Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Everytime I use bit torrent (there is legal stuff on there too) I experience connection problems with my Verizon DSL connection. The connection will constantly drop and reconnect. Now it could be that my router or some other part along the way is choking on the extra traffic. But it could also be that Verizon is trying to punish Torrent users in some not so subtle way. Oddly enough these issues sometimes seem to persist even after I’m done with the torrent.

Probably I’m just being paranoid. I should find out soon enough if my router is the issue since I have a new on ready to replace it as soon as I get a chance to do the install (finally upgrading the house from 802.11B to 802.11 Draft N). Just wonder if anyone else experiences connection issues across their applications when running BitTorrent?

I read on SiteProNews some interesting statistics on MySpace and Facebook demographics. Facebook of course started out as a site exclusively for students and MySpace has the reputation of being home to tons of underage chicks trying to look hot and the boys (and pedophiles) that love them. I’d personally expect that both sites would be populated almost exclusively by the under 25 crowd but that’s not so.

• 62% of MySpace visitors are older than 25 (40% are 35+), and 83% are making over $30,000 a year. Nineteen percent (19%) are making $100,000 and up…
• On Facebook.com 46% are over 25 and 34% are 35+, but they’ve got deep pockets. Eighty-eight percent (88%) make more than $30,000 and twenty-three percent (23%) make $100,000 or more.

These statics mean that social networking sites are being accepted (at least to some degree) by the exact demographics that markets seek to reach. Certainly I don’t expect my mother to launch a MySpace page anytime soon but certainly bodes well for social networking sites and the people who seek to market there.

Aside - perhaps I’m spending too much time in and around blogs but seeing a site like this with an article that doesn’t have a space for comments or a mechanism for trackbacks makes me feel like something is missing. They may write that “Web 2.0 is a dialogue not a monologue” but it’s a shame that their site tools don’t recognize this.

My wife had an interesting idea for a website. Someone pointed her to an existing site that does pretty much the same thing. I had an interesting idea for a website. A blog post pointed out several others that are working on the same problem. Does this mean it’s time to abandon these ideas? Not necessarily.

When I built my “big successful site” I was building it for three reasons:

1. I wanted to play with some new (to me) technology - Java servlets at the time
2. I wanted to start a site that might make a little extra money
3. I wanted to fill what I though was an unserved need

Those were actually my motivations in order. Not really the best way to launch a business but this was essentially a hobby when it started. After about a year of development and quiet launch I discovered that there was another site that was working in the same space. They had a big head start in terms of content though it was all manually edited html pages. What I had built was a CMS that had very little content.

Though this other site had a big headstart in terms of content and traffic it was being run purely as a hobby with no monetization in mind. I contacted the authors and eventually worked a “partnership” where I took all their content and imported it into my CMS. All for free. Certainly not an arrangement that many will be able to accomplish.

My point however is that if I had researched a bit better and discovered the competitor I might not have started the project in the first place. There are certainly areas out there where you’d be insane to try to assail an established leader - don’t go and start a new search engine or online bookstore. Google and Amazon respectively own those spaces.

If however you see a need and survey some other and they see a need then don’t let the existence of an established competitor necessarily dissuade you from building a product to meet that need. If a large enough portion of your target market isn’t aware of an existing solution you may still have an opening. If everyone needs widgets and someone is selling widgets but only 10% of the market knows they exist you can happily grab a piece of the remaining 90% that is still not served.

I’m not certain that I’ll ever work on either of the two projects I mentioned at the start but if I decide against it, it won’t be exclusively because a competitor exists.

So you get a great idea (well an ok idea anyway) and think of a cool domain name that would be perfect - easy to remember and fitting the site well. You go to register the domain and one of three things happen:

1. You find out someone is using the domain for a similar service/product
2. You find out someone is using the domain for an unrelated service/product
3. You find someone has registered the domain and is either not using it at all or just has a parking page up

In my mind the most frustrating result is #3. Domain squatters are people who register a domain without any real intention of using it for anything useful. They may park the domain and hope to get a bit of traffic that will click on some ads or they may be looking to sell the domain to someone for a profit.

Technically there’s nothing wrong with this. They’re not typo-squatting - which is registering a domain that might by a typo for a common domain name. They’re not (necessarily) registering a domain name that a big brand would want and trying to hold it for a large ransom. But what they’re doing does stifle development.

Conventional wisdom says that a first mover can brand a name that’s completely unrelated to the product/service they’re selling - like Amazon for books - but people who follow are better off with a descriptive name like bookstore.com. That latter one by the way is used by (what I’d consider) a domain squatter.

I suppose it’s fully within the spirit of American (and world wide Internet) capitalism to want to make a bit of money in a fairly easy way. I just wish the practice didn’t tie up useful domain names for less than useful purposes.

And yes, this all stems for the fact that I had an idea and thought of the perfect name only to find it was registered and leads to a “this domain may be for sale” page. It’s just a dumb little parody site I’d like to do so I’m not really willing to spend a lot on the domain but I guess I’ll contact the owner and find out what they want for the ransom.

Seems like every idea I have lately has either already been done, draws an adverse response or is prohibitively difficult to do.

My latest combined a bit of both. There exist services on the web where people who are starting new forums can purchase posts. These come from real human participants and help to stimulate a conversation so that when real users find the site there’s something for them to join in.

Well I figured a similar service for people who are attempting to start a blog would be useful. Generate blog comments to stimulate a conversation with your readers. Unfortunately someone already started something similar but from a different approach. They’re selling blog comment posts to people who want to get back links out of them. Essentially spamming people’s blogs.

I’m not sure that this really negates what I think is the benefits of my own idea. That is blog promotion by stimulating conversation on your blog vs blog promotion via spamming your backlinks across other peoples blogs.

Still I think at the very least I’ll be putting this on the back burner for now.

Funny that right after my lottery dream job post I read this is Seth Godin’s blog:

Then, over time, things get soggy. They slow down. Decisions aren’t so black and white any more.

[...]

3. The paper isn’t blank any more. Which means that new decisions often mean overturning old decisions, which means you need to acknowledge that it didn’t used to be as good as it was.

Perhaps the idea of starting anew every quarter isn’t so daft afterall.

What’s your “win the lottery dream job”? If you think “If I won the lottery I’d just go sit on some beach” you’re wrong. Trust me. Being idle isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

So if money is no object and you have a good amount of money to invest into something what’s your dream job?

For me it’s an expanded version of Startup Weekend.  In case you’ve never heard of it before, Startup Weekend is a project that goes to a city and with the help of an all volunteer staff and the support of some sponsors attempts to take an idea from concept to finished project in a weekend. It draws people from a variety of backgrounds from marketing to design to programming and they together agree on an idea and seek to build the damn thing in just around 48 hours.

I’ve never actually been to one - found out about the D.C. area one after it was over - but it sounds like both a hectic mess and a lot of fun. Now these Startup Weekends haven’t generated the next Google or anything but at least one or two of them have launched sites that are at the very least interesting and somewhat functional.

Given my lottery dream scenario I’d love to hire a team of great people with the goal of cranking out a new product every quarter or so. Actually I’d like to generate a product in around 2 months and then do version 2.0 in the second month and then go on to the next (very possibly) unrelated idea.

In some small ways I’m trying to get into that kind of a routine now. The major difference being that I can’t afford to hire a team of great people. If you’re a brilliant web designer, programmer, marketer or whatever who’s independently wealthy and you’d like to work on such a project let me know. Certainly there’s going to be some people who’s Google stock is vesting soon.

I call my blog Solo Programmer and when people ask what I do I say I’m a programmer but lately the work I do isn’t really much what I’d call programming. Actually I have a bunch of real programming project on my plate but today’s work involved installing Word Press and a bunch of plugins, configuring Google analytics and other such tasks. Not really programming and yet something that I can do in large part because of my tech background.

Sure “non programmers” can do all the above. You don’t really need a ton of tech savvy to install Word Press. But “non programmers” do HTML right? Well if you’re writing HTML by hand what you’re doing is pretty close to programming. Certainly once you get into JavaScript or PHP what you’re going is legitimately programming.

I remember once in grad school a Professor saying “In the near future we won’t need programmers at all”. I was momentarily concerned since this was how I planned to make my living. He then proceeded to show how you could tie together some (I think it was) ActiveX components to build a new application. And then if you wanted some specific behavior it’s “just a little code”.

Ignoring the very important idea that someone somewhere needs to be writing these components in the first place, the very combining and writing “just a little code” to glue it together is actually programming. Perhaps not something that you need an advanced degree to accomplish but something beyond the reach of your typical computer user.

ShoeMoney (can you tell I’m a fan) often talks about respecting a company or person because they just did something. Don’t spend all your time analyzing - do work.

Such a simple thing and yet for me sometimes the hardest thing.

I called this blog “Solo Programmer” because I work alone. Partially by choice but mostly because I don’t have anyone I know who would be a good partner (though that’s changing somewhat). When you work alone you have to decide on a regular basis exactly what it is you should be working on.

Too often lately I waste away me day reading blogs, playing poker, reading forums and trying to figure out what I want to work on next.

I started this blog in part as an effort to motivate myself. I was going to start off the New Year with a new dedication to productive work. From the date of the first post and the frequency of the posts you can see how well that’s working. So now I’m going to start of February with a new dedication to productive work.

We’ll see how that goes.

Interesting that both ShoeMoney and John Chow recently ascribed their success to support from their wives.

Certainly the very least that a married would-be-entrepreneur needs is permission from his partner to spend the time needed to build anything of import on the web. When I started building my successful site I was single. My girlfriend then fiancee then wife didn’t really understand all the time I spent “playing on the computer”. In part that’s because I was awfully shy about talking about it. It was a project that seemed pretty trivial and while I hoped it would someday make money I wasn’t planning on it becoming huge.

It did become huge however and when it serendipitously become our sole source of income my wife began to understand that not only was it something important to me it was something that could bring financial security.

Now don’t get me wrong. My wife didn’t come to accept my pursuits simply because they were making money. She’s long supported me doing the things that interest me. More interesting is her support now when I don’t have a successful project going and don’t have a lot of clear direction. It’s her belief in me that keeps me going much of the time. It’d be easy for her to demand I pursue a more traditional employment but she won’t unless it becomes clear that such a move would really be best for me.

Beyond that she’s brought me quite an interesting project. It’s working with someone who has some great ideas and materials about parents helping their kid’s education. She has very little knowledge of how to use the web for her business (just a simple brochure site at the moment) and I’m hoping to help her build out that site into an important part of her business. I’ll keep the blog updated as the project progresses.

She also wants to develop a project for mom’s who’ve left the professional world to stay at home to raise their kids. It’s an idea that we’ve both tossed around for a while and my wife is ever the networker and we hope to drive it forward in the near future.