Monthly Archives: June 2008

New Section of BenParr.com – Introducing the Internet Tools Wiki

Posted on June 12, 2008 by Ben Parr| 1 Comment



For the last few days, I’ve been working on some design and functionality features of BenParr.com. I’m nowhere near done, but I’m ready to release a new section of BenParr.com: The Internet Tools Wiki

The Internet Tools Wiki is a project designed to aggregate the most useful information on the internet regarding internet tools and social media. What does that mean? It means that, unlike Crunchbase or Wikipedia, which are focused on general, non-biased information about companies and products, the Internet Tools Wiki is chiefly concerned with effective utilization of these products and aggregates the most impressive articles and community knowledge to that end. In the next few weeks and months, you can expect blog articles to coincide with wiki articles, for articles across the net to be added to the Internet Tools Wiki Database, and for more and more tools to be added over time.

The information you will find on most of the wiki pages:

  • A Brief Description of the internet tool, no more than two sentences
  • A Value Proposition explaining why you should use the tool, no more than two sentences
  • BenParr.com Articles, an aggregate of all relevant articles on improving your use of an Internet tool from the BenParr.com blog
  • Other Featured Articles, a collection of articles from myself and the community on how to best utilize each Internet tool.
  • Community Advice, the section where users can place their tips, tricks, and information on how to best utilize Internet tools.

The wiki is currently bare bones and does not have proper information for most internet tools – That will come with time. Instead, functionality and information will be gradually added as articles are written and found.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to the wiki and to add their tips and information . You are also welcome to add new tools and new articles.

Expect more integration between the blog and the wiki as time goes on and my coding skills improve. In the meantime, I hope you get some utility and usefulness out of the Internet Tools Wiki!

- Ben

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Posted in Announcements, Productivity, Projects

Does Blogging help make you a better overall Writer?

Posted on June 10, 2008 by Ben Parr| 1 Comment

Hold onto your obvious judgment for a moment while I explain what I’m talking about.

So as many of you know, I’m not only a blogger, but also an author. I’m nearing the end of my first novel, The Eternal Sphere, which I hope to be the first of five or six books depicting a society and characters in search of redemption. I’ve been writing the novel for years, far longer than I have been blogging.

When I first started reading blogs, I immediately noticed the difference in writing styles: pithier, more images, a focus on emphasizing key point via bullets or bolding, and far less emphasis on details. This is how I write my blog articles as well. I try to highlight the key points and hit them early. You’ll find bolding and bullet points a great deal in my articles. But in my novel writing, it’s a completely different style of writing. I “see” the images, the fights, the suffering of my characters, the landscapes and I try to convey as much of that as I can to the reader. I am conveying this through dialogue and very descriptive writing.

So far, my novel writing hasn’t been drastically affected by my blog writing, but it’s tough for me to know objectively. While I do want my novel to be a bit pithier, I do not want it to be like a blog. So I started to wonder if the general blog writing and reading style, pithy and quickly scanned, is good for my overall writing.

So here’s some pros and cons of blogging towards your overall writing I came up with:

Pros

  • Able to write every day – Constant writing improves your technique
  • Must read others’ material to properly blog – It’s simple, the more reading you do, the better you become as a writer. More ideas, more techniques, more exposure via blogging
  • Research – You’re doing constant research on the internet to write many of your posts, to find links, etc. Great also for non-fiction writing.
  • Exposure to far more thoughts and opinions – What you may lose in the length and quality of some authors you gain in the quantity. Yes, seeing so many different styles helps your own.
  • Exploring Topics you Love – You better be blogging because you’re passionate about a topic
  • Commenting – You can get the thoughts of your readers almost instantly, something you don’t really get with other types of writing.

Cons

  • Not working with plots – You’re mostly writing about news or opinion. With novels, you’re writing in arcs, plots, and longer term thinking.
  • Not reading as many books – You may read more blogs, but that inevitably takes away from time you could be reading novels or other great literary works. I try to make up for this by audio books while I work out, but that isn’t a perfect substitute.
  • Heavier on Images rather than imagery – When’s the last time you read a book that had pictures on every page? Even non-fiction books have fewer images than blog posts.
  • Pithier writing leaves out details and nuances – You need to convey a lot more to readers in a book or a paper. In blog posts, you can simply link. Sometimes it makes for lazy writing.

I could go on with a list, but the question I posed in the title is a bit misleading. Sure blogging helps your writing, but it’s a different style of writing. The question should be: Are you able to adjust your writing style to the need, topic, and audience you’re writing to? If you can, then constant writing will get your creative and writing juices flowing. If not, then you need to concentrate on one type of writing or be more conscious about altering your style of writing for your intended audience.

As a bonus: 34 Writing Tips to help make you a better writer.

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Posted in My musings, Productivity

7 Things Google should (and probably would) do if it buys Digg

Posted on June 8, 2008 by Ben Parr| 72 Comments

Update: Amazing response. Subscribe if you want more and watch for my new blog, TechThrill.
Not even a few months ago, Digg was on the verge of being bought out by Google or Microsoft. While those rumors have largely disappeared, the possibility (and even likelihood) of one of the two giants snatching up Digg is still prominent.


I had a debate with a friend of mine over the usefulness and future of Digg. It got me thinking about which direction Digg is headed. So I am performing a thought experiment to explore the possibilities (I love these).

What should each of these companies do with Digg if it bought the social media and user-chosen content powerhouse? Where would the integration points be and what would be the long-term strategy and direction for Digg under new overlords? And how would an acquisition affect the Internet landscape?

I’m going to start with Google (Microsoft will be next week). After that, there will be one more article about the impact of Digg on the internet.

So without further ado, here’s 7 things Google should do if it buys Digg:

1) Integrate Digg with Google News and the news algorithm

Google is a company of synergies. Utilizing its unparalleled efficiency in search in all of its products gives it a distinct advantage. Integrating your email with Google calendar keeps you on the Google servers (and makes life quite easy, too!). You get the idea.

The same would hold true for Digg if they buy it. There are many ways to incorporate Digg as the preferred social content destination of the Google empire. I’ll start off with Google News.

Google News aggregates the major news into one simple and efficient interface. But its relevancy and popularity rankings for stories of similar topics can always be improved and Digg would help in that endeavor.

Yes, the male-skewed demographic of Digg may not be the best source of demographic information for Google News, but it is a good indicator of the popularity of major news stories, of the most popular article within a certain topic, and can help find more obscure stories that should be on more peoples’ radars. Also, over time, the Digg demographic would become more representative of the general internet population. See #5 below.

Google could do a few tweaks to the Google News algorithm, nothing big, to improve the rankings of news articles within categories and to bring out some of the more obscure but very interesting news of the day. Also, Digg icons next to Google news stories. News stories are what reach the Digg front page the most often, so this integration feels natural.

2) Place Digg icons in search results (but do it methodically)

Let’s get a little more controversial. Digg is the largest player in the social media space, but Digg is still small compared to the vastness of the Internet. Google isn’t though, and it can leverage that size and reach to really combine the social with the computational. Social search engines like Mahalo and Wikia Search are already beginning to fill their niches. Although it’s unlikely, it’s possible that one of these engines innovates enough to knock Google on its ass, or at least give it major headaches. Hell, just look at Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Internet Explorer.

The other thing is that people power can actually improve search results, weed through irrelevant data, and bring up the best information. To that end, if Google bought Digg, it must be committed to integrating social data into its overall data empire, and it starts with Google Search. The first step in this process would be integrating Digg into Google Search results.

Next to the “Cached – Similar pages – Note this” and other link items that appear with all Google search results, there would be a link with either “# Digg(s)” or “Digg this.” Perhaps limit it to certain topics, to sites with a previously popular story on Digg, or don’t have the Digg link appear until there’s a predetermined # of Diggs (by algorithm), but integrate Digg if you buy it, Google. Hell, Google has something similar to the Digg/Bury system in its Google Experimental Search program.

Yes, this suggestion is a bit more radical, but there’s no other way if Google buys Digg. It must expand the site, its demographic, and its influence on the web. The Digg community would be a lot larger if Google took it over.

3) Heavily tweak the Digg algorithm based on Google’s massive stores of data

Continue reading →

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Posted in My musings, Tech

FriendFeed Blog Comments – Challenging Disqus and all blog commenting

Posted on June 7, 2008 by Ben Parr| 1 Comment

(update: FriendFeed comments work again. I think there’s a time delay.)






So if you scroll down (on individual posts), you’re going to find something new: FriendFeed comments appear on my blog! FriendFeed, the rapidly rising lifestreaming service, allows you to comment on any item that comes through FriendFeed. Some blog posts and twitter comments can have 50+ comments, and that number is rapidly rising as more and more people sign up for FriendFeed.

Well today I stumbled upon this post on FriendFeed by Chris Pirillo that he had added FriendFeed comments to his blog via a WordPress plugin by Glenn Slaven

Glenn, thank you.

Now as you can see, any comments on this post (or any post) via FriendFeed will appear under my normal Disqus comments. Plus, you can post to FriendFeed via my blog. Disqus, a customizable and dynamic blog commenting software, is what I use to run comments on my blog currently and I couldn’t be happier.

But with FriendFeed comments on blogs, I wonder: Could it compete with Disqus? And then I wondered: Could this be the start of something bigger?

First on Disqus: One of Disqus’s main advantages is that you can track the comments of someone you like across multiple blogs. Another is that it can help build community around comments via a “community page” hosted on disqus’s servers.

My argument is that FriendFeed performs both of those functions better. You can track a person’s comments on blog posts via FriendFeed. Hell, you can track a person’s Disqus comments via your FriendFeed too. Now that those comments appear on blog pages, everyone can see them too! A person doesn’t even have to join FriendFeed, already a more popular service than Disqus, to see what a person they like is saying on not only blogs, but on YouTubes, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s far more dynamic of a tracking system than Disqus.

The second, on community: You can build community around FriendFeed. You can encourage people to visit your FriendFeed blog posts (it’s real simple to give a link that only shows your FriendFeed blog posts) and to comment via FriendFeed OR the blog. I may very well make FriendFeed my “message boards,” so to speak.

Of course, you have to sign up for FriendFeed to comment via FriendFeed, which of course makes regular commenting much easier to use. But as more and more use FriendFeed, you’re going to see more and more people comment via FriendFeed rather than Disqus, WordPress, or any other commenting system. That could be bad news for Disqus, but good news for the rest of us.

As more people install this plug-in and integrate FriendFeed comments into their blogs, there may very well be a dynamic shift in how FriendFeed is used and perceived. Hell, this could be the beginning of a movement that makes FriendFeed mainstream. This grants FriendFeed more exposure and leaves people who are not currently part of the FriendFeed universe with a desire to be heard (one that can only be fed by joining FriendFeed.


FriendFeed comments on blogs is a game changer, people.

- Ben
(By the way, I encourage you to comment on this blog via FriendFeed and then to follow me!)

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Posted in Internet Tools, Social Media, Tech

Finding a Programming Co-Founder/Partner when you are NOT a programmer

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Ben Parr| Leave a comment

Does this look like gibberish to you?
Every so often I do some consulting on internet tools, optimization, and early-stage entrepreneurship. Today, I had the pleasure of sitting down with a beautiful woman, a college entrepreneur, trying to start an internet service. The difficulty for her and her partner? Finding a partner with the programming experience they lack.

It’s tough to enter the internet space without having coding experience. I myself have been learning PHP on the side so I can personally build all of the ideas in my head. However, that lack of experience should not, by any means, stop you from realizing your dreams of building your idea to fruition. While I do suggest learning some code so you at least understand what can and can’t be done with PHP, Ruby on Rails, or whichever language you choose, you’re going to want someone with the experience and skill to get it done. Yes, you could outsource your idea to a firm to build it, but you’re not going to get the same passion and commitment to the project and to the customers as you will have.

I gave her a few resources for finding a non-programming partner, and I wanted to share a few of them with you. Almost all of them are actually links from YCombinator’s Hacker News, but you’re not going to be disappointed with the conversations and advice given in the links below. Also a quick thanks to the Startups Wiki YC Archive for most of the links.

And as a bonus (and because I love Ittybiz),

Hope this helps some of you!

- Ben

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Posted in Entrepreneurship

Youniverse.com – How Social and Dating Websites Should Work (or at least a step in the right direction)

Posted on June 5, 2008 by Ben Parr| 7 Comments

Youniverse.com




I usually talk about internet tools for business, but they also should be made and used for pleasure and personal fun. And by analyzing these types of tools, we can learn more about what works and what doesn’t for online business as well.

This time, let’s talk about the most popular of personal pleasure tools: dating websites. Whether it’s because we don’t need them, don’t want to be seen as needing them, or are just horribly annoyed by them, they have become one of the mysterious creatures of the internet. eHarmony for those looking for a serious relationship. OkCupid for those looking for something simple and free. Adult FriendFinder for the horny guys who can’t get any the traditional way.

Okay, okay, I’m getting off topic. Let’s talk about Youniverse now.

Youniverse is a bare-bones dating/social meeting service. I say bare-bones because some of the major functionality of a dating service (like the inability to select sexual preference) is missing.

Despite that, however, Youniverse gets several things right. First of all, it creates an interesting and engaging quiz and personality profiling system. Instead of answering dreary and dreadfully similar personality and love quizzes, youniverse spices it up with image surveys, which allow you to choose images to represent your thoughts and feelings.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a very visual person, and it was actually fun to go through some of the great images they have for their quizzes.

The rest of youniverse you can imagine: match you up with people similar to you, browse other profiles, ask people you don’t know out on dates and seem creepy in the process. But imagini, which built youniverse, has taken a step in the right direction.

But hell, they have a ton to do. OkCupid works as a system because there’s a neverending series of quizzes and questions made by users that narrows down the choices of “potential” dates little by little. Youniverse simply doesn’t have enough questions to do that. Allowing for user-created quizzes and for more of the general features of a dating and social meeting website will do youniverse good.

Youniverse received mostly unnoticed coverage on Mashable and Techcrunch today. I think Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch does get it right when he says that imagini hasn’t launched a true dating site. But the potential is there and I think the “imageDNA” model may very well be copied by other dating services and even other businesses. When you ask your audience to participate with your website, it has to be engaging. Visuals (so long as they load fast) are central to that march.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to visit my Youniverse profile, though I have this feeling I’m going to regret ever posting a link to it on my blog.

- Ben

Your thoughts? Is Youniverse really any different than other dating site?

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Posted in Innovation, Internet Tools

FriendFeed – How to use it to track the chatter

Posted on June 4, 2008 by Ben Parr| 3 Comments

A major up-and-comer in the internet startup and social media space has been FriendFeed, the lifestreaming service that allows you to track what your friends are doing on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, and the blogosphere. Unfortunately, most of your friends are probably not using FriendFeed, at least yet. But that doesn’t mean that FriendFeed isn’t very, very useful. I’m going to talk about the usefulness of FriendFeed as a social media organizer in a future post, but this time I want to talk about how to use FriendFeed to follow the chatter, the buzz, and even mentions of your company or blog (or of yourself).

FriendFeed is the ideal place to track all of those mentions. The first key to Friendfeed is its importing of activity all across the internet. I can find out what, oh, social media expert Muhammad Saleem is Digging or I can find out what the hell top blogger Robert Scoble is up to (wait, why do I care again? Oh yeah, he sets trends).

The second key thing that FriendFeed does is create conversations around some of these major pieces of information. To the left is the beginning of some search results I did for Obama. There’s at least 13 comments/conversations and growing for that single link alone. Tracking the entire conversation on Obama gives you an even greater picture of what people are thinking, although I admit that it’s a tech-saavy, early-adopting crowd. Regardless, these people set trends and you want them setting trends for you or your blog in a positive direction.

Some things you can do to track the chatter:

  • Add trend setters to your FriendFeed. Scoble may be annoying at times (sorry Robert, it’s true!), but he is at the pulse of a lot of trends. Follow the top bloggers and trend setters in your industry to gain a better picture of what is happening.
  • Track non-users of FriendFeed: Another brilliant feature of FriendFeed is the ability to track people who aren’t even on FriendFeed via “imaginary feeds”. If your favorite Digger is NOT on FriendFeed, you can just input his username as an imaginary feed and you’ll get his updates in your FriendFeed. Perfect if you don’t want to track too many websites in the social media space.
  • Search! FriendFeed has a search option now, and you should utilize it to the best of your ability. Keep track of mentions of your blog or mentions of your competitors.
  • Join Relevant Rooms. Rooms are basically conversation hubs within FriendFeed. I’m in the Social Media and All Things Productivity Rooms. With them, I can follow conversations on my favorite and important subjects along with others who know a thing or two about each subject. I think it’s best if you make sure conversations from your rooms appear in you main feed.
  • Add every service you use! The more you appear on other FriendFeeds, the more you raise your profile and the more interesting conversations you will start. Import your blogs and social websites at the least.

    • There’s much more to FriendFeed than that. And it’s a new service, meaning many more features are coming. If you do things right, you can make FriendFeed your entire hub for social media and internet chatter tracking.

    - Ben

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Posted in Business

18 Key Firefox Extensions That Improve Online Productivity

Posted on June 2, 2008 by Ben Parr| 4 Comments

I’m shocked companies still use Internet Explorer as their standard browser for business. I’m not about to go into a rant about how Firefox is more secure or how it wins in the speed tests, but if those reasons haven’t convinced you to switch your browser or your company’s browser to Firefox, then I have one more reason:


Productivity

Just THINK about how many hours you spend every day, every week, every year of your life at a web browser. Almost literally every minute you are on a computer. That’s a lot of hours, and that’s a lot of time that’s wasted by inefficient hand motions, loading times, and bad habits.

These extensions below help solve those problems and making browsing the internet more useful. Period. If you’re the head of a company and reading this, I’d require that these extensions be installed on every computer and your people trained in their use. Two hours of training is going to turn into hundreds of hours of saved time.

I’ve come up with a list of 18 Firefox extensions that perform a variety of uses. I went for a breadth of extensions that covered many facets of your browsing experience, from email to search. There’s tons of others that do a great job helping you gather information and accomplish tasks faster, but these stand out of the crowd.

I’ve categorized the list for easier browsing!
So without further ado, 18 Key Firefox Extension that Improve Online Productivity:

General Functionality Improvements

  • 1) DownthemAll:

    • Have a page of images or powerpoints you want to put on your computer, but don’t want to click and save them all? Want to just grab the Mp3s from a webpage? DownthemAll can do it in one swift motion. Grab a group of images for your future use with one or two clicks.

    Why it improves productivity: Allows you to download many items at once, thus saving time.

  • 2) Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer:

    • Bookmark Synchonizer allows you to access your bookmarks from everywhere. If you have a different computer at work than you do at home, this is an absolute must. Anytime you add a site to your bookmarks at work, it adds it to your home computer. In addition, you can access your bookmarks from ANY computer. Never leave home without your favorite websites.

    Why it improves productivity: Bookmarks can be transferred to work, personal, or public computers with absolute ease, allowing you to access all of your important websites from anywhere.

  • 3) InterClue:

    • Preview links before you click them. The moment you hover over a link, you’ll know what website the link directs to, how many words/characters are on the page, be offered a preview and statistics on the site, and have the ability to email or copy the link. It has even more features you can add as well.

    Why it improves productivity: Allows you to preview links before clicking. Knowing the source of links allows you to skip needless link clicking to find information. Also great at gathering information.

  • 4) Text Link:

    • You’ll find, especially on message boards, that people will post links but not make them hyperlinks (aka make them clickable). Text link fixes that. Double click on any URL, and it’ll take you there. Very simple, very effective.

    Why it improves productivity: No need to copy and paste links ever again.

  • 5) FireGestures:

    • Firefox takes on new meaning with FireGestures. With some mouse commands, you can do everything from open new tabs to opening scrollable tab menus to printing pages. Right click and move the mouse up and down and the page reloads. Hold down left click and then press right click and you’re taken to the next tab. Hold down right click and scroll the mouse wheel down and a list of all your tabs appears in a simple pop-up. With the ability to create your own gestures and commands, your browsing experience becomes not only faster, but smarter.

    Why it improves productivity: Removes needless clicking. Once you get the hang of it, browsing goes by in a flash. By far the best way to browse in Firefox.

    Continue reading →

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Posted in Internet Tools, Productivity