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

This is a post by a friend of mine that goes by Frydlichen. I’m sorry I ca’t give out an blogs, because he doesn’t have any. Comment if you like it and I’ll see if he can do more. 

I recently purchased Mirror’s Edge off of Steam, having been interested in playing it for a while now. Just a few weeks before I had (and I’m sorry to say this) tried to pirate the game so I could see whether or not it was going to be worth buying or even playing for that matter. Everything went smoothly throughout the installation and patching and I thought I was in the clear with getting the game to work. I was wrong. In the most vital phase of playing a video game (getting it to start), failed; miserably. I searched everywhere for solutions and even found a few others who had the same problem as I, which somewhat consoled me. I tried everything: running the game in almost every compatability mode I knew of, changing .ini files, etc. Yet nothing seemed to work and I was forced to let the incident slip from my memory. Yet a few weeks later, on this very day on which I am posting this, I ran across a few gameplay videos. I couldn’t resist anymore, and I bought it. I had, in my naviety, presumed that all non-pirated games were bound to work better than pirated ones and I thought for sure I would be able to play after the downlaod was complete. I was wrong… again.  God forbid, I experienced THE SAME EXACT problem as I had with the illegal version. I was fuming, not only because it didn’t work, but because I knew that there was no way I could ever solve this problem until a patch came out.

This leads me to the point I’m trying to make. Why is it that, although developers usually get a longer time to develop a game for the PC than they do for the consoles, performance optimization or general usability is significantly lower in PC versions of a cross-platform game than the console versions. This figure might be a bit exaggerated, I admit; there are countless top-notch games such as Fallout 3 or Far Cry 2 that extremely polished and exceed anything the consoles were able to offer. Yet for games like Mirror’s Edge and GTA IV, support has been abymal. The winter season has been sort of a let down in terms of the quality of the games I have purchased. First, Dead Space which ran great but didn’t have the graphical option every game should have: anti-aliasing support. Second: GTA IV, the one game I seemed to have gotten to work faster than anyone else, yet still managed to hog my 8 gigs of RAM for no good reason. Third: Mirror’s Edge, a game I don’t doubt is quality but has for me personally been a pain to try to get working. All I’m saying is, developers, please show me some love… OR A WAY TO GET THIS FREAKING GAME TO WORK.

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.

Isn’t it always a great experience when you get on the phone with a company, and suddenly you are informed about an option that they don’t normally release onto the web and ads? Or when you are able to negotiate with a sales representative in order to get only the parts you need, thus lowering the price? I think that an automated process of signing up for services takes away from the company’s ability to make customers more happy by providing case by case basis on services. I encounter this frequently with web hosting.

I have a few scripts I want to run on a server. It takes up less than 100 MB of data. I also only need a MySQL server and a good high amount of bandwith. I’d rather pay more on getting a lot of bandwidth, than pay for 400GB of server space and 200 MySQL databases. It would also benefit the web host, because the disk space on the server that I’m not using can be leased out to other people, making more money per GB of disk space. 

Spam is the most annoying thing in the world. It gets into our email and suddenly we can’t find the important messages. It creates bogus accounts on social networks and services that basically do nothing but attempt to get you to click on a link. Spam irritates me. Most of this spam is caused because people can click and make an account automatically, and then abuse the service in as many ways as they can untill their account gets banned. Then they just go and try again on another account. When all of this is automated, you can’t stop them from making that second, third, twentieth acount. But by having them talk to another person to sign up, the representative can realize that the person is bogus fairly easily. This means the first account, much less the twentieth, is never created.

Now for the other side, the dilemma part of it. Often, it takes more resources to have companies talk to individuals one at a time. In order for them to flaunt big numbers, they have to make  it extremely easy for someone to sign up. (Which in turn makes all the numbers bogus because half of the accounts aren’t even doing anything) The other way around is true as well, many people like having a completely anonymous sign up. 

So, what do we lose by having an automated ‘Sign Up’ process? We lose the ability to customize our service to what customers want on a case by case basis and we lose the ability to keep bogus people out of the site. But does that outweigh the positives? You decide, comment and tell me what you think. Should companies have sign ups on service automated or not?

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.

TechMeme is a semi automated news system that depends somewhat on a lone human editor to sift through thousands of online news sources, find the most important ones, and then display all the related content spinning off of the breaking story. Sounds amazing? It simply is:

TechMeme on a recent day

Here we can see a recent screenshot of the Techmeme homepage, displaying several major stories, and then in the lower sectioned, linked commentary that is pertinent to that topic. Each commentary section is filled out as the story continues to develop, and if there is a large enough change, it becomes a sub-headline with its own commentary section. You can see this under the “Facebook” story, where there is a second headline entitled “Primates on Facebook.”

TechMeme is constantly live, all day every day. It always seems to bring in the newest breaking news before I can even begin to discover it. Also, if you are researching your own post on the topic, the discussion links are indispensable.

Back to TechCrunch, they are here. In fact, according to the TechMeme leaderboard they are the number one source of content for TechMeme. Despair not, that only means that the comprise a screaming 4.5% of the links. That is livable. And also this compares favorably to the 100% of TechCrunch posts that end up on TechCrunch.com.

Jokes aside, you can even get your own content linked on TechMeme if you are quick enough. If you manage to break a story, however that may be, you tell the TechMeme editors about it through Twitter. Send them this “Tip @Techmeme STORY NAME HERE <LINK>” and they will pick it up if they find it newsworthy.  Keeps the flow of news open, and fast.

Downsides? You can get lost in the links sometimes. And you cannot always get a good consensus view of a topic. You merely have all the voices; it is up to you collate the views into something understandable. And the site is pretty damn basic, if you are offended by the Reddit-esque stripped down feel.

What else? If you want a break from the hot air factories around the net, and want a better look at breaking news, TechMeme is for you, give it a try.

—-

Alex Wilhelm writes at AlexWilhelm.com, and can be reached at Alex@TheNextInTech.com

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.

Write a list of ideas.

Whenever you think of an idea for any type of blog post, related to your subject or not, write it down. This allows you to have a good place to start when you aren’t ‘inspired’. Often when something happens in your life, it takes more priority over your blog, so you are thinking about it constantly instead of a blog post. 

Have a backup of blog posts.

Whenever I can, I try to have at least 2-3 blog posts that are ready to go. This makes it much easier when I need to do something really important, because now I can simply press publish and it is up. If you use WordPress, you can schedule posts. So if you go on vacation, your posts can go out at set times while you are away.

Make a post about how you post

Some of the easiest blog posts to write are about things you are already doing. You already easily know how to do it, so it should be natural to write about it. I actually do have a list of ideas for my blog, and drafts for when I need them. If you’ve read my blog, I post often about things I am already doing, or things I would like to do. If you are strapped for time, writing on something that doesn’t require a lot of brain work is probably the best way.

Lists

Lists are simple, quick, and often can be made in less than 3-4 minutes. Find a topic, and then go thorugh and name a bunch of items about that topic. If you have 15+, you probably should either not write any description, or a one line subscription. If you do a paragraph per item people might get bored. Anything less than 5 should have some explanation with each item.

Don’t let distractions get to you

You might be in a situation where someone could call you at any moment. But don’t be distracted by waiting for the call, it will happen anyway. Simply start writing and if someone calls, they call, if you finish before they call, you just got a blog post done. 

Outline

Many people simply delve into blog posts going from start to finish. I think that if you are dealing with something either fairly long, or has a lot of points you want to hit on, outline it before hand. I simply write headers for each part I’m talking about and maybe a quick sentence. Then I come back and write the actual content afterwards.

Guest Posts

When you can’t blog, give other people a chance to reach your readers. Ask a few friends to guest post on your blog. Normally, they will be willing to do so, and it benefits them by getting traffic going to their site. It can also generate traffic going to your site. My second most read article was written by Holden Page at lostthetech.com. 

Post less often

Some people recommend this method even when you can post. People are already swamped with news stories from everywhere else, so if you post less often and post better content, your readers actually look forward to the next post. It also helps you because you can re-edit stuff and pick more worthy topics to talk about instead of just trying to get out a post.

If you are caught in a bind, your blog isn’t your number 1 priority. Use some of these techniques to get through the bind, and we all hope to see you on the other side.

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)

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.

I currently have an iPod Touch, and I really think that they could increase what applications could do, along with how you can customize where they are. What if through iTunes you could load your application into a window and enter information that way? It would allow easy editting, and if someone made a very functional program, it could even replace your desktop software. 

One benefit to having everything through the Appstore is that for desktop applications and iPod applications to be in sync with the current system, you have to transfer them via servers, and not everyone who makes an app could afford that. What if when you bought an application on the app store, it came with a way to edit it via the computer. The app that you use would suddenly become a lot more valuable. All the information would still be stored on the iPod, so there is no 3rd party, but if you need to enter a lot of data, you simply plug it into the computer.

I think that the App store, and market places like it could easily package all these things together, and would truly create a mobile platform that would allow you to even enter large amounts of data, yet have it anywhere you are.

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.

I’m convinced that if Apple created a social network like Twitter, many things would be different from the current social networks we see. While the culture of Apple might make the network weird, the features and layout would probably be very seamless. It would be easy to update your feed, and follow other people. You would probably be able to sort contacts by list, and import them from elsewhere. Heck, there would probably be a lot of features that we can’t even think of. But what this endless rant comes down to is the fact that it the entire web page would sink away, and it would just simply be you, and the people you follow.

Meebo has been a very good site at allowing you to get all your contacts in one place. I have yet to see a client that supports Google Talk(Jabber), and Facebook. Meebo even does little alerts when your friends go on and offline of Facebook, something I’ve found a lot more useful than checking the Facebook page everyday. It is simple things like that, the things that just make it easier to be social, that really garner attention. If you can actually find yourself being more social and interact with more people using a service, you’ve probably found a great service. I personally found myself talking to more of the people I have on Facebook and IM networks just because I notice that they are on, and I don’t have to go to Facebook to find out.

Another way Meebo allows me to connect with more people in a single place is its use of Meebo On Site Chat. This allows me to embed a little widget on my site, and anyone can chat with me while I’m on, or leave me a message while I’m not. The ability to connect with the author of a webpage very easily means that if it is things like blogging, it is very easy to get someone Google Talk or Skype so you can talk to them (or just talk right in the Meebo client). For things other than blogging, I think it would be excellent for website support if the IT department could be left messages on things like Meebo, that something happened on their site.

Another application I’ve used is Feedly. Feedly is a magazine style feed reader that basically beautifies reading news feeds. It allows you to view them in many different ways and integrates Social Networks really well. You can quickly see all the articles on Friendfeed that are linking to the specific article, and you can comment, Tweet, and email the articles right from Feedly. Ever since using Feedly, my friends have gotten a steady stream of stories emailed directly to their inbox. And who better to give it to them than someone who reads over 200 articles a day.

What applications make you more social? With the wide variety to choose from, which have you tried?

Also, what makes you social while blogging? What are the tools that give you ideas and support for posts on your blog? I find that often I will see a really cool article on Friendfeed, or a comment on Twitter, and I’ll write about it. Do you use something else to get inspiration for posts?

What makes you social?

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. 

I for one, am trying to improve my content. I haven’t posted much for a while, so I am coming back by posting 5 links a day of interesting stuff I find on the web. I look through plenty of blogs articles, and share Google Reader entries with a bunch of people, I figure I should at least be able to come up with 5 links a day. Not only should this benefit the people following me, it will actually allow my Twitter account to be valuable, to the extent that 140 character messsages can be ‘valuable’.

How will you improve your content today? How will you become a more valuable person on Twitter, Friendfeed, or any other social engine you might be on?

While I am asking questions, how do you find the interesting stuff on the internet. Many people use StumbleUpon, but what other methods or services do you use?

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?

Every day, people walk around, going through life. Tomorrow you will wake up, you will walk around all day, but do you ever think who won that day? Now, winning might mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. I win when I achieve a goal, when I’ve been able to do something I want to do. But what happens when you win? Is it the day that you do as much possible for your wife? Do you win when you are able to finally make that last car payment? Or do you win when you finally are able to watch that Office episode everyone is talking about? Do you win when you get that promotion? Or when you finally decide to download Firefox onto your work computer?

Whatever you do tomorrow, wake up tomorrow and ask yourself: “What will I do that will make me win Today?”. Whatever it is that makes you win tomorrow, it is something that no one can take away from you. It is special enough to not care about everyone else’s acomplishments.

So Tomorrow, Win.

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.

I think a lot of the thoughts running through Aspen’s head could be applied to humans. When I see a wrapped present under the Christmas tree I wonder what is inside of it. When I see a button, what happens when I press it?

So what in the heck does this have to do with technology?

In technology, and more specifically, the internet, is that people are able to search to their hearts desire and find whatever they want to know about an increasing number of subjects. Want to know the capital of Chile? Argentina? Brazil? it is all a few clicks away. Things like Wikipedia allow people to access information about things not even covered in giant encyclopedias. With all of this information, you would think it be very easy for the kids of the next generation to grow up and have more knowledge than a lot of people. You might be surprised

I was reading a chapter in The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. At one point, he reads a letter written by a 5th Grade Teacher. This teacher had gone through parent teacher conferences but remembered four in particular. In one, a foreign parent told the teacher that the homework given was not enough, and not challenging enough. Another foreigner complained about noting have a science book and having a ‘flimsy science curriculum’. ‘How could we be a competitive school when we didn’t have a science book’ they complained. The ironic part about these 2 conferences, is that many other American parents had told the same teacher, about their kids who had the exact same class, with the same homework, that the course was too hard and couldn’t complete it and have time to ‘be a kid’. 

In NASA, as of 2006, there is not enough younger scientists to replace the older people. People who were inspired by the Sputnik and JFK, when America poured money into the promotion of Science and Technology. Well now that we have just gone through a president that hasn’t promoted either in a big way, we are left with a low interest in Science and Technology, interest that we will need in order to become a more sucessful country. 

I think that kids today have lost interest in the engineering and building on new technologies. I go to class, and plenty of people are enjoying the benefits of the advancements. People are using iPhones and iPods, Laptops, Computers, everything you can think of. But I think this new generation of people have been born into a society that doesn’t particularly encourage them to take up interests in mathematics or technology. We have lost our curiousity.

No longer are we like Aspen, continuing to search for things and find out how they work. One thing Thomas mentioned in the book is that in order to build greater advancements, we first have to understand everything that happens with our current systems. But if people aren’t urged to figure that out, we are going to have graduates that don’t contribute to the global innovation. This may lead to us not actually realizing the progression most people expect. The next generation of people might not live better than the last generation. If we can’t compete with intelligence, then the only thing we can compete with is wages, meaning they will go down.

There are a few services that allow you to upload your documents and distribute them through a flash document viewer. None of them though do it quite as beautifully and creatively as Issuu does.

Think of of Docstoc and Scribd the Wal-Mart of documents and Issuu the IKEA of documents. They both have products that are useful, but IKEA has the higher quality.

Issuu supports three major file formats, Word, PDF and Powerpoint. For my review I will be using a powerpoint document.

One thing I really like about the uploading process is that the link for it is always on the navigation bar once logged in. So no matter what I am doing whenever I get the urge I simply am one click away. Once you are to the upload page you are given two options. You can upload one file or multiple. Uploading multiple files doesn’t allow you to enter the meta data right away. Issuu has all the standard meta data forms. One thing that stood out was the ability to link music to your document that you were uploading. You also have the ability to target your audience with there location. Once done editing your meta data simply click upload.

You are then directed to what is called My Library, a collection of all your uploaded documents and here is where the actual magic is. There are virtually limitless things you can do with your document. You can drag and drop your documents into seperate folders, share your document, edit it, publish, view statistics and even optimize for search engines… all on one page.

The one thing that stands out the most for me is the statistics. They are beautiful, rather detailed, and should fill all basic needs rather well.

Issuu is not all about uploading and sharing documents. Since following people is the new cool thing to do you can also follow people that upload documents on a regular basis and view them through a status feed.

Of course Issuu is free but they do offer a premium service. With Issuu premium you are given a white label version of the site and detailed statistics. You can also tailor your embedded document to your site.

Issuu is beautifully designed, well put together and was definitely thought through. I suggest to anyone that is looking for quality documents, service and design to check out Issuu… I promise you won’t regret it.

Check out my Issuu document http://issuu.com/holdenpage/docs/web20

Written by Holden Page. Edited somewhat by Alex Wilhelm.

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.

What happens then? Well, we have all been there, nothing happens. People go home and write away, wishing for more traffic. Hoping for more comments. More anything, really. In all honesty, for the small blogger, it can be a little depressing at times. This needs to change. We need an increased number of social news websites where smaller bloggers have a chance to be heard. We need to as a collective group, add a few more blogs onto our RSS reader. We need to take that extra minute to leave a comment.

But more so, we need to find a new way to distribute the power. Mega-blogs and the like are too powerful, they have to much control over the news. We need new micro networks to come forward and bring their perspective to the forefront. We need to reform the internet.

What I am advocating here is the birth of a thousand new blogging networks, and a hundred new social news sites. There are enough people on the internet to support new aggregation. We need to let small voices be heard, and right now, you cannot hear them. Long live the blogger.

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

One of the topics going around the web is this idea of Micropayments. The idea that you could have easy ways for people to transfer small bits of money over the internet. Would you be willing to pay 1 cent to read this blog post? Would you be willing to pay 3 cents every day that you use certain web applications? Even after a month, you wouldn’t even have  paid a buck. Over a year? $11 for this one simple web application that you use alot. Plus, it is beneficial because if you don’t use an app a certain day, your cost goes down. 

Alex Wilhelm spurred this idea that Micropayments should be put in place to allow for both easy viewing of blogs, but also allow for a stream of revenue from those bloggers. If enough people came to a blog, it would off set the cost. 3 people coming every day for a year at 1 cent a day would cover the amount I pay for linking my WordPress Blog to my account.

Here is an except:

“There is no real way to make all parties happy. Producers need money, and consumers do not want to give it up. Can micropayments bridge that gap in some way? Yes, and here is how:

Any micropayment system that would be implemented would need to be flexible enough to work across several platforms. Therefore, the one that I use to access selected content on the New York Times should work on ArsTechnica the same way it works on TechCrunch. Anything short of that will make it unpalatable to consumers, and thus stillborn.

Prices need to be kept amazingly low. One cent to read a blog. Five cents to read a newspaper. Four cents to listen to your favorite podcast. Nothing to the user, they would run up a bill of less than ten dollars over a month. Ten dollars a month for amazing, internet wide content? I’ll signup for that deal. Works for me. People need to eat, that involves money, so throw them a bone.” – Alex Wilhelm