Category: Web/Tech

Here’s the big announcement the blogging community has been groaning for. My interest is peaked.

About 3 years ago on a long road trip Jon and I came up with the idea of a rolling LAN party. So as the church vans worked their way from state to state we could set up tournaments for the latest first person shooter or Madden game. Forget showing movies. Forget each van having an XBOX 360 or PS3, let’s really pimp this out and have van teams compete against one another! We thought, "it’s probably possible but not easy." Just the kind of challenge Jon liked.

Well, we never did set-up the routers to try to make it happen but I always thought it was a fun idea.

Now it’s closer to a reality. Check out the AirBox CM3 from WAAV.

This mobile broadband cellular router can maintain a broadband speed connection on the go and allows multiple devices such as PDA’s, laptops and gaming consoles to be connected simultaneously. It weighs the same as a paperback book small enough to be placed under a car seat.

At just $500 (not including your cellular data plan) this fits nicely into any youth ministry budget, right?

I find this very funny. Yes, the State Department has a blog. So citizen journalism finds it’s match at some office in Washington. Likely, some government worker collects quite a salary and made blogging sound very difficult and official sounding.

Let me give just two reasons why the State Department shouldn’t be blogging.

1. Proof #1: Yes, the State Department’s blog is called "Dipnote." I don’t know if people in Washington know this, but calling someone a "dip" means that you think someone is an idiot. So you could translate the name of their blog to "the idiot note." Smooth move.
2. Proof #2: Don’t advertise mistakes. This week they unveiled a video made by Disney (at Disney’s expense) to show the world how wonderful the US is. Only problem, one caption shows the Canadian part of Niagara Falls. Oops. The video is below.

Now, it’s an innocent mistake. And it’s only a second or two of video… but you’ve got to make sure that a video of America actually features all of America.

Forget the fact that Facebook was recently valued at a whopping $15 billion by Microsoft whereas MySpace was sold to News Corp for a mere $580 million. Let’s look at the statistical comparison of MySpace vs. Facebook. MySpace is the blue line while Facebook is red.

See why I’ve been saying MySpace has been dying? While traffic remains high, Facebook is obviously about to surpass MySpace. This is "reach." If you click on the image you’ll go to Alexa.com where you can look at pageviews… there you’ll see just how close Facebook is to overtaking MySpace.

1. Microsoft Outlook (church mail)
2. Mozilla Thunderbird (YMX mail)
3. iTunes
4. PhotoShop
5. AIM
6. Mozilla Firefox
7. Filezilla

What about you? What are programs that run on your desktop/laptop all the time?

When ads, then adults, then porn took over MySpace… the number of users died quickly as people looking for social networking fled to newly opened Facebook. While there were a lot of factors for the death of MySpace, too many ads was clearly one of the issues.

On November 16th, 2006 I posted that I thought MySpace was dying. (If you google the term "myspace dying" I’ve been #1 on that search term ever since and get 1-2 hits on that term daily.) People thought I was crazy! But in the end I was right… most people I know who switched to Facebook quickly drop their MySpace.

The problem for every online community
As a web developer there is a tenuous balance between creating community and monetizing the site. On the one hand the community wants no advertising. But at the same time they want the place they hang out with be free. Users demand a cool experience… one that costs lots of time and money to provide… and they don’t want anyone to get paid for it. I know this personally because this is the same tension we feel at YMX all the time… for most sites, the investors win out of the community, and ads slowly take over.

The death of Facebook is two-fold

1. Facebook applications are killing Facebook. In May 2007, Facebook started allowing 3rd party developers to add application to the site. Almost immediately the became annoying. All of a sudden applications could produce dozens of annoying emails to users without their permission. With every Facebook application developed, people get less interested. What drew people to Facebook was the simplicity… what will drive them away is over-customization.
2. Ads will kill Facebook. Application developers, like Slide, want to get paid for their efforts. I can’t blame them for wanting to put ads in their applications but at the same time, it’s going to create a big problem that will drive people away from Facebook.

Slide is just one of many developers trying to sell advertising in
widgets. While Slide sells its own sponsorships, several application
developers have opted to use ad networks for monetization. In fact, the
latest mover in the widget-as-media-network space is none other than
Google. Read the rest at AdAge

Here’s my prediction
If Facebook doesn’t slow down developers adding applications and cut off ads on applications, users will switch to another social network with less ads and less annoyance. It’s all about permission… people will display advertising on their sites and they will receive emails from sites… but they want to give their permission to do that. Remove the permission and they will remove themselves.

(more…)

I wonder how long it will take them to sort this one out. Don’t tell… it’ll be our little internet secret.

Observers of this blog will not that in recent weeks I’ve been adding technorati tags to the bottom of my posts. The main reason I do that is so that other people who are interested in what I’m writing about can easily find my blog to read about what they are interested in from my perspective.

So, I have a feeling this little game is going to be exploited in the upcoming election cycle.

What is it?

Let’s say I post about how much I think Al Gore is sexy. Well, in fact Al Gore is an attractive man but I wouldn’t call him sexy because I don’t swing from that side of the plate.

So the mere mention of his name will make a couple people who are monitoring technorati for the search term "Al Gore" take notice. So they may visit my site to see what it’s all about… no big deal in web land.  It’s called "ego searching" since you can actually set up an RSS feed for any term on the internet and you’ll be notified as soon as someone posts something with that search term. How do I know? I have a few ego searches in my feed!

But if I use the technorati tag "All Gore" on this post, the post will automatically appear on sites like GoreHub.com. See… sites are popping up all over which are actually publishing links to stuff that people think their readers may be interested in. They can’t moderate what goes on there, only the search parameters which populate the feed. In other words, there are websites about donkey’s where the text about donkey’s isn’t written by a donkey expert… it just populates with blog posts about donkey’s.

How will this effect the elections?
Let’s say you are a supported of Barack Obama for President instead of the former Vice President who never said he invented the internet but people claim that he did say that. (Say "Barack Obama Mama" five times fast, it’s fun!) In order for Pro-Obama supporters to get anti-Gore messages on Al Gore’s websites… all they’d have to do is put a technorati tag for "Al Gore."

Is it really that simple?
Uh… it is. It’s the easiest hack you could ever do.

Does this really matter?
In the past elections were won and lost by controlling the message on television. In 2008, the person who can control the message of bloggers and internet media will be the President of the United States. Don’t believe me? Just ask the people running the campaigns.

Is that the only trick to the election?
Actually, no. Let me clarify and say that I think the person who manages Web 2.0 resources the best will be President of the United States. Allow me to be an active supporter. Allow me to support you with your resources. Make them fun to use. Make them catchy. Design them in a way that allows me to be creative. Allow me to take your logo and tweak it. Allow me to remix your videos. Create that kind of stuff… and you will win the election.

In 1960 Kennedy defeated Nixon after out-using the media during the first televised debates. 47 years later, the candidate who masters Web 2.0 in a way that makes them look like the other candidate has a sore leg and a five o’clock shadow will call the White House home in January 2009.