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I figured I’d see if I could get in on some of the Macbook Air® action. Today Steve Jobs announced the Macbook Air at MacWorld 2008. The Macbook Air is a super-thin Macbook, measuring in at 0.76″ thick at the widest point and 0.16″ at the thinnest point, the Macbook Air will set you back a cool $1,800 for the cheap version. I’m not really sure why the more expensive Macbook Air is nearly $3,000 since it has a bit more processing power, but less memory… Hardly seems worth it for the upgrade.

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Macbook Air

As widely expected, Apple is launching an ultra-thin notebook called the MacBook Air. At 0.76″ thick at its widest point, the three-pound Air has a wedgelike shape that tapers down to 0.16″ thick at the front base. LED backlighting on its 13.3-inch screen, multi-touch trackpad (which offers some nifty features like rotating photos, all in the touchpad), and a backlit keyboard. Specs are decent: 1.6 or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (on a cleverly shrunken socket), 2GB of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive (or 64GB SSD option). No optical drive (of course), and just one USB port. It’ll set you back $1,799, which is on the inexpensive side for ultralight notebooks with specs like this. Ships in two weeks.

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I don’t post on this blog very frequently because it is more for me to keep my ideas floating, but not in a day-by-day matter. On my main project (Blog Project A) I currently post 1-2 posts per day, and plan to up that to 2-3 posts per day as the weather begins to warm.

I have several competing blogs in my RSS feeder, and have noticed that some of them post an insane amount each day. One blog in particular, which has several writers and is part of a larger blog network, has posted 14 posts already today, and it’s now 2pm. To me, this is excessive. Yes, they are building a lot of pages and that may bring in more traffic, but these posts are not SEO’d and some of them are simply pictures with a few words of text. To me, it’s annoying to have 14 posts from one site in my RSS Feed. I usually just mark all those posts as ‘read’ and then move on to the next blog that has 1 or 2 new posts.

I made $15 on my Amazon Affiliate Site in December, but things have taken a nosedive since Christmas. I have almost zero traffic and of course that converts to zero dollars on the affiliate end.

I am trying to get back in the habit of posting on that site, and considering if there is something else I can do to improve traffic. I am not creating thoughtful posts about products, but simply posting the basic info along with links to Amazon. That seemed to work well enough in December, so it simply might be connected to my posting frequency.

I’m a little down about making money online at the moment - I made some money via Ticketmaster off of one event on Blog Project A, but since posting additional events, I haven’t generated any more income from Ticketmaster. Also, Blog Project A is getting good traffic, but the pages per visit are still around 1.5 - 1.9 … Not exactly the sign that people are stopping in and shopping around. I expect this is because people are often landing exactly where they want to go, to find the information that they want - but it would be good if I could get them to stick around for a while.

I am going to be revising my Free PHP eBook. There have been almost 200 downloads, which I think is good for something that I created on the fly - I am hoping then when I revise it, I will begin to get some more downloads and feedback.

December was the first month where I generated any measurable amount of money online. I didn’t start using Amazon or Ticketmaster until halfway through the month, so January should bring in more than December.

I’ve been learning a good amount about what works and what doesn’t, so I look forward to growing this in 2008.

December Income
Amazon.com : $15.32
Ticketmaster: $10.50
AdSense: $0.78

Total: $26.60