web-2.0

Turn WordPress Into Personal Hub

Wordpress.com LogoSean 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.

10Links Consumes SPAM Sandwich

10Links.net Logo

10Links.net the site I reviewed a few days ago has temporarily gone under because of the vast amount of spam that was getting into their site queue. This is easily understandable considering their submission form, at the very least, didn’t provide a CAPTCHA image to ensure that human beings were the ones submitting websites.

10Links.net has vowed to keep the archive of links public while informing us that they are currently in the secondary stages of their next project. Don’t ask me what their next project is because they didn’t tell me! Whatever they are working on, I’m sure they will be using some sort of Anti-Spam measure this time around.

Web 2.0 Startup Movie Comparisons

EverybodyGoTo.com Logo

Ali J from everybodygoto.com has published a humorous blog post which compares a few different web 2.0 startups to Hollywood movies. Some of the comparisons include:

  • The YouTube Project – Blair Witch Project
  • The MySpace – The Matrix
  • The Facebook – The Graduate
  • Flickr – One Hour Photo
  • The Digg – The Godfather

What movies can you think of that would compare well with a web 2.0 company?

Web 2.0 – Real World Photography Contest

Jeffro2pt0 Web 2.0 Photo Contest Logo

I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you about a contest that will be starting on August 1st and ending on September 30th. I’d love to see if anything dealing with Web 2.0 exists in the real world which is why this is a Web 2.0 photography contest. The idea is simple. Take a photo of anything that resembles Web 2.0. This could be objects with rounded corners, pastel colors, unique billboard advertisements, architecture, perhaps a product name with the word BETA next to it. Anything that you think you would see in the world of Web 2.0. At the end of the month, I will go through all of the entries to judge which one best represents Web 2.0 and the winner will receive a free Flickr Pro Account which will be good for one year.

In order to submit your entries, please visit Jeffro2pt0 the official Flickr Group for this contest and join the group. Entries submitted in any other way will be discarded.

Here is the low down concerning the contest, also known as rules:

  1. 2 Entries Per Group Member
  2. No Photoshopped Images
  3. Do not use multiple Flickr accounts
  4. Nothing Pornographic or Violent In Nature

I reserve the right to determine whether an image is a rule breaker or not and these rules could be updated or changed at any time prior to the contest completion date. Have fun, and lets see how creative you people are!

Kontactr Update:

I was kontacted by the folks from Kontactr yesterday in regards to my review and they really appreciated it. They also gave me a small update as to the features they are working on.

We are working on allowing the users the ability to customize the AJAX form too. Also the ability to change the “Sender” of all the mails sent through Kontactr as “message@kontactr.com“. This will let you filter your messages more easily.

The ability to customize your Ajax powered contact form would be a big plus. If they wanted to, they could probably develop a social network where users could share their contact form designs with one another. This may be a stretch of the imagination but I think it’s certainly possible.

Why Are Web 2.0 Sites Compressing Avatars?

I have a bone to pick with these web 2.0 sites and services. It may not be a huge bone but it’s an annoying one at the very least. Many of these sites and services allow members to customize their profile by uploading an image also known as an avatar. These images are usually .PNG, .GIF, or .JPG files. There is often a maximum dimensions rule as well as a maximum file size rule in place.

I don’t understand why these sites and services have to turn my images into pieces of crap. Most of my avatars that I have created in photoshop look great, until they are uploaded to one of these sites such as MyBlogLog or Technorati. Let’s go through a few Before And After pictures to try and illustrate my point. The first image will be the image as it should be seen, straight out of photoshop saved at maximum quality. The second image is what is seen after uploading the file to the service in question.

First up, Technorati avatars in JPG format.

Before Technorati Before Uploading To Technorati After Technorati After Uploading To Technorati

Now lets take a look at MyBlogLog avatars in .GIF format.

Before MyBlogLog Before Uploading To MyBlogLog After MyBlogLog After Uploading To MyBlogLog

In case you can’t see the differences notice how the second image always looks worst after it’s uploaded to the service in question. The image goes through some sort of compression and the end result is a crappy looking avatar. I have tried changing the images to .PNG and .GIF formats, saving them at the maximum quality level but the compression just rips these images apart.

Why do these sites and services have to compress these tiny images? Why can’t I as a user have a nice looking avatar without compression? I mean, take a look at that example for MyBlogLog, it looks like total crap. I urge you companies to turn that compression crap off. I think the file size limit along with the dimension limit is enough to restrain insane avatars from overtaking your hard drive space. There is no need to compress.

I wonder if I am the only one who has noticed this? Please let me know what you think.

My First Podcast Sort Of

Talkshoe.Com Podcasting Made Simple

Every Monday, Pete Balasch Jr. hosts a show on Talkshoe called Internet Marketing And SEO Tips. About 2 weeks ago, Pete decided to do an apprentice type show where he takes a generally inexperienced user and teaches them about SEO and the different ways a new user can gain ground on search engines. This past Monday, as I was waiting for the show to start, Pete informed me that his guest couldn’t make it. Since I was the only one in the room, he asked me if I’d like to do a show and be a special guest host. I said “sure”.

The show which you can listen to here, EPISODE18 – The SEO Apprentice Course Week 3 turned out to be rather informative. In the show, I gave an audio review of InviteShare, along with an explanation of how it works. Pete and I both discussed the effects of Web 2.0 on search engine optimizations along with a new term that has been created called Social Media Marketers. Think of SMM’s as the SEO guys who apparently get the gist of Web 2.0 and social media. During the middle of the show, Highway_Of_Life the new co-host for PHPBBWEEKLY joined in and gave us some valuable information concerning Google’s Supplemental index. This segment alone is enough to warrant a listen.

Last but not least, we covered PingBacks/Trackback URLs, the No-Follow link attribute, blogging in the blogosphere, using Twitter to update multiple other services and sites, and general SEO tips. If you happen to listen to this episode, I’d love to hear your feedback as I plan on having my own Talkcast/Podcast show in the not so distant future.

Who’s Amung Us Update

http://whos.amung.us

Since the launch of Graphs.Amung.Us, the Whos.Amung.Us site has seen a dramatic increase in the time it takes to load the page. I’ve also noticed that the little icon used to display how many concurrent users are on your site at one time has occasionally disappeared. The icon, when clicked on, is also producing Internal-500 errors which is shining proof that the infrastructure behind the service is maxed out. Christopher Shannon has recently posted a blog entry that clarifies the issues currently ongoing:

We’ve been experiencing a huge surge in traffic lately, and our current infrastructure is stretched to the max right now, but we are working as fast as we can to get things back up to the blazing fasts speeds we used to enjoy, so just bare with us for a couple more days.

Good thing they recently added Google ads to a few of their pages or else WhosAmungUs would probably go belly up.

Who’s Amung Us Update

http://whos.amung.us

Since the launch of Graphs.Amung.Us, the Whos.Amung.Us site has seen a dramatic increase in the time it takes to load the page. I’ve also noticed that the little icon used to display how many concurrent users are on your site at one time has occasionally disappeared. The icon, when clicked on, is also producing Internal-500 errors which is shining proof that the infrastructure behind the service is maxed out. Christopher Shannon has recently posted a blog entry that clarifies the issues currently ongoing:

We’ve been experiencing a huge surge in traffic lately, and our current infrastructure is stretched to the max right now, but we are working as fast as we can to get things back up to the blazing fasts speeds we used to enjoy, so just bare with us for a couple more days.

Good thing they recently added Google ads to a few of their pages or else WhosAmungUs would probably go belly up.

Jaiku Fixes Annoying Problem

http://www.jaiku.comFinally, Jaiku has fixed an annoying problem which I have been giving them hell about for quite some time. Twit actually has a channel on Jaku that I joined awhile back. Twit or (This Week In Tech) is administered by Leo Laporte and as you can imagine the channel became very popular very fast.

On the right hand side of the channel area is anumber which represents the amount of users who have joined that channel. Underneath that number, every user who is part of the channel also has their avatar displayed.

Once the channel member count reached about 1,000 it became apparent that something was wrong. The text that a member would type into the text area box would appear slowly while the images on the right hand side would load. All 1,000 images. I’m not sure if the amount of user avatars being displayed had something to do with the Ajax part of the page but it slowed everything to a crawl which became very annoying.

Only A Few Avatars Are Displayed

I am happy to say that Jaiku has fixed this problem. Now if you look at the right hand side of the Twit channel, you should see a list of member Avatars and then a MORE link which will provide you a page with even more avatars. Thank you Jaiku for fixing this annoying issue. Browsing and posting in popular channels has become fun again!