It appears that as we get closer to November 4th, people (by people I mean the WSJ) all across the country are beginning to look closer at Obama’s proposed “tax cuts” and other tenants of his campaign. One of the most startling things people are finding is that while he promises to cut taxes on 95% of families (40% of which do not pay taxes) he’s “proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%”. Something hardly anyone was talking about a week ago.

Now MSM (main stream media) and Others are finally taking note. So yes, while he would “cut” taxes, the truth is that just like other democrats before him who promised lower taxes, he’s actually raising them. In fact, according to the WSJ article:

Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year.

Thats something you won’t hear any of the talking heads on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN or any other MSM outlet mention or ask him about. Its only a wonder why we haven’t heard that from the McCain Camp yet.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Wild fires start with a simple spark. Whether or not its from a match, a lightning strike, an unattended campfire or a cigarette butt, it takes one little spark to set the world ablaze. Saint Catherine of Siena said that “If you are what you should be, You will set the World ablaze”. Izea, the folks who brought payperpost and paid posting to the forefront of the blogging world, hope you’ll become a prolific blogger with a myriad of topics from their SocialSpark system.

SocialSpark is the next revolution of blogging services. Besides being a ginormous marketing platform for bloggers and advertisers alike, its aiming to become a leader in social networking for blogging and seems to be well on its way.

Anyone looking to monetize their blog, make friends, find new and interesting reads or just develop a growing reader base should take a look at the new marketing trend SocialSpark is creating.

In addition to many “for pay” opportunities ranging from simple posts to full blown video/audio masterpieces, SocialSpark allows almost anyone to reach people by asking for help promoting items, posts, sites for virtually nothing more than a link in return. One of the nice things Spark is working to do is prevent the massive google spank many paid bloggers received last year.

SocialSpark unlike many of its predicessors is Search Engine Friendly. They include the nofollow tags in the links you use (which many engines are looking for these days). They’ve also got a pretty good code of ethics and like PPP pay on a fairly regular basis as well. There has been some negative feed back about some of the options for advertising (such as some embedded flash) but for the most part SocialSpark has been received pretty well.

If you’ve been looking for a good way to make some extra cash on the side (and these days, who hasn’t) don’t look too much further than SocialSpark. You might just set the world ablaze.

Popularity: 14% [?]

With all the brouhaha over the google bitchslap that took place towards the end of 2007 (in case you didn’t know, google penalized sites who posted links with out nofollow for payment) something was bound to step up and take its place. The question is can a new comer survive in the shark eat shark world of SEO and Page ranking? IZEA (payperpost’s daddy) hopes so and it thinks it has a winning product with RealRank.

RealRank (RR) is Izea’s answer for its affiliates on how to retain a ranking system that doesn’t care how or what you link to so much as traffic quantity and quality to your site. The idea is that the realrank weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK (Izea tool Kit). While the idea was just released to the public, Izea and the PPP crowd have been using this since December ‘07 as a way to rank websites in order to maintain the level of advertising as before. From where I sit, the only down side is that advertisers have been slow on the uptake of the new ranking system, prefering PageRank still despite the fact that anyone who would even consider posting about their products has virtually no PR at the present time.

The realrank system is a pretty nice system with some nice looking graphs. According to the ranking, Delusions of Grandeur is some where around 452 for the day with a weekly average of somewhere around 588. Not bad when you consider the 100,000 blogs that Izea/PPP is potentially already tracking. A nice feature about RealRank is the ability to keep the stats private. While I personally do not mind if others see how successful I am, it might not behoove a smaller site to have its stats public until they’ve built up a good base.

According to the realrank site:

RealRank is a more accurate ranking than Alexa and Google PageRank because it isn’t based on a small sample of a site’s visitors or on a censored link-weighting algorithm. It’s based on real traffic.

One of the other cool things is that they have an open api so anyone can develop for it with out any penalty. Already, there’s a rank badge available and its only a matter of time before there are more and more things developed.

We’ll have to see if RR makes a difference. If you haven’t checked it out yet, visit IzeaRanks to check out your blog, create an account and get the tracking code for your site. It could help boost your traffic!

Popularity: 51% [?]