Well, I’d say pretty good – it’s still going to be a while before we see a 3D printer in every home, but the capabilities to make use of them have already arrived, and the hardware itself is getting cheaper. Plus we’re seeing new applications for the technology every week, covering all levels of interest from building hobby parts in your home to creating human veins and body parts for healthcare and industrial applications.

No need to design – Scanning tech revolution:

One of the main problems with the concept of 3D Printing on a consumer level is that not everyone is skilled and able to access 3D design software when they need to make something. On a technology level, smaller scanning technology is starting to really move forward, for instance Matterports new, smaller 3D scanner. But even more important could be the new 3D Printing App for the iPad – 123D Catch.

That’s right – you can fully scan any real world object with your iPad and use that captured image to output via a 3D printer. It’s from Autodesk, and allows you to capture and store the design online to then be printed out, or you could send it to a service like Shapeways to print it for you. And the app itself is free!

That means everyone who owns an iPad now owns a full 3D scanning tool which might not be suitable for the most intensive applications, but gives every single person a way to try it.

3D Printing hardware falling in price:

I previously covered the likes of MakerBot, which come in at under $2000. But now we’re seeing the likes of RepRap ‘free’ 3D Printer community project, the Kickstarter-project Printrbot which comes in at $549, and now Solidoodle, which combines the worst name of the bunch with a $499 starting price.

That means it’s getting to the same level as an iPad, and for under £1000 you could have the iPad, 3D capture app and 3D printer all set-up and ready to go (Some tweaking and set-up necessary). Under £500 comes into geek impulse buy territory, and also means that you can pay off your investment in a reasonable amount of time without becoming a rapid prototyping company.

3D Printing innovation is almost endless:

Just look at a quick sample of the 3D printing news and business that I’ve spotted and saved in the last few months:

• 3D Printing custom-designed limbs for amputees – how awesome is this?
• 3D Printer designed for drugs – the implications for drug patents and availability are pretty interesting.
• 3D Chocolate Printer on sale now – it’s £749, but surely every chocolate shop and chocolatier must be worried?
• MIT are working on printable robots! – Further off, but in around 5 years we should be able to print our own small robots as required. MIT already have working version in their own labs.
• Smithsonian Museum uses 3D Printing to replicate collection – Obvious but incredibly useful given how many objects could now be displayed and touched, rather than being hidden away.
• 3D printed jaw transplant – 3D printed body parts are not only being created – they’re now being used in real operations to improve lives.
• The Pirate Bay introduces Physibles – Whatever you think of The Pirate Bay, there’s no denying they’ve got as good a handle on new technology as anyone, and have access to a lot of data on what people might want. So introducing swappable 3D Printing files shows how important it’s getting.
• Already people are starting to travel with 3D Printing solutions in cars, allowing them to reach any community which might have a project for them.

Here are the MIT printable robots in action:

3D Printing – is 2012 realistic?

I was intentionally a little bit vague when I claimed 2012 would be the year of 3D printing, because I didn’t define exactly what that meant. Would it mean everyone knows what is it? Or owns a 3D printer of their own? Or has one on their Christmas list?

In my mind it was the year the phrase became as understood and accepted as ‘the internet’, ‘iPhone’ or ‘iPad’. And I see no reason yet to become any less optimistic that will be the case by the end of the year – it’s already happened in technology circles, and with the range and scope of innovation, there’s a good chance one or two breakout ideas will have occurred by the time December rolls around – indeed the coverage above includes mainstream publications such as the BBC, so this really isn’t a niche idea anymore.

The question is really how soon you and your business might start actively using 3D Printing, rather than talking about it. And I suspect it won’t be long unless you want to be left behind…

Whether it’s laughter or tears, love or hate, making a purchase or revolting against a government – both can provide amazing tools to inspire and encourage.

It’s how I ended up combining writing and marketing.

And it’s why I don’t dream about one day turning this business into an ‘SEO’ agency. Or a ‘social media’ agency.

I dream growing this business into something larger which is known for being able to enable change and action both internally and externally.

And it’s why I also think a lot about how that looks in terms of structure and recruitment.

And both of those issues are likely to become increasingly important this year, so if that’s the sort of thing you might be interested in, please do get in touch. Location won’t be important, but the right ideas will…

Either way I’ve constantly veered between writing about marketing and journalism, with the occasional posts about blogging and more personal topics. I’ve invested about $300 in the site over the years, including domains, hosting and themes, and I’ve apparently published 1,299 posts, so an average of 20 per month.

And in the last 4 years, that’s brought me over 113,000 visits, almost 100,000 visitors (Should happen in May), and 157,041 pageviews.

It’s also resulted in about $30 in advertising revenue during the period I experimented with ads on here, and about 3 times as much in affiliate revenue.

So you may think reaching 100,000 for around $180 and a lot of time wasn’t the best way to spend my time?

The real value of this site:

But that’s ignoring the real value that this site has given me and continues to deliver:

• Leads for my digital content and marketing business – I don’t need to reach a million people, if I reach 20 or 30 that want to hire TheWayoftheWeb to provide content, marketing or training.
• It keeps me writing – If there’s a time when I’m focused on other work, this place is the one where I can write whatever I like, whenever I like, although as it’s the only form of marketing for my business, I’m probably doing that slightly less now!
• It’s entirely mine – All the content is mine, all the data is mine, and I set the rules regarding privacy. 2 minutes of tweaking domain settings and I can move it wherever I want, whenever I want.
• It’s helped meetings – Surprisingly often I’ve been in meetings where clients or agencies etc have seen my blog and have even occasionally mentioned a post or brought a printed copy along to discuss a particular point.
• It gets me referenced – Not only does it provide proof of my identity to the likes of Google+, but it’s also been linked to from the likes of The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal.

Blogging dying?

In the time I’ve been blogging, it’s been pronounced dead at least 3 or 4 times, and the latest eulogies are probably the strongest yet with numerous studies suggesting corporate blogging in particular is fading fast.

And personally I think that’s great – because the more my competitors and my client’s competitors ignore the benefits of regularly publishing fresh and quality content on their own domains, the easier it is for me to succeed.

I’ve seen client sites grow massively over the last 12 months. And I’ve seen some of my own sites which are more focused and targeted on mass audiences go from a couple of thousand readers per month to 70 or 80,000 per month.

So although I share some of the fears that others have written about regarding the future of the open web ( For example, see John Naughton and Brendan Cooper in the last couple of days), there’s still a lot of success to be had before the opportunities may start to close.

Feel free to get in touch if you want to take advantage of them right now.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, here are the 10 most popular posts so far:

1. The best webcam-based augmented reality application
2. 2012 – The year of 3d printing?
3. Has Microsoft made a major marketing mistake?
4. The best G1 application, augmented reality and Moore’s Law
5. Solving Feedburner Feedsmith problems with WordPress 2.9
6. The best social games on any platform
7. Problems embedding Youtube videos in WordPress
8. Augmented Reality needs to jump the shark
9. Breaking the habit of broadcast media
10. How the traditional world punishes social media

I have the vaguest idea that this might be about American Football – a sport I rarely watch as I’m not a big fan, and it’s not freely available in the UK. In fact, none of the 5 highlighted stories were particularly interesting or relevant.

Partly that’s because my Facebook network is a network of friends, family, present and former colleagues and other people I’ve met over the last few years. So many of the people on there may not share similar interests to me – I don’t keep in touch with my 2nd cousin because of her knowledge of SEO, Social Media or 3D Printing for example.

And partly it’s because there’s no way for me to indicate which stories might actually be interesting and allow Facebook to learn more about what to show me – it’s not being cross-referenced against my listed interests as far as I can see.

Not only that, but there’s no way to remove or minimise it from my stream, and it’s designed to blend it well enough I can see a mistaken click on the lone ‘Share’ button is likely to happen more than once.

How Google missed a trick:

And possibly the saddest part of this is that I used to have the perfect mechanisms for finding articles from people I knew which I always found interesting. In addition to Twitter, my favourite way to get stories from friends and contacts was via Google Reader – it meant that the people I followed had made a decision to publicly share something from their stream which led to a far higher signal to noise ratio as I was able to select people with relevant interests from within my network, see everything they’d shared quickly and easily, and remove anyone who wasn’t quite in sync with what I wanted.

Obviously Google dropped that to pursue Google+, but that network has emulated Facebook in providing a lot of noise around the things I actually want. And yet Google has 6+ years of data on what I actively click and share via Reader, what I search for, and what I list as my interests on my profiles.

The saddest thing is that as publishers are finally moving towards embracing digital more and more as their core medium, the social networks seem to be moving towards interruption as a way to force up their figures and revenue. And while everyone complains about spam and misdirection in search results, at least there is an incentive for Google and Bing to try to curb the tide of paid links and dodgy manipulation in SEO, whereas there’s no such recourse on each social network.

Well, after two weeks, the result of his first customer happening to make a video about him, and then organising a flashmob via Reddit and Facebook is in.

• 2.9 million views on Vimeo, with 10,400 likes.
• 2.5 million views on Youtube with 31,000 likes
• 105,000 Facebook Likes.
• 6,400 Followers on Twitter.
• Over $186,000 raised for Caine’s Arcade Scolarship Fund.

Almost $200,000 dollars has been raised from what began as a child creating something cool with some old cardboard boxes, and it has a following that many brands would kill for. So what lessons could you take from something like this in terms of viral video?

• Doing something interesting is key – if Caine hadn’t built his cardboard arcade for the fun of it, and then won over his only customer, filmmaker Nirvan Mullick, then none of this would have happened.
• Relationships count – to make the flashmob happen, Mullick had help from the Reddit community, and also from friends and contacts who were able to post the event on popular LA recommendation sites and Facebook pages.
• Spread it far – obviously we all put our videos on Youtube, but in this case, Vimeo actually received more views. Do you only focus on the first-placed site of it’s kind?
• Give people inspiration – part of the effect has been kids around the world building there own cardboard arcades, which are constantly being featured on the Caine’s Arcade Facebook page etc.
• Give people quick and easy ways to contribute – the scholarship fund suggests contributing ‘$1 or more’ to help Caine and other children prepare for college. Or you can buy a T-shirt or the film’s theme song via iTunes.

So basically:

• Interesting.
• Inspiring.
• Relationships.
• Shared.
• Easy participation.

But what’s also missed in a lot of digital activity and promotion is that there was no guarantee that this particular video would take off. Besides Mullick’s time and energy in capturing and editing the footage and his promotional efforts since then, the reception it has received has been down to the people seeing it and responding, which led to media interest putting it in front of more people.

And yet still brands focus on big stunts and extravagant campaign approaches to video and asking people to do things. A lot of people have also been sharing this video for a new television channel launch:

OK, it’s a cool idea, and it does involve some participation in terms of kicking off the action by pressing the big red button, but then what? The audience watches everything unfold, and then possibly pays attention to the launch of a new TV channel in Belgium. Or not. It doesn’t lead onto anyone doing anything except watching some TV shows.

• 29 Million Youtube views
• 733 Likes on Facebook
• 80 Followers on Twitter.

A couple of parody videos have been created, including a nice Lego version, but that’s about your lot. To put it another way, the big TV advertisement may have driven awareness of the television channel launch and resulted in higher audience figures initially, but most of you reading this would have comparable reach online, because messaging you is likely to give some interaction.

The question is what effect you want to achieve…

As part of a double act with Lead Developer Robert Rhoades, I attempted to explain a little about how Jigoshop operates as a business based on a free download, open source code, and working with the WordPress community, whilst Rob explained some of the tips for working with the software as a designer or developer.

Here’s the presentation – I attempted to go for extra open source kudos points by using Open Office Impress, which then got merged with Rob’s Mac-based slides via Google Docs, causing all sorts of formatting fun. Thankfully neither of us is responsible for design!

And as a bonus, it turns out that the presentations were being captured on video. So if you’d like to watch the slides accompanied by our mumblings, you can watch it here.

I’m also available to talk about technology, wordpress, marketing and digital content for birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and christenings – you can contact me here!

And it’s something that brings back a lot of memories for me. I can remember my first experience of playing on a 48 ZX Spectrum at a friend’s house, with the excitement of hearing the squeals of code loading from a C90 cassette tape deck attached by some rudimentary cables, and the joy of being able to control the onscreen action with the rubber keys.

It was followed by some incessant pestering of my parents and for the Christmas following my 5th birthday I unwrapped my very own home computer, which I remember came with Transversion – a grid-based space game blatantly ‘inspired’ by Pacman and Space Invaders.

Then came the delights of typing in the code copied by hand from Sinclair User and Your Sinclair magazines. The frustration when it didn’t work as I went back to 3 line programs to display a never ending stream of swearwords. And the fun of being given C90s full of copied games and trying to find the gap between the first and second game on the tap.

And although I wholeheartedly embraced piracy as an impoverished 5-year-old, there was the risk that in trading cassettes evidence of particularly bad music choices was revealed when some of the evidence remained.

In the years that followed came the 128K +2 Spectrum, the Amiga, the Gateway 486PC, and various work computers up to my modern day Samsung laptop. There’s barely any way I could have imagined that a computer or games console could ever produce the graphics now churned out by the Xbox 360 in my living room – that was beyond what Hollywood was filming until pretty recently.

But without the ‘interesting’ approach of Sir Clive Sinclair to computers, I might not have been interested in technology, the internet, or anything that has led to a fascinating life which has taken me around the world, let me work with some amazing companies, people and brands, and now means I can run a reasonably successful company with a number of clients and a growing number of employees and partners from a laptop on my dining room table.

My Spectrum, next to the positively prehistoric by comparison Binatone console

It’s also why I’m so keen that the Raspberry Pi and projects like it are supported in given access to children to be able to be creators rather than just consumers.

It’s why I’m so interested in British companies producing innovative technology, and how that can give rise to entire industries – in this case, the Commodore 64 (spit), and Spectrum 48k gave rise to the bedroom games coders and early games companies, relatively few of which still survive in the era of Japanese and American consoles dominating video-games. It’s why we need to support existing British technology brands, particularly those which open up opportunities to the end user.

Long live the Spectrum, and if you had any doubt I’m still a fan, here’s a recent tribute on one of my online racing cars. Graphics have come a long, long way….

Checking out one of the TV adverts for the Spectrum at the time also makes me remember the formative influence of the first time I watched The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy after it was adapted for television.

It’s interesting to imagine which products from the last two or three years will be celebrated in 30 years time… Which would you suggest will make it?

You can debate whether Technorati is still a decent ranking system, and it doesn’t include 8 sites for which information wasn’t available, but 40% of the sites with available information are on self-hosted WordPress (with 9% on WordPress.com’s hosted alternative). The article also has an informative list of what each of the top sites is actually running on – sadly TheWayoftheWeb just missed out on making the list, but for the record, I’ve been using self-hosted WordPress for a number of years now for pretty much all my sites (I do have one or two on both Blogger and Tumblr).

There are a number of reasons why I recommend self-hosted WordPress, including the fact that you have ultimate control over design, data etc, and as long as you’re backing up regularly, you’re better offer in the event of hosting/domain name failures.

It also gets increasingly easy to use – in addition to usability improvements to the core product, all the big third party theme providers and frameworks have made big steps in making everything quicker and easier to setup. Most of my sites currently run on the Genesis framework from StudioPress (aff link), but there are also great products I’ve been checking out from the likes of Headway and Pagelines, who are both offering drag and drop customisation.

More and more themes are now coming with responsive design as standard (meaning your site automatically works on mobile/tablets), and it’s really easy to find extremely talented designers and developers who are not only familiar with WordPress, but the relative ubiquity of it keeps prices fairly realistic. If you’re stuck for designers/developers I’m always happy to recommend several that I’ve enjoyed working with both on my own sites and client projects.

And that’s before you get into the various projects built on top of WordPress – for example, Jigoshop, a client of mine who produce a frankly amazing WordPress eCommerce solution. Not only can you install and set-up a fully functioning online store for free, but there’s an amazing range of extensions for it already which means your shop has all the services at a level you’d expect for a big online retailer.

And if you need some help, I can provide domain names and hosting, plus initial set-up for a low fee, having currently set up a number of sites for my own projects and for a range of friends and businesses, which regularly get many thousands of visitors each month, so feel free to contact me. I’ve also had experience of transferring sites from other platforms, and if you just want some quick tips, advice or reassurance, feel free to give me a shout!

Story via BoingBoing.

The best way to enrich the web is to go out and discover, find and create interesting things and then help people come together around them.

Malware can get you, even when you’re careful:

I tend to be reasonably careful, particularly on the laptop I primarily use for my business. I have antivirus software installed (McAfee for the record), I run some browser add-ons for extra safety and I try not to visit any websites which I know or suspect could be dangerous.

I also don’t click on links in emails offering Nigerian lottery winnings or direct messages on Twitter which suggest there’s a ‘really bad picture of me’ with a link obscured with a shortened link.

And yet on Friday afternoon I was hit by a spoof version of a legitimate program which not only then covered my desktop in pop-up windows, but also proved a complete pain to remove as it edited the computer’s registry and made sure it reappeared every time I thought I’d successfully eradicated it.

The one good thing is that there are now plenty of websites giving detailed instructions on curing more problems as soon as they appear – unfortunately it took a couple of attempts to find one to deal with the current version of the malware, but it’s worth having a look around to find trusted and reliable sites before you need to Google them in a hurry.

And incidentally, a new piece of research just published shows how easy it is to fall foul of a widespread problem – on average 2 of the top 25,000 websites in the world (ranked via Alexa) serve malware to visitors each day on average. Or problems can occur installing apps – even from ‘official’ sources such as the Chrome Web Store. This doesn’t mean you need to be paranoid, but does mean doing some research and thinking before clicking on links, installing apps, and putting some effort into protecting yourself and your data, including if the worst happens.

The importance of backups:

The good news is that I finally managed to remove it successfully, using a couple of anti-spyware programs I hadn’t tried before. Having finally killed the process and restarted my machine to ensure it wouldn’t reappear, I was left with one further problem – the malware had also been created to remove all desktop icons, links and to stop anyone searching from programs which would interfere with it.

So a Restore/Re-Install was needed. But trying the automatic Windows Restore didn’t work – it was only the proprietary manufacturer backup which worked, sending my laptop back in time to the first day of 2011.

I always ensure I have two copies of all data relating to work – one copy is stored on a removable hard drive which is kept in a different part of the house to the laptop when not in use, and the other is stored ‘in the cloud’ on an online storage system which automatically saves any changes made to any files.

Pictures are always backed up on the hard drive, and also uploaded to Flickr on a weekly basis, as are most videos. But I did lose all my (legally) downloaded music as unfortunately I’d cleared all the albums from my hard drive backup whilst I sorted through them and put them into some sort of order.

Aaaaaaaaaargh.

And even worse, I have a nagging feeling that some images and videos of my son appear to be missing, and it was pre-upload/backup, which means they’re gone forever.

Going back so far also means I’ve spent about a week receiving updates every time I fire up my laptop, which then install on Shutdown and leave me stood around for ages when everyone else is going home.

Re-install, Rebuild, Update,Protect:

So what have I done since? Well, seeing as I’m fully paid up for McAfee for a while longer I’ve made sure it’s completely up-to-date and double-checked the set-up. I’ve also started testing one of the new programs which seems to have killed the malware on this occasion, and one other anti-virus solution which is available for free download. No single program is lightly to always cover everything 100%, but having 2 or 3 available means I should be able to cover most options.

I primarily use Firefox as a browser, so I’ve added ‘AdBlocker’ and ‘No Script’ to cut down on the risks. There’s a moral issue with using AdBlocker, in that it deprives ad-funded sites of revenue by stopping any advertising from appearing, but you can quickly and easily whitelist sites you trust, as you can with No Script, which stops a lot of sites working initially as it blocks all Javascript. That’s great for preventing malicious attacks, but it’s not a solution that will be 100% effective – for many sites to work, you have to start allowing various processes to run, and as mentioned earlier, even trusted sites can sometimes end up unknowingly spreading malicious software.

But on balance I think I’ve done a reasonable amount, as well as double and triple-checking all backups are running correctly both for the laptop OS and Software, and for the Files and Data. I’ve reinstalled the programs I use on a regular basis, and set them all back up to work properly, and I’m working at full speed again.  You can never be 100% safe, but with the right processes in place the occasional problem isn’t as much of a hassle, and a clean install can be quite a refreshing spring clean of all the old junk you’ve got on your PC which isn’t actually used.

It’s also reminded me to audit my accounts and passwords on my sites, remove unused WordPress plugins, and update everything on social networks etc.