Google Antimatter?

Summer 2008: in a planet called Earth, which we seem to inhabit for now, a new power seems to have taken over. A once-little search engine has rose to dominate our specie’s most vital method of communication: the Internet. No one dares compete with them. Erstwhile monoliths are courting this new entity like timid schoolgirls, and bright new start-up dream of being assimilated into this new power’s all-encompassing aura. You and I have already been assimilated. Resistance is futile. [This space for lease for your own cliché.] In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s Google of course. The Mater of the Search.

So, in the peak of Google’s success and popularity, in the world where we “google” things before we search for them, where Gooogle is a subject, verb, object, and all other parts of speach, what’s a mom-and-pop startup to do?

Enter Cuil, stage left. Now, I’m not sure whether their owners have any kids, but for those to whom it matters Cuil’s owners are married. (To each other). They decided to do what us normal google-fearing won’t dare do: Start a new search engine. And the Internet is abuzz.

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WordPress2.6 was released today, a month of ahead schedule…  yes, you read that correctly, a month ahead.  And, by the time I finish writing this, more than 60,000 copies will have already been downloaded.  Along with significantly new feature upgrades from 2.5, this upgrade comes with 194 bug fixes.

Yes, its time to upgrade.

Couple of important new features that we like out of version 2.6:

• You can now track changes made to your Posts or Pages
• Publish anything from the web to your corporate blog

Here’s WordPress.org’s fancy video tour of the latest features in 2.6:

Tracking Changes to Posts & Pages

WordPress has moved very quickly over the past two years from a blog publishing platform to a full fledge Content Management System.  It’s done such a good job, at the beginning of this year, all new websites IGT creates are based on WordPress or Drupal frameworks.   Goodbye static websites, goodbye brochureware websites, goodbye kludgy simple CMSes.

WordPress has moved to create multi-user environment that is easy to manage, create content, and publish it.   The entire platform is standards compliant and search engine optimizaton friendly and best of all, free.

With this new change tracker technology, we expect to give even our Drupal interested clients something to reconsider.

Publish anything from the web on your blog

Ever been browsing the web, saw a picture, video, or story and thought “I should blog about this.”  But, the world being hectic and all, you don’t have the time for that.  You’d have to get back to your blog, find the original article, fiddle with ways to embed it…it’s like the bad side of an infomercial.  

Enter Wordpress 2.6 

2.6 now includes (or reintroduces, depending on your point of view) Press This! , a bookmarklet that allows you to blog while you cruise.  You see a photo on Flickr and are inspired to blog about it?  Push the Press This! seroquel  bookmark on your toolbar and it will bring up a pop-up with the picture already embedded.  See a video that moves you on YouTube?  Same thing.

This feature could make blogging as easy as bookmarking.  It can increase the frequency of blog post and even change the style of your blog.  You can easily add interesting pages, videos, images, etc as you find them on the web.

These are only two of the new features…the full feature set along with significant security enhancements and bug fixes should convince anyone to upgrade to 2.6

Go Green 2009

Last evening I stopped by Good Stuff Eatery to try out a burger after networking at an event behind Capitol Hill.  I thought of it as a spruced up Five Guys, where all you get is burgers and fries..  their specialty.

Anyway, I placed my order and waited for it.  A short while later, I got a great cheese burger and receipt that came with a 6 cent charge.

It was labeled “Enviro Charge”.  What’s this about?

So… I asked Top Chef’s Spike Mendelson about it.  He happened to be there.  He said it was less than 1% of the charge and that it covered their use of recycled materials.

My Receipt with an Enviro Charge

The reason he had it on receipt instead of pricing it into the food was that he wanted to make sure that people saw what they were paying for.  He said it was pretty common out west.  And if you were anti… Earth, he’d refund it back.

Pretty common out west?  That was the only part I didn’t like.  Not a bad idea frankly.  A gentle reminder to give a hand in preserving this world, who couldn’t use that?  And less than a percent of the overall costs, it certainly makes sense to me.  Every little bit helps and we want to make sure doing our part.

For 2009, we will finally move our servers to a reputable carbon neutral hosting company and reduce the use of paper by getting rid of paper proposals & invoices out of the business entirely.  We are almost there.  We just have a few clients to convince that paying online is far better for them, and subsequently better the environment, than expecting us to invoice them through snail mail.  I mean really, shuffling paper across the country to do business sounds almost as antiquated as say…  the phone book.   Looking forward to seeing less of this paper stuff in ‘09.

The only question left, is what are you going to do in 2009 to help preserve this planet?  That’s seems like a big question but really it isn’t.  Just start with something small and go from there.  See you in 2009.

Google Chrome

Today on Google’s Blog, it was announced that Google will launch in 100 countries a brand spankin’ new browser and it’s called…
drum roll please…

Google Chrome

Aw yeah!  Aren’t we all excited?  Well for us website designers in DC, well at least this one that is, not so much.

“So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”

Lets translate the subtext – we’re doing this here at Google, because we can.  We own the world’s largest market share in online search services, lets get the last mile going with a spiffy browser.

“We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.”

Well, it is interesting to note that they making all of their code open source.  We’ll see how this plays out.  In the meantime, here’s yet another browser us web guys are going to have to test for… and surely there will be bugs.

Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser

How many of you out there have registered more than a few domain names? Considering how hard it is to simply find an available “.com” domain name, I would venture to say there’s a lot of you that have more than one. It make sense, you want to sure they’re available to you when someday in the future when you’re ready to do something with them, they’ll be there. And, if you like some of my more entrepreneurial clients, a few domain names can sometimes be a lot of domain names.

As much as I deplore the illegal practice of domain squatting (aka cybersquatting), it is certainly legal to register domain name for a future use. If you’re lucky enough to even find a decent domain name that isn’t already held by someone else, you should consider registering today, because really may not be there for you tomorrow.

That being said, NameDrive is a great service to park your domain names with them and here’s why:

If you use Register.com or GoDaddy as your registrar, you duly pay your annual registration fee to keep the domain under your ownership and control. Then, like most of us, we get to work on creating a masterpiece of a website, which of course takes time.

Until the website is complete, what is actually running under your shiny new domain name? Advertisements. And guess who’s profiting from them? Surprise! Not you. Your beloved registrar, yes, the company you just seemingly paid for the privilege for them to advertise on your domain name.

Argh, ok, so why not you? I agree, why not you!? It’s your domain name right?

Ok, queue in NameDrive. They help you sort this mess out. You sign up with them, they run ads on you domain name… and generously split the ad proceeds with you. Far better deal if you ask me.

How?

You simply point your domain name’s DNS to their servers, and they handle the rest. You can pick from a variety of templates. You can select what types of ads are suitable to run under you domain name (you wouldn’t run football ads under a “KittensNPuppiesForMe.com” would you? No of course not.) Or you can just let NameDrive put up a generic template and forget about it.

They’ll manage the ads, rotate out lower performing ads out, rotating better performing ads in, and provide you with statistics of how many visitors and click-throughs your domain names have attracted on their very own.

There are several other companies that compete against NameDrive, but most of them are for professional domain name… hogs. They offer services to questionable practice of bulk domain name buying and dumping. It’s not quiet illegal but not exactly nice either. These competitors want the big fish, and they set a minimum number of domain names you should have in tote. Usually anyone with less than 100 domains they’re not interested.

But you can place your one domain name if you like with NameDrive, they’re happy to have you no matter what. There’s no minimum stay, no contract, no setup fees, nothing. You put your domains in, and keep them there until your ready to do something else with them.

How much can I make with them and how do I know what they’re earning?

From NameDrive’s reports, you’ll easily see what kind of traffic they get without any heavy lifting. But before you get too excited with delusions of easy money, its not exactly easy.

In fact most of your domain names will likely not earn a dime. But don’t throw in the towel, it just means these domain names need to be developed into a full fledge website before traffic starts to generate. It’s a rare gem, that you domain name alone, has enough typed-in and residual traffic to make cash.

Regardless of your luck, NameDrive can still help you. Apart from identifying if your domain name is a diamond or dud, they have additional services available to you that can still help you make some cash. For example, if you want to sell your domain name, you can put it on the chopping block with them. They’ll help you find a buyer and broker a sale for you.

Or more interesting, NameDrive’s latest service called BuildingBlocks helps domain name owners find interested professional web developers, to help you develop your website concepts as part of a revenue sharing approach.

Whatever you end up doing, if you have a few domain names just sitting there collecting ad revenue for your registrar, I would consider parking them with NameDrive and make sure that revenue goes into your pocket, not the registrar. Good luck!