John Chow, a Dot Com Mogul...

Let me introduce you to John Chow, founder of The TechZone since 1999, as a technology specialist he's very successful in his business and based his blog on this idea: The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul. He provides tips on making money online, but also implicitly shows how to monetize a very high traffic blog (like having a freelance writer to bad sites reviews for money, and paying him a share of the bad site owner's money, not many bloggers can get away with it) and set an example for many followers.

Not everyone likes him, because of his style and the way he seems to takes lightly things that others find hard to do, like making money online and having a large readership. Critics are often comparing him to other well established "make money online" bloggers and ask: "how much did John Chow help you to earn last month, last year?". Their point being that John Chow's readers don't get useful, practical advices, but only reviews, ads and ramblings. But that's ok... as he puts it: "I make money online by telling people how much money I make online".

To mock John Chow further, in july 2007 John Cow was born, this parody blog's WordPress template was, at first, very similar to John Chow's but then johnchow.com had a complete redesign and johncow.com had its template modified too but without copying. The bloggers behind johncow.com are also in the make money online niche, and have a whole "cow" thematic in almost all of their blog posts and in the graphical elements. They also provide advices on making money online and are doing it themselves in the process.

Do you get it?

I hope this helps you get the story behind John Chow and John Cow and perhaps you'll do like me and add their RSS feeds to your daily blog intake :-)

I did the Simpson-like characters (edit: not visible anymore) with a fun site that I already recommended to you when I wrote about Joel Comm, it's SimpsonizeMe.

You simply upload a photo and personalize elements such as nose, mouth, etc. Then you can download the picture and modify it with a graphic editing package such as Gimp or PhotoShop. Have fun with it!