Given I’ve developed MyDND as a web publishing platform, I’ve decided it’s about time I used it for my blog – hence this is my last post using good old Wordpress – I’ll miss you WP, you’ve served me well!

Actually I had a lot of fun making the new blog using MyDND and it gave me much more flexbility to create exactly what I wanted.

Anyway, please click here to check out the new blog – and if you’re a subscriber to Writings On The Wall, please re-subscribe on the new site as I’m also stopping using Feedburner for updates.

Here’s a little video called Last Post On The Bugle by that great band, The Libertines, as a kind of remembrance for this day:

If you got this post by email and can’t see the video, please click here.

I suppose most people have seen this but just in case you haven’t, here’s a couple of minutes showing the history of that truly awesome company….

If you got this post by email click here for the YouTube link.

I made the decision last Friday to move the release of MyDND v2.4 to mid November. It wasn’t a decision I wanted to make, but in this startup we have a very small team – and while I’m not averse to hard work, I realised I was trying to do too much and it was starting to affect the overall business as well as my health.

So on these occasions it’s best to take stock, prioritise your task list, and get things back into some sort of order rather than flying on instinct.

Customers are enjoying v2.3 anyway, and the main thing v2.4 will bring is ‘trusted scripts’ and I want to make sure we get that absolutely right.

When we get closer to the release date, I’ll update this blog with info – and if you fancy checking out another site built today for another small business have a look at D.P Windows by clicking here.

I’ve started taking time each day to look through what people are creating using MyDND and I found a really cool page entitled Aural Nightmare by Jengiz Aziz. Bascially it’s a blog style page with some fantastic imagery including some brilliant album cover art.

There’s also a fascinating video on there which I’ve embedded here showing a way of making music that I’ve never seen before.

YouTube video link is here.

Link to Aural Nightmare is here.

Chris Saad has kindly ’comped’ us a Pro version of his new comments widget Echo, which we’ve now put for testing at the bottom of the MyDND Homepage.

Firsly, it was easy and intuitive to setup given the number of customizing options available. I haven’t turned them all on for now but he’s included a rich text editor, youtube embeds, image uploads and more in the full blown version.

I’ve made it so people need to ID themselves via Twitter, Google etc which seems to make sense on our kind of site, and using the trusted script tool we’re testing internally due for release in v2.4 soon, it embedded really easily in the page and dragged into position no problem.

I tested it in IE8, Firefox and Chrome – and although it behaved a little differently in each of those, I could still leave comments fine. Now I need to find out if it’s the widget code itself or maybe how our platform is interpeting that – but for now I’m really impressed with it and MyDND is a step closer to being a serious competitor for things like Wordpress and Blogger etc.,

So please help us if you can by clicking here, scrolling down and leaving a comment - and if you want to get it for yourself now simply visit js-kit.com

I was mucking around in Twitter a while back and somehow I ended up in a community where I could ask questions and see if other people wanted to know the same thing - and it was really cool.

Then when I was talking with Joan the other day, she mentioned Get Satisfaction, and after a little bit of mucking around today I got the thing going and it’s now linked from the MyDND home and help pages.

I think Joan might be cooking up a pretty funky marketing move so thought we’d better get something proper going in case we get a few new visitors.

I’ve only set a free account on their servers to begin with but if MyDND people like it, we’ll upgrade and really get it cranking….

I met Ivan Trajkovic online a couple of months ago and he was really helpful peer-reviewing MyDND at the time. He was working on a survey building tool, and I’m really pleased to say I’ve just tested out his beta release, Quickker, and it works great and embeds easily into the script tools we’re currently testing internally at MyDND.

Signing up is simple (and he offers a free version plus a pro package) and the workflow was intuitive. I published a simple survey in under 5 minutes.

I’m yet to review the analytics, but I’m certainly going to test this out as a feedback mechanism for MyDND early adopters and have added it to the list for our up-coming appstore.

A good friend of mine and very close advisor, Jonathan MacDonald (jMac), witnessed a TFL (Transport for London) underground worker verbally abuse a passenger and captured the incident on his video camera. He then blogged about it (first post here with a follow up post here), put this video on YouTube and was caught up in a media and comments frenzy as a result.

There were many defences and attacks on jMac personally in his blog comments - some carefully considered, and others downright insane.

Now I took my time getting to know jMac and while he is an extrovert character, I found this is driven by his willingness to selflessly help people and not by any ego issues or wanting to make money out of an incident like this. Yes, he got a lot of traffic to his blog but are there any ads on there? No. It’s something he puts out there on his own time and at his own expense.

However, what this whole furore has indicated is that social media is creating another powershift, and it’s an important one in mankind’s history.

The first powershift I noticed in my working life was when computers became an integral part of the workplace. What this meant was an opening up of INFORMATION and that’s what the social media powershift is about too.

With the advent of computers, workers were given more information about the workings of the company that employed them – with less secrets able to be kept by management. Even the simple introduction of MS Excel meant that workers could pretty much build business models themselves and understand more about the financial side of a business.

In fact I did this once myself when working in a small business. I modelled what I knew to be the revenues and margins, then did my own take on running costs – and the result was I discovered why the company had less cash than it should have when comparing actuals to budgets. What had happened was in the management budget, the guy who built it didn’t have the expense total taking into account the last row which was Wages and Salaries and therefore the bottom line was out by a projected $80,000 for the year.

So when computers came along, there was a definite shift in power from management to the workers.

Now with social media and the tools to push content into the cauldron of humanity (as jMac did with a video camera, YouTube upload, and blog post) there is another powershift occurring and again it’s based on INFORMATION.

Real information can now be captured, shared and commented on freely among the massive numbers of people who make up the social media. In fact tools are getting so easy to use now, what used to be the domain of technical people (with the skillset to publish to the web) is now open to everyone. And that truly is everyone – good, bad or ugly – and so much so, that if you take a look at the 600+ comments on jMac’s blog post, you get a snapshot of humanity.

So is social media the 8th mass media, and is it a thing (like a radio) or is it actually the people who create it? I wrote a previous post about this topic here.

And if you’re not convinced about the scale of this powershift, I’m including below a video I’ve posted before but am repeating this as it’s so important. As Bob Boynton (Professor of New Media and Politics at the University of Iowa) said in a comment on the previous post: “That is what I am teaching — it is an inflection point in human history.”

We’ve always made no secret of the fact that we wish to partner with entrepreneurs in different countries to help build local businesses as part of a global group.

Today we’ve published pricing for the countries that are available. The list is based on internet user populations of over 2,000,000 people in each territory, and works on IP address driven traffic.

Full details are available here.

Software developers often talk about the satisfaction gained by creating something out of nothing. You know, some code gets created and it does something – but before it went from idea > code > product, there was nothing.

Well here’s a classic example of a similar thing, but this is really hilarious!

Have a read of this blog post on The Next Web entitled “How Chinese men searching for “village of hot lesbians” broke the Internet in Sweden“.

And of course then some enterprising guy bought the domain name http://chakopaul.com/ and if you click on that link, you’ll see the bloke is trying to fill up his PayPal account off the back of it!

Ah well, bit of end of the week hilarity