Google… the new Microsoft? (response)

Posted on October 25, 2006 by Sean

In response to a fellow coder/entrepreneur’s article that Google is the New Microsoft, anaemia I wrote a comment that I later realized should be a post… here is my reply:

I feel your pain… but keep your chin up!

I agree that Google is flattening competition in a very Microsoft-esque way. Their honeymoon should have been over after they started ignoring customers as a policy or maybe when they refused to tell publishers what percent of the share they will get on AdSense. If everyday people were exposed to Google Labs, order they may also have noticed that the number and scope of projects they are undertaking leaves very little space for anyone else.

On the brighter side… in a keynote that David Koretz (CEO of BlueTie) gave at RIT, he pointed out that in all areas other than search, Google is number 2. It doesn’t matter whether it’s calendars, video, picture-sharing, etc… they crush 90-some percent of the businesses, but someone still beats them. This shows that if you can get to a market before Google does, there is still some (although not much) hope for you.

Even with this encouraging news, that’s not going to help you get funding. I’m also trying to raise VC for a web-application, and although my site is in an area that is miles from where Google has ever touched (because “Sergey doesn’t like music”), I always hear the same question: “How are you going to stop Google from coming in and beating you?” I don’t know what they expect to hear in this scenario, because they already have Google built up in their minds as the brightest and fasted coders on the planet (far from true).

Fortunately, Google gives us one parting gift… hype. Their IPO, then their large buyout of YouTube paints quite a picture in the average investor’s mind (talking about laypeople here, not VCs) that The Bubble is Back.

Good luck to you!

For more information about Google, I recommend reading The Search by John Battelle.

Wikimania 2006 – in review

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Sean

Last night I got back from Wikimania 2006 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, sanitary Massachusetts. The conference is put on by the WikiMedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia and other similar projects. Here are some of the highlights of what came out of my visit:

Brewster Kahle – founder of The Internet Archive and Alexa Internet – gave a keynote address in which he talked about providing universal access to all knowledge. A sub-theme was that our country “massively screwed up” copyright law in 1976 when we said anything ever written down was automatically copyrighted. This applies in part to LyricWiki which always has to look over its shoulder since the law is really unclear on whether song lyrics are copywritten material or if they are distinguishable as different from the songs that they represent. I think it’s safe to say that if you bought a CD and all that was inside the case was the lyrics you would be understandably peeved since lyrics are not the same as songs, but legally there have been some precedents in which lyrics sites have been shut down. About this legal uncertainty surrounding copyright, Kahle had this to say: “The way you ask a question in this country is you go out and, uh… cause a lawsuit”.
Legal Stuff – At the legal discussion led by Brad Patrick, the General Counsel for WikiMedia, the only resounding point was that the laws governing copyright and many other online issues are still very much in a gray-area, but in general it is fairly safe to do something ethical without having to be afraid constantly. After saying that we have to “get used to this idea of ‘I don’t know‘” in current laws, he pointed out that the highly controversial Wikipedia has still only had 1 litigation (in Germany, that resulted in a victory) in its entire existence.
LyricWiki non-profit? – I have tentatively decided to spin LyricWiki out of Motive Force as a non-profit organization. There are a couple of reasons for this decision.
1. It doesn’t turn a profit anyway, and would be very hard to make it do such a thing without endangering the vision of the site.
2. If it gets sued, I don’t want to risk losing Motive Force LLC over it.
3. If it is non-profit, I would have no qualms with accepting donations for it. Hopefully, this could offset the costs which are not nearly being covered by the Amazon commissions from in-page links to albums.
This may take a little while to finalize since I’m not familiar with the process for setting up a non-profit organization and legal paperwork is oppressively time-consuming in general. Furthermore, there is still a small possibility that I won’t make the conversion to a full third-party entity, but I see that as unlikely.
AboutUs – In one of those weird small-world coincidences, I was sitting next to Ray King, founder of SnapNames and the new AboutUs at one of the sessions and – because of the LyricWiki.org shirt I was wearing – he asked me if I was the one who wrote the review of WetPaint. Awesome! People actually read my blog! Traffic is relatively low on my blog compared to several of my other sites, but now I’ve recieved comments from the people who created WetPaint, AboutUs, and (the code for) Atlassian Confluence. That feels rather fulfilling. Making the small-world coincidence even stranger is that I had just been to AboutUs a few days earlier even though it is just now making a major (still beta) launch. AboutUs is basically a whois site taken to the next level and then made into a wiki to boot. Personally I think it’s pretty cool, you might want to check it out also if you’re into domains.

FIQL.com using LyricWiki.org as lyrics source

Posted on August 3, 2006 by Sean

FIQL.com has just completed their beta and released the full version of their site. Included on the playlist pages is now a link to visit LyricWiki.org for the lyrics if that song is already on our site. The way they determine if the song exists or not is by using the API that was created at their urging, and expanded into a full webservice (still under construction) at the urging of a plugin-developer who is working on a media-player (WMP, iTunes, WinAmp, etc.) using this SOAP webservice. It’s exciting that the API is already being used, and it’s not even technically out yet.

On another exciting note, I’ll be at Wikimania 2006 this weekend to promote LyricWiki and to learn more about the community. If you’re going to the conference, look for me… I’ll be wearing this shirt.

Lastly, we’ve been contacted by a ticket-sales website that wants to offer tickets through links similar to the amazon links currently on the site. This is a welcome change, because the site is draining money fast, and I’d much prefere to put targeted links on individual pages where they are relevant than to slap some Google AdWords on the pages (which may end up happening eventually). As an example, you wouldn’t be bothered by links everywhere, but if you happened to be on the Tool page and Tool was on tour, you’d have a link to find those tickets you couldn’t seem to get your hands on. More on this to come!

WetPaint – a wiki system bound for greatness

Posted on July 8, 2006 by Sean

==Intro==
There is a new wiki-system called WetPaint that I recently had a chance to preview before its official launch (it then launched on June 19th, 2006). Before I get into this further, I want to point out a couple of things:

I run the world’s largest wiki next to wikipedia: LyricWiki.org [1, 2], and this has given me quite a bit of experience dealing with and thinking about wikis.
I have no vested interest in promoting WetPaint. I get pretty complementary in this article, so just remember that they’re not paying me or giving me any incentive. If I say their code is good it’s because… it’s good.

==The Scoop==
Although I still like the MediaWiki software that I use to run LyricWiki.org – the same software used on Wikipedia – I think it is safe to say that it’s been trumped. WetPaint uses MS-Word-like editing to remove the otherwise-substantial learning curve from contributing to a wiki. It’s sprinkled with AJAX to make the process faster, and it fixes a number of problems that come with MediaWiki and many other popular wiki tools. The way WetPaint works is that they host wikis, and they get revenue from some Google AdWords in the bottom of the right-hand column of the page. In the first two weeks after their launch, over 6,000 sites were created [3]. A couple of these sites (set up during the private beta) appear to have been set up by Wetpaint themselves to show off the system – and presumably because the sites are useful anyway – including wikiCancer and wikiPregnancy.

==Advantages==
I noticed several interesting things when poking around Wetpaint. Many of these features I only noticed because they were unfortunately absent in MediaWiki. Anyway, here’s the beef…

The links to add a new page are very prominent, and it’s really easy to create sub-pages also. When creating a page, it will warn you as you are writing if the page name is a duplicate.
Wetpaint makes very good use of tags. They’re easy to add, and they have a tag-cloud on the side of the page to make it easy for people to get intrigued and bounce around your site.
Altough I have no benchmarks and there don’t seem to be any available online yet, Wetpaint seems significantly faster than the bloated MediaWiki. This is partially because Wetpaint uses AJAX so that only parts of the page need to be sent back and forth, and partially because MediaWiki is significantly slower than it should be – but I digress.
The site is fairly cross-browser compatible. It supports Firefox 1.0.7 and higher (PC & Mac) and IE 6.0 for PCs [4]. That’s not phenomenal for a wiki, but it’s really good as far as most AJAX sites go. The much-lauded ajaxWrite receives all sorts of attention even though it requires Firefox which abandons the vast majority of web users.
Editing is intuitive and intentionally similar to Microsoft Word, effectively eliminating the learning curve for most users. As a person who runs a wiki (or four), I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Not only have I spent countless hours correcting the pages created by people who don’t know how to deal with the proprietary wikitext-markup of each system, but I’ve also had to waste hours of coding-time making forms to make data-entry more intuitive.
The comment system they made has the potential to be very viral. This may have existed in some wiki engines before – since there are so many of them – but I sure haven’t seen it. The only potential drawback I see with it is that visitors might get lost amongst the flame-wars and forget to come back to the content.
There is an auto-generated site map. This is good for search engines and for lost visitors. On the flipside, I checked it out a larger sitemap though, and it appears that it doesn’t scale itself yet. Therefore, if you have a humongous wiki (50,000 pages or so), this page may get to be a bit ridiculous.

==How Wetpaint can become the dominant wiki design==
Wetpaint is one sweet pile of code. There is no reason that a system as well-created as Wetpaint can’t become the dominant wiki design. Since I’ve had some good luck in the wiki-industry, I’ll wax-prophetic for a moment on how Wetpaint can make sure they become the dominant design.

Develop importing from other wikis. This decreases switching costs allowing many of the other well-established wikis to abandon their former engines. WordPress did this with a very high level of success in blogging-software.
Make a developer network! This is important. If they make a SOAP webservice and encourage developers to make plugins, skins, and utilize their API for other programs and mashups, there is a great deal of potential for really cool things to be created. Things that would further Wetpaint’s grasp on the market. In addition to the basics, they should have a very strong platform for letting wiki-owners easily create bots. Wikis with bots are far more effective than those without bots. Since wikis have one structure and many different types of sites are crammed into them, normal maintenance through the database is hard. In the case of Wetpaint it would actually be impossible since it is a hosting solution (it just wouldn’t be safe). If a wiki-admin can create a powerful bot, they can keep their site from becoming messy.
They need a wiki about their own site.
Get Business 2.0 and their blog to worship Wetpaint (as they should)
Think about alternate business models (sell a CD with an archive in a specially browseable format, possibly publish books from the content). The only reason I can think of that the majority of wikis aren’t going to jump onto Wetpaint like geese on June bugs (that was lame) is that they are only a hosted solution. See below for more on this.
Bonus: Some sort of anti-spam solution. Spamming is one of the biggest problems with wikis today. If they could think of a way to combat it, they would have a strong competitive advantage.

==Hosted versus installed==
Right now, Wetpaint has joined the ranks of JotSpot, pbwiki, Wikia, and Atlassian as a hosted-wiki provider. I have full confidence that they can dispatch of those companies fairly well. It will take some time though, because they all seem to have some Bubble 2.0 cash to burn through.If they are happy enough with this, then so be it. But if they want to be the only standard for wikis, they have to figure out a way to compete with installed wiki software. When companies have their own servers, they are often more than happy to use installed wikis even for their enterprise wikis which eats at Wetpaint’s potential market. The reason I run MediaWiki instead of switching over to Wetpaint is that by installing an open source package, you have full control. If LyricWiki does decide to put Google AdWords on the side of my page, LyricWiki will get the money. In addition, I have the option (which I have exercised quite a bit) to change the code around to make it better suit my needs. Of course, I have to concede to the hosted-sites that upgrading MediaWiki is a pain, especially when you have modified some of the code in a way other than an official extension.

==Conclusion===
Wetpaint is awesome, there is no doubting that. The code is top-notch and the management seem to know what they’re doing. This site is going one direction… up! In times when the 2.0 bubble is spawning countless new businesses based solely on buzzwords, it’s nice to see a company do it right and use the new tools available to build a solid, easy-to-use product. Good job guys.

==Sources Cited==
1: WikiStats by S23 – List of largest Wikis http://s23.org/wikistats/wikis_html.php
2: List of Largest wikis http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_wikis
3: Email-conversation with Chris Kollas of WetPaint.
4: About Wetpaint Sites – Frequently Asked Questions http://faq.wetpaint.com/page/1.%20About%20Wetpaint%20Sites

==Additional Sources==
* More browser statistics http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
* List of the top 100 wikis on Wetpaint http://www.wetpaint.com/more

New Blogging System!

Posted on June 14, 2006 by Sean

I have several blogs, all with different topics. One of the reasons I haven’t been updating them enough to meet my satisfaction is that there is some overlap in the subject-matter, and I am often confused on where to post to.

I decided recently that I should start burning through my list of articles to write, and to help this along, I wrote a cross-blog posting system. It’s pretty nifty because it posts to a WordPress v1.5, WordPress v2.0.3, and my own custom blogging system that I wrote for Codeaholics.

My personal site will generally serve as the aggregator and (probably) get every article, along with links out to each of the blogs where the article was posted.

Here is a breakdown of the different blogs and what they cover:

SeanColombo.com – the aggregate of all posts. This is my life as a whole, so it will have every article, and will have little icons indicating which blogs the article was posted to.
Motive Blog – productivity and the glory of man! Basically this blog will exhalt all the things that Motive Force LLC stands for, and pretty much ignore the rest.
iHateCSS.org – general griping about numerous, poorly implemented web-languages/standards and tips on how to survive them. Since it’s made partially as an emotional outlet for the frustrations of coders who have been portability-hacking their code for hours, the tone is fairly informal.
Codeaholics Code blog– programming / hacking / general caffeination.
Codeaholics News – where the code-blog is less-pinnacle code-related stuff, the News blog is just for announcements (eg: when coding projects get started/released, etc.).

Blogging Plans

Posted on June 12, 2006 by Sean

Permanent hosting! SeanColombo.com and Codeaholics.com have been live and dead repeatedly over the last several years since they were always running off of my desktop computer. Every time I relocated, buy they would go down for a while. In fact, dermatologist they have been down for a couple weeks, visit and last summer they were down the whole time.

Justification (skip this paragraph if you’re bored already)
They’re pretty decent sites (in my humble opinion), and Codeaholics even gets some sweet page-rank when it stays up for a while, so I decided to make them a little more permanent. Since one is about my code (which relates to Motive Force projects) and one is about my life (which is about 90% related to Motive Force), I moved the sites over to my Motive Force web-hosting account. There are no additional fees to host additional domains (because DreamHost is sweet like that), so I think hosting these sites just for the promotion they give is a legitimate use of the company web-space.

Anyway, with those sites back up, I’ve decided I’m going to try to start blogging on a regular schedule. I have a lot of cool things to tell the world (don’t worry, they generally won’t be about my life, they will be legitimate articles!) and I wrote them down in my Projectory so I could come back to them later. When people read a blog, it can be frustrating to have a bunch of topics coming through their feed, so I’m going to be writing a tool that lets me post to certain blogs and not to others. Here is the breakdown:

SeanColombo.com – the aggregate of all posts. This is my life as a whole, so it will have every article, and will have little icons indicating which blogs the article was posted to.
Motive Blog – productivity and the glory of man! Basically this blog will exhalt all the things that Motive Force LLC stands for, and pretty much ignore the rest.
Codeaholics.com – programming / hacking / general caffeination.
iHateCSS.org – general griping about numerous, poorly implemented web-languages/standards and tips on how to survive them. Since it’s made partially as an emotional outlet for the frustrations of coders who have been portability-hacking their code for hours, the tone is fairly informal.

LyricWiki.org – DreamHost Site of the Month April 2006!

Posted on May 2, 2006 by Sean

Great news! LyricWiki.org just won the DreamHost Site of the Month (DHSOTM) for April 2006!

DreamHost is a popular web-host that allows any of it’s hundreds of thousands of users to submit their sites each month to be evaluated by the other members to determine a winner.

It was really uplifting to hear all of the positive feedback from the public in the commentary, adiposity and I was thrilled by the great review that one of the founders of DreamHost wrote in the newsletter about LyricWiki:

5. DHSOTM

Is this month’s DHSOTM winner yet another beautiful flash-based website,
sucking our bandwidth and making us wish for the sweet release of death?

That would be a surprise. Another surprise, a bigger surprise, a much
HUGER surprise, would be if this month’s winner was actually based
entirely on a simple DreamHost one-click install!

http://www.lyricwiki.org

As you might surmise, this site is a wiki. It’s not just any ordinary
wiki though, it’s a fun and useful wiki: a wiki of song lyrics! That’s
even better than a wiki of spy codes and ciphers! Chicks just don’t dig
spy codes and ciphers the way they do lyrics. And what better way to
organize a bunch of lyrics than in a wiki, where everybody can submit
modifications and new songs without any kind of central authority or
even basic fact checking? No better way in my mind! This is my favorite
site of the month, EVER. I love that they just used our 1-click installs
to make the whole thing! I love that there are no pop-ups or spyware!

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.dhsotm

That’s right… he said it was his favorite EVER!! :D That kind of feedback is what makes it all worthwhile when I take a significant amount of time away from Motive Force‘s commercial products to make something purely for the benefit of the internet community.

Needless to say, traffic has jumped considerably with the exposure from the newsletter (it was already doing as well as any other Motive Force site) and someone even “Digg”-ed it which will hopefully drive even more traffic. This is exactly what a wiki needs to thrive!

New Site – LyricWiki.org

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Sean

LyricWiki.org is my (proposed) solution to those annoying lyrics sites with banner ads and pop-ups everywhere. It uses the same MediaWiki software used to run Wikipedia with a few modifications.

Some notable things about the site:

I wrote bots to grab reliable lyrics from the internet and add more than 200, pharm 000 songs to start the site off
There are FireFox and Netscape search plugins available that can be installed in one-click from the side menu
Wiki format will allow new songs to be added very quickly and old songs to be corrected by the community until they are super-reliable
I actually released the site yesterday and it had the biggest first-day of any site I’ve made to date (yes, sick it even beat ChuckNorrisIsGod.com)

If you’re into music at all, resuscitator give the site a gander. It’s free and has no banners (my company, Motive Force LLC is going to absorb the costs), so check it out. If you really enjoy it, maybe you can contribute some song lyrics from your favorite bands (hint hint). Enjoy!

New site – JackBauerIsGod.com

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Sean

JackBauerIsGod.com is a simple “Jack Bauer Facts” site. I bought the domain a while ago and tonight I finally got around to modifying the ChuckNorrisIsGod.com code and posting it.

Despite Fox’s blasphemy-bordering murder of Tony Almeida this season, doctor every American that doesn’t have the Cordila Virus, gonorrhea radiation poisoning, ambulance or convulsions from Centox Gas owes their life to Jack Bauer.

Here is a taste of what’s on the site:

Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.

and another one of my fav’s:

Jack Bauer killed so many terrorists that at one point, the #5 CIA Most Wanted fugitive was an 18-year-old teenager in Malaysia who downloaded the movie Dodgeball.

Even though I have a full-blown Web 2.0 (AJAX and such) project-management web-application in the works, and another extremely useful site (see next post) that I just made, if the Chuck Norris site’s traffic is any indication, JackBauerIsGod will end up being more popular than either one! Enjoy.

Quick Tip: Notepad++ – Modify / Delete Macros

Posted on January 18, 2006 by Sean

I use Notepad++ (v3.3 currently) for a lot of my development work, this web and I noticed that I couldn’t find any sites that mention how to delete or edit a macro once you create it.

Here is the rather simple method (simple once you find it anyway… it’s not in the “Macro” menu):

From the top menu, prostate select “Settings” => “Shortcut Mapper…”
Scroll down near the very bottom (my macros started at item 60)
Right-click and select either Modify or Delete (double click will act the same as selecting Modify)

Hope that helps someone!