’s Keyword plugin uses plus (+) signs to separate words while the new WordPress tag functionality uses dashes. This seemingly simple rewrite rule probably has a simple solution, but I resorted to a list of less elegant, static rules like:


RewriteRule ^tag/portable\+apps(.*)$ /tag/portable-apps$1 [R=permanent,L]

Other WordPress Upgrade Tips

When all is said and done I am happy to have completed the upgrade and in retrospect it was a good learning experience.

Here’s how he’s been doing:
September          $352.94 (first month as a moneymaking blog)
October          $1,361.64
November         $2,139.93
December         $2,790.05
January          $3,440.66
February         $7,011.05
March            $8,545.25


He’s also kind enough to show the breakdown of his income for March – all from smart marketing tools:
ReviewMe:        $2,400.00
Affiliate Sales: $1,962.20
Text Links Ads:  $1,308.06
Google AdSense:  $1,129.60
Direct Ad Sales:   $625.00
Vibrant Media:     $357.08
Kontera:           $296.12
TTZ Media:         $278.92
FeedBurner Ads:    $188.27
Grand Total:     $8,545.25

(I noticed that he also has Adsense-like ads by ActionAds.)

The traffic didn’t come for free, but it was relatively cheap at $480.75 for March (mostly AdWords). Now, $480/month is a lot of money for an amateur blogger, but it goes to show that a little money can go a long way.

An interesting expense that he incurred is what he calls Google IM ads to other blogs. “Google IM ads” could be a way of spreading the love (“who knows who”) or it could be a form of AdSense arbitrage, or – most likely – it’s a combination: spreading the love and making money. The perfect mix. Huge hooray for corporate marketers that are on board.

He may have been lucky, but he proves that one can make a decent income from blogging. Can he keep it up? I bet he can because, like any other job, it takes time and passion to do it well and he seems to have both.

Why do I do it..? Passion! I am a Web professional and I love this stuff and so it has become a hobby. The Adsense income was a “why not?”, but now it justifies the hobby . I also do it to encourage other people to blog about their passions because it is such an amazing forum to spread knowledge.

Make Money On The Internet – johnchow.com

My concern with the “next year we upgrade to Web 3.0″ suggestion is that while the term Web 2.0 has been around for a couple of years, it is barely starting to mature. Web 2.0 is all about social computing: Blogs, wikis, syndication, mashups, user generated content (UGC) and using ajax to make Websites more interactive. It trusts the community and empowers them to contribute and police content. Very few corporate Websites have ventured into this terrain. They would like to invite and build community, but dare not open the doors.

So what about Web 3.0? As it turns out people are, at this point, just speculating what Web 3.0 is going to be. According Wikipedia Web 3.0, a.k.a. the Semantic Web, is “an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily�. Some people define it as Web 2.0 + artificial intelligence (AI). Others as a “world wide database�.

The graph below was created by Radar Networks and shows a believable prediction of the evolution of the Web.

So I believe we have a couple more years before Web 2.0 will be fully embraced by enterprises and only after that will Web 3.0 even start to get defined. I also believe that Web 3.0 will be more elegantly simple than what people are predicting because people love “simplicity� – just ask Google.

Have fun upgrading!

The idea was to give keywords more importance in title tags by placing them first, e.g. a page formerly titled “Da Vinci Planet ›› Blog Archive ›› Essential Portable Apps” is now titled “Essential Portable Apps | Da Vinci Planet“. Google’s search results pages have since updated and are now showing the “SEO friendly” page titles. The results are somewhat surprising!

For the search term “essential portable apps”

Before: Positioned 2nd of about 1,370,000 results

Now: Positioned 2nd of about 1,390,000 results

Result: Position unchanged

For the search term “remove popcorn”

Before: Positioned 3rd of about 1,140,000 results

Now: Positioned 5th of about 1,260,000 results

Result: Position down from 3rd to 5th

For the search term “Top Web Analytics Tools”

Before: Positioned 94th of about 18,100,000 results

Now: Positioned 280th of about 23,400,000 results

Result: Position down from 94th to 280th! Total indexed Web pages increased by about 30%.

Conclusion

My position went down for two of the three search terms. Especially the last one, from 94th to 280th! Not that 94th was any good to start with: ) The number of pages that Google has indexed on the Web has increased for all three search terms – as one would expect – and that may have an effect. It’s possible that my page rankings were affected simply because Google detected that the pages were modified. I’ve heard that old is good when it comes to search engines. If that is true then it’s possible their rankings will improve over time. For now I’ll hope so and I will be checking from time to time how they are doing. Either way I’m sticking with the new title format because it looks better. Blissful ignorance?

One tip/plugin that I think is very useful is the SEO Title Tag. WordPress, by default, puts the blog’s name in front of every page title. Search engines typically display page titles in search results so you need to have an appropriate page title and normally your post title is more appropriate. This plugin makes it easy to create SEO friendly page titles. I activated the plugin today and will post an update when the updates are reflected in Google.

These two sites have good SEO suggestions and plugin recommendations for WordPress sites:

• Blog optimization: 10 SEO tips
• Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips

1. Create a hosting account
To start off you will need to sign up for a hosting account and choose a domain name for your blog. Go to the Hosting Plans page on the Go Daddy site. The Economy Plan is usually suitable and currently costs $3.59/month for 12 month. You need to choose between Linux and Windows hosting solutions and I’d recommend Linux because it works nicer with WordPress (particularly permalinks). You typically do not need any of the optional services that they offer, but you may consider the Private domain registration ($4.99 per year) to hide your personal info from public whois. You can add a domain name for $1.99 (+ $0.25 ICANN fee). The total charge, for 1 year, will be around $50.32. That will be your only cost for this setup. Once you have paid you may have to wait a few of hours for your hosting set up to complete.

2. Install WordPress
Next you need to install WordPress into your site. To do this, browse to godaddy.com, log in to your account and then go to Hosting & Servers and go to My Hosting Plans. Select Open next to the hosting account that you would like to add WorPress. In the Hosting Manager look for click on Value Applications, locate WordPress and click on install. You need to enter basic WordPress administration info, submit, wait a couple of minutes and it’s installed. Besides WordPress, you will also see many other applications that are readily available, including Coppermine image gallery, SiteBar, AdvancedPoll and PmWiki wiki.

After installing WordPress, Go Daddy will show a link to launch the application. By default WordPress will be installed into the /wordpress folder. To change that could be tricky, but you could do it by using an FTP client to connect to your site (create an FTP account by going to Manage FTP Users in the Host Manager) and renaming the wordpress folder to the name of your choice, then you need to browse to the admin page in the new folder (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/new_wordpress_folder/wp-admin/index.php) and update the path info in the Options | General section. If you want to run WordPress as your root application, you will need to move the files to your root folder – possibly by downloading and then re-uploading the files to root (make sure you know what you’re doing!).

3. Familiarize yourself with WordPress
This is where the fun starts! After you get WordPress working you need to familiarize yourself with the Web application by checking out the admin tool and reading the documentation. You will want to create a theme or choose one from the many available on-line (mostly free) and enhance it by installing plugins and adding Web analytics, RSS feeds, etc..

4. Useful resources

Themes:
WordPress Codex
Emily Robnins, How to blog – a comprehensive list of themes.

Plugins:
WordPress Codex

There are two ways to add the tracking code to your WordPress blog: 1) by installing a plug-in and 2) by editing the theme source pages directly.

Install a Google Analytics plug-in.
There are a number of plug-ins available for free and they are mostly similar and very easy to use, including:

• Google Analyticator
• Boakes Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress
• Semiologic Google analytics plugin for WordPress
• OraTransplant – Ultimate Google Analytics plugin for WordPress

Edit your WordPress pages directly.
This is probably the no so smart option, but since I did it I might as well mention it. You will need to edit the source of your theme pages. Login to your WordPress admin tool, select the Presentation tab and then Theme Editor. The Header (header.php) or Footer (footer.php) is normally the best place to insert your Google Analytics code, but make sure that you insert it after the <body> tag in the Header or before the </body> tag in the Footer, depending on which file you inserted the code. After saving the file, preview your blog and view the page source to verify that the tracking code has been inserted. Google Analytics can can lag a few hours to show traffic.