Awakened Voice

There are three questions that I ask when visiting the site of a new web-based service.

What service do you provide?
How does the service work?
What is going on?

How and if those questions are answered tells me a lot about the service.
The answer to question #1 should include a brief description of what problem the service solves [...]

The term social media is a ubiquitous one these days. But at the same time there are still many people who know the phrase but don’t really understand the meaning. A proper definition of social media does exist on Wikipedia. I find the definition that’s located on Wikipedia to be quite convoluted. My definition of [...]

In my previous post in this series I attempted to define the social media herd. In this post I’ll share my thoughts on the true value of the herd to web based services. I think it makes sense to assess the situation from the perspective of where certain services sit on the food chain. A [...]

Apple has just tossed a huge bone to high traffic social media sites. But will they pick it up?
Sites like Twitter, FriendFeed and yes even the mighty Facebook are grappling with the issue of exactly how they can earn enough revenue to continue to support their services without the need for future rounds of funding. [...]

I’ve been thinking. To some those are some pretty scary words but not necessarily as scary as me deciding to tell you what I think. In this case I’ve been thinking about what I call the social media herd.
The social media herd is a group of people who move in concert from web application [...]

My obsession with the Drupal platform has expanded from the occasional screencast to a Drupal guide for beginners and now a new website. I’ve been working on Learn By The Drop for a few weeks now. It’s a place to learn Drupal. I’m posting tidbits of information (which I’m calling drops) to help the average [...]

I’ve been a DreamHost customer for a while now and although they have problems with servers failing from time to time I have generally been happy with the combination of prices, tools and performance.
The weakest point of the hosting experience with DreamHost has been the performance as major outages seems to happen a couple [...]

Let’s continue with the subject of building brands and keeping control of your content. There’s this issue with comments. A growing number of people who write their own blogs want better control of all the comments that they leave on other sites. Comments represent ideas and opinions that can add to the value of your [...]

We are living in a world of dilution. Lots of people are creating lots of content. There are many companies that want to get a hold of that content so they can use it for their own purposes. And those companies won’t pay the original publishers a dime. That’s not a good thing.
One of my [...]

Take this word of friendly advice from someone who hasn’t invested money in a third-party commenting service. Maintain control of the comments on your site. Third-party commenting services like Disqus, coComment and Intense Debate always state that you retain ownership of your comments. That’s great but you really don’t retain control.
When you utilize a comment [...]