Beginning tomorrow morning am off on a six-day motorcycle road trip taking me from here in Southern California, through Arizona, a tiny piece of New Mexico, and into Colorado. It'll be me and three other guys that I frequently ride with. I should be back to my full blogging form on September 6.

Of course I'll be taking my digital camera, trying to get as many good photos as I can. I'm also bringing my laptop, hoping to chronicle the journey on my biker blog, Biker News Online. I already posted a ride-map and itinerary that outlines the entire course. When I come back, I'll work on writing up a comprehensive story on the whole thing.

As for blogging, you won't see a whole lot on Strange New Products, or much on any of the others. We'll see what happens. I'm not saying that I won't be blogging at all, I just don't know what the circumstances will be at this moment.

I'll be heading out to Salt Lake City, Utah this afternoon to visit the good folks at MyFamily, Inc., and won't be back home until Friday evening. You'll probably see a lot fewer blog postings from me over the next few days.

While our company is establishing itself as a weblog publisher, it's actually our websites that generate most of our business. I'd say somewhere around 75% of our total traffic flows through our websites, and they earn about 90% of our income. And MyFamily still accounts for the lion's share of our income, with AdSense on a course to catch up, and Harris Digital Publishing a distant third.

The outlook in the online genealogy publishing market is uncertain. It doesn't look like the market will be as lucrative as it once was, perhaps due to a variety of factors. For one, MyFamily's suite of web properties just isn't all that popular as it once was. There is also a whole new series of other websites offering new content for free. Interment.net, one of our properties, has long published valuable genealogical content and made it available for free.

Some affiliates in this sphere are blaming sites like Interment.net, accusing them of contributing to overall lower sales for MyFamily.

The conference starts tomorrow. So, we'll what happens.

Today, while perusing the referral logs for Strange New Products, I noticed a sizeable amount of referrals coming from Yahoo's site directory.

I clicked over there to see what it was all about. Apparently, they added SNP to their directory.

The interesting thing is that we never submitted this URL to them, nor ever requested they add it. It seems someone at Yahoo found it on their own, and decided to add it. Cool.

What's funny is that I've submitted other URLs into Yahoo's directory several times, over the past several years, and they've never added them. Yet here, SNP is not even one month old yet, and someone at Yahoo adds it by their own initiative, just like that.

The folks at RealTechNews asked me to do some blogging for them as an invite from Strange New Products. It seems SNP is getting a reputation for blogging the strangest stuff, thanks to Liquid Ass. Basically that's what they want, strange stuff. I'll do my best for them. But, I think I'll also blog some not-so-strange stuff that you'll only find on RTN.

As for that piece about Liquid Ass, it's generating tons of backlinks for SNP. Message boards, blogs, even USENET groups, in every niche category you can think of, linking to that article! I imagine orders for Liquid Ass are going through the roof. I can't imagine how they are having to fill those bottles.

In other blogging news, Political Dogs is starting gain some traction. PD is not a Clear Digital Media property, but one that I co-own personally with a buddy of mine. Dave writes most of the content, while I chime in once in awhile. Dave tends to write very lengthy stuff, and one such piece, "Media Field Day", is drawing quite a few responses, considering how little traffic PD gets.

Politics is a tough niche to get traction in. There's is just SO much competition from other blogs, that it's hard to get any attention.

The other problem is that small-time bloggers like Dave and myself don't have the ability to get news as it happens. We mainly respond to what's being reported by the MSM. And who wants to read the opinions of a couple of whack jobs like us? I boils down to hoping you've optimized your writings well enough for search engine rankings, and finding the one subject that hits it big.

Google AdSense on political blogs is really bad. It's really stinky. The CPC is dismal, and the CTR is a joke. Moreover, the ad relevancy itself isn't all that great. PD is largely a conservative blog, yet half the time AdSense gives us pro-liberal ads.

Dave and I figure selling t-shirts with the PD brand may be the better thing to do. He's got a buddy that does custom screen printing.

Spurred on by a good head start from Strange New Products (thanks Blogebrity and Gizmodo) we've relaunched Cool Website Ideas.

CWS was originally launched in July 2004, but not as a blog. It was a static-HTML site that featured websites based on novel ideas, but focused more on their business aspects. It was meant to be a serious review of how such websites were monetized.

The problem was that it took quite a bit of time reviewing each site just to write up a good analysis. Having to spend this much time meant taking time away from other tasks, thus we had to set it aside until we could come up with a different approach.

Enter the gadget blogs.

I guess it's no secret that folks have always been fascinated with new products. The fact that there seems to be an endless supply of gadget blogs proves this. Part of the fascination with marveling over the latest gear has something to do with seeking entertainment. Gizmodo seems to know this quite well by its often humorous write ups. But there's an artistic side to this fascination as well, with products that seem to solve tough problems through simple designs. I think this is another reason why people keep coming back to their favorite gadget blog, to reaffirm their appreciation for the simple-and-ingenious.

And that's where we come back to CWS. We've relaunched it to take advantage of this particular interest, as opposed to dry reviews of content and monetization. It's like a gadget blog that writes about websites. While we expect web publishers to be the core audience, we'd also like to attract folks who read gadget blogs.