SHOULDdoTHIS – The Internet Suggestion Box

Here is an interesting site I came across the other day. It’s quickly being referred to as the internet suggestion box. SHOULDdoTHIS resembles Twitter with unique spin on the micro-blogging idea.

This is one of the few services I have come across that supports logging in by using my OpenID user account, which made creating a registered account a breeze. I wish more sites would include this type of login access. In my opinion, OpenID will play a big role in creating a unified login across multiple sites. So the more sites that support OpenID, the better.

While Twitter provides an avenue for you to tell the world ‘What Are You Doing?‘ SHOULDdoTHIS allows you to give your opinion as to what should be done, and who it should be done by. For example, in the ‘Someone Field‘ I typed in EA. In the ‘do something great field‘ I typed in ‘Should release one last major patch to Battlefield 2‘. Unlike the 140 character limit found on other micro-blogging services, there doesn’t appear to be any limit to the amount of text that can be placed within the ‘Do Something Great‘ field. After I clicked the submit button, my suggestion was published to my account where users can do a number of different things.

On the right hand side of the site, users can choose whether or not the suggestion is likely or unlikely to happen. Underneath of that, users can guesstimate when the suggestion will take place. Suggestions can be tagged but as I was browsing around, the tags feature didn’t appear to be used by quite a few people. Just like Twitter, each user has an RSS feed attached to their account. After adding a suggestion, there is a text area which appears at the bottom of the post which lets users give a detailed explanation as to their suggestion. I believe this is a nice touch as quite a few suggestions can not be explained in a short amount of detail.

Final Thoughts:

Everyone has an opinion, and this service let’s you get your opinion out in the open. If Robotcoop releases a public API for SHOULDdoTHIS, I see no reason as to why sites and services, especially those with actual products wouldn’t use something like this as a suggestion box. SHOULDdoTHIS is not a Twitter clone as I feel the service has taken the micro-blogging idea and put a very nice twist to it. Considering there are sponsored ads that appear on user account pages, this site already has a monetization model, but if they charged a price to use their service for commercial use, I think they would do very well.

If you sign up and give the service a try, let me know what YOU think.

Reader Feedback Answered

Mark, an email subscriber, emailed me some feedback in regards to this site. He also asked me a question which I decided I would answer in the form of a blog post.

Hi Jeff,

I’m very much enjoying your blog. Very educational and “present”. I’m curious how you got into this game and if this is a full time gig for you. Continued success to you :)

Cheers, Mark.

Well, to tell you the truth Mark, I’ve been blogging since 2004 but only recently have I decided to take things a bit more seriously. I use to post on a blog located on the EFx2.com network which I somewhat consider to be the WordPress before there was WordPress. Back in 2004, I used the blog to share things that were going on in my personal life such as photographs, news and events, recent trips I took and various other musings. I essentially used the blog as a diary for a long time.

In late 2006 into 2007, I decided to concentrate on sharing my thoughts on general news items I was discovering across the web. I would merely post a quote of the article, include my thoughts and then provide a link to the article in question. This formula worked rather well as there always seem to be a few comments left on every post. This eventually bored me. In early 2007, I decided that somehow, someway, I was going to break away from the self serviced blogging platform and do things on my own. I just didn’t know exactly what my niche blog was going to be about.

Then, one night in Talkshoe, I was participating in a LIVE podcast when I met Pete Balasch JR, otherwise known across the net as xyour925job. We started discussing various topics during the show such as SEO, blogging, web2.0, ect. Pete told me that there were quite a number of people who still didn’t understand what Web 2.0 is. He suggested that I start a blog around the topic of Web2.0 to see where it would take me. Up until this point, I watched the Web 2.0 space from the sidelines, never really caring about what was coming out of the gate next. I had a general idea as to what Web2.0 was all about, so after sharing a few of my ideas with the crowd, I ended up choosing the domain Jeffro2pt0.com My actual name is Jeff, but I think Jeffro2pt0 just has a nice ring to it. I just hope web3.0 doesn’t arrive sooner than later, or else I’ll look really outdated.

I purchased everything I needed during the month of May. That included a domain, hosting, and a few other tidbits. I had a general idea as to what I wanted to accomplish with the site and the way I wanted it to look, but I had no idea on where to begin. WordPress was suggested to me numerous times and even Pete suggested that I use WordPress, so that’s what I did. Initially, I couldn’t for the life of me, figure out the templating system within WordPress. I gave up and decided to use Joomla, as I had a good amount of experience with the CMS. I quickly realized, Joomla was too much of what I needed. I ended up giving WordPress a second try and since then, I have never looked back.

The first post published on this site occurred on June 4th, 2007 New Fan Of Tumblr Since then, I have provided a number of reviews on different sites and services, offered tips on blogging, covered various news items and plan on doing even more. This particular site has been online now for only 3 months, yet I am achieving personal milestones that I didn’t think I would achieve until much further down the road.

Concerning the advertisements. My blog is relatively new and at this stage of the game, I am trying to establish a reader base, aka an audience. Once I feel I have accomplished this and after I do some research into the different methods of monetizing a site, I will begin to dabble with those different methods to try and turn blogging into my second job, which is one of my goals.

It’s nice to know that folks are actually reading what I write. Makes me feel like I’m not wasting my time. Other than turning the site into a second job, my other major goal is to create a community of like minded users around the site using forums and other methods. Once I accomplish these goals, I’ll be in blogger heaven.

Thus the short answer to your question Mark. This is a part time gig with full time possibilities.

Site Scrutiny – Scrutinizing In Style

SiteScrutiny.com is a brand new blog dedicated to reviewing and sharing some of the coolest, most useful sites on the net. Some of his latest reviews include Preezo, Open Source Web Design, and Agatra.

SiteScrutiny is maintained by John Kolbert, the webmaster of Simply-Basic.com which on an unrelated note, has a very nice looking design. As I provide you with a ton of crap in my reviews, John writes about the goods and discards the crap. His articles are to the point and contain insightful opinions, not to mention the design surrounding the content is easy on the eyes.

This blog is in it’s infancy, but it’s already looking good. Remember John, if you blog it, they will come. So SiteScrutiny, welcome to my Up and Coming section in my FeedReader.

Happy Birthday WordPress.com

Can you believe that WordPress has only been around for two years? It’s true. Back on August 20th, 2005 the first blog on WordPress.com was created, that being Matt’s blog. I didn’t know this but, invitations for the WordPress.com beta were sold on ebay for as much as $90.00 Check out these insane stats that Matt published concerning what has been accomplished over the past year:

Created 50,334 blogs
Added 269,035 static pages
Tagged 715,905 tags on posts
Gotten 920,363 comments
Written 678,842 posts
Had 96,095,493 pageviews!

Wow, that’s what I call user generated! I’ve only used the stand alone WordPress CMS for a few months now, but it’s been the best damn CMS I have ever used. It’s been a pleasure to work with and it’s one of the only systems I’ve used where everything seems simple. So I’d like to take this oppurtunity to thank Matt and his crew for this awesome piece of software, and to wish everyone involved with WordPress a Happy 2nd Birthday.

Also, if WordPress.com is indeed getting the same amount of traffic as Facebook.com chances are, WP.com will see birthdays 3, 4, and 5!

WordPress Real Time Browsing Stats

Ever wanted to see who is browsing your site in detail and in real time? Now you can, using WordPress Live, a live blog statistics plugin.

WordPress Live gives WordPress site owners the ability to track IP addresses currently browsing the site while also being able to view which posts/pages that IP address is browsing. The plugin divides stats into three categories: Page hits, Feed hits, and Comments. There is actually a speed bar which allows you to control the speed in which the plugin refreshes. Move the slider to the left, the refresh is quicker, move the slider to the right, the refresh rate is slower.

This plugin is really cool and from what I could tell, is only accessible through the backend of your WordPress install. If you’d like a plugin which displays a similar set of data on the frontend, check out the WP-UserOnline 2.11 plugin written by Lester Chan.

The only downfall WordPress Live has is the lack of documentation. The plugin lacked a read me file and there are no concrete installation instructions published on the authors site. If your familiar with how to install WordPress plugins, you shouldn’t have a problem with this one.

WordPress Live In Action

Be sure to check out Headzoo.com to download the WordPress Live Plugin. So far, I’m digging it.

Ajax Edit Comments 1.1.1.0 Released

Reader Appreciation Logo Ronald Huereca has released a new version of his plugin, Ajax Edit Comments, which gives users and guests the ability to edit their comments similar to the way that comments can be edited on Digg.com The latest version includes a couple of bug fixes, most notably dealing with UTF-8 encoding.

The following issues were addressed in this release:

Admin were able to edit, but non-admin couldn’t. This was caused by the timer offset in the WordPress admin panel.
MySQL errors resulted in the comment unable to save. This was caused my blogs and MySQL database not in UTF-8.
Some characters were being screwed up when saving to the WordPress database. This issue was caused by non-UTF-8 back-ends.
The blog would be inoperable in Internet Explorer due to multiple session headings being called.
Random loading comment failure on WP 2.2.2 installs.

The issues (with the exception of issue number 4) can occur on a case-by-case basis depending on blog configuration and character set.

Be sure to visit The Readers Appreciation Website to pick up the updated version or to grab it for the first time.

Turn WordPress Into Personal Hub

Wordpress.com Logo Sean Aune from Mashable.com has put together a useful list of 30+Tools that help turn your WordPress blog, into a personal hub of information. Using your blog as a central hub, allows you to keep in touch on multiple networks using one site.

I’m not sure which of these tools I might install onto this WordPress install because I think, most of the subscribers to this blog are looking for useful information, not a series of posts which are nothing more than clippmarks that I have found on the web. However, installing one or two of these might help out on those days when I can’t think of anything to write, yet I need to put some sort of content onto this blog.

With more of our lives being lived online, it’s nice to centralize our media as much as possible. New aggregated social networks are springing up, but did you know you can do much of this already from your blog? These 30+ WordPress tools will help you display and run more of your digital life from WordPress itself.

Some of the tools include, Blogmark Integration, Facebook Comments, StumbleCrumble, MeeboMe Plugin, WP-ICQ-Status, MasterWish, Phoogle, and Facebook Photos. Check out the entire list by reading, 30+ Tools to Turn WordPress into a Personal Hub

If you happen to install and use any of the tools listed in that article, please let me know how they worked out for you.

iWebTools Visual Page Rank Checker

Using this tool will enable you to view all the links along with the pageranks on the page that you require to view.

For those that do not have the SearchStatus FireFox extension which shows you a sites pagerank along with it’s Alexa ranking, can use this site to figure out the page rank of not only that web site, but of all the sites that link to that particular page.

Giving this tool a try using my URL, I noticed just how many sites I link to which have a page rank of 5 or higher. The visual pagerank checker loads the website in question and then places little pagerank icons next to every link within the website. What is interesting about this tool, is that, I can actually view the page rank for a tag which is linked to Technorati. For example, the tags blogger, podcasts, seo, and twitter all have a pagerank value of 6.

Give this tool a whirl yourself and let me know what you think. http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank

WordPress 2.2.2 Released

WordPress Logo Just wanted to pass along that WordPress 2.2.2 was released the other day. This release includes only security and minor bug fixes so they should not cause any plugin or theme compatibility issues, so you have no good excuse not to upgrade.

Click here to see the list of bugs and security upgrades that took place. One of these fixes was a CROSS SITE SCRIPTING Vulnerability. These things are popping up all over the place.

Download the latest update here

Solving The SUPPLEMENTAL Problem

There is quite a bit of discussion going on across the net about this SUPPLEMENTAL INDEXING problem that so many people seem to be having. In this article, HowToSpoter explains what their particular situation is and describes the steps they took to put their supplemental pages back into the original Google index.

What is a Supplemental Result?
Supplemental results are generally pages that Google has determined to be secondary to other, more relevant pages that Google has indexed on your website. In effect, supplementary results are actually a secondary database of results that are only called upon when the most obscure queries force Google to check all its indexed resources.

It’s definitely a good read, especially if your dealing with this problem yourself. I have heard through the grapevine that Google is planning to get rid of their supplemental index, but I have yet to confirm this rumor. At any rate, I tried to find a supplemental result for HowToSpoter.com and apparently, they have fixed their problem as I couldn’t find any.

*TIP* To see if any of your sites pages are listed in the supplemental index, type site:www.mydomain.com *** into Google. Replace MYDOMAIN with your actual domain name. Let us know how many results you find by leaving a comment.

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