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ThoughtsPlease Support the ‘Make Keith Rich’ Cause

Building an Internet Empire takes time and money.  Because I am mortal the former is limited...but the latter you can help with.If you appreciate my articles and the value I add to the world...
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InternetJoomla or Wordpress?

Let me say straight up that I prefer Joomla to Wordpress because of its greater flexibility.Although both are open source Content Management Systems (CMS) their functionality is vastly...
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InternetRocketTheme.com

One of the premises of my Internet Empire is that, where ever possible, it must be one built around Open Source platforms (Joomla being my first choice) and using other people hard work...i.e. other...
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ThoughtsThe Internet Country

The Internet crosses boudaries and spans the entire globe.  Even China's Great Firewall cannot stop the interaction across its borders.Single YouTube videos make and break lives, single blog...
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InternetGoogle Notebook

Google Labs (Google Experimental Section) has recently put out the fantastic little FireFox plugin called "Google Notebooks".This simple little application allows you to store information...
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ThoughtsFree or Paid For Content?

Should you make the content on your website free or must users pay for it?This question is fundamental to how to make money from your website and there are two schools of thought:Make the content...
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BusinessOnline Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is becoming more and more important for those that are building lives online.  Personal blog attacks, spam and smear campaigns, and even mentioning by...
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ThoughtsThe Future Web - Mobile Aggregation

Aggregation is the process of accumulating content from across the Internet and placing it in an ordered and value-added manner in a single location.  This is not a new concept and has been...
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Case StudiesFractayle: The Collision of Worlds

Despite being analytical and financially inclined, I also have a strong literary streak. Fractayle.com was one of my first projects and was (and remains) what I call a ‘personal’ project;...
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InternetGoogle Custom Search

I've recently been playing around with Google's custom search engine service.  This service allows you to harness Google's database of websites and their content and run it through...
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BusinessFinancial Ads Rule!

I have a friend with a website far more popular than any one of mine, but interestingly enough my websites appear to make me far more money than his.  As money is obviously a sensitive topic I...
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BusinessGoogle AdSense

Part of Google’s success as a company is its AdSense programme.  Basically, Google’s AdSense operates by selling adverts based on key words to advertisers for, say, 50c a click...
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Further Articles
The Perfect Social Network
Written by Keith McLachlan   
Sunday, 13 July 2008

MySpace has spammers, FaceBook is a walled garden, Google has privacy issues, Twitter is unreliable...and so on.  Each major social networking site has something wrong with it and, despite their unique appeal, could easily have its market stolen from it by a better (new) social networking site.

So what would the perfect social network be like...?

The perfect social network would be an open platform that allows itself to integrate with other platforms and websites.  Despite this, there are a vast range of easy to manage security settings that allow users the choice of varying degrees of privacy.

Users should be able to make some parts of their profiles "public", some "private", and limit who of their friends sees what of their profile.  What we are going for here is perfect scalability of security and privacy settings.

Along with this open platform approach, the perfect social network would have very restrictive spamming controls.  Among these could be a "flagging" system where a user can flag another user as a "spammer".  Admin will then investigate the flagged user and come to a decision.

Another anti-spamming law would be the total blocking of links outside of a certain portal within the platform.  Within this "link-posting portal" in the platform, before users have even seen the links, the platform should ping the destination and come to a decision as to whether it is a spam-link or noth.  Built into this "link-posting portal" users could vote for each individual link, thus turning this anti-spamming device into a value-adding aggregator of sorts.

Within the platform, the perfect social network should have integrated communication formats.  What I mean by this is that the basic "public postings" (wall in Facebook), psuedo-emails, and IM are part of almost every social network...but no one integrate them.  You should be able to have a live conversation (IM) in public (wall) and hide parts of it (email), flag or star some of it (archiving and documentation) and even "tag" pictures, places, websites, and users in it (linkage).

Now...and here comes the controversial suggestion: the perfect social network should not be owned by anyone.

The colloborative platform ("wiki concept") should be applied to the network with users value in the network (via other users votes for them and their frequency of posts etc.) giving them greater admin responsibilities in the platform.  While the core platform should be unable to be changed, the social network should be as far as possible self-regulating.

While all our current social networks are dictators, the perfect social network actually embraces the Western worlds free market principles and applies a self-regulating democracy to its operations.

Other factors that need to be mentioned in these loose thoughts on the perfect social network would be:

  • It would be free,
  • It would have unobtrusive advertising (if at all),
  • and it would be light on bandwidth by using thumbnails of pictures (clickable to go large), etc.

In conclusion, the perfect social network would be scalable in its approach to security and privacy, with strong emphasis on self-regulation as a control for both spammers and for the organic growth of its users changing needs.  Although there are serious challenges (like how privacy and user admins interact...) in the wiki-social network concept, if it could be built then I reckon it could have a good chance of blowing the current competitors out of the water.

 
Self-education
Written by Keith McLachlan   
Saturday, 05 July 2008

I recently found the following fantastic article on Geeknews where the writer has compiled a fairly comprehensive list of Wikipedia articles for self-education of computer science.

Very interesting stuff...

Last Updated ( Saturday, 05 July 2008 )
 
Joomla III: Monetizing
Written by Keith McLachlan   
Wednesday, 25 June 2008

The pinnacle of website development is successful monetization.  As each website in your portfolio should generate income, the question of how to achieve this is crucial to building a successful Internet Empire.
Follows is my three trustworthy monetization extensions for Joomla:

AdSense Module (ClickSafe - Special Edition):

This module allows for easy, customizable and reliable display of google ads from your googe adsense account anywhere on your website.

A most important and self-managing method for monetizing your website that allows you just to focus on building the site and putting on quality content, while Google handles the advertisers.

Letterman Newsletter Component:

Wonderful and clean component for publishing a newsletter to select groups.

At first glance this component does not look to be a monetizing component...but consider that you can create specific groups that the newsletter will be published to... Simply create a paid-for subscription list (per annual or life membership) that is linked to a payment gateway, and add the paid for members to your subscription "elite" newsletter group, and your site has just become monetized.

VirtueMart:

VitueMart is simply the biggest and best ecommerce platform for Joomla.  Besides a range of its own plugins, you can create infinite categories, products, orders, discounts, shopper groups, and customers and link it directly into PayPal and other payment gateways...

A truly fantastic and powerful component.

Last Updated ( Monday, 23 June 2008 )
 
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