Last night Karl Susman opened his new site which I developed over the holidays. The site is to support his new book, “Love Your Geek”, which was released over the weekend for the Kindle and will be arriving in the full splendor of print on February 1. Many of you will know Karl from his WestsideGadgetGuy.com podcasts, and if you don’t you ought to check them out. The site is a combination of WordPress and BBPress Forum, designed to foster…
“It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell them!” Soylent Green – 1973 So what is the real commodity of social media? It’s people. You and me, and all our friends. Period. Over the past few weeks, this as really started to steam roller. Let’s take a look at a few examples: Fake Steve Jobs…
The permalink – nothing could be more core to the concept of blogging, and indeed, content management. In it’s early inception, it was the one link to rule all others. The problem is that with the advent of microblogging systems like Twitter, the permalink has been devalued and now faces possible extinction. From Wikipedia: A permalink, or permanent link, is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Because a permalink…
(Disclosures: I work for Namemedia, who is technically a competitor of Internet Brands, owners of vBulletin. I also run several sites that use vBulletin and spend a significant part of my work week working in vBulletin code…) Over the past month, there’s been a slowly erupting feud in the vBulletin community over the new pricing structure that was announced for vBulletin 4.0 by Internet Brands. You see, back in the day, the original vBulletin license cost $185 (originally $160 I…
That’s right you heard it here first …the darling of the noveau marketing is “transparency” and unfortunately, it’s the wrong answer. Transparency and disclosure simply aren’t enough. For some crimes, Mea Culpa simply won’t cut it. Yes, if you are accepting payment from outside entities in return for writing that blog post or tweeting that little tweet, you need to disclose. For me, all the “disclosure” in the world isn’t going to absolve you if you’re writing a disingenous post…
I’ve had a few launches recently and a few of them are worth mentioning. The Afternic Domainer’s Advantage – this is a knowledge center for use by Domainers, which is fully integrated with the AfternicDLS.com site. For those who aren’t aware, Afternic is the world’s largest premium domain marketplace with over three million domains available for sale. The Domainer’s Advantage site is a fairly standard WordPress installation that makes use of several fairly standard plugins. Special features: Integrated news feed…
Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission issued it’s first change the policy on endorsements in over 30 years. From this point forward, if you accept any form of payment for a post, you need to disclose it. PCWorld.com sums it up: Bottom Line: If you receive gifts, money or any other type of compensation from a product manufacturer or service provider you have to disclose it. For the record, it’s always been my policy that if there’s any possibility of conflict…
Some fun facts for this wonderful Monday: 94% of all email traffic is spam, according to this article from the New York Times. Think about that – 94% – if you were to round that off, you might as well just say that all of it is spam. InformationWeek estimates the cost of spam in terms of lost productivity has reached $21.58 billion annually. ISPs have used the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 to try to sue to recover the cost…
For some time, I’ve been looking for the next compelling thing in social media sites. For that next development that transforms the way we interact, that re-envisions forums, chat, photo galleries, articles, etc; in fact a redefinition of the way in which we communicate online altogether. For the past couple years, I’ve watch as vBulletin, my favorite forum software, basically did minor incremental releases, remaining essentially the way it was in 2001. Wordpress has done better, yet still, the fundamental blog/cmslite experience remains pretty…
Let’s say you own a business. It’s a small business, and you’ve tried very, very hard to build it into something. Along the way, like most businesses, there have been bumps, but for the most part, you’ve got a bunch of customers who love you. Then one day, right in front of your door, someone puts up a huge billboard, and on it, they will allow anyone with anything to say about your business to put up whatever they want. …