As usual, this video is distributed on basically all the major (and a lot of minor) video sites. The key being to bring your content to the users — not the other way around. It’s not their job to find your content. If want it to be seen, put it in front of them in spaces where they’re already sitting. The internet distribution systems, along with ancillary viewing environments (like AppleTV and TiVo’s podcast support) make this process beautifully elegant.

This week Pras was getting honored by the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter which is committed to ending homelessness by providing men and women with housing and support that can transform their lives — a perfect fit for his film Skid Row.

Since its founding in 1982, NCS has helped more than 25,000 homeless and formerly homeless individuals find food, shelter, counseling, employment, and in many cases, a home to call their own. NCS provides a full continuum of services aimed at helping people move from the streets to housing and independence.

We also check up on Miami with 944 Magazine and what went down in Paris.

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Are you a diehard PvP fan? Want to get paid for posting about your hobby and have an audience to express yourself to? We want you!

PvP Lab is always looking for quality content producers to contribute their knowledge of PvP in MMORPGs. This is a paid gig which will require you to write a minimum of 4 articles per month. If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you.

Send an email to info@pvplab.com outlining what sort of thing you’ll be contributing (include sample posts on other blogs or forums if you have them). We’ll get back to you right away with our pay rates if we’re interested.

You might also be interested in the Age of Conan Leveling Guide.

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What’s great about this write-up for The Apple Blog is the fact that probably 95% or more of the development, hosting and infrastructure is done on Apple hardware. I know that I love reading about workflows like that. I enjoy learning what goes into a specific site or company that I have respect for. The Apple Pro articles come to mind and are great reads if you’re into that sort of thing.

Read the Interview with Stephen Caudill on The Apple Blog.

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For those of you that don’t know, these days Pras is the Executive Producer of the World Music Awards and a principle member of our recording artist branding and marketing technology company called Platinum Brand. With a double major in philosophy and psychology from Rutgers and Yale University, Prakazrel Michel could have traveled in countless directions. But he was destined for music stardom. In the mid 1990’s Pras, lead the Fugees to their huge 1996 crossover success The Score, after which experiencing multi-platinum, international success and recognition worldwide. To date the Fugees retains title of best-ever selling hip-hop group with sales reaching over 30 Million albums.

We’re moving this forward in a big way. Like the Obama campaign, which has been expertly run on the internet, we’re going for market saturation. This initial rollout included Blip.tv, Viddler, Revver, YouTube and Vimeo — with more to come. This video saturation is becoming key to building a subscriber-base. The key being, you no longer expect people to come to you to see your content; instead you have to bring your content to them.

Also check out what Mashable had to say about us:

Musicians starring in Web videos is nothing new. John Mayer’s comedic attempt on Funny or Die comes immediately to mind. And as far as general Internet startups go, M.C. Hammer is only one of many players. 50 Cent, Nick Lachey, and Kylie Minogue are in the fold as well.

It’s big, for sure.

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Ok, fine. I did test this on a couple sites just for fun. What?

Firefox iMacros Addon

The first thing you need is the infinitely handy Firefox addon iMacros.

iMacros allows you to automate Firefox tasks. Record and replay repetitious work. “If you love the Firefox web browser, but are tired of repetitive tasks like visiting the same sites every days, filling out forms, and remembering passwords, then iMacros for Firefox is the solution you’ve been dreaming of!” Yeah well, we’re using it for the power of evil, in this case.

Finding Users

For this example, we’re going to use a site called BlogCatalog, but really any site will do.

The first thing you need is a userlist or some way to easily jump from user to user without much fuss. Luckily BlogCatalog gives us a page in their directory that outputs a random assortment of users.

We can reload this page over and over, each time giving us a choice of randomly selected users to choose from. We’re only interested in the first box on the top left though. This will be the link we click to visit a random BlogCataloger’s page each time.

Randomization

As anyone who has done an Armorsmith grind in Star Wars Galaxies back in the day will tell you, a good macro needs some random delays. That’s why I use iMacro’s ability to run Javascript rather than just recording a standard macro.

With Javascript, I can assign my loops as well as generate a random number variable to insert into various PAUSE lines of the resulting macro.

The Codez

Note: You do need to do some editing for this to work correctly for you. Particularly the x and y coordinates for the thumbnail. If you can’t figure that part out for yourself, I question whether you should be participating in this little experiment anyway.

var macro;
var jsLF = "\n";
var i, retcode, errtext;
var MyDelay;
var MyPosts;

/* Define the Looping */
iimDisplay("Loops");

for ( i = 1; i < = 50; i++) {
    iimDisplay("loop "+i);

/* Assign a Random Delay for Hax0ring */
MyDelay = Math.round(10*Math.random());
iimDisplay("Random wait t="+MyDelay);

/* Create the Macro */
macro = "CODE:";
macro += "SET !ERRORIGNORE YES" + jsLF;
macro += "URL GOTO=http://www.blogcatalog.com/user" + jsLF;
macro += "WAIT SECONDS=" + MyDelay  + jsLF;
macro += "CLICK X=19 Y=188" + jsLF;
macro += "WAIT SECONDS=" + MyDelay  + jsLF;
macro += "TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Add To My Friends" + jsLF;
macro += "WAIT SECONDS=" + MyDelay  + jsLF;

retcode = iimPlay(macro);
if (retcode < 0) {              // an error has occured
    errtext = iimGetLastError();
    alert(errtext);
}

    if (retcode < 0) {          // an error has occured
        errtext = iimGetLastError();
        alert(errtext);
        break;
    }

}

Can Has Friends

Basically, what iMacro does is run through my Javascript as if it were running through a standard macro. The javascript sets the variables, such as the loop and delay between actions (MyDelay) from the random number generated.

The result is an output of a new macro upon each run of the Javascript. This new macro has single-use delay values between each line. So, for example, if I’m running the Javascript 3 times, the first run will pause for 4 seconds between actions, the next will be 2 and then next might be 10. How exciting.

Now don’t run off to follow everyone on Twitter, Plurk or the other hundreds of networks out there. Like I said, this is obviously against most sites’ Terms of Service and will likely get you banned if you abuse it.

Use your macroz skillz 4 guud.

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Just using them is fine but, as usual, I like to take it one step further into better integration with my desktop workflow. That’s where OpenID and Fluid.app come in.

OpenBar

If you didn’t already know, the 37signals apps support OpenID (they call it OpenBar, to be cool). Step one is to go into all your accounts and switch over to OpenID login.

If you’re wondering, I use my custom url for OpenID.

This gives me a convenient bar at the top of all my applications whereby I can switch between them. If you don’t already use this, you’re insane.

Having all of these applications in place really creates a great intranet-type workflow. It’s helpful even when working solo but if you have a small team like me it really shines. I also noticed my people used the various apps a lot more once I introduced them to using OpenID to bring them together — as well as putting it all together in Fluid.app (below).

Fluid.app

So we have our cool kid intranet setup with OpenID. Now we need to go download Fluid.app and turn this puppy into a desktop-like application. Fluid is an SSB (site-specific browser), which is basically just a web browser without all the extras and with a customizable dock icon (I would recommend grabbing these nice icons for use with Fluid).

It’s great for tabbing to your intranet window, adding a calendar entry, and tabbing back to Photoshop, to give a quick example. This is a process that just isn’t as exciting when you’re stuck in Safari.

(If you’re completely insane and not using a Mac, Prism does something similar on the PC)

When creating a new Fluid app for this project, I would recommend setting the url you use the most as the homepage. For me, this is /calendar in BackpackIt. You may be more inclined to roll with one of the Dashboard views in either Backpack or Basecamp though. I’m considering a move to one of those 2 options as well.

By default, when you click one of the links in your OpenBar (to go from Basecamp to Backpack, for example) Fluid will open that link in Safari. It does this because it assumes this is an external link and treats it accordingly — each service has a different URL.

There are 2 options to get around this. For me, it was easy because I use the same URL prefix for every one of my 37signals services: vocino. So what I did was change the URL wildcards in the Fluid preferences to include any URL that contains *vocino*.

If you’ve used different account URLs for your 37signals apps, you could either add each one of simply allow any linked to be opened inside Fluid. The latter option is not ideal because a lot of times you’ll have real links to external sites that people in your intranet have posted and you’ll generally want to view those in Safari so that you can keep your original app pure.

Now you have a stylish intranet app that lives in your dock, complete with all of your 37signals services. Ah, sweet sweet synergy, the web 6.0 word of the future.

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This is my late night setup. This is how I roll at 3AM when I’m usually plugging away at something. In the photo above, you can see I’m rocking Twitterific to keep up with my tweets and iTunes to provide some passive entertainment — in this case, Firefly.

In addition to those, I usually have NetNewsWire over there, Adium or iChat, and sometimes reference material specific to what I happen to be working with over on the main display.

To prop the MacBook Pro up and create a fluid eye-level transition between monitors, I use the handy iCurve 2 ($39.99 from Amazon).

Of course, on the Power Mac desktop I do the actual work. So I’m running Photoshop, Textmate, CSS Edit, Final Cut Pro and all the rest of the nonsense to get things done.

Using this 2-Mac setup is really helpful for several reasons. Not only does it feel like I have a lot more desktop space but that space is also running on 2 different machines using isolated CPU, RAM and disk access resources. When working with huge files — especially video in Final Cut Pro — this really comes in handy.

SynergyKM

This is all good but the whole setup might not be worth it if I had to actually reach up and manipulate the laptop. That’s where SynergyKM comes in.

SynergyKM is a GUI wrapper around the synergy command line tool that lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers. You can even use it with Windows and Linux, although I currently don’t.

SynergyKM was a life saver for my setup. I have my Power Mac desktop running as the host and my MacBook Pro connecting to it in order to grab keyboard and mouse info. This allows me to just shoot across to the laptop and perform tasks as if I was working with a simple dual-monitor setup.

Both my desktop and laptop are running on wifi from an Airport Extreme. The 802.11n network never misses a beat — even with torrents cranking (no shit, important benchmark info!) — so I don’t experience any lag issues with the mouse or really fast typing. I’m not sure if there would be issues on other networks but I can’t imagine there’s much data to keep up with. The packets transfered are relatively low.

Combine this with some disk sharing and you’ve got a nice almost seamless system.

Growl

So we’ve got our 2 Macs and we can effortlessly travel between them. However, there’s one more piece of the puzzle which I think brings things together in command-center-like integration. Growl.

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X. It allows applications that support Growl (which is most of the everyday ones) to send you notifications. Most of the more poweruser level Mac addicts already use it.

The notifications are basically little popups that can be styled the way you like. These could be new songs playing in iTunes, a buddy in Adium sending you an IM, a file transfer completing in Transmit, etc. There’s really a ton of apps that support it these days.

Now, the great thing about Growl for this setup is that it allows you to push the notifications to a host from a remote Mac. Perfect.

I have my MacBook Pro sending my vital Growl information over to my Power Mac. There’s no lag and it’s just like the events were happening on the local machine — again, contributing to that dual-monitor feel. This allows me to focus on my primary Apple Display on the desktop and know if something semi-important happens (like my friend’s Tweet — damn right that’s important!) I’ll get a shiny new Growl notification.

You can of course choose what notifications you’d like to receive and from which applications. Your 500-friend twitter list might not be so appealing.

So that’s pretty much it. SynergyKM+Growl= …Synergy. I guess. I’m really into this setup now. I feel like things are working in harmony. That’s what owning Mac hardware is all about, right?

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Now I’ll rant a little about usability. If you’re offering a solution to my problem (as all products, services or applications should be, obviously), you have to be open to the possibility that I’ll be tailoring my experience to what best suits me. After all, I’m the only with the problem to be solved.

Now, for what seems like a decade, I’ve been staring at a large green box when logged in to my LinkedIn profile telling me that my profile is incomplete. Why? Because I haven’t filled out my education fields.

In all other aspects of LinkedIn, I am an avid participant. I answer questions in the Answers forums and I’m considered a LinkedIn Expert in the fields of Blogging, Web Development and Non-profit Management. I usually invite my new contacts to connect with me when possible. I try to connect with most internet acquaintances whom I find interesting. The list goes on and on. The bottom line is, I definitely put in my work on using LinkedIn.

However in spite of all that, their system still annoys me with a constant reminder that I’m only utilizing 85% of the awesome-power that LinkedIn could potentially provide to me.

Listen, don’t tell me what I need to do. Instead, offer me solutions that could potentially help me. These should be passive and, more importantly, dismissible. I’m not a new internet user. I haven’t just forgotten to finish my profile. Strangely, I don’t consider myself a complete idiot. Yet, I don’t see any possible way to dismiss these “Complete your profile” messages.

It’s not LinkedIn’s job to review my profile/resume in order to see if I’m qualified for something. That’s the job for another user who is equal to me and therefore a 100% complete profile is what I deem it to be. It’s what works for me and my situation. It’s however much information is needed for your web application to solve my particular problem.

Remember, your users dictate what works for them. The best tools are the ones that adapt to the job at hand, not the ones that are stuck in one track.

As an example of an application that currently demonstrates that, I look to Yojimbo. While it’s amazing at what it does (organizing data), it gives the user the freedom to tailor the application to their specific needs. Personally, I use it to catalog receipts for tax purposes. Imagine what a hassle it would be if Yojimbo constantly told me my database was only 85% complete because I didn’t have any passwords stored in it (Yojimbo has a password organizing function, too).

It would be annoying. Just like it is on LinkedIn.

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Nana and Geni as a Case Study

Seniors have some decent spending power and they’re willing to give up some change in order to make their lives easier. Surely there are some sites out there that might fill this niche. I think Geni and other genealogy sites are a good example of that. Old people love that stuff.

My grandmother and her sister were already working on genealogy projects using tried and true pencil/paper systems. When I explain to her how putting all this information they had gathered into a database where it could edited and changed easily, she was in love. This would have been impossible, though, if Geni wasn’t very easy to use and employed simple concepts when setting out to solve problems.

Girl boxes are pink and boy boxes are blue. It sounds simple, duh, and it is. It’s not rocket surgery or brain science, it’s just simplest of concepts that might be overlooked from a developer perspective. Further digging shows how hassle-free adding a new person to the tree is, or checking up on family, or adding photos.

The Senior Market

The senior internet market is actually (surprisingly, perhaps) very healthy.

In 2006, there were 17.6 million Internet users in the US ages 62 and older, according to eMarketer. By 2011 that number will increase to 25.4 million. A 7.6% average annual growth rate is not too shabby — especially when you consider that’s more than twice the 3.1% growth rate eMarketer forecasts for the entire US Internet population.

This may have something to do with seniors today enjoying better health, longer and more active lives, greater free time and higher discretionary income than past generations.

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Most companies don’t seem to realize that a large part of creative technology work is simply thinking. “How do you solve this problem?” or “What’s the best way to deploy these features while dealing with the constraints of the client’s budget?”

Questions like these are always the starting points for a new project and usually get carried on throughout. New problems inevitably arise while the project evolves and those need to be thought on and solved. Thinking isn’t as easy as you might imagine, either.

Recently, in producing video mockups for various Olivia Munn media at Complex, the starting place at the beginning of the thought process and where we ultimately ended up were light-years apart. Even though the original work wasn’t a direction we wanted to go, that development process facilitated the creation of the end result — and that result is better because of it. By “original work” I might just mean playing in Photoshop, screwing around with your favorite camera for an hour to get ideas, or simply sitting back in your den and browsing inspirational books.

This might seem like a crazy concept to some people. After all, sometimes this might mean billing for seriously intangible timeframes. Spaces in time dedicated to soul searching, almost. You might even be tempted to call this practice a bit shady or dishonest. Well, I assure you this is not the case at all.

I’m exceptionally diligent about my time-tracking for clients I consult for. I have an arsenal of tools I use to log my dedication with Mars Lander-like percision. iPhone hacks, dashboard widgets, web applications and more. Rarely, if ever, is time logged that is more that 1 or 2 seconds longer (or shorter, for that matter) than need be.

When I talk about thought time, I’m talking serious thought time. When I start the clock on something like that for a client, I’m highly and efficiently dedicated to solving the problem at hand. If it’s a technology development issue I’m actively looking for a specific bit of code, open-source solution, new way of thinking, contractor to crunch it or innovative work-around. Similarly, if it’s on the design end, I’m immersed in the user’s or audience’s perspective. I’m pursuing inspiration, moving elements around in Photoshop in tactical art experiments in order to get something that sticks, and thinking outside the web design space in nature or external source material for new creative sparks.

Keep in mind, this is what good clients pay for. They want more than a chop shop style churn-out of so-called creative technology solutions (remember I said good clients). So, just like a plumber bills you as soon as he starts thinking about how to solve your toilet problems, you should be invoicing your clients for the time you’re dedicated and immersed in thinking for their company.

So, how do you bill for the thought-power time required for the total project to be a success?

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Recently near the border of Brazil and Peru this, one of the very last uncontacted tribes, was photographed from the air. The red-painted warriors or hunters with their bows and arrows are very striking and even a bit surreal. The guy painted black in the back seems to be some kind of leader perhaps.

Seriously, this is like a real-life Indiana Jones here.

Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. A problem with making contact with isolated peoples is that they usually don’t have immunity to most of the diseases we take for granted. These can be carried by the people from modern society that go to make contact with them. This can have severe consequences as normally minor diseases, such as the common cold, can be deadly when no natural immunity exists.

On another note, the whole uncontacted tribes discussion brought up another controversy while I was arguing chatting with a friend.

Where do these people fall in regards to the standard Christian thinking that you must “know” Jesus to be saved from the burning pit of fire? Do they get a free pass since they haven’t had the opportunity to read or hear about this other god dude?

As an atheist, I don’t believe they are any less important than anyone else. They undoubtably worship some form of god or gods. Just imagine what they must have been thinking when the spy plane was circling them taking pictures. That’s possibly a pretty mean god right there.

Their god and belief system is just as real to them as Jesus, floods or sea-parting is to the Christian in modern society.

So here’s my question to you, random anonymous christian: Are these people doomed? Shouldn’t Jesus be putting the thoughts in their minds or “hearts?”

Surely god would give them the opportunity to know the so-called truth. However, throughout history there has never been a case of any spontaneous finding of Jesus so I don’t think their odds are very high with that.

Time to start drop shipping bibles? Or better yet, what if they are the ones who know the truth?

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Monkey Arms that KILL

You heard me. I said giant robotic smashing machines that get directly hardwired to monkey brains. This is no joke, kids. This is real science. This is how you change the world (and it has nothing to do with Guy Kawasaki).

My assumption was that they hacked off the little monkey arms first — you know, in order to test. However, thankfully you can see their cute hands down in those tubes. Whew.

Have you ever been to Epcot and played with the robotic arms inside the Innoventions building? Basically you control the big arms that play various musical instruments from a touch screen. It’s really boring but it was built 10 years ago so give it a break.

When is it time to hook some monkeys up to those bad boys?

Think of how much fun it would be to walk up and plug them into your brain and duel your friend on the next machine over. Where is that? That’s the kind of power I need for my Cyber Monkey Suit. Except instead of drumsticks, mine will have guns on the ends. Obviously.

Exoawesome

Either way, arm hacking is not a step I want to go through. No, I’m talking more like an Iron Man suit. I suppose you could call it a Powered Exoskeleton. Something fast that I can jump into and kick some ass or rob a bank with.

Yeah that’s right, I said rob a bank. I’m no superhero.

Speaking of Iron Man’s suit, while looking great as far as built (much better than that freaking Power Armor in Fallout), it lacks in the bad ass paint job department. Did we have to go with red and gold? I know it’s for the good of the series and everything but if it were my suit and be rocking some kind of dark stealthy color. Like carbon fiber (before you flood me with comments, I don’t mean made out of carbon fiber, I mean carbon fiber looking — as in silver and black).

Oh, and by the way, where are my damn flying cars you promised me in Back to the Future II?

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I’m honored to be one of the chosen in this round of new 9rules blogs. Referring to my blog, Tyme White noted, “This is the one where I said I look forward to watching him grow as a blogger. I like the innocent (enthusiastic) perspective he has towards some of his entries. So often we are filled with the ‘expert’ authoritative perspective, which is fine, but it’s not the ‘only’ perspective.”

To which I say, “Hey, I am an expert, bitch!” No, just kidding. Actually I see exactly what she’s saying. I read a lot of blogs (perhaps more than I should) and there’s a ton of technical marketing data out there. How to increase this, how to do better at that, etc.

While these sorts of blogs do serve a purpose and contribute a lot, that style is definitely not what I like to write about. I don’t consider my blog to be a place to turn to for expert knowledge on a very specific topic — nor do I want it to be. That’s not to say there’s nothing of value, of course. It’s just that my interests are extremely dynamic and probably somewhat unpredictable at times.

At any rate, I hope to grow with the 9rulers and continue to write posts that I’m into. Hopefully some other people will be too.

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I use Highrise to organize my correspondence with the outside world — especially via email. I send so much freaking email everyday. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that I really dig the Dropbox feature.

Here’s the thing though. I want to put my Highrise Dropbox address in the BCC field automatically in Mail.app. This way I know I’m not forgetting to log it and I don’t have to ever think about it. When I want to find a conversation in Highrise, I know it will be there. From there, I can move it to a Case or organize it further.

Now, there may be a better way to do this. And shit, if there is, please tell me. This way sucks. Honestly.

Here’s what I did.

1. Open Terminal.app
2. $ defaults read com.apple.mail UserHeaders
3. If nothing shows up, you don’t currently have anything set and you should be golden to move to the next step.
4. $ defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"BCC" = "dropbox@YOURDROP.highrisehq.com"; }'
5. Restart Mail.app

That’s it. From now on your email should be automatically BCC’d to your dropbox address and you should get a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

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We talk about her personal projects, her workflow at Warner Bros. Records and the independent film she was recent cast in. So much going on with this girl these days.

If you have time, consider helping a brother out and digging the article.

I have some more articles lined up for the coming weeks, such as David Seah and Stephen Caudill. The reception from my interview solicitations has been so great, I’m considering a site dedicated to it. Might be an interesting idea.

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Yes, I hate the phrase “viral marketing” too, but it’s actually applicable in some circumstances, believe it or not. As in this case, the goal is really to create a sense of snowballing interest through the various networks. Before launching the official site, we’re releasing episodes on Viddler, Revver and YouTube.

I haven’t quite decided which network to sort of officially endorse. That is to say, which one’s embedding code will live on the official site and serve our adorable videos. Currently, I’m leaning toward Revver. Although I like most of Viddler’s features better, Revver has a couple tools that make it easier to monetize more distribution points — primarily iTunes.

Video Cuteness

Gino goes shopping for Fire Chili ingredients

Gino prepares Fire Chili for the Firehouse

Gino visits the Firehouse and talks to the Firefighters

If you digg these, please spread them around. They make good excuses to email relatives that use e-machines. :)

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I read assloads of internet news all day everyday. On my iPhone, on my various computers, on the toilet. It’s retarded.

However, in all this time I never realized just how redundant all this shit is until I started actually looking for things to write about. I call this, Regurgitated Internet News. It’s nothing new and most people already complain about it. I’ve probably even complain about it before on my blog.

The basic premise is that there’s only a very small (like 1 or 2) sites that actually break technology news. Although we like to pretend these are homegrown blogs, they’re not. They’re the big names like Techcrunch. Everyone else just repeats these stories with a little blockquoting and a little commentary.

I’ll see an article about how the new iPhone firmware has 3G enabling sliders on AppleInsider, then I’ll see it on every other god damn site on the internet within seconds. Some of them pass it off as if they broke the story. The vast majority off absolutely no interesting commentary to go along with their rehashed article. I know, I’ve been guilty of this in the past I’m sure.

It’s something that Tyme and Scirvs were complaining about with the 9rules submissions last week.

This issue gets even worse when you couple it with the fact that everyone is competing for Digg and Reddit type promotion for their regurgitated stories. Sure, I’m cool with posting your shit on Digg if you really have something unique to say about the subject but not if you’re just blockquoting. All you’re doing is adding another layer of annoyance to get to the real fucking article.

Again, nothing new. Everyone complains about this. It hits home now though.

My goal with contributing to The Apple Blog is not to fall into this mess. While to a certain extent, if you’re reporting on Apple news you simply have to regurgitate some stories (when 25,000+ people subscribe to your feed, you have to give them something), but we can also rock out some really nice commentary and tutorials.

That’s what I plan to do.

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The Chaitén volcano now erupting in southern Chile is one of 200 to 300 volcanoes in the “Andean Arc” region of Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Columbia considered active by volcanologists.

“Volcanologists” being, of course, my new title of choice for all future business cards.

A cloud of smoke and ashes produced by intensified eruption of the Chaiten volcano are seen over Chaiten on Tuesday, May 6, 2008, in southern Chile. The eruption spewed incandescent material and blated ash some 20 miles (30 kilometers) into the Andean sky, forcing authorities to a complete evacuation of the area. (AP Photo/La Tercera)

Absolutely amazing, if you ask me. We’re talking about a context which encompasses the Earth as a whole. A massive swirling ball of molten rock that spews out into our living space and shifts along enormous plates. Bad ass.

The local cultures actually used the sediment from the eruptions to create things like pottery and art.

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Whenever a new “get a bazillion visitors to your blog” system comes along, I get nervous. Well, “nervous” isn’t the right word, more like skeptical. I mean, remember BlogRush? Don’t get me started on that shit.

Anyway, there’s a new player in the market: Entrecard. More external javascript, more advertising click-back equations, more orange.

Calculating the “Price”

It’s all about shameless self-promotion. As usual.

So by “Entrecard” really they mean “Advertisement.” Your card graphic is an ad. Why not just call it that? You go around to other sites that use the Entrecard system and “Drop” your card off. This apparently gets you points which can then be spent on getting your ad to show up in other people’s Entrecard spot.

The goal is for the ad spots to stabilize at the maximum price users are willing to pay for the spot (again, “drops” being the currency here).

Ads waiting on spot	Formula	Final price
0	2	2ec
1	2	2ec
4	2*2*2*2	16ec
8	2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2	256ec
10	2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2	1024ec

Overall Usefulness

Eh.

I can see this being another fad system like BlogRush and the ones before it were. It’s primarily for people that don’t really care about mucking up their site with javascript widgets ad nauseam.

While thumbing through the catalog of sites, it seems to be mostly spam blogs.

That’s not to say there’s zero value here. There’s something. I mean, the statistics seem to work pretty well and they’re very responsive. However, I changed my ad/entrecard to an image an hour ago and it still shows up as the default text (that point is rather irrelevant though since I don’t plan on using Entrecard).

I did see it on Problogger, which seems odd to me. Does Darren really need the traffic from this? I’m assuming (read: hoping) he’s getting paid for that placement.

The Experiment

So here’s the experiment. I will not be placing this on my site, but instead on this post. While the post lives on the front page of Vocino.com I will be running a mad crazy Entrecard dropping operation.

We’ll then buy some ads and see how the return on my investment is as per Analytics.

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Why don’t “normal” companies do this?

Today 9rules had a streamcast hosted by Tyme and Scrivs (Mike was in the chat). Basically, they went over some opinions on sites that were submitted during yesterday’s open call for blogs using Ustream.tv.

Now, 9rules is a younger company of course, but what stops other larger sites from doing something like this? We’re all looking for a new layer of uber corporate transparency. Every decent web company has a Twitter feed, a Flickr account and everything else you can think of. There remains a level of interaction that seems untouched by most companies though.

Human Personalities

I have to admit, before attending this streamcast, the personalities at 9rules were largely unknown to me. I didn’t follow their Twitter accounts, I wasn’t active on Chawlk and didn’t do much to get involved.

Now I feel somewhat connected to the whole thing. It’s odd but now I feel like I want to be part of it. I did submit my site and I hope I get accepted. On a larger scale, it’s very interesting to see how the human element changed my feelings toward what is normally just data and graphics.

Giving your users the ability to actually see and, more important, feel who you are is invaluable. It’s a connection of intimacy largely lost on the internet.

This is somewhat surprising given that we have so many tools available to us to communicate with companies willing to provide that level of transparency.

New Transparency Ideas

I’d like to see more organizations get into this. Perhaps a monthly streamcast with the founders of the company — or at least the tech people or PR people.

Right now I’m working with Pras to do a weekly video blog that talks about the things we’re working on in order to build our brand, build his brand and get that interaction going which is classic in creating interest on the internet.

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