Higgedi-house-core to the max! There's a new DJ mix out by the one they call the DJ Dan Taylor – yes indeed, after thousands of fan-letters my man from NY squeezed the lemon good: So all you deep house and minimal techno lovers, check this gem of a mix out as won't get any funkier and better than this until Dan is releasing the next mixing session.
Listen to Dan Taylor: Squeeze Read more
My old rootserver has done a great during the last two years, but since more and more visitors are interested in my ramblings, it was time for an upgrade :mrgreen: I rented an Intel Quadcore with 8 Gigs of RAM at Hetzner (a relatively cheap and very reliable German provider) – this should do for the next couple of month!
During the last weeks there were a couple of downtimes due to server-overload – things should work fine again now. Thanks a lot to Gerald who helped me with setting up the new Apaches – and thanks to you, dear readers, for your growing interest. I'll keep my postings interesting and as always: feedback is highly appreciated!
“Welcome to the world of tomorrow!” No, that's not right. Let me try again: “Welcome to the world of the last seven days!” That sounds better! There's a lot to show-and-tell, so without any further ado, let's jump straight into last week's social media news.
There's been a lot of talk about Facebook's future last week. Regular Geek views the new multiQuery API plus the profile search as two important steps in opening the walled garden:
There is a very strong feeling from developers that a closed system like Facebook cannot succeed. While I tend to agree that a completely closed system will have difficulties, Facebook has slowly opened up little by little to a decently open system. They still have some work to do before they become as open as Twitter, but the foundation has been started.
And Copyblogger, even goes a step further in explaining “How Facebook kills SEO”:
But the rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that?s completely invisible to search engines – most of which, Facebook blocks – and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users. So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook?s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic.
ReadWriteWeb looks even further into the future. My guess is that scenario 4, “distributed social networking”, has a huge potential, and Google wave might give this a huge boost:
The next step after Facebook may be no social network in particular at all – it may be social networking as a protocol. A set of standards that let you message, share with and travel to any social network you choose. Suddenly all the social networks have to improve because they are competing on quality of service, over customers that have free will and are able to leave at any time.
Blogging is dead – that's what they've been saying for a couple of years now. But is lifestreaming here to stay? Of course a social media feed is a welcome guest on many sidebars, and the time budgets are indeed shifting:
It seems as if blogging is becoming old hat, or at least evolving into something smaller, faster, and more portable. I?m with Louis Gray, I?m not going to give up my blog, instead, I think of it as the hub of content, and the rest of the information I aggregate (notice the Twitter bar up top and the Friendfeed integration below). To me, joining the conversation is certainly important, but it doesn?t mean the hub (or corporate website) goes away.
Mashable compares 19 twitter clients, from pro-dream-machine to keep-it-simple:
Now that Twitter is older than a toddler, you have a variety to choose from. From apps for groups, Mac and PC specific clients, and apps that let you do a whole lot more than tweet, you can use this guide to help you find the desktop client that?s right for you.
And just in case you don't know what to do with these clients, take a look at his Mashable posting on twitter strategy..
I found Henry's video on Lifehacker – this one should make many Matrix fans quite happy:
If you're a very sharp-eyed fan of Matrix movie trilogy, you'll recognize the knot captured below as a rare specimen sported by “The Merovingian.” The knot itself didn't originate with the movie, and isn't rightfully named “The Merovingian Knot,” but the Ediety Knot. Still, it's nearly impossible to find any reference to it independent of the movie, so let's just keep the Wachowski-an etymology for now.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA-n2xkYX6s[/youtube]
It took me a couple of tries and my knot is still not perfectly symmetric – but I must say: great video-tutorial!
The Cost (and Payoff) of Investing in Social Media sure is an impressive title. So there's no need for actual arguments, especially when the introduction acts as a series of climaxes:
But is social media right for your business? Could it be a free substitute for a traditional (read: expensive) advertising plan? How much time should be spent in the care and feeding of all those profiles? The answers may surprise you.
It sure did not surprise me – actually, I'd have guessed that the answer would be “maybe”. But one thing I do know for sure: SM strategy (read: social media. don't read: Sado-Maso) is not a series of quickies and requires careful analysis and planning. So this is probably one of the dumbest quotes I've read in a while:
Time is money, but Weathers says it's all about how you manage it. “Previously wasted down time like sitting in taxis for 20 minutes or standing in a bank line for 10 minutes is now spent on my mobile phone, bouncing between Twitter and Facebook. It's getting easier and easier, and for branding an entrepreneur, I think it's golden.”
While writing the occasional tweet on your way to the airport or answering Facebook messages via Smartphone-client is a great time-killer for geeks, this is not what social media marketing is about.
btw: bad, bad entrepreneur.com! Using a javascript that dangles with the contents of the clipboard when copy-pasting is just… not a good thing.
And it's Blair Williams who claims that – author of the mighty and highly acclaimed Pretty Links for WordPress. Now we all know that good looks are sometimes sufficient for a night of fun, but if you're thinking about a long-term relationship, there are plenty not-so-visible factor to be considered: in the case of a WordPress template comment formatting, landing pages and many more are among these. In his post, Blair outlines the 10 most common issues with WordPress templates – definitely worth a look if you're thinking about switching!
I'll think a theme looks clean, beautiful and professional ? then I install it, have a look under the hood and realize that it has fatal flaws.
This really makes me wonder how many people are slaving away on their websites and blogs all the while their site is dying a slow death because of a WordPress Theme that they think is fine.
It's been a while since Sacha Baron Cohen shocked the world as Kastachstan reporter Borat. In his new movie he portrays a gay Austrian fashion journalist – I'm so looking forward to see this film – starting on 10th of July. The trailer is *very* promising:
Man's Best Friend is the title of zedzap's bw-shot – very nice pic, no HDR this time :mrgreen:
This movie has got it all: action, car stunts, daring love scenes… unlike the director of the latest Bond movie, Asim Varol did a great job:
And that's it – see you again next week! Thanks for you whuffies and never forget: comments and feedback make blog authors happy :mrgreen:
Got any news you'd like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?So don't hesitate – just click here for the contact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.
Yesterday the WordPress Team released the official roadmap version 2.8, named after Jazz musician Chet Baker. Thanks to the update engine most webmasters should be able to do the update via CMS – but of course it's always a good idea to start with a complete Backups. The Highlights of the new version are the improved widget- and template-interfaces, plus there's syntax highlighting for editing templates via the backend.
All the improvements come in very handy and render a couple of plugins workless – no more need for Ozh' Better Plugin page (there is a new list view for all plugins which require an update), and there's no more need for the duplicate widgets plugin: finally, all widgets can be used in multiple sidebars out-of-the box. The team also fixed more than 700 bugs, so updating is highly recommend. There's more details on the official WordPress Blog. This video demonstrates the new features:
PS: Since BarCamp Vienna is starting tomorrow and I'm going to be real busy during the weekend, I decided to run the update-marathon today. No major troubles – great work, dear WordPress team!
A thankful blogger.
But if you actually want to secure your unique name, you gotta be quick, because:
Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you'll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You'll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.
That's what the official blog says – and what's even more important: once you chose your unique username, it's here to stay – no change of mind later on. And it's first come, first serve – so be quick! Read more
This weekly round-up comes with a built-in 24 hours of delay, as the author was extremely busy during the last weekend launching the Austrian Internet Council [site in German]. This was an amazing proof of the power of social media: within the short time span of 5 days we our project was the cover story on ORF FutureZone, Austria's biggest Tech News site. Crowdsourcing is great, but it can be quite time-consuming, especially when there's a lot of interest and involvement. So, without any further ado, let's jump right into this week's hot social media topics!
breas! Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid published his first book titled Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity
The first rule of business, is never sell something you love. Otherwise you may as well be selling your children.
The Pip Boy saved me various time – while I was strolling through the post-nuclear wastelands of Fallout 3. But the nifty little arm-computer might soon enter real life: Engadget shows pictures of an impressive flexible OLED-Display:
The 4-inch organic electroluminescent display sports up to 1.67 million colors, QVGA (320 x 240) 100ppi resolution, and can be bent to a curvature radius of about 2 inches. Hopefully, this doesn't become a must-have fashion accessory any time soon: while it's perfectly appropriate attire for post-apocalyptic wastelands, we don't know how well it'll fly at the sorts of high society social events we normally frequent.
TechCrunch interviewed Seismic founder Loic LeMeur – and the most charming Leena Rao managed to make the man talk:
According to Le Meur, Seesmic will soon be offering a browser based client. This offering is actually appealing, considering that Adobe?s AIR platform has some strange UI bugs and quirks and tends to use a good amount of resources on computers. And Seesmic will also launch an iPhone app, which is currently under wraps along with the web-based product.
Jeremy Shoemaker has been writing about affiliate marketing for quite some time; but recently he launched his own affiliate-network and published a post about his experiences. I'm really curious about his plans:
Sure I hear you? your thinking “Why the hell would you pay people to sign up for a free course?” It's a great question and I think when the dust settles around the shoemoneyx.com program I will write all about it, why I did what, and what exact effect it had. I do have a method to my madness but it's not as many have guessed. We will see if it works but that is for another post
Regular Geek posted an interview view on twitter – his main point: Twitter is shifting from an online service to a basic infrastructure upon which early adopters are constructing an eco-system:
So, why is marketing and economy so important to Twitter becoming infrastructure? Without an economy building on top of Twitter data and functionality, Twitter would just be a toy. With people researching the data that is generated from Twitter, it becomes much more important. In order to monetize the system, they can sell the data, but monetization becomes much easier when you become ubiquitous.
Can't argue with that – with all the various mash-ups and the growing interest in real-time search, it seems that Twitter is here to stay. At least for now.
Microsoft's new search engine hat a great start: TechCrunch reports that Bing overtook Yahoo – now the question is: will this trend last or will the wearer of the ancient headband #2 leap for a comeback?
The company?s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google?s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).
“The idea that ‘content is king' in blogging is total bullshit” says Viral Garden:
Every day I read hundreds of blog posts. And every day, I see dozens of truly GREAT posts that get no comments. Every day I see dozens of pretty good posts that get dozens of comments and have vibrant conversations.
The difference? Most of the bloggers that write those pretty good posts are also pretty good about leaving their blog and interacting with people on OTHER sites. They comment on their reader's blogs. They tweet their links on Twitter. They are ACTIVELY social with social media.
Interesting thesis… I'd say that both factors come into play. Social media spamming will just piss people off unless you got some stories that are actually worth watching your moves.
I admit: I just couldn't decide between these two beautiful shots. A direct path was taken by eyesplash Mikul, it's a free-handed shot. The seconded picture portrays a female lying wolf in the zoo of Z?rich and was taken by Tambako the Jaguar:
Boats are only people – pretty unreliable ones, to be exact. These love boat passenger are in for a wet treat – feel the pain of these great sailors:
This is the end – of this week's round-up. Thanks for stopping by and offering me some of your Whuffies. Let's do it like this: I'll keep posting and you'll keep coming back and drop a dime from time to time :mrgreen:
Got any news you'd like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?So don't hesitate – just click here for the contact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.
Usually, I don't get too excited about new ad networks – but since Contenture has been developed by the team behind Clicky, I'm quite sure that this service deserves a closer look. The idea is simple: by paying a monthly flat fee to Contenture, users help webmaster make their sites sustainable. Via a JavaScript-Snippet, the Contenture networks measures users' visits to participating sites and spreads the money accordingly.
Basically, Contenture is reversing the classic ad model: instead of generating indirect revenue streams via AdSense and affiliate banners, webmasters profit from their regular users. I think that Contenture enters the stage at a quite early time, but basically the financial sustainability will become one of the key questions of the future web. There are some caveats involved though: such a network can only bring benefit to its webmaster if enough users are willing to pay – since most surfers are even reluctant to pay for online-services, I doubt that the big rush will take place instantly.
But the team has obviously kept that challenge in mind and came up with a *very* tempting idea:
Contenture is a new way to monetize your web site. Ad revenues are poor, unless you're a big name – and even then, they're still not that great. With Contenture, you make money for every visit to your site from a Contenture user. Furthermore, Contenture makes it dead simple to add premium level features to your web site with very little work. Think of it as a way to take your site Freemium. For example, you could give paying users priority access to new articles, exclusive access to your archives, an ad-free experience, and more. These features are built right into Contenture, but you can do even more with a little work on your end.
Now what's so special about that? Think about it this way: during the last weeks, a number of big affiliate networks – especially Clickbank – have got into a struggle with several kinds of malware-clean-up software: once those programs start deleting CB-cookies, the fun part is over. Contenture offers a much more stable system and establishes a monetization system which doesn't require any ongoing user actions. Once a couple of popular bloggers start posting mini-tutorials or premium contents (Twitter reports are still pretty hot), Contenture will experience a massive grow:
Contenture offers web sites the ability to (optionally) add premium level features to their web site. One of these features is to remove ads, but that's just one of many. For example, a site could give paying users priority access to new articles, exclusive access to their archives, special commenting abilities, and more. These types of features are built right in to Contenture. In other words, we're bringing the Freemium business model to the masses.
Here's another way to look at it. Contenture is the first that lets content providers create premium “micro services” throughout their sites. This is a crucial variable that other micropayment services have failed to implement.
And this is just the beginning – there are more features to come, like pay-per-article, tools for subscription-based models and much more. In this respect, Contenture not only is the first “anti-ad-network” but at the same time a valuable toolkit for developing micro-payment models.
The pricing seems rather reasonable to me – the minimum fee is $6,99. Users can pay more on an optional basis. Contenture keeps 20% of the revenues, which is very low compared to the standard 50% of most ad networks. Contenture works with all types of sites, but there are plugins for WordPress and Drupal – the integration is one in two minutes. There is no approval system, but Contenture reserves the right to delete accounts.
Conclusion: Contenture arrived a little early, but the idea is great and from my two years of Clicky experience, I definitely know that these guys understand how micro-traffic analysis works. There are no downturns involved – I activated the Contenture plugin on datadirt today and I'm not expecting a massive income stream yet, but I expect this to grow quite big. So it's probably a good idea to jump on the band-wagon as soon as you can.
More reviews:
Stefan Jacobasch on Contenture [in German]
Micropayment-Based Freemium Models For All. (If People Use It.) on TechCrunch
The anti-ad network
Monetize content without ads?
Step in, ladies and gentlemen – welcome to the weekly Blogistan-round-up! It's my duty to entertain you (and sometimes maybe even piss you off), but who cares – it's all in the blog, st00pid! From Google Wave to the sluttiest brides in 2008, the blogosphere is here to cover your every information need.
The buzz is on – Google has announced the release of their newest project called “Wave” later this year. The stakes are high, as Wave claims to redefine the way we communicate and collaborate on the web. E-Mail, contacts social networks – Wave will tear down the boundaries between documents and dialogue:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Google posted a couple of screenshots, future beta testers can sign up here. This in-depth presentation from Google I/O waters my mouth; and btw: Wave will be completely Open Source.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ[/youtube]
“But all good things, they say, never last”, sang prince. And now TechCrunch is saying the same about Twitter's trending topics:
Up until recently, Twitter?s trending topics – which are prominently displayed on their Search homepage and now also in the sidebar when you?re using the Twitter website – were an awesome way to get a feel of what was buzzing on the Web, in a way that virtually no other web service was able to do.
+
But then came the pirates and Michael is really pissed!
Today, when you look at Twitter?s trending topics, you?ll notice that the large majority of trends are memes started by a single user or a group of users, with the main goal offering entertainment rather than spreading information. That?s all fine and dandy – no harm in having fun – and I realize well that Twitter?s trending topics are not necessarily required to be giving you and me an overview of stuff that really matters, but I can?t help but think it?s a pity that that list is starting to turn into the top 10 of chain letters people used to circulate through e-mail messages in the late nineties.
Oh dear gosh, I wish more people would recognize that manipulating social media platforms is so much more fun than obeying their “laws”…
Many native Indians have names like “Robin kills the Enemy”. Their name is in their passport, the same applies to people with exotic names like Lisa Strawberry. But if your name sounds like made up (but actually isn't), you might have trouble keeping your Facebook account. An article on Spiegel Online [in German] reports that a couple of users got deleted without any previous notice. Facebook's policy requires you to use your real name, and with the ongoing success of the platform a lot of users are running multiple fake profiles with strange names. Removing these might be a good idea for FB in terms of scalability and reliability, but the collateral damage has become so big that the group Facebook: don't discriminate against Native surnames!!! already has more than 4.000 members, among them the likes of Linnie Birdchief, Carl Fourstar jr. and Sandy White Hawk. Facebook speaks person Barry Schmidt admitted mistakes, and the said accounts have been reactived, but the waiting period is quite long as only 850 people are on the payroll of the world's largest social network.
New York Times reports that Russian internet investment company Digital Sky Technologies acquired 1.96% of Facebook for the sum of $200 million:
Digital Sky won because its founders Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger have strong experience running Internet properties in Eastern Europe and Russia, and “a deep, advanced understanding” of social networking technology, Zuckerberg said.
We all know that FB is burning money at an amazing rate, but Zuckerberg still plays it cool – after all, he is running the largest social network in the world. Yet still numbers have gone down: when Microsoft purchased 1.6% in 2007 they had to pay $240 million – during the last two years, the overall value of the platform has decreased from $15 to $10 billion despite the growth in user accounts.
Jeremy Shoemaker turned 35 this week – congrats, man! I love your blog and there you're the person who taught me the most valuable lessons about online marketing and blogging – thx for your excellent posts and keep up the great work! You definitely got a fan in Vienna :mrgreen:
This week's href=”http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/29/friendshirtme-free-shirt-friday/”>T-Shirt of the week is also definitely worth a look: it was printed by Friendshirt.me. And the comments say it all… when I saw this app I instantly had to order mine!
Robert Scobble is a tech evangelist and twitter legend. Disqus blog published and interesting interview with man responsible for the tweet-frequency-unit “Micro-Scobble”:
I grew up in silicon valley, I had no choice. My Dad was an engineer and I grew up in Cupertino about a mile from Apple Computers. I had an Apple Computer in 1977, in my junior high I was in the first computer club , and I got a tour of Apple when they were one little building. So yeah, I?ve always been around tech.
Judith sent me this great article – thx! Take a look at the Top 5 Sluttiest Wedding Dresses Spotted In 2009! Even though is nearly breaks my heart that Miss Carey is no longer single, I have to admit that with this elaborate sense of taste she'd get a job in any brothel in the whole world:
The Mariah Carrey slutty wedding dress certainly doesn't leave anything to the imagination. Fully equipped with garter belt, stockings, and a main fashion piece better off worn under the dress or on the wedding night, this dress starts us off with its moderately tame slutty fashion.
This one goes out to the Open Source Community – I usually don't publish ads as the video of the week, but in this case Redhead has done a fantastic job – and with over 3 minutes, in these short-clip times this is almost an online feature movie. Congrats to Peter Novak on this fantastic job!
New to my weekly round-up: starting this week, I will publish a “pic of the week” – no special topics whatsoever. Since I started digi-SLR myself my appreciation for those perfect shots has grown immensely. Choosing the proper pic wasn't easy at all, but this Manasquan Reservoir by Joisey Showaa is one fantastic shot:
And that's about it for this week – thx for visiting my blog, see you again next week!
Got any news you'd like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?So don't hesitate – just click here for the contact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.
When I played my first computer games, screens were generally mono-chromatic. Looking at the small pixel-heaps which were supposed to look like cars (one needed a whole lot of imagination back then!) for too long made one's head ache, but despite all the limitations, virtual racing was definitely fun. Back then I wouldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams that current F1-simulations are looking more and more like the real thing – and by now even online technologies are offering an nice simulation experience, which VW embraces to fuel up the buzz for the launch of the new Golf GTI.
This weekly round-up comes with a free day of delay, as I was pretty business last night taking pictures of the sunset from Braunsberg. Riding my bike home I had to be very careful since a nightly meeting of a rabbit and a motorcycle is usually a very unpleasant experience for both sides. I haven't digi developped all pics yet, but this one turned out quite nicely:
So back to blogging business – what a week! We now finally know that there actually *are* differences when it comes to the two sexes using social media. Read more
Widget-enabled themes are a good thing, Martha Stewart would probably say – and rightfully so. Configuring one's sidebar directly via CMS and drag-and-drop is doubtlessly a nifty feature we bloggers don't want to miss. To kick things up a notch, WordPress allows for an infinite number of different Sidebars. This comes in very handy for putting different sidebar contents on the blog homepage, the single postings and the static pages. But most bloggers who start experimenting with multiple sidebars experience a major draw-back: most plugins can only be used in one sidebar exclusively.
This means that if you have different sidebars for your homepage and your single posts, you cannot for example include the tag cloud widget in both sidebars. (more info: How set up multiple sidebars) But worry not, of course there is a very handy plug-in which solves this problem: Duplicate Sidebar Widgets does what its name implies: it enables you to make up to 25 copies of any widgets, therefore being able to use the same one in up to 25 sidebars. (You probably won't need that many, though.) btw: just in case anything goes badly wrong, you can always delete your widget-copies later. This solution works for most widgets, but some complex scripts simply refuse this treatment. (Top Commentators is one of those.)
But luckily, there's Samsarin PHP Widget. While the standard text-widget may only contain HTML but no php, the Samsarin Widget will gladly accept php input. So basically the first step is to copy the php-widget using the aforementioned Duplicate Widget Plugin, and in the second step you have to enter the desired php-function-call manually. This does not just sound like a bit of work and readme-digging, it actually is – but using this method gives you total flexibility in designing your widgetized sidebars.