Found this page on Wikipedia last week.

Thanks to “Eno1″ on Wikipedia for creating the page!

First of all, let me have this chance to thank Zazz, especially Adam and Scott there for helping to run last two months’ competitions smoothly. For the very first time our winners can actually pick the prize, and there’s great communication to help all parties to be in the loop. Well done Zazz!

For the next two months, we will be having a sponsor that is slightly different. No, we are not doing gadgets again, but software this time. Nor is it freebie software that you can just download from the Internet — but something pretty useful for many who have a budget and want a tool to manage his/her own finance. Well, bargain hunting on OzBargain will help you to meet your budget (well, hopefully). This might also help…

Quicken Personal Plus 2010

Quicken Home & Business 2010

Ullash from Quicken came to me last month to negotiate a sponsorship for the next 2 months, and they will be giving OzBargain users who submitted a bargain a chance to win 2 copies of Quicken Personal Plus 2010 subscription edition (RRP $79) each week for the month of March, and 2 copies of Quicken Home & Business 2010 subscription edition (RRP $115) each week for the month of April.

How to win? See the wiki page on OzBargain weekly competitions. Submit a good deal and the personal finance/accounting package could be yours!

Although I spend my day developing software for financial planners, personally I have never used Quicken for planning, budgeting and tax preparation. However I am now very tempted to win the competition myself as the accounting burden from OzBargain has pretty much exceeded my little spreadsheet :) Or maybe I need to see an accountant first…

New Year, and New Sponsors for our Weekly Competitions. First of all, big thanks to 9289.com.au for the last 2 months — especially to Jennica and Nancy as they are very helpful getting all the prizes sorted out.

And the sponsor for the next two months (January-February 2010) are…

Zazz.com.au

Zazz.com.au is pretty much the original 1-day-1-sale shop in Australia, which I reviewed at pretty much the beginning of this blog. Quite a few prizes are lining up according to Zazz –

• Laptop warrior kit with carrying case, USB numeric keypad, mouse, USB hub and all that zazz.
• DC to AC inverter with USB charging socket for the car.
• Remote control power switches
• Graphics tablet + styles

Thanks to Scott @ Zazz for organising this. Competition starts this week, and I’ll announce the winners later this afternoon.

As announced on OzBargain forum, the weekly competition sponsor for the next two months (November and December 2009) will be 9289.com.au.

For the first week, 9289.com.au will be giving away 2x “Elecom Scope Node 3-Button Laser Mouse”, where you can hold onto a mouse like how you normally hold onto a pen. An interesting gadget indeed, but I’ll probably categorise it under “weird product” as I much prefer to hold onto a mouse than hold onto a pen.

Anyway. 9289.com.au is also trying to give away different prizes each week. I shall make the announcement for them when they send me an updated list.

Okay. I was bored. Saw a friend of mine updating her status on Plurk, which is a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter (which OzBargain already has a presence with 1000+ followers). However, all your short messages get presented on a time line together with your friends. “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice to have OzBargain plurking as well”, I thought — I could have updated the status there at the same time Twitter status was updated.

So I started coding. And it is the end result :)

It happens that Plurk actually does not have a public API like Twitter. Therefore to get status updated you have to pretty much posting to the forms. Here is a code snipe in Python on how OzBargain posts to Plurk:

PLURK_USERNAME = 'your Plurk username'
PLURK_PASSWORD = 'your Plurk password'
PLURK_USERID = 'your Plurk user ID'

def plurk(msg, qualifier='says'):
    import cookielib, time, urllib, urllib2

    cookiejar = cookielib.CookieJar()
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(
        cookiejar))
    opener.open('http://www.plurk.com/Users/login',
        urllib.urlencode({
            'nick_name': PLURK_USERNAME,
            'password': PLURK_PASSWORD,
        }))
    opener.open('http://www.plurk.com/TimeLine/addPlurk',
        urllib.urlencode({
            'posted': time.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S', time.gmtime()),
            'qualifier': qualifier,
            'content': msg,
            'lang': 'en',
            'no_comments': '0',
            'uid': PLURK_USERID,
        }))

Note that “USERID” is a numeric value that you can find when you look at the HTML source of your Plurk page. OzBargain is 4759873 for example.

Now, follow OzBargain, if you are a Plurk user!

Man, I love statistics and indices. The monthly Top 100 Aussie Tech Startups is something that I check every now and then just to see “how everyone else is doing”. TechNation used to use various traffic stats (Alexa and Compete ranks), but now have changed to use YouNoodle Scores. What score?!

A YouNoodle Score is a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 0 to 100, of a startup’s impact and importance based on its traction, activity, and buzz. The score is based on information pulled in from thousands of online sources: traffic, mainstream media, the blogosphere, conversations on Twitter, and other key factors.

So instead of just the traffic, it also includes how much media coverage this website receives. Now, stop reading and blog and tweet about OzBargain so hopefully the score will go up :)

It has been a long time since I last blogged here (Wow, THREE months ago!). My involvement at OzBargain has been gradually changing. Due to other commitment (i.e. “work”, d’oh) I no longer have much time to sit down and write some stuff. How I used my spare time has also changed from talking about the latest bargains, to managing a community that talks about bargains. I am still hanging there (just) and some new features are still planned for this year. Stay tuned for those — and sorry about the waiting :)

My last post was about ShoppingSquare sponsoring OzBargain in our weekly competitions. Over the last thirteen weeks ShoppingSquare has been giving out 2x 8GB USB Drive each week. Big thanks to Danilo and team at ShoppingSquare.

Upcoming Sponsor

But we have a slight change of sponsor this week. TopBuy.com.au, another Sydney-based online retailer, will be providing us the prizes for the next two months (September to October 2009). And the prize? Digital Photo Frame with 1.5 Inch LCD that is sold on TopBuy.com.au for $29.95. Again — two winners each week, one with most votes and the other one randomly picked. Big thanks to Max at TopBuy.

How do I Sponsor OzBargain’s Weekly Competition?

This is actually one of the frequently asked questions. After all, let’s face it — while we do thank the sponsors for their generosity, they do get something out of the sponsorship. First of all their name and website gets mentioned here on this blog. Moreover, sponsors are featured on the sidebar of OzBargain, with their logo and a direct link to their website for the duration of their sponsorship. They are visible on almost all page views — and we are talking about 2.9 million page views there from August 2009.

With overwhelming requests from various merchants trying to tap into “cheap advertising”, I decided to add a section on OzBargain wiki on how to sponsor our weekly competition.

First of all, it would be a queue on the first come and first serve basis. As you can see the November-December spot has already been occupied by 9289.com.au (they have given me a few options and I have not yet decided). Feel free to contact me with your choice of prize, and I will pick the best offers and add them onto the queue. Next available spot is January next year.

First of all, let me give a big thanks to Danilo @ ShoppingSquare for sponsoring OzBargain’s weekly competition for the next few weeks. We have been running our weekly comps since February 2007, and has given out thousands of dollars so far. From this Thursday onwards (4 June 2009), instead of getting our regular $20 PayPal credit or shopping voucher, the winners will receive a 8GB Kingston Data Traveler USB Flash Drive instead, sponsored by ShoppingSquare.

Here’s some spec (copied from ShoppingSquare’s website):

DataTraveler 100 was built with simplicity in mind, allowing you to focus on your data. The USB connector is safely housed inside the sleek case, so you don.t have to worry about losing a cap. DataTraveler 100 is available in capacities up to 8GB to give you plenty of room to hold just about any document, from term papers and theses to digital images, spreadsheets or other important documents.

• Dimensions: 2.35″ x 0.88″ x 0.37″ (59.7mm x 22.3mm x 9.5mm)
• Capacities: 8GB
• Operating Temperatures: 32F to 140F (0C to 60C)
• Storage Temperatures: -4F to 185F (-20C to 85C)
• Weight: 0.48 oz (12g)

Valued at $24.70 on ShoppingSquare’s website (+free delivery that’s worth $9.99).

What you need to do is also having a registered account at ShoppingSquare so the crew at ShoppingSquare can post the item to the winners.

Again, big thanks to our sponsor — and don’t forget to submit your offers to win our weekly prize!

Via CodingHorror — Penny Auctions: They’re Gambling, on “Swoopo”, a penny auction site where you need to buy credits before you can start bidding.

Because Swoopo is, at its heart, thinly veiled gambling. The companies backing Swoopo and other Penny Auction sites are hoping unsophisticated regulatory agencies will buy the “It’s not a game of chance” argument if it’s wrapped in a lot of technical intarweb mumbo-jumbo they can’t fully comprehend.

Reminds me of many unique bid auction sites that surfaced online 2 years ago, where some of them have actually been covered here on the OzBargain blog. I actually went to the Swoopo site and it does feel like gambling — and it’s addictive. I can just sit there and watch the clock counts down to 0, or bounds back to 15 second again with more bidding action.

It’s actually worse than gambling because not only you need to pay for entrance, win the auction purely by chance (and risk loosing your money not winning the auction), addictive in nature which you ended up spending more than you should because you don’t want to lose out — you still need to pay for than damn thing when you win.

But somehow it has gained a lot of popularity according to Alexa. I guess the old saying is right. Every second on Swoopo, “a fool and his money is soon parted”.

When you visit Catch of the Day now, besides today’s main catch and small fishes, down at the bottom of the page you’ll also see the advertisement of the up coming Baitathon.

On the 27th of May we’ll be running a little members only promotion. We’ll be selling a lot of stuff that people love and want, at prices they could only dream about.

• This is a members only special event. Not a member? Click here to register. Its important to register in advance, as registration will be closing at 11am on the day, one hour before the event goes live.
• Its all happening to get people talking about CatchOfTheDay
• Quantities are very limited, and listed below
• We can’t predict how big the response will be, have mercy on our servers

We definitely fell on point 2 there by talking about it on this blog and this post on OzBargain. Although many still felt hurt from last year’s birthday bash fiasco (more details on the OzBargain wiki), it certainly did not stop them trying to run it again this year.

Well. At least they are trying to be honest this time and admit that there’s still possibily that their web servers cannot cope with load. They have also clearly listed out the quantity this time to avoid speculations like last time on exactly how many Nintendo Wii’s they have in their warehouse.

I had a quick glance on the items listed and unfortunately nothing interests me this time so I won’t queue up with you guys :)

Update: Just had a look at Rackspace’s managed configuration (I believe CoTD uses Rackspace for hosting), and the “cheapest” server has a quad core AMD, 2GB memory and runs RedHat Linux — at the price that’s around 10x our monthly hosting cost here at OzBargain (i.e. expensive).

Here are some simple suggestions for handing traffic surge (might not be possible as Rackspace is managing the system):

• Replace Apache/mod_php with Nginx/PHP-FastCGI (running 2 Nginx worker + ~10 PHP slaves) and enable xcache for op-code and variable caching.
• Replace your front page with a static HTML file which Nginx will serve in no time. Just re-generate it every few minutes for updates.
• Cache all the pages in xcache (using variable cache), and serve them to guests/visitors.

Even a quad core AMD Opteron will go a long way :)

We love social networks.

September 2007. OzBargain released its Facebook application to let you see the latest deals posted on OzBargain from inside Facebook. In August 2008 I created the OzBargain page on Facebook and ran our birthday competition pretty much on Facebook…

May 3^rd 2009. We have finally reached 500 fans! Yes it took a while, but thank you for all the supports! And congratulations to Stacey Miller in Melbourne who became our 500^th fan!

June 2007, OzBargain started sending out new deal notifications to Twitter. Yes I know it was less than a year since Twitter was launched. It was way before Obama and McCain were on Twitter. It was way before Ashton Kutcher and CNN’s competition to reach 1 million followers. Way before Jason Scott’s cat. And of course OzBargain was here before Oprah.

Sadly OzBargain did not have the massive number of Twitter followers like the celebrities. In fact we have just reached 500 followers last week on the May 14^th 2009. Congratulations to @tdm911 for becoming our 500^th followers on Twitter!

Small milestones — but significant number nevertheless. It’s difficult to predict that what will be the hottest social network next year, but I’ll make sure OzBargain is there :)

Last week Vikas sent an email to me sometime late in the afternoon…

I am currently with OptusNet and every-time I type in your website OzBargain, it goes to eBay…

Have you done something?

Yes I know sometimes I uploaded half-baked scripts onto OzBargain which caused all kinds of mess, but seriously I have not been able to work on the website for a few weeks due to general busyness. Moreover, why am I sending visitors to eBay? No way! So, maybe Optus stuffed something up? Or maybe OzBargain got hacked and the intruder now redirects everyone to eBay instead (which does have bargains every now and then). I quickly log back onto the site. Check the logs. Nope. Works for me, and I can’t seem to be able to reproduce the issue (always happen at work anyway so I am used to false alarms). Maybe if there is indeed some issues with the network, I’ll be flooded with the emails anyway so I would just wait and see…

An hour later Vikas wrote back and apologised his mistakes.

Scott — Found the problem

Click on this link and see for yourself: <OzBargain with one of ‘a’ missing>.com.au and it goes to eBay.

It must be an honor for ebay to try and get your traffic.

Huh? I know lots of people hate eBay but I do not think they will go this low to typo-squat OzBargain’s domain to get visitors. So I trace the link, and the first hop it brought me to rover.ebay.com/…. For those who are not familiar with it, it is eBay’s partner/affiliate link. So basically if you missed an “a” in the domain name, instead of coming to OzBargain to share the best deals in Australia, you’ll end up on eBay.com.au. Moreover, everything you have purchased on eBay will send a piece of seller fee to the guy who typo-squatted our domain.

Yes. Did I say a “guy”? A bit of googling reveals all the details I need — name, address, phone number, photo + a few other domains as well. While it is permissible to typo-squat domains on gTLD (and people will hate you for it), I do not think it is actually allowed on .au domain — at least auDA has published a policy against it.

Well. Complain has been sent to auDA. Let’s see how fast can they react. By the way, cheers to Vikas for spotting this.

Saw this in today’s Dilbert.

’nuff said. I guess it might remind many about Acer and their rebate practice here.

Last night a deal was posted by pokerplayer on OzBargain, and it quickly broke the record and became the most voted deal in OzBargain history — Logitech MX Revolution Rechargeable Cordless Mouse For $34.10 from Dell. Currently it has received 164 votes and over 5,000 click throughs to Dell’s website. Consider the same mouse is going for at least $65 according to staticICE (and often more than $100), $34.10 delivered is a great deal.

Except it’s from Dell. According to the comments posted on OzBargain, looks like it’s going to be a repeat of last year’s pricing error, which only occured 4-5 months ago with promise that it will not happen again.

D’oh.

Congratulations to those who managed to get OfficeWorks to price match it for them, whom seem to be the biggest winner here.

Update: Here is an image of the Dell Giant Easter Deals (PNG, 912kb), just in case they have pulled the media page.

There are several reasons why a post on OzBargain gets unpublished, i.e. in a state that only the original poster and moderator can see, and will be automatically purged from the database if not being republished after 90 days. For example,

• It’s a duplicate of an old post.
• It’s violating our terms and services
• It’s spammy
• Someone else requested it to be taken down

Yes. We do have other parties, mostly merchants themselves or their representing media party, request some posts to be removed from OzBargain. Most common reason is that the “deal” itself is exclusive to their subscribers and is not opened to public. At OzBargain we would like to work with both the shoppers and merchants, and we understand that an invite-only private promotion with limited number now exposed to the public is probably going to do no good to both the shoppers and the merchants. Usually we are happy to take those posts down at receiving of take down notices — but asking without threatening would be the preferred way to do it.

So we had 3 take down notices this week –

Monday

Got an email at around 1pm. Got another email at 3pm saying “online voucher URGENT”. Then the body of the email contains that threatening take down notice. Here’s an excerpt:

This voucher was unauthorized and we have been advised to inform you that we will contact ASIC and further prosecution may be deemed necessary, should you fail to do this.

Wow. ASIC? Prosecution? And no where in the email contains the actual URL of the deal posted on OzBargain, so I have to go and find it myself. Since I am such a chicken I took the voucher down immediately. But hey, I don’t like to be threatened.

Tuesday

Got another email today asking me to contact her about “advertising vouchers on your website”. Yeah? What does that mean? So I wrote back. What fired back to me was an angry email. It turns out that a voucher posted on OzBargain back in February is a fake, or photoshopped, which caused their cashiers a lot of confusion.

Cool. That’s fine. We don’t like fake vouchers either. So I removed the PDF containing the voucher, and put a notice on that deal. However, when you ask people to do things, ask them nicely.

Wednesday

Must be my lucky week because I had received take down notices 3 days in a row! This time it’s someone at Expedia, a big online travel agency. They have launched a promotion to a specially segmented group of Expedia customers to have free SMH or Sun Herald subscription. Somehow this got posted on OzBargain so they are asking for it to be removed.

Different from those on Monday and Tuesday, she explained the matter clearly, and asked OzBargain politely.

Although it’s great to see our brand communicated virally, this offer is only available to Expedia newsletter subscribers and the terms & conditions of the promotion reflect this, so no further people are eligible to register for this promotion.

I contact you with the request to remove the above mentioned post from the Ozbargain.com.au website immediately, to ensure that non Expedia customers and Ozbargain visitors will not be disappointed.

Yup. It’s looking out for all the parties — Expedia, their customers, OzBargain, and our visitors. 3 minutes later, the offer is unpublished with a comment explaining the reason.

So, if your promotions got posted on OzBargain and you wish to take them down — send contact me about it — I am more than happy to find a way to work it out for you and for our members and visitors. You might need to prove that your company is related to that offer though (from your email address for example). Also, ask politely — it will get things done faster.

Another note for our OzBargain members. Almost everyone with the take down notice asks me who posted their offers. With our privacy policy — don’t worry, they won’t have your details.