What has the blogosphere been discussing this week? Let’s find out.

Laura Spencer approaches a common question that many freelancers may have. The assumption is that you will have more clients if you lower your rates, but is this really the strategy that you want to take? According to Laura, you’re already asking the wrong kinds of questions.

Lea Woodward helps the Internet entrepreneurs in the audience by describing five beginners’ tips to make money from AdSense. The Google ad platform is a popular one, but are you doing what you can to maximize your income from it?

Daree Allen shares one of her most recent customer service experience and, to put it lightly, it wasn’t a positive one. She was looking for a new apartment to lease and it seems the property management company could barely see this “invisible customer,” quickly moving from one customer to the next without paying attention to anyone in particular.

Wil Wheaton is quite the icon among the geekier crowd, but he also happens to be a very compelling blogger. He recently had the chance to attend E3 2010 in Los Angeles. The popular video game convention certainly didn’t disappoint, filling Wil’s day with plenty of great titles and cool innovations.

Dough Roller recognizes that many high school students are probably looking for summer jobs, as well as part-time jobs they can maintain during the school year. In the post, you find 10 high-paying jobs for exactly this demographic. You don’t have to flip burgers for minimum wage.

Many Internet marketers are already familiar with the existing ad networks out there on the web. They already know about the Google Adwords and Adsense system, for example, fully understanding the intricacies of finding the right keyword, adjusting the ad creative, and so on.

However, the same strategy may not be quite as effective with Facebook Ads. On the surface, the system seems to work in much the same way. You are able to target a specific demographic based on a number of different criteria, so you should be able to see a similar click-thru rate and, should the destination URL allow for it, a similar conversion rate. This does not appear to be completely true.

Part of this has to do with how people interact with different websites. If you are buying advertising space on Google search results (search engine marketing), that’s one thing. If you are buying ads on different websites (Adsense/Adwords), that’s another thing. And Facebook is entirely different too. Many people who go to Facebook are too preoccupied with the casual games, status updates, and uploaded photos to bother looking at the ads, let alone click on them.

Even though the ads can be targeted to an extent on the popular social networking site, it seems that it may not be quite as effective, at least for certain niches and industries. What has been your experience with marketing through Facebook’s paid ad system? Has it worked for you? Or do you find greater success with different ad networks?

Do you oftentimes use the same block of text in multiple places on your blog? Perhaps there is a usual snippet of HTML that you commonly append to some blog posts, but not others, so it is not suitable to edit the single post template in your WordPress theme?

If you find yourself facing any similar scenarios, you may want to consider the Contemplate plugin for WordPress. Developed by David Gwyer, it allows you to insert commonly used blocks of content anywhere in posts, pages, comments, and widgets. To do this, you just use the shortcode defined within the plugin.

The WordPress plugin allows for text, HTML, CSS, and Javascript in its mini-templates, adding a great deal of versatility. The shortcode takes on the form of [contemplate1], [contemplate2], [contemplate3], and so on. You can define the names of the individual templates, but it seems that the shortcodes cannot be customized. I hope that Gwyer changes this with future revisions of Contemplate.

For more information, including screenshots and the free download link, check out the Plugin Directory on the official WordPress website.

One business tactic that you may want to consider is to offer a free product or service in anticipation of the launch of the related paid product or service. This can offer several advantages. For starters, it gives potential customers a taste of things to come and it can help to build up anticipation for the upcoming launch.

Perhaps even more importantly, it can give you an opportunity to build up a mailing list that can subsequently be used for future announcements and product launches. This is a very targeted list, because the people on it have already expressed explicit interest in the types of products or services that you sell. They have already shown that they want what you have.

For instance, consider the free ebook being offered by John Chow. Called the Ultimate Blog Profit Model, it is a free download for anyone who visits the main page of the site. All they have to do is provide a name and email address, confirming the latter when a message comes through.

These contacts are added to the list and they will be immediately informed when Blog Profit Camp launches. This is the paid product that is directly related to the free ebook. John Chow is increasing interest in this product by offering a glimpse of it for free.

Have you considered using a similar strategy for your own company? Have you tried offering a free demo or download in anticipation of an upcoming release?

Even though the price of solid state drives is coming down, it is still much more affordable to buy regular hard drives instead. We’re also finding that more and more people are demanding more and more storage in their portable devices. And we want said devices to be as thin as possible.

Aiding in this effort is a recently announced hard drive from Toshiba. The Travelstar Z7K320 measures just 7mm in thickness, but it is able to maintain the full “desktop” spinning speed of 7200rpm. The 2.5-inch drive also supports the Serial ATA (SATA) 3Gbps transfer speed standard, meaning you don’t have to sacrifice anything in terms of performance.

It is available in up to 320GB in capacity and features a 16MB cache. Given its smaller size, the Hitachi drive offers a low power consumption rating of just 1.8 watts during operation and 0.8 watts when idle. For even lower power consumption, you can consider the similar Travelstar Z5K320. It spins at just 5400rpm, but consumes just 1.6 watts when active and 0.55 watts when idle. Its cache is a memory little smaller too at 8MB.

The Hitachi super-thin hard drive has just been announced, so it may be some time before it hits retail channels or appears in consumer-ready devices from various manufacturers.

Canada is home to some of the most amazing landscapes on the planet, offering widespread prairies, amazing icebergs, and spectacular forests. One of the little known secrets along the west coast is Cape Roger Curtis and its best interests are protected by the Cape Roger Curtis Trust Society.

A BlueFur customer, the trust society was formed in November 2002 and it aims “to create the optimum solution for the future of Cape Roger Curtis lands on behalf of the greater community.” There are currently about 300 members of the Society, according to the about page, and they conduct ongoing public awareness campaigns and engage in constructive dialog concerning the Cape’s use.

For those of you who happen to be out by Bowen Island later this month, you may want to attend the Annual General Meeting on June 26. The meeting will be held at the multi-purpose room at Bowen Island Community School between 10:00am and noon. There are other ways you can help too.

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