A dot com millionaire tries to do it again

Now that all of our electronic devices are powered by open source software, we need a good way to get at the devices to update them and tools to use to provide them with more functionality. The ideal way to do this is with a WiFi connection.

Yes, I’m talking about nearly every device yet again. It would be nice to be able to login to your dishwasher and determine when it had last been run and/or the current state of the wash cycle. But there are other devices where that wireless network connection would be far more useful. Namely my car.

Think about what you car could do with even an “sometimes” network connection. Your car could e-mail you with diagnostics reports and maintenance requests (without some satellite based service that comes with a large monthly fee). Better yet you could login to your car’s web server while it’s parked in the driveway and check it’s status along with getting all sorts of interesting but useless stats.

Combined with the WiFi connection there are a billion new applications for your GPS navigation system. Anonymously submit your driving time/location/speed information to my new web service and I’ll generate an average speed for a given road at at given time of day. You can then upload that info back to your GPS which can now use it to determine the shortest route.

Forget trying to enter your destination with your car’s touch screen (or worse mine uses a cursor system). You can send destinations from your address book to your car’s nav system which can then design the optimal route for the 4 errands you need to run. Oh, and don’t forget to check the box that makes the grocery store your last destination - wouldn’t want your milk to spoil while your getting your haircut.

And finally there’s your stereo/entertainment system. Download your MP3 collection directly to the car. And beam the latest Disney flick to your in car pvr so the kids have something to watch on that next road trip.

The possibilities are nearly endless here and once again free boost for the device makers.

I spend at least 90% of my day immersed in open source software. My web browser is FireFox. My server runs Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. I’ve recently been working in the excellent PHP framework CakePHP. This blog is powered by the amazing open source WordPress. There’s no doubt in my mind that these projects are all best of breed and I wouldn’t be able to do most of what I do without them.

There is, however, another side of open source that drives me crazy. That is the vast number of half-finished abandoned projects that litter the web.

The other day I was looking for a good PHP class for handling user registration/login. It’s obviously something that nearly every website deals with. While there are a number of projects out there I wasn’t able to find one that’s well developed and does what I need. That’s ok. The problem is the large number of partially working solutions that are abandoned. On many open source repositories it’s difficult to impossible to determine the exact state of a project. Most importantly is it still being actively developed.

When picking an open source project - especially one that will be incorporated into a larger project as opposed to one that will be used stand alone - it’s vital to find a project that’s current, actively undergoing development and that has a community of users that will support it.

But here’s the good thing about open source. Most of the time if is project is abandoned it’s possible for someone else to come along and take it over. Or at the very least it should be possible to use an existing project as the basis for a new open source project that you can maintain, actively develop and build a community around.

6 months or 9 months or a year ago when I started thinking more about what it was I wanted to do next one thing that immediately sprung to mind is that I wanted something to do with blogging. Blogging is a huge part of what’s new and exciting about the Internet these days. While Facebook and MySpace get all the media attention I personally think they’ll either have to change substantially or die off (though that’s a topic for another day).

When I first heard of blogging years back it was mostly of the “Dear Diary” type. I didn’t much get it. I had no desire to either share daily details of my life or read daily details of other people’s lives. Over time the very nature of blogging changed (or perhaps I didn’t understand it at the time). Blogging became simply a mechanism for publishing on a wide variety of topics many of which had nothing to do with what the blogger ate for lunch or where they were going on vacation. Bloggers became in many ways the new journalists - sharing news and opinions that just a few years ago only those employed in news industries would be able to share.

So while the who blogscape excited me and I knew I wanted to do something in that sphere I wasn’t sure exactly what and to a large extent I still didn’t get what it was all about. I dove into reading a wide variety of blogs and immediately some ideas sprung to mind about how to better server blog readers. As I started doing more blogging myself I started thinking about ways to serve the blog authors.

It goes along with the advice to start a site about a topic that you’re passionate about but jumping into the world that you hope to serve is absolutely essential to the modern day independent entreprenuer.

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.

Why is everybody jumping on Scoble just because he’s all giddy over some new Microsoft thing that he can’t talk about? Honestly it’s stuff like this that I love to read out of Scoble. The guy’s a geek but so are most of his readers. And quite honestly I rarely care a whole heck of a lot about any new thing that’s come along.

Odds are the “next big thing” won’t live up to Scoble’s hype but watching him get all giddy about it is about as much fun as watching kids on Christmas morning.

Welcome to Idealistic Fridays. Fridays seem like the most hopeful of days in general since there’s always the anticipation of the fun that’s going to come over the weekend. Of course there’s not much distinction between weekday and weekend for most solo entrepreneurs but just go with me on this on. In honor of the hope that is Friday I plan a series of posts about things that would make the works a better place in my not so humble opinion.

—–

Every device that has a computer chip should make their software open source.  Really nearly everything with a plug these days is run by some level of computer chip - from your TV to your dishwasher and at the more complex end things like your cell phone are essentially computers that are highly focused on a single task.

I think all of these devices should make their software open source. Yes, even your TV or toaster oven. Why? Well first of all why not?

There’s no downside to making embedded software open source. Companies will I’m sure disagree with this and say that their software provides a competitive advantage but I don’t agree. There is a point at which the device really is nothing more than an off the shelf computer and the product being sold is actually the software. A TiVo for example. I wouldn’t expect TiVo to make their software open source because in reality what they’re selling is the software. Your clock radio or refrigerator or car are a whole different story. Even given the software very few people would have the skill or desire to build the device to run it and even if they did it would almost certainly be more expensive than just buying the device in the first place.

Besides the why not there are two big reasons in my mind why this is a good idea.

Making your device’s software open source means I can eliminate those annoying little quirks about your device. Some of those quirks would even prevent me from purchasing your device or at the very least prevent me from recommending it to someone else. My alarm clock for example has the ability to play these nature sounds. I thought it’d be a nice thing to use to fall asleep to. Sony however thought it would be a nice thing to wake up to and that’s the only way you can use it. If their software was open source I could fix that.

Making your device’s software open source opens up the possibility of all new applications that you never thought of that could lead to increased sales. Sure the chances of that are remote for a dishwasher manufacturer but you never know what people can come up with. Certainly the creative potential of a whole world of people will exceed the creative potential of any one company’s creative staff. And who knows. Maybe a washing machine that can belt out MP3 tunes is just the thing that someone out there is looking for.

RssHugger is a site dedicated to helping bloggers promote their blogs via their rss feeds. The site itself sports a clean simple look with a dark background and orange text. I’m not normally a huge fan of dark backgrounds on websites but I think it works here - specially since there’s not a huge amount of text to read on the site.

The site functions essentially like a top list. Each blog is given a page at RssHugger (see mine here). The more hits you get to that page the higher you rise in the top 100 list. This gives the blogger an incentive to promote RssHugger and thereby promote their own blog. At the moment RssHugger contains just over 1000 feeds and seems to be growing at a fairly slow but steady pace. You won’t find any of the major A-list blogs there but there’s enough variety to ensure that you’ll find something that’s interesting.

One gripe I have with the site design is that it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how to get to the entire blog directory instead of just the “top 100″ or “random blog”. The poorly named “search” link the navigation actually brings you to the entire list.

I’m also not enamored of how they handle the voting for a site. Simply visiting a page for a blog doesn’t mean I’m interested in the blog or giving it my vote of confidence. I’d rather see the voting be done by people clicking through to an actual blog post which is at least somewhat more indicative of interest and would allow multiple “votes” for a site that the reader deems worthy of reading multiple posts.

Overall however RssHugger seems like a worthy addition to the blogosphere which I’d be happy to see succeed.

—

RssHugger requests a review of the site be posted from blogs seeking entry in the directory. This in no way affects the content of my review.

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.

I’ve been in and around computers for many years and so I’ve seen lots of help requests - both addressed to me and in general programming or other technical forums. While I’ve seen lots of help requests I’ve seen very few good help requests. Here are a couple tips to keep in mind when requesting any kind of technical help:

1) Don’t assign blame. “Your program doesn’t work” is a bad way to request help because you’re assigning blame. It’s a request that sets a bad tone for the conversation and will tend to get you dismissed. If you say my program doesn’t work then all I have to do is show you it working in my own environment. That proves that the program does work and even though you can’t get it working in your own environment I’m done with you.

2) Describe the problem and not your own guess as to the cause of the problem. “My e-mail is broken” is an underlying cause that’s most often not correct. “I’m not able to login to my e-mail” is a description of the problem you have that you’d like me to help solve.

3) Provide relevant details. Even though it’s a slight improvement “I’m not able to login to my e-mail” is still a pretty poor way to request help. Much better is to describe in detail what you’re doing. “I’m trying to login to the web-based e-mail which I’ve done successfully before. When I enter my username and password I get the error message ‘Your account is unavailable’. It’s been doing this for 3 hours.” That’s some relevant detail that gives me something to work with.

4) If something has changed - tell me. I’ve frequently gotten “Your script used to work but it’s not working anymore.” When questioned further the requester then reveals that the recently changed servers. It’s a general principle of engineering that you change one thing at a time and re-test so that if something breaks you know what change caused it to break. If a program stopped working when you changed something like the web host, the operating system, which browser you’re using to access the site then that is extremely relevant information to should be prominent in your request

5) Address your request to the appropriate person. Don’t complain to your ISP that you can’t get your word processor to work. Don’t ask me about how to get someone else’s program running. Don’t post on a forum asking for “a little help” when what you really want is someone to provide you with a complex solution.

6) Keep your support expectations realistic. Microsoft sells software packages for hundreds of dollars and then charges you another hundred if you want to ask them a question about it. Yet I’ve seen people expect demand hand holding and free upgrades for life for a $10 script. Very little software or online services have enough margin built into the price to provide more than basic support and that will often be limited to pointing you to the documentation.

I can understand the frustrations of being a customer with an issue that you want resolved and really most companies want to provide you with good support. Follow these tips and you’ll find you get a faster, better more helpful response out of almost everyone.

———-

This post may be reproduced in it’s entirety provided it is attributed with a link to SoloProgrammer.com