The topic of trust is where I draw a line in both my personal and management philosophy. My belief is that a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers at 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You’re not striving to be everyone’s pal; that’s not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other’s the reliability, truth, ability, and strengths.

The problems with authors like Rands is that every single post a hits is. Check this latest one out… now!

Months ago, I installed a browser plugin for Safari called “ClickToFlash.” It blocks all Flash content. You’ll see a placeholder image in the webpage and if you want to view the content, give it a click and it’ll load in. I have not noticed any drop in my ability to enjoy the Web. What I have noticed is that my browser is faster and more responsive, and that I can leave a couple of dozen tabs and windows up for weeks without having to force-restart my Mac.

I also use ClickToFlash and a Flash-less internet has positively improved my browsing experiences.

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
(Martin Luther King Jr.)

You change my life in so many ways
Options I did not know existed
New doors have been opened
Incompatible with my plans

Anyone who told me this would happen
I would have called their shrink
If you told me weeks ago
I had laughed at you

Of course I tempted Fate
Decided what I wanted to do
Told everyone my next step in life
Challenged Fate knowing what I wanted

I saw you standing in the corner
You changed everything and every plan

Fate, You’re a damn bitch
But damn do I love it

Photo Credit: Malu Green.

As life moves on and the years start adding up, people tend to sit down and reflect more. This is probably still my weakest point, I like moving forward too much to really sit down. Nevertheless I have learned to not always immediately react on things anymore, sometimes I even know when to shut up. Occasionally I still fail at the latter.

Generally though, I tend to live a quiet background life all while being the dynamic me people know. While trying to still be prolific I really enjoy living in the shadows. It is nice there, not too hot nor too bright.

Believe me when I say that I do know how it feels to live in the spotlights and the three people who have followed this blog since years do know that I do not shun these spotlights either. But I’m getting old and people change.

Suffice to say that I was very surprised today to find myself in the crossfire or rather the line of fire from someone I do not know. In the middle of a very hostile and spiteful attack.

An anonymous ‘ex-member’ spit his/her gal on the latest 9rules blog entry, going fully frontal. After several personal and/or inside details on the former 9rules Triad (and my publisher) were revealed it was the turn of my colleague Andy, my boss Mark and myself.

Being under SplashPress is supposed to make members feel better? Didn’t the crappy sites get added when Andy was running 9rules? You said you didn’t like the direction of 9rules, but you gave Andy a promotion. Frank is managing editor? He’s too busy looking up to you to be qualified. The descriptions on the team page are all lies. You aren’t fooling anyone. You’re still messing up and Mark is letting you by not getting you a qualified team. You might be running things but Mark owns 9rules and I hold him completely responsible. His network is trash and he’s ruining a quality site.

It would be easy to rebut this and go into detail how Andy wasn’t involved with the latest Round, I had left SPM all while being a long term participant to Splashpress Media. Or even by saying that I probably stopped following 9rules long before ‘Ex-member’, but I won’t. This entry isn’t about hitting back or defending myself. Nor is it about admiration.

Life’s Too Nice To Be Spiteful

Life’s too short and the future belongs to those who look forward

I am nowhere near perfect and hate to admit this. But as the years move by I have learned many things and I continue to learn daily. I have examples in life, people who motivate me to continuously improve and keep an eye on the real world. Understand what really does matter. Remind me how lucky we are.

There is more to life than look back at errors people made and hit out at them for those. Nature is lovely but cruel at the same time. Over the last 12 months several thousand people lost their life due to earthquakes, landslides and typhoons. Others were killed at war and people just around the corner of your and my doorstep live in poverty, some even die on the streets.

In our Western society, especially those of us who live mainly online, we barely know what it means to suffer but instead we get sucked up in meaningless disputes on ‘tinternet. Laugh at the best fails of 2009, no matter how harsh and painful several are. We do not respect our roots anymore and forget that what really matters. That what only seems to move people when disaster strikes. The spirit of community and siding together. Hate’s more important to many of us.

Love Each Other. Grow Up and Improve

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it

I love admiring people. Each and everyone daily reminds me that I have to improve, work at everything I do. Probably I even have gathered lots of inspiration from ‘Ex-member’, maybe I still read Ex-members site on a regular basis. Who knows, I don’t know who ‘Ex-member’ is. What I do know though is that every single day I get up and want to improve not only this site, the sites I write on but also, and most of all, my own tolerance levels. Days like today prove that I am doing damn fine and believe me, life’s really nice if that’s your motto and that’s how you live. My idols help me reach out to what initially seem unreachable situations.

Life’s too short and we only get one shot at it. Face the truth, there is too much misery on this planet to get stuck in disputes.

Be your own worst critic and the worst critic of your idols and you’ll do fine. I know I am.

Photo credit: Talia Twilight Photography.

A dream which became reality.

As a kid I have always been a reader. I would read more than 100 pages per day already when I was only 7 years young. I loved my parents’ Winkler Prins(1). On rainy days you could find me in my room, on bed with most of the time at least six tomes around me. I was a knowledge leech as kid already. My parents had a Wikipedia without online connection.

I was a reader with an unsatisfied hunger for knowledge. My life seemed complete.

The Internet, My New Encyclopaedia

I do not want to think of the enormous bills my parents probably had to pay but it was their own fault. They got a modem and showed me the internet. A nice internet. Looking at a monochrome monitor, often cursing at a blinking cursor at the top left of the screen while waiting for the information to download. Information coming from people I didn’t know, people who were all over the world. Lots of stuff to read. Newsgroups. My life couldn’t become better and if one, other than the usual sex, drugs and rock&roll, the internet certainly contributed to me ditching what pretty much every other adolescent did: watch TV, watch the ever more popular becoming MTV and sports. I was different.

In between two parties I would logon and read as much as I could before another Saturday evening of debauchery and alcohol followed. I wanted to read. As much as I could.

The internet provided me with a continuous flow of information, every day more. When mid 90s the main media started to publish their content online I almost immediately ditched my daily habit of reading the newspaper and Knack(2). My life became almost picture free. I read as many words as I could every day, often to the detriment of my social life but there was barely any discussion I could not participate to because I knew something about almost everything.

The Internet is for Text

Excuse me, and you might not agree with this opinion, but using a <h3> tag was both the easiest way and fastest way to display that message, *my* message, quickly and hugely. Maybe I should have used a <h2> tag even.

Even in these modern days of constantly faster connections I still believe in this statement: the.internet.is.for.text. Personally I can not say that I watch one online video per day on average. I love reading too much. Although I have a rather large movie collection, barely ever will I allow myself to take a break from reading and sit down for 2 hours or more, enjoying a movie. Barely ever will I allow myself to take a break from reading.

It’s who I am and although I appreciate Flickr and SmugMug or Vimeo, I prefer reading.

9Rules

I have more than once declared my love for 9Rules. When the ‘content gallery’ launched it was great at what it did: display awesome blogs about several topics. I was an avid lurker reader. As the network expanded I struggled to keep up with more than 140 additional blogs to my daily reading habits and at some point I stopped following the ever-growing network anymore. I figured that I would continue to discover awesome blogs just by reading the more than 400 blogs I already read.

Recently there have been some changes at 9Rules. 9Rules was sold to Splashpress Media, my employer. Because I did not believe the SplashPress Media network was a worthy bearer and owner of the once so thriving and awesome 9Rules, I shortly left Splashpress. But only for a really short time.

Long enough to refocus on the 9Rules.

Some day the unexpected happened. The (online) person who over the last years had inspired me most became the new publisher of Splashpress Media. Scrivs.

Mentoring is the best job ever

I re-entered the Splashpress Media fold and have been having a blast ever since. Never has a challenge been this big and rewarding. Every day again I strive to publish (at least prepare) new valuable content. Not write for traffic but write to contribute to the community. Write to constantly improve. Write to show that I belong on board and am a worthy member of the team.
In the background I have what is probably the most awesome job one can have: I help bloggers. Help them with tips how to find their blogging groove. How to feel great when writing something. My IM is always open and I would rather contribute to, collaborate on an entry for them than ignore them, trying to push out the best content I can deliver. We have seen some awesome results already over the last weeks and I am sure that some of our authors will be headhunted soon.

Because they write valuable content. Not because they know all tricks to rule the search engines and social media. Because their content is awesome.

Today’s there’s nothing more left for me than point you to the latest 9rules blog entry: Let’s refocus on quality content. An entry which makes me happy and makes me want to improve iFranky. Improve enough to some day be proud enough of my work here and submit this site to 9Rules.

Go read it now.

Photo credit: Image by neonihil

1. the Dutch encyclopaedia in 24 tomes back then
2. Back then probably the best Flemish news weekly

Focus on content and not how great and powerful a platform is or how I can play with the header image in every post. Refocus on content. Cut out the bloat. I love WordPress but the platform, a very powerful option which everyone should consider in their quest to run a blog, has grown beyond my personal needs.

What I want here for iFranky is a blog; I don’t need a full-blown CMS.

It’s An Ongoing Fight

This is nothing new and last year two years ago already I tried another platform, Chyrp, here on iFranky. With the impending merge of WPMU and WordPress for the 3.0 version, I feel that my time has come and after the redesign of iFranky to a single column design it is time to simplify the backend as well.

Introducing Habari

In one of my first ever entries on BloggingPro I reviewed self hosted blogging options and included Habari among the platforms, saying the following:

…is one of the blog platforms to watch. Started by some of the core members of the k2 theme for WordPress, the idea behind Habari is simple: a blog platform with the most cutting edge technology.

PROS

• Cutting edge technology, PHP5.2 required;
• Support for both MySQL and SQLite (PostgreSQL support is planned);
• Apache 2.0 license, following the meritocracy principles;
• Support for Apache, Lighttp and Nginx server;
• Respected and blog experienced core developers.

CONS

• Very young community and software, only few themes and plugins available;
• Apache 2.0 license: sometimes discussion, decision can take ages.

Distraction Free Environment

I usually do most of my writing for shorter entries in the WordPress editor and for longer posts I tend to use WriteRoom(1). Habari itself though makes writing in the post editor a lot more enjoyable and although the full screen experience isn’t reached Habari does a great job at keeping the environment distraction free.

The whole admin interface, experience is totally different. After the creation of Kubrick, co-creation of the marvellous k2 theme for WordPress, which certainly served as inspiration for the Kirby theme for WordPress, a concept for a WordPress 2010 default theme, the Habari interface is another gorgeous creation by Michael Heilemann. You should try it out yourself and give the Habari demo a test run here.

I Love WordPress

My love for WordPress as a software blog package will continue. In fact, expect many more WordPress tutorials from me over at BloggingPro in the next few weeks, but there is no doubt that I will also pay more attention to other platforms at BloggingPro. It will be an uphill battle but it’s a challenge I gladly take on.
The beauty of blogging is to have many options available and it is the task of a general blog news site to report about as many platforms as available.

Personally though I have no need for all the features offered by WordPress and both iFranky and frankylicious will be converted to Habari over the next weeks. This is no decision against WordPress, this is opting for the best platform for the job, the best platform for my needs.

I will also port Notesblog by Thord to Habari.

1. I recently discovered Scrivener as the ultimate software for longer features and to work at drafts of future entries. Entries requiring lots of research

In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now, this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. […]

Suppose you come in, and you’ve got to put together animation or drawings and show it to a famous, world-class animator. Well, you don’t want to show some thing which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right.

The trick is actually to stop that behav ior. We show it every day—when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrass­ment, you’re more creative.

It’s not obvious to people, but starting down that path helped every thing that we did. Show it in its incomplete form. There’s another advantage to that. When you’re done… you’re done.

Pixar president Ed Catmull, in a speech to Stanford’s business school.

But apparently, that’s unusual, and most Mac owners in the world not only use Windows, they need Windows and, more than any other version, they absolutely must have Windows 7, so Apple’s missed deadline is nothing short of scandalous.

True? Because if that’s not true, all of that breathless reporting over the weekend about missed deadlines and Apple’s ‘fears’ would prove a tad silly, wouldn’t it?

Actually, I have had one issue since switching to the Mac; my friends don’t use iChat. They’re stuck with Skype or — horror of horrors –Windows Live Messenger for video conferencing and collaboration. I pity them. It’s the one thing I wish Apple would release for Windows. The world would be a better place then, I’m sure.

At some point, I think after 6 months on Mac, I stopped caring about Windows. Unless I really need to work in MS Access for a client, I will not install Windows and if, Windows XP has a much smaller footprint.

If you’re hiring well, you’re hiring people not just for this job, but for your career. These are the people who, for better or worse, will explain to others what it is like to work with you. They’ll explain your quirks, your weaknesses, and your strengths. When they eventually leave the group, they’re taking your reputation with them. You may never talk to them again, but they’ll continue to talk and my question is: what stories are they going to tell?

One of the most important things to make this double-edged sword highly successful is to assure that the employees still feels wanted after joining; the hire is an important pilar of the department.
How long does it take you to settle in a new job? That period is arguably even more important than the actual ‘chase’; it’s when the new hire grows roots.

Your friends are not all in one social network, but we want to help you stay in touch with them anytime and from any device. That is Seesmic’s vision and to deliver this faster, we have acquired Ping.fm. You can now update 50 social networks using Seesmic+Ping.fm from email, chat, sms, Blackberry, Android, web, Windows, OSX and much more soon.

So much for less noise in 2010.

I have given up on resolutions and symbolic, commercially abused dates. I will not stop smoking(1) and I know that the world will not be saved by some superhero politician. Instead I have ambitions, personal and life ambitions and they are high. Very high.

For one the biggest hope is that I will be able to abuse all the potential I think having and I certainly do hope my bosses will challenge me enough to release this potential. But this entry is about last year’s movies and music.

What About Music and Movies?

Avatar reviewed
The Good: James Cameron
The bad: James Cameron

The year ended with a piece of shit in a golden wrapper by James Cameron. In a year which largely saw the commercial acceptance of 3D Cinema, an evolution of a more than 20 years old technology, it was saddening to realise that ‘Cameron The Effects’ would mark the year and make us forget the awesome brilliance that Up is.

Apparently 2009 Was a Great Year for Film

It is sad to think this. After the marvel that the Dark Knight was in 2008 and the subsequent popularisation of the HD format at home(2), we were left with very few innovative and truly marvellous movies.

There were some blockbusters, who would also have made it even without 3D but the majority of them were franchises and would have been popular mainly because of their fan base. And there’s the sad tale of one girly hype movie franchise.

2009 left us with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, The Hangover, Star Trek, Monsters vs. Aliens and the largely understated but entertaining Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Would we have watched these movies without 3D or will we watch them at home in HD? Yes, but none wil be remembered for a long time. Furthermore the James Bond franchise and Daniel Craig made a nose dive with Quantum of Solace, not only at the box office end 2008 but also in HD release.

Luckily there also were some highlights. The return of Tarantino and Brad Pitt with Inglourious Basterds was as good a film with these almost impossibly high expectations can be and the already mentioned Up was one more example of how Pixar raises the bar and sets a new story telling, and animation, standard with every new release.

The Box Office Year Was Perfect and There Was a True Revelation

The 3D tale and mega success of franchises in the newly accepted format made 2009 a perfect year for the studios and the upcoming release of 3D HD home systems will only increase the format’s popularity even more. One can only hope that interest in old-skool IMAX 3D nature movies will be revived and people will discover the true beauty of 3D. Our planet. The BBC Life (Challenges of Life) TV series were not only of HD brilliance but also a great, albeit small, sample of the treasures that can be found on our blue planet. Not to forget the calming and almost perfect voice of Sir David Attenborough.

Although I generally do not post videos on iFranky, I will make an exception for these 10 minutes from the first episode of Life, even though the crappy Youtube quality doesn’t really do justice to the beauty of HD(3). Highlight of this video: 8:43 in, after the epic cheetah hunt, the camouflage of the chameleon and high quality shot of the mantis.

Video removed due to Copyright issues. Get it from Amazon.

But there was also a true highlight in 2009 and of course it did not become a box office success. Nevertheless you really should add the war drama The Hurt Locker to your must watch list and purchase list. The multiple award winning movie is one of few with a trailer which isn’t too misleading and Kathryn Bigelow was my movie revelation of the year. USAToday had this to say about The Hurt Locker:

This profound exploration of the line between bravery and bravado brings the war in Iraq to life with an immediacy and power that no previous film has achieved. This tale of technicians in the bomb disposal squad captures the complexities of the war with thrilling battle sequences and nuanced performances by Jeremy Renner and his co-stars. With her gritty handheld shots, director Kathryn Bigelow has made one of most visceral and moving war movies ever.

What Will 2010 Bring?

Some say, to survive it you need to be as mad as a hatter

Never one to really follow what releases are scheduled, I must admit that I am truly excited about 2010 and hardly ever have been this excited about an upcoming movie. Fans of frankylicious will certainly know what movie I look forward to.

The main crew of the 2007 Golden Globe Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street adaptation is once more reunited and ticks all the boxes. All my boxes: Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in a Disney story to be shown in IMAX 3D. First look pictures and trailers already are amazing and I can only wonder, hope that Tim Burton has been able to benefit some of the Pixar technology for this movie. March 5, 2010, the new highlight for 2010 and the second movie embed exception in one entry.

Other scheduled movie trips in 2010 are Iron Man 2 and Toy Story 3D. The latter is obviously a compulsory Pixar movie and Iron Man 2 with built-in preparation for typical sequel disappointment. Otherwise I would not have the faintest clue of upcoming releases.

A Year in Music

2009 Was a year which was mainly limited to playing the good old music library and barely any new albums made it into the collection. Besides the ex launching a new album and some minor discoveries, the year in numbers looks pretty much the same as the complete Last.fm history. The main 2009 music trend for me was to again participate actively to the local nightlife again and it was very enjoyable. To conclude another +1000 words entry, a long screenshot. Statistics.

Update: The National Society of Film Critics agrees with The Hurt Locker being the best movie of 2009.

1. Unless I were to meet that one and she would want me to
2. Mainly due the increasing popularity of the PS3
3. Hint: that Youtube account has uploaded the complete first episode!

Less is More. Simple is Beautiful. What is Simple?

Everyone who likes to design knows the challenge: designing for yourself is the hardest task there is and we all love to ignore that task. Because no matter what we do, no matter how awesome the design is, there will always be something which could do with a little more tweaking. No design is perfect, especially not when it’s made for yourself.

iFranky, and it’s predecessor Am I Famous Now, has gone through many design iteration over the last 5 years and never have I been really happy, until recently. Really recently.

Version 1047

The last design iteration of Am I Famous Now was probably the design I have enjoyed most of all. Just like the quotes I have used ever since I had a blog(1), the whole concept of the design was to mock modern standards, more precisely to mock the whole Web 2.0 design.
As Angelo described here the whole design was a stab at semantics, gradients, pink and lime-green, greek letters and dropshadows. The blog also was offensive at times.

‘Am I Famous Now’ nevertheless validated and made use from Microformats in Cutline as well as several conditional cases to use different backgrounds for different categories. Post types before post types. Simplicity was nowhere to be found.

iFranky, the Tale of Cluttered Simplicity

After I had mainly worked with k2 before I designed the above mentioned Cutline modification for iFranky, working with Chris Pearson’ theme was a breeze. I really enjoyed Cutline and would again modify the theme for the newly used iFranky domain. The new modification became more a Cutline 2.0 than a child theme(2). This boy of course had to push custom further and soon almost every file was modified. Cutline became gridified and it looked OK but something was missing. Part of me couldn’t stick to simplicity either and I had a smooth gallery header, as well as every possible thumbnail sidebar option: flickr, last.fm. Simplicity cluttered.

My focus was more on having the perfect grid than what really mattered: a perfect use of whitespace and today it is hard to understand why I liked this theme at some point, but I did and Cutline 2.0 has been in used on iFranky and for a personal blog for almost a year.

Sue Me Because My Parents Called Me Franky: The Quotes

When I started this domain, there was a classic entry along the lines of Veni, vidi, bibendum. I, Franky, I came, I saw and I had a drink. And of course the stab at Steve Jobs.

My Cutline modification and some more typical online stuff had taken away the desire to blog and I started a quest for a new platform. Sadly since then some entries have been lost, mainly due to deleting older backups and not bothering about backups at all. Even not although I’m automated backup boy. Chances these entries can be found in an archive folder are high but such was my interest in blogging at the time. Movable Type, Chyrp and then back to WordPress. Internet fatigue was the best way to resume the state I was in.

The interest in blogging had disappeared but I still wanted to somehow stay in touch with my domain and the quotes, which had been dropped from the latest Cutline design, made a return. Pretty much without blog updates though, but at least when opening the homepage, there was something I could relate to. The continuous stab at the world around me: the blog scene and design world(3).

…A Wise Man Knows Himself To Be A Fool
…Diatribe Of A Cyber Suicide
…Give Me A Job And I Will blog About
…Freshly Baked, Self-Proclaimed A-Lister
…What About The Chicken You Just Saw
…Creator And Destroyer
…I Am So Coordinated
…Many Authors Go Crazy
…I Am Perfect Except When I Lie
…Fashion Assassin
…Sue Me Because My Parents Called Me Franky
…The Most Insignificant Blogger
…I Have Ataraxia
…The Hemingway of the 21st Century

I Still Design and Blog. Just Not for Myself Anymore

No matter what I did, somehow I always would continue to be active online and maintain websites, just not mine. I recently had discovered Mimbo and my style had gone to something along these lines: better whitespace, still grid-anal and complete customisation of WordPress. Add custom fields to the mix.

Simplicity still was a far shot off but slickness was on it’s way and I needed a ‘new’ online presence. A new visual concept. Mimbo had led me to the world of magazine themes for WordPress and I loved to showcase lots of content on one page. Enter ‘The Morning After’. Add some customisations to the mix and born was what I think a cool showcase of lots of content on one page but a totally cluttered mess.
With only 6 excerpts of main entries on the home page this was way too long and I doubt that anyone ever clicked any of these entry excerpts or links. But the quotes had made their return and I had a new way to display content related tumblings.

Blogging for money soon took over again and although I would not venture in good old-skool punditry yet, I noticed that more and more I started to develop my own voice, brand again. Less punditry but cleaner prose. And I needed a cleaner design to reactivate my own blogging because no matter how nice and solid ‘The Morning After’ is, there’s more wrong with the design than anyone can imagine.

Simplicity, It’s on Its Way, But Please First Slap Me in the Face With It!

Over at frankylicious I had been sporting a barely modified Notesblog Core since several moths already because the theme did not get in the way and focused on what’s most important: the content. Of course when I decided to use Notesblog Core here on iFranky, I had to ruin that. Immediately. Royally.

As I was planning a remake, a remake within the first weeks I considered stepping away from WordPress. Once more. Even though I had the biggest plans to use different sidebars and footers for different sections of the page, I did not understand why I would need bloatware engine WordPress. Funnily enough I even considered static pages for a while, focus on content not on design.

On the Way Home I Got Hit in the Face

Then it hit me straight in the face. Who cares about all that clutter? If I had already deleted the search form because when was the last time you used a search form on a blog(4)?

Some sections such as the tumblings and writings elsewhere have entirely lost their display on the home page. The fixed bottom navigation needs to be improved but the result is… simplicity.

1. You can still find all the quotes in the header
2. I don’t think anyone had already discovered the child theme term in the codex in those days and custom.css was totally fashion
3. Some quotes have been added later
4. Other than your own one, looking for entry to link

In a more common and closer to home situation: the weather for tomorrow will be dry, but if our most optimistic dreams don’t become reality it will rain.

1. Note the huge difference of more than 25% here

Do bloggers need to have an opinion on everything and can being opinionated turn against you?

Of course this entry is nothing more than just another opinionated piece, a rant.
It is time that bloggers use their grey mass a little and look in the mirror before ridiculing themselves. Being opinionated is easy but being opinionated AND making sense is a different game all together.

Especially because blogging has to be opinionated it becomes a very thin line to walk.

Am I Just Ranting to Rant and To Be Heard?

He that sees another in error and endeavors not to correct it, testifies himself to be in error.

To have an opinion on things is a natural phenomena for us humans(1) and there is no one who seems to escape being opinionated. How many times haven’t you had thoughts about news you heard, about the politician you voted for a while ago. It’s normal, we all do it and there’s no hiding from. It’s what differentiates us from animals, we’re the smart ones. At least we think so.

When Does The Need to Share Your Opinion Kick In

Maslow clearly recognised that humans are in need of esteem to feel well. Whether it be self-esteem, esteem earned by achievements or respect won from others. When blogging these three go hand in hand, it is important to be satisfied with your own content before others might even value your blog. If you are not satisfied with what you wrote, why would your readers be?

It is important to feel good in your skin when you want to be a good blogger. Frustrations, dissatisfaction and generally being uncomfortable with things will shine through and could easily be the reason why your rants become non-sensical.

Acceptance and Tolerance Are The Prime Weapon of Every Self-Respecting Blogger

Everyone knew this entry would contradict itself

More important to continue walking the thin line between delivering quality rants and being on PMS is to understand facts and accept things before penning down your thoughts. A serious and well constructed rant can bring you lots of attention, a quick fire rant might result in ridicule and not bring you any respect. Like the example that drove me to finally blog about the topic: Buck up Google or we need a Feedburner alternative.

In the example the author goes on a rant about the failing services of Feedburner, a service owned and operated by Google.
Many bloggers use Feedburner, mainly because Feedburner one of the only services is which delivers statistics for feed subscribers and even click-through rates. Feedburner can also be easily integrated in Google Analytics but most of all, Feedburner is free.
Over the last 18 months, actually ever since the acquisition by Google, there have been many issues with Feedburner and many users have complained. A quick look at the Feedburner group shows that there are tons of support requests and most of all, no one at the Plex seems bothered to reply. Basically… Feedburner has gone down the gutter.

Besides saying that the author probably spends way too much attention to statistics to notice the issue over the festive period, a time with dropping statistics every year, there is a big, bold But to this story. It’s very easy to forget it, especially if Feedburner has become part of your daily working routine, but at the end of the day Feedburner is a free service offered by the Big G. A service which does not need to work, a service without SLA. A service Google could arguably kill like it has done with many services before or as Yahoo! is actively doing to several of its services. It’s a service which offers us a free alternative to (not very much).

Think. Could You Deliver Better Than The Subject of Your Rant?

Once more the armchair critic has hit out

If bloggers want to raise our game to another level, we have to stop being armchair critics. Instead, we have to go out there and deliver. Build an alternative if we need one. Prove that we can deliver better work and services.

Being the raving ranter is too easy and sometimes it is better to be acceptant and tolerant, AKA STFU (an example of when it’s better to STFU can be read here). Instead, show what you can do. Just do it!

Yes, you can. Esteem and recognition will follow, through acceptance, creativity, problem solving and mostly through respect earned from others.

1. Probably animals think that we’re the dumb ones.

I have participated to several new companies both in the bar scene and online and have every time experienced this happening, not because of free sodas or food being cancelled. It’s a natural process in every high paced sector.

Most companies go through 3 different ‘generations’ of teams.

The Foundation

Every company starts with an initial crew of team members, together with it’s founders. Often the team members have previous experience in starting a company, business. These are people who thrive on building something new, it’s a rush. You can feel the adrenaline flow in the days before launch, opening and experiencing a successful launch after the preparation period is one of the greatest professional moments.

It doesn’t matter if you have been preparing this new venture for months or only joined in the last weeks, days before the place opened. In my years in bars I have known many people who wanted to be part of as many opening nights, weekends, as possible. It’s a special rush.
But more than just the opening night, serial ‘starters’ often are driven by the desire to improve. Although they very creative minds are, with a specific view on how they can help a new company and are hired for being people who just have that one thing more on other great minds: personality, character, the ability to bound, they are very open and can analyse signs. They know how to listen and continue improving after launch. A good starting crew does know how to turn a hot concept into a long lasting and successful company.

They know how to turn a hot concept into a long lasting and successful company

This crew, the ‘first generation’ in every company is the most important crew as they will establish the company, its reputation. These people thrive on starting something and usually only know one thing really well: work. It’s their drug, their addiction, their obsession. Gowalla and Foursquare are here.

But they get easily bored.

They want to build, not maintain. They do not like to fall in a regular routine and unless your startup regularly new features launches, they will become susceptible to listen to people who are starting a new company.
Contrarily to online startups in bars you often only need two months to get your name out there and become one of the hottest hotspots in town. You only have two months to put your own stamp on the spirit of the club. After this period everyone is talking about the location and people are lining up to get in to your place. Soon the most hardcore ‘starters’ will start to leave.

The gourmet kitchen has been replaced with a canteen

Life’s kicked in.

Consolidation

Our bar or startup is now several months in and has gathered street cred. People are starting to apply and want to work for your company, because you’re all everyone speaks about. They heard of the spirit and fun at work, the culture and want to be part of it. These are top professionals and you to add them to your crew because they can take your company to the next level you think.

Wrong.

If they are that great professionals, able to take your company to the next level, why did you not hire them in the first place?
The new hires will help you consolidate growth. They are driven and a real asset to every team but would not be great members of the ‘first generation’ team.

As your company grows, the focus changes. You are not working at the next hot thing anymore, instead you are keeping the place on the list of hotspots. You are consolidation your startup, your company, your club. This will have a direct impact on your initial crew.
Your company has become just another successful enterprise for your first crew. You are not the newest and hottest kid on the block anymore, the kick is slowly disappearing.

The sodas are taken away

I have seen people leave for the rumoured new place around the corner as soon as after three months in bars and clubs. I have been one of them. Usually the exodus will happen in the second six months of the company. Online it takes twice as long before this process kicks in. Your crew are some of the most wanted and best professionals out there and launching your venture has only fortified their reputation. They will be headhunted. They will leave and there’s nothing you can do. It’ in their blood.
They thrive on taking care of everything needed, filling in gaps, working in small crews. Working very hard and many hours.

The popularity of your startup leaves you no other choice than hiring more staff and while your company grows, new hires, highly valued professionals, will slowly replace every member of the initial crew. The second crew tends to stay twice as long as the first crew: 1-2 years. It still is too early to analyse how long this scheme takes among hot online startups (because the first stage takes 1-2 years), but it seems that twice as long as in bars the measure is. Facebook is at around 55-60% of this stage, Twitter one third in, the exodus is about to start.

Hibernation

The ‘second generation’ takes your bar into its 3rd year, 5th year on average for your online startup. It doesn’t really matter anymore who you hire now, your startup, company, bar, club has become part of the daily life, routine of your visitors, clients. Your company doesn’t need people who live and breathe your enterprise anymore, as long as they are knowledgeable workers.

You are nothing special anymore

A great example of companies in this stage are Yahoo!, Google and Amazon, both are already experiencing the exodus of the second generation.

As for why I refuse to embed Flash, let me put it this way. I use and highly recommend ClickToFlash, which blocks all Flash content by default. Why would I publish content using a technology that I personally block by default? I truly hope to see Flash fade as the de facto standard for embedded web video, and I’m willing to put my markup where my mouth is.

I am an avid ClickToFlash user as well and until recently thought the internet was for pr0n text. It would be nice to be able to embed H.264 videos from Youtube.

A controversial comment on Hacker News makes us wonder if hot U.S. startups are the new vanity purchase for rich Russians.

The time at Emmaus Preston was rather limited and even though I was happy not to have to deal with that board anymore, it has taken me around a year to reorganise and refocus.
Refocus and return to the colours of my roots: Racing White Daring Molenbeek(1)(2), the first club I played football for.

I am no person who stands still for a long time or will whine about how miserable life is, but as the years slowly accumulated I certainly needed some time.

I don’t do end of year reviews either nor do I pay much attention to the symbolic importance of dates, years but I am happy to notice that there seems to be an upturn to life and I am slowly but surely starting to think again. Think about the future. Or as someone went ahead and changed my former life quote, ‘Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it‘:

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Of course all this doesn’t mean anything and I still have certain things to sort out.
I merely needed an excuse to announce the change in design, justify the colour change(3) and state the obvious:

I’m back, bitches.

1. Dutch Wikipedia link
2. Now FC Brussels
3. Apparently these are also almost the ManUtd colours

And yet barely a day goes by without someone telling me they tried to find my book in the US, only to be disappointed that – due to publishing’s ridiculous obsession with territories – it’s only available outside North America. “It’s available on the Kindle” I say. “Pft” they reply, “I don’t have a Kindle”. In most cases I end up emailing them a PDF – a distribution model that doesn’t really scale.

The logical solution would be to publish the PDF on my site. The print version of the book has been available for 18 months now – it’s had plenty of time on bookstore shelves and with the publication of the paperback in the UK and no US publisher on the horizon, any future sales are just part of the long tail. There’s already a pirated version available on Limewire – that’s where I got the PDF from in the first place

Worth reading 275 pages? If you like dry humour and everything’s as good as the intro, yes. If you don’t want to visit TC, grab it here.

Back in 2006 people still had a notion of privacy online, particularly around contact information. Today those walls are crumbling. People share information today without blinking that they never would have considered sharing in the past. Things that bother us today probably won’t matter much this time next year.

It might seem a lost battle in the mindset of people, but the more information is readily available the more people will become aware of sharing less. Expect big battles with law makers in countries such as Germany.

Last weekend while chatting with friend Thord D. Hedengren I joked about one of the things I learned over the last 4 years, dealing with pro bloggers. The bloggers who will write tutorials how to get traffic, how to promote your blog and similar crap. Of course I could not not twitter my joke(1):

What I learned from ‘pro bloggers’: Gimme a topic & within 3hrs I’m an authority all while BEING drunk!
Lots of work for me to become ‘pro’!

The sad thing about that rather hilarious(2) tweet is that it is based on real experience, the truth in the sector. There are forums where you can order 400-500 word entries for around $6 on ANY TOPIC. Many of these entries land on rather well trafficked sites. I know people who will write on any topic and depending on the fee they will become an authority, ie. read one or two Wikipedia entries and also follow on average three of the outgoing links below the Wikipedia entries.

Today Dutch blogger Ernst-Jan Pfauth posted a good read on what bloggers should do: think more like journalists and write what you have to write. Not what you think your readers want to read.

Newsflash: in the endless discussions about the future of journalism, most people are asking the wrong question: ,,What does the reader want?” What follows are assumptions about the behavior of the new news consumer. ,,He doesn’t want to pay for news”, ,,He’s only going to read from epaper”, etc etc.

Well, two things:

• Assumption is the mother of all f*ckups
• The reader has NO clue what he wants

Ernst-Jan started as blogger and landed a job at nrc.next, a Dutch newspaper. He also interned at IPS Inter Press Services.

The best thing about his Stop Wondering What Readers Want, It Leads to Mediocrity for bloggers is the closing paragraph:

You’re not into journalism but just want blog tips? Sure enough. You can use the above story as an advice to ignore all ‘how to grow blog traffic’-articles. They’re based on mediocrity. Just think how you can get your message across.

Quality will generate traffic. If you don’t write interesting and compelling content you need to improve your SEO, have your voting brigade ready and try to get your entry pushed out on every bookmarking site, preferably by at least 15 to 20 contacts to give it an initial push.

Lesson learned: Write interesting stuff and do not bother with tricks.

1. It’s called peer pressure
2. Or was it condescending?

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

Posts are an issue. Content is up <7 seconds but the full page is way too long (18s). The biggest problem is JS-Kit, and loading icons for each comment, for example hits to FriendFeed for icons can add 5-10 seconds to load time. I’ve asked them for the option to cut the icons out, crossing fingers.

Two-thousand was the last time the Yankees managed to win a championship. And it was awfully close to the last time that that Microsoft managed to produce a version of Windows that anybody cared about. And, hey, both the Yankees and Microsoft have long histories of dominating their professions, and of using that dominance to run up huge payrolls with — let’s be honest here — a near-decade of lackluster results.

“I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.”

And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.

Do. Not. Trust. Them.

The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web.

Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility

Complete story here.

We were going to reach out to Godin yesterday, but instead figured we could write this story by aggregating what everybody in the world thinks of Squidoo, and then asking him to pay us $400 to remove the parts he may not agree with.

What most have missed though is the huge marketing campaign, even if not entirely positive, the Squidoo Brands release aggregated in only 2 days. Marketing Guru Seth Godin 1 – 0 ‘tIntarwebz.

Not only am I a fan of Trent Reznor’s because of his music, but I also admire the guy for his online marketing understanding and knowledge. He did what brought Radiohead probably their biggest moment of fame, the In Rainbows release on a pay what you want principle, earlier already and actually had a plan for both Ghosts and The Slip.

Some days ago he chimed in once more and delivered his stance on whether artists should charge for their music or not.

If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:

* Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) – your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.

If you’re forging your own path, read on.

* Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.

It is no secret that Reznor a fan of free distribution of music is (who also released all his latest albums under a Creative Commons license) but the truth needs to be said and repeated: unless you receive massive marketing, you will NOT become really popular or rich even. Not from your music. Let’s face the harsh facts: no matter how good your band is, if you have to rely on local gigs and sales, within several months you might be able to get several thousands to your gigs. Many of those will be REPEAT fans, and probably almost as many will be acquaintances, friends.
If you’re lucky, 20% will buy your music. Probably the repeat visitors.

Fact.

Every other sale depends on you being able to reach beyond local stages and broaden your geographic area. BUT you will have to be able to get follow-on gigs, without creating the impression ‘Oh it’s XXXXX AGAIN. Meh, can’t be bothered’. People in the 21st century suffer of boredom very quickly. And you will have to be an social media ace to keep boredom away online. We saw it with Myspace. Facebook fan pages are no exception to this(1) and soon people will start hiding band updates because they have whether become a fan of too many bands or bands push too many status updates and pollute one’s news feed. It is a tricky and difficult line to walk.

But was does go viral?

Free music does. The 21st Century is the era of free, especially online. And music is one of the biggest promoters of Free.
The choice obviously is left to bands, but it is a simple one. The only decision to make is the one about what your real aim is: become rich and sell yourself and your soul (see Reznor above) or do you want your music to spread virally and enjoy hordes streaming to your gigs?

Their are many platforms available to distribute your music virally: Bandcamp probably being the best one right now, Last.fm although pretty much dead almost, still is a great way to get out there and offer downloads. Forget about Spotify: people want to take your music with them, have it on their laptop, on their media player or stereo. Most people are cheap skates and Spotify IS expensive, especially the portable versions. Face it, offer free downloads of your music and you might climb the Last.fm rankings. Upload your music to Youtube and your video might hit Facebook news feeds and be embedded on several music blogs. Free downloads will also be featured on many more music blogs. Yes, free is the decisive factor nowadays.
Your biggest fans will gladly buy special, limited releases.

I even do not want to mention the influence of the credit crunch, but remember that if people want your album they will get it. Without paying.
Don’t call them pirates because probably you have received many a copy of music albums yourself over the years. Whether you’re as old as I am already and still remember audio tapes or nowadays just by sharing digitally. Remember, even iTunes initial DRM allowed music to be played on 5 devices. Now it is only an ethical matter anymore whether you share iTunes downloads or not. I am old and consider every burned CD I pass on just like the old copy on an audio tape. Because… music is made to share and great music I will share.

Freely.

I will come to your gig. Maybe, maybe I might even be that one person who will pre-order your next release in iTunes. But only if your music has climbed my play count rank.

1. On a side note, I see way too many bands use ‘message updates’. We do not read anything which is not on our NEWS FEED!

My parents’ handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today’s standards, minor works of art. At the time, some – probably those with poor hand- writing – said that fine writing was the art of fools. It’s obvious that fine handwriting does not necessarily mean fine intelligence. But it was pleasing to read notes or documents written as they should be.

I hate the phrase lazy journalism.

It suggests that an undercooked story is because the journalist doesn’t work hard. Many times that’s not true.

Mind you the reality isn’t much more attractive to lovers of the old school journalism of contacts, beats and knocking on doors. But it does have big implications for PRs.

A more accurate description of what we’re seeing today is ROI journalism – where efficiency with scarce journalistic resource means that journos are spread thinner and have more ground to cover than ever before.

If there’s one thing you can learn from publishing online, especially in the news sector, it’s that you can’t let complacency set in. You have to grab things by the balls and do what you have to do.

The same applies to dreams, plans. They won’t happen while sitting there, waiting for a miracle. To be happy you have have to pursue your dreams and get active, get of that lazy ass of yours and stop bitching if that was what you were doing. Sometimes you might need a reminder, but when you have been lucky enough that someone woke you up… act! Don’t wait and talk about it, just do it!

I am hungry. I am an achiever. I want to be somewhere there at the top, where ever that may be.
Life’s short, too short and you only live once.

We all have our dreams and some of us are lucky enough to be able to work at their dreams. So it comes that hot on the heels of the acquisition news, I can announce that I have decided to step down from my position as member of the managing team at Splashpress Media (1). Step down after having worked up to where I was. Step down because I want more, because I am hungry.

Splashpress Media is a small company, an indie network and has always resisted the call of VC. There is no board I could possibly join as consultant, advisor or whatsoever, but I will be down in the trenches with the authors and freelance for both The Blog Herald and Forever Geek. Both those sites definitely should aspire to become worthy 9rules members. And I want to profile myself as a hard working and valuable 9r member.

What’s next for myself? I am an idea tank, throw something at me and within minutes I’ll have ideas for it. Change the core and only minutes later again, there are new ideas. But ideas alone are worthless, they also need to be converted. Now is the time to start showing that I have learned and not only play hard. Now is the time to act(2).

Act and live by the rules.

First I need a partner in crime and then… rock ‘n roll!

Image: Geopoliticus Child watching the birth of the New Man, Salvador Dalí.

1. I will probably continue to annoy many of you!
2. Expect the odd reference to the past and moment of snark

Sometimes you are lucky without even realizing how much people would do to have the same opportunity you had. Today was one of these moments, the light shone on me, but not before I was reminded by Tyme White how lucky I was, after I had announced the acquisition of 9rules by Splashpress Media.

Although I am a latecomer to the blog party, being stuck in ‘CMS communities and *Nuke’ pretty much until early 2005, I had discovered 9rules a while before I left Germany already, sometime late 2003. When it was still a little club, a really little club of totally awesome blogs. A little club where I learned quite some about blogging and design. It were the days people still read feeds. When you were cool if you used Bloglines and later switched to Google Reader. Twitter had not launched yet. It was before I discovered The Blog Herald. It was before I had a blog. I even didn’t have a personal rant blog or Myspace. Facebook did not exist back then.

Blogging only became a reality end 2005 when I needed an outlet for the professional stress. I was not allowed to have a public figure. I overshared on my ‘anonymous’ blog. I did everything you shouldn’t do on a blog and almost paid the price for. Geek nature quickly took over and personal blogging disappeared more and more. I discovered WordPress via 9rules and The Blog Herald. I ditched my blogspot account and moved to Am I Famous Now (1)(2). I now had a blog, I had to be famous!

I will never forget the day Mike Rundle left a comment. A comment on AIFN? A site written in my Engrish? WOW! OMG!
All while hiding behind my laziness fourth language, I had commented and put in doubt the exclusivity of 9rules after Round 4. Before I knew it, Scrivs linked back on the 9rules blog.

It was how everything started for me. It was when I decided to create the eyesore colour scheme of Am I Famous Now, my participation to the CSS Reboot. My pisstake on Web2.0 design: pink, lime green and Kappa4.0 badge, complete with drop shadow. Not to forget semantics. Even the sidebar titles aligned properly. If you used IE6 your comments weren’t welcome.

Yeah, baby. I was cool! Or something like that.

Before I knew it, I was offered a writing gig. On Jack of all Blogs, after another rant obviously. Those were the days, hit out at someone and earn yourself a writing gig or get linked.

Almost three years have passed since then and I have written on some prolific blogs for Splashpress Media: Tubetorial, BloggingPro, Forever Geek, Wisdump and since some weeks I regularly contribute to The Blog Herald. Every day I enjoy blogging more and more again(3).

I have been lucky to have had the occasion to write on several well-known blogs with a strong following, but most of all, these blog were all started by strong characters and they all have inspired me. One person always stood out.

More than Duncan at BH, Krug at JOAB or Mike over at Business Logs, Scrivs became my inspiration. The blogger I wanted to learn from, work with at some point. A born writer with a very outspoken opinion. A great online columnist, a true blogger. Living the life by 9 rules:

1. Love what you do.
2. Never stop learning.
3. Form works with function.
4. Simple is beautiful.
5. Work hard, play hard.
6. You get what you pay for.
7. When you talk, we listen.
8. Must constantly improve.
9. Respect your inspiration.

I admit that it was easy to have fun at his expense at times but would I have bothered if I did not follow the guy? No.
Thanks to my stints at JOAB and Wisdump, I grew up online. I needed a time out to re-evaluate my online persona. To work at my still not too great English. First work, then comeback.
When some days ago I was informed about the 9rules deal, I can not tell you what went through my head. OMG, WTF and Holy Frackin’ Noodles are only understatements coming nowhere close to my initial thoughts. I was stoked, hyped and nervous at the same time. I could not wait until Scrivs announced the news, to follow up with an entry at The Blog Herald. And then, then I saw the rules once more.

9 rules, 9 rules we all should endorse a lot more. But the first and last two are the most important ones to me:

1. Love what you do.
2. Never stop learning…
3. Must constantly improve.
4. Respect your inspiration.

Today everything starts all over. I will start working at making sure that the Splashpress sites I contribute to will be great enough to be submitted and become valuable members of the 9rules community. I will not run 9rules, but will actively participate to the hidden forums community.

Today reminds me of my inspirations. Today reminds me why I love publishing online. Tyme reminded me of how lucky and privileged I have been to publish on those sites and follow in the footsteps of these great and inspirational bloggers. Thank you 9rules, thank you Scrivs. I hope am sure we can do you proud.

Tomorrow is when I will proofread. Tomorrow is the day everything starts from scratch. :)

1. Yes, all blog stupidities still are archived there
2. Sold since long, I am not famous anymore
3. I had an almost 18 months break until early 2009

And yet, I argued back, after camera phone dude helps us establish that the plane has crashed, who can we trust to tell us why it happened? While bloggers can own the first five minutes of any breaking story – a plane crash, a fire, a burglary – it’s always going to be the professional reporters who own the next five days, or five weeks. They walk the streets, work their contacts and – yes – trawl the blogosphere for eye-witness reports, and then take all of that information, analyse it, follow it up and ultimately provide an account of events that readers can trust.

Andrew D. Rosen asked an interesting question today over at the Blog Herald: how much do you earn per post?

Many people nowadays wonder how to make money from blogs, some still think we can get rich doing nothing, sitting at home naked.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

In my position at Splashpress Media I can tell you that there are huge differences in pay across the board and different networks have different payment structures. Often the fee is based on several different factors:

• Location of the blogger: someone who lives in the UK obviously has higher living costs than a Vietnamese citizen. Both have the same number of hours in a day to craft entries;
• Experience and ‘Rockstar level’ of the blogger: experienced bloggers and so-called A-listers tend to ask more for an entry because usually they have a following, a group of loyal readers who will also subscribe to their entries. Blog rockstars tend to get more trackbacks and comments than beginning, aspiring bloggers;
• Controversy and linkbait experience: Nowadays an often forgotten quality of bloggers is their ‘controversy’ strategy and capability to link bait. Blogging became popular because it was a personal and opinionated style of writing. Bloggers were online columnists. A controversial blogger will get many comments and generate traffic;
• Number of entries: Some bloggers only look for some gigs monthly. Often they are specialized in writing ‘feature entries’. These take a lot longer than your average blog post;
• Social media popularity: Many professional bloggers have a high popularity on the social bookmarking sites. An entry submitted by them will easily get more votes and hence generate lots of traffic;
• Credit crunch

Different networks apply different structures

At Splashpress Media we apply a flat fee per post based on many of the above mentioned factors.
Duncan Riley’s Inquisitr recently started looking in to a traffic-based payment system. Nick Denton’s Gawker network pays out a traffic based fee, with a small monthly fix. Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch‘s network pays the bloggers a flat monthly fee.

Due to the differences it is very hard to put a number on the earnings of a blogger. Lately many beginning bloggers are paid only USD 2.50 – USD 3.00 per entry. There are several reasons for this: credit crunch being one, the international open application market being the second reason. In a market with many Asian candidates ‘Western’ people always face more and more competition and often have to lower their rates to the actual average. Reading and reporting about blogger jobs on a regular level, I can confirm that being paid USD 0.05/word has become a great and only very seldom reached level. The reality is much closer to USD 0.01/word on your average blog.

Valuable advice for applicants

We receive daily applications from both beginning and professional bloggers. Some are downright hilarious and read like this:

I am a very good writer I have good knowledge .You can write
very good blogs and want to work with you.

Hilarious as this submission may be, generally perfect English is not the most important criterium to get a gig. Obviously an (open) application like this one will immediately be filed in drawer 13, not only because of the English(1) was below par but because there isn’t enough of information for us to decide. What do you need to mention in your application email?

• Full name and contact details: Under certain condition we will allow people to post under a pseudo, but usually we require complete details;
• Link to your OWN blog: Even in these times I can think of many bloggers/applicants who do not have an own blog. This is important as it allows us to discover everything you didn’t want us to know about you(2);
• Samples of your work: Link some of previous work in the email. Do NOT submit any attachments as we love to see the work published online and check out reactions on your work;
• Financial expectations: To avoid any further confusion, disappointment submit immediately what your financial expectations are. This is especially important when you filed an open application. If you reply to a public ad without financial specifications, also mention your expectations. This saves everyone time and because we just checked out your previous work, you might be more lucky than you expect;
• Other specialities: Mention what your other specialities are, especially if you are strong in web development, server administration or even SEM or Adsense optimization
• LINK to your CV: Feel free to submit your CV but LINK to your CV and do NOT add it as an attachment. Many companies have a no-attachment email policy and to be honest, I do not need your Resume as a local file. Your resume belongs on your personal site or on your Linkedin profile;
• Convince us, go out of your way to land a writing gig: Let’s be honest, we are dealing with a credit crunch and the online commercial situation needs pink glasses to be called colourful. If you like a site and want to convince the editors of your skills, feel free to offer 2 or 3 free entries. By now we will already have formed an opinion about whether to hire you or not. In case of doubt these entries can help you, if we would have hired you even without those, they will only serve you ass a bonus because we will think that you are motivated and absolutely want to post on site X.

Disclosure: These are general guidelines and might or might not always be applied by every site editor/owner. The main rule, especially when applying to an open position is to RTFM.
Other than above mentioned numbers, I will not be drawn in to list any number we pay to our bloggers as every situation is handled individually and differently.

1. My English is far from perfect
2. Such as your link to your Facebook profile. Kidding but the first site we will usually look at is your own blog

New Chief Editor and other changes at Splashpress Media

As of today Jayvee is the new Chief Editor of Splashpress Media and I am now officially Head Muppet Head of Marketing for the biggest indie blog network.

From the announcement introducing Jayvee:

If you’ve read The Tipping Point and believe Malcolm Gladwell’s three classification of marketers as mavens, connectors, salesmen or a combination thereof, Jayvee falls under the second type as a firm believer in the quality of relationships you build your community upon. He’s been a community organizer in his previous job that had nothing to do with the Internet, and it seems to be fate that brings him into more community building endeavors, apparently more on the Internet.

It is no secret that of the three categories of marketers, I certainly belong to the Muppet(1) category and will thus also focus part of my attention on creating content for some of our bigger sites: Forever Geek, 901am, XFEP, Blogger Talks and the good ol’ Manchester United Blog.

I will also be spearheading the release and marketing of Splashpress Media’s first Premium Theme Rogue Theme.

Update about Forever Geek

Some months ago, when I announced my return to Splashpress Media, I mentioned possible plans for Forever Geek. I have to say that I did not continue the approach of creating more noise, publishing more entries, instead we have focused on making FG more niche again and less of a gadget blog. Over the next weeks we will now start pushing FG to the social media sites and promote the site more and more. More about the new approach to follow in the near future.

1. Sarcasm will never cease to be part of this blog ;)

Myspace is popular as a platform but should not never your main presence. Take on board the following advice, use following platforms and for less than £100/year you have a great and modern online presence.

Set up an own website.

URL starts at $9.89/year at namecheap.com
Cheap and adequate webspace can be found for around £50/year: this should offer you around 5GB storage space and several GBs of traffic every month (some webhosters even give 1TB traffic monthly but I tend to not recommend those bigger providers because they like to fail on a regular basis).

Use a platform such as WordPress for your site software. This is free and entirely customizable and is used as fully fledged site software/CMS on several cases. There are thousands of plugins for WP, even free shop platforms allowing you to sell your tracks and merchandize. It should not be too hard to find online mavens who will design your site and keep it updated (give them free entrance to your gigs etc), even I maintain sites of friends for free.

Last but not least… BLOG!

Add your music to Last.fm, Spotify and Pandora

Music owners can submit their music to these platforms for free and receive royalties for every time their tracks are played.
If you are a subscriber on last.fm you can easily create playlists of your albums release and embed these on your site, thus allowing your visitors to listen to your tunes without having to pay the bandwidth host if you suddenly became the latest #1 in the country. Being a subscriber costs £1.50/month. Otherwise embed a spotify playlist.

Get a Flickr account

Stop your whining, this will cost you $25/year if done and used properly. The free account will only show your last 200 pictures and will not allow flickr users to download the high-res pictures. Upload pictures of all your gigs in high-res (at least 5MP) to your Flickr and also release your official press photos via Flickr. Allow Flickr users to download your pictures in hi-res(1).

Get the plugin for WordPress to display the last x pictures on your website, transforming your website in a ‘hub’.

Use social media.

Do not only focus on myspace to promote your music and facebook for the events. Also use services such as upcoming, eventbrite (perfect to sell tickets for your gigs), twitter (shut up it’s a powerful tool if used properly). Set up a zazzle store if you want to offer merchandize but haven’t reached enough of popularity (or earned enough of money) yet to order your own t-shirts in batch.

Do not forget to use Twitter as a tool to promote yourself, your gigs and your merchandise. You can easily embed your latest tweets in your website with the Twitter Tools by Alex King if your site is WordPress based.

Also create a Facebook page. Since the Facebook design update some weeks ago pages play a more prominent role. Page updates will now appear in the newsfeed of all fans, highly improving the interaction with your fans.

Prominently link to your social media/other online profiles on your website.

I can hear you ask already ‘If I have to link out to profiles on other sites, why bother with my own website?‘.

Do you want to be indie or do you want to allow the biggest sites, Myspace (owned by Mr. Murdoch) and Facebook (valued at $15bn) to earn from your product by framing your product in with the ugliest ads you’ll ever see?

1. This is not possible with free accounts

The main focus of the lecture was the importance of blogging for computer scientists for their future career. I briefly touched the history of the modern internet and blogging, mentioned the difficulty of making money with blogs online before pointing out the importance of a blog for programmers, developers and designers.
I decided not to release the podcast but publish a slightly more in-depth entry instead

Short History of the Internet and Blogging

Blogging started almost as soon as the ‘modern internet’(1) was created and people started to web log what they discovered online, mainly as an aid for other surfers to find interesting sites. In these times there was no Google, Yahoo (Directory), DMOZ Project, Technorati or Eaton Portal yet helping us to discover what was great, funny and/or interesting. We entirely relied on what others discovered.
The history of blogging is a very discussed topic but a brief version(2) can be found at The Blog Herald.

When in 1996 the MSM(3) started to discover the World Wide Web and online magazines such as Slate were created, the WWW still was a small world where most people knew each other. It was a thriving and helpful community.

The World Wide Web was an invigorating, compelling and, frankly, amazing place in 1996. Innovations were fast, furious and quickly adopted. Clever people did clever things and pretty much everyone noticed, because “everyone” was a rather small and curious community. [...] The Internet of 1996 was certainly nothing like today’s experience. But to suggest there wasn’t much to do is to ignore everything that was being done.(4)

As online magazines started to grow and channels such as BBC Online emerged more and more, the online publishing sector was pioneered in these years. Together with the evolution of open source CMS(5) it became easier and easier to publish online(6).

The Web As A Publishing Ground for Amateurs

With the growing popularity of CMS platforms such as *Nukes and Mambo in the early years of the 21st Century, many students and other geeks started to publish on a regular basis, often more than 5 times/day, on their favourite topic. Online communities became really big and many a freetime author, citizen journalist, started to earn a buck from their website. Several communities were multi-authored and the software platforms were huge, resource hungry and often heavily SEO’d(7). This was the period when I started to publish on a semi-professional basis myself and ran one of the bigger(8) German Windows communities. We fought an eternal battle for page views and usually were hours, sometimes even days, earlier with tech news than the established news sites. The financial factor of running a popular online community was highly rewarding. The technical site of running a website and trying to stay on top of SERPs(9) was a rather difficult battle and many webmasters become online mavens, learning much about server optimization, SEO and waded for the first time through code, modding their platform constantly.

Blog Software Emerges

It was around this period that the first blogging software applications started to be written and released, with Movable Type(10). WordPress, today’s most popular blogging platform, was first released in May 2003 as a fork of the not longer maintained b2\cafelog and would soon become more popular than the MT after Mena Trott announced changes in the MT licensing structure. Blogging software, itself also a CMS platform, could be defined as a ‘stripped down’ version of the popular PostNuke, Mambo/Joomla platforms and became popular because of the ease of use. You only needs to compare the simplicity of the admin backend of WordPress to the backend of the still popular Joomla! to understand why platforms such as WP and Movable Type became popular(11).

Different Types of Blogs

There are three kind of blogs which I will discus and also have a look at their future and importance now.

Personal diarrhea diary

There is not much further explanation needed about these blogs, we all know the ‘OMG my cat just had a poop!’ blog and love to hate them. There is little future in these blogs, in the words of the wise and snarky Paul Boutin:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Multi-authored blogs, AKA Online Magazines

Some of the most popular blogs such as TechCrunch, Gawker and Engadget are multi-authored and rather lucrative online sites. Personally I do not tend to consider these sites ‘blogs’ but rather the perfect example of the web being recursive: they are professional online magazines. Often these blogs have been created by one person, who tried to be a journalist with a carte blanche for snark. Citizen journalism. For many of these sites the main mottos are publish often, publish fast and We’ll fact check later.

These blogs often are mentioned as New Media and A-Listers have fought for several years to receive the same credits as more traditional, MSM, journalists.
Now the MSM have accepted and endorsed blogs, it makes little sense to start a new Web2.0, tech , games, car, movie, whatever blog and hope to become rich. The combination of both classic media endorsing blogs(12) and classic media using similar SEO strategies as bloggers(13) will result in a renewed fight for page views, especially in these financially bad times online. Unless you have PR you can bleed and you can push traffic to a new site you have no chance to rank well in the SERPs. Quality does not matter if no one reads.
The jury still is out on the Long Tail and whether you invest in the Long Tail. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail recently even came under criticism from his own editors.

Your Blog as Your Online Brand

Your blog can also be used as an extended online curriculum. Your blog is your online presence, a hub to your other online profiles. Your own online column.

Why It Is Important to Grow and Maintain Your Online Presence

Times have changed and Computer Science continues to grow in popularity. 20 Years ago there were only few computer specialists and those who were literate in this science could easily get a job. Nowadays everyone thinks they can program, code, design and manage networks/systems and the value of a CV has largely been reduced to some more sheets on the stack of applicants. Your blog can help you stand out from the masses!

In times when companies such as Google screen applications you want to have an extra to your CV. This extra should be your blog, your central hub.
Your blog will link out to other online presences expressing your interest in computer science and related topics, such as your(14):

• Social Bookmarking profile (fe. Delicious or iterasi)
• Your ‘coding archive’: if you use platforms such as Github you have to link to these.
• Your LinkedIn profile
• Your photo sharing profile/Flickr. More than you can imagine the pictures you take, publish are an expression of your interests.

Programming is much more than knowing a certain language, programming is a way of thinking and your blog offers you the possibility to show off your knowledge. Every time you make an interesting edit to public code, use pastie or have discovered a bit of slick and clean code, you should write about it and explain the reason behind your edit. Your blog offers you the opportunity to show that you can think as a programmer, understand code and are bleeding edge, interested in learning always new things and improve your code.
Many software engineers employed by the major online and IT companies share code, return to the community and if your writing and thinking is great they will discover your entries and start following you. This might even result in companies offering you a position. In our modern age even several open source applications have received venture capital and they also hire people. Your blog is where you can prove how good you are. Much more than by doing a practicum at a company, a company which much not allow you to share your code.

Tought Palace by Jens Alfke(15) is a perfect example of how to use your blog both personally and professionally. In the period after Jens had left Apple and before he accepted the position at Google, he blogged regularly about an idea and for and the thought pattern behind an iPhone application he planned to create, Cloudy. Other great examples of blogs landing people lectures and consulting jobs in their specific areas are Merlin Mann, from 43folders fame, and Chris Garrett a famous British social media consultant(16). Other examples include Swedish Campground by Caius Durling, Brightbox developer, Veerle Duoh‘s blog, designer extraordinaire and Expression Engine evangelist, 456Bereastreet by Roger Johansson, accessibility guru par excellence, and the blog of MySQL guru Jeremy Zawodny.

1. To keep things simple we will settle on 1994-1995 here, when the World Wide Web became ‘mainstream’.
2. Written by one of the first professional ‘bloggers’ about blogging
3. Mainstream Media
4. David Wertheimer in response to Slate on the Jurassic Web of 1996.
5. Content Management System
6. Online pioneers such as Merlin Mann might look back on the early day in a nostalgic way
7. Search Engine Optimized
8. Now defunct
9. Search Engine Result Page
10. First released in September 2001
11. You can try out all different open source CMS platforms here
12. Media sites usually have a very high Page Rank in Google
13. Mainly linking to each other to keep the Page Rank flow to only well ranked sites
14. Do not link to your Facebook profile, just think about why you shouldn’t. Your blog is not a chatterbox
15. Creator of the iChat
16. Chris’s site is down at the moment of writing

There is an easy formula for doing it wrong: publish attention-getting bullshit and pull stunts to generate mindless traffic. The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

…Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job. Eventually I shut down—not for financial reasons, but because Steve Jobs appeared to be in poor health. I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.

Actually there is money to be made from blogs, no matter how crazy it may sound, but two domains are not profitable. Blogging about blogging and snark. In the first category there are some exceptions to be found, but the latter is a money burning hole.

The problem with snark is that no company wants to be affiliated with this topic and that’s it. Nothing more needs to be said about that topic. Snark is out, snark is unprofitable and snark only works when anonymous. Snark belongs in the fun department, not in the professional one.

To be entirely honest, I never really liked the blogs as a platform option.

So there certainly is some irony in the fact that I will not only edit Forever Geek from now on, but also run BloggerTalks.

BloggerTalks certainly will be an interesting ride as I hope to present some interviews with people from less known corners of the blogosphere, but also have the desire to interview some blogging celebrities or celebrities who network actively online but do not blog. Besides, I hope at times to have contrasting opinions on the future of blogging.

Possible future plans for Forever Geek hit closer home for me as it certainly is a consideration to overhaul the site and maybe even not use WordPress in the future. The plan right now is to present Forever Geek more as a magazine than as a blog and although WordPress offers lots of great configuration possibilities, it will be a challenge to reboot the site, especially with several thousands of articles in the archives.
Right now the site is a mix of geekiness which could (almost) be generated by adding several feeds of major blog and covers a several popular topics such as hardware, gaming and entertainment, some sort of Lifehacker, Joystiq and Gizmodo cocktail. This obviously is a very healthy mix of topics, especially when spiced up with some celebrity geekiness such as is the case at Forever Geek, but the broad cover area can also cause problems when trying to grow a platform.

In times of low CPM the easiest trick to grow a site, blog in to a magazine is to increase the amount of entries… and noise. Together with a growing number of entries the risk of losing regulars grows as they might not enjoy the number of entries in their favoured topic anymore or just lose interest because their feedreader becomes too noisy.

And that will be my challenge for Forever Geek: take the site to a new level, with more content, but without alienating the actual regulars. There are several options to do this but an in-depth analysis of both content and options over the next months will help us make a decision and then see if the site can be further developed in to a community.

1. Obviously blogs are CMS too, but I mean the *complete* packages

Illegal activities
Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on form 1040 line 21, or on schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self employment activity.

Kickbacks.
You must include kickbacks,side commissions, push money, or similar payments you receive in your income…

Stolen property.
If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner.

Bribes.
If you receive a bribe, include it in your income.

Macintosh adherents tend to be frivolous time-wasters dazzled by cheap sensory effects.

If she had been at all good looking we might have done it.

It would be a fantastic contract, yes, but there are other things more important than money. A player wants to be remembered for what he has won.

Imagine 10 years after you stop playing, you go back, you look around, you are not in any picture, you have no medals, no trophies; it is like you played for nothing.

You may have a fantastic car, a fantastic home, but what does it matter?

You can have a contract that is better than your friends, but no player looks back and says, ‘I won more money’.

Being a Manchester United fan I obviously do not fear Man City or see them winning trophies anytime soon. I must admit that the prospect of seeing Kaka in the Premier League is an interesting one, but at that price?
No one is worth that kind of money. And to be honest, I kind of ‘gave up’ on football some months ago after realizing how negative fans, me included, think. I want to be entertained and enjoy what players offer me, not scrutinize their every move.

<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key
<Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> fuck me
[via Bash.org]

Are you a 1337 with perfect eyesight?

[via ffffound].

1. Tumbling will become more present here

It’s a pleasure to see how far Michael, whom I have worked with on Tubetorial during my time for Splashpress Media, has come. From subliminal pr0n evangelist(1) to WordPress guru. Although the ‘guru’ thing can be debated ;).

1. Kidding!

Related: You might want to browse through the complete photo series at Boston.com, there are some amazing documentaries.

1. Via Jason Kottke

I’m off again, reading about one more friend probably not winning the battle with cancer just weighs too heavy on me.

Update: Luckily Lisa Lisa hasn’t given up yet still a very sad day.

It was a difficult situation and many people ‘close’ to us have done their best to abuse all possible options. Although, pessimistic as I usually am towards people and knew they were looking to find their foothold against one of us, I did not see the signs coming, but they were trying to drive us apart(1).
It was a very emotional road, a rollercoaster bigger than most attraction parks offer, and we both committed a lot to the cause. Driven in our commitment we initially grew apart. Grew apart after an awesome and very promising first contact. Sometimes it’s just the way life goes. It is sad that I did not always see the road they tried to walk, thus allowing them to abuse a possible split between us, worse even thus allowing me not to believe 200% in You.

Still, and most important of all, even though the road we walked together was very ‘cobbly’ at times, we did an awesome job and I am sure you will do an even better job as time moves off. You are the right guy for this project and you will succeed. I regret not to be able to be there and side with you in the future, but hope our professional roads will continue to collaborate, not just at national meetings.

The gift some months ago was not just ‘something’, it was a sincerely meant present, a present because you believed in me and gave me a chance although I probably was the least qualified for the job. When we first met I immediately ‘sensed’ you. Since then many disruptive things have happened and I forgot to ignore them, ignore them like I did to initial doubts I might have had about our collaboration and ignoring those doubts was the right thing to do because they were plainly stupid.

One thing I have learned over last months: no matter how rough the road together might have been at times, from the start there were great dynamics between us and last weeks have shown that ‘they’ were/are wrong in their arguments.

Right now I only have one dream: I hope that no matter what might happen to you, bother you, annoy you, that if some day you need help/assistance you will let me know and allow me to help, advise you.

P.S.: I will not accept any linguistic analysis from your partner, I bet her knowledge is not focused on people writing in their fourth language :P
I might come back to her if one day I need an editor for a great blogging gig ;)

1. And they somehow succeeded

1. But don’t we say that every year?

They do not understand the value, importance of lime. No you don’t put lemon in a G&T.

The fact that the Tanqueray is brought to you by a Brit girl, with the accompanying bottles of Tonic(1) and _lemon_ don’t make this lack of knowledge more acceptable.

1. Surprisingly Slimline Tonic tastes rather well with Tanqueray

I must admit that I used to be a rather addicted gamer as a kid, when my parents still had our first C64. Mission Impossible, Summer and Winter Games, Spy vs. Spy all were very high on my activity list, just like arcade games such as Outrun, Double Dragon and Streetfighter II. And I certainly am not the only one who prefers these games on modern titles.
Once the C64 was replaced by an Amiga and then OS2, gaming was sent to background. The whole console rage just happened but never caught any of my attention. Just like the whole iPod thing(2). Until recently.

As previously said, the real reason I bought a PS3 was because I wanted to upgrade my movography (?) to Blu-ray, now the platform war finally was won and the PS3 seemed the most appropriate, feature rich low-budget BD player at that time(3). Once confronted with lots of freetime, a new discovery started. Sometimes I liked playing Need for Speed on my PC and with the release of NfS Undercover imminent I purchased a secondhand version of NfS Carbon some weeks ago. Although initially I was annoyed by the poor aliasing in the 1080p(4) display and the impossibility of listening to my own music while playing, quickly I started enjoying the controller and the great sound the PS3 delivered on my new amplifier. I purchased some more games, mainly the high rated ones, those not requiring to be an awarded pianist a button freak, and soon playing replaced the countless hours I previously spend reading online.
Right now, after only some weeks, several games have been added to the collection already and it is only a matter of time before I become a Button Master. First I have to finish Oblivion Platinum Edition, GTA, MGS 4 and Soulcalibur 4. NfS Undercover, FIFA09 and Race Grid: Driver already have been sent to the bookcase. NfS because it was another typical boring EA release.

1. Or resolved and not disclosed, in the best of cases
2. Yes, everyone and their 3 nephews know that I got in to iPod thing with both the iPod Touch and iPhone
3. I will soon upgrade to whether a Pioneer whether a Panasonic model though
4. Full HD

KeegsMom
it was a scenario description, but I take your point, getting to even a couple of thousand a month is hard going. If you want to ping me on email duncan at nichenet.com.au I’d be happy to take a look at what you’re currently doing and share some personalized advice if you like. Always happy to help. [Emphasis mine]

Yes, that is right. Initially the internet was built upon helping each other. Whether it was by sharing links to awesome sites/content or by sharing tips and tricks.

And I remember plenty of moments when I hit up people like Duncan(3) or Matt Craven and if they were online, within minutes, you’d have a Skype(4) session with them.

Sometimes I wish the _next big thing_ would start and it would be a mix of the _old garde_ again. Back to the old style, the time when everyone helped each other out.
Hats off Duncan for still keeping up the old spirit!

1. Especially for the MSM
2. Although I was a latecomer to blogging, I used to spend all my time helping people on Usenet and then managing Windows Communities. *nuke Times for those who remember that type of CMS ;-)
3. Who already wrote at TC
4. Or AIM chat for the old skool ones among us

Ever since Ian Parker-Joseph, leader of the UK Libertarian Party commented on the 1984 entry, I have been reading about Libertarians in the UK and the Libertarian Party (1).

Having lived in Germany, but also as a qualified police agent in my home country, the 1984-issue is a sensible one for me, but also an issue of mixed feelings.
I actually do have NO problems with the gouvernment collecting my data. Get over it, but there’s no issue with a compulsory ID card, nor is there with handing over all my internet logs to the authorities. The problem only arises when this huge data collection can create paranoia, when there is no law protecting the privacy of citizens.

I must admit that when I came to the UK, the thought of being almost 24/7 on CCTV was a scary one, but soon I got used to this new form of Big Brother spying upon me. Especially since I had just left Germany, a country where it is NOT allowed to log IP addresses. The same country where a law regulates that internet providers log the login to the internet, emails and VOIP calls. This combined with a stringent set of laws on regulating the protection of personal data. The UK is not alone, Big Brother is watching you all over, in any country, and I seriously doubt that most so-called privacy anal-retentists browse online anonymously or avoid cloud based services such as GMail and Google Web History(2) and consequently block cookies from third parties such as ad providers, statistics programs and many more. Probably most of them have at least one credit card, and maybe even participate in several bonus card systems in their favourite shops, thus allowing everyone and their neighbours to analyse their spending patterns.

Your privacy is an illusion(3). I’m drifting. Back to the Libertarians.

Wikipedia offers, via the Internet Encyclopedia of Psychology, following definition of Libertarianism:

Libertarians are committed to the belief that individuals, and not states or groups of any other kind, are both ontologically and normatively primary; that individuals have rights against certain kinds of forcible interference on the part of others; that liberty, understood as non-interference, is the only thing that can be legitimately demanded of others as a matter of legal or political right; that robust property rights and the economic liberty that follows from their consistent recognition are of central importance in respecting individual liberty; that social order is not at odds with but develops out of individual liberty; that the only proper use of coercion is defensive or to rectify an error; that governments are bound by essentially the same moral principles as individuals; and that most existing and historical governments have acted improperly insofar as they have utilized coercion for plunder, aggression, redistribution, and other purposes beyond the protection of individual liberty.

Noble words, as is the case with almost any ideology. The principle of liberty has been forgotten in most parts of our world and has become the same illusion that your privacy is. A visit to the UK Libertarian’s website makes the ideology sound even better:

At long last there is another way forwards for our country; one which puts you, rather than the corrupt politicians at Westminster, firmly in charge. Our policies provide real-world solutions to the real-world challenges that we all face today, and do so whilst putting government and the State back in their rightful place as the servants, rather than the masters, of us all.

Who would not immediately want to become a member of this Party?
When you start reading their manifesto, feelings might chance be reinforced even more, depending on what your favourite movie is. Did you take the Red Pill and do you believe in The Matrix?

If you answered both questions with Yes go now and apply for your membership.

If you also are a firm believer in the morals(4) of the movie Fight Club, you will have even more sympathy for the LPUK:

We will amend the Firearms Acts to repeal the pistol ban, which has both completely failed to reduce armed crime and crippled our country’s ability to compete in the pistol shooting events in the Olympic and Commonwealth Games, while depriving law-abiding householders of the ability to defend their homes with one of the most suitable weapons available. [From the LPUK Manifesto, topic Law and Order]

Things become interesting here, especially when we hit over to The Devil’s Kitchen, a funny and well-written thought-provoking blog, started by one of the LPUK co-founders(5) (Warning: common offensive language). Actually a political blog right down my alley.

Today’s entry seems to fit the provoking, but also _scary_ mentality of the LPUK:

We might instead say that if we impose systems under which children are only forcibly separated from their parents under the very worst of circumstances, and under which parents are not always and unequivocally treated as evil abusers if they fail to live up to ideal standards of parenting, then sometimes this will mean that children will suffer horribly and die – but that it will avoid a far larger number of children suffering horribly by being taken into council care without good cause.

And fuck, if we’re libertarians rather than just blathering cunts, we might say that this is the *right thing to fucking do*.

A very powerful but dangerous message, prone to be understood wrongly. Ad rem and also bordering the style of propaganda which always will be listened to when countries experience negative economic downturns. The same style of propaganda alike style, which made the secessionist Vlaams Blok popular in the Belgian 1991 elections. The style of propaganda which could lead to a bump in popularity, because in a country driven by binge drinking a petty crime, isn’t it true that everyone has the right to defend themselves? And we admit:

Allowing people to carry firearms certainly will lead to the death of several people on the compulsory Friday after work binge drink, but at least the victims will have had the opportunity to shoot back.(6)

Libertarians of the LPUK, let’s rehearse the populist blogging style once more please.

The ‘Harsh’ Facts

• I like thought provoking, harsh and highly aggressive opinions if based on factual truths.
• I must admit that The Devil’s Kitchen could quickly become my favourite UK blog
• DK has the potential to bring the highly offensive(7) blogger madbull back.
• I consider myself a Libertarian.
• I like to provoke and select quotes just to ridiculize things. Fisking?

1. This is how I discovered the awesome Philosophy of Liberty animation.
2. Chances that most users of the Google Toolbar actually know that their queries are saved are rather SLIM.
3. Unless you are consequent
4. I use this term loosely
5. Multi-authored nowadays
6. Following quote should be added here, but I do not condone the LPUK stance on firearms: And fuck, if we’re libertarians rather than just blathering cunts, we might say that this is the *right thing to fucking do*
7. As once said by Libertarian Kn@ppster

But I do not see a link between suffering the bane of being an early adopter and getting banned for not respecting the rules, guidelines.
Early adopterism has been the topic on this blog before, and even nowadays, in my days of blogging retirement, I continue to be an avid tester of applications and spam my colleagues with any new service I discover and like. Around 3% of the stuff I test. My Holy Shit Tools.

And sometimes, I realize I better had waited before switching, before implementing a new, beta service in my daily workflow, as the Chyrp experience has shown me once more.

Never though have I been banned from a site, been confronted with a restriction other than my own stupidity. Not because I was an early adopter.
Honestly, I would be happy if Twitter made the decision for me that following more than 2000 tweeps is insane is. Then again, probably I am not interested enough in everyone’s lifestream.

1. Even after my problogging past, I still stay interested and follow the fewest blogs about blogging. I still read several Splashpress Media blogs.
2. Disclosure: I have blogged on several blogs Andrew blogs on now and think he is a fun and snarky writer.

Via International Society for Individual Liberty.

The UK government is planning to track everything you do on-line and on the phone. Even if you have done nothing wrong, every e-mail you send, every website you visit, every text you send and every call you make will be tracked, logged, categorized and stored for years.

Through an innocuous sounding “Intercept Modernisation Programme”, the government wants telephone and internet companies to send all their logs to a centralized system where it will be made accessible to law enforcement and military agencies at will.

Read more about the threat here, here and here.

Now that your car numberplate is scanned daily and CCTV tracks you up to 300 times per day, the government wants to invade the final bastion of privacy – the sanctity of your own home. In an effort that mimics George Orwell’s dystopian book 1984, it now wants to log all electronic communication between everyone.

Neither terrorism nor crime poses a threat big enough to warrant such sinister intrusion into the daily lives of innocent citizens. While targeted monitoring of potential criminals can be justified in many cases, instantly turning 61 million citizens into suspects is not British, not moral and not befitting for a democracy no matter the threat. Irrespective of the moral implications of this proposed tracking, do you really trust the government to keep all this information secure? How many times have we heard about supposed private information being dropped or intentionally leaked in the last year alone?

We do not want to live in a society where innocent people have to worry about what they say, what they do and how they act. If the Intercept Modernisation Programme, or any programme like it, goes through, it will kill the democracy it is trying to preserve. Even the Information Commisioner, Richard Thomas, has described this as a “step too far“.

Please sign the petition against these plans on the Prime Minister’s website.

If you feel strongly about this, please consider forwarding this information to your friends or tell them about the threat in some other way.

Thank you.

Via Michael Heilemann.

iCult, I love you.
Unrelated: my work Vista PC still hasn’t crashed, frozen or whatsoever. Since November 2006.

1. Expected on Tuesday

We will not be bullied, and people who file frivolous lawsuits need to be put down. I would rather run TechCrunch into the ground and go out of business than let this guy win.

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.
… There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Seems like I have heard that before. Pandora? Music recommendation platforms, nowadays as easy to find as social networks.

So what’s special about Spotify? It’s fast. At times. The sound quality is highly acceptable and they have a huge library. MOD. You can listen to complete albums(1) at once, without having to click every track like at Last.fm. You can skip as many tracks as you want unlike with Pandora. The radio service is not too bad. You can build your playlists and share them(2) online.

But I miss things, I love the recommendation platform from both last.fm and Pandora. especially because I can listen to ‘similar artists’ station. I love having a profile I can submit everything I listen to. And most of all, even though last.fm has not announced the pricing structure for unlimited MOD, Spotify seems expensive. Right now, all you need is an invite code to access the platform. Some days you might see the occasional ad in the player, other days you might not see advertising at all. If you want an ad free platform it’ll cost you $.99/day or $9.99/month. I just can’t see why I would pay (yet). Maybe if more features are implemented in the near future I might change opinion, until then I will stick with last.fm(3).
To be entirely honest… what’s the hype about Spotify about? And no I have no Spotify invites.

1. Spotify has signed licensing deals with companies including Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo.
2. Spotify has a proprietary URL protocol
3. It is rather hard to leave a profile with more than 100k submitted tracks

The will to share, the possibility to share. The ease of sharing.
The eternal chase for that special invite to a closed, private beta(1). The fear of missing out on the next big thing, only accessing a new service when they launch publicly.

The ease of meeting new people, the ease of accessing awesome content. Short(2) or long(3). That same ease to throw everything overboard again and forget about those new people, that awesome content and enjoy life, enjoy the always rainy weather in this country.

I am confuzed. I want to blog again, I really want to write again but sadly can’t settle on a topic. I’m your usual geek, always learning, leeching knowledge and discovering new stuff, even new professional ventures in. But, I tasted life…

…a long time ago. It’s out there, it’s knocking on the door. It’s shouting at me. Yelling!

Telling me to get out there. No, not in to RL, but pick up there where I left. Dissect themes, skin them, write reviews, share my _oh so_ interesting opinion on online stuff. Become an authority in commentary. I need an outlet.

But most of all… not just stalk people in my IM list, get in touch with them. They all were good friends and I dropped of the internet. So if I hit you up(4) anytime soon, you’ve been warned.
And hopefully I can work at all those drafts I started. Drafts about themes, blog platforms and plenty of commentary. Now it’s time for Beetlejuice though(5) . And maybe IM.

1. Yes I have spotify, TYVM. No, I have no spotify invites.
2. You still don’t follow favrd? That is so August 2008!
3. Go and read it, it’s long but awesome. I’ll watch LOTR in the meanwhile.
4. In IM
5. I can’t wait for Tim Burton’s ‘Alice’, with who else than Helena Bonham Carter and Johny Depp. Yes, if it weren’t for Tim Burton I’d kill Helena Bonham Carter’s fiancé.

#!/bin/sh
while [ "$CONSCIOUS" = "yes" ];
do
slamHeadIntoWall();
done
.

Thinking I sorta liked it when you had to learn perl, apache, and html to smear the web with dumbassery. It was a modest barrier to entry.

I can’t tell you how many girlfriends I’ve had that said “me or the business”, and I said “whats your name?”.

Two additional small webapps can make a kid an online geek happy.

LastGraph

LastGraph visualizes your music data, submitted to your last.fm account, in a unique way. Inspired by Lee Byron’s last.fm listening’s history graph the service pulls all (ALL!) your data from audioscrobbler and outputs everything in an awesome StreamGraph. Click image for larger graph (Original graph is 13000px wide).

Twitter StreamGraphs

What would a life be without the same, but for twitter? Exactly.

Worthless.

Twitter StreamGraphs does kinda same… but obviously _is_ restricted by the twitter API restrictions. And can’t be favourited in twitter either. Surprisingly the status of the service does not graph Failwhales or Failbirds.

• Gmail: Would I pay for GMail? Yes. But more even I’d pay for the hosted GMail. If it came with push to, because the hosted GMail actually is the only reason to pay for Google’s email service. Agreed the UI is great compared to other, although my preferred hating platform, Yahell, has become better with time.
  Why would I pay for a hosted email platform?
• Google Maps: Google Maps is a great service, but again… why would I pay for a service provided by others for free? Especially considered I already pay yearly to have my TomTom updated.
• WordPress.org: I would never consider paying for WordPress. The beauty of WordPress is the GPU/GNL spirit. If it weren’t for those, I’d rather pay for ExpressionEngine than for WP. Just because the platform is more mature.
• Statistic platforms/plugins:To be honest, although I have both Statcounter and Google Analytics installed here, I couldn’t care less for stats. I’m a huge fan of CrazyEgg though and pay for this service on several sites I manage.
• Craigslist: Considered I’m in Europe, Craigslist is pretty much useless to me. Even its European counter part, Gumtree is rather useless because I have an active social life and usually just have to tell/ask friends to sell/obtain something.

Several more, specifically US focused services are mentioned in the article, such as MLB, so it is very hard to comment on those. The only services I actually do pay for and enjoy paying for are:

• Flickr. I do pay for flickr, although I do consider switching to SmugMug, having the option to keep all my pictures somewhere as a backup option other than my hard drives and my own (soon to come) photoblog, is perfect to me.
• Last.fm: I do pay for the freedom of having my own radio station, based on what I listen to.
• Web hosting: Rather than using WP.com I pay for my own web hosting and like to have all my stuff in my own control.

To be entirely honest, there are only few I would pay for. Most involve platforms I use for websites, but otherwise I can perfectly live without many of the services which have become all day usage to me.

[Via WLTC]

So Andrew, you’ve bought into the simplistic argument that reducing paper usage will save trees. Actually reducing paper usage is more likely to reduce the amount of trees grown. Most trees used to make paper are grown by private land owners. If the market for those trees goes sour those land owners won’t replant trees after they are harvested. They will divert the land to something more profitable — like growing houses. I know. I’m one of those private tree farmers
A comment at WLTC.

Every person engaged with nature, rather than profit, knows that a fully grown tree can generate more oxygen than any young tree.

Photophlow certainly is a great addition to flickr, but in the end it’s nothing more than _one more social network_. A waste of time.

Unless… flickr had something more…

What flickr really needs are blogs. Yes, one step _back_ and be prepared to the already traditional flickr members backlash, but blogs are needed.
Why?

Not every flickr user will daily post new pictures, but sometimes they might live events which could be directly linked to their flickr presence. Like Andy and I did yesterday. So far the only way to link this up with my flickr account is to write an entry on my own blog. An entry totally independent from my flickr account. And from our mutual social network contacts. Differently said, noone on flickr really is aware about how our firstly virtual social contact now became reality. IRL reality.

Was it worth it? Yes!
Was it wirth blogging about? Frakkin’ yes!
Is it an experience to share with my flickr contacts who only follow our pictures and not our personal blogs? FFS YES!

But there’s no way to do so.

The beauty of social networking finally has come to reality: I have met someone I first met online in real life.

The irony: we only lived about 700 yards away from each other.

It was a pleasure to finally be able to connect the virtual world with reality.

Sadly my thighs and legs don’t agree though. :)

But now, I’m back online.

as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.
the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options – all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits

The album will also be released as CD and on Vinyl next month.
The album is available in standard MP3 quality, lossless FLAC and M4A downloads and in high quality WAVE format. Latter 3 options are torrent downloads.

Great to see music being released on the hated platforms.

Fans also might want to follow NIN on flickr, which NIN also uses as platform to release press images.

1. From Nine Inch Nails for the culture barbarians among us

In the now almost 2 years that Splashpress Media has been active as a major online publisher in the about blogging area, the network has come a long way. At times the ride has been rather bumpy, but I am sure that Mark Saunders and his team have the potential to continue to grow their brand and portfolio, not to forget their influence in the blogosphere.

And what better can one do than try to help, be part of a potentially great network?
No matter what might have been.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
Charles R. Swindoll, evangelical christian priest.

To resume: I am joining the team at Bloggingpro and will report on blogging software/platforms, plugins, tweaks and themes.

But the real matter here is not the great platform for spammers created by twitter, but rather the recluse the twitterati live in. Maybe, some day the top Web2.0 posterboys will get some rationalism in their bones too. Hopefully even while they still are hyped by their latest discovery.

The error I made was to jump on the bandwagon based on the technical aspect of the platform and even a small, but rather active community. Most important factor though, the main developer behind the platform, was an element I didn’t analyze well enough before making my choice and decision for Chyrp.

As beautiful as Chyrp may be, its problem lays in how Alex Suraci rushes, or not, things.

Alex is a talented coder and has built an awesome platform, but sadly his ambitions are too personal and too little focused on Chyrp for the lightweight blogging platform to become really successful. Alex is ambitious and as a young developer, constantly learning and discovering new coding languages. This sadly to the inconvenience of the Chyrp community and adopters. Some details: a PHP5 is coming… and pending. So is a Ruby port.
The community forums have been changed to a new, non Chyrp related, and unmoderated location at toogeneric. All in all Chyrp is a nice platform, one I will continue to watch, but for now the uncertainties made me switch back to good ol’ WordPress.

I should have known better being a regular early adopter.

What is Photophlow?
It’s a chatroom. It’s another social network. It’s everything one would expect in 2008. Yes, it’s Beta.

Forget what I just wrote, Photophlow is much more. Photophlow takes the flickr API to a new level.

Small intro: After years of toying round with several Point&Shoot cameras I made the step. I always wanted to play more with photography but somehow never jumped in to it. This time I did and purchased a new Canon Digital Rebel XT(2). More than looking forward to my new love being delivered, last days I’ve been diving in to learning photography and the networks around.

Did I want your regular photography forum (or blog)? Negative. What I was looking for was a quick way to interact with people who really know their stuff, all while discovering great photography. Flickr is your friend. But so is SmugMug. Sadly those sites are nothing more than a waste of time, waste of time because of all the awesome discoveries.

Add Photophlow.

First remarkable aspect of Photophlow is that there’s no need to sign up(3). Photophlow uses the flickr user authentication process to login. Single sign on if one wants to. Once you’re logged in to flickr, you also are to Photophlow.

Once logged in online in Photophlow, you can join chatrooms based on the groups you are member of or create chatrooms for the groups you administer. And that’s where the fun starts.

In every chatroom, all flickr searches are public and display a list of results in the sidebar. On hover those pictures enlarge and on click they are posted to the room. You can immediately comment on flickr to every picture, favorite it, view the EXIF data or boil eggs with.

All in all, Photophlow so far is the fastest way to discover high level pictures(4) and at the same time, if needed, share information about the technical factors.
But you can also use Photophlowg as a tumblelogging discovery engine.

Compulsory with the 2007 standards, Photophlow offers an integration with both Twitter and Tumblr API as well.

Compulsory invites for Photophlow available. (3 2).

1. Limited Beta right at the moment
2. Cut me a slack, it’s an older model but still quite a jump coming from Canon Ixus’s
3. They still are in limited invite beta status – or something web 2.0′y
4. This obviously depends on the level of the group you visit

Other times, it’s not so fun running a visible site. Some people are determined to deliberately misunderstand much of what they encounter in life. Sometimes I have a hard time realizing that that’s their problem, not mine.

Jason Kottke in an interview with Deron Bauman.

Such as 90 seconds of video, taken when sitting on the loo.

Disclaimer: Yes, I had almost uploaded a similar video. But in the end… the internetz iz 4 txt!!!1!!1!1!!!1

Armed with everything I might eventually need (Model number, serial number, purchase date, invoice number and .pdf invoice), I rang 0870-SAMSUNG, although the printer was purchased at Pixmania, I first was greeted by a loudly laughing woman. Laughing, not greeting. No niceties. When after some seconds I hesitantly said ‘Hello?!‘, I knew from her reply I had dialed the correct number. Yes, I was connected to the Samsung Help Desk. Phew.

Optimist/Pessimist/Cynic I am, I had only given myself 5-8 minutes to sort this out or I would have ordered a new printer. I am in the first month of my new IT budget and honestly am too lazy to walk to the network printer. Network printing, a former pet-peeve of mine. My desk though… has its own printer.

I was really surprised when within less than two minutes I had received both a reference number and the promise that a technical agent would call me in the next two hours. Not once was I asked where or when I did purchase that printer, nor did I have to go into detail about my problem.

That was easy. Let the wait begin now.

But there was no wait. Only few minutes later a Samsung Tech Agent called me and asked me to describe the problem. Not knowing how a printer is engineered, this proved to be a much more difficult problem than expected. What can be that hard about explaining that a printer doesn’t grab the paper anymore, all while making loud, protesting noises, before throwing a ‘Online error’ at you? The agent luckily was whether a bad car driver or had several friends who couldn’t handle the gearbox of a car properly, because the analogy ‘If you can’t find’em, grind’em‘, immediately explained what my problem was.

Within the next 2-3 days Samsung UK will drop off a new unit for me. No need to send mine in, wait for weeks and pay shipping costs.

That’s what I call Customer Service. Service with a capital S. Especially considering the fact that the printer only cost GBP 47.99 (less than $100).
Well done Samsung.

Update 04.15.2008: The new (refurb?) unit arrived today(1). Hats off, Samsung Customer Care. :-)

1. Still no one bothered asking for an invoice/proof of purchase. Also starting today another 12 months of warranty on that same below $100 printer kicks in. :D

But there is better.

And to continue the number game, even though I still am not sure whether to be proud or not of my Twitter hate/love relationship, here’s some tweetscan stuff. From my active and my inactive twitter account. Before you ask why I have 2 accounts, I’ll explain you the stuff you aren’t interested in anyway: my first account was a residue of the personal blogging area. A twitter account in the category of noise. Loaded with lots of personal internet drama memories. I wanted to and had to move on some day. My actual account still is noise, just much less.
But the important thing about both graphs is that I actually might have to listen to all my friends and try to get a regular life schedule. Not have the period from 0:00 to 04:00AM be my most active period of the day.

The best thing about twitter in my case is when I started tweeting.

November 2006. :-)

Wanted: Spotify invite. I want to experience what is next now last.fm really starts to bore me.

Yes, LiveVideo execs are losing the plot. Consider following concept to understand my joy more: run Blogexplosion on a monthly budget of $500.
After little more than a year ago, I, and Splashpress Media, tried to buy Blogexplosion for the sum of $135.000 plus 6 months of advertising (above the fold) for LiveVideo. Almost a year later we were contacted and asked for our highest bid. We offered $75.000 for the then already fast declining platform, but LiveUniverse had other illusions.

But only then the fun started. Regularly one LiveUniverse person started to contact me, whether it was to broker a fallen platform, Blogexplosion, whether to run it. After a while I sent in a proposal, based on a monthly $2500 budget, with an initial 5 number sum to totally revive the platform and redesign this outdated 2002 nuke-alike website. Answer: too expensive.
Nevertheless LiveUniverse still hoped to recover some of the $150k invested in BE when they bought it and continued to bug me.

Bug me with the option of equity. Equity in a quickly declining platform, a platform with most features turned off already. The offered equity would obviously be performance based, 20% spread over the next four years. With a budget of $500/month.

Dearest LiveUniverse,
obviously you are too greedy to throw in a basic MacBookPro (an investment of $1999, tax deductable even), knowing that the entire monthly budget will be used for your platform.
Here’s my answer to you: get a grip.

Next season will be Liverpool’s.

Promises.

We’ll knock them off their Champions League perch as will. That is if they reach the finals. Looking forward to play them in Moscow in May. Days after Manchester United lifted the Premiere League Cup for the tenth time. :)

View out of the Window on Easter Sunday.

On the Internet, we’re all famous to fifteen people. Inevitably, you’ll date at least one of them. So how does one gracefully navigate Relationships 2-point-whatever? Is post-coital Twittering acceptable? Should you block an ex from your Flickr? Do we need to call in a couples’ counselor to revise our Facebook relationship status together? After the breakup, who gets custody of the secret sex vlog? A seriously self-effacing facilitated discussion of social networking & managing your identity online when that comes close to and at odds with that of your lovers & partners.

Melissa Gira Grant condensing the truth of internet love drama in only some lines.

Self Reminder: I really should start working at iminternetfamous.com.

Interesting is the conversation which had grown/could have continued in the comments had I hijacked the comments even more.

Sure, it’s peanuts, but it’s a significant step up compared to nothing at all. Also, $35/year for hosting, if that was static, is nothing compared to hosting on your own and potentially seeing your hosting costs skyrocket to hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.
On the whole, though, I just don’t think the comparison with Sourceforge will hold once this all goes live. The two have very different (developer) communities and, more importantly, audiences. [Faruk]

The point of this comment was my comparison to an eventual Sourceforge alike, jungle which might grow based on $.99 applications.

I entirely agree with Faruk that both platforms (iPhone and Sourceforge) have a different audience. But the iPhone platform is only 10 months old and already heading for 10m users (not counting the multiple iPod Touch users – I use a touch at work as well, an iPhone in private life).

What does this mean? The iPhone/Apps Store surely has the potential to reach out to even more people than Sourceforge does. Not that long ago it costed $35/year to host an (open source) application at Sourceforge. The Apple digital certificate costs $99 (for a lifetime probably since no edits pointing at a yearly fee have been made since yesterday).

Let’s bring things back to reality now. Until little more than 2 years ago I ran several Windows communities, with around 20 k members and more than 4k daily active forum nerds. My voice pretty much was law in those communities. Yesterday I applied as Enterprise developer for the iPhone platform. It cost me $99.
If I hadn’t sold on those Windows communities (I’m on Mac now), I could have pitched no matter what sh|tty iPhone application to around 20k people without much of an effort. Apple takes care of the effort hosting and distribution. And highly improves the visibility of my crappy application, even more than the 2-3k nerds who will blindly throw in a buck to test/use my stuff.

Does my popularity guarantee that I deliver quality? Nope, but probably the fact of running a community soon will see my application among the most popular apps and boost my sales even more.

Did I say Sourceforge Jungle? $99 Is nothing compared to hosting on your own and potentially seeing your hosting costs skyrocket to hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.

Their are five different ways to obtain the album:

1. Free. The first 9 tracks of the album (together with PDF booklet and several wallpapers. 320kbps MP3))
2. $5 for all 36 files. You can chose from different formats: FLAC Lossless, 320kbps MP3 or Apple Lossless (with 40page PDF)
3. $10 for 2 CDs with 16 page booklet. CDs will ship early April, until then you can download the files from the $5 package
4. $75 Deluxe Package. 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with all 36 tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with Ghosts I-IV in high-definition 96/24 stereo and slideshow
5. $300 Ultra Deluxe Edition Package. 2500 Limited Edition Packages have already been sold out.

The only difference with the Radiohead album: ‘Ghosts’ rocks less than ‘In Rainbows’. :D

Rate Your Music allows you to manually add all the albums you have and rate/tag them, but you can also rate, or review even, any music.

I started my profile, adding and rating all the albums I currently have on my phone. W000t! another music show off.

Rate My Music just asks to be bought by last.fm and tied in together with their platform. Until that happens, let me share around 15% of my music library with you. Feel free to sign up, add me and other usual social networking stuff. It’s free! I will be adding as I change the music on my phone. :-)

Btw, maybe someone can give this awesome platform a less Myspace-lookalike-look.

The challenge is simple: make a blog popular (subjectively), without whoring the blog out in comments or on traffic platforms. Just rely on the ability to write passionately, opinionatedly and know some keyword stuff SEO have a popular topic.
Both blogs enter an already overcrowded area and target a passionate and active community, which actually makes things harder, but could also be an advantage.

In one month I will report here about the first weeks and how stats have grown (or not).
Both URLs will not be used in comments on more than 2 other blogs each.

Update: Life has come in between the challenge and the reality. I still believe in the concept and several blogs are in the planning. One more actually: Bloggers Turn Me On, a return to the good ol’ (JOAB) times, just a little more high profile and less obligatory as then. See you soon in a blog coming to a browser on your monitor.

One rule of thumb:

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.