As of a month ago Trader's title had been downgraded to VP of Partnerships and Studio Services, although no top sales or business development replacement executive has yet been named.

Why is he gone? No one is saying. CEO Mark Pincus says only AT [Andrew Trader] and zynga have parted ways. He made an awesome contribution. We need to continue scaling the company. Trader hasn't yet returned a phone call asking for his comment.

Zynga's revenue growth has been nothing short of astronomical over the last 18 months, so it would be hard to blame him for not bringing in the dollars. Perhaps he took the fall for the Scamville saga although that has largely blown over now.

Trader was with Zynga nearly three years, so he's vested on a lot of his stock. Given how much money is at stake, the whole story about why the first cofounder of Zynga has left the building may never come out. Zynga raised $180 million in December 2009, at a rumored valuation of above $2 billion.

And no, I have no idea why he's holding a banana in the picture.

Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It's crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything's been programmed to use Yahoo.

It is not unusual for carriers to work deals for specific software on its handsets. They take money wherever they can get it. But this deal is sure to confuse the customer, as Android phones are commonly called Google phones by many. Let's face it, Google makes Android, and one of its strengths is the tight integration with the company's online services. And search is certainly one of Google's big services, but not on the AT&T Backflip.

This is the equivalent of a Windows PC hitting the market that has Internet Explorer removed and Safari as the only browser. Some customers might be happy by that but most would be confused. Then to make matter worse, imagine that Internet Explorer couldn't be installed by the user to get around this major change. That seems to be the case with the AT&T Backflip, as early testers are reporting the inability to get Google search working in any of the Android programs.

There has been enough complaining about fragmentation in the Android space, so I won't rehash that topic. But there is something so fundamentally wrong when an Android phone has Google search removed. And replaced by Yahoo search? I guess this makes the Backflip the Yahoo Phone.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

As Windows Mobile Stumbles, Which Smartphone OS Will Seize the Lead?

Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It's crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything's been programmed to use Yahoo.

It is not unusual for carriers to work deals for specific software on its handsets. They take money wherever they can get it. But this deal is sure to confuse the customer, as Android phones are commonly called Google phones by many. Let's face it, Google makes Android, and one of its strengths is the tight integration with the company's online services. And search is certainly one of Google's big services, but not on the AT&T Backflip.

This is the equivalent of a Windows PC hitting the market that has Internet Explorer removed and Safari as the only browser. Some customers might be happy by that but most would be confused. Then to make matter worse, imagine that Internet Explorer couldn't be installed by the user to get around this major change. That seems to be the case with the AT&T Backflip, as early testers are reporting the inability to get Google search working in any of the Android programs.

There has been enough complaining about fragmentation in the Android space, so I won't rehash that topic. But there is something so fundamentally wrong when an Android phone has Google search removed. And replaced by Yahoo search? I guess this makes the Backflip the Yahoo Phone.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

As Windows Mobile Stumbles, Which Smartphone OS Will Seize the Lead?

140proof, which is based in San Francisco and backed by a $2-million investment raised last summer from Blue Run Ventures and Founders Fund, said that its algorithm aims ads at users based on their profiles and other public data. Other Twitter advertising services include Ad.ly, which has gotten some press attention for paying celebrities such as Kim Kardashian thousands of dollars to endorse products to their followers, as well as Magpie, Assetize and IZEA.

The question all of these services will inevitably confront including Twitter itself, once it launches its own platform is how users will react to a wave of advertising in what was once an ad-free social network (in the case of 140proof, of course, you can simply not use HootSuite's mobile apps and you won't see them). Many of these services are only just ramping up in what will undoubtedly become a much bigger campaign to bring ads to the Twittersphere. So what will you do when ads start appearing in your Twitter stream?

Related content from GigaOm Pro (sub req'd):

How Human Users Are Holding Twitter Back

Although Open Home is an $3.99 app, I'd really call it a platform. With it, you can skin or customize your Android interface, add Live Folders, shortcuts and such. And there's tons of custom skins, fonts, icon packs for sale in the Android Market to enhance it. There's even an experimental 3D cube interface in the latest version as you swipe to other home screens, the screen rotates like a cube. I haven't dropped the $3.99 just yet, but I did install Open Home Lite, which is free. It wasn't until after installation that I realized the software adds two extra home screens to the Nexus One. I don't have enough apps and shortcuts to fill up seven screens just yet, but I'm heading in that direction, so the extra space will come in handy. Each of the screens can hold a custom descriptive title as well check this old but relevant video to see how one user categorized the screens on his HTC Magic.

Aside from the extra home screens, Open Home adds dedicated search on the left and an interesting little slideout drawer on the right side of the screen. Simply tap and swipe the star to pull out the drawer. I'm thinking of placing the most used apps in the little drawer so that they're available from any of the seven screens. And I don't even have to give up my Live Wallpapers since Open Home supports them on my handset. Perhaps one of the best features of all Open Home allows for home screen rotation to landscape mode, something I wish Android would support natively.

I'll be playing some more with the free, lite version of Open Home, but I'm already inclined to drop the $3.99 it's a small price to pay for two extra home screens and customization features.

Images courtesy of Better Android Apps

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

Google's Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One

First, let me inventory the raw materials that got me thinking this way. Recently JC Hutchins posted that he had been dropped as an author by St. Martins Press and that they would not be publishing the 7th Son sequels. The post lives between a gut-check and a crisis of faith from one of the pioneering new media creator/ novelist hybrid guys. He also posted about monetary realities of writers pubishing via ebooks. Not that long before this, I had listened to JC's Hey Everybody interview with Pablo Defendini and Ami Greko from The New Sleekness blog. It's a really interesting discussion about the future of book publishing by industry professionals young enough in their careers to be less invested in the status quo and more willing to help a new future emerge. (Side note 1: I met Pablo and Ami at last year's Dragon*Con in the classic SF con fashion I wanted to meet them, saw them in a hotel bar, asked if I could sit with them, introduced myself and hung out for an hour. Try it, it works! ) Much in my thinking was informed over the last month by the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing wars of far too large a trail to link to anything. In that debate I did first run across Joe Konrath, his fiction and some of his posts with amazingly open and detailed statistics of what he sells and what he makes from digital publishing. (Side note 2: I bought, read and enjoyed his book Whiskey Sour as fallout from the debate).

There are many other bits of thought in the mix, such as my feelings about beginning my own novel during NaNoWriMo and thinking about hiring my friends at Sterling Editing to work on it and what I might choose to do with such a book when)it is finished. That's enough of a prelude, though. Time to hit it.

JC Hutchins struck a nerve when he basically waved the white flag on his current way of working.

Creating podcast fiction does does not generate direct revenue for me. Based on anecdotal and statistical data, very few people are willing to pay for general podcast content, much less podcast fiction. Since my goal is to make a living wage with my words, the current monetization models including in-show advertisements will not deliver this. Dedicating time and effort to my non-fiction podcast projects will deliver equally underwhelming monetary results.

It is also apparent to me that using the Free model to promote a tangible product, such as I did with 7th Son: Descent and Personal Effects: Dark Art, does not deliver sustainable sales results. I have friends some of whom are my best friends, the most talented people I've had the privilege to know and work with who have absolute faith in this model. I treasure their trailblazing efforts and enthusiasm. My faith, however, has been fundamentally rattled.

Put simply: The new media model viably supports only the most blessed and talented of authors. The time, effort and money I invest in entertaining you for free pulls my attention and talent away from projects that can generate revenue. While podcasting, podcast fiction, and most importantly your support and evangelism has positively impacted my life and career in ways I'll never be able to fully express, I cannot continue to release free audiofiction if I wish to make a living wage with my words.

This is pretty big stuff in the world of podcast fiction. Hutch was one of the pioneers of the form and his getting picked up by St. Martins was considered a watershed and a validation for the medium. So if he can't make it in this world, what does that say about all the other podcast novelists who are less engaged, have less of a fan base, less sheer horsepower? Does it mean this medium is screwed?

I am positing that Hutch had a terrible misfortune of timing, that he arose as a viable author at exactly the wrong moment in publishing history. As he started down his path it seemed like the end game was to get a book deal with a major publisher. For writers of the last 100 years, this was the reasonable career success path for authors, and practically the only one. In the last few years though a sea change has happened so rapidly and thoroughly to flip that Hutch got his boat capsized in the process and he will be far from the only one. As crazy as it may sound, for a certain kind of author at this point I think a major publishing contract may seem like winning the game but is in fact losing it.

The red flags I got from the JC Hutchins post started here:

Examining the lead up to, and release of, the novel, I cannot see how I could have promoted it any better than I did. I literally went broke promoting this book and Personal Effects: Dark Art (another novel that will not have a sequel; it also underperformed). I conceived numerous brand-new online marketing campaigns that dazzled you and others. I asked you to purchase the novel, and many of you did.

If JC is literally going broke promoting 7th Son and Personal Effects book, I think a reasonable question to ask is What is St. Martins Press' role in this? If JC is willing and able to put so much of his own time and money into the promotion of the books, what value is he getting from the big publisher that is worth giving away 90% of the sale of the book to them? 50 years ago, and 20 years ago and 2 years ago, this made sense. It was pretty much impossible to get a book published and into the hands of the world in any significant way especially in a way that a writer could make a full-time living without a major publisher contract, especially one paying advances at a level to be a livable wage. Nowadays, especially due to the markeplace enabled by the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader et al, that's a different equation.

Joe Konrath's post about the money he makes from the Kindle store shows a really clear pattern that he summarizes with:

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I'd be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I'm losing $15,762 per year.

For a writer with an engaged audience, like JA Konrath has and like JC Hutchins has, there may well be more money in their books self-published primarily through the Kindle and other ebook stores. An interesting bit from the Konrath numbers above, that's from making 35% of the sales price for his direct books. When it changes to 70%, he'll be making twice as much per book as he posted above for the self-published ones.

Let me say it again: for a writer who is engaged with their audience and reasonably prolific (because you need new books to keep this engine turning), we may be at the turning point where a better living is available through self-publishing than a big New York publisher book deal.

There are certainly authors that this model will not work for. During my preparation for last year's Podcasting for Working Writers panel at Dragon*Con I talked to both James Patrick Kelly and Kelley Eskridge on this topic and they both raised the point that for a number of old school writers, the idea of engaging at the level of podcasting and doing large parts of their own publicity is anathema. A reasonable chunk of authors don't want to get out in the limelight and picked this career specifically so they don't have to engage. They write their books, maybe do a few conventions a year, do some bookstore events and that's it. Back to the keyboard where the serious work happens. That's fair enough and those writers will always need a publisher to do the parts of this business that would make them unhappy to pursue.

I think of the classic big publisher and big record label model as basically serving the function of the bank or maybe as VC. The manufacturing and distribution of the creative work was too capital intensive for an individual so this company would lend that money to the process, make the books or records show up in the store, do some publicity and keep most of the money. They insulate the creator from the process and from the retailers and fans. What publicity efforts exist, the big media company acts as a semi-permeable membrane to let a little of the public through, but not a lot. Ultimately in this model, the relationship with the fans of the buying public is owned mostly by the retailer and the publisher or label, very little by the writer or musician. For the author that doesn't want to feed and water that relationship, that's perfect.

For the other kind of author, a JC Hutchins or Mur Lafferty or Scott Sigler, going with a major publisher outsources to a third party a relationship with their fans that these writers are really really good at maintaining. When Hutch is paying his own money to publicize his books and his his own direct line into his own fanbase, what can the big publishers do for him? They could give him large enough advances to keep his bills paid while future books are written, but obviously they aren't willing to do that because sales aren't high enough. JC's books earn money, but not enough money to keep him in that system. For me, the real question is Did St. Martins Press do 9 times the work than JC did to get the work promoted? If not, what did they do to deserve a 90/10 split?

Last November for NaNoWriMo I began a novel that I have literally been thinking about since 1991 when I was 23. While I came nowhere near finishing it that month and am nowhere near finished now, I have a goal to finish this novel in 2010. I've already been thinking about what happens when I finish the book. Do I try to find an agent and then try to have them place it with a major publisher? Since I don't have any plans beyond that one book and thus don't necessarily have a writing career in mind, how does that affect my decision making? At the moment I'm leaning towards not bothering to place the book with any publisher at all. I'll pay Nicola and Kelley at Sterling Editing to work with me to get it publishable and hire a book designer and/or artist to hone the final product and then publish it to the Kindle store, Smashwords, the Nook store and whatever else seems reasonable at the time. I'll probably release it via Podiobooks.com at the the same time, do my publicity via that and the other usual online suspects and let it ride. The key point to me is that the energy I could spend in placing my book at a big publisher could be spent selling the book to readers and I'll probably make more money that way in the long run. This isn't the way things worked for the 19th and 20th century and it may not be the way it works in the future, but March 2010 it is the way it looks to me now. The validation of having a major publisher decide I'm their sort of writer doesn't do anything for me. I don't need the book contract to pay my living, I'd end up doing mostly my own publicity anyway so what the hell does the publisher have to offer me anymore? Rather than have them put out a $15 Kindle book that I see a buck or two from and no one buys with a print version that is on and off the shelves in head-swimming time on a death march to the warehouse remainder store, I'd rather put out a $5.99 ebook version that I see $4 from each one and more people buy. I have a whole rant on how the true function of ebook platforms is to enable impulse buys, but this current post is already too long. That must come later.

When I interviewed Cory Doctorow in 2006, one of the things he said is that the generation coming of age now is the first one to arise without a stigma attached to self-publication. Since I've been paying attention to the world of science fiction and writers in general, a giant shift has happened. When I joined GEnie in 1992, the notion of self-publishing your work meant that it was unreadable tripe and the very thought of it was risible to any serious author. Nowadays, it might well be the most rational economic choice available. If you aren't already in the system and earning livable wages from advances on your books, and you are the sort of writer and person with that drive a JC Hutchins, a Scott Sigler, a Tee Morris, a Mur Lafferty, an Alec Longstreth, someone willing to do more than thrown the manuscript over the wall and wait for finished copies to return it might be time to take the reins yourself and just do this. The costs are low which means the cost of failing is low. The traditional publishers aren't paying that much anyway so the opportunity costs are low. Just do it. Lynne Abbey, CJ Cherryh and Jane Fancher did. The writers at Book View Cafe did. I will. Don't pin your hopes on a big publisher with economic drivers that are different than yours. Just do it yourself, work the people yourself and keep as much of the money as you can.

Tags: akismet, amazon, ebooks, jakonrath, jchutchins, kindle, macmillan, publishing, sterlingediting, stmartinspress

- Lulu will take PDF files for a book. Blogbooker.com will try to create a PDF from a blog. Unfortunately, my blog made BlogBooker choke (I have 991 posts from my blog) even when I excluded comments.

- Blurb.com will try to create a book from a blog, but it only supports blogs hosted on WordPress.com, not other WordPress blogs. That will help some people who want to print their blog into a book, but not everyone.

- I had the best luck with FastPencil. In order to reduce the size of your exported blog, you'll first want to go to your comments section, click on the spam link and clear out any spam comments by selecting all the spam comments and clicking Empty Spam. Then you can export your WordPress blog (from the Dashboard, click Tools, then Export) as an XML file that you can download to your computer. From there, FastPencil lets you upload the .xml file and then select which blog posts to include in the book. You can also filter by time, which I had to do. Even my blog posts (no comments) from the last year and a half still made a 350+ page book, and FastPencil choked on turning my entire blog into a book.

FastPencil did a few things well. Included images were imported, and some formatting such as bold made it into the PDF. But other formatting, such as code formatting and newlines/spacing between paragraphs didn't make it. Embedded content such as videos or polls were likewise empty. Trying to import my entire blog also didn't work. But all in all, I was impressed with FastPencil. They also have nice collaboration tools (e.g. you can designate editors, reviewers, co-authors, and project managers to help in writing/polishing the content). The site also works through your web browser instead of as a downloadable program, which appealed to me. If you're used to WordPress, FastPencil won't be too much of a change.

It's still not a point-and-click affair to make a nice looking coffee table book out of a blog, but it's getting closer. Right now, the make a book niche feels like the early days of recordable CDs. Back then, CD-R discs were expensive enough that I would spend time to make sure that I used all the free space on the CD. Eventually prices dropped so much that you didn't feel bad about burning a half-empty or not-perfectly-polished CD.

If you've tried other blog-to-book services or websites, let me know your experiences in the comments.

About twice a week I think, "Why don't I try this crazy idea and see if it works?" about some element of my career. With no label, no manager, and no inner voice of reason slow me down, I get to experiment all I want. 90% of my crazy ideas have to do with social networking -- which I spend half a lifetime doing, despite the crap I take from my family and Real Life friends. (Hey, some of us actually do bond over web comics, starship replicas, the fail whale, and photos of stuff on cats.) Mostly my nutty ideas work just a little bit. Some are epic failures. But my experimental flopping and floundering inches me closer to the day when I'll be totally financially independent as a full-time musician. Plus it's more fun than having a real job.

But every now and then a crazy idea works really really really good. Bam!

I planned to sell 20-40 of my little bootleg CD's. Silly me. I sold well over 200. My little stack of jewel cases looked so pathetic.

WholeWheatRadio.org broke every record for online listenership, CD sales, tips -- everything. The more listeners tuned in, the more tuned in, and the more money they gave, the more money they gave. The crowd online was thrilled to be breaking WWR records. I drove away from Talkeetna having earned about $4,000 in one night, with a new CD to produce in just a couple of days and an avalanche of e-mail and publicity requests to deal with. Seldom have I been so happy and so panicked.

SFWeekly Web Editor Alexia Tsotsis (not pictured left) spent some time early this morning trying out Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers for a video chat. The results are unlikely to surprise you. Unless you are new to this whole Internet thing. Screen shots of some of her more entertaining chats are below the post.

Harkening back to the days of A/S/L, the random vidchat service Chatroulette is one of those online arenas where not being a white male looking to get off puts you in a definite minority. Founded by a 17 year-old Russian high school student named Andrew Ternovskiy, the service is a more successful Omegle, combining elements of the MTV show Next with vidchat capabilities.

Aspiring chatees click to play and as an escape latch you or your partner can hit Next anytime if you get bored, scared, or have to get back to work. The Report video as inappropriate button also seems to provide some comfort, but by judging by the nsfw fare served to me last night, doesn't provide much of a threat.

I pressed play last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on Next encountered 5 straight up penis shots, a lot of camera disabled chats, two women who automatically clicked Next once they figured out that I too was a female, and a lot of very grateful looking guys, including a Chinese fan of Google and a French guy in indoor sunglasses, who asked me whether I was a more dominate lady or submissive woman in the hope that I would be the former.

Out of the 10,920 of my fellow Chatroulette participants, my Roulettees were a good cross section of Internet humanity. And while I did not encounter the suicide hanging videos alluded to in many of the chats, things like did you hear the one about the guy who shot himself in the bath tub, were brought up in conversation quite a few times, as examples of just how crazy Chatroulette can get.

Anywhere you get a mass of people communicating uncensored (and yes much like 4chan.org, China has not yet blocked Chatroulette) will be subject to typical groupthink behavior like urban myths and requests for interaction better left to the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Nonetheless, the service's potential for more substantial acts of communication is formidable.

Chatroulette is what you'd expect it to be, micro-interactive reality TV with a large heaping of cybersex. While most people are (whether they admit it or not) voyeurs the fact that Chatroulette lets the both participants see each other limits the site's potential user base to the weirdos and despite piquing VC Fred Wilson's interest it doesn't seem like there's currently enough weirdos to turn the humble startup into something mainstream.

One Roulettee, when asked what he thought the service was most useful for, responded, connecting with people around the world. Yeah, and asking them to show you their boobs.

In December 2008, Six Apart acquired Pownce, a microblogging service that never managed to attract a large following. Pownce was shuttered after the acquisition, but its two-person team joined Six Apart to help integrate the technology into Six Apart's blogging services. Today Pownce founder Leah Culver has written on her blog that she's leaving Six Apart, where she spent the last year working on its TypePad and TypePad Motion products. Culver writes that her next project is developing an iPhone application for Plancast.

Despite reports to the contrary, Culver isn't joining Plancast full time (at least not yet). Plancast founder (and TechCrunch alum) Mark Hendrickson says that she's joining on a contract basis to build the iPhone app, but that the long-term future is uncertain. Culver's blog notes that she might continue working on Leafy Chat, a web based IRC client that's in private beta.

One thing worth pointing out: Culver and Mike Malone were Pownce's only engineers, and they were absorbed into the Six Apart team as part of the acquisition. Malone left Six Apart just over a year after the acquisition to join SimpleGeo, and now Culver has left just a few months later. It looks like they had a one-year post acquisition cliff, and given their departures soon thereafter, it's possible the integration of Pownce's technology didn't work out as they might have hoped.

Image by hyku

The big project fails, the company begins to struggle and before you know it, the board of directors replaces the management team. Sound familiar? But crisis doesn't have to spell the end of the company itself.

Most companies and teams in turnaround situations focus on the obvious and important factors of balance sheet, cash flow and net income health. Teams also usually get to work quickly on market analysis that ultimately results in new product and business strategies. These actions are almost always necessary, just not always sufficient. Here are four often overlooked tactics that, if successfully employed, are critical to rapidly and successfully turning around a struggling enterprise:

1. Facilitate Closure - When a team has been through an extended period of hardship, it needs a sense of closure before it can start moving forward again, and closure is often best facilitated through a cathartic event that symbolizes the end of the perilous and painful journey. But while closure commonly necessitates letting a person or team go, don't rush to find a fall guy. Be very precise about identifying what was holding the company back it could just as easily have come in the form of an ineffective process or out-of-date strategy. Approach its removal the way you would a tumor: Excise carefully, and be wary of damaging any healthy surrounding tissue.

2. Set a Vision - According to intentional change theory, there are five steps to achieving sustained desired change. The first is to identify the ideal self, which for an organization is usually embodied in a collective vision consisting of its members' dreams (to be recognized as the best in the industry? world domination?), their desired future (market penetration? profitability?), and their strengths or values (high quality? extraordinary customer care?) Identify these in order to establish a shared vision that resonates with each team member on a deep, even emotional, level.

3. Find an Enemy - The easiest way to solidify an us is to identify a them. As Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory makes clear, people need to be part of a group, but in a company the result is often conflict between groups. The conflict that most often occurs in a crisis is affective and role-based and therefore often negative and value-destroying. There is no better way to rally the troops than to embody the fight with an external nemesis. Identify for your team an enemy outside the company and focus on beating or staying ahead of it, using everything from its press releases to its product launches to spur the team into action.

4. Tend the Garden - In our recently published book, The Art of Scalability, we talk at length about how leadership is like gardening. Leaders must hire or seed the team with the right people and mentor its members just as gardeners feed their plants. And when team members aren't working out, they need to be weeded out.

The time period between Microsoft's release of its XP desktop operating system and Vista marked the longest in the company's history between product launches. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's co-president, admitted in a Wall Street Journal interview to telling Bill Gates at one point that It's not going to work, describing the development as crashing to the ground due to haphazard methods of feature integration.

To recover from this, Microsoft enlisted the help of senior executive Amitabh Srivastava, who rooted out the process that was holding the project back. He then had a team of architects establish a development process that enforced high levels of code quality and reduced interdependencies. Once the new process was in place, the vision was set for what was ultimately a successful product launch, at least in terms of getting the product out the door and meeting the expected sales volumes.

There are entire books and domains of research dedicated to turning around failed projects and distressed teams. This list is in no way all-encompassing but if you are ever faced with the daunting task of turning around a team, these four tasks will be critical to its success.

The web is becoming more dynamic, context-aware and personalized by the day, and the amount of information consumed by each person is increasing exponentially. But while hardware performance is improving, except when it comes to the simplest of parallel programming tasks, software infrastructure is not keeping pace. We need to develop new data processing architectures ones that go beyond technologies like memcached, MapReduce, NoSQL, etc.

Think of this as a search problem. Traditionally, there was an index of every document in which every word occurred. When a query was received the search engine could just look up the precomputed answer to which documents had which word. For a personalized search, an exponentially larger index is needed that includes not only factual data (words in a document, brand of cameras, etc.) but also taste and preference data (people who like this camera tend to live in cities, be under 40, love Napoleon Dynamite, etc.).

Unfortunately, personalizing along 100 taste dimensions leads to nearly as many permutations of recommendation rankings as there are atoms in the universe! Obviously there isn't enough space to precompute what recommendations to show every possible type of person that queries a site. Additionally, precomputing the answer to queries is too slow. People expect real-time results, not hours- or days-old precomputed answers. If I tell Amazon I don't like a book, I want to immediately see that reflected in my recommendations.

We're at a turning point in how we need to build web sites to handle these sorts of personalization problems. While first-generation distributed systems split the application into three tiers web servers, application servers and databases second-generation systems build large non-real-time back-end clusters to analyze huge amounts of sales data, index billions of web documents etc.

A third generation of systems is now emerging, with the computation shifting from those back-end clusters into front-end real-time clusters. After all, you just can't build a back end that precomputes personalized results for millions of Internet users. You have to compute it in real time.

Adding complexity, many personalization problems are more difficult to parallelize than a lot of traditional back-end applications. Indexing the words in web pages is actually a lot easier to parallelize than are the long sequence of matrix calculations required to optimize a user's recommendations.

Matrix calculations tend to involve complicated data access patterns that mean it's hard to partition calculations and their data across a cluster of computers. Instead there tends to be a lot of sharing among many different computers, each of which holds a piece of the problem and updates the others as data changes. This back-and-forth data sharing is both incredibly hard to keep track of for the programmer, and can significantly degrade application performance.

The systems we've built at Hunch to solve this started off using distributed caching with memcached but very quickly veered into something more akin to distributed shared memory (DSM) systems, complete with multiple levels of caching, coherency protocols with application-specific consistency guarantees and data replication for performance. With an abundance of processing cores at our disposal, the real challenges tended to revolve around getting the right data to the right core.

I think that in a few years we'll look back at this time as an era in which a slew of new large-scale programming challenges and their solutions were born. Hopefully we'll also see more open-source solutions along the lines of memcached and Hadoop, so that building personalized and real-time web applications is easy for everyone.

Tom Pinckney is the co-founder & VP of engineering of Hunch.com.

Related GigaOM Pro content:

• What's Next for the Cloud? Distributed Architectures
• Infrastructure Winners and Losers of 2009

UPDATE: We've been anxiously following Mobile Firefox for a long time. The mobile version of the web browser has also been known as Fennec for most of that time. While this mobile version of Firefox has already hit some platforms as both early alpha versions and release candidates, Android owners were understandably excited when Mozilla confirmed a version for their platform was under construction. Now it is being reported that there may not be very long to wait, as Mobile Firefox for Android may appear as soon as next month.

Mozilla is keeping mum on when the Android version may be released, but let's hope this rumor pans out. Mobile Firefox should bring some welcome features to Android including bookmark syncing with the main Firefox and screen panning.

Mobile Firefox already has some cool features that should make mobile browsing a great experience. Take a look at this from Mozilla:

• The Awesome Bar searches your history, bookmarks and tags to go to your favorite sites instantly
• Share your Firefox preferences, history, and bookmarks between your desktop and mobile
• Add-ons to make your browser your own
• Tabs that let you browse multiple sites at once
• One-touch bookmarking to quickly organize websites

There are other mobile browsers for the different phone platforms that have some of these features, that's not new. But hey, this is Firefox.

UPDATE: Our friends at Android Central were a bit surprised by this rumor of a February launch as we were. They asked Mozilla if this was accurate and got the kibosh put on it directly:

Android is on our mobile road map, but the German reports were a bit exaggerated. The Android version of Fennec is not yet in alpha so on the way is premature.

It's a tribute to how badly folks want to get Mobile Firefox up and running when rumors like these get bandied about.

We've been anxiously following Mobile Firefox for a long time. The mobile version of the web browser has also been known as Fennec for most of that time. While this mobile version of Firefox has already hit some platforms as both early alpha versions and release candidates, Android owners were understandably excited when Mozilla confirmed a version for their platform was under construction. Now it is being reported that there may not be very long to wait, as Mobile Firefox for Android may appear as soon as next month.

Mozilla is keeping mum on when the Android version may be released, but let's hope this rumor pans out. Mobile Firefox should bring some welcome features to Android including bookmark syncing with the main Firefox and screen panning.

Mobile Firefox already has some cool features that should make mobile browsing a great experience. Take a look at this from Mozilla:

• The Awesome Bar searches your history, bookmarks and tags to go to your favorite sites instantly
• Share your Firefox preferences, history, and bookmarks between your desktop and mobile
• Add-ons to make your browser your own
• Tabs that let you browse multiple sites at once
• One-touch bookmarking to quickly organize websites

There are other mobile browsers for the different phone platforms that have some of these features, that's not new. But hey, this is Firefox.

I cant wait to get my hands on the IPad. Its going to be a HUGE hit.

You can book it right now that it will be the product that kids of this generation grow up with and look back on with affection just like we did with the first video games. Video games changed how we grew up. The IPad will change how kids grow up.

Apple was brilliant in how they cultivated apps for the IPhone and Touch. With so many apps for kids, any parent with young kids and either of these 2 devices will tell you that their kids use and love them. In fact, it was this very reason that I helped create Puzzle Palace for the IPhone. It allows my kids to take the pictures they take and turn them into puzzles. My 3 year old loves it.

The IPad will take this to the next level. I recognize that its very expensive for most families right now. Hopefully that will change over time. If it does, you can bet every home with kids will have an IPad. And the first person to create the kidproof covering will make money as well (Hint to entrepreneurs) On the flipside, the minute these devices hit critical mass in families, the DVD market for kids, who watch the same movie over and over will end as we know it. Download Scooby Do one time and the need to hassle with all those DVDs for the kids at home or on trips becomes a distant memory. A relic of an older generation.

Thats big.

Whats also big is the exclusion of flash. The reason is obvious. No flash. Far less streaming over 3G. Less streaming over 3G means less bandwidth consumed. Less bandwidth consumed means ATT can offer a GREAT price on the 3G data service. I personally have never had problems with the ATT Network. The limits on 3G streaming probably means I wont going forward either. Thats a good thing.

Its big that there is no USB port. As a content producer thats not a good thing. It means that Apple wants to force us through ITunes to sell content. It will be the path of least resistance for consumers to add content to the IPad and a HUGE source of revenue for Apple. Im sure there will be work around alternatives, but they wont be able to match the simplicity of the ITunes Store.

Outside the Apple Universe, the company that should be licking its chops is Dish Network. Their SlingBox product just became a grand slam. I absolutely LOVE the sling box app I run on my IPod Touch to watch NBA League Pass games, HDNet in a hotel room and other shows that I record on my DVR. I cant wait to put it on the IPad and its big screen.

And finally, if i was just out of school and fluent in all things Wi Fi , networking and wireless, I would immediately go door to door offering to fine tune your home's wireless network. With new HDTVs coming out with Wi FI, the IPad, SlingBox, Netflix Streaming and other applications consuming tons of bandwidth in the home, it is an ABSOLUTE certainty that 99pct of home networks can be improved and perform significantly better. Be that kid in your neighborhood that comes in and fine tunes everyone's wi fi in their home for 50 or 100 bucks (or more if you live in a fancy part of town) and you will make some good money.

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It won't.

I was talking not long ago with editorial folks at an unnamed media company that rhymes with The New York Times. There was some possibility of my blogging over there. They were intrigued, but couldn't fit it into their grand plan, at least not right away. The problem was resources were already allocated and such an endeavor takes months to mount and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

No it doesn't, and that's the problem with Big Media.

When I was at PBS we did occasional redesigns and I never knew what they cost because for most of my 11 years there I was just a paid contributor. But toward the end of my tenure I became a producer which means I was finally exposed to budgets and was, to some extent, even responsible for paying some of them. And I was shocked to learn that my final design for a Moveable Type blog over there did, indeed, cost tens of thousands of dollars many tens of thousands of dollars.

PBS isn't a company that rhymes with The New York Times but it still qualifies as Big Media, so the pricing was more or less confirmed.

Now look at the screen you are reading right now, my Wordpress blog at cringely.com. It cost me NOTHING to design. I did it myself in a single night with the help of an experienced and generous friend, Benjamin Higginbotham of Spacevidcast.com. This blog is hosted by Media Temple in Los Angeles and costs me $50 per month, which is a lot compared to most blogs, but then I'm getting more than a million page-views per month. One more Christmas card or IBM column and I might bump up to $100 per month just to get some more resources, but I think I've made my point: a good Internet media product doesn't have to cost a lot of money. This is my living, remember, that's putting three kids through school. What are my gross margins 10,000 percent?

While those are my gross margins they aren't the gross margins at PBS or at a company that rhymes with The New York Times. Those outfits have overhead I don't. They have legacy relationships and obligations I can't even imagine. They can't just go from there to here in an instant even if they wanted to.

Which brings us back to the iSomething to be introduced tomorrow. No matter how great it is, it can't support the legacy infrastructure of Big Media, which includes mid-town office buildings and business lunches (hence my picture of New York's 21 Club, if you hadn't already figured that out).

Big Media wants revenue approaching what they could charge if a web site was a printed magazine. Remember the original lure of the Internet for publishers was the idea that there would be more profit without the expenses of printing and distribution. But it didn't work out that way because Internet users won't generally pay for content.

But Apple has the mojo. Steve Jobs has been firm from the start that content should be paid for and his generally is, except of course for my podcast on iTunes. Big Media likes the way Steve thinks. And so they can with one breath condemn him for killing the music album, yet in a second breath they can see him as the savior of magazines, newspapers, and good-but-thinly-watched TV series.

And Apple CAN be that savior, but only after a rationalization and severe downsizing of Big Media overhead, which I am not at all sure Big Media is really ready to do.

Based on the rumors I've heard so far I'm guessing the new Apple product will be like the Apple TV a hobby, a critical success but a business failure, though one with enough potential that Apple will give it a few years to succeed. It's in giving those few years where Apple really can save Big Media, which will undoubtedly by then be not so big.

What would a world be like without the idea of heaven? How would people behave? What would they live for?

Of course, it is not as if the world that we live in, where the notion of an afterlife or some form of continuing existence is prevalent, is all that great. No, there are lots of wars and disagreements in contemporary life. But perhaps we are able to escape a sense of desperation in the belief that modern medicine, prudent behavior, and the possibility of an afterlife will allow us to continue our existence for a while at least, and perhaps permanently.

The ancient, pre-literate Greeks of Homer's day could not so easily apply the balm of eternal life to their troubled psyches. They had no notion of a heaven of the type that Christians believe in, no sense of reincarnation such as the Hindus expect, no Muslim vision of paradise, no anticipation of a reunion with relatives and friends who had predeceased them. Instead, death led to a trip to Hades, the underworld, where existence was a pale and not very attractive shadow of earthly life, not something to be eagerly awaited. So if we want to know how men live when the notion of heaven doesn't exist, we might well look to these people.

Remember too, that the life of the pre-literate Greeks (the Greek alphabet is thought to have come into existence somewhere around 800 B.C.) was painfully short. Even at the turn of the last century, around 1900, the average American lived only about 50 years. The brevity of life was certainly known to the ancient Greeks.

Greek literature and philosophy point to two driving concepts that motivated men. (And I speak of men, because women were extraordinarily disadvantaged in that period, seen as having almost no function or status other than for sex, companionship, rearing children, and domestic handicrafts). Honor and glory were what men sought. Honor tended to come in the form of goods, precious metal, slaves, concubines, and the like; in other words, mostly material things or things that could be counted or displayed or used. Sort of like today, perhaps you are saying to yourself. In our world, honor is conferred by status and very similar material thingsthe size of your house, the amount of money in your bank account, a trophy spouse, the car or cars you drive, a gorgeous vacation home, etc.

Glory (the Greek word kleos) is another matter. What might glory have consisted of in a world without heaven? It took the form of a reputation or fame that continued beyond death. And, since there was no written word, you and your accomplishments had to be sufficiently great to generate discussion, song, and story once you were gone. This was usually achieved by being a great hero or warrior. In war, then, one could hope to grasp both of these things: the honor that came with sacking cities and accumulating wealth, slaves, and sexual partners; and the glory of having the fearlessness, strength, and tenacity to carry out that accumulation via battle; sufficiently so that people would (sometimes literally) sing your praises after you were dead.

As I mentioned, today's world doesn't strike me as much different from yesterday's on the point of achieving honor, although we are a little more discreet about our sexual conquests and have largely risen above keeping slaves. On the subject of glory, however, we seem to do everything we can to avoid death, which in the ancient Greek world was the only path to glory; a path that required both risking one's own death on the battle field and inflicting it on others in the same place. So, whether you believe in heaven or not, it would seem that the idea of heaven has had some civilizing effect. There are, after all, more ways of getting to heaven in our cosmology than killing people, despite what some terrorist/martyrs might tell us.

To me, even apart from the question of a civilizing effect of a particular religious concept, is the human need to conquer death as revealed in the heritage that the pre-literate Greeks have bequeathed us and, of course, in our own religious behavior. Both the ancient Greeks and most of us seem to hope that when we breathe our last, we are not finished forever. It is not a new idea, even if our solutions to the dilemma of mortality are (in part) different from those of our ancestors.

Unless, of course, you are such a brave soul that you have dispensed with the idea that you will live on in any form much beyond the time of your earthly demise: not in words or writings, not in great buildings that bear your name, not in photos or videos, not in businesses that survive you, not in the students you have taught, not in your artistic creations or inventions, not in making the world a better place for those that succeed you; not in the biological output of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who continue your genetic line.

Clearly, it is pretty hard to give up the idea of glory, some sort of posteritythe hope for an afterlifeisn't it?

(Footnote: this essay was prompted by rereading The Iliad and The Odyssey for the first time in many years, and by listening to The Iliad of Homer by Professor Elizabeth Vandiver of the University of Maryland. This course and many others are offered by The Teaching Company. Professor Vandiver is a wonderful lecturer and I have relied heavily on her discussion of honor and glory in the pre-literate Greek world in this essay. I can strongly recommend courses sold by The Teaching Company. I should say, however, that I am in no way affiliated with that organization or benefit from any purchases from them that you might make; I'm simply a satisfied customer).

Let me say, first off, that I am a huge fan of the elegant WPTouch plugin for WordPress by Brave New Code. This is one of those plugins that I would gladly pay $99 for since it creates such an amazing version of a WordPress blog for iPhones, iPod Touch and for Android devices.

Word to my peeps perform this update only if you HAVE NOT modified the theme. If you have, you will lose your changes as all of the theme files will be overwritten.

I learned the hard way that any modifications to the code or layout will be removed. Of course, once I hit the update button I thought to myself about the nature of this plugin. Then, upon refresh of Tech Startups on an iPhone and with Agent Switcher . . . my handiwork was toast.

Before you spend seconds obliterating hours of work to make changes in your WPTouch theme make sure you back up your original files (I do have mine, fortunately) and don't do the automatic update in your WP admin. Download the upgrade, unzip it, add your hacks back in to the new theme and then upload it to your server.

I have to say, it is kind of cool to have a plugin for a theme. What is important is to realize that it is a totally different animal than any other plugin.

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Hold On! WPTouch Update Available is a post from: TechStartups.com

You need a pile-o-data fast and you got nowhere to get it other than surf, bookmark and beg for interns to copy and paste for you. Where do you turn? Your IT department? Your hackery skills and your shared GoDaddy hosting account for bandwidth? Nah.

80Legs is ready to run a couple miles with your pile of data on their shoulders. You get to pick it up and work with it as you see fit.

Did I mention that they are now offering this as a free service? Well, up to a certain point it is free but for the many is plenty of room to get what they're looking for.

80Legs offers a unique service that will crawl the internet on your behalf and gather data from the links that you provide. They then take this unstructured data and make it available for further refinement to the customer.

Their value proposition lies in the ability to deliver this service efficiently and affordably. Like I said earlier, it would be difficult if not impossible for an individual run a service to crawl 100,000 pages quickly. 80Legs is offering this as a free service now and it's all powered by a 50,000 computer network.

The ability to put the data collection into another companies hands allows developers to think about what to do with the data. By freeing up developers more can be done with the data that is returned to them as they have time to think about new algorithms to run across the dataset.

An example of this would be simple search. Developers with more time could work on creating new layers to search that make it more valuable to the end user. Whether it is integrating advanced search functionality or returning results contextually depending on the page that a user is currently searching from.

If you're interested, the free Basic specs are below. Plus and Premium are listed on their blog.

80Legs Basic Plan:

• Free to use
• Normal crawling speed (up to 1 request/second/domain)
• Access to 80legs Web Portal
• 1 job running at a time
• Up to 100K crawled pages per job
• Low priority in 80legs job queue
• No recurring jobs allowed

[Via VentureBeat]

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80Legs, 50k Computers and a Web Crawler is a post from: TechStartups.com

If you're just starting out or a WordPress hack from way back, the new book from Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr titled Digging Into WordPress could be a good addition to your shelf.

Coyier and Starr have been plugging away on WordPress installs for a few years and now sharing their intimate knowledge of the blogging platform.

The book comes in two versions spiral bound and PDF. The spiral version looks beautiful and the PDF, if anything like the sample, should please with its colors and page layout.

The real question about this book is the $67 price tag for the spiral bound version. Is it worth it?

Yes, slices of tree with pretty ink aesthetically pleasing. Yes, it will lay completely flat on a surface next to a computer, unlike traditionally bound computer books. No, it won't every question you have about WordPress. I'm not sure anyone or any book could do that.

If I were in the market for a WordPress book I would take a different approach to justify spending the money on this book consulting. Not that I would buy it and become an instant WordPress consultant. Nor should you, unless you're already a Social Media Expert and have it all figured out.

I mean consulting in the sense that you are getting the best that Coyier and Starr have to offer because their names are on the line with this publication. If the content is not good or they don't add value to solve your WordPress conundrums their names will be mud.

This book should be viewed as an insanely cheap consulting session with two guys that really know their stuff and can prove it with their client work. At $67, you're already halving the rate for most WordPress gurus worth the money and getting two for the price of one 24 hours a day.

They're also offering an affiliate program for those interested in helping sell some copies and to put some extra bucks under that mattress. Check it out if you're into that whole affiliate thing.

I have no material connection with the publishers of this book or am a part of their affiliate program. All links are to standard pages. I am basing my opinion on a sample chapter (PDF) that is available from their sales page.

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Ready to Dig WordPress? is a post from: TechStartups.com

Are you the sum of your thoughts? It's a hard question to answer, right? I'm trying to sort this out and would like your help.

The dissonance between the physical and ethereal nature of disembodied communication like the internet is a minefield for human interaction. Primarily because we rely heavily on physical cues and environmental variables to base our levels of connection with a person. We rely on their actions, not just words.

My assertion is that social networks exacerbate this inability to fully understand the people we are linked with in these networks due to experiencing their random thoughts.

Sure it is interesting to read what someone is doing throughout their day, but the only value is what the reader places on that thought to make it a reality in their own mind. Maybe that is the nature of connection?

What I am really trying to understand is that if a person can create real bonds simply through sharing their thoughts in social media?

I've personally been at what turned into social media for over 7 years. I've become many things to many people based on the types of content that I was producing. Much of that content was dependent on what I was interested in or experiencing at that time. Like this piece.

The sum of interactions in social media are related to those fleeting thoughts. When shared repeatedly with networks of people a notion of who that individual is are created. This give us the ability to create baselines for who we think a person is. A baseline for example being, they're nice or they are a jerk.

Again, we are only dealing with thoughts to create these notions. They are assumptions as to the true nature of a person that most have yet to meet. I would posit that what happens in social media and across social networks is the connecting of thoughts. If you like someone, you like their thoughts. If you dislike someone, you dislike their thoughts. Any judgments are based on these and most likely very little on physical actions. So, if you met them in the real world you would need to attempt to ascertain all over again who that individual in front of you is.

Maybe we're connecting thoughts first and then people with social media?

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Social Media: Connecting Thoughts Not People is a post from: TechStartups.com

Linking words together online is an hobby. Creating context from those words is an art. Making them work in harmony is a gift. The team at Thomson Reuters have done this for some time with their Calais project and the first consumer product from it OpenCalais.

OpenCalais is a monster database filled with linked data that can be accessed by anyone via a special API. Currently it works on an individual application level and as plugins with other popular CMS and blogging platforms. In tandem they create a more powerful experience for the publishers of new content by allowing the integration of linked data for linking, tagging and finding optional third-party resources for inspiration.

Word on the street and from a trusted source is that the Calais team has something new on the horizon their own CMS. A release of a CMS that has semantic technologies built right into is a powerful addition to the marketplace. Many blogging platforms and CMS products available today have stagnated under the weight of their own popularity.

It is hard to innovate when you are leading the pack or trying to figure out how to make money from your product that is free. Time and resources become devoted to maintaining the status quo, patching holes and community relations and support. Not to mention that many of these tools have crept out from the minds of developers and not publishers.

The same can't be said for Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative. With a business model built in from the inception of the project they have the ability to create value from the wealth of content that is entering their system. It is treated to some natural language processing, machine learning and prepared to link with other content. As the initiative currently exists it is the side car to better publishing as there is no status quo or hole patching. They realized this.

Throwing a CMS on top of this type of foundation is a logical move for OpenCalais to extend development and create publisher relations. There has been so little innovation in core CMS offerings that most rely on third-party developers to create additional functionality or implement API's like OpenCalais, Zemanta and other discovery products.

An OpenCalais CMS, blogging platform or whatever comes from this group is going to be a welcome addition to the choices that publishers have available today. The closest opportunity today to creating a true semantic experience in a publishing platform that is readily available would be to install the Zemanta plugin in WordPress. It transforms the writing experience. An offering from Calais could transform the writing and CMS experience.

Update: Krista Thomas (@kristathomas) from OpenCalais got in touch to say that there is a fully integrated CMS based on Drupal called OpenPublish available now.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

CMS Innovations from Thomson Reuters? is a post from: TechStartups.com

With the imminent release of WordPress version 2.9 on the horizon and my subsequent lack of excitement, it only seems fitting to put together a wish list for the next version. It is even more fitting since Raanan (@raanan) asked, What's on your wishlist for 3.0 ?

I partially answered that question in the comments with the following:

1. Semantic integration with Zemanta or OpenCalais
   1. This would be like having a librarian with a fancy masters degree in categorizing everything on the planet riding shotgun with you while you write.
2. WordPress recommended vocabulary for categories
   1. This could mirror NYT Open Linked Data RDF or other semantic tools
3. Image upload and modal window to open in advanced mode for properties control
   1. This could be a combo of both tabs but something more powerful from the first time the window opens so that users don't need to perform multiple actions to add padding or custom links to images
4. Feed only choice for publishing posts
   1. This doesn't have to be authenticated and would work by same rules with tags, categories, etc. to syndicate for apps or widgets
   2. Imagine being able to use WP as a CMS to manage the data that is delivered to mobile apps on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Palm as one standard

In addition to these four I have some more wishes for this list

1. The return of horizontal navigation to the administration panel or the option to choose vertical left side or horizontal suckerfish style
2. Integrated gallery function for display in themes
   1. Yes, there are plenty of plugins to do this but some of that code like the integration of the fabulous WPTouch mobile theme into central codebase would be huge
3. WordPress.org installs that allow for gravatar uploads through profiles
   1. Hook this into the .com API and welcome these users into the fold
   2. This could turn out to be a great way to make them familiar with the .com platform
   3. But mainly so users can swap them on the fly with their own installs
4. Content libraries from media companies
   1. Stock photos, video, quotes
      1. A new API component to allow multiple third parties to supply this content

I'm sure that over the next few weeks I will think about this some more and come up with a couple other ideas. But for now, what's on your wishlist for 3.0 ?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

WordPress 3.0 Wish List is a post from: TechStartups.com

In 2006 I proudly started my first blog, DigMo! It was technology, it was creativity, it was music and it was education. Despite it being a bit of blog soup I was pleased at how quick the site grew but within a few years it reached a critical point beyond which I really couldn't get the traffic to grow. The site was frankly far too general to appeal to a specific community.

The site had a massive 80% bounce rate and taking advice from reading the great advice on this site I decided to take stock and critically re-evaluate the future of DigMo!

As a result I decided to split the site and create two separate niche blogs, DigMo! To focus on educational technology and I launched a new site, TotalApps, to focus on Mac and iPhone App reviews. The thought of starting from zero scared me and I looked at ways to get the site up and running quickly.

I decided the best way to draw attention to the blog was to offer regular site competitions. Finding companies willing to sponsor prizes was actually much easier than I initially expected. I tend to target companies whose product I have reviewed and especially if the review has been popular with readers.

With blog authors being urged to declare any products they are able to keep once a review is published what better way to retain your creditability but by passing the review samples on to your readers as a competition prize ? It seems to me like a logical benefit that will add value to your site and grow the community.

The Mistakes

I think it is best to share my mistakes with the Problogger readers and the initial competitions I ran simply required visitors to leave a comment on a post. This didn't grow the site and managed to result in a massive 70% bounce rate i.e. the users came, entered, and left knowing we would email them if they had won.

The Successes

I decided if I was going to make competitions really work they needed to be of benefit not only to the visitor but also the site and thus I needed to limit entry to RSS subscribers (both email and reader)

The solution was simple and surprisingly successful and will basically work for anyone running a Wordpress blog even with a custom theme.

Setting the competition up takes a tiny bit of code adjusting but nothing too difficult.

The Concept

The competition works by placing a code at the bottom of blog posts that will only appear when the entry is read in an RSS reader, i.e. it does not appear on site.

To do this I used a known solution that was pointed out to me by fellow blogger Thaya Kareeson.

There are a few versions of this idea around but this solution works brilliantly on TotalApps. As I haven't come across any plug-ins that can run competitions this bit of code fiddling is the ideal solution for now.

Getting Started

Open the functions.php file in your current theme folder (I would back this up before adding the code just to be on the safe side).

Paste the following code into the text :

function contest_post_filter($content) {
if ( is_feed() )
return $content.'TotalApps Competition Code (Please note it is case sensitive) : a12221s';
else
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content','contest_post_filter');
function contest_comment_filter($comment_text) {
return str_replace('a12221s', '[code hidden]', $comment_text);
}
add_filter('get_comment_text','contest_comment_filter');

There are two lines you need to change - 1. the line that says TotalApps Competition Code and 5 lines down the code is repeated (a1221s).

I recently ran a competition where visitors could win a copy of Screenflow 2.0. The following screenshot shows the bottom of the post as it appeared in the browser.

. and this is how it looked in the RSS reader. You should note your RSS Feed must be the full article view (i.e. not just the abstract) for the code to appear.

When the competition closes as I generally ask the sponsor to select a number between 1 and the number of comments and then contact the lucky winners using the email address in the comment.

When a competition closes you can either comment out the code in functions.php by adding /* before the code and */ after or alternatively is simply change the text to "No competition at present"

Offering a reason to sign up to the RSS feed resulted in the number of TotalApps RSS subscribers growing in one month to double the number of readers DigMo! had after 3 years.

Tips :

• Know what your readers want and try and target prizes appropriately.
• Make sure you link to your RSS and RSS by Email Feeds in the post to make it as easy for visitors to subscribe as possible.
• Make sure you make the rules clear and post the winner's name publicly on site.
• Where possible have the competition sponsors look after the postage. This not only saves you time and hassle but it is also assures the sponsor the competition is above board.
• Don't run competitions for more than a week as most of the comments tend to happen in the first week after that it dries up quickly.

I have to say I am certainly no expert in coding or blogging but am really excited to find a solution that really works for managing the competitions and I am equally as excited to see the number of subscribers grow.

There may even be better solutions out there and if you know of any I would be keen to hear them.

David Cleland is a teacher based in Ireland who runs three successful blogs (TotalApps, FlixelPix and Digmo.co.uk)

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Run Subscriber-Only Competitions on Your Blog

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WordPress release a beta version of its blogging software earlier this week and I thought that I would give it a go. I installed it on my server having read about new features on other blogs a few days ago.

I was hoping to see some of the changes in effect. I did. But I'm not excited.

This release was more about patching things up and plugging some holes on the code side. It isn't at all about the UI and display layer. It would have been great to see some Admin changes to the grouping of features or a more robust media uploader.

The current one isn't bad, it's just too many steps to get to the advanced features for formatting around the images or video. Sizing them is still fine and linking them up to the post or a larger image of the image being inserted are still options are easy to get use.

I was able to install plugins and themes without many issue. Of course all of them displayed messages letting me know that they weren't tested with this version of WP and they could blow up the universe if installed. Not really on the universe part but it would have been cool if they said that.

Themes were another story. I'm guessing that there are some hooks that have changed that threw off quite a few that I tested but a couple made it through with flying colors. The most frequent problem was the main body column area not displaying.

This goes without saying, but if you're not as adventurous as me and seeking thrills in new features or a challenge managing an upgrade, then this version of WordPress is for you. You can do the upgrade and won't even notice the difference. That is until your theme flakes out.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

WordPress 2.9 beta Review is a post from: TechStartups.com

User: Taminania
Location: Norway
Occupation: Psychologist

These sound like the character sketch for the lead in a science fiction piece about some dystopian future. Maybe a future ruled through a bot-mediated reality? Sorry, just had to touch on yesterday's post about that.

The information above is true in fact. She is a social psychologist in Oslo, Norway that goes by the user name Taminania on Google Reader. And she shares about 20 blog posts on average from her subscription list daily. I have never met or spoken with Taminania but she is a rock star in my world. A smart rock star.

She isn't the leader of a rogue group fighting for survival in the aforementioned dystopian world. She is a passionate psychologist that seeks out high quality content online in her field then shares it online. In this sharing process the door opens wide to accept her recommendations, nearly tacit, that allow those that come across her Google Reader shared feed enlightened.

In every example of the site that I have built to capture and continue filtering her shared feed, and that of about 59 others, I talk about her shares. By filtering the master feed that Taminania creates through daily user activity I am able to glean what I find most valuable and let the rest flow on by.

Example:

I have created a group called Taminania Science. Where I filter down the entire content database to shares from Tamihania, from any publisher and with the keywords augmented, brain, reality, science, research.

Which currently yields the following results:

1. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
2. Foreign subtitles improve speech perception
3. Why Do We Dream?
4. Are You Treating Your Computer Better Than You Treat Yourself?
5. New Brain Findings On Dyslexic Children: Good Readers Learn From Repeating Auditory Signals, Poor Readers Do Not
6. Geoffrey Cohen on Identity, Belief, and Bias
7. Bacteria in Gut Linked to Obesity; Western Diet a Factor

Compare this list her current (as of this moment) full Google Reader shared feed:

1. Drop of water
2. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
3. Google *Chrome OS* To Launch Within A Week
4. Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering.
5. How To Easily Automate Backing Up Your Wordpress Blog
6. A New TV Guide for Internet Television
7. The Introvert's Guide to People

Of all the links in the first list above I am not subscribed to a single of the publishers. I don't need to be to get the value of their content. However, I do need a guide like Taminania that has an understanding the topics and the drive to sort the quality content from these publishers. The other thing I need is the software to make it happen. In this case I built it for myself and would love to publicly release it. But in the current version it doesn't scale very well and has a tendency to crash my server. Who can make this happen for everyone?

The answer is simple Google. What I have created are features and an automated advanced search that pulls from a pool of data. My pool is currently 43k items. Google's slightly larger. By a factor of 10k or more I am sure.

What I am able to learn from Taminania's shares in what is clearly not a dystopian reality comes to me from as close to osmosis as a human can get when it comes to information. In this version of the story we are all learners and we are all teachers. The only problem is that we don't have the tools we need to teach.

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Google Reader and The Osmotic Learner is a post from: TechStartups.com

Five years ago I wrote my first Content Management System from ground the ground up. After forty-five days of coding day and night I diagnosed myself with coder's elbow'. The main symptom being a sharp and agonizing pain in on the inner elbow the ulna meets the humerus.

It was in the middle of one of these painful episodes that I was working on the database and the trying to figure out how I was going to transfer that content to the display layer that my a-ha moment occurred. I wasn't building a content management system to circumvent the issues and limitations I was having with WordPress, I was creating a distribution tool.

Once I had the content in the database the display layer could be anything that I chose it to be. It could be sent anywhere that I choose. The greatest of all these bursting thoughts was that it could go places that I didn't even intend it to. The content would have a life of its own. No more was I restricted by developing a site architecture and held to the constructs of a storyboard with A to B to C or D back to A.

With my coder's elbow I went on another week long journey through RSS to make sure that the content would be in the right namespaces, that it could be personalized with unique URL elements, creating search and keyword feeds, developing feeds that could use Basic Auth to restrict usage and the holy grail of individual content metrics. Imagine throbbing pain in both of my elbows now as these feeds overtook my life.

What came from this platform was a CMS that I began licensing for professional development, blogging, podcasting and for real-time metrics (back in 2005). I literally began my first business with it and continued to use it and variants of it for startups and media companies like MTV.

One thing remained constant in all of these scenarios syndication. Along with that syndication came the monitoring and proof that the programs and companies were getting the most value from the digital projects they had entrusted to me.

I decided to write this post and explain my process after I found a series of posts by Daniel Jacobson (@daniel_jacobson) from NPR. He was one of the individuals responsible for developing their robust, media rich API. It's not an API that I have discussed here at Tech Startups because I don't use it for any projects. I did test it when it launched and found it to be a great way to traverse NPR's archives and deliver legacy content as if it were created that day. Daniel Jacobson gets it.

So to spare yourself a case coder's elbow that could ruin your tennis game, you should start with Daniel's COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere post. This will put you in the right frame of mind to follow with . . . wait I'll list them in order.

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization
Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough

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The NPR Model Is Correct is a post from: TechStartups.com

Blogs.mu has been around for a while but I'd bet you haven't heard of it. I'd also bet that if you have heard of it that you forgot all about it. If you fall into this latter category then consider this a refresher about the easiest way to run a WordPress blog network without installing WPMU yourself.

For the uninitiated, WPMU stands for WordPress Multi-User. It is the same WordPress that you can download from their .org site except that it allows you to create unlimited blogs from one upload to a web server. It is powerful and built from the same code that runs WordPress.com. Though I highly doubt the out of the box ability to run millions of blogs form a single installation without countless hours of coding.

The folks at blogs.mu have come close to doing exactly that for the end user of their service. They have taken an off the shelf version of WPMU and spent the hours coding, hacking, theming and delivered it as a product that anyone can use with all the bells and whistles build in.

I've run a couple instances of WPMU over the years on my own servers and if I needed to run it again I would go about doing it on my own. However, I am a tech masochist that stubbornly decides that sub domains are the the best way to run these installs and then spends days hacking around Apache and other config files. Blogs.mu has taken care of all of this.

They have even taken care of themes, plugins and advanced user management for you. Believe me, this is a big deal when you want to run a network of blogs. Being able to manage bloggers, themes and plugins effectively can leave you more time to create editorial or your own blog posts.

Blogs.mu is a free' service but one that I would recommend that you pay for. Partially, because their business model and your ability to unlock some of the best tools depend on it. You can use their free version to get your feet wet and create a couple blogs to use as demos for the decision makers at your job or within your group of friends. Then upgrade to the paid version once you are comfortable and ready yourself to blog like a pro.

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Multiple Partner Blogs is a post from: TechStartups.com

Today we'd like to announce the inclusion of the WPTouch: WordPress on iPhone, iPod & Android plugin to our arsenal. It's been making Tech Startups look great on your iPhone or other touch smart phone since 10:38 am today.

Instead of stripping down each blog post to it's bare elements the WPTouch plugin beefs it up with theme that presents the content as a native application on the viewing device. This goes a long way in conveying to the user that, as a publisher, you get it.

WPTouch creates this experience through integrated Ajax libraries and theme graphics that match the platform that is being viewed on. Another feature that is handled well by the theme is search and subscriptions. See below.

Filtering by tag or category is awesome too (a great way to access your favorite topics on mobile tech startups) :

The final great piece to using WPTouch is that when combined with Flavor Studios iPhone icon generator some extra magic happens when the site is bookmarked and saved to the home screen:

If you're running your blog on WordPress come get some WPTouch and mobile Tech Startups version.

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Mobile Tech Startups Views is a post from: TechStartups.com