It has been crazy here in San Diego, with 24 hour live coverage of the San Diego wild fires. There has already been 250,000 people evacuated from their homes. The fires have already been classified the worst ever in California, and it’s far from done.

People are being evacuated from communities like Romana, Scripps Ranch, Rancho Bernardo, and Poway. They are being sent to high schools and Qualcomm stadium for shelters. Of course they are being told to take all their irreplaceable belongings, pets, and animals.

What may be the worst thing is that there are 7 or 8 separate fires. These fires are being named after their point of origin. They are the Harris fire, Witch fire, Coronado Hills fire, Rice fire, San Marcos fire, Descanso fire, Fallbrook fire, Eagle Peak fire, Descanso Valley fire, Palomar fire, McCoy fire and more. If you’ve been watching the news, the most covered fire appears to be the one in Malibu. They are spread throughout California, with several in San Diego.

I have already packed clothes for my family and begun to organize what I am going to take. Some of our neighbors have people staying with them for now that had people evacuate. Rancho Bernardo is close to us and thats the one I am concerned about.

The fire has thrown everything out of control. The air is bad, school is canceled and the freeways are closed.

I won’t be without the internet (thank god) so I will keep you posted on how we are doing. Watch out for Mira Mesa on the news!

I would really encourage anyone who can to donate to the cause, to do so. If anyone finds a link to it I will gladly post it. The San Diego news has been broadcasting that they are accepting donations. With over 250,000 people evacuated from their homes, the needs for food, water, and shelter are great.

For live updates check Sign On San Diego

Written by Mark of MeAndMyDrum | Fave MAMD | Subscribe to MAMD

Ever had online popcorn? I hadn’t until today and it was quite satisfying. 🙂

Hotcorn is a game where you pop as much of the popcorn kernels you can in the time allotted. You play the role of the hot sun. You move your cursor over the screen to make those babies pop. Sounds easy, but the clock ticks fast so you must do the same.

Watch out for sticky butter and dangerous water. Those are never a good combination with popcorn.

Written by Mark of MeAndMyDrum | Fave MAMD | Subscribe to MAMD

Not quite open to the public just yet, iWantSandy wants to be your personal email assistant.

Just like a real assistant, she’ll help you stay organized, but do so via email. For me, this makes for a sensible approach since we all pretty much email on a regular basis. When you want to set a reminder for something, like say, send a report to someone, you could create a task, but iWantSandy is more interactive than that.

So let’s say you pick up your cell phone or PDA and email Sandy the following message, “remind me to send Bob the weekly status report today at 3pm”. She’ll then email you a reminder at 3pm with that exact message.

Now imagine you’re writing an email to someone else, this time a real person. You can even copy Sandy on it and give her an instruction in that same message, like “Sandy, please remember to [and put whatever you want her to remember for you].” She can even remind the other guy as well and he doesn’t even need an account to do it.

The key to communicating with her is to remember a few simple keywords. You can ask her to lookup things, forget things (stop reminding you), update your tasks, and more. She may act like a real person, but she’s all code.

You always have direct access to your online account, so making changes there may be easier. When she recognizes that you’ve included a contact or calendar event in the email you send her, she’ll send you back an email with an attachment you can use to upload into Microsoft Outlook.

Her service is still in beta, but you can subscribe to me to learn more as I’ll be keeping an eye on things.

When I started blogging I joined a lot of directories and toplists hoping for traffic. That doesn’t work, however they do provide other services, one isn’t traffic. Why?

Because They Don’t Have Traffic

You can’t expect to get traffic from websites that don’t have much traffic themselves. I’ve never had much luck with top lists, if I did, it was short lived.

That has changed, since Blog about your Blog was named to the top 20 of 45n5’s Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs. I helped hype the list when it was first launched around September 9th.

The Results

Time to throw some stats at you. From being on the top list, we’ve received 390 visitors and counting. In September alone we received 291 visitors, which leave 99 for October so far.

If Blog about your Blog was listed on the top list on September 9th, that works out to be 9 (almost 10) visitors per day.

Guess what? We didn’t have to do anything either! Well, besides be a top blog, all we had to do was ask for inclusion. We didn’t have to install some code or script, provide our stats, or anything. It was all done for us.

Benefits

Mark has done a great job to market his top list. By sending traffic to the top list on 45n5, it is sending traffic to the other blogs. Traffic is a huge benefit, but it’s not everything.

To be named one of the top 20 “make money online” blogs, is an honor. The system isn’t perfect, but nothing is. If anything it is accurate, although it is missing some great blogs on the list. Since they are new, they don’t have the page rank to compete, but shouldn’t they have to pay their dues, like we have?

Not only is the list “honorable” to be mentioned with John Chow and Darren Rowse, but it also provides credibility. We’ve been around long enough, and worked hard enough to be recognized.

If you blog about making money online and somehow missed out on this list, you should definitely get listed.

Good to see our comment friday get back to what it usually is at. It only took a little bribery to get some of you to finally comment! I’ve stumbled everyone who left a post.

The winner I chose is Marco Richter. It is his first comment friday, however I have seen the blog before. He linked to my post about Effective Email Marketing, since I entered it in Courtney Tuttle’s writing project.

Marco has a newer blog, but is offering up good content. He listed his traffic series for me to stumble. I have, now I am passing it on to you. He has 6 articles completed out of 25 that is listed. I’ll be checking back for more as he updates.

Glad to see our new subscribers already participating in comment friday, I hope it’s the same next week. If there is a particular topic you want to talk about, let me know.

Viagogo.co.uk is a leading ticket hub in Europe. There are many types of websites that are U.S based, but I have yet to see one for outside the states. With millions of dollars, or in this case Euro’s changing hands over huge events like sport games and concerts, it’s a great business.

Registration and Selling

The format of this website is nice and easy. Registration is easy and literally takes only a minute. After registering you can then buy and sell your tickets. That includes sports, like Football Tickets and Rugby Tickets, as well as concert tickets. By searching the categories you can find the particular event that you want.

What I couldn’t find easily was what rates they offer, etc. Most ticket sites will take 1-10% of the selling price, or it will cost you to list your tickets. As far as I can tell it’s free, however I don’t know how that would be profitable for them.

If I am comparing websites on which ticket places I want to use, I want to find a place where I can get the most for my tickets. Not knowing their rates could be a problem.

Not Just in Europe

After being on the website for a while, I found at the very bottom of the page that they have ticket listings for the US as well. I doubt I am going to be searching for Cricket Tickets in Europe, so I was happy to see even more variety.

Going back to the main page I did discover a small and annoying pop-up that told me they had U.S listings. Being blind to those I automatically close them. I’d definitely emphasize on the main page they have list tickets in different countries. I can see why Viagogo is successful and I would definitely give them a shot.

Buy and sell live event tickets in a safe and guaranteed way at viagogo.

Another friday! Seems like I always say that, but the weekend comes so fast. It’s been tough the last few weeks. I’ve had a lot of pressure to make money and with Emma sick, I’ve been with Matthew a lot of the time. I hope our contest will kick it up a bit around here, we haven’t had too many people posting.

If this is your first comment friday, the idea is pretty simple. Leave us a comment about anything you want. I will select one lucky commenter that really stands out, and I will be giving out a free link to that person. In addition to that that, I will be giving them a free blogroll spot.

This will be a stumbleupon edition of comment friday. To break in our new subscribers and readers, I want everyone to leave a comment to posts they like that they’ve written or enjoyed. I will stumble every post and likely leave a review and tags on that post. I’ve been working on my profile, with at least 167 “fans” you should get some bang for your buck.