The month of February 2011 I decided to run a month long blogging series dedicated to Black’s in Technology.  I decided to showcase a host of African American inventors.  The Idea came from a friend of mine Wayne Sutton who runs SocialWayne.com he came up with an idea a couple of years ago for 28daysofdiversity.com.  Well following in his footsteps I decided to copy his idea, but with different flair.  I decided that most African American’s don’t get the opportunity to be highlighted in our everyday lives, but they are just as important as any Inventor.

I thought about doing this last year but for what ever the reason I didn’t do it, and I wanted to jump on this opportunity for 2011.  I will say that it’s easy to blog about something that your passionate about, but when it comes to a blogging series, and no less about people who may have passed away and your research is limited, that’s a different story.  Your writing from stories all over the internet some factual and some fake, you can’t get the word from the horses mouth so to say.  It takes some time to get your information togeather, you need to approach the task as an overall achievement up front.

Here are a couple of my tips for how to address a month long series in blogging, or just a series in blogging over all.

• Creating the concept is easy, but you must be ready to write it down, even if it’s not going to make it to publish (your ideas are important, don’t loose them because you thought it was not important)
• Come up with the number of post or days up front, this helps you know how many post you will be publishing, and your not brainstorming every night looking to add more and more post that will drag your series out.
• Have your days mapped out, so you know who your going to talk about and on what day (This does not mean you have to write all your information up front)  You do need to know who’s coming next so you can be prepared
• If your doing research and it seems your not getting anywhere, make sure to use the advance search capabilities of Google (I know other search engines exsist, but this one just seems to give me what I want the way I want it) i.e. images, blogs, video, and more.
• I just wanted to give a couple of tips for how to create a series in blogging on a topic or subject.

I hope my tips are helpful I know there are other sources that have probably put out information like this, add that to your list of current reads on “Creating a blogging series”

TBTR

February is here and that means “Black History Month” most of us remember these days from our childhood where schools would try and give some information about the contributions that African Americans have given to history. Keeping with that theme I decided to give the world a little bit of Black History myself. I decided to blog about  28 individuals over 28 days that have contributed to Black History with a Technology core.

If you read this blog then you know how often I post… almost once every two months, and if you know me then you can see how this could be a disaster or a compelling success. I want this to be a success, and I’m going to make sure I keep going with valid information about African Americans that have contributed to Black History in some Technological way.  If you want to thank someone for giving me the bug to do this, it’s my good friend Wayne Sutton his blog is here and he created the site “28 day of diversity“.

How ever big or small I want to take a moment to give light to some old and some new individuals that are making waves in Technology or have made waves. A word of caution I’m not here to debate all that these people have done in the world right or wrong, it’s a light that I want to use to help someone or give someone information they may not have known.

So pull up a chair and take a moment to read some of these post I will be bringing to you each and every day. By all means please send comments good or bad so that we can start a dialog about these people here on TBTR.

I hope you enjoy this “28 days of Black History in Technology”

TBTR

introductions are usually blad, not at Apple

Many companies over the past 2 years have been trying desperately to appease the public, and most of all their shareholders during these financial times.  One company has been moved to display a calm and really serious valor for bringing innovation in times of hardship.  That company is apple with numerous consumer items at arms length it’s only fitting that they introduce one of the most anticipated items of the year.  On January 27th Apple let the world in on a secret that only the blogs were buzzing about for months.  Apple introduced the iPad which for lack of a better word seems “perfect”.

While some people look at these kind of events with one blind eye and deaf ears, when Apple speaks it’s like the old E.F. Hutton of the 80 “people listen”.  The keynote speech is up for anyone to download, and for those interested in Apple products I would say take a look at this Keynote.  While the CEO Steve Jobs looks surprisingly well, he is very thin, when you get past his lanky stance you get to the meat and potatoes of this event “The iPad”.

Simply "Perfect!"

What is it?

Apple says “It’s the best way to experience the web, email, photos, and video. Hands down.”  It’s a multi-Touch computer that enables you to do all of the above and more.  It weights just 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7 inch LED display.  Talk about beautiful products, this has to go down in history as just plan ass cool.  So many people have said that the iPad just looks like and over sized iTouch.  I will say it does have some cool features that allow you to surf the web, respond to emails, watch videos, and by all means even create & edit documents and presentations using iWork.  You get productivity in a small package that can make your life easier while traveling, having a client meeting, or just plain old surfing the web.

What does it do?

Well I think every person using a iPad will have an opportunity to decide how this question is solved.  We know you can surf the internet using safari no doubt (the build in browser in all apple products).  We also know the iPad has the capability to provide email in a small package, while so many of us are tied to our desk to read, and respond to email the iPad gives you a chance to come out of your email comfort zone.  Think about those photos that you have on your computer, say you want to organize them.  You can do that and more with the iPad, it gives you a chance to edit, move, and also watch some amazing slide shows right from the iPad.  It’s helps ease your access to pictures that you would normally have to display on a laptop.  No more, you now get a chance to show the best slide shows of your summer vacation at any time to anyone.  Think about, if your a photographer, and you want to show people more about photography and how you seem to capture the moment.  It’s all right here on the iPad.  We could talk about how well the device is tied to all the music you already own in iTunes, or the more than 140,000 apps in the iTunes app stores,  no need to buy your apps all over again, they work already out of the box on the iPad

Last, but not least the iPad has something very new to the Apple Store, iBooks.  Steve Jobs showed how effortlessly the iPad is able to display your books to be used as an e-book reader.  With a battery life of about 10 hours you could read most of a great novel during a trip overseas.  While there are other e-book readers out there, I don’t think you will find one that does so much more than just read books.  Lets be honest other e-readers only display in monochrome, but don’t we read in color?

Why should I want one?

I could sit hear and think of numerous reason why the iPad would be a great purchase, weather your a mac or windows fan.  Take these notes with you How much does it weigh? 1.5 pounds.  Can I surf the internet? Yes Am I able to listen to my music? Yes Do I get a chance to slow a slide presentation with out taking 10 minutes of messing around with the VGA cables and trying to get my laptop to display on the projector? Yes Do I get more precise use of Google Maps? Yes Notes and Contacts are included.  Honestly what more can you ask for in such a small package.  While netbooks have been making great strides, you need to understand the value of this new product.  I will never say that something fits all, I think its possible that Apple has created a product that’s not only pleasing to the eye but pleasing to the pocket book.

Take some time to get to know the iPad here at the Apple site, also everybody will have an opinion it’s not right for every occasion, but it’s damn close.  Congratulations Apple for being the true innovator we always knew you were, keep up the good work.

TBTR

I have been thinking for a while about keeping this blog going, and for the moment the appeal is just not there.  I could say that talking about technology is getting…shall I say boring and uneventful.  Personally I have been reading more and more, and since I have gotten rid of cable I have also tried to stay away from the computer more and more.  Reading was never a passion of mine, but lately I’ve read some really good books.  I guess I’m just taking a little bit of time to look inside and figure out what direction I’m going.

I hope to see you on the other side in 2010.

Happy Holidays

Jayson Flint

While Microsoft and Yahoo pounded out a new long awaited partnership, a small company has firmly placed it’s hat into the arena as a Real-time search engine, Twitter.com.  Twitter has long been seen as a site for uber geeks, and that thing people do for fun, but today Biz Stone one of the founders of Twitter announced on the Official Twitter blog about the new home page redesign.

It looks like they have made a change for the better or maybe the worst (more about that later).  The new design shows a focus on topics that are hot by the minute, day, and month.  This is showing up as a fire storm on the internet it’s obvious that twitter is really trying to make money by positioning themselves in a better way to grow and create revenue.

Twitter began as a rudimentary social tool based on the concept of status messages but together with those who use it every day, the service has taught us what it wants to be. From features invented by users to applications built on the platform, we’re still discovering potential. Twitter has moved from simple social networking into a new kind of communication and a valuable source of timely information. Also, it’s fun.

We all know how many companies have failed at trying to change the original concept of having fun while being different from the rest of the pack.  Twitter will remain different from Bing.com and Yahoo.com which are both horrible in there own little ways.  A head of twitter I see a lot of changes to the culture and pure awesomeness of the site I have come to know and love.  You see twitter while a darling in the social world is burning through cash like Netscape was during the Internet Explorer invasion.  The only way for twitter to survive and stay a float is to do something that gives them more appeal and makes us all look at them like the kid that got beat up on the playground.  You feel sorry for the poor guy, but those who were his friends from the beginning will remain loyal and now tell more friends just how awesome he really is.

The internet has long been buzzing about what twitter can do to start making money, I think this is one of the items on the radar along with paid accounts, which hopefully will give you more capability.  I think the problem with twitter coming up with paid capabilities is the fact that most of what they think up will have already been made by a third party app using the Open twitter API.

While it has been a challenge trying to explain what twitter is to a lot of my friends who are not twitter users, this looks like at least I can tell them use twitter when you want to search a topic that is right now Real-time.  If a huge news story hits the wire, it’s almost a given it was first reported in 140 characters on twitter.  The appeal to a lot of people is the always on and current topics that seem to find it’s way into twitter.  Only time will tell if this “Search Engine direction” is a good move or not, we do know this twitter is here to stay and I’m loving every minute of my 140 characters.

Tell me what you think about twitters new direction by leaving a comment

TBTR

WordPress hands down might be the best blogging platform around, but with so many changes so quickly do you really need to upgrade today?  I always say when it comes to upgrades on blogs or on standard Operating systems, unless the update is a critical patch don’t upgrade immediately.  Most of the time you find that if you don’t need to upgrade then take your time and let the experts do all the break fix testing.

New WordPress 2.8 Blog Post

Give the community time to download and install especially those who are new to blogging and WordPress.  I would say give it about a month before going for the upgrade and if there are plug-ins that you use check out the developers site to see if they have checked that it works or is having issues before you upgrade.  WordPress is at version 2.8 which means in my opinion if your at anything below 2.7 you need to a least upgrade to 2.7.  With that said please check your plug-ins before upgrading this will help you in the long run.

On the other hand WordPress 2.8 seems to be another great release from the guys/gals at wordpress.org.  They say that over 700 fixes have been made to this version.  WordPress has release a video that shows some of the improvements and I would say those improvements alone are reason to upgrade, but again wait a month and I think you well be out of hot water by then.

Enjoy,

TBTR

Spammers

Looking over my friendfeed today I came across a post from Lockergnome that simply said “Spammers Harvesting Sorrow From Twitter“.
The post talks about how spammers could be harvesting email addresses
directly from your own steam on twitter.  Lockergnome referenced the
article from ZDNet “Spammers harvesting emails from Twitter – in real time”
And while the article talks about a script that can be run to harvest
the emails in real time, we further get a understanding of the Twitter
TOS (Terms of Service).

You are solely responsible for your conduct and any data, text, information, screen names, graphics, photos, profiles, audio and video clips, links (“Content”) that you submit, post, and display on the Twitter.com service.

- meaning your on your own if you tweet something you didn’t like

After reading the ZDNet article I decided to do my own test with tweetgrid.  If you do a little bit of search for things such as “email me at” you can see all kinds of addresses.  A sample search on search.twitter.com using gmail.com OR hotmail.com OR “email me at” Weather these email addresses are valid or not is a whole other story but look at the image below.

Savvy internet users who have their own domains know you can create a temporary address such as info@mydomain.com.  Send that out as a tweet and then after they are done, delete that address.  Situation solved and over in my opinion.  Although for people just coming to twitter and the internet for that matter a little help with this is understandable.  Some people were posting in comments on those blogs that “Well your stupid if you tweet your address.”  While I understand why they say that, most people forget we all come to the internet with limited skills and over time we understand more and more.

Just know this email harvesting is not new, but with twitter gaining warp speed traction in some of our everyday lives we are opening up to those who want to do harm with the info we tweet, always be cautious.

TBTR

((Video attached))

Over the weekend twitter was exposed to what they dubbed the “Stalkdaily worm.”  I got wind of this worm as a tweet from one of my followers on twitter then I followed up and found the techcrunch.com article also twitter talked about it on their blog http://blog.twitter.com/ this weekend.

Next I talked about Smallaa which is a new site that was launched by CEO Tim Lai here is how they describe the service at http://www.smallaa.com

Smallaa helps you bring relevancy to your social interactions by enabling you to follow the most interesting aspects of your friends. The feeds in your multiple social networking sites are combined at Smallaa. Everything you post at Smallaa will automatically goes to those websites. When you and your friends post to different topic of interests, you get to pick and follow what really interests you from them. Friends will in turn want to post more things about your interests.

Last but not least I talk about the Dasher Project this is one of the coolest things I have ever seen, In my opinion the applications for this project are endless, not to mention immobile, and paryalized individuals can type with limited movement using this application here is a youtube video showing how it works. At first it’s confusing, but continue to watch you will get it I swear.  If you want to test for yourself make sure you go to this (java applet) link it’s an awesome product.

Comments are appreciated, enjoy

TBTR

It looks like someone has finally said, the hell with twitter search I’m gonna create a Plurk search site.  If you don’t already know Plurk is another social site much like Twitter but no where near the mass appeal of Twitter.  I don’t want to make this a Twitter vs Plurk post but lets face it Twitter has some great search resources and while that’s all good.  It looks like someone decided to dive into the Plurk API and create a search site for us plurk lovers.

Plurk History v1.0 beta has arrived and I have to say it looks like they are just getting started so it reminds you of the store bought brands bland but functional.  No flashy icons on the site no catchy name but it does one thing good.  It shows me my old Plurks month by month going back to when Plurk lunched.

Honestly sometimes I have wanted to go back in my stream on Plurk and look at something I posted along time ago but could not do it.  Well now with this site I’m able to look at plurks from November of 2008 with amazing speed.

The cool thing about Plurk is that every update creates a Plurk page where your update is listed with all comments associated with that Plurk.  That is one of the selling points of Plurk a conversation you can follow.

I was able to put in my Nick name and chose the month and year I wanted to go back and within seconds I was looking at my stream of previous plurks.  Since my account is not protected I didn’t have to enter my password.  I’m not too sure about the project yet so I would say if your account is protected on Plurk you probably don’t want to enter you password yet.  At least not until we find out about the publisher of this project.  It’s not affiliated with Plurk so we have to approach this with caution.

This is posted on the site to help those with doubts of entering their passwords… “If you still don’t feel safe enough and you have a private time line you can also change your password temporarily so that even if we stored it (we promise we don’t) we wouldn’t be able to access your data”

I hope that the project finds legs and can stand somewhere on the net because it really has a purpose.

TBTR

Plurk History Link

Plurk History is not affiliated with Plurk.com

We have hit 2009 and some people started their case for world dominance before me, damn you. Over the past couple of days twitter has been all a buzz over a phishing scam that someone is using. While the scam seem to only be a way to send out spam to your followers again here we go with the what if scenarios.

What is a phishing?

(wikipedia.org description)
Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites.

So now that you know what phishing is let me tell you why it’s gonna be around for a long time. Users are gullible, sometimes we click things we should not, sometime we are curious, sometimes the joke is on us. Gone are the days of sending you to a website that pops up 50 windows and it’s like a duck hunt game trying to shot your way out of the maze. Now what people, thieves, and yes sometimes companies, do is make you think that what you saw was real.

Twitter has a API that has been open for a long time, and the authentication has always been a question to me. Coders have no behind the scenes way with twitter to authenticate with any other way but to have users enter their username and password on an off site.

What makes this phishing scam work is the fact that with all the fail whale, and network issues of the past. When people saw the screen shot below at first glance that thought oh here we go again. Twitter is on the fritz but what most failed to do was to just look at the URL and see that it was not twitter.com that was serving up the page.

Will this ever stop?

Probably not but if you have other sites where you socialize you will notice some distinct things that try to help curb users from falling victim. A lot of other sites that have OPEN API’s allow you one password to log on to that service, then when you want to login or tie your account to another site they give you a alternative password. This helps to ensure that you don’t give out your real login password and shall we say hand over the keys to the house. Twitter knows all about this authentication method, why they have chosen not to implement is beyond me.

I think it’s time twitter give it a second look, other wise I for see some people changing their strategy of using twitter as the first line in micro blogging and move on to something like friendfeed, brightkite, or even jaiku (no one really uses jaiku so I’m only kidding on this one) none of these sites do things much better but when people get feed up they move on to the next ship.

Remember boys and girls your password is a very important thing, I blogged about this here in I wonder how many computers will be infected and I still feel people are sleeping on good passwords for access to their online life. Keep your password in your pants that way no one can steal it, for the most part. But seriously just be aware of whats going on, and remember two things if nothing else in this post.

1. No the King of some small country does not really want to deposit 28,000,000 in your account
2. You bank will never send you anything online saying change your password it’s been compromised

Twitter get it right or get lost oh and don’t forget to follow us on twitter.com/thebtr

TBTR

Not more than a couple of weeks ago I wrote a story called “Talk about EPIC Fail, I got a Colossal EPIC FUCKING FAIL LHW.com” I wrote the story because of my disappointment with LHW.com and how they handled a admited colossal FAIL. It looks like the powers that be have decided to enrich the community and try this promotion again but with better results.

They have enlisted the help of Akamai Technologies, Inc. to help provide the needed bandwidth for this promotion, something they should have done in the first place but were either to cheap, or didn’t know the old network would bog down and Fail. Regardless I’m happy they have fixed the issue and I’m also happy the are going to try the promotion again details to follow on October 17, 2008.

Check the website often and see if you can get in on booking one of the Leading Hotels of the World at the amazing rate of $19.28 per night rooms.

Promotion Link to rooms for $19.28

TBTR

EPIC Fail

I truly believe that some system administrators don’t get it when it comes to internet traffic and the power of the media. So yesterday I was surfing the local news site AJC.com and found the following story Luxury hotels offer $19.28 per night needless to say I fell for this hook line and sinker others did too. At Hotelchatter.com they posted Yeah, We Got Totally Shut Out of the LHW $19.28 Sale Too. As I understood it the World Luxury hotels were going to offer rooms in some of the worlds best hotels for $19.28 in celebration of being in existence since 1928. This was all supposed to unfold at 8AM Est time on October 1, 2008.

I show up at the website ON Freaking Time and I hit the link http://www.lhw.com/1928 and this is what I got immediately:

Needless to say I hit update like a gazillion times trying to make sure I was not gonna get cut out of my share of low cost hotel rooms.

Anyone who works on the internet or makes a living on the internet knew this was gonna be a huge deal when it comes to internet traffic and system resources. So Truth is I was at the website early, I made a point to get up and out of the house just to make sure I was at work and in line to get one of the rooms at a great rate. I really feel for the people on the Pacific coast they were truly hoodwinked, the constant updates or refresh of the website did nothing for me, until about 10AM when I got the second message saying this:

I’m sitting in my chair at work like WTF, these bastards made me get up early get to work, take the time out and your not even gonna have the promotion now because some snot nosed kid in your data center can’t figure out how to off load some traffic through routing and sever timeouts. I was ready for a revolt against all hotels today then the next message came:

Oh I’m still pissed and unsatisfied I don’t think they understand what they just did, I don’t have many friends who stay and luxury hotels but hell I really did want to try out The James in Chicago. I guess that won’t happen now or maybe one day it will I am still pissed and not happy but this goes to show you, idiots are all over the world.

Next time you guys at LHW.com decide to do something like this call some fucking experts not your cousin Johnny who thinks he knows networking you guys truly suck MONKEY BALLS. IMHO

Thanks,

TBTR

Micro blogging has been around for a while now but lately it has taken off growing by leaps and bounds. Can you update your friends and colleges in 140 characters? It’s harder then you think and by no means is it easy when the real estate is so limited. So what happens when you want to save and share a URL link? As we all know some URL links could be 50 characters all by it self. so the shorter a URL is the better that is for you and what you want to say to the world.

Tweetburner lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter.

Last week I came across a URL shortner called Tweetburner. Not the shortest name for URL shortners but it ties statistics to those URL’s so you can gauge how many people click the link. It’s always good to know if people are really clicking your links. There are a number of URL shortners on the net, I found a blogger at cusumingexperience.com who created a blog post back in May of 2008 about is.gd called “Shorten URLs via is.gd – free bookmarklet for URL redirection“.  Mashable created a post showing “90 of the top URL shortening services”

The reason why I’m talking about tweetburner is two fold, not only does it work but you can create your tweet right from the tweetburner website which will let you login to your twitter account and/or friendfeed to send a post right from the site. Most of the other URL shortners don’t do that cause they were not made with twitter specifically in mind. Give tweetburner a try if you want statistics or give is.gd a try if you just absolutely have to have the shortest URL.

I found a video of Tweetburner which explains a bit and shows you what it does check this out:

Enjoy,

TBTR

Please don’t forget the doors to this years Black Weblog Awards is closing on 8/31/2008 if you have not voted please take the time to do so here.

Remember if you feel this blog has potential and you would like to see us win something then please vote for us under:

Best Science/Technology Blog
The Black Tech Report

Thanks so much for all those who voted and I hope you have a wonderful Labor Day weekend.

TBTR

Just a couple of nights ago I was taking a picture with my blackberry, I usually post these pictures to twitpic. Twitpic is a picture service that post to your twitter account from your cell phone, since there had not really been any other services that let me post once to multiple sites. I started thinking wouldn’t it be nice to be able to post to a picture service that can post to not only my twitter account by all my other micro blogging sites? Well I found such a service it’s called Pikchur and this service lets me post to all of my sites with one email.

Pikchur is a simple service that updates your social networks / micro-blogging platforms with pictures!

Supported platforms are:

• Plurk
• Pownce
• tumblr
• Jauiku
• Facebook
• Friendfeed
• Identi.ca
• Twitter
• and Rejaw

Now that you know how many services Pikchur can post to now I’ll walk you through some of the process of setting it up.

Send your piks via phone, mms, email or upload

1. You have to first login to one of your micro blogging sites on the Pikchur website I choose my twitter account.
2. Next you have to configure your posting email address.
3. The system tells you to create a PIN which will go at the end of the email address just before the @ symbol (this PIN is very important so do not make it simple) ( In my opinion the PIN needs to be more than 4 numbers, but that is all Pikchur will allow in the PIN section at this time)
   

After this process you have some settings you can configure

• Additional settings such as Triggers, and Status messages

All and all I tried the system out and it worked perfect from upload but when I tried to email from my blackberry it never showed up, I’ll have to fix that soon or try and figure out the reason why it didn’t work.

Overall Pikchur has a great idea with a lot of potential.

Enjoy,

TBTR

I want to take time to say thank you to all of those people that saw my previous post about the Black Weblog Awards and then nominated this blog. At times I am amazed at what we can do as a community of ONE when we come together. If I could only interest you all in giving to my MacBook Pro Fund, but that is a whole different rant.

We made it, 2008 Black Weblog Award Finalist List

Now the nominations are over and the real voting begins. Over the next 14 days I need as many of you to vote for me again by August 31. This time I want you to please tell a friend about this event and ask them to vote for me. Anyone can vote…

I’m only under the Following Category:

Best Science/Technology Blog

Click here to vote

I really appreciate all the nominations now lets win this thing. If you vote for me again please let me know I want to connect with you. As a tech blogger I need feedback.

Thanks,

TBTR

The 2008 Black Weblog Awards is under way, this is my first time trying to get noticed. While I have never won an award for what I do with my blog the honor of being included is a great thing so help me out yall.

A twitter friend already ask me what category (Science/Technology) and my URL (http://www.theblacktechreport.com), I was overwhelmed with happiness to say the least I’m excited this is how it works.

The Black Weblog Awards has been around since 2005 with entries from over 83 countries. The doors for Nominating your favorite blog just opened today August 1, 2008 and will stay open till August 15, 2008. Then they will close the doors for Nominating and open the doors on August 16, 2008 (my birthday of course) for your votes on the finalist this ends on August 31, 2008. The results and winners will be announced on September 4, 2008.

Just a few more things you can find more information here:

Facebook
MySpace
Twitter
Forums
Promotional Graphics

I started asking myself everyone will not know what catagory to put me in or they have no idea I wanted to be included on their potential list of bloggers for the BWA’s. So I decided to try something different since I use Twitter twitter.com/thebtr I decided to use the twitter search so others could see the buzz on twitter about the BWA’s and also put up some queries so you can have a direct link into the channels that are talking.

Vote for me under Science/Technology Blog also to everyone who gets voted on good luck…

Based on twitters with blackweblogawards.com
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=blackweblogawards

Based on twitters with Black Weblog Awards
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=black+weblog+awards

Based on twitters with BWA’s
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=BWA%27s
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bwa (other references to bwa show up in this query)

First of I didn’t even know about the .me domain coming up for registration.  Sometimes I think I’m in the loop only to find that I am not, well tonight I thought up a great domain to register and when I went to find Godaddy.com it was blank.

It seems the site is down, I would guess from all the registrations trying to go through, well I’m glad it’s down, now maybe the name I want will still be available.

One thing I do know about Godaddy is that Bob Parsons the owner of Godaddy, he will make it right mark my words.

I started a ping to see when the site comes back up, I’m just waiting right now so I can get this domain I’m thinking is great..

As you can see the ping is not answering back, but they could have turned off ICMP request, or they could be hit with a DOS attack we will find out soon.  Just for fun I checked bobparsons.tv his personal blog and it’s down too….

I know Godaddy.com to be a great company with a great guy at the helm, he’s awesome in my opinion and I have a ton of domains with them I would go no where else. I hope they get it fixed before I go to bed… I need that domain.

TBTR

Twitter the social micro-blogging site that helps you make online friends, promote your business or just have fun has a new helper service. Less friends is a cool little site that helps you find out who’s following you. When you first start using twitter it’s easy to know who follows you all you have to do is look at the number your following and the number of followers if they are close then most likely most of your friends are following what you say. As your status and friends grow on twitter it becomes very hard to keep up. In comes less friends I was a little leary at first to sign in to see if this works, but I used an account that I don’t always login to and thus not to worried about it.

WOW it really worked I was able to notice about 16 people that follow me but I was not following them. The number on my twitter page showed me following 46 people and 60 followers, that means when I’m done adding them I’ll be at about 62 i think. I would tell you it works perfect but I’m not sure the guys at Less Everthing that made this are kwel in my book. Here is a link to the Less friends blog

TBTR

Another invite to a beta site I have access to evernote. Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

On the web. On your desktop. On your phone.

Everything you put into Evernote is always synchronized across all of your devices. That way, all your memories are available to you wherever you are.

Downloads

• Mac OS X Leopard
• Windows XP/Vista
• Windows Mobile
• Web Clippers

Have fun with Evernote they just added support for .pdf files, and they have widgets you can install on your blog, OMG if you don’t have Evernote your CRAZY.

I have 20 invites if you want one please send me an email to thebtr [at] gmail [dot] com

TBTR

Tags: evernote, web clips, searchable text, cool apps

I have been reading more and more information about monetizing your blog, and turning your hobby into a business. This created a situation that this weekend worked me to the bone and I made some changes that reflect as of now. Did I really think that I could make money with this blog this fast?

What was I thinking?

Somehow I came across the problogger site and got into my head the thought of making money from this technology blog. So after reading an article or two about blogging for money I decided to sign up for Ad sense to run Ads on my blog. That was the first of my many mistakes here are some the lessons I learned.

Don’t monetize your blog unless you have readers.

• If there is no one to click on your ads then why have them there in the first place.

Money from blogging is not easy, don’t believe the hype.

• A lot of people, websites and others will say it’s easy just follow my 12 step program it’s far more than that I assure you.

Time is your friend

• Time is on your side the more you do and the more time and effort you put into blogging will help you out in the long run.

Make a plan of what you want and set goals that help you move forward.

• In any business you can’t get to where you want to go until you plan for it, set obtainable goals that help you reach the finish line.

Everyone does not make money blogging

• Most of the people making money from blogging have been around for a long time with tons of resources that keep people coming back, you have to create something that compels people to visit over and over again.

Hope for the best plan for the worst

• Just one of those saying that you forget when it’s your turn to do something, just a reminder to Plan, Plan, Plan…

You will probably not make money your first 6 months of consistent blogging

Making money from blogging takes time, traffic, planning, and understanding you want it to grow not fizzle out and die.

Are you a pro or not!

I’ve learned that to call yourself a Pro you need to have posted more then 20 articles about something you like or love.

While that is a joke you have to understand people want resources and something to visit over and over again. Your passion has to be there even if your readers are not. In the beginning you can only rely on yourself and no one else. You need to read some of the resources out there by these pioneers, now once you have read these blogs don’t get in your head that all of the sudden you are a blog PRO. Your far from that title and need to understand this is a hobby for most with some having a goal of a full time endeavor. Visit these sites with caution they will take up hours of your time:

Problogger by Darren Rowse
DoshDosh
Remarkablogger
Seth
Chris G

When will the change from novice to Pro happen.

That question will plague you over the coming days, weeks, months, and maybe even years. It is my belief that once your readers ship and viewers of your site are at a level such as 500 viewers and 500 readers. To me this is where you have a following that will continue to come back to read. As you create more and better content your numbers and influence will begin to help you grow from Novice to Semi-Pro. Those numbers are my own indicator for me, see what others think out there and use the FREE resources that are available to you.

In conclusion I know I have not even scratched the surface of blogging, let alone I can’t be called a Pro. So back to the content I will go. As I grow I will ocassionally share with you but my main objective is to keep this blog about technology. Also to keep it simple.