Blog Moved

This blog has been moved to http://chacha102.com. If you are accessing it, it is through tandmnews.wordpress.com

The Sign Up Dilemma

One thing many people love about the web is the fact that it is simple and easy start almost any project. I can create a blog on WordPress, a podcast on Mevio, then syndicate it using Feedburner so I get stats and a nice customized feed, and then I can back to it on my WordPress blog, and suddenly I’ve created a TV/Radio show with a website to boot. Now all I have to do is advertise it on Twitter, Friendfeed, and iTunes. The entire process of doing this sort of stuff is really easy, because the entire thing is automated. But is it a good thing that it is automated? What do we lose by making this entire process automated. We lose quality but gain quantity.

TechMeme – The Best Tech News Source

Most everyone has been violently itching to get away from TechCrunch lately, following the endless fiascoes led lately by Erick Schonfeld. I have been repeatedly asked in the past few weeks, where do I turn for news if TechCrunch is slowly going the way of the Buffalo? Simple, I turn to TechMeme.com If you have never used TechMeme, you are in for a treat.

8 things to do when you can’t post.

Some people get in a jam, or something happens in their life that they can’t blog a lot for a certain period of time. For people who read their blog, this can be annoying because you expect new content from them. Here are 8 things you can do to help make sure you always have content rolling on your site, even when you are in a hard time in your life.

How many of you are out there?

Due to WordPress and the fact that their stat collecting really stinks, I’d like to ask: How many of you are out there? How many of you read my blog often and find my content interesting? I think that many authors need to ask this question every so often, because it is a good chance to find out who is visiting your blog?

But in a quick update: Chacha102.com just passed 5,000 total views, which I think is a pretty good milestone. I will probably be switching this over from WordPress.com to a hosted server, and with it will come a Feedburner feed, along with things like a new theme, better statistics, and probably a whole bunch of cool stuff I can’t think of right now.

So, if you can spare the time, please put your name, blog, and any links you wish in the comments. I’d love to see your blog, social networks, etc. (I promise, I will write a blog post tomorrow)

App Store as a Software kit?

 

Althought most of Apple’s products are very well thought of, sometimes we find that parts of it are too simple to actually add functionality. One person saw this in the way the icons on your iPhone are arrranged. Currently, the only way to get an App onto your phone is to sync it to the device. Not very handy, and doesn’t really encourage you to be using applications. What one person envisions is a way to edit your home screens directly through iTunes. This includes the ability to sort applications by name, use, etc. It also allows for you to reorder home screens and the icons on them. Here is the YouTube video.

What makes you social?

What happens when Facebook locks you into their chat that you have to be on their specific page to view your contacts? What about when you have to use the Twitter site because you have ran out of API calls? When you are inconvenienced, it takes away from the true purpose of whatever network you happen to be on. You aren’t social any more.

What are your Tweets worth?

People have been asking what their tweets are worth for a long time. ‘How much value do I bring to the people who subscribe to me?’. You have 140 characters, and those  characters are what people base whether they listen to you or not. For people not following many people, if they follow you, they expect an actual value out of it. But how do you actually know?

This, I cannot answer. I cannot tell you how to find out if you are providing useful content for people. One thing many people do is follow everyone who follows them. This allows you to see what the people who are listening to you are saying. Things like Twhirl with its expanded @reply finder makes it extremely easy to catch your name anywhere on twitter. 

Today I Win.

That is right. Out of everyone else and all their achievements I win today. Why did I win? I just broke 4,000 views on my blog, and with the recent new post about America’s Lost Curiousity, while getting some bad comments, pushed me almost to 5,000 views. But that isn’t the point. Who will win tomorrow?

Lost Curiosity

Tonight while doing homework, I was fascinated by my new kitten. She is about 5 months old, has a few orange spots. Her name is Aspen, and she was playing with a string hanging off a door knob. Just fascinated with this piece of string. She played with it for about 10 minutes, constantly trying to pull it down. She then moved to a little rat tow and proceeded to try to tear it up, the best a kitten could do. She was extremely curious of the string and the rat. She continuously wanted to see what would happen if she pulled on the string, wondering what it was, and what was inside of the rat she was attempting to kill.

Is Power Overly Concentrated?

Any blogger is painfully aware that to grow traffic you have to make a front page somewhere. When bloggers come together they wistfully talk of that one day they got Dugg by accident. Traffic exploded, the server nearly melted, but the people just poured in. They kept coming and coming, seemingly endless. Who knew there were so many people on the internet? A few cups of over-priced coffee later, someone will state a pact that everyone should upvote each others stories. Heads nod.

Weekend Off

Just wanted to give you all a heads up, I will be off for the next 4 days skiing. Except there will probably be more Jacuzzing (Is that how you spel Jacuzzi? ). None the less, Alex Wilhelm from alexwilhelm.com, and Holden Page from lostthetech.com will be guest posting in the next 4 days. I trust that they will give you interesting content. Please also take this time to go over past posts like my Complete Guide to Windows 7, 25 things you didn’t know about me,  and how I suggest listing your friends on Friendfeed. 

Until Tuesday,

Chacha102

5 Ways to Push your media.

One question I stumbled onto this week, is where am I sending my content to? I know I’m sending it to Friendfeed, Twitter, SocialMedian, but where should I be sending it to? And how should I be sending it? What are the best practices to make sure that my content is know, without being labeled a spammer?

Here comes list time!

CCBS2009: Survey

It time to take the Chacha102 Content Blogging Survey! This is a survey that is not nessicarily annual, that asks bloggers questions about their blogging habbits, and their blogs. Everyone who participates will get a link from me, and I will also probably subscribe to you on Google Reader, if I am not already, and share your interesting articles. I plan on putting it up for a week and advertising it, and hoepfully I can actually gain some knowledge from the questions. To take it, click here.

The Complete Guide to Windows 7: Beta

Welcome to the Complete Guide to Windows 7: Beta. This will take a look at a vast amount of features in Windows 7: Beta, now referred to as simply Windows 7. (This is a guide from Chacha102 at http://chacha102.com.)

What does Google Really need on the iPhone?

(After typing that title, I have officially added iPhone to my writer’s dictionary.)

Google has been optimizing applications for the iPhone for awhile now. Many people feel that it’s RSS reader is superior to any application they can find, and I’m pretty sure that many people prefer the Gmail interface to the iPhone’s built in mail functions. But I think one thing that Google is missing, is something that it created it’s own browser just to get: Google Gears.

We…. experienc….. ing… Tec…. nical….Diff. lties

We have experienced some technical difficulties alongside the launch of SocialWhois, and our post about them. For a short period of time we had to change the theme of our site to something that better coped with the layouts of certain posts. The main theme is back now, and if you want to find out the exact story, click through to read it. Otherwise, enjoy reading Chacha102.com.

Superbowl Commercials (Yes, it could be considered linkbait)

So, the Superbowl has once again came and passed, and I am sure that all of you you were glued to the TV. Except those who proudly decreed on Friendfeed and Twitter that you were NOT watching the Superbowl. Whether you watched it or not, everyone has something to gain from it. The entertainment that is the Superbowl Ads.

Hulu put on a special event for Superbowl 2009. They updated their website during the game with all the ads. Well, unfortunately the really under delivered, and many of the ads seen on TV weren’t even on the site for a while. But, it was still a great place to watch the ads. You can find all the ads here.

But back to more relevant, and ego inducing things. What were MY favorite ads?

SocialWhois: Who you should follow, and why.

Robert Scoble has said multiple times that the key to getting the most out of places like Twitter and Friendfeed is following the right people. You have to follow the people you are interested and the people that give the best information. This must work well for him because he spends up to 7 hours a day on Friendfeed, and has 5,400 subscriptions to keep him interested in the latest news.

But what about the rest of us? The people that don’t have 7 hours a day to go through everyone and find the best people to give us information. I want to be able to follow someone and know they are going to give me information on a certain topic. That is where Directeur’s new application comes in. SocialWhois

Horrible, Unusable, Ridiculous, Completely Idiotic, Waste of Space

Today, while testing out Windows 7, I felt that it would be beneficial to put some stuff on my desktop. I have 2 montiors and might aswell keep some stuff on there to use it up. I go, look at the pre-given gadgets, and what do I find? An RSS Gadget. Not just any RSS Gadget, the only RSS Gadget that comes installed with Windows 7. And not only the only RSS Gadget installed with Windows 7, a RSS Gadget installed with Windows 7 that it tied to the horrible, unusable, ridiculous, completely idiotic, waste of space we call Internet Explorer. So I decide, well I don’t want to use the RSS Gadget installed with Windows 7 that is tied to the horrible unusable, ridiculous, completely idiotic, waste of space we call Internet Explorer, so I decided to search online for RSS Gadgets. All I found were RSS gadgets that linked to specific blogs, none of which I really wanted to read.

Janurary, Month Review.

January, The second month of http://chacha102.com. Let’s see first how it went for us, and then highlight some posts, and then I’ll point out some cool articles I just recently found.

Stats

Total Views: 1,507

Busiest Day: 119, Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Busiest Day in January: 87, January 23rd, 2009 (When I posted “Anyone use Twitter Favorites?“)

Average Views per Day: 38

Preceding Months Views: 354

Current Months Views: 1,153

Percent Increase: 325.70%

Overall, more views, probably because I post more and some people actually know about the site. But, in order to increase the awareness that I do infact have a blog, I will begin posting these stories to Twitter. I have been forgetting to do that, but it is probably my biggest outlet, with 400+ followers. Just a note: Everything is also fed through Friendfeed, and into my FF Twitter account: http://twitter.com/tandmnews

Next up, Posts.

Syncing Seamlessly

One journey that many companies embark on is the quest to sync documents between different computers, and increasingly the web. Microsoft has tried it with Live Mesh, allowing you to have 5GB of storage online, and sync folders between your computers. Live Mesh is actually unique in the fact that it allows you to sync folders only to computers, allowing big iTunes libraries to be synced with ease. Dropbox, another syncing company, creates a box that allows you to share 2GB with the web for free, and 50GB without. While both of the options are fine, I think a lot of them have missed what syncing really needs. The ability to match the syncing to your workflow.

Crackberries and Problem Solving

So, over this 4 weekend break, I have taken an interest in the iTunes U section of the Music Store. In there are many lectures given at universites like Yale, CMU, and others. A lot of these give Audio and Video ways to watch/listen, and each provide interesting information. On my last post I provided you with the m y 4 favorite lectures so far. Now I’m going to give you 2 more. I’ve also included a quick notes link to my notes about the lectures. I tried to pick out some of the interesting parts.

My Favorite Lectures

These are some of the lectures that I have recently listened to, that give some very good points. They arn’t really in a ‘theme’, but both are extremely interesting.

Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman is a writer for The New York Times aswell as the writer for books like ‘The World is Flat’, ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded’, and ‘Longitudes and Attidutes’.

The World is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman

This talk at MIT explains the book ‘The World is Flat’ by Thomas L. Friedman, where he explains the different 10 thing what flattened the world economy, and the 3 events that recently have caused the 10 fatteners to converge.

[Audio] [Video]

Hot, Flat and Crowded - Thomas L. Friedman

This talk explains how the new energy market will be one of the biggest upcoming world market It also touches upon the fact that the United States is missing this large opportunity to undertake one of the biggest tasks of possibly the entire human history.

[Audio]

Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch was a Virtual Reality teacher at CMU, and the creator of the Alice programming software.

He gave a series of talks during his battle with pancreatic cancer. He died in July of 2008.

Time Management

This talk by Randy Pausch gives a look at how in his time, prioritizes tasks, dealing with meetings, and bosses.

[Audio ] [Video]

Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams

This talk by Randy Pausch gives a view of his childhood dreams and how he achieved them. He also gives pointers on how to achieve your childhood dreams.

[Audio ] [Video]

I hope you enjoy some of these. Most of the links are to iTunes, but can also be found with a Google Search.

Hope you enjoy them.

25 Things about you and me.

Yes, I guess I will do this blog post aswell. Giving you 25 things that you may not know about me. And then afterwards because I am not very interesting, I’ll link to 15 other people that have done the same thing.

1. I bought an iPod in August for my birthday. Returned it because of the lining was peeling, bought another, returned that one and got the 2nd Gen. (Costco Rules)
2. I have 2 monitors on my desktop, 1 laptop, and an iPod
3. I like to put my feet ontop of the case of my computer.
4. My chair deserves the title : “Squeakiest Chair in the Universe”
5. I don’t switch to the new light bulbs because my kitten likes the heat from the old ones.
6. I almost never charge my cellphone because I forget.
7. I spend at least 3-5 days a week at my church helping out.
8. I have no idea what a ‘visionary’ is.

Anyone use Twitter Favorites?

I’ve wondered for many months of why that little ‘Favorite’ button was both on  the website, aswell as supported in so many Twitter clients. It is a little star that saves things, doesn’t reshare or do anything fancy, and simply lets you save a Tweet for later. Yes, much of the web is centered around saving things for later, but I really didn’t find it that useful. It just takes up space that could instead be given to a more useful feature. I’d really like to see ‘favorites’ mimic Friendfeed’s ‘Like’ action, where instead of having to Retweet a message, instead I could just ‘like’ it. Robert Scoble points out here that Retweeting is simply the gateway into eventual implementation of the ‘like’ feature. 

But then something hit me. I noticed that the ‘Favorite’ RSS feed was public, meaning that I could have any service come in and grab it. Now I’m thinking to myself: “What service aggregates RSS feeds and allows me to share them with others”. I immediatly imported my feed into Friendfeed as a Custom RSS/Atom feed and now I have a stream of all the Tweets I find interesting, shared as another item. The best part about it is that if I wanted to do Retweet-like functionality, I could set up Friendfeed to simply post all my messages coming from that RSS stream into Twitter. 

The best part of Technology is the fact that people can take the tools that a service gets them, and find cool new ways to do stuff with them. Afterwards I checked on Friendfeed for other people with similar RSS feeds, and found several people feeding their favorites into Friendfeed. I’ve seen people pull RSS feeds from services I didn’t even know offered them. 

Many people have probably came up with many different implementations for the Twitter Favorites section. How do you use yours? Do you use it to save for later? Do you somehow share it via RSS? Do you check others favorites?

A Friendfeed Twitter Account. Sounds Ironic. It is.

So, some people like to have the content they produce on Friendfeed to be sent to Twitter. I happen to be one of these people. I like having everything I like go to Twitter, because it is easier to scan, and it also me to reach a broader audience of people (I don’t only reach the 2 people that follow me on FF, I reach the 2 that follow me on Twitter).

But, when you send all that content to your personal account, you start to get friends, sometimes real life friends, annoyed at you because they don’t follow 600 people and you flood their feed. Me, being very courtious to my RL friends, decided to create a second Twitter account. Acctually, I decided to create a Twitter account in the middle of a church sermon. But, wherever I decided to create it, it still stands that almost all of my content generated on Friendfeed (Google Reader Shares, Likes, and Blog Posts) will go to http://twitter.com/tandmnews. It will also serve as my communication to anyone who wants to follow my blog, hence that username @tandmnews. 

My question to you is: Do you use a second Twitter account for any reason? Personal vs Proffessional? Following different people? 

As people generate more content, it will be more important that you only get the items that you want, because those items take up valuble time to look through. Services like Twitter and Friendfeed are going to need to implement better filtering options to be able to zero in on content that is exactly what you want.

Say Hello to President Scoble.

Today I have read probably 3-4 sets of arguments on why Robert Scoble should/shouldn’t post Amazon Affiliate Links to his Friendfeed/Twitter. Louis Gray even graced us with a post about it, and there has been buzz going on Friendfeed about it all this morning. Some people argue that by posting affiliate links, he might become biased towards the products because he gets a percentage if people buy it.

via LouisGray.com

The point is that so many people post affiliate links to Amazon product, why should we really care? You don’t call out the other bloggers that use the affiliate program, why is Robert Scoble so very important? As Chris Baskind put here, this is not the first time it has been done. Heck, probably all of you have clicked on 1 or 2 affiliate links without knowing it. So no, there is no reason why everyone is all in a buzz about this. There is a great disscussion going on about this here. One of the best points I think that is made is if you really cared about seeing if it was an affiliate link, you could have simply checked to the URL that Friendfeed gives you. 

This Week in Previews….

Incase anyone was wondering, I haven’t been able to post recently because of the closing of the first semester at school. With this comes a lot of preperation to get things done as fast as possible. Making me unable to post. But next week is a whole other story. I intend to talk about:

• My Experience with Google Apps
• All Email Clients Suck
• Start Up Apps
• Google Reader Decimation

So, I hope you all look forward to this week on T&M News. We also are trying to get ideas for weekly video type broadcasts so send me an idea at ideas@chacha102.com if you have a cool video idea that somehow relates to news. If it doesn’t relate to news, send us an email anyway. Or you can always leave it in the comments. 

Currently, I am trying to find more content to put up on the blog. A lot of times I only post every 2 days and I’m trying to be able to get content out at least once a day. The first thing on that list is I will start to round up content I find interesting and post 3/4 entries on here with my take on it. This will be about once/twice a week, and I will make an effort to keep it short. If you want to see EVERYTHING I find interesting, just go to my Friendfeed.

Have a great week!

Why I will go to an actual host someday.

So, I’m about 4-5 hours into this WordPress nameserver stuff. What happened is that in order for me to have WordPress host my blog, on my domain (chacha102.com), I had to point the domain at WordPress.com nameservers. For people that don’t know this mumbo jumbo, here is what it means:

1. I can’t have email go to anywhere but Google Apps . 
2. I can’t create a subdomain (something.chacha102.com)
3. I can’t FTP (load files up to the server)

So, these are some big things, that I’m quickly learning mean that WordPress just screwed me out of $10, AND my domain (for the length I want to keep pointing to WordPress). Because I can’t create any subdomains, I can’t hook up a lot of features that Google Apps is built for. If I wanted to, I could add my own custom Google Sites to something like sites.chacha102.com, Google Calendar to, calendar.chacha102.com, and access to the Mail (Uses the Gmail Interface) at mail.chacha102.com. Apps also has a bunch of great other capabilties, and none I can use because WordPress wants me to basically hand over control of my domain (or the records for my domain, I still own it).

New Home

This holiday season I bought myself a domain name. For a few months, I’ve been deciding whether to give up my domain name servers to WordPress in order to get my blog hooked up. Well, I finally decided that being able to use OtherInbox for my mail was less important than establishing myself on Chacha102.com, so I bit the bullet and now our new home is : Chacha102.com. I figure it was best to switch us before we were that well established. 

By the way, we just hit 1,000 views in total. Not that big of an accomplishment, but one none the less. One thing I find strange is that 1/3 of the hits everyday come from people searching for ‘Motivational Posters’ on Google. I don’t get it, but obviously I am a authority on motivational posters, after only one mere post about them. Who would have guessed?

So, Chacha102.com lives! No, I will not explain the T&M part.

Windows 7: Setting Up the thing.

I meant to write something useful today. I really did. I meant to sit down, open up the browser, and write a fully featured and useful blog post. It never happened. Instead I decided to install Windows 7 on a virtual machine today, and will give you a review when I’ve tested it out for awhile. Here are my first impressions.

After a weekend of shakey downloading from Microsoft, Windows 7 has been released in a beta to an indefinite amount of users, unlike the 2.5 million cap it had before this Friday. Originally, only 2.5 million people were oging to be able to download it. After Microsoft had to shut down the downloads because of the massive traffic, they reopned it without a cap. Alex Wilhelm gave me all the links here. I downloaded it, and it was annoying. Why? Because Microsoft, is Microsoft.

I am Sick.

Disclaimer: This is not my usual writing style. Please bare with me as my head returns to its usual state of mind. Also, if you perfer this writing style, say so in the comments.

 

And I caught it from all of you Friendfeeders who are also sick. Just because one of you is in Australia, one in Canada, and a few on the East Coast, doesn’t mean you didn’t give me a virus over here in San Diego. Well, while I am sick I’ve decided to give you all a nice little batch of updates.

Windows 7

Windows 7 will be launching its beta version tomorrow to 25 million people. I don’t like that 25 million cap because it puts everyone who has to do something, like go to school, out of the loop. Although, if I don’t get better by tomorrow, you can be sure as heck that I’ll be downloading it. No sore throat is going to keep me away from trying it out. Find more here.

Push and Pull Content Please.

One of the reasons that some networks are so annoying to a lot of people is that things get lost amongst the noise. Articles you want to hear about often won’t be seen by you because you have … *checks Friendfeed*…. 435 other people throwing content onto your screen. You can create lists to help sort this out, and that is very useful. But often between the time you check and you get back, you don’t know exactly what happened, because you were just caught up reading about the latest Scoblememe. The fact is that we can’t catch everything, and we shouldn’t try to. It is estimated that 4 Exabyte’s of information will be created this year, and your brain can only hold 10 TERABYTES! That means you about 4,194,294 terabytes short. This is important while thinking about how you consume social media, but not my current topic.

The Many Ways Your Content Travels

Just recently I did a sketch mapping out all the different ways content can get onto Google.  If you follow the entire path of what happens to a message,  you can see a large amount of repetition begining to form when one site triggers another site, that triggers another site, and chain reactions begin to form to where you probably have a single message on the web 10-12 times.

Getting Back to the Norm

If you have ever had a bunch of relatives cooped up in a house for too long, your probably seeing the same effect on Twitter and Friendfeed. Tonight Robert Scoble decided to block Dave Winer after both of them having been at each other’s necks for a good portion of the holidays. This is kind of sad because the meaning of the holidays is to bring people together, not create conflict. Either way, things are finally starting to calm down.

I Got Your Motivation Right Here…..

With Holidays bring very little news. Little news means I have nothing to rant about and post up for you guy. So I’ve decided to post my collection of funny motivational posters. You know, those posters with a funny picture and caption to go along with it? See my collection here. If you want more, like 414 more, click here. 

Disclaimer: These are MMORPG Posters that often use jokes that gamers would get. If you don’t get it, you are not nerdy enough.

Have a great holiday!

Lists of Friends and Lists of Feeds

Today I went on an undertaking bigger than Poverty, more important than World Hunger, and will achieve more than exploring outer space: Organizing my Friendfeed Account.

If any of you gave listened to Robert Scobles 20 ways to being a bigger friendfeed monster than Guy Kawasaki, you’ll realize that Friendfeed is a very power tool. You can easily share things with others, sort people into lists, join rooms….

Wait, what was that? Organize People into rooms? Man that feature is cool. I can basically make an entire new list of entries from the people I choose that is very customizable. I take any room or friend, and put them into my list. Then I can either choose just to have it limited to the people I choose, or make it more like a home feed where I see what those people liked. Very good stuff.

Robert, Michael, Loic, You’re all WRONG

That is right, I said it. You’re all wrong!

Incase you haven’t been following all of this blogosphere hysteria, here is everything you need to know about the debate on: Twitter Search: Followers vs Value. Michael Arrington first brought this idea to the masses after Loic Le Muer posted asking for a feature to sort through large amounts of tweets by the number of people that follower the person who tweeted it. In numerous Friendfeed disscussions, most of the top bloggers have been arguing with people on this subject.  Robert Scoble has posted numerous times on the issue, and seems to be one of the main people backing up the idea that tweets should be ranked on Retweets and the number of links/replies the tweet gets. Most of the conversations can be followed by looking through his profile.

Some cool stuff…

After not being able to post over the weekend, I’ve decided to make it up to all of you who were actually looking for content with this nice list of remarkable content I’ve found over the week. Enjoy!

2008 Latest Edition – Did You Know 3.0 – From Meeting in Rome this Year

This video gives very interesting facts about our current would and the exponential growth rate it currently has. Created by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod and set to the tune of “Right Here, Right Now” by Fatboy Slim.

This is, Unoriginally, the Social Media Post.

Every, single, blogger, will someday come to the awful conclusion that their next post will be titled: “How to use Social Media”, and the content of that post will somehow relate to that. I know what you are thinking, and No, I don’t plan on doing something different.

In short, there are a lot of new sites out there. This site can attest to that. You would be surprised who you can find.

….. (Here is where I stop to check the TWhirl Notification that popped up)….