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.

Via this old thread on Whirlpool forums, where I noticed two new Australian “bargain sites” have been posted over the last month.

BShare.com.au

First we have BShare.com.au. I presume B in BShare stands for Bargain, and it looks like it is still in pre-launch stage:

Well. There’s very little I can find out about this website. Its 1st deal was posted just after the new year so I guess that would be the age of this website. It’s also Drupal-based + the Drigg module. Page thumbnail generated with PageGlimpse.

EnterTheBargain.com.au

This is much more better looking (I wish I have the design skillz, ha!) and it’s using the Kung-Fu theme and the pun on this Bruce Lee’s movie.

It’s vBulletin powered so it’s much more forum like. From the posts it looks like it has been around since September last year.

Well. Looks like it’s becoming an even more saturated market. All the best to BShare and EnterTheBargain.

Via the comments posted by shaztronics at OzBargain. DealDump is a feed aggregator that put all the latest deals from OzBargain, Buckscoop and RetailMeNot into one spot. In fact it does a bit more than that — it also lists out the current sales from various one day one deal sites (Zazz, CotD, OzStock, etc). At the end, you get a single page where you can glance through where the bargains are in Australia.

What a good idea!

Here is a tip for ya, Shaztronics. Grab the actual scores from OzBargain (I can provide the API for you), Buckscoop and other voting sites, and then build a ‘meme-like aggregator that highlights deals that got linked the most (+ most votes) automatically (like Techmeme) — but for Australian deals :)

It has got to be one of the easiest competition on OzBargain so far — just guess a number and you could win a Microsoft Explorer Mouse with BlueTrack Technology. It’s so easy that some actually forgot to take out their calculators. What Kingwang26 said in the comment was actually very correct — the hints are all there and a bit of calculation can get you the bounds — from historical data.

The fact is, history predicts the future but unlike what Juslookin00 has suggested, rather than going up, the number of Internet Explorer users actually went down over the last week (no free/open source software conspiracy here please :)

Here’s the snapshot from Google Analytics, who provides statistics for OzBargain:

So the correct answer is — 41.85%!!! Let’s also congratulate our winner here — Matthew Wun who guessed 41.8%.

Amongst all the IE users, 69.86% use IE7, 29.08% are still stuck in IE6 and 1.03% have tested the water with IE8.

I’ll be back to Sydney by Wednesday and will hopefully post out the prize on the following day. Thanks to all who have participated.

One of my first Christmas presents last year was from Deeps at Microsoft Australia, whom I’ve worked together to create the IE8 Web Slice for OzBargain. It’s the Microsoft Explorer Mouse with BlueTrack technology that works on “any service surface”.

• Easy Recharging
• Reliable Wireless on the go
• Sophisticated design and comfort
• Go anywhere
• Retail for ~$99 from MSY

And guess what — it is still sitting on my desk, started to collecting dust. A wireless mouse is not that useful to me unfortunately as I am mostly desk-bound. There’s always a designated area on my desk that’s flat so the all-surface BlueTrack technology is an overkill to me as well.

So instead of becoming obsolete on my desk, I am now giving away this Microsoft Explorer Mouse. Guess the answer correctly, and this high-tech wireless mouse will be yours!

Rules

To enter, leave a comment with your answer in this blog post — and make sure you use a correct email address just in case you guessed the right answer and needs to be notified about the prize). So what’s the question?

Since I got this gift because of Microsoft Internet Explorer, I would like you to guess the exact percentage of Internet Explorer visits on OzBargain from 1^st of January to next Sunday, 25^th of January 2009. I will then announce the winner probably the following Monday or Tuesday.

I have no idea about the exact answer either as there might be a huge influx of IE users this week due to the release of Windows 7 beta. But here are some hints, from the stats collected over the last 30 days from Google Analytics:

• There are 10% more Firefox visitors than Internet Explorer visitors.
• Safari visitors are 1/10 of the Firefox visitors.
• 4.43% of OzBargain visitors use Google Chrome.

So your answer would be in the form of xx.yy%. Whoever guessed the closest value wins. Let the guessing game start!

Ops. I meant to post about it like two weeks ago, but anyway. It’s better be late than never…

Happy New Year, OzBargain!

I have actually been back to work for a week, although I have been a bit lazy getting back to work on OzBargain (as you can see my lack of participation on the site). Hopefully this blog post will kick start 2009 and get everything in gear for me to get back working on OzBargain again.

First of all, let’s look at some of the stats from last year —

While there were up and downs last year, it was still pretty much a year of growth, continued from what we had the year before. For December 2008, we had 665,000+ visits from 221,000+ unique visitors, just falling short of 2 million page views, having 3,500+ readers on our RSS feeds and 150+ Twitter followers.

Back in March/April we had to move the site from Melbourne Australia to Fremont US as our host back then had some stability issue. For the past 9 months OzBargain has been hosted on a VPS at Linode for USD$29.95. Big kudos to Linode for the top notch service that they have provided.

Some of the most-viewed deals from last year:

• Dell Vostro 220ST Desktop + 19″ Monitor for $238.64 — it was the Dell fiasco back in November. Top deal? Maybe not, but definitely news worthy, as this page received almost 25,000 page views. It’s related deal has also received ~13,000 page views. From the latest comment on that deal, it seems that not everything has been resolved, as some people still have not received refund. Can anyone give an update on this issue?

• 10c off per litre fuel at Woolworths Fuel — lots of visitors came to this page via search engine, totalling 21,000+ hits. Don’t ask me why as I have never done any search engine optimisation :) However I guess people must have been desperate last year when the petrol price went up all the way to around $1.60/litre here in Sydney.

• Catch of the Day Birthday Bash & $199 Wii — the most commented post from last year, and has also received most negative votes. It was quite an event, but from QQQ has said to me that it’s not likely to repeat again…

• Pizzas from $4.95 pickup @ Dominos Pizzas — Pizza deals always grab lots of visitors (12,000+ hits in this case). The two $4.95 pizza deal also receive over 10k page views last year. I guess the pizza deals on OzBargain were popular enough that we have store managers posting in forums condemning the use of coupon and pizza customisation tricks. Too bad that those $4.95 coupons are getting more and more rare (if any is still valid). Maybe “eating healthy” might become a reality this year :)

• 37″ Sony Bravia LCD for $899 — 11,000 page views on this one and I wonder how many Sony Kmart has actually sold. No I did not get one although was very tempted.

To share your top bargains in 2008, please comment in this forum thread started by bargrin.

2009?

There will be various announcements throughout the year in terms of partnership and new development. A lot of details are still too early to make public, but definitely stay tuned!

How many of you are actually Internet Explorer 8 users? You know. The one that has Beta 2 released 3 months ago, and is heading for gold release sometime early next year? I am. Well, during the day when I am at work which requires me to use Internet Explorer. And I know some of you are as well — around 0.36% of visitors to OzBargain use IE8. Not that many actually — in fact much less than Google Chrome which comes at whooping 3.73%. However IE8 is much better than the previous versions of Internet Explorers (from a developers’ point of view — a built in debugger finally!!!) And you know — all these will change next year with Microsoft’s monopoly dominance on the PC desktops, and they will all be running IE8 sooner or later…

I guess the real reason for this blog post is, OzBargain has actually implemented some extra functionality just for the up-coming web browser from Redmond. Shocking! Is OzBargain selling out?! No, I am not paid by MSFT nor have they offered me a big ass table as Christmas present (except for a free lunch, thanks Deeps!). OzBargain has been invited to participate in the up-coming IE8 launch, and the challenge is — how to incorporate new IE8 features into existing website. And in my case, adding a Web Slice.

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