The reason, really, is that it’s such a wonderfully gray area - an area that begs clarification. Most of us, I’d think, have engaged in some sort of piracy, or filesharing. It just, somehow, seems natural. You like this song/game/movie, so you share it, so that others can enjoy it too. Of course, there are quite a few people out there who would have you believe it’s an incredibly wrong thing to do - and for the most part, this argument just doesn’t make sense.

Which is why I find it such an intriguing subject. But I won’t talk about the lawsuits and the rulings and the unfortunate few who have been sued for millions - I want to talk about scale. I don’t think enough has been said about scale, and why it’s one of the major causes of all this negative buzz around digital sharing.

Scale has its roots in the industrial revolution. Let’s pick an arbitrary yet common product: bread. Before the industrial revolution, and the construction of massive, expensive factories that could manufacture bread faster and cheaper than ever before, bread was baked by hand, generally in small, family-run bakeries.

There were several advantages to this: quality being among the top ones, as well as distinctiveness and loyalty. But the downside? Relatively expensive and time-consuming process. There was only so much you could do before you hired someone else - and there were only so many people you could hire before all you did was manage them.

So a few bright people came up with the idea for a factory. A building outfitted with machinery that could bake tens of thousands of loaves in a day, producing uniform, relatively good bread at a very low price per unit. Why was it cheaper? Economy of Scale.

This is (or rather, should be) one of the first things you learn in school-level Business Studies, because Economy of Scale is what drives the leading capitalist nations and corporations of the world. It simply goes as thus: The bigger you get, the more you can buy at bulk prices, and the less your final product costs per unit, hence more profit.

So how does this factor into music? Well, it’s not really about the music at all - it’s about the medium.

Back when LPs were the dominant medium of music sharing, I’d imagine it was pretty hard for the common individual to duplicate an LP. Oh, sure, it would be possible, but scale would have driven down the prices to the point where the investment didn’t make sense, so you bought all your LPs instead.

Then tapes came along, and pretty soon the era of the mixtape followed. The music industry didn’t particularly care about “piracy” at this point - sales were no doubt booming, thanks to the new ultra-small, ultra-portable storage medium.

Then the compact disc came along. This is when it all changed, really.

The music industry (or, rather, to be more precise, the printers and copiers and distributors of the actual LPs, tapes and discs) was a big one. And when industries reach the multi-billion-dollar level, there’s something you should know about them: They’re generally not liquid.

Case in point? Sub-prime fiasco in the US, video here.

They over-leverage themselves, taking out huge loans, and justifying it by saying “well, this artist here sold so many millions of albums last time, so we’re sure he’ll do it again, and we’ll pay you back”. The banks go “okay”.

Printers, distributors, factories, music stores, marketers, agencies, and so on and so forth, invest a huge amount of time and money towards any given album, based on estimates of previous performance, and right until the digital era hit, they were probably over-target - making more money back than they had originally expected.

Yes, the music industry is actually a business. Don’t worry - I also thought it was a magical fairy-cake factory for quite some time.

So the 21st century arrives. The music industry has fed and grown this gargantuan scale machine, that can take a golden master and produce, label, ship, promote and sell millions of units inside weeks. And this scale machine is driven by debt, and founded on the promise of consumer demand.

The second thing you should have learned in Business Studies is that supply and demand influence price. More supply, less demand, lower price, and so forth. High demand, low supply, and you have a scarcity.

But what the digital era did is this:

Infinite supply.

So no matter the demand, the expected price is always the same:

Zero.

Now, I’m sure the problem becomes evident. Whereas it cost real money to etch LPs and record tapes (and dupe CDs), it costs nothing to copy-paste. Suddenly, the average citizen with the average Pentium 3 has outdone the wildest scale machine they could ever hope to build, and they’ve done it by the billions.

The music industry is beginning to wake up to two realities:

1. People are growing out of the “pay for music” era.
2. There’s a huge bill to pay.

It’s heading for a collapse. I don’t think anyone can doubt that. Just as the print media is heading for the exact same collapse - their printing press scale machine was outdone by the personal blog in ways they could never have dreamed of, and the numbers are showing it.

One of the things I love about watching the Internet unfold, is seeing how everyone’s getting back to the village mentality. Why did they phase out the phrase “Global Village”? We’re really getting into it now, where it’s common netiquette to actually list a real face and name, type proper english/german/sanskrit, and generally treat the Internet as an extension of your daily reality.

And along with that, we’ve seen the online news industry really take off - and to a smaller extent, the independent music industry. Starting a website costs next to nothing (free, if you’re willing to go the Facebook/Jamendo route). You have instant access to the largest scale machine ever created by man, and you have unlimited use. Anyone from anywhere can post anything, and generally find an audience, and probably a business deal or two.

Of course, right before the music industry goes insolvent, and all those made-by-Hollywood “stars” find themselves out of a job (thank goodness), and the true geniuses behind the music go independent, you can bet that they’re going to grab at every single straw they can. Sue people back into paying ridiculous amounts for a product that costs nothing to duplicate.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of keeping the music industry alive is that it finds and promotes great music, and if it crashes, where do we get our great music from? Will we all just listen to ads all day? How will these artists get paid and fed and make a living? Would it even be worth it, as an artist, to start making music?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I know this - Bach didn’t have a record label.

I honestly have very little to say on this subject. The end product will be a netbook, running nothing other than Chrome. It’ll have fantastic offline support for Docs, Gmail, and Calendar, reduction in processes will most likely equate to better battery life, and it’ll look good with Google branding.

I wonder if the netbook market hasn’t already been saturated, though. Google will have to release the OS as a downloadable, which gives curious geeks like me a chance to try it out.

It also will not compete with established OSes like Windows, OSX and Ubuntu. The real war is for the mobile (read: smartphones and netbooks) market. If all you use a netbook for is accessing Google services and browsing, it’ll be an attractive prospect, and if you don’t want to switch from your trusty Acer or EEEpc, you should be able to download and install Chrome OS on your current hardware.

And as great as all of this is, I can’t really see it growing the netbook market (or growing very rapidly in it), but I guess that’s an issue of pricing, which is still an open-ended discussion.

One things which does stand in their favor is that Chrome has over 30 million active users. If they can afford (and want to buy) what will undoubtedly be low-cost netbooks, Google might just make a statement.

All in all, a fairly expected move. What do you think?

Related Posts:

• My review of Google Chrome

But not just pretty - they’re also packaging a backend system called OCMX-Live, which adds additional, rather powerful features to the blog. Things like advanced comment control, custom logo upload, ad slot support - essential, useful stuff.

It’s probably the most exciting feeling yet - seeing a local startup produce work of this quality. I’m very, very impressed, and am definitely looking forward to seeing more.

Nicely done guys! I’m sure the rest was worth it - now go make the Internet prettier! :)

Core. They’re the company that imports Apple hardware to South Africa. And as far as SA is concerned, they’re doing a poor job of it - pathetic customer service, arrogant public relations, inflated prices, etcetera.

Probably just about anyone who’s done business with them’s got something to say about it. So when RJ van Spaandonk, head of Core, went on the radio to clarify a few things, well, all hell broke loose.

One of the things Spaandonk tried was using Twitter. Nothing pointless here - most Mac users are probably on Twitter already, and it’s a good way to reach them all at once.

And reach them he did. I think we can all agree that his approach wasn’t the best - by his own admission, his strategy first involved prodding what was already a very angry beast, get them all worked up, then use clever math to show that they’re actually getting a good deal, thereby making them all look like idiots, shutting them all up, and scoring a massive victory for Core.

It backfired.

It backfired so badly, that Spaandonk tried retracting his tweets, tried to undo the damage, but they’ve already been reblogged. What’s done is done.

And in a nutshell, I’m pissed off about it. Not Core, not Spaandonk, but the community response.

Among the hundreds of things that make SA a great place to live, the sense of community is one of them - this is especially true of Twitter, where it’s almost as if it’s one big happy (and slightly dysfunctional) family.

But this is also the dark side, since it only takes a few people to get heated up enough about an issue to spark the rest of the family into a bloodthirsty frenzy, clamouring for vengeance.

Remember Regator? I’m sure quite a few of you do. It’s an australian news aggregator, which basically picks out the most interesting bits of the web, offering visitors a convenient experience.

Since Regator is green, contains an alligator as the mascot, and has “gator” in it’s name, it’s a total ripoff of the local Afrigator, right? Afrigator assumed as much, and just about the entire local tech community got angry at what must have been a very baffled group of Australian coders.

Right there, we demonstrated 2 things: 1. Groupthink. And 2. Irrational response.

And right here, less than 1 year later, with Core, we did it again.

Let’s be absolutely fair and honest - Macs are not essential items. They’re about as luxury as luxury gets, without delving into the realm of Born Rich. They are far from essential, and there are loads of other computers out there that can get the job done just as well.

The fact that you (yes, I’m talking to you, Anti-Core supporter) own a Mac, and have lived to tell about it, leads me to realise that, actually, you could afford it - both in terms of price and self-maintenance savvy. If you couldn’t, you wouldn’t have bought one, and this wouldn’t be an issue.

(Let’s be clear about something else - Core isn’t the only company we suffer poor customer service from. Vodacom, Neotel, Telkom, DSTv, all major banks, Incredible Connection, and on and on. What it comes down to is the sales floor and call center staff they employ - they’re the ones that dictate the majority of your experience, and for all we know, Core might not have as much say in the matter.)

It is an issue to you, though, and I can’t really see why it’s an issue. Spaandonk’s math aside, you were willing to pay whatever inflated price Core threw at you, so I don’t see how complaining about it now makes any difference.

Scratch that. It made a huge difference. Among other things, the “leading” “bloggers” in our local net decided to abuse their advantage on Google, copying a screenshot of Spaandonk’s tweets across several sites, and entitling them in such a way that a Google search for “RJ van Spaandonk” returns the aftermath of this catastrophe in the top 3 slots, snide commentary included.

Yes, he’s made it in life, and there’s not much that can be done to his reputation at this point (far as I know) but well done for showing the rest of South Africa just how juvenile and temperamental we are.

Also, well bloody done for twisting Twitter into a hammer and beating Core with it, so much so that Spaandonk’s final words were:

So, what is the lesson in this for others, and especially for businesses that feel the pressure to embrace social media? My advice: stay away from Twitter. [link] [emphasis added]

Thank you, for setting back the drive to get more local companies SM-aware. You can bet that Spaandonk had much harsher words for his friends behind the scenes, and you can bet those friends and their friends control a good portion of the local IT pool, and that they can’t afford a PR disaster, and that they’ll take his advice at face value.

I hope the discounts and the better service you didn’t get were worth it.

The UK has been left with some soul searching to do after findings that Britons experienced more incidents of violent crime per 100,000 citizens than South Africa, which is often depicted as the world capital of violent crime. [link]

I suppose it comes as no real surprise. It’s not as if first-world nations are immune to crime, or, as it seems, knife-wielding teenagers:

It’s knife-wielding teenagers, however, who scare him most. Schipper said: “These gangs walk the streets wearing hooded tops and baseball caps. Most of them try to look like your typical gangster. A lot of them carry knives. I find that adults in the UK fear teenagers because of that. “You read about stabbings in London on a weekly basis, and that’s only the ones the media know about. Knife crime among teens is getting out of hand. [link]

But it would seem that our relief at not being the most violent nation was short lived - given that we’re ranked on stats that are (and we all know this), skewed to begin with:

Police in South Africa’s three major provinces are implicated in a conspiracy to make it appear that they are winning the war on crime. Evidence of manipulating crime statistics — including destroying dockets and failing to register cases — has been exposed in Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. [link]

Which brings us back to square one, if not worse.

Personally, I find it a little depressing that some of us got happy at the news that the UK was more violent - and that even more decrying the whole situation as misinterpreted, insisting (possibly with a touch of pride) that South Africa is the most barbaric nation of them all:

Any farm murders in the UK in the past year? Any elderly farmers tortured with garden scissors and steam irons? Any farm workers eaten by lions? Probably not. Nothing in the world compares with what is going on in South Africa.

As far as I’m concerned, every nation has it’s problems, but it does us no good sitting around talking about it all day. Instead, try focusing on the positive - it’s the best way to stay sane ;)

Setup:
I set up Bing as the default search engine to use from Chrome’s quick bar (which is how I do 99% of my searching), so the only time I’ve had to look at Bing’s pretty front page was when searching from another PC, which didn’t happen often. More info on setting Bing as default here.

Points:

1. It’s okay.
Not fantastic, not terrible, but okay. The fancy images do nothing for me, since as a savvier user, I’m just here for the results. And what of those results?

2. Substandard index
Google rules the roost on indexing - purely thanks to the insane work put into their spiders. Microsoft hasn’t made a fraction of that investment, and it shows. Yes, with accurate-enough queries, you can generally find what you’re looking for - but it’s not as easy or intuitive as Google.

3. Formatting
I never thought I’d say this, but the formatting plays a big part. Bing doesn’t embolden query keywords in result titles, where Google does - and it makes a huge difference. With Bing, it feels like you have to read every single result plus description, whereas with Google, skimming the titles is more than enough.

4. Relevancy
Bing is somewhat like Cuil on this - good indexing, not enough timely relevancy. Searches for hot topics (things like the Iran Election, Honduras Coup, etc), generally yield outdated sites and articles. Contextually relevant, yes, but not chronologically relevant.

5. Related Searches
This is where Bing seems to have put most of it’s effort, and once again, it shows. Going from broad to exact in-topic searches is seamless and intuitive. I’ve only used it one or two times (since I generally phrase my queries with a view to get a hit the first time round), but I can see where it’s a gain for average users.

6. Image Search
A refreshing take on image search, but nothing that can’t be just as easily found on Google.

7. Video Previews
Strangely enough, I didn’t run into a single video preview. Then again, there aren’t many videos for PHP functions and UNIX commandline tutorials, so that may be a factor.

8. Operators
Google has a far wider arsenal of operators: site, inurl:, cache:, links:, etc etc. Bing only supports site:, and cached pages are accessible from the search results. It’s also when using a specific site: that the incompleteness of Bing’s index shows.

Conclusion
Using Bing is like going about 3 years back in time. It looks nice, feels awkward, and, while it delivers results (and delivers them fast), it just doesn’t seem to deliver them as well or as broadly as Google. However, it should also be pointed out that despite the limited index (and all the other shortcomings), there wasn’t a single result I couldn’t find on Bing.

Yes, I got a hit every time, which, as far as I’m concerned, puts it on equal footing with Google.

That’s Search, though - there’s more to be said for the marketing, too (thanks, iMod).

Ever heard of MoralFibre? I’d think that most of you have - it’s a very popular blog, dealing with local culture, music and current events, with a healthy dose of wit and razor-sharp observations. I was recently saddled with the task of moving the entire system (a multi-author Wordpress blog) to a new server. But not only move. Reinstall.

See, we’re upgrading, going from “blog” to “social network”, somewhere MoralFibre hasn’t really gone before. And this gave me an excellent opportunity to figure out the ins and outs of Wordpress MU + Buddypress - most of which I’m sharing here.

Firstly, HUGE thanks to IS for sponsoring the server (a full-on local beast of a box). It’s really legend of you :)

Secondly - No GUI. I did all of this via commandline. The only time you really need a drag-and-drop FTP-like interface is when you’re setting up the themes, but that’s really the last thing you’re doing.

So let’s get started! Grab your favorite terminal client (PuTTY on Windows, terminal/ssh on Linux and Mac), a Red Bull, and maybe a small bag of biltong ;)

Step 1: Get the domain set up.

This is really the responsibility of your host, unless if they gave you a control panel of your own. Set up the domain, then register it, and make sure it works by navigating to it in your browser - it makes things much easier later on. Also, be sure to pick the final domain you want to use - setting a temporary one then changing it later is a mission you don’t want to have to deal with, trust me.

Step 2: Download MU

SSH in to the box, navigate to the html root (generally /var/www on Debian and CentOS boxes), and download MU:

$ cd /var/www/
$ wget http://mu.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

That will download the package. Now to extract it:

$ tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz

It’ll extract everything to a folder - wordpress-mu/. Chances are you want it running on the root of your domain, though, and this is the easiest way to go about it:

$ mv wordpress-mu/* /var/www/

That moves everything to the root. Now, if we navigate to the URL (say, awesomemu.com), we’ll get the Installation page of Wordpress MU.

Of course, we can’t install it yet - we’re exactly one MySQL database short. Time to correct that :)

Log in to MySQL:

$ mysql -u root -p
Password: [your SQL root password here]

If your host set up the server, they should have mailed you the password. If it’s a self-service VPS, the password is generally blank. If all else fails, here’s a guide on restoring it.

If you get an error like this:

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket 
'/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

Remedy it by starting MySQL:

$ /etc/init.d/mysql start

Otherwise, if all goes well, you’ll get a MySQL prompt:

mysql>

Now to create the database:

mysql> create database mu;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

That’ll create the database, responding with “Query OK”. The next step is to set up a user for it:

mysql> use mu;
Database changed
mysql> grant all privileges on *.* to 'admin'@'localhost' identified by 'some_pass'
with grant option;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

This allows a user, identifying himself as admin, with password some_pass, to connect to the MySQL server. Note the @’localhost’ bit - we’re only allowing this account to connect from the same box MySQL is running on. If your MySQL server is located on another box, you’ll want to set up the user like this:

mysql> grant all privileges on *.* to 'admin'@'%' identified by 'some_pass'
with grant option;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

The % wildcard allows the user to connect from any IP address. You can also provide a specific IP address, or a block (eg: 196.34.%)

Ok. We have a database, and a user. Time to get MU sorted. In your browser, navigate to the domain. You’ll probably get a warning at the bottom, with MU complaining that some directories aren’t writable. They also offer a sample command to fix it:

$ chmod 0777 /var/www /var/www/wp-content

That’ll make the necessary folders writeable. Proceed with the installation, following the on-screen prompts.

On the next screen, you’re offered a choice of domain structure. Every user that registers can register a blog - do you want each of those blogs to sit in a subdomain (like wordpress.com?), or each in a subfolder (like moralfibre.co.za?).

If you choose the subdomain option, there’s a little extra setup involved. I woud recommend the subfolder option, though - keeping all your content on 1 domain == better indexing and rankings.

When it comes to setting up the MySQL user, it’s a simple matter of providing the username and password you used earlier, at the mysql prompt. And all should go well.

Congratulations - you’ve got MU running! Now for buddypress (the complicated part). Buddypress is really just a suite of plugins with a slightly trickier folder structure. Nothing we can’t handle :)

Step 3. Install BuddyPress

Navigate to your plugins folder:

$ cd /var/www/wp-content/plugins

Now download Buddypress:

$ wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/buddypress.1.0.1.zip

When that’s done, you need to unzip it. Unfortunately, tar won’t work here - we need to use unzip:

$ unzip buddypress.1.0.1.zip

That’ll extract Buddypress. If it doesn’t work (”unzip command not available”), you should install it first. If you’re using Debian (or Ubuntu), you can install unzip like so:

$ apt-get install unzip

If that doesn’t work, refer to the manual for your distro, and if that (and Googling/Binging for help) fails, contact your host.

Now that it’s extacted successfully, log in to the Wordpress admin panel for your blog, navigate to the Plugins menu, and you should see Buddypress listed - along with an option to “Activate Site Wide”. Click it, and voila - Buddypress is alive!

Alive but ugly. The next step is to set up the default homepage theme. It’s included in the zip we downloaded - we just have to move it to the right place:

$ mkdir /var/www/wp-content/bp-themes/
$ mv /var/www/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/*
/var/www/wp-content/bp-themes/*

This sets up the Buddypress themes. Now for the homepage theme:

$ mkdir /var/www/wp-content/themes/bphome/
$ mv /var/www/wp-content/bp-themes/bphome/*
/var/www/wp-content/themes/bphome/*

From here on out it’s simple - navigate to the Appearance box in your Wordpress admin panel, and activate the Buddypress Home Theme just like any other theme. You might need to enable it in the Admin -> Themes section first - and disable it in there afterwards, to deny regular users access to the theme.

Finally:

• Swing by the options in the Admin panel.
• Enable blog registrations,
• set up the default upload limits & file types,
• turn on Plugin menu for your users,
• allow them to add members to their own blogs,
• set a default support@ email address,
• and so on and so forth.

Set up the home page of your new Buddypress site by going to Widgets in the Appearance menu, and adding all the Buddypress widgets into likely places. And that’s it - you’re done :)

Addendum 1: Using subdomain blogs.

If you choose the subdomain option for blogs, you need to be sure that your nameservers were configured with wildcards - *.mydomain.com. This tells the nameserver to redirect any and all possible subdomains to your main domain. If you haven’t set it up like that, you’ll have to add every subdomain manually (which defeats the purpose of automatic registration). Check with your host if you’re not sure.

Wordpress’ installation should tell you to use the htaccess.dist file that was included with MU. It contains a default set of .htaccess rules - all you need to do is activate it:

$ cd /var/www
$ cp htaccess.dist .htaccess

If you encounter any issues with this, let me know in the comments.

Addendum 2: Installing themes & plugins

If you’re the careful type, get WinSCP - it gives you an FTP-like drag-and-drop interface over SSH. Just set it up with the same details you used to log in to your server in the first place, and it should work. For a quicker solution, though, you can do this:

Installing plugins, for instance. Navigate to the plugins folder:

$ cd /var/www/wp-content/plugins

Now, when you find a plugin you need, copy the link to the .tar.gz or .zip file, go to your terminal, type wget, and Shift/Command Insert to paste in the link:

$ wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/google-sitemap-generator.3.1.3.zip

That’ll download the plugin. If it’s a .zip file:

$ unzip goog [tab]

[tab] is Autocomplete - just type the first few letters, press tab, and the rest of the filename gets filled in for you. Press enter, voila - instant plugin. If it’s a .tar.gz. file:

$ tar -xzvf goog [tab] [enter]

Note that you have two choices when enabling plugins (from your Admin panel). Enabling a plugin SiteWide forces it for all users, and they also have NO customization options. You will (as admin) have access, however. If you just activate a plugin normally, it’ll only be active on the site’s default blog (while being available to other users too). And just uploading it to /plugins will give users the ability to choose which plugins they activate.

In other words - be careful. And register a new account, log in to it from a seperate browser to make sure that you’re not accidentally giving ordinary users access to plugins they shouldn’t have.

Same deal with themes:

$ cd /var/www/wp-content/themes
$ wget http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/download/garland-revisited.1.1.zip
$ unzip garl [tab] [enter]

Any theme that works on Wordpress will work on Wordpress MU, and by extension, Buddypress. Just be careful - some themes use static image titles, which means you’ll have to edit them to add in <h1> tags, to actually allow the user to set the blog title and tagline.

Also - be extremely careful when setting themes on the front blog. Some themes (like Zenko - we ran into this problem on MoralFibre) - include functions and plugins that stop the registration process from working. If it’s not entirely necessary, leave the Buddypress theme as-is - and if you really need a custom style, download the bphome/ theme and skin it manually.

Whew, finally. If you run into any problems - please post them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer :)

And for the most part, there are only really a small handful of massive social networks out there - Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc. The problem with a massive network is that it’s impossible to cater for all the needs of all the users - which is why niche social networks are also well on their way to becoming the next big thing.

But how do you start one? I’m presenting 5 possibilities - from the easiest to the most technically challenging. Let’s go :)

5. Ning

Register, start a new social network, configure it, and you’re ready to go. Ning makes it as easy as possible, with loads of preconfigured modules, layouts, etcetera.

The main drawback? Being a free service means that it’s heavily Ning branded. You can pay to remove the branding, park your own domain over it, and so on, but if you’re even slightly technically inclined and have cash to spend, the other options here might be more appealing.

More info here: http://ning.com

4. Boonex Dolphin

Boonex makes community software. Their flagship product is Dolphin - a once-off, easy to install-and-run system that features all the functionality and all the flash you’ll need to get a social network up and running.

I’m also impressed by their payment system. Downloading and installing Dolphin is free, and you can elect to pay a monthly amount to remove any Boonex branding from your site.

So if your network is just a free network for friends/fans, etc, you don’t pay anything. If you go professional, and you’re generating revenue, you can pay to have the branding removed. Best of both worlds :)

More info here: http://www.boonex.com/

3. BuddyPress

I recently had the pleasure (lol) of getting Buddypress up and running for a local community blog. It’s not very tricky if you follow the instructions, and all you need is a web server with a domain - VPS optional.

What’s nice about Buddypress is that it bolts on to Wordpress MU - making it a blogging-oriented community. You can also bolt bbPress on for added forum functionality. The Wire serves as a great wall/microblogging tool.

What makes it tricky is if something breaks, or doesn’t go according to plan (doesn’t that always happen?). I’d still rate it as very easy to install, even for novice webmasters - maintenance, hacks and upgrades? Those are much, much more difficult, and will require a fair amount of digging in the databases.

Overall, though, I am impressed with it.

More info here: http://buddypress.org/

2. Laconica

If you want as little bloat as possible in your social network (ie, just opening a network for sharing and chatting), you should consider Laconica. It’s free to download, free to install, and it’s basically the same as running your own Twitter server.

Added advantage: It’s already compatible with a wide range of desktop Twitter clients, which (as I’m sure you’re aware), makes it very easy to get started.

More info here: http://laconi.ca/

1. NoseRub

Up to now, I’ve really been mentioning the knowns - but have you heard of NoseRub? It’s a German project with an obscure name, so I didn’t think so :)

NoseRub isn’t a social network per se - it’s really a social networking protocol. The idea is that you’ll start one of you own (say, for digimon fanfiction authors), then you’ll be able to connect to other communities (other digimon communities, fanfiction communities and author communities).

So while keeping all the profile data & media on one server, you can enable your users to interact across multiple sites in distributed social networking system - make friends, chat, share media - all from a single profile.

More info here: http://wiki.noserub.com/

As wonderful as that sounds, it’s not the easiest to set up, and it’ll need many more setups in order to become a critical mass in the social networking sphere.

I do think, however, that it might hold the key to the future of social networking. A Web of niche networks, all interconnected, sounds a lot more appealing than a single monolithic network that doesn’t serve 99% of its userbase very well.

And those are my suggestions! Have you started a social network of your own? What did you use?

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. ~ Wilhelm Stekel

Mousavi’s green army, over in Iran, won’t win their freedom by doing what they’re doing now. If they simply accepted the results (whether or not they were rigged - and I doubt it), but worked hard to ensure that the next elections were in their favour, there wouldn’t be any problems, would there?

What they’re doing now is only leading to death, discord, and eventually, an even harsher crackdown. Remember - they started this war, and they have the power to end it.

Yes, below are my personal views on the Iran Election thing, as well as the Green Avatar Activism we’re seeing.

Relevant links:

This doesn’t appear at length in the speech video below, but it was said and translated and recorded and reported like so:

“Supporters of some of the candidates should have faith that the Islamic republic does not betray people’s votes. The country’s legal structure does not allow for fraud to take place.” [link]

• The Khamenei’s Speech (video): http://bit.ly/1Z1Z0
• Obama Pressured to Strike a Firmer Tone: http://bit.ly/ziIOV
• Western Misconceptions Meet Iranian Reality: http://bit.ly/16sEpP
• Facebook Humanism: http://bit.ly/L2FB9

I’d love some debate on this. There are invariably many sides to any story. I’ve presented one, and I’m eager to hear more.