Buying Links

I'm considering buying one-way links to jumpstart the SE ranking some of my websites.  Price is less of an issue than the thought of somehow being penalized for it by search engines.  Theoretically if the links come from relevant sites to mine, then what does it matter whether I paid for them versus contacting the webmaster(s) directly?  Also, I paid $299 to get a Yahoo! directory listing and I can't say that it's particularly useful.  Yahoo's own Site Explorer didn't find or count it as an inbound link.  Contrast that with $249 for 10 "permanent" one-way links, I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Mechanical Turk Revival

Moderating results from Turk today proved more inspiring than the last bout, the ones requiring people to write things.  I thought a lot about coding against Amazon's MTurk API, but then decided the cost of time (and money if I hired someone other than myself) was not worth it.  Instead I altered the way I requested the HIT's and also the instructions.

Rather than 4 HIT's for 4 different pictures sent to 3 unique workers (which sometimes gives me great results), I have only 1 for 6 which gets sent to 2 unique workers.  I also lowered the pay-out for that one, rather than raising it, because I want to do more of these and have less to moderate.  It doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense (or cents), but it does in my head so I'm going to try it.  Since I'm having to go back to these and scrub/fix data anyway, my aim is to get their cost as low as possible (about a buck per site instead of five).

Part of the issue also related to waiting to publish the pic HIT's.  I found that putting out all of them at once tended to degrade the quality: all the pics from one person would be the same for all 4 HIT's.  So I had 4x the work and 4x the cost, with the same output.  Additionally, pacing myself is not fun and caused a lot more repetitive busy work.  I hope that this new structure allows me to blast out all the HIT's at once and parse all their data the following day.

Lastly, I hope to genericize the pics HIT to use for games, movies, and television shows in addition to people.

Split and Stalled

This week, these last couple days, I've been feeling split and stalled.  My "to-do" list has grown exponentially and there are many disparate categories of items.  I installed Tasque in Ubuntu and created a Remember the Milk account to sync with it.  Now I have a paralyzing collection of tasks staring me in the face.  Rather than bang my head against all of them, getting nothing done, I decided I'd rather write about the problem.  I'm sure it will seem insignificant when I read this back to myself and then I can move on.

It's not as if I haven't had large, challenging piles of work up to this point.  I have.  Somehow I run into this "writer's block" (except it's not just writing) and at some point I chew threw the barrier and burn past my immediate responsibilities, resulting in a panting wait for the remaining motes to settle.  Currently, there is a transparent wall.  It can be seen through, but it keeps movement stalled until broken.  That makes it more frustrating to see the path extending further than where you are, and somehow your metaphorical feet refuse to budge; mentally cemented.

Okay, so what am I working on?  The problem isn't what to work on, it's what isn't to work on.  With FanSiter I am constantly writing and posting on the blog in the "Celebrity Bikini" and "Game of the Day" categories, because they require no research and are pleasing to do.  They are, however, my "busy work"; occupying the mind and hopefully merely exercising it and not exhausting.  On the other hand, trying to find bikini pictures inevitably leads me to more people who are great candidates to be new fansite subjects.  Blessing and a curse!  These probably need to be in their own list, rather than on my Tasque.

There is programming to be done.  Little improvements to the engine are queued up in my Moleskine, brain, Gmail tasks, and Tasque.  There is a major feature, the Blogger Fire-hose, rattling around my noggin.  And administrative coding for better management of Turk HIT's looms large on the horizon.  Turk, as is obvious by a previous post here, has caused some major disappointments.  Large time sinks appeared where trampolines should have been.  After giving it careful consideration today, I've come to the realization that part of how I input and structure the HIT's has flaws and is cracking under the issue of scaling.  By relying on CSV's, I have to create whole new spreadsheets containing the subjects to be re-done.  The thing is, I don't want to learn the API ... at least not right now.

Training is the most arduous of cerebral labor.  Communicating concepts in tiny consumable bits, feeding someone you hope to be hungry enough until performance matches a new part of the position.  This comes in the form of documents which I have spent a great deal of care producing; and there are only two thusfar (more on the way).  My hope is that they can be recycled should I need to find new help.  It is straining to pull apart the processes I take for granted knowing, and attempt to lay them out in an educational manner.  Gratifying output, for sure, but exhausting to the highest degree.

Finally, the business overhead and some form of meetings.  Talking to others about the project, figuring out what to say, or just winging it.  Then pondering accounting and license issues ceaselessly; a constant internal cycling ear-to-ear and without reprieve.  Sooner rather than later I must bring an accountant on board, for this year's taxes at the very least, but have been dragging my feet.  There is so much else to do, I tell myself, but then I cannot escape my own reminders.  And I dislike putting things off.