Netizen

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Make Money On Twitter

Time: Brought To You By Twitter
Mashable: Sponsored Tweets Launches

The Time article grabbed my attention and I signed up right away. The site suggests I need to get paid $34.07 per tweet. I am not complaining. Twitter has been my 2009 fascination. And I have worked hard to build a stream and a following. I am at 23,000 followers and counting and a day or two away from becoming one of the top 100 Twitter users in New York City. I am not complaining.

Twitter so far has been quite a journey.

Twitter Should Hand Over Search To Google
Twitter Number 115 In New York City
Twitter, TechCrunch, And The Stolen Docs
The Best Follow Friday I Ever Received On Twitter
Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?
My Twitter Suspension Lifted
Can Tweet Google, Can't Tweet Twitter
Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas
How To Increase Your Following On Twitter
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Eminem: The Relapse: Twitter
Converting To The Mass Follow Formula On Twitter
NewsDesk: China, Twitter, Hawking, Obama
Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
Twitter Is Not Micro
The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Family Ties: The Other Bill Clinton
As Economy Improves, Bank Bailouts Persist
G20 Leaders Agree, Broadly, on Climate Change
Surrogates: The Zen Machismo of Bruce Willis
What You Need To Know About The H1N1 Vaccine
Brought to You by Twitter

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Search engine optimization is not black magic. It is essential. It is basic. Unless you entirely missed out on the whole internet thing. How could you have?

You want to be found. That applies to big media websites, but also applies to local businesses. People will look you up on the internet before they show up at your storefront.

SEO is not about tricking people into showing up. It is about helping people find you. Big difference.

It is about putting in the right words, but it is also about deserving and getting inbound links. This is a link economy, many would say.

And the online world is hardly for just tech companies. There is no line of business that need not be online. No business is too small to get online. People do local search to get to you. Are you optimized yet?

Search Engine Optimization Chicago
Chicago SEO
Chicago Internet Marketing

Search: Pregnant Territory

Image via CrunchBase

Once you have figured out that there are four screens - the phone, the browser, the desktop, the wall - it is easy to see search is pregnant territory, rich with possibilities. Search, content, distribution. There is so much to do.

Search is of special interest to me. There is one clear leader, but the challenger is not lacking in money. And for the leader the competition is but one click away. If there was ever an innovation challenge, this is it. Could Microsoft innovate, or find a startup or two that might? That second possibility is more likely. But then Google has been in competition with itself. It never stopped innovating in the search domain and boasts a larger index than anyone else. And its algorithms are still the ones to beat.

Microsoft should try and eat into Google territory. Google should try and eat into Microsoft territory. The consumer will benefit. Search and operating systems are fair game.

Technology Review

What's Microsoft's Bing Strategy? "We are going to compete hard on the core results, but where we are going to differentiate is in organizing results more effectively and providing tools to help searchers make decisions"
Making Search Social
More-Searchable Flash
Opening Search to Semantic Upstarts
Searching as a Team
Building a Better Search Engine
Q&A: Peter Norvig
Digging Deeper in Web Search
Better Search in Virtual Worlds
Wolfram Alpha and Google Face Off
How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed
A Smarter Search for What Ails You

Image via CrunchBase

Microsoft Searches for Group Advantage
A Google Killer Stumbles
Search Engines' Chinese Self-Censorship
A New Perspective on Search Results
Social Search
Jennifer Chayes
Wikipedians Promise New Search Engine

How Facebook Copes with 300 Million Users Technology Review Doing things in or near real time puts a lot of pressure on the system because the live-ness or freshness of the data requires you to query more in real time. ...... There's too much data updated too fast to stick it in a big central database. That doesn't work. So we have to separate it out, split it out, to thousands of databases, and then be able to query those databases at high speed. ...... "Like" became one of the most common actions in the system. ........ a tremendous wealth of photos being uploaded and shared ......... Then we went and built our own storage system called Haystack that's completely built on top of commodity hardware.
Twitter's Growing Pains a large-scale, ground-up architectural revamp ...... it will reduce its reliance on Ruby on Rails, and will move to a "simple, elegant file-system-based approach," to replace its original unwieldy database system. ........ a communications-class technical infrastructure that supports unpredictable activity.
Social Networking Is Not a Business
How Facebook Works

More Angry Investors Say, Throw the Boards Out

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

What Makes An Entrepreneur Tick?

Image via Wikipedia

What Have VCs Really Done for Innovation? TechCrunch Back in 1986, when Bill Gates was still making sales calls, he pitched my group at First Boston on why we should bet the farm on Windows. Despite the risk involved, we gave his fledgling startup the deal. This wasn’t because of his financial backers (he didn’t even drop any names), but because we believed in his vision and nerdiness. ....... VC’s follow innovation, they don’t lead. They go where they smell blood.
From Nothing To Something. How To Get There. forget everything else and just get your product out the door

For one there are few of them. But not that few. Every business owner is an entrepreneur. They create and sustain jobs. They are in every sector. The bold ones build the companies of tomorrow. Since most people work in the private sector to feed their families, we can say entrepreneurs are our guiding light. But what makes them tick? The failure rate is high, but many still try.

Partly it is a personality type, I think. Some people go for it, most don't. And there are all kinds. Few are big, most are small. The entrepreneurial spirit can also take over jobholders. I would think the best companies encourage that spirit.

But there is no crystal ball. It is hard to pick the winners early in the game. And, of course, the trailblazers become legends in their own lifetimes.

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious New York Times he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists. ....... the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists. ...... the mangrove swamp of his inner world ........ the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become. .......... “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.” ......... Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism ........ “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams. ........ humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious
Paul Krugman: Reform or Bust

Thursday, September 17, 2009

That Thing About Changing The World

Image via CrunchBase

Memo to Start-ups: You’re Supposed to Be Changing the World, Remember? too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better ....... The people who extol the virtues of “sensibility” are never the people at the core of the next great companies. .... Whether press or VCs, they’ll be late to the next wave, just like they were too late to this one.

Or maybe the next big startup is not trying to sqeeze into the dot com space.

Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation TechCrunch
Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users. Oh Yeah, And They Just Went Cash Flow Positive.
RedBeacon Wins The Top Prize At TechCrunch50 2009
Skype Sniffing Around Web Chat Startups
Jajah Brings Voice Calls To Twitter
Posterous Adds Theme Support; Continues To Grow
For Better Social News Times, Make It The Twitter Times
Pricefalls Scores Seed Funding, Launches Online Auction Site In Public Beta
Corkd Is Back With A New CEO, Winery Fan Pages, And A Social Stream
Imitation Isn’t Always Flattery: Microsoft Previews Google Apps Killer To Beta Testers
Fwix Launches API For Real-Time Local News, Announces $2.75 Million Series A Round
TC50: Six Noteworthy Startups From Korea And Japan

The Car Connection: GMC, Volkswagen, Ford, Mazda

GMC Review: A whole bunch of robust looking vehicles fall in this category. Look around and take your pick. For example, the 2009 GMC Yukon Denali. It is the go to SUV for VIP

Image via Wikipedia

motorcades and for good reason. It looks sturdy. This is a secure looking vehicle.

2010 Volkswagen Jetta TDI: This sportswagen is an improvement from its previous edition for how much cargo space it has in the back. Its aerodynamic styling catches your eye.

Image via Wikipedia

2010 Ford Transit Connect: This van has been designed for tight, urban environments. This was launched in Europe first, but will hit the market in the US as well.

2010 Mazda CX-7: This baby has an aggressive look. It has a SUV feel. But it drives like a passenger car. That is the combo that seems to have been attempted. Autoblog: “Mazda has refined the CX-7 inside-and-out, including a redesigned front end with a larger five-point grille and different front and rear fascias.”

TutorVista: Math Help

TutorVista is the top online tutoring company in the world. It is the beauty of the online medium that the tutoring can be 24*7. For about a hundred dollars a month, a student can get as much tutoring as she wants and needs on all subjects. That is a deal. K-12 students are welcome. Those starting college are welcome.