The Apprentice Blog

The Apprentice Blog Lives!

Yes, it's true.  TheApprenticeBlog.com is back up and running just in time for the last couple of episodes in the oddest Apprentice ever. Over the last 10 weeks, there has been lots of speculation on the Apprentice Views and sites about what happened to the site and why the new owner wasn't at least leveraging the back links for advertising revenue.  Whether he will answer that question directly still remains to be seen.  But it nice to see that he's back and taking charge again. Sadly, due to the drama here around my stolen wallet and the double Sci-Fi hits…

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The Apprentice Blog Fired?

You all know that for five seasons of The Donald, and one season of Martha, I ran TheApprenticeBlog.com.  With a little nudging, a quiz asking Which Apprentice Are You?, and regular commentary about the business lessons and the candidates’ performance, I built a healthy… nay… huge active reader base.   Then, before Donald could move west and shove his unsuspecting candidates into tents in the backyard, I sold it on eBay.   Since I included all 6 season-specific sites and back content,  Terry, of Superaff.com, was bang on when he/she pointed out that the new owner “just bought themselves a whole bunch of links for peanuts.”  The…

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The Apprentice Blog Fired?

Some of you may know that for five seasons of The Donald, and one season of Martha, I ran TheApprenticeBlog.com.  With a little nudging, a quiz asking Which Apprentice Are You?, and regular commentary about the business lessons and the candidates' performance, I built a healthy… nay… huge active reader base.   Then, before Donald could move west and shove his unsuspecting candidates into tents in the backyard, I sold it on eBay.   Bloggers like Terry, of Superaff.com, pointed out that the new owner "just bought themselves a whole bunch of links for peanuts."  The new owner introduced himself on the site, and…

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Sweet Shufflin’

Sweet Shufflin’

I just won an iPod Shuffle.  Then I tried to convince them I hadn’t won.  Really.  I did. Here’s the deal.  Lately, Typepad has been announcing a new widget partner every couple of days.  One of the widget partners is Tumri CornerStore, that “makes it easy for your readers to shop for relevant product offers without leaving your site.” I figured I’d play with it to see how it worked, so I set one up for “electronic gadgets” on TheApprenticeBlog.com. I got a little square box down at the bottom of the left-sidebar displaying cool gadgets and a price. Click…

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Simply unsweetened

Hi guys, Yup, unsweetened.ca is up and replacing “Letters from Lex” and this is the first exclusively unsweetened post. Warning: this post may cause boredom, disinterest and clicking away, since it is primarily for me to test the new blog. So as with most blogging – this post is for me, not so much for you. I’ve just finished 4 days of networking-shmoozing-networking at Book Expo, which was great and a shmoozing-at-Book-Expo speaking engagement at Humber’s Creative Book Publishing program which was fun for me, and hopefully useful for the attendees. So my focus now is on promoting the sale…

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Is The Party Over?

Is The Party Over?

Remember yesterday when I listed all the attention I was getting from Rannie & roro?  Well, minutes after posting that I found out that the sale of TheApprenticeBlog.com on eBay.was noted in yesterday’s MarketWatch.com Internet Daily column by Frank Baranko. As per my conversation yesterday with Rohan, Baranko started the article with “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.” Not exactly the media endorsement to buy-buy-buy that I’d like to see, but predictable given the performance of the show in the last season and the general downward slide away from Business lessons towards soap-opera drama which has caused me to…

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The Apprentice Blog – Season 5

Yes, in the midst of all this craziness, Season 5 of the Apprentice launched last night.  When I checked my email this morning I already had over 8000 ApprenticeBlog readers, including one asking why I hadn’t published my opinions of the first episode… it had been 12 hours already and he was waiting. Some days I wonder exactly how I get myself into these situations… and then I remember – "oh yes, I’m a complete nutbar!" Off to continue building those press kits (Yes, Miss Carol even I leave my press kits to the absolute last minute, and pray my…

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Well didn’t I just get told!

So you know how writing a blog is a conversation… the whole concept predicated on an interactive journaling exercise?  This belief in interactivity is held so strongly that there are people who have claimed a blog is not a blog without commenting. So say you build a blog specifically for the conversation – say like The Apprentice Blog. Conversations start, they build, they grow.  The community builds. You have thousands of regular readers.  The blog grows and develops and conversations start happening without you even starting them. Then things start going a little wonky, you don’t update for a couple…

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The Apprentice Blog – Season 4

Yup, it has started again.  I’m obliged to be seated in front of the tv Thursday nights … but now, with the addition of Martha – Wednesday night is also tv night. Argh… my little brain is fried. If you don’t know what I’m talking about… it’s the new seasons of The Apprentice, and thus the Apprentice Blogs are up and rolling.  The Apprentice Blog::Martha’s Apprentice It has started.  The new seasons of The Apprentice, and thus the Apprentice Blogs are up and rolling.  On Sept 21st, Martha started the ball rolling with a book development task that had the…

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