These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
Spam Clock runs the counter of the SPAM websites that were created since January 1st, 2011. The data is provided by blekko search engine. And the numbers are staggering. Every hour a million of new SPAM pages is created. And there I was, thinking that we mostly have a problem with email, where, any ISP in the world will tell you, SPAM messages account for roughly 99.99% of all emails.
Via Download Squad.
I came across this blog post asking the question of whether Facebook Pages are killing the corporate web sites. Just by coincidence, I’ve been thinking about this for the last few days. And not only thinking, but discussing it with other people and collecting their ideas, feedback, and data.
With a question like this its easy to fall into an extremist black and white view of the world. But an answer in the middle isn’t quite as interesting as an answer from either side of the debate. In my personal opinion, the answer is more yes than no. Let me now explain.
Corporate web presence is increasingly important. It is so important in fact that today it’s almost a requirement. Web site is one of those first things a company needs to do, together with the office, logo, and business cards. Yes, I am aware of the fact that not every company needs an office, or a logo, or business cards, or even a web site, but these are minority and more of an exception rather than a rule, so I’ll ignore them for now.
But as much as web publishing technology developed and improved these years, it’s nowhere near the accessible level. Take for a example a brand new company. And let it, for the sake of the example, be a small business. A store, or a small services company. At the stage where we are now, the company basically has these routes to establish its web presence:
Larger, richer companies have resources to invest into a proper web site, which would be maintained and updated, as well as constantly promoted. However many smaller companies simply can’t afford the option. And for them Facebook pages work surprisingly well.
In fact, I’ve spoken with a few local people who use Facebook pages to promote their business, services, and products. And most of them are very satisfied by this option. The outcomes vary, of course. Some people said that Facebook doesn’t help them at all. But they don’t mind since they spent only a few minutes setting up the page. Others are much happier. Two people in particular told me that they even had their own websites before, but those were a waste of time, since nobody ever visited them. But on Facebook they managed to capture their audience and now they have larger client base and its much easier for them to keep everyone in the loop on stock updates, as well as to collect feedback.
I think that this last bit is particularly important. It’s not about how much time or money you can invest. But whether you can break through and reach your potential audience. And somehow Facebook pages seem to be doing it better than standalone corporate website. At least for some types of businesses. And if it goes this way, I think more and more companies will start downgrading corporate websites from top priority to an item of lesser importance. After all, it’s never too late to start with your own website, but if you can survive for some time without it, and save money and time – why not?
During the last few days I’ve been asked by several people what I think about the scary bit of news regarding the shutdown of Delicious. I’ve replied individually several times, but I feel that a blog post is in order. So here it goes.
First of all, Delicious is not being shutdown. Here is a quote from their blog:
Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.
But with all that said, I want to stress it once again – Delicious is not shutting down. So if you use and enjoy the service, simply continue doing just that. No need to worry.
A couple of days ago DailyPost suggest the following topic for a blog post: Share something that makes you smile. I wanted to share something, but so many things make me smile that it’s hard to choose. Today though I came across something that made me smile, and even laugh. It’ll take me a bit to explain, so please bear with me. And if you choose not to, here is an entertaining and short explanation of “bear with me” versus “bare with me”.
Anyway, here we go with the facts:
So, what we have right now is a lot of Russian-speaking people sending “С Рождеством Христовым” via any means possible to a lot of other people. One of those means is Twitter. One of many Twitter features is Trending Topics (aka TT). This is an automatically generated list of most common phrases used across Twitter in some recent period of time (like an hour or two). And as so many other automated features, this one has its side effects.
Firstly, it seems that it doesn’t much care for the language or alphabet. It grabs any frequently used phrase in any language or any alphabet, puts it in the list of trending topics, and shows it to any user, no matter what his location or preferred language is.
Secondly, it seems that it tries to minimize the phrase by removing very short words. Like those consisting of only one or two characters.
So what we have by now is “Рождеством Христовым”, and not “С Рождеством Христовым”. And that phrase is a number one trending topic, shown to all Twitter users everywhere. Here is a screenshot.
Here starts the fun. Most people who see this, have no idea what is it all about. Many of those, who are trying to find out get confused by incorrect spelling and by the fact that Christmas is over already for most of the world. That I find funny.
But that’s not all. Since the phrase went up to trending topics, it got a lot of special attention. Humor. Some people started spreading rumors. For example, that “Рождеством Христовым” is the name of the new Russian nuclear bomb. Some others started using the phrase in famous quotes. For example, “I love the smell OF Рождеством Христовым in the morning!” (original quote talks about napalm and is from the movie “Apocalypse Now”). That I find hilarious. You can have a look yourself at everything that has been tweeted with this phrase.
And even that is not all. Twitter has been known for having hard times during activity spikes. Today is just one of such spikes. So Twitter is unstable, falling over the edge. And when it does so, it shows the famous Fail Whale.
This is cute and worth a smile, but there is still more to the story. The meaning of Fail Whale varies between people. Mashable once published an interview with the designer of the image. While I know the background of this image, I can’t help a different association. The one that Denis Lebel mentioned in the comment to that interview – the story of the Sperm Whale from Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Universe.
It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a Sperm Whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet and since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity.
Innocent “Merry Christmas” wishes, weird Cyrillic letters shown to the whole world, rumors of nuclear war from Russian, word play with famous quotes, Twitter outages, and flying whales – I find the mix hilarious. I hope you do too.
P.S.: To all those of you celebrating – Merry Christmas and С Рождеством Христовым.
New Year is the perfect time to raise hopeless hopes. Like any given Monday, or the first day of any month, it’s the time to start something that you hope to finish. People promise they will start (or stop) doing all sorts of things – quit smoking, start exercising, stop procrastinating, and so and so forth. This is non-sense of course, but that’s just what we, humans, do.
So in the spirit of a new era start, WordPress.com issued a challenge for 2011 – blog more. To help you complete the challenge, they created a separate website – DailyPost. This one will be updated daily with ideas and other bits of inspiration. All you need to do is post a single blog entry every day throughout 2011. If that sounds like too much, they have a lighter variation – a post a week. You don’t have to follow their subjects – post whatever you want. Just write something either daily or weekly. And to help others find and follow your stuff, tag your posts with postaday2011 or postaweek2011. That’s all.
I’ve done similar challenges before. Not necessarily they were centralized or aligned with someone else, but I did put myself to such a task before. And not only in blogging. For example, I’ve learned most that I know about photography in just a couple of months. It was when I followed someone advice to make a photograph every day. It didn’t matter what I was making a photograph of. Just that I made one. Of course, there were days when I didn’t have the camera around, or was too busy, or too lazy. But I was pretty close to a daily picture (see POTD – Picture Of The Day tag archives).And it did magic to my skills. And so did a blogging challenge.
Someone said somewhere that creativity requires fluency. In order to be creative, you have to be fluent. If you want to be creative in photography, your camera and equipment shouldn’t stay in your way. If you want to speak or write better, you shouldn’t need a dictionary for every other word. If you want to do experimental dancing, you should have good control of your body. And so on and so forth. But there is only one way to get better at something. It’s do that something. The more, the better.
So, if blogging sounds interesting to you, you should blog more. And it’s much easier to do it when you are not alone. Now is the time.
I’ve been quite busy last year. And I blogged much less than in previous years. I wanted to do more. And now I think I will. I will follow up with the challenge. Will you?