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Making Money With Social Media
It’s long been my theory that social media are a great fun tool, can even be used for marketing and promotion, but it still hasn’t figured out how to reliably make money. Actually, only eCommerce and porn are the two reliable moneymakers on the web ;-) That inspite of the fact that social web sites have actually accounted for more traffic than porn on the internet this year so far — first time ever.
Business Week writes a rather interesting article about The Trouble With Twitter:
Twitter’s business model is starting to show. An early sign came in April, when the popular microblogging service launched in Japan and the home page for every Japanese user included a big banner ad in the top right corner.
Then, on Aug. 7, Twitter made another change, this time in the U.S., by limiting the number of people a single user could connect with, or “follow,” to about 2,000. Most recently, on Aug. 14, Twitter made the biggest move yet to slash costs. It killed outbound message delivery to mobile phones via short message, or SMS, in all countries except the U.S., Canada, and India.
Taken together, these moves point to the trouble with Twitter. Investors and marketers have been agog over the potential for Twitter—unlike other social media properties, such as Facebook and MySpace (NWS)—to crack the code, finally, on wringing revenue from millions of users. But the optimists better brace for disappointment.
>> See the Busineess Week site for the full article.
Why the Olympics didn’t ‘Melt’ the Internet
This is a very interesting article about why the video traffic from the Olympics didn’t “melt” the internet. LimeLight (unlike Akamai) actually runs their own backbone which keeps a lot of traffic off the internet:
Sex, Drugs, Strawberries, and a New Bubble
You might have read about Cuil, the supposed Google killer which indexes three times as much content as Google does. Too bad it never surfaces anything relevant for me. And have you noticed that the “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages” hasn’t changed in days? Ok, you might guess, they’re not really going to kill Google. Instead I think we’re really re-living some sort of strange bubble at the moment.
First of all, check this out to get an insight into the inner workings of Cuil as a company. That sounds very 1999.
Secondly, working for the largest interactive agency in the world™, I’ve seen a lot of requests for proposals from a lot of companies that all want to build video search portals. That seems to be the next big thing. There are a few cool players out there, Truveo is one of them. Select sites are trying to index the videos by scene detection and voice recognition software in addition to standard metadata.
A lot of players want to build similar portals all of a sudden. Unfortunately there aren’t any really viable off-the-shelf search engine technologies you can buy to do this right. If I look at FAST Search, which is still one of my favorite engines and happens to be owned by Microsoft, they have a multimedia search add-on I want to evaluate soon (yet I’m told not to get my hopes up). I think sophisticated video search portals will be limited to a very few capable players that can invest in the technology themselves and have the proper funding for the R&D and necessary server farm required to parse through all video on the web.
And just to round off the argument, I am surprised at how many of these projects don’t have clear business models (Cuil included). It might be cool, but what’s the point if it doesn’t make money? Just because Google can throw money at 15 technologies to get one out of it that works doesn’t you should.
Anyhow, I think we’re in the middle of a (video) search bubble and it’ll be very interesting to see which players emerge from it as leaders!
Ode to M0n0wall
About half a year ago I bought an Alix 2C3 embedded system board. It’s got a 500 MHz Geode CPU, 256 MB of RAM, a mini-PCI slot (for a wireless card), 3 network interfaces, and a compact flash slot (CF-card as hard drive). It’s running m0n0wall, a free FreeBSD-based firewall software and is essentially the entry point into my home network. I had looked at other alternatives such as pfsense, yet I found m0n0wall convincingly simple and to the point. And it boots up fast from a 256M flash card.
I used to rely on a Linux box to provide my basic network needs like DHCP and DNS and every time I rebooted the box my network stopped working. This little dedicated box is not running all of it. With the three network interfaces I created LAN, DMZ, and WAN zones. The LAN is hooked up to my Linux server and wireless (for the iMac and laptops), the DMZ is connected to a virtual machine on the Linux server which is basically my public-facing web server (Ubuntu!). The WAN is directly hooked up to the cable modem.
Let’s look at some of the features that have led me come to adore m0n0wall:
- Web-based admin interface with user management capabilities
- DNS relay
- DHCP Server (much more configurable than a standard wireless router)
- Firewall and NAT rules (stateful packet filtering)
- Traffic Shaper (which I use to throttle the traffic on my public web server)
- VPN (PPTP and IPSec) - I just love VPN-ing in to my home network from work
- Logs, debugging support, and live traffic graphs
- Dynamic DNS integration (e.g. with DynDNS in my case)
Here are some fun screenshots:
 Intro Screen |
 Firewall Configuration |
 Traffic Graph |
Related Links: M0n0wall | Alix Boards | M0n0wall traffic shapping
Site Update!
The upgrade to Wordpress 2.6 wasn’t quite as seamless as it should have been but everything seems to work fine now. I further decided to go for a new - clean and simple - theme which is now optimized for 1024×768 - more content! Learn more about all the new features in Wordpress 2.6.
This site now also has a mobile version (just point your phone at it) thanks to the wordpress mobile plugin. I also integrated Twitter. Or, in web 2.0 talk: this is so like totally awesome :)
Installing WSS 3.0 on 2003 Server R2 / 64 Bit
Install IIS
Add the IIS server role via the “Manage your server” panel.
If you’re running on a 64 bit OS (which is the way of the future) things are, as usual, a little more painful. First, let’s disable the quirky 32/64bit mixed mode in IIS and enable full 64 bit .NET support (basics from Dan Bartel’s site):
- Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
- Type the following command to disable the 32-bit mode:
cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 0
- Type the following command to install the version of ASP.NET 2.0 and to install the script maps at the IIS root and under:
%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i
- Make sure that the status of ASP.NET version 2.0.40607 is set to Allowed in the Web service extension list in Internet Information Services Manager.
Note the build version of ASP.NET 2.0 may differ depending on what the currently released build version is.
Install WSS 3.0
WSS is the foundation underneath MOSS 2007. If running on 64 bit, don’t even bother installing the “Sharpoint Services” server role — it’s really a 32 bit version.
- Download WSS 3.0 including SP1 for 64 bit from Microsoft.
- If the setup terminates with the error that ASP.NET is not a registered web server extension in IIS, fire up the IIS command center and in “Web Service Extensions” change the status of ASP.NET from prohibited to allowed. Re-Run the installer.
- When faced with the option whether to install “Advanced” or “Basic” — just opt for basic. Advanced will simply allow you to specify the location of the content index file and whether you’d like a web front-end or standalone installation.
- Run through the admin wizard at the end when offered (it’ll set up the database etc).
- After this is done, you should be able to see the basic WSS portal by pointing your browser at your own computer.
Hair & Nail Deli Salad *yum*
I walk by this every day, but I finally snapped a picture. Feel like eating some hair and nail in your salad?
Virtual Box
On the note of awesome pieces of software. My work laptop died on a work-from-home-day, so I “had to make due” with my home Linux server (just a dual core with 8G of RAM running CentOS 5.1/64).
After configuring what had been a headless server with a few VMWare Server virtual machines to be a full desktop environment, I decided to give Virtual Box, the open source virtualization solution from Innotek (which was just acquired by Sun) a try.
Compatibility
VirtualBox runs Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts. OpenSolaris! I’ve wanted to set up a fat Solaris box at home but always shied back because of the lack of virtualization. I still won’t do it now and my little Ultra 5 will continue to collect dust in the corner. But I could!
Installation
Just download the installer (RPM in my case) from the web site and start it up. Unlike VMWare Workstation, VirtualBox runs alongside VMWare Server just fine.
Creating a new VM and installing Windows XP in it was just as easy as it is in VMWare. Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions in the guest operating system will install the correct graphics and mouse drivers for seamless operation.
Seamless Mode
The fanciest part is the seamless mode which blends the virtual Windows instance directly into the Linux UI (it really looks just like Parallels on a Mac).
Conclusion
What an awesome piece of open source software. This will be my first choice from now on under Linux.
Scary Landing
This is the scariest landing I’ve seen in a long time, especially since I went through a similar landing at the same airport (Hamburg) a few years ago. It’s a lot less scary when you’re in the plane..
Lunar Eclipse
There was a perfectly visible lunar eclipse last night, and for a change during normal awake times. Of course I forgot about it and didn’t look until I saw it on the 11 o’clock “news”, when I decided to bundle up and take some snapshots:
