New device desireable, old device undesireable

 Ahh the Onion...couldnt have said it better myself.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_device_desirable_old_device

Thats it for today.

Google Wave is Google's "vista"

Here I am alone in Google wave. There are some buttons I can press, lots of familiar interface elements, but no contacts, no one to "wave to".

So, I'm alone.  Perhaps I can create something and store it for later, just in case at some point someone joins my "wave" ?  What exactly is a "wave" ?  Dont really know so far, but it seems to be what I would call a conversation.  You can apparently attach files, applications, pictures, sounds (usually measured in waves), and the like, so it basically looks like chat, message boards, comments, and blog posts all mooshed together in a kind of baby blue / mostly white interface.

What I had hoped was I could at least communicate with twitter, facebook, or people I know on youtube (all 5 of them), but it seems to have no interop, so their aim is to effectively redo social networking from scratch?

There are some interesting elements.

Scrollbars - Instead of having the up and down scroll buttons on the top and bottom of the scroll pane, they attach them to the bar itself.  This seems practical in a way because then you can move your mouse slightly less far to get to the up and down buttons, which is probably what the mac tried to do .  However, the bar doesnt resize to indicate the relative scroll amount, and covers the apparent indicator which is behind it (you can see it occasionally) so interesting try, but really its kind of pointless to change something that wasnt really broken unless you can offer a true improvement.

From what I can tell by reading the greyed out, currently unavailable menu choices, it appears that the "waves" could be somewhat of an improvement on conversations - if they were embeddable inside familiar contexts.  If you could have a "wave" or a "chat" or a "thread" as a choice when you were on facebook, or someone's blog, or in a chat room on ning.com, then I think this would potentially be groundbreaking.  If its supposed to happen in a vaccuum, then its entirely useless.

They are offering an api, so for their sake, a flash SDK, a ning/opensocial widget, a facebook widget, and  stuff will hopefully come along soon to let people see the potential of this, but so far, just going to the wave preview was about as interesting as hanging out in an empty chatroom.

You can't get everything right, and the ability to be innovative seems inversely proportionate to the amount of money and resources one has.  Microsoft has proven this for many years by only being able to copy Google's search with Bing, 10 years after Google got it working and started on a shoestring.  Since search though, Google hasnt really broken any new ground, and they've instead tried to copy word processing programs, bought other peoples ideas and then squished them (youtube), and is basically starting to look a lot like Microsoft.

We'll see what happens. But from what I read on the blogs here and here, its looking more and more like Google wave is Microsoft Vista, only no one has to buy it.

Installing Windows 7 on vista.

Vista was getting to be more and more of a pain. Crashing more often, windows defender zombies trying to come back from the grave after I have repeatedly tried to disable it, and after 7 years of virus free operation in the last few weeks inundated with viruses so I was forced to run zone alarm, which was incredibly annoying in new ways I could only have dreamed of before.



I went to costco and bought windows 7 "family pack" 3 licences for 179.99. Apparently the local store "Computer Angels" can also get it for that price (I imagine by ordering), but Futureshop and Office Depot didn't have the family pack and could only offer the upgrade for $129 each computer. Walmart was around 132 or something. Did some online research and found that Amazon is offering a student version upgrade for $39.99 US so thats the cheapest Ive seen yet.



First off, it seemed to take about 2 hours. What a computer needs to do for 2 hours when its processing and RAM runs at the speed of light is mind numbing. How far could you send some data at 2 hours travelling at the speed of light? Around 2,160,000,000 KM.



So after my data had managed to travel 2 billion kilometers or to the Sun and back around 7 times, the OS was finally installed.



In general, first impressions are its clean, fast, and impressively remembered almost all of my settings. It got all my bookmarks right and most of my cookies/filled in forms correct, kept all my installed programs in tact, and has all my desktop mess preserved exactly as I had it in Vista. Very impressed with this, its the best OS install I have ever experienced, and Ive been installing or attempting to install dozens of them for years on Mac, Linux and all the Windows versions.



Curiously it did get a few things wrong, the dual monitor positions were switched even though it preserved the background picture, and all my program shortcut icons were gone from the "taskbar" which seems to work differently - more like OSX does.



Some of the programs I run prompt the "are you sure you want to do what you just told me to do with 6 different actions" crap, and that did happen ONCE, but thankfully you can shut that up immediately by selecting "change when you see these notices" pushing an easy to use slider down to the bottom. Presto, no more "cancel or allow" garbage which has been the bane of my existence with Vista.



Windows IE 8 so far is snappy and intuitive. Enjoying it so far.



Another curiosity is Windows 7 seems to have eaten Windows Movie Maker. Its completely gone and there appears to be no Windows 7 version of it available in any of the Microsoft packs. I actually preferred it to "iMovie" because its much easier to edit the soundtrack independently of the video clips, plus the transitions and overlays had more options. Thats a disappointment, but I'll keep vista running on another box so I can still access it if I need it.



It seemed to find the other computers on the network faster than before, which is nice.



Another pleasant suprise was I was able to share my DVD drive on my network on the recently installed Windows 7 desktop over to my Sony VGN-P530CH, which doesnt have a DVD drive. In fact, I'm typing this part of the blog on that computer with Windows 7 on it. Very impressed, I've never heard of installing an OS across a network. It took a bit longer to install on the netbook but again, all my settings including the misc positions of my various icons are retained, almost as if the OS hadnt really changed. Even Firefox's previous session survived the OS change.

Hooking up to windows live I managed to quickly retrieve windows movie maker and mail, albeit somewhat less functional than the vista versions. Probably a temporary situation but so many web based apps are coming along that do much more like aviary.com so its not a huge deal.

Next up for me will likely be looking at a bamboo tablet to take advantage of the multitouch features.

So far, very happy with Windows 7, seems like Microsoft has finally gotten it right. If they were able to make 17 billion dollars in profit after launching a "failed" operating system, I shudder to think how much money they will post as profit end of 2010.

Thanks for reading, hope this was useful.

I was contacted by facebook legal, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt

I run a small online community website called "FacesForFilms.com". Until recently we were called "FilmFaceBook.com" and once we reached around 1500 members, I was contacted by a facebook lawyer to stop infringing on their brand. Apparently I was damaging their business by supposedly causing confusion.

As it happened, I had just purchased 20 shirts and several posters with "filmfacebook.com" on them out of my own pocket. The site is a volunteer effort that I maintain to help the local film community.

Not wishing to have any dispute with arguably the largest web based corporation on the planet, I quickly complied with their request. Facebook, rumored to be partially funded by the US Dept. of Defence, is not an organization to be trifled with.

So, I changed the name of our little online community as fast as I could think of a new name and register it, and all is well. The lawyer said they would send me a t-shirt, and it just arrived. It has an FB logo on the front and on the back it says "I WAS CONTACTED BY FACEBOOK LEGAL, AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT"
So I did lose about $300 in the various branded things, but at least I got a laugh out of it.

Cheers to facebook for having a sense of humor. I certainly could have done a whole lot worse.

Proprietary Content Management System Blues?

I get a lot of calls from clients concerned about a web development company they hired to provide content management software for them. People generally see software as a product like a desk, or car, and figure you buy it and it acts like a tool for you.

They couldn't be more wrong. Software is a service, and this is becoming increasingly true as our online technology evolves rapidly to meet the creativity and demands of the users.

Web companies that offer content management systems need to be seen as partners, not vendors. Get to know them well before engaging in business because you'll be linked to them for a long time. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, particularly if your success is their success, and you both work towards mutual benefit. If control is your thing, look at hiring in house talent and make sure a solid accountability and transparency structure is in place so you don't become hamstrung by an IT "silo" inside your company.

Large corporations offer software solutions in the "Cloud" but you need to have a person independent of the corporation that is on your side and in the know so again you don't become linked to a company who might diverge from or even become hostile toward your bottom line. Wow, I'm sounding all business jargon-y!

Here is some advice I wrote to a potential client today:

"Don't invest in technology, invest in people.

If you have a relationship with an existing company, invest in that relationship, and structure your contract so that everyone benefits from your mutual success. Think of software is a service, not a product.

E-learning specialty products I build are like RSS feed readers, quiz and assessment objects, simulations in video, animation and 3d virtual worlds etc. All of my stuff can be integrated into blogger, ning, typepad, youtube etc.

My immediate advice to you would be to start a blog that shares helpful stories and tips about what you do to your prospective audience. Then, create a facebook page or group and post links to your blog there, and try to get customers and friends to join it.
Then, start a twitter account and post links to your blog on twitter every time you post a new one. Once established, these tasks shouldnt take more than 20-30 minutes a week and will provide you with huge marketing.

If you are having fun with that and find it rewarding, create a youtube channel and start posting helpful videos you film yourself about what you do and how to help people. The vast majority of your training should be free, and your premium training should be specialized beyond what you offer online. Go with the intent to help people and wealth will follow. It always does.

All of these things you can do yourself and they will not work in opposition to your website, they will only help it. Your effort should be focussed on helping people, not picking colors or deciding logos. You can pay a designer $1000 to do that and basically move on quickly.

Avoid giving advice or writing general info privately. Keep your online conversations public in the comments section of your blog and many will benefit."

Hope that helps, please leave comments below if you agree or disagree, or have something to add that might help the readers.

If you are looking for great CMS solutions, check out ning.com, joomla.com and facebook fan pages/groups are excellent tools. Blogger, typepad, and youtube are also excellent tools that all integrate with the others I mentioned and provide great cross referencing to increase your "google juice" (thats TM Jeff Jarvis).

Twitter is even a CMS in a way, it manages real time tiny bites of content that can also point to and help promote your other more "meaty" content.

If you need special functionality that these systems don't necessarily offer, try to find ways or people who can build widgets that integrate with these tools and you'll be better off than building something from scratch - unless you really can bankroll and fund the ongoing maintenance of a big system - and that is your core business...but even then, interoperability is always beneficial.

Remember, successful businesses see their people, not their software as their most precious asset and invest in their collective "brain trust" to ensure coping with change will be easy. Software then supports that relationship and is by nature light on its feet and only built to handle what is necessary, not over-encumbered with "just in case" or "because we can" code.

Good Luck!

Hello, I'm a PC, and I'm a PC.

Today I am writing this blog in Safari 4.0 for the PC. I started out as a mac person because of the superior hardware, speed, and processing power offered at the time, using the now defunct "clone" called a "Supermac". When I left the mac platform to move to the PC platform, of course my fellow mac developers have heaped nothing but endless scorn on me for my choice, and invariably sent daily links to articles pointing out the obvious inferiority of the Windows / Intel based platform I use.

Eventually, the Mac succumbed to the Intel based chipset and I thought the game was up, and finally the Mac would simply become a flavor of windows offering distinct hardware and interfaces for all software, but take advantage of the windows platform in the back end (thus benefitting the end user). This didnt happen, and the Mac platform instead has worked tirelessly to lock the OS and its applications down to ensure continued control even though it has entered the world of the Intel platform, where up to then, the OS didnt care what apps you ran or what hardware you used.

Apple did not win the OS wars, and now with the impending release of Google's "Chrome OS" the competition has clearly changed altogether, that is, it is now between software that is an "Asset" vs software that is a "Service". Apple and Microsoft make billions of dollars by selling software as an Asset. You buy windows or OSX like you would buy a car, a chair, or a blender. You own it, you can resell it, if you had enough you could presumably borrow against it.

As the economy becomes increasingly abstracted to a service based model, and the internet bandwidth growth increases, the game is changing to a battle between which asset to buy, rather, whether or not "owning" software is a good idea in the first place. A real zinger is the recent plethora of online image editing "services" made using "asset" based software Adobe Flash that ends up competing directly with the "asset" based software called Adobe Photoshop and its incarnations.

So, as we see Safari 4 available for the windows platform, it becomes increasingly apparent that the Mac is slowly and inevitably going to migrate to the windows platform, and go into partnership with Microsoft to join forces and fight the new business model being signalled by Google and other service based software companies.

Microsoft continues to make $17 billion dollars in profit every year, and the Apple platform largely owes its very existence to continued support for the Microsoft Office Suite-which MS could end support for at any time. If Apple were running on top of a microsoft platform (now it runs on the UNIX platform), however, the threat of Microsoft pulling the plug on Office support would become moot, and Apple could continue to offer the same great hardware and interface elements that its customers love, PLUS eliminate any objection to "switching" to mac, because both platforms would run all the same software, and you wouldnt have to buy seperate licences for both platforms just because you liked using the OSX interface at times.

On top of that, Apple could then licence and distribute game software, and perhaps even release a gaming console based on XBOX technology, which would be a massive profit center for Apple.

Safari on the windows platform may only be the beginning, but the real competition to come will be the Asset vs Service model for software, and if MS, Apple, Adobe and the Gaming industry join forces, the Service model will have an even more difficult time becoming viable, as if MS werent a formidable enough enemy by itself.

So I'm a PC, and I'm a PC may be what we can expect in the near future. I always thought the PC guy was funnier anyway.

XML Extensions for AS 1 and AS2

For those of you using XML and actionscript 1 and 2, I made this set of xml extensions that I use regularly and wanted to pass them along to help you and your projects that involve XML parsing, sending and loading etc.

Here is a quick list of functions and descriptions. Script and docs available for .zip download here.

getRootNode();
returns the root node and all its children(see docs for useage examples)

findNodes([searchName],[callBack Function])
searches all the node names and return them to a callback function as they are found.

getFirstNodeByName([searchname]);
returns the first node with the specified name in a set of childnodes. Use this when you dont know exactly where the node you need will be in relation to other nodes in the list, but you only need one node and its children for your specific function. You can use a loop to grab many of these as its a quick function that doesnt require a callback function.

getFirstNodeValueByName([search node name])
works as getFirstNodeByName but this one returns the nodevalue. Textnode or not. (I hate that nodes have to be textnodes in order to read the node value so I bypass that using a function called returnNodeValue I'll describe later.

returnNodeValue()
The XMLNode docs tell you that a node has to be a type "textNode" or type 3 or you cant use the basic xmlNode.nodeValue to grab the text in a node. Unfortunately loading in XML from anywhere generally is not that type, it all comes in as type 1. So I wrote this function to extract the nodevalue even if the type is not 3.

getTotalNodesByName([searchName]);
This returns the total number of nodes in your xml file that have the specified name. A handy searchy tool.

getNextNode([search name],[callBack])
works almost the same as findNodes except it returns an undefined node when its finished. Havent really found a use for this one yet.


findNodesWithAttributeValue([search name],[callBack])
works like findNodes but searches for a value attributed to an attribute anywhere in the XML.

findNodesWithAttribute([attribute name to search for])
Works as findNodesWithAttributeValue with just the attribute name

Enjoy! If you find any bugs or have ones you'd like to add just comment below! If my script looks lame or you have suggestions, again, comment below, I'm always looking for constructive criticism.

Make it a great week.

Side Door? Try Butterfly Effect!

Side Door Economics? Try Butterfly Effect Economics.

How does Google make a 30% increase this quarter in the middle of an economic downturn when they give everything away for free?

Selling advertising? Bums in seats?

Sorry, Charlie, its not that simple. In fact, as the social networking neural pathways develop, they create vastly more complex paths between you and financial success. Fortunatley, there are theoretically infinitely more of them.

To determine the intelligence of an animal, they are often tested to see if they can establish an abstract relationship between them and their food and thus achieve the goal. For example, if a lever is pressed, it opens a gate which allows poor rat 23756 to get his cheese. The more steps the rat is able to use his hunger to motivate him to learn, the more "intelligent" the rat is. Say the lever is on the opposite wall of the cage, thus away from the food. The relationship becomes more abstract as the rat then needs to figure out the relationship of the lever and the door without necessarily seeing them both and their mutual effect at the same time.

Add to that complexities, perhaps the lever needs to be held down while the door is open, but its too far away for the rat to rush from the lever to the door before it closes, so the rat needs to find something else (another rat perhaps?) to hold the lever while they go for the door, and mabey even figure out that sharing the cheese will result in this partnership working out in the future.

Welcome to a social networking business model. Those who manage to solve the puzzles currently being generated by the massive abstract neural network of people... connected across geography, time, and modes of communication...win the cheese. Those who give up on the puzzle early starve.

Sometimes it may be as simple as this. I have an island in Second Life. That island costs me $295 a month to maintain as my own. Many people just rent their islands to other people and get a direct A-B business out of it. Not me, no revenue, it largely just sits there, mostly vacant, with some nice free areas for people to roam and reflect in a lovely virtual forest with beautiful ambient music. What a waste of money, people might say. Wow, you must be rich, others say. Nope, neither. Im quite poor, and have significant debt at the moment (but the relationship to the island is again, abstract)
Because I have it, I take my time in second life and think about it quite often. I think about how it works, the significance of it. Because I have an island, when I do speak to other secondlife people, I get instant rapport and am not dismissed as another freeloader. It is a massive, interactive calling card that immediately demonstrates to all who visit my skills and taste in asthetic design, environment, and for those who like it, it begins a conversation without words.

What has all this brought me personally? Well, over the past year, I have had many things happen that I can trace back to my island ownership in one way or another. Amazing things. I was hired to do a job that paid me $15,000 over 3 months part time that I would not have gotten had I not set up this virtual, conversational context for myself. I met a composer who liked my island so much, he composed an album of ambient music specifically for it. This person also represented "Gibson Guitars" in second life and now my island is positioned next door to theirs.

I met an engineer/producer named Gary who flew me and my wife to L.A. for a visit thanks, in part, to my context. I was flown to SanFrancisco and met the CEO and staff of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, again because of the context I established. In SF, I met others who were working to establish their own "contexts" and were making, in some cases, upwards of 10,000 a month with theirs. I couldnt begin to describe the convaluted paths money and opportunity takes to flow to all these people, but it does, and they were all happy, intelligent, and excited about their lives.

If you arent in Second Life, you are missing out. I dont think you necessarily have to own an island to derive value there, but it could be relative to the level of success.

Ive often thought to myself, how does Coke, Pizza Hut, and what not REALLY make money from an ad on television? Its hard to trace and probably benefits their competition just as much.

Thats THE KEY. Social networking is about you doing some action that benefits everyone. You dont get paid in money right away though, instead, like Coke, Pizza Hut, etc, you need to think about your actions creating ripples that tell two friends who tell two friends, they buy the other guy's product but are still encouraging support for your market vertical, your locale, your community (online or off).

If Dell advertises a mini laptop, Sony actually indirectly benefits in some ways because the person who saw it buys the even smaller sony...and then someone who saw these two computers at the airport makes the buying decision to get an acer aspire one. While at the mall to buy the dell, they all buy a coffee and some thumbdrives, and a lovely wicker stand. The ad dropped the stone in the pond, and many benefitted from the waves.

Of course, in TV advertising, none of those pathways can be traced by the vendor, they just assume it will happen when they pay 1,000,000 for a 30 second spot on tv for the super bowl.

In the new social networking economy, those pathways can be traced and turned into hard data that can influence the next "stone dropping" position, force, or size. For the first time, social networking enables the public to benefit from this en masse advertising for "brand awareness" that rivals or even trumps the capabilities of the big corporate juggernaut.

I used to play a game called "Myst URU", kind of the realtime 3d first person puzzle solving version of the original myst. Eventually I played a game which I believe to be one of the most brilliant puzzle games to date, called "Portal". Both of these games require the player to be observant of their surroundings, acknowledge that the answers are all there, just not quite grokked, and with time, experience, and a dash of cleverness, can all be solved with relatively simple tools. Sometimes the steps proved quite irritating and over convaluted, but the reward of solving the puzzle in both of those games were well worth the chase to me.

Another important thing to realize is that rewards will be delayed, or non monitary, but sometimes the non monitary rewards end up being the most treasured, the most valueable. If you are able to pay your rent with the income you make, you are in a position to use whatever other time and opportunity you have to build wealth in relationships, asthetics, social wealth etc. Fortunately you dont (yet) have to pay tax on those things.

I'll end with this example. Ning.com is a social network platform. Ive been setting up ning networks for clients who either 1. cant afford a big CMS / UMS but need one, or 2. are new to Social Networking but hesitant to invest the big money.

In both cases, the personal wealth I have derived from doing this work has been incalculable. No money per - se, yet, but I have established several life long friendships, gotten respect at work and among my peers, and even have an 8 ton granite inukshuk in my backyard all as a direct result of my efforts with Ning. The effort of a few hours here and there have made me more skilled, got me blogging, and helped me help dozens if not hundreds of people discover their own new pathways. I'll keep you posted. Oh and check out my virtual self's blog...he owes his existence to my virtual island!

social networking is the most important thing you can do

If you perceive social networking as a game, or waste of time, or frivolous, you are in for a rude awakening.

Social networks are the building blocks of a new organism, the latest manifestation of the collective conciousness of human beings.

As the internet was born, the first aspects of social networks took the form of irc chat rooms and email. This led to unprecidented speed and efficiency in many displaced humans sharing ideas across newly formed pathways.

Out of these rooms basic asynchronous communication developed in the form of a "forum" which allowed pathways of communication to form not only across geophysical boundaries, but now temporal ones, IE a person can join a conversation within its context with out having to be same place/same time.

By introducing ways to communicate across these pathways in non-text forms, such as posting photos, groups, fan pages, interests, changing colors, building 3d worlds, avatars etc, Social networks have introduced the latest vector across which communication paths can form.

All this is directly analgous to neural development, and since thoughts take all these kinds of forms as they move from neuron to neuron, and all the neurons are simultaneously connected in multiple dimensions, we have the unprecidented capacity to act as a single organism, a collected consiousness.

Those who choose to remain outside the collective will either be necessarily assimilated or face abandonment, just like rogue cells in a body. But the body is extremely intolerant of rogues, in that it fights their very existence for its own survival.

Interestingly though, each member or "neuron" is like no other, there is no uniformity within the neuron, only connectedness. The collective necessitates that we all remain wholly intact as we enter into it, and only expand our own individuality through the tendrils reaching to the others. This is not an oppressive utopia, it is actually the birth of our next phase of evolution, and its as unstoppable as nature itself.

Turn your Content into Conversation

Yesterday at our staff meeting with Jeff Jarvis, I was quite inspired and came up with 2 phrases summing up web 3.0 that I want to put here for posterity:

Web 3.0 - turn your content into conversation™
Web 3.0 - stop being the wall, and become the floor.™
Web 3.0 - public conversations trump private ones.™

First one, fairly self explanatory just take your big long statements and allow comments, or further, make your content become the conversations between your customers, clients, and peers, and extract value from that like Google does.

The second one is less good as it requires the context of, you know, being a wall in a room with say a big monitor displaying all your various value props, and instead, become the platform that supports everyone else...let them walk all over you but be dependent on you, they can leave the room, but if you are a good floor, they will come back and you can look up their skirts. I suppose that metaphor works for gathering information but its a bit crass. Apologies.

Third one...basically a conversation held in private like an email or IM or whatever is useless, in that you cant reuse it or extract PR value from it, or have the benefit of other perspectives applied to it. If you instead use public statements in a forum, others can react, respond etc, plus you can demonstrate your character to your entire audience. "Humanize it" is what Jeff Jarvis said.

So thats my summary from the Jeff Jarvis meeting...and I'm trademarking those three statements ( ha ha )

My RSS Feed aggregator

Finally got my RSS feed aggregator working. Whats an rss feed aggregator? The little widget below reads a list of RSS feeds RSS from an XML file and displays the RSS feed news items from all the feeds in order of most recent to earliest. Theres a few of these out there, but mine is free for you to use, and has some interesting features. If you press the grey button underneath a specific feed name you toggle it on or off in the list. Pressing the red button makes the feed become "solo" or the only one in the list, and you can toggle that off and go back to your previous settings.



The "reset" button resets your filter feeds toggles as they are saved in the flash shared object "cookie" (to let your website visitors pick which blogs they want to keep up to date on and not have to keep resetting that)

You can popup the viewer here and see it resizes with whatever window you put it in. Working on adding custom colors/fonts etc.

I'll continue improving it, but for now you can view source and embed/tweak the above code to play around with it on your website if you want. Ive tested it with blogs from blogger, twitter feeds, and NING blog feeds. Known issues...turning off all the feed sources causes a weird display I need to fix, workaround is you just turn one back on. Also if you are on a slower connection try to let the feeds load before clicking buttons. I havent really built too much "idiot proofing" into this yet. This particular one is built in AS1, my next one will be in AS3 as I get time and guage the popularity of this app. Updates to come...Enjoy!

Replacing humans with technology

Recently I was asked to review a product that fit in the "powerpoint killer" category of applications. Threaded throughout the marketing material were phrases that appeal to the cost cutting business manager audience who often find themselves frustrated by the effort and knowledge required to build engaging, interactive presentations or games.

"With a click of a button... " , "reduced costs without sacrificing quality...", and "replace expensive technicians and professional designers..."

These products can be fantastic tools at extending your team's abilities, inspiring your team's experts to greater tasks and saving time and money.

That said, the products also wedge themselves between you and your basic technology. If, as in our company's case, the underlying technology we build our product in is flash, then we could buy some auto-flash generation tool to save time, but we then become dependent on that tool, its developers, and ongoing support and updates, on top of Adobe and its flash product.

Once the product is entrenched, the idea of leaving the product becomes less and less feasable for your company as you "save time" in the here and now, but become more and more estranged from the core technology as your team focuses on the middleware instead of learning the basics.

Not only are you then dependant on the product's technology and what it allows or doesnt allow you to do, you then become married to the company strategy of the product. If they, say, decide that the military vertical is their most profitable, their tool will evolve to serve that vertical more than your vertical or niche.

To avoid this kind of scenario, many platforms are "open source" or almost open source. This means you can always go into the code of the platform and tweak it to suit your needs, if you have to, as well as being able to strip out the features you dont need and extend any features you like.

Flash itself allows you to extend and manipulate it down to its core, yet Adobe also provides scores of automatable, customizable components. Beyond that, a developer base of tens of thousands of independent component developers provide innumerable tools that your team can use, expand upon, or be inspired by to push your product beyond that of your competitors.

Your product IS your people, so investing in platforms, technology, and training that will extend the capabilities of your staff and bring them to a higher level of skill will always give your company a competitive edge. Any product that becomes what amounts to a crutch for your staff to save a few minutes but sacrifice learning important skills in the process, will make your company less and less able to cope with change and market demand.

In conclusion, I encourage everyone to buy tools that can be extended, stripped, pulled apart, and tweaked, and work well with all the other tools out there. In terms of platforms I use xml, google, ning.com, mediawiki, blogger, anything RSS capable, and of course my all time favorite...flash! With these tools I feel I can do pretty much anything in terms of web based applications. When spec'ing out a new RIA, I generally start with XML and defining the webservices methods and datatypes all in XML, keeping each component as discreet and plug and playable as possible, capable of using off the shelf stuff, or moving on without it depending on the circumstance.

Why Facebook Looks Like Twitter...

Here is a snapshot of the traffic on these websites, ranked where "1" is the most visted website on the 'net, and 10000 is the 10000th most visited website. As you can see...Facebook is plateauing with a gentle increase in the past year, Yahoo has seen a recent sharp drop, twitter.com and ning.com are experiencing significant increases, with Twitter being the most pronounced most recently, and second life has a steady decline.
Now its interesting that roughly when Twitter sees the spike in their useage is close to just before we saw facebook change its pages and profiles to look almost exactly like twitter's.

My purpose in grouping these particular websites is to draw a comparison between sites that are "open" and let you put content from them on other websites, and others that are "closed" AKA "walled gardens" that will let you post content to them from other sites, but they wont let you pull content from them to other sites.

Yes, the sites in decline or plateauing fit the walled garden category, with Second Life being the most severe walled garden largely due to the bulky client "viewer".

Conversely the sites with the sharpest increases in traffic allow you to easily put content YOU create on their sites on whatever other sites you want. Twitter makes this perhaps easier than any of them.

Again, this is all predicted in "What would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis, and its interesting to see which companies here need to smarten up, and which ones are the future leaders, so lets just hope for their sake when they do get to the top...they dont forget how they got there, like Mr. Zuckerberg apparently has begun to do.

Run your own analysis for free at Alexa and see how your favorite sites stack up! Just replace the sites in the text boxes with whatever you want for .com and play with the date ranges. Its a very handy, free tool that makes Alexa another big winner in the traffic world. If only the big CEO's would realize, the most honest, open companies will always win in a world where "Free is a business model".

In facebook, it would be great if you could RSS the updates feed, and all the feeds, for that matter, and get the content out from inside the "blue and white utopia" of facebook if we wanted to. Its our content after all right?

Why Facebook Looks Like Twitter

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Do I have to learn Actionscript 3? Is AS1 outdated?

Actionscript...1,2,3...they're all good! A biased opinion piece from an old hand at flash.

Executive Summary for CEO types:

Actionscript 3 is a good move if your company is large, well funded, and well staffed with low staff turnover. You have a good chunk of your budget put aside for R&D, and another good chunk for training and employee personal development, and process is important. Also customers don;t dictate how to run your company or what you are selling. They just trust you and depend on you to provide them with results and profit.

Actionscript 1/2 are great if you are effectively building your airplane at 30,000 feet or in startup/recovery mode. You constantly have to spin on a dime, retool overnight, and have relatively high staff turnover (staff last less than 5 years on average) and havent really settled into exactly what it is you do. You will make whatever the customer wants and on their schedule. The flexibility and lack of strictness in AS1/2 lend themselves perfectly to this, as well as the short learning curve for new incoming staff.

The essential differences


First of all, AS3 and AS1, while similar in appearance, represent two distinct virtual machines in the flash player. They are about as different as Java, C++, and Pascal are from each other. In fact, to send messages from a VM2 (virtual machine 2 / actionscript 3) to a VM1, you have to invoke the same communication as you would between the flash player and the containing HTML page, or java object or whatever. Suffice it to say, even within the code the two are strange bedfellows sharing the same containing plugin.


History
Actionscript 3 came about because Flash/Adobe are trying to compete with Microsoft and other "big" language platforms so they had to tighten up the rules to play in that space. They did a great job, but, in many ways, they lost the original appeal of flash as a kind of coding "sketchpad" where you could rapidly deploy prototypes, games, and interactivities for one off purposes.


Disadvantages of AS3 (from a business and practical perspective)

First, my personal perspective as a coder...
I have built apps in both languages with equal sophistication. As a coder, I find AS3 far more elegant and fun to work with, its less of a Kludge, and truly object oriented. I really, really like working in it, and I think as I coder I am more useful and "hire-able" being proficient in both.

In the following I will point out the potential pitfalls and objections to moving to Actionscript 3, but only to ensure companies move to the new technology without any misconceptions about the costs and real benefits.

Procedures and Housekeeping

AS3 requires a far stricter process, naming convention, and organizational set of rules and processes to work beyond 1 coder. There is no room for any flexibility in naming conventions, file hierarchy, or even root script file locations. File management is very complicated and requires a lot of housekeeping to keep everything straight. The end result is a cleaner, more scalable and robust product for sure, but if the project is under 2000 lines of code total, the housekeeping can easily outweigh the actual coding in terms of time and resources.

Comparatively, AS1 / Flash is relatively flexible. If a particular bit of code works, but maybe is inelegant or quickly written, the compiler will pass it. in AS3, the compiler is extremely unforgiving so a lot of time is spent finding "bugs" that aren't causing actual problems, but just represent inelegant wording or phrasing according to the compiler. (this is a highly simplified approximation of what is going on...but accurate nonetheless)

In fact, the language is now so complicated, that they had to invent another language called 'flex' that sits on top of it along with a lot of paint by numbers style components, in an attempt to simplify it to decrease the learning curve. Why build an entire set of classes, folders, and establish naming conventions when all you want is a silly banner ad that lets you click a golf club and hit a golf ball into a little hole...?

The converse of this of course is, if you are sufficiently able to reorganize your production team to handle the rigors of AS3, you will be more scaleable and capable as an organization, and ultimately your software will be more robust, and less dependent on one individual's idea of organizing things. This is an expensive thing to affect, can be worth while, and if your company isnt thinking about making software as part of its overall business model, well, thats like being any company that plans to deliver its product with no control over a key part of its supply chain. In short, scalability and process in software development is everyones problem, even if you make concrete tubes.

Stability
VM1 is fast, does most things you need in a production, has 12 years of evolution and bullet proofing behind it, and the VM2 still hasn't proven itself as truly faster than VM1 in all applications...actually in any.

I have also yet to find any instance where the VM2 actually outperforms the VM1 at least from the end user perspective. Certainly the VM2 is faster but the AS3 language demands it has to be. VM2 is, in this way, a bit like Windows Vista. The computers are faster, but the mundane tasks have actually seemed to become much slower because of all the overhead associated with a truly object oriented language.

I don't have any actual VM 1 vs VM 2 developer content statistics to quote, but I'm willing to wager that 90% of the interactive flash content out there is VM1.

Conversely, the best practices required by developers and the stricter language acts like a micro manager whipping your developer work force into shape, which again promotes stability, scalability and reusable code.

Why 90%? Well first of all, I'm not talking about videos. I imagine that easily the statistic for flash video on the web is the other way around, 10% swf and 90% flv/h4. Im talking about interactive flash content, or its primary "raison d'etre". I say 90% because if it was 100% VM1 3 years ago before VM2 came along, my guess is most flash developers at the time tried AS3, couldn't figure out how the document class worked, then went back to flash mx and kept working...then got hit with the recession and said...screw CS..im just sticking with what I know 'cause I gotsta eat.

On the other hand, many developers also tried AS3 in the flash dev, hated it, then tried flex. Flex didn't offer much originally because of the lack of components. Now with a few more components, its more palatable, but any developer who is ultimately responsible for performance of their apps knows that becoming dependant on a plethora of components built by everyone and their dog can lead to a lot of customer support calls that go very bad.

The other choice, VM1, means that you can deploy apps on a tried and true platform quickly and without a lot of housekeeping so you can keep your consulting rate low and know that all the code out there is yours, so you can be responsible for it.

So what exactly can you do in VM2 that you cant do in VM1? Precious few things.


Cool, useful effects
As long as you are publishing in flash player 9 or higher, you have full support of all the filters and transitions offered in the CS Suite of tools. That means blur, drop shadow, transitions everything...all available to you in VM1, although you might have to write in actionscript 2.


Coding Elegance
Actionscript 2 is kind of a kludge compared to AS3, but if you are thinking future, you can write in AS2 in very close in form to AS3, almost indistinguishably in fact.


Neato 3d Components
There are quite a few components built in AS1, but some really interesting 3d ones built for AS3. This is a curious one. Neither VM is as good of a 3d rendering engine as the major ones out there, and Flash will probably always be many years behind the leading 3d rendering engines in terms of physics, ray tracing, procedurals etc...because getting flash to do 3d is like trying to make surgical tools out of bananas...honestly.



Sort of possible but why ?

I ask you to compare Papervision 3d's latest doo hicky to any of the top game titles of today, like Unreal, Half life, Portal, Fallout 3, Bioshock..etc. or even Second life, which is basically a kind of a "platform" sort of. Even Google earth kicks ass over anything 3d in flash, even with the "optimized player". Again, bananas for surgical instruments.

Standalone Applications

With AIR, now you can make desktop applications with installers that run as a standalone in flash! Well, heads up sparky. You've been able to do that with AS1 for many years using programs like Screenweaver. And you can build those without requiring the end user to run a pointless "installer". Just double click the icon and run the program when you want, and when you're not running it, its not pervasively existing in tiny pockets throughout your massive maze of folders in the mysterious c and d drives.

Speed Advantages
Since the VM2 player is, in fact, much faster than VM1 in terms of computations per second etc, you should be able to see marked improvements in high end math applications, working with a lot of children classes that exist and disappear rapidly to form various effects, and procedurals like smoke, water etc. Well, in reality, the VM2, while faster than VM1 for this kind of thing, is still years behind more optimizable code like C++, Java, and processor array specific languages that do the big number crunching that again, flash will never hold a candle to or be practical for. It is fun to play with this, but in the real world business app, not worth investing in the learning curve or the cost of the latest CS4.

Mobile devices and Social Networking apps
Since VM 1 is a smaller, simpler player that ran very well on very slow machines in years past, and netbook computers and cellphones seem to be taking us developers back to those 800mhz days and downgrades to windows XP on the rise in spite of Microsoft dropping support for it, all the new bells and whistles in AS3 may not end up being supportable on the mobile devices. Developers who become dependant on the new components because they couldn't learn to build their own will be stranded until the phones and netbooks can support them.

Even the most successful social networking apps are still very simple, and don't even begin to scratch the surface of what a developer can do in AS1 or 2, so the need for 3 is still a long way off, and at the bleeding edge, if Second Life or some other real 3d engine came into open social, well, the papervision guys would be cut off at the knees over night.

Competing technologies
Microsoft Silverlight, Google Android, and many others compete directly with Flex and Actionscript 3 as platform development tools.

That said, none of the competitors can fit exactly what VM1 does, because that is what flash originally was, and what made it so popular. A very shallow learning curve on a simple app "sketchpad" where you could add fairly decent code to a bunch of pretty good graphics without having to go too code-nerdy with classes and methods and all that weirdness, and could focus on the graphics, animations, and fun stuff. It is an invented niche that flash VM1 still owns. No one else can touch them or compete, and it accounts for 95% of the interactive web games out there still, and they all are running very solidly with no sign of slowing down. Stuff I built in '99 in flash still runs just fine on my vista PC. I never did any updates, never had to rewrite anything. So as a VM1 developer, you essentially have no competing technologies to contend with.

Developing countries
As developing countries come to the table with their massive numbers, developers who have only had access to older flash development environments and definitely cant afford to keep up with Adobe's latest and greatest corporate edicts will again continue pushing out VM1 content for many years to come, and have even less interest in joining the party ranks of Adobe's VM2 crowd.

Business Case and Cost
Even if their developers really want to move to AS3, for flash dependent business there is a heavy price to pay. Some businesses have invested in the VM 1 heavily (whether they realize it or not-many CEO's probably don't) and the cost of moving to VM2 in terms of staff training, turnover, upgrading machines, changing general production policy, etc. may keep them away from it indefinitely, particularly if there is no business case that is compelling enough for them to move over. Trying to explain to a CEO that a number after the letters VM is worth 300,000 in staff turnover and training and platform rebuilding just to keep up with the Joneses when, essentially, it "ain't broke" is a hard sell for any nerdforce.

Adobe itself
Since Adobe managed to come up with "vm2" in the first place, what is stopping them from suddenly creating a "VM3" that only supports "Actionscript 4" and so on. Even though it seems crazy, it is possible that Adobe's head is so far up their own butt that they would actually do this. AS3 is already 3 years old now, VM2 has been around for a while, and devices continue to evolve in strange and unpredictable ways. Adobe has not indicated this sort of plan, but I dont think anyone but the most naive would assume that VM2 is the last of the VM's.

Nevertheless, and I can't stress this enough, as a developer you SHOULD learn AS3, become very good at it as a matter of professional learning. Even if you end up doing most of your work in AS1 or 2, you will be a better coder if you learn 3, and learn it well. It is a lot of fun to work with, and if Adobe is really stupid, may be the only thing you can build for in 2-3 years.

But given the fact that AS1 content constitutes 90% or more of currently being made (not to mention the huge amount of content made over the past 15 years) flash interactive content out there, the idea of Adobe dropping VM1 from the player is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable or even long term future. As VM2 gets bloatier and bloatier with more and more components and add ons, VM1 will remain a small, tight and efficient player that continues to do what it does very well.

Thanks for reading, I hope it helped. Please add your comments and particularly your criticisms below. I cant learn if you dont tell me why Im wrong!

future topics - ON TOPIC

Really more for myself than my dedicated readers...ha ha... I am posting a few future blog titles that I need to write about because I want to focus this particular blog on actionscripting best practices in the e-learning vertical, which is my primary area of expertise.

Here are the titles you can look forward to seeing articles on in the form of my to-do list!

1. Scorm and flash resources. Getting your flash stuff to work inside SCORM. (If you cant wait for this article, visit pipwerks.com now and join their groups. They are the best)

2. Building an RSS feed aggregator in flash. I need to do this myself, so I'll post how I did it when its finished. The purpose of this is to put any feed url into flash vars of an embedded flash object, and quickly parse out the important information with a nice little XML parser. I'll do one in AS1 and AS3.

3. Actionscript 1, 2, and 3. What are the futures and advantages of each? Is AS3 truly the best for all applications?

4. Badges badges badges. Making badges you can let others embed on their sites in flash.

5. My world famous video player widget. How its made, how you can use it.

6. The best quiz/question engines. Theory behind them, what works, and what is most effective for training online.

7. "What would google do?" by Jeff Jarvis book review

More to come!

Internet and the shared experience.

With all these social networks that are heavily customizable, targetted advertising, and personalization of content feeds, the shared experience of the internet is becoming less and less apparent.

When you log into a system, the appearance is constructed on the fly based on your preferences, settings, and permissions. If you are an "admin" you get different buttons and layouts than a "public user" and again different from a "member" on an increasing number of sites.

At one time, when you went to any website, you could call someone and get them to look at the same site, and you'd both see the same colors, same ads, same content.

Now, with feed aggregation, embedding, and even inline comments and ads, you could even be watching the same youtube video but have entirely different contexts and popup messages than someone else viewing the same video somewhere else.

Moreover, with Google's promotion and web history tools, not to mention international filters, search results differ depending on who you specifically are, so the idea of calling someone and saying "Hey...google painted squirrell and check out the third result" will no longer work.

How important is the context to a message? What difference does it make if my friend and I watch the "Simpsons" and my TV in the kitchen is 13" and someone else watches it on a 72" Flat screen in their livingroom?

I think these are important considerations for the design and evolution of rich web applications, because shared experience is what makes us able to relate to each other. Without it, in all our "connectedness" we become increasingly "disconnected".

Why Second Life is Largely Irrelevant, (and how we can fix that).

My SL alter ego would kill me for saying this, but Second Life is largely irrelevant. Why? Because it doesnt integrate into my life.

I have an island in Second life called "Tree Estates IV". I pay $299 every month to keep it there, but I'm only there 1-2 times a week for up to an hour for the past 6 months.

Its important to me and my business, and it still pays for itself in ways I cant begin to calculate, but those are intangible things as yet, and dont currently translate into cash. So for me, that is the first way SL is irrelevant. Only a slim minority of participants can do business with it.

Its not like Im off the computer much. I spend most of my online time either doing work or in facebook, various ning.com sites, googling things, digging things, checking CNN.com and more.

Second life doesnt integrate with any of those things, at least not in useful ways. In fact, my SL character's blogger page and facebook page gets more attention than his actual SL avatar gets.

I bet, seriously, im not alone in this situation. Even when I actually hang out in second life, my window fills with chats, popups, messages, notices so I cant really even see the virtual 3dness of the world. Last night I was in a televised in world gameshow called "the second question" and I found the 3dness almost irritating as I tried to get the audio all set up. I could have easily participated without even having a 3d world as it operated mostly like a big conference call. (we all "phoned it in" as it were)

Its not all bad though. I will say that in spite of all this, the true value is by looking like I do in second life, and by having my island, I can "tell a thousand words" about my skills, my asthetic, my personality. As a calling card, it beats everything else combined, and that is easily the primary reason I keep the island going.

But that still isnt relevant, and while it works for me as a 3d modeller / enthusiast, it doesnt work for most people who just have the default avatar or buy everything they wear, beyond showing their taste.

That still means that Sl is only relevant for the first 1-2 seconds of first impression you have with someone. What about the ongoing, continued relationships? Well, they quickly evolve past the look you established, and become simple chat sessions.

How do we make it relevant then?

Well one way is this. I used the windlight simulator technology to enhance a logo on my website. Now average joes who dont care about 3d technology or virtual whatsits can experience some of the benefit without having to sign on, get an avatar etc.

One could argue that Machinima movies do the same thing, but lets be honest, unless you are already a gamer those generally do look creepy and silly, the sheer magnitude of belief suspension required to view those make them practically unwatchable by the mass audiences. No question it will improve but for now, not practical.

Another way would be making SL content viewable without having to log in. People could see part of the world, say, as the background of a website, or have an in world camera that could see a little spinning logo inside SL and thats just the header. A widget that allowed people to replace all the blogger, facebook, and other profile pics with their current in world face, preferably as an interactive 3d model instead of just a static photo.

You could build simulations of various things and allow non logged in people to interact with them from web pages, like a car, or a ball on a stick. Basically opening up the simulator technology to be embeddable anywhere and everywhere. The simulator is the key value of SL, and it just needs to get more portable.

Conversely, users need to be able to "digg" things in SL, or have their facebook status update their SL status, or even have their avatar pull data from facebook, linkedin or whatever.

Join me in this conversation by posting your comments!

Crowd Computing and 6 steps to make it work for you

I have a lot of people coming to me for advice on their websites. Here is my personal philosophy on the topic and what drives my advice to pretty much everyone these days.

First of all, websites as we generally think of them, are dying or dead. The idea of a static page with some sharp graphics, perhaps a fancy flash logo animation etc. has largely become irrelevant to most people in the past few years.

I like to correct people and say web presence instead of website. Web presence means just that, your presence on the web, in all forms. Your emails, your facebook pages, profiles and groups, your blogs, your pages on other social networks like ning.com, linkedin, twitter, second life, myspace, wikipedia, and your AIM/MSN/Yahoo chat handles. That list seems to be getting longer and longer, but essentially its all just where you're at on the web.

It may seem intimidating to have all these things out there and feel like you HAVE to be on all of them. The good news is, you dont. You only have to participate where you feel most comfortable, and where you get the most "bang for your buck". Buck in this case translates to time and effort.

I watched from the outside for 10 years this blogging and social networking phenomenon, really staying out of it and focussing on my job of building dedicated flash applications for online training. I stayed out because what I saw was millions of people with what I would characterize as a very shallow web "presence" in a wide range of media. I would call it spamminating, or just dipping your toe in a lot of different pools. That sort of thing didnt mesh well with my personality. I like to get into something and go very deep, explore it to as far as its limits, and master it, THEN move on to the next thing.

As the technology evolved, I did too. With the advent of more and more cross linking between them, badges, open application architectures, and flexibility, I saw a new opportunity to dive deep. With all the cross linking done automatically by things like badges, you can now write once, publish everywhere. That exicites me.

I read this line in a book called What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis that talked about how linked in disseminates the hundreds of millions of photos by using algorithms that monitor the cross promotion and cross talk between members about photos, and basically could use the wisdom of the crowd(crowd computing?) to determine interestingness.

Now, like the new ad companies, my audience gets my content not by how good my SEO skills are, or my raw willingness and lack of social life to post to thousands of networks all day, rather...and this is important so I'll bold it...my content automatically goes to people who are interested in what I have to say.

This is game changing. I've always thought that the internet was the dawn of a collected conciousness, but now with vastly more intelligent search thanks to google and the like, everything we say can and will be said to the people who need to hear it.

It effectively turns everyone's brains into one giant brain, with computers as the connectors between brains.

For now, we have to post our thoughts in writing to things like blogger, but eventually I think thanks to voice recognition, our every thought, our musings, will bring us kindred spirits to develop those thoughts either into new thoughts, learning journeys, personal catharsis, and evolution.

Crowds have always been feared by people, as angry mobs with pitchforks, but in What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis talks about the wisdom of the crowd. If properly analyzed and understood, a crowd is vastly intelligent, it is the sum of all its parts. If you take an individual neuron, its not capable of much, but put them all together and you have the most complex thing in the known universe, the human brain.

For the first time in history, sites like Flickr and Google have begun to speak to the crowd in its language (or even give it a language for it to articulate itself) And its talking. It has a lot to say. Democratic ideals have always tried to make this a reality, but voting never really captured the true meaning of what the crowd wanted, only grunts and warbles. With AI and computing however, the crowd now can finally talk with unprecidented precision.

What will we say to the crowd? More specifically what will you say to the crowd? Here is where we get out of the clouds and return to earth with actionable items:

1. Make sure you have and control your personal brand on as many social networks as you can find. This means own your own domain www.myname.com if you can. Own your company name www.mycompany.com, myproduct.com etc.

2. Create a facebook fan page for your product or service. Get everyone you can to join. If there already is one, become an active and leading participant. Always Give Value in everything you do.

3. Create and own your facebook profile, before someone else does. Facebook is used by 150,000,000 people as of this post, and by default is quickly becoming the defacto identity source. If you dont own your facebook profile, you are wide open to someone else taking it for you. And that is still legal.

4. Create your profile on everything else. Ning.com, Linkedin.com, blogger.com, myspace.com. All these can be more or less empty but just grab and own them.

5. Now that you've experimented with all these things and learned all these new skills... :) Pick which one you like the most and dive deep. In linked in, get all your friends in there, find new contacts, find opportunities, recommend people you respect. In facebook, post funny and entertaining things to your status, make people smile daily. Tell people things they can use, share your ideas, your concerns, your hopes.

6. Watch the comments roll in, tweak what you are doing based on them. If one thing you do gets no fans or comments, but another thing does, do more of the other thing.

That is how you can, right now, capture the wisdom of the crowd.

Good Luck!

Changing all my sites to blogs

I spent the last day and a half converting 4 of my 120 .com's to blogs using blogger. I chose blogger for the simple reason that it is currently #8 on alexa.com's list of highest traffic blogs, well and that its owned by Google, my current "mentor". I just renovated part of my house to have a lovely sunroom addition (and sank any hope of getting out of debt in my life time with it...heh heh)
So I thought, why not do all the work in there? I have this excellent $300 laptop that is a bit small, but it works wonderfully with the wireless internet in here, so I just sat on the couch sipping coffee, listening to old jazz 78's, and went to work!

First one was this one of course, but I didnt have much content to put in it so it didnt take too long. I added a bunch of links to it today, and hope that all the cross linking I did will help increase my "google juice" without getting spammy. The thing thats kept crossing my mind is, what kind of person is going to sit an read all this nonsense? My private ramblings, poorly written and unedited? Certainly not somebody I would likely target as a client, I dont think anyway. They generally want the highlights. No, I think the kind of person reading all this will be the kind of person I wouldnt want to read it. My parents, mabey a friend who is a bit too snoopy, and possibly someone seeking some kind of dirt on me, or to steal my identity for their own evil purposes I guess.

So why do it? Well, my primary driver is, the very exercise is cathartic. Seeing my thoughts on "digital paper" solidifies them, makes them almost talk back to me, and gives me a personal sense of permanence. Reading this as I type it, its almost like Im being scrutinized by the external visual representation of my thoughts...ah but Im getting too close to a post for my personal philosophy blog, secondskeleton.com! So I'll leave that for now.

Secondary driver, posterity. I often think about what legacy I will leave behind and ways to make the most of this short life we all have. Im writing my thoughts down here, and in some ways, this my end up being all that's left. There's so much going on in my head that I really want to just get it out there so mabey others can use it some day...mabey even in 100, 1000, or 1000000 years!

All the blogging stuff then is ready, but its not done, Ive started something. Mabey just a beginning, but Im starting to write, and Im excited about that. Ive effectively removed all the technical barriers to writing and I feel suddenly free to just put it all down.

If you are still reading...thanks! I hope you can get something out of it. This is the beginning of a learning process for me, I've been at this for 10 years now and Im really doing my first blogs! Well, you cant be first at everything.

Changing my personal brand in 3 hours.

My previous (current?) brand is northeastmagic.com. I do coding for a living, so the brand was based on coding as "magic" as I was not good at explaining how exactly I "solve problems" or enhance online applications with my work, so I called it magic.

Its been that way for 10 years. This afternoon I decided to eat my own dogfood so to speak, and begin opening up my brand to conversation, rather than just having a scaled down resume/me and my opinions and ramblings.

So first thing I did was sit down and ask myself, what exactly do you do? See, I read this book called "what would google do" by Jeff Jarvis, and in it he says that a fatal mistake of many businesses is not knowing what they do, what their core value proposition is.

So, I thought about what I do. I build little flash apps to enhance or customize existing back end internet based applications. A quick recent example is my "RSS headline display" widget built for www.southshoreclipper.com.

I also help people figure out what technology they need, and how to spend as little money as possible to get the job done effectively.

So in realizing that, I tried to think of an analogy. Handyman popped into my head. A person who comes into a situation, makes an assessment, then applies his skill, and if they are smart, hires out or recommends purchasing the stuff he or she isnt the best at. They don't reinvent the wheel, and they make clever use of existing resources and whatever else is around.

So code handyman is the brand. Next step was to quickly register the domain names. Code handyman doesnt exactly spill off the tongue, but it is easy to spell and relatively short, so for a domain name, its pretty decent. There is a common mispelling of it, handiman. So I registered both spellings even though one is wrong. How did I know it was common? A google search of the word handiman returned over 80,000 results, even though it did ask me if I meant "handyman".

Another advantage of the name is "code handyman" in quotes on google returned only 119 results, so its clearly a brand that I can take over and own in relatively short order without fear of confusion with another brand.

So I have my domain names. Next stop is to use blogger and grab the blog title for myself. I like blogger because it's associated with Google, and I want that "google juice" as Jeff Jarvis would say.

I think the time consuming parts will come next, like designing a sharp, trendy looking logo, deciding what drapes and slip covers to buy...but the decisions that needed to be made quickly have been made, and Im well on my way to establishing a new brand, a new successful brand I hope.

So by using blogger to drive my content, I open it up to a conversation rather than me me me me. I hope to see your comments and look forward to talking to you.

Sincerely,
The Code Handyman.

PS watch for changes to the following sites over the next few days:
codehandyman.com
codehandiman.com
northeastmagic.com
treekyomoon.com
secondskeleton.com
genericise.com
autoplayer.com
iruntheweb.com
iruntheuniverse.com
iruntheplanet.com