Archive for the ‘blogging’ Category
2 years and 200 posts
I started this blog 2 years and 200 posts ago. The time has flown by. I’m still having fun with it and no major missteps so I’m sticking to my plan. Just over 50,000 pages viewed so far. Thanks for reading! I’ll try to keep things interesting.
My picks: The best service providers for startups
Filed under: Braintree Financial, Google, KnowledgeBid, MediaTemple, My picks, Netvibes, RingCentral, Wordpress, blogging, outsourcing, telecom |
Comments (29) A friend of mine…I’ll call him Arnold Babar…is in the early stages of starting a company. Over a few beers the other night, Arnold asked me a few general questions about service providers we’ve used for various aspects of building the KnowledgeBid expert network management platform and other projects. A few came to mind immediately…then I thought of a few later that night…then a few more the next day. I’m putting them all into a post in the hopes that I might save someone else the hours of head + wall collisions it took me to find these guys. I’m only going to include services that I use heavily myself and would recommend to a close personal friend. I’ll add to this as more come to me. My top priorities: 1) cost; 2) functionality / flexibility; 3) quality; 4) reliability.
Best Corporate Telephony / PBX / Fax Service: RingCentral
My previous write-up on RingCentral is here. Super flexible PBX, digital fax delivery, digital voice mail delivery, $19.95/month. Can’t beat it. Mac friendly except for the sound recording / uploading feature.
Best Payment Processing Service: Braintree Payment Solutions
My previous write-up on Braintree is here. The payment processing industry is a total mess. The Braintree guys are straight shooters. Save yourself serious pain and go straight to them.
Best Press Release Services: PRZOOM, The Open Press
The web has antiquated the newswire industry. These two providers are free and get your PR messages on sites other than your own, which is all you really need. PRWeb and the others try to get you to pay, but it’s really not worth it.
Best Conference Call Service: Free Conference
My previous write-ups on the free conference call industry are here. The FCC says these guys can stay in business and so long as you just need them to work for your call tomorrow or next week, you’ll be fine. Call quality is good and reliability is good. I would advise against trying to bake them into your app though…you get what you pay for and who knows how long their loophole will be open.
Best Desktop Sharing Software: Glance
This a simple, functional, reliable piece of software perfect for sharing your desktop for demos. No install needed for your clients, but this means there is no way to see the screen of the person on the other end. It’s $39/month and WebEx has dropped prices in response. There may be some free stuff out there too but I would rather have my demos work and pay a little. Glance is Mac friendly, WebEx is not.
Best Domain Registrar: One and One
One and One is clean, easy to use, without constant upselling, ads and pop-ups. GoDaddy is a nightmare IMO.
Best Hosting Service: M5 Hosting
Previous mention here. These guys were referred to us by a friend and they have done a great job so far. Stay the hell away from MediaTemple.
Best Blog Platform: WordPress.com, WordPress.org
The best blogging and simple content management system out there, IMO. Open source so there are an amazing number of plug-ins, style sheets, and high quality WordPress designers out there so you can really make anything. WordPress.com is a free, hosted blogging platform (example here) while you need to host WordPress.org on your own server (example here, here, and here).
Best Corporate Email Solution: Google Apps for Your Domain
Face it, yourcompanyname@gmail.com is JV. Google Apps makes it free and easy to have Google tools under your own domain.
Best Bug Tracker: Mantis
We’re coming up on our 300th mantis ticket and so far, so good. Free, open source bug tracking & project management. We tried some of the more trendy solutions out there and were very disappointed.
Best Stock Photography: Stockxpert
High quality stock photography on a pay-as-you-go model. Many other players out there have high subscription fees which sucks when you only need 1 or 2 pictures. Examples here and here.
Best Professional Voice Recording: VoiceVector
These guys and gals are based in Alaska but you wouldn’t know it. $1o for your first 12 words and $8 for each additional group of 12 or fewer words in a single recording. Quick, easy, high quality, and they give you your recording in lots of formats. For example call here.
Best Screencast Solution: Camtasia
The web video world is like the credit card processing world…it’s a total mess. Camtasia makes it easy to record a screencast, polish it up, and host it so anyone can watch it. Example here. They have a free demo period. Tip: don’t try to cut and splice within a single recording – just go all the way through.
Best Competitive / Industry Monitor: Google Alerts
Previous write-up here. Cut down on your unnecessary news reading and get productive.
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I’d love to hear comments on these and other solid services out there. I’m actively looking for these:
Best Headset for Blackberry 8703e
Best Low Volume SMS Solution
Best Free CRM
Best Password / Login Manager
Efficiency through Google alerts
Filed under: Google, KnowledgeBid, My picks, Netvibes, blogging, information, outsourcing |
Comments (2) One of the reasons my posting has slowed over the last month or so is because I have drastically cut down on my news consumption and a good amount of my posting was derivative of the random stuff I read on the web. I still check my Netvibes page every day or two, but in the past I spent at least an hour a day staying current on various tech, econ, VC, law and entrepreneur blogs and news sources. A major factor in my slimmed down news diet has been thanks to Google alerts. I’ve set up alerts for a variety of keywords that I’m interested in monitoring (my company name, competitive company names, friends’ company names, my name, etc.) and get emails from Google alerts when new material is on the web that includes those keywords. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a big driver behind my news consumption was the fear that I would “miss something” relevant to my life. Google Alerts is far more efficient in monitoring the web that I could ever be, and now I can spend my time on more important things without worry that I may be out of the loop.
New look, new platform, same blog
So I finally made the switch over to WordPress from Blogger. Blogger served me well, but WordPress has features and flexibility that Blogger doesn’t have. It’s a lot easier to change the design and it generally functions much smoother. Blogger is actually a bit better with embedding videos, widgets, etc. but WordPress ironically has built in analytics that run on Urchin…which was bought by Google…who owns Blogger. Maybe someday Google will integrate all of the stuff they’ve bought and reclaim control of the internet. I’ll be here for the time being though. The conversion was generally painless, but I need to go back through my posts at some point and brush things up a bit. Also, it maybe worth noting that the tag links associated my posts go to “global” WordPress tags. The “categories” tags on the right side filter the stuff on this blog by tag. Not sure if anyone clicks those.
Thus far, WordPress seems great. Also, I highly recommend domain purchasing and management provider One and One. Everyone says that blogging platforms and domain providers are the same, but they really aren’t. Thanks to Joe for perfecting the CSS here and Chad for the One and One heads up a long ways back. I haven’t seen much of Chad since he started running with the horses in the hills west of San Diego a few years back though.
Let me know what you think. Your comment will show up in my new super sweet “recent comments” section..
crispyideas
I have been looking around for a Digg clone and came across a cool company called crispyideas that lets subscribers create customizable user generated/submitted content sites with voting features. You can see crispyideas in action on the Salesforce.com customer feedback page and news sites like PutVote and OSViews. Rates are a bit steep though. It looks like crispyideas started as crispynews, which allowed anyone to host a user generated news site like one can host a blog with Blogger, etc. but they recently switched focus to enterprise customers. I’m guessing the hosting costs got to them. I’m still looking for an open source customizable framework to use for something like this if anyone knows of one…
Edit: Found it.
38 Pitches…noticeably silent
38 Pitches, Curt Schilling‘s blog, has been silent since June 13th. Schilling, a $13m starter for the Boston Red Sox, posted on his loss to Colorado on the 13th, but hasn’t written about his blowout loss to Atlanta on June 18th (after which he was placed on the DL) or his subsequent MRI and additional testing.
I love Curt as much as the next Red Sox fan, and have ever since the bloody sock of ’04. I’m also a fan of blogging. However, I can’t say that right now I’m a fan of Curt Schilling blogging. I don’t think I’m alone in that when I hear about Schilling’s 40 year old fatigued shoulder, the first thing that comes to mind is that maybe he shouldn’t be blogging so much, shouldn’t be starting a nebulous gaming company, and shouldn’t be signing up for speaking engagements alongside Walt Mossberg. He should be doing what he’s getting paid $13m a year to do and save the other stuff for retirement.
Blogging corporations and CEOs
The NewPR Wiki is an interesting wiki dedicated to blogging and other forms of…you guessed it…new PR. The best features seem to be the robust lists of corporate and CEO blogs. Blogs are normally used to keep track of things like news and gossip, but they are also really good for sneakier stuff, like doing diligence on investment opportunities and keeping tabs on potential competitors…
Where are you?
I was flipping through my FeedBurner site stats today and noticed a couple of random places in my “Top Cities” statistic that piqued my curiosity and I checked my Top Cities list over the past month and saw some interesting results. My top 10 cities by readership over the last 30 days:
- Chicago – 14.8%
- New York – 10.0%
- Washington – 5.4%
- San Francisco – 4.8%
- Woodside – 4.8%
- Oakland – 3.3%
- San Luis Obispo – 2.7%
- Hayward – 2.7%
- Atlanta – 2.4%
- Los Angeles – 2.4%
The other 47% are spread out over the US and internationally. My readership “nationality” over the last 30 days:
- United States
- Canada
- Serbia
- Germany
- England
- Australia
- Italy
- Belgium
- Singapore
- Latvia
- Spain
- Uruguay
- France
- Israel
- India
This is all based on what FeedBurner tells me and their methodology very well may be screwy, but I’m happy to remain blissfully ignorant for the time being. Pretty cool stuff.
Justin.tv
Arrington’s post about a police raid on Justin.tv piqued my interest enough to check it out. Kiko founders (a Y Combinator backed calendar start-up that auctioned off their software on e-Bay after Google Calendar ate their lunch) Justin Kan and Emmett Shear started Justin.tv five days ago. Justin wears a head-cam that is kept on 24 hours a day, seven days a week which is connected to a laptop and EVDO card that transmit wirelessly. This takes video-blogging to a new level. The site is actually set up pretty well and the video streams nearly perfectly. There is live chat under the video stream where viewers blab with each other about what Justin is doing or what he has been up to recently, as well as a forum where users can make suggestions of what Justin should do, and a blog updating viewers to plans, hardware changes, etc. This is a ridiculous idea, but the site works so well I’m guessing that it will be at least a short-term cult hit. If nothing else, these guys have actually done what we all once hoped we could do in college for our most ridiculous friends – give them a head-cam all the time to have a record of what they do. For me, this person was my good friend Jeff. The obvious problem is that what Justin does all day might not be as funny as what Jeff did in his Dartmouth fraternity basement while wearing a clown suit. That said, the Justin.tv apartment has been received two visits from police and fire departments in the last five days thanks to pranks pulled by viewers, so the audience might help keep it interesting. His cell number is right on the main page too, so you can give him a call.
Feed inversion
So I just went through my posts and tagged them all with topics (now listed in the sidebar to the right) and now when I see my post headlines in Netvibes and via Firefox toolbar, they are completely scrambled and almost in a perfectly inverted order, since I edited my most recent post first and my first post last. I think this is feedburner’s fault. Oh well. At least now my recent subscribers will now get more exposure to my older stuff?
Reasons to blog
I started this blog for several reasons, the primary of which was to have an outlet for my thoughts. Ben Casnocha had a good post a while back on the benefits of blogging, the focus & research it demands, and the benefit of forcing intellectual engagement. I agree with all of Ben’s points, but I think he misses an obvious one that is clearly part of my motivation and I am willing to bet is a backdrop to Ben’s voluminous posting as well.
It sounds silly and stale, but blogging gives you an “online identity”…not in the sense of a Second Life identity (e.g.: you can be a furry ninja bear-man) but in the way that a web designer’s online portfolio creates an identity that is accessible and available when someone wants to research their work. For those that don’t have concrete evidence of their work product on the web like designers and developers, blogging is like creating a portfolio for your thinking and thought processes. Doing diligence on someone that has a blog is really, really easy. It gives you access to their thoughts over a long span of time, lets you analyze their writing style and thought processes, and shows what they spend most of their time thinking about. The more you blog, the bigger your online record gets, which in turn makes it easier for people to learn about what makes you tick.
Also, the more your blog and the more people read your site, the easier it is for people to find you in the first place. For example, I can see in my site stats from yesterday that six people found my blog by searching on variations of rob, webb, blog, and university of chicago in Google. B
efore I started blogging, if you Googled my name you would get lots of stuff about the British actor Robert Webb (who, pictured, was the host of Numberwang and Peep Show) and some Rhodesian guy’s homepage. Thanks to this blog, I’m at the top of the results for “rob webb blog” and about to crack the first page for “rob webb.” Thus, in the future when potential employers, coworkers, employees, and investors want to learn about me, it’ll be easy for them to find this blog and sneak a peak into my head.
So, as long as I hold back on posting my thoughts on Iraq, gay marriage, abortion, politics, gun control, school testing, smoking bans, trans fats, Scooter Libby, global warming, religion in schools, and anything else that isolates and polarizes, I’ll be in the clear…
Poll testing…
I need to do some market research so I have been checking out the various online poll options. I would like something a bit slicker than surveymonkey. We’ll see if I can find it! My search for “web 2.0 polls” brought me to polldaddy.com. It is definitely slick, but I’m not sure I can ask more than one question, which would be a bummer.
Technorati, Google Blog Search & DMOZ
Technorati has this thing to put into your blog so it shows up on Technorati. So I’m putting it below. Good times.
I think Google blog search works way better, btw. but to register with Google. I’m pretty sure to “claim” your site with Google you have to submit to DMOZ (the open directory project), which has been down recently.
Edit: Ha! Once I registered I got this awesome stat from Technorati: Rank: 2,445,365 (0 links from 0 sites)
iPhone + Schmidt + Jobs = crashed Blogger
Blogger, the blogging platform run by Google that I use for this blog, crashed right when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google joined Steve Jobs on stage at MacWorld to help him announce the iPhone. I guess that combo is a little too much heat for the blogosphere…
First one…
OK, here it goes. The primary goal of this blog will be for me to have a good time posting about things that interest me in tech, law, markets, and stuff on the internet. The secondary goal of this blog will be for me to not shoot myself in the foot by creating a public, permanent record of my thoughts to the world.
Wish me luck!
