John Chow dot Com Review
Roughly two days ago John Chow of, you'd never guess that, John Chow dot Com, started a little 'competition' on his popular weblog. This was not much new, on the first glimpse, but the previous attempt didn't turn out to be much of a success because it was issued trough Pay Per Post dot Com, a website where webloggers can apply in order to get paid small fees for reviews they publish on their weblog.
What's this contest about?
My best guess of he goal of this contest is self-reflection, John's website has been the same for quite a while, and I suppose he's looking for some possible improvements on it. Instead of only the small group that was able to register their website on PPP, this time John allowed all his readers to join this opportunity. The reward for this little job has changed as well, instead of the small amount of money PPP would've issued, John Chow now offers a link back to every author that submits a review of his blog in time. The less tech savvy might consider this a bad deal, but the opposite is true; John's weblog is ranked in the top 1500 on Technorati, which makes a link from his website pretty valuable for your own web ranking.
Enough on the contest for now, who is John Chow?
To quote his own articles, John is 'a damn fine person, friend of the community, Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant', but, as he added, that wasn't exactly a seriously description, his more realistic description states the following;
I live in Vancouver, Canada pretty much all my life. Before discovering the internet, I was a partner in a local Richmond printing company. After over a decade of running a print shop, I decided it was time for a change, and the internet was where I was going to stake my claim.
On April 1999, I started a little technology site call The TechZone. That site has risen to become one of the largest hardware tech sites on the net. Currently the site has over 10,000 pages and gets over 200,000 page views per day.
And what's his website about?
The title describes the content pretty well, “John Chow dot Com, The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul”. John writes about various things, of course the majority is internet-related, as he's the mogul around there, but also various miscellaneous stories about random things and his own personal life are described.
What makes John's weblog so good compared to the millions of other weblogs?
First of all John has a relaxed and understandable writing style, I believe that if John would've written a book on Einstein's relativity theory everyone would be able to understand it, perhaps it's an idea John 
.
Besides his writing style his subjects are also pretty useful, such as his report on the most profitable ad network for low traffic blogs, his review of the brand new SEO-book and his various posts about the most optimal ad placements available. In addition to that his blog is one of the few websites that still offer full articles in RSS without filling them with advertisements, I'd recommend every webmaster to subscribe to his feed.
And now the harder part; is there room for improvements to the layout?
Yes, there is no doubt room for improvements on his website, just like every single webpage has. To start at the beginning: big stock picture in the header of the page unrelated to its content, the weblog has basically nothing to do with cars or racing, which can no doubt confuse visitors that come by for the first time, I'd advise to change that one into something more related to the blog, or at least add something to it that would show more of the actual subject.
Another point that could be improved some are the RSS links; there are two links in the header, for both comments and posts, which are both outdated I guess, because of the redirect to FeedBurner, but just 200 pixels lower the sidebar starts, where another link, this time the famous FeedBurner icon, is shown. Also, when you've got an article on your screen, a fourth RSS link, for comments, shows up at the bottom. I know John loves the RSS phenomenon, but this might be even a bigger overkill than his 'worlds biggest RSS button'.
Another thing that I would personally change is the 'common Wordpress look' that a lot of blogs bear with them over the net; the famous sidebar at the right with latest posts, comments and a blogroll. Even though I can imagine people like it, it's a common design that has somewhat proven itself to be handy and easy to use, which makes it hard to create something better.
As last suggestion I’d like to bring up the ‘Top Posts’ page, it’s a wonderful idea to show the most read or highest quality posts, especially when the blog is small and there are only a couple of worthy posts. But, with a website of this size perhaps you should consider making separate pages for each category, as right now the page is longer than about 5 times my screen, which doesn’t increase readability.
Conclusion?
As this is not a paid review, I'm allowed to conclude anything I want, but a negative conclusion just wouldn't fit here, especially not since I’m also a frequent visitor and proud RSS junk, John Chow has created a wonderful website with a big amount of readers and fans from all over the world. Keep up the great work and keep on writing!
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