A dot com millionaire tries to do it again

If you’re wondering why I decided to start this blog now there are several reason. Probably none are enough on their own to undertake the amount of work that a blog entails but together they’re a pretty compelling motivation. And it’s kinda fun.

An Interesting Story

I think I have a pretty interesting story. There are many people out there who have made millions on the Internet but I’m not sure how many there are that have made it the way I did. Some people got some great stock options early in the lives of companies like AOL or Google. Fewer people were part of a founding team of a company that sold for a nice price or made it big. But you don’t hear too many stories of people who actually built a site on their own, never took financing and were smart and lucky enough to build it into something pretty big (and then sell it for a nice price).

photo credit: julianrod (PBUH)

 Plenty of Opinions

When I was a kid my parents threatened to get me a T-shirt that said “Everyone has a right to MY opinion”. I’ve always been one to enjoy explaining my point of view and a blog is a natural place to do so. I’ve been around the Internet since before the world wide web even existed and I’ve worked on Internet based projects for at least the last 10 years so I think I bring some experience and perspective to the topic I like to cover.

Self Accountability

Initially one of my main reasons for wanting to start this blog was to ensure that I was actually working on things instead of just goofing off. When you’re solo there is no external accountability so you need to make sure that you keep yourself productive. Especially when you don’t necessarily need an income to live a comfortable life. Of course so far I’ve spent more time on the actual blog than working on projects I could blog about but I still hope to use the blog and the (self imposed) pressure to write about interesting projects I’m undertaking to motivate myself to work on such projects.

Self Promotion

Blogs have some inherent self promotional aspects (pinging for one) and are beloved by search engines (who adore frequently updated content). There are also some good promotional opportunities for bloggers that aren’t necessarily available to other webmasters. This means that it’s somewhat easier to drive traffic to a blog than to other types of sites. And of course if you can drive traffic to a blog you can also send some of that traffic off to other projects you launch.

I Really Enjoy Writing

photo credit: MayrFor the longest time I’ve enjoyed writing of various forms. In high school it was creative writing. With my “big successful site” I had the opportunity to do some reviewing and interviews. It was never the main part of my job and I hadn’t done much of it (aside from the frequently overlong forum post) in quite a while. I actually toyed briefly with the ideal of studying to be a journalist but I’m not sure that’s a growth industry or the type of life I want to lead right now. Blogging gives me a great chance to exercise that muscle without becoming a job.

Money Making Possibilities

I actually never really thought a blog had a lot of money earning potential until I started getting into blogs a bit more and reading about guys like John Chow. I’m not sure I’ll ever build an audience like John and even if I do I’m not sure I can monetize my blog as effectively as John does but there is certainly a chance that this blog will someday bring in a few dollars.

So there you have it. For me at least the reasons I blog. If you write a blog consider what your reasons are. And if you’re thinking about writing a blog know that blogging is much harder than it looks and you’ll likely need more than one reason to keep you going.

On previous Idealistic Friday’s we’ve established that we want our consumer electronics devices to be driven by open source software and have a WiFi connection. The next thing we’re going to demand in our new improved world is inspired in part by the blockbuster device of 2007, Apple’s iPhone. Even those of us who don’t have an iPhone (I don’t) are affected by it. Certainly all the geeks among us have at least had a friend hand us their device to show how cool it is. And it is damn cool. And it’s cool in large part because of that big, beautiful touchscreen.

photo credit: QypeThe touchscreen on consumer electronics is something so brilliant that it’s amazing it hasn’t become ubiquitous already. I’m not talking about touchscreens on computers. I don’t want fingerprints all over my monitor when I already have a perfectly good device for entering text (the keyboard) and pointing (the mouse). But the majority of consumer electronics devices are too small to put a keyboard and pointing device on them. Hence the touchscreen.

What are the advantages of a touchscreen? Well first of all we’re all pretty used to graphical user interfaces on PCs by now and the touchscreen allows graphical user interfaces on these much smaller devices. The alternative is clunky menus which seem oh so 80s in comparison. Most importantly the touchscreen allows the manufacturer to turn the entire display surface of the device into a dynamic input surface as well. It effectively makes the display larger while making the input area larger at the same time. Quite the bending of the laws of physics there. The bigger display and the dynamic nature of the input area means that you can accomplish far more complex manipulations while making the device easier to use

Improvements all around. Any type of complex interaction with a device that’s too small for a keyboard is greatly improved by using a touchscreen. My car navigation system uses a cursor, my wife’s uses a touchscreen. My car salesman tried to sell me on the “no fingerprints on the screen” angle. He’s wrong. The touchscreen is just far easier to use. So much so that it negates the minor issue of smudges on the screen. Even very simple interactions could be improved with a touchscreen though. My microwave has a small led display and some pre-defined buttons. So when you want to cook a food that it has pre-programmed you often need to cycle through the menu and then try to decipher the 4 letter spelling of the word. With a touch screen you could have a picture of a big bag of popcorn next to a small bag instead of repeatedly hitting the popcorn button to find the “Rglr” size. Imagine setting the time on your clocks by dragging the hour and minute hands into place - or sliding back and forth for a digital clock.

Avoid annoying the customer. Have you ever walked up to a door and pushed only to find you need to pull? That happens because the door is poorly designed and doesn’t follow conventions. Increasingly people are coming to expect touchscreens and will often intuitively push on the screen to get things to happen. When it doesn’t work the way they expect people get annoyed. Annoyed people don’t recommend products to their friends. Lack of a touchscreen where it is intuitively expected was a big part of Scoble’s complaints about the Kindle device.

So why isn’t it already so? Even though they’ve been around for a long time in some form or another touchscreens the way we see them today are relatively new. It will take some time for device manufacturers to get them into their products. And then there’s the issue of cost. Since consumers can be so overwhelmingly cost driven in their purchases manufacturers are reluctant to add even a small amount of cost to their devices. But as with anything scale will make touchscreens more affordable and I think they’ll prove to be such a competitive advantage that it will be suicide to not use them widely.

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It’s fun having the power to change the world in this virtual way. I think that in general this is the way that entrepreneurs and creative people view the world. Exercise your mind and imagine how you can improve the world around you even if you don’t have the power to do so at the moment. And follow along here because I have plenty more ideas for you and eventually a fictional device that brings all of it together.

There’s an amazing new way for WordPress bloggers to easily add publicly available Flickr photos to their blog. The PhotoDropper Plugin is an amazing time saver.

photo credit: bingbingOne comment that you’ll see on that page though is that people are having trouble wrapping text around the images. It’s normally easy to do that in WordPress because you can just set the alignment on the image and the paragraph will wrap around it. The problem here is that the plugin adds a caption to the image that include the attribution link that is required for the image’s use.

Unfortunately there’s no simple way that I’ve found to achieve the alignment and flow that you want using the visual WordPress editor. But if you drop into the code editor temporarily you can quickly and relatively easily get the look you’re going for.

1. Write your post as normal (using the visual editor if that’s the way you work).
2. Put your cursor where you want the image to appear and using the PhotoDropper plugin to find and insert your image.
3. Now switch temporarily to the code editor and locate the code you just inserted. The trick is to wrap that code (the image and caption) with <span> </span> tags and apply the styling to the span.
4. At the very beginning of the inserted code add <span style=”float: right”> (or float left as you desire)
5. At the end of the inserted code (after the attribution link) add simply </span>

That’s it! Pretty simple after all. You can apply additional styling to the span if you want to alter the padding or whatever.

For the advanced reader. If you want to make things even easier (and you generally want to put your images in the same place) you can go ahead and make this wrapping with <span> tags and floating the default by doing a simple modification to the plugin.

Go to the plugin directory (wp-content/plugins/photo_dropper) and edit the file flickr-js.php. Around line 123 (in the version of the plugin that I’m using) you’ll see the code for adding the HTML for the image to your post. Edit that code to include the <span> tags and your desired floatiness.

imgHTML = ‘<span style=”float: right”><a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/’ + owner + “/” + id + ‘/” title=”‘ + imagealt + ‘”‘ + ‘ target=”_blank”>’;
imgHTML = imgHTML + ‘<img src=”‘ + imagesrc + ‘” alt=”‘ + imagealt + ‘” border=”0″ /></a>’;
imgHTML = imgHTML + licenceHTML + ‘</span>’;

Note however that if you do that modification it will be wiped out the next time the plugin is updated. If you want use both left and right floating you can still do this mod and make it a bit easier on yourself to edit in the code view.

Hope this helps and happy dropping photos into your blog.

I titled this blog Solo Programmer because for the last several years I’ve been on my own. My big successful site was something where I wrote 98% of the code and did 90% of the admin work (I did eventually hire some part time admin assistance). So what’s it like being on your own? There are a few advantages.

photo credit: *L*u*z*a*You decide the agenda. I’d keep a running list of projects that I wanted to get done, bugs that required fixes and user suggestions but when it came time to decide what to do next (then and now) it’s all up to me. That means if I didn’t feel like working on a feature at the moment I didn’t have to and if a great new idea springs to mind I can crank it out right away. One interesting tactic (that I’d like to replicate) that I employed was dividing up my work week into different types of work. Mondays I’d focus on SEO, monetization, building partnerships, Tuesday through Thursday I’d work on big features that would often take from several days to several weeks to get done and Fridays I’d crank out a couple minor updates or bug fixes. This allowed me to always have that sense of immediate accomplishment that generating a new feature brings while making sure the long term website and business development wasn’t ignored.

You decide the technology. Programmers are pretty much all geeks by nature who enjoy new technology. When you’re working on a large existing project or even working with a smaller team you’re often limited in introducing new technology either for reasons of backward compatibility or because it’s hard to do a new project in Java when the rest of the team only knows C++. When you’re solo you can pick a new technology because it’s cool and apply it to the next project. There may be costs in longer development time as you pick up new techniques or a new programming language but that stuff keeps it fun and interesting and helps to keep the true geek motivated.

photo credit: Mr.Thomas

Increased efficiency due to lack of communication overhead.One of the great classic books on computer project planning is the Mythical Man Month. The book explains how two programmers can’t necessarily do twice as much work as one and as teams get larger you get increasingly little more productivity out of additional members of the team. This is largely due to the fact that each member of the team needs to spend a certain amount of time communicating with other team members. This overhead typically grows linearly with the size of the team. When you’re solo you don’t have to communicate with other developers and so your programming time can be dedicated entirely to programming. Without the big business overhead of meetings and filling out various forms and reports and communications overhead I’d guess that a solo programmer can generate at least twice the amount of code as a programmer in a typical big office that’s part of a 7 or 8 person team.

You don’t have to take outside funding. There are so many advantages to not having to take outside funding that I can’t even begin to cover them here but that’s not really an option that a most startups have. When you’re solo however it’s much easier to boot strap a company by initially working on it part-time and it becomes much more viable to dedicate yourself to a project much sooner when you don’t have the big overhead that comes with maintaining a staff and offices. One thing we learned in the dot com bubble (the first on in the 90s) is that it’s not really a good thing for a company to go public or take too much funding at an early stage. Besides that fact that so many of the bubble companies spent at a ridiculous rate outside funding for a company that comes too early can put pressure on a company to preform immediately when it would be better for the company to take a long term approach. And the ultimate benefit of bootstrapping a company without outside funding is that when the exit comes all of the proceeds are your.

So there are a few of the benefits of being solo but don’t go thinking that it’s all good. There are a lot of disadvantages to being solo which I will address in a later post.

Scoble responds to the question “how is the web screwed up” by talking about how there are a number of individual services that he wishes would work together.

This is a great response and a fair complaint. Most Internet sites (even the most social of them) work in isolation creating little enclosed worlds of their own. It’s something that isn’t so apparent in the traditional publishing and web 1.0 world - you don’t really expect the New York Times to be intimately interconnected with the Washington Post - but becomes readily apparent in the web 2.0 world where sites become far more personalized and more about you.

How many of the sites you use on a regular basis are really about you? Well your blog or Facebook page is about you. Then there’s your Flickr account. Your Google Reader page is about you to a certain degree - by choosing what feeds you subscribe to you customize the content on that page. I frequent a number of different forums on varying topics and the topics I participate in and the sub-communities I’m involved in on those sites are about me. It’s natural when you see a site as being about you that you’d be able to join all these pieces of yourself together into one unified whole.

But one of the problems that we see on the web 2.0 world is that these sites remain individual islands and they do so for several reasons.

Probably the most predominant reason is that they feel that keeping their systems closed is vital to their economic success. It’s hard to get loyal customers (even on the web) and it seems pure insanity to then offer up those customers for free to other sites when you get no economic benefit from doing so. Offering strong, deep connections to other services may also limit the things you can do in the future - if Facebook is tightly integrated with Flickr why should Facebook have it’s own image gallery. And there is at least the perception that a closed system will encourage additional users through the network effect - sellers use eBay because that’s where the buyers are, buyers use eBay because that’s where the sellers are. If a site like Facebook is completely open then your friends can stay on MySpace but since Facebook is closed those same friends might be encouraged to sign up to Facebook as well so they can interact with you.

In addition to all the economic incentives to remain isolated web developers face the very simple proposition that there are a lot of services out there that are potential integration partners. Some of those services have APIs, some don’t. Even the ones that do have APIs typically use proprietary APIs. Lets say that Twitter decides to develop a tight integration with Flickr - well what about all the Twitter users that prefer Smugmug? Then there are those on Picasa web. And it goes on and on. I appreciate the desire to have all the services you use tightly integrated but the reality is that a provider could easily spend all of their time working on integrating with others leaving no time to further develop their own service.

I suppose it’s possible to create a sort of universal API for integrating web 2.0 properties in some sort of lightweight way that may provide at least some of the integration that users seek. I’ll have to think about that some more (though I can’t imagine that it’s something I could ever launch perhaps Google will come up with something).

In the meantime there’s a need and an opportunity for providing services that work across different web 2.0 properties or services which integrate a user’s web 2.0 usage. There are a number of ideas here I’d like to explore further in the future.

There is a near 100% chance that you will be interrupted (by a phone call, kids, spouse or someone at your door) in those few seconds between when you get a thought and you’re able to get that thought into your next post.

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?

It seems like a lot of the make money online type blogs have been talking about motivations lately. I’m not sure if it’s coincidence or just a meme that’s going around. The common idea seems to be “do what you love” and while that’s much better than “do what you think will earn money” it’s not really the greatest reason to start a site. What are some of the common motivations for launching a new internet venture?

Build a site you think will make money. Have you heard about mesothelioma? It’s a nasty type of lung cancer most often related to asbestos exposure. There were tons of class action lawsuits around asbestos and lawyers found that they could make good money from people with the disease and eventually they found Google Adwords. Since it was a lucrative area the advertisers were paying $10, $20 and at some point over $100 per click. So what followed is tons of webmasters creating sites to try to drive traffic to those ads. But of course none of them really knew anything about mesothelioma and the competition in the search engines for the term was out of the world. These webmasters had no real interest in the topic, nothing value to add to the topic and little chance of actually getting any traffic or making any money.

Build a site around a topic you love. This seems to be the most recommended idea being tossed around and it’s certainly better than trying to build a mesothelioma site. There are a few problems still lurking here however. Say you love the TV show Lost. While you could start a website about it there are about a billion others that already exist. Unless you have something unique to bring to the table there’s little chance that your site will succeed. Another problem is if the thing you love is not of interest to very many (or any) people. As much as I love my kids the only people who would want to read about their daily exploits are their grand parents. Now you may find that you really do want to start a site in a crowded field where you have nothing original to add or you may wish to serve the grandparents up some day to day stories but realize that such a site is never going to be a money making venture.

Build a site around an under-served need. Is there something that you really wish existed on the net? A resource for some topic that you know a bunch about but don’t see anyone else addressing? These are where the winning ideas come from. Lets say you want a quick an easy way to tell your friends what you’re up to and find out what they’re up to. You look around and no one is doing it. Voila! Twitter is made. Or maybe you really want a way to communicate with the parents of your kids little league team. If you search for a solution and can’t find one or can’t find one that works the way you like chances are you’ve found and under-served need. It’s something you’re interested in so you won’t give up or get burned out quickly and you have an idea about how the need should be served so you’re adding value to the net.

Now every in reality not everything you come up with is really going to be an under-served need. There may be a solution out there that you’re not aware of. Or the need may be limited to so few people that its really not worth serving. But ask around to a few friends who would be in your target demographic and see if they also experience the need and are unaware of a solution.

Finding and meeting an under-served need is not easy. The obvious ideas all seem to be taken. But if you’re looking for an idea for starting a new website spend some time thinking about what it is you’d like to see that isn’t yet out there. If you can find a need and fill it you’ll have a recipe for a site that can keep you interested for a long time and potentially provide a significant amount of income.

When you’re your own boss one of the interesting things that happens is that you get to decide what is “work” and what is “goofing off”. When someone else is giving you tasks to accomplish this is largely determined for you but unless you work for the pointy haired boss if you’re in the tech industry you likely have some degree of freedom in how you spend the passing moments while your at your job.

The question then becomes - especially for the self-employed - how do you classify blogging time - and by that I mean time spent both reading and writing blogs.

Certainly if your blog is your primary work product then time spent writing blog entries has to be considered working. But really very few of us - even those who seek to monetize their blogs - have a blog as their primary work product. By that I mean that guys like John Chow and Shoemoney - while they do make good money from their blogs really make most of the income from running other sites.

And what of time spent reading blogs? The blogging world is highly inbred and bloggers spend a lot of time talking about what other bloggers are saying. Bloggers will get ideas about things to discuss and important happenings from reading other blogs.

For me, I spend a lot of my time wonder what it is I want to do next. After being tied up in one particular site and niche for years I’ve largely lost my feel for what the state of the Internet is and the state of the Internet has changed drastically since 2000. For me I view reading blogs and writing here as absolutely “doing work”. I admit that not all the blogs I read are work related and I certainly enjoy both the reading and the writing but to me at least it is still part of my job.

It’s good to enjoy your job.

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.