Jason Drohn's Scrapbook

Power Of The Web

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

google halloween logoIf you have yet to visit Google today, a new graphic is waiting; a special Halloween design of the logo.  The reason I bring this up is simple.  Personality..

The Internet has an amazing presence.  One that is growing everyday.  But the true power and presence of it is simple.  You no longer have to wait to launch a product, design, or article.  You publish it, and it is available immediately.  You can react on topics and events in the blink of an eye.

The traditional form of print, namely magazines, newspapers, and books, take a long time to publish and sell.  The web, however, can react to something in seconds.  You can adapt and move on.

The beauty of the Halloween logo is that it will be up for one day only, then return to normal.  Their personality had a chance to show through, and then it’s business as usual.  In a corporate sense, it is their form of a jeans day.  The difference being they allowed everyone in on it, not just the employees.

31.10.2006 business Comments

Google Alerts Support Blogs – Increasing Traffic

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Google Alerts is my primary source of news outside of rss feeds, and has introduced blog notification about a week ago.  The service is still in beta, buy I have been using it religiously for about 6 months now.  It is a great way to stay on top of news.  I wanted to actually test it out before I commented on the blog addition though.

Google Alerts will notify you weekly, daily, or every time something is indexed in its engine with a keyword that you specify.  For instance, one of my keywords is ‘data mining.’  Everytime there is news about ‘data mining,’ it let me know via email.  Now with the new blog service, when someone blogs about data mining and Google picks it up, it let me know as well.

Basically, when I want to monitor a market such as ‘WiMax,’ I will enter the keyword into Google Alerts.  Then, I will gauge the activity around that market and figure out how often I want to be notified.  If it is still a developing area, I might want to read about it every week, but if it is going crazy, I will switch it to daily.  The added blog notification has given me a lot more information to sift through though, leading to later post times if you haven’t noticed!!

The cool thing is every once in a while, I will get notified of my own articles.  It’s always kind of nice to read what you wrote, outside of visiting the site!  Not to mention, the traffic here has shot through the roof in the past week.  I wonder if that is why?

To sign up a Google Alert, click here.  Also, Problogger wrote a great article on the Alert service as well.

31.10.2006 technology Comments

The AlphaCorp Project Board

Monday, October 30th, 2006

alphacorp interactive project boardI would like to take a minute and introduce you to the AlphaCorp Project Board.  As many of you know, I started AlphaCorp so that industry experts could help other people build businesses.  As a team, we combine our resources and areas of expertise to help people launch their own web presences and companies. 

This project board is a natural byproduct of that innovation.  Here, you can post a project (or a job) which you want filled.  Say you need a web designer or a person to design a logo, just post your project on this site and a ’seeker’ can get a hold of you.  If you are looking to do some freelance work, take a look through the site.  It is new now, but will offer a lot of different things you might like to get into.

My thinking behind AlphaCorp Interactive is this: projects start businesses.  If you are looking to start a small website, with the right combination of resources and people, that website could absolutely take off.  You build it right, market it right, and throw enough personality into it, and it has the makings to be successful.

To ward off spammers and people who really aren’t seriously considering following through with projects, I am going to place a monthly charge on the site.  However, all readers here get free access for the first 7 days.  If you have even considered starting a small business or need some logo work, write a post for free.  It uses Wordpress so the controls will be familiar :0)

30.10.2006 general news Comments

The Essentials of Creating Web 2.0 Sites

Monday, October 30th, 2006

Web 2.0 is not AJAX and visual design.  We typically see a site that has bright colors and fancy shadow effects and say, “Web 2.0.”  That is not the case. 

In a simple definition, Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence through the internet.  Think Myspace and Youtube.  Both rely on user generated content.  They have some color schemes and such which fit the design bill, but that is not what their business model is centered around.

I found a great list, which I wanted to touch on here.  It should help to do two things; see what Web 2.0 is and let you use some of the aspects on your own sites.

The Essentials of Leveraging Web 2.0:

  • Ease of use
  • Open up your data
  • Aggressively add feedback loops to everything
  • Continuous release cycles (growth)
  • Make users part of your software
  • Turn your applications into platforms
  • Don’t create social communities just to have them

These are some of the bigger aspects to Web 2.0 as diagnosed by Dion Hinchcliffe at sys-con.com.  He points out that if you want to build a successful Web 2.0 community, it takes a lot of very precise effort, but the concepts will always center around the above points. 

One thought: It seems that blogging encompasses all 7 of those points.  Coincidence?

 

30.10.2006 technology Comments

Firefox 2 Downloads 2M in 24 Hours

Monday, October 30th, 2006

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 crushed any of the previous versions in regards to downloads within the first 24 hours of release.  The browser acheived 2 million downloads in its first day.  That equals about 30 downloads every second.

Some of the past versions on the launch day:

  • Firefox 1.0 – 1 million
  • Firefox 1.5 – 1.5 million
  • Firefox 2.0 – 2 million

This is great news for the open source community.  IE7 is a great browser, but it is not my every day choice.  I really think that with the two companies pushing each other harder and harder, the ones that stand to benefit the most are us, the users.

 

30.10.2006 open source Comments

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