Google Voice really didn’t add anything new other than some interface modifications and instructions for mobile users, however it does bring the service one step closer to perfection. Here’s why: Most people are not going to spend the time figuring out how to forward their cell phone voice mails to Google Voice, but a few clicks gives you the exact sequence to type into your phone for your carrier.

Forwarding your cell phone calls to Google Voice for Voicemail enables voicemail transcription as well as the visual voicemail style audio file in an email message. If you have a smart phone such as a blackberry with the Google Voice application already installed, this just adds to the benefit. Now I am down to two voice mail boxes: Email and work. As soon as work converts to VoIP I suspect I can consolidate that to email as well.

The perfect Google Voice feature would be the ability to port an existing number to them. My home phone, for example, I have had for over 6 years. Everyone knows it and I don’t want to change it. I have ported that number from Verizon to Lingo to Packet 8 and then to ViaTalk. The problem is that each move is a time commitment. Each one had a year contract, but more importantly they had my phone number. If I could port my number to Google Voice, then I would have much more flexibility to try new services or multiple services, or even replacing the home phone with a cell phone. In the case of a cell phone though I would not want to commit my home phone number to it. With Google Voice I could simply forward my permanent number to which ever service I wanted to use at the time. Suddenly I could become completely carrier neutral. If I wanted to use MagicJack for a few days I could do that then switch back to ViaTalk, or even get a land line.

I believe that centralization of voice communication is the goal here, and as soon as I’m able to port my number to Google Voice they will have reached that goal.

There are a few camps of thoughts on certifications. But first I want to talk about the types of certified people. First is the certification nut who has half a dozen or more after his or her name. These are typically instructors, or people with a job that is relatively un-demanding enough to provide them the time and opportunity to pursue all these certifications. They may or may not be qualified, but it doesn’t matter much because most people will see all of those and immediately classify them in the “they know a lot” category. Also included in this category are people who feel personally validated by their certifications and will spend personal time, money, and effort to get certifications that really are mostly common sense.

The second is the “required certification” individual. These individuals have one, maybe two certifications, but typically don’t show them off. Typically these are people who perform a job that requires them to go get a certification to prove what they already perform, however it may also be someone who is attempting to further his or her career and managed to take vacation from their real job to get certified.

The third type is the person who has no certifications, but has more qualifications than any of the above. These are people who managed to land in a career, or make a name for themselves without the certifications. Their position and knowledge precludes the need for certifications. These people may find themselves in the second category because of a government or industry regulation that suddenly requires them to prove what they already know. This type typically disdains the first two categories.

The fourth type is the (typically younger) person who is trying to make their way in the business but doesn’t have a job that will fund their certifications or doesn’t have the job they want because they don’t have the required certifications. These type are envious of all of the above, but lack traction to get moving. Occasionally these people are self-taught starters that businesses could snap up for really cheap by dangling the certification carrot in front of them, although any time a business invests in the education of its employees it must be willing to follow through on the investment with increased compensation or improved work conditions, otherwise it sets itself up to lose its best employees.

Those are all general camps and some people won’t fall into any of them, or more than one. The craziest thing about it is that the people in-the-know understand that a certification is less about what you know but more about what you are willing to spend to get yourself to where you want to go. The certifications themselves mean little. Know any A+ people? I know a few who couldn’t tie their shoes let alone plug an IDE cable in the right way. There’s nothing worse than someone who brags about having their A+ certification because it immediately tells you two things: First, the person is proud of a certification that sets the bar so low that most people in the industry could walk into the test without studying and pass the test. Second, because the person hasn’t been in the industry long enough to realize this. Double whammy: go home, or go work at Best Buy and tell grandmothers that they need a $300 discrete video card so the pictures from their grandkids will look better.

It is similar with other certifications, but to lesser degrees. For example the CCNA cert is one that requires a decent amount of Cisco knowledge to pass, but not necessarily real-world experience. They have made the test more challenging by requiring a troubleshooting lab piece to it, but this increases the cost of the exam and throws CCNAs into situations they may rarely face in their jobs, depending on their jobs. For example, a WAN guy for a large company might be asked to configure a switch – something he never does on the job, or a LAN guy for a multi-site enterprise who, because of policy, can’t touch anything past his LAN. There is little doubt these people know their stuff, but either one would have trouble walking into the test and passing it based on their real-world practical experience alone. Yet there are IT managers with this certification who never touch a switch or router except when they are in training for certifications. They learn what they need to know for the exam, pass it, and then move on.

The more this happens, the more diluted (the less valuable) the certification becomes. Eventually it becomes like a Microsoft cert or A+ where no one really cares, and the people who hold those certs are scorned by their peers for being so naieve to think the cert is still valuable.

This is not an online marketing blog, or anything of the sort, however my experience with promotion over the past few months has taught me a few things and given me the motive to try some new things. I thought I would share some experiences and get any advice that anyone might want to share. There are several things I have tried:

• Entrecard
• Adwords
• Adbrite
• ProjectWonderful
• Traffic Exchange
• Amazon Mechanical Turk

This is just a very informal and non-scientific review of what I’ve done and my perceived benefit to the blog. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently bought a Magic Jack to evaluate, and I finally got around to moving the house phones over to it. Unfortunately it is not yet possible to port your number to Magic Jack, so for the time being I have forwarded my Packet 8 number to the Magic Jack number. We will see how it goes. In the mean time I am looking at ViaTalk again since I can port my number to them and it will end up being about 1/3 of the price I am paying for Packet 8. They also have many more features that Packet 8 has not even dreamed about yet. Just worried about the stability, but I will get around to that.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a few small topics that I’d like to mention that aren’t big enough for their own post yet.

The presidential debate and DirecTV

Am I the only one who has glitches throughout the broadcast? Pieces of their words are missing as the system seems to lose the stream and has to rebuild it. Then near the end one such glitch ended up with the audio and video way out of sync. The HD picture is great, but its hard to believe it costs so much for such lousy total experience. Wait, am I talking about the candidates or the DirecTV service?

MagicJack

I’ve been curious about this for a long time. How can they provide a product at such a low initial cost with no monthly fee? Well I bought one to find out since I can’t find a review of one that doesn’t sound like a paid advertisement or a baseless bash. I’ll be keeping you up to date on how that is going. My initial reactions are that the voice quality is great, and it seems like they are subsidizing the calling with advertising on the screen. Also, about all the little “rush processing” and “last chance for savings” that they try to pressure you into during the purchase process? Ignore them. You have the same opportunities after you receive it, and I chose standard shipping and got it in just a couple days.

Entrecard

I’ve commented around a few places about the ups and downs of the service. I am still happy with it, but there is a serious problem with the ranking system. Still. Any time a blog with half a dozen total posts that hasn’t been updated in a month and a half is ranked ahead of people who are obviously trying, that is a problem. I’ve figured out the system myself and am ranking between position 4-6 in the Technology section, but there are a lot of people way down the list with high quality blogs.

Blogging

I saw a website of a guy who absolutely hates blogging and is quite vocal (wordy) about it. I found it ironic that while his tirade wasn’t in a blog format, it sounded just like the kind of spewing opinion that he finds offensive about blogs. There are a lot of bloggers out there trying to make a quick buck at the expense of quality, but it is so obvious when people do sponsored posts that I have no problem ignoring it and moving on to real opinion that is interesting and thought provoking. On the flip side, even his opinion was interesting enough for me to mention it here. The best thing about the Internet is that you don’t have to visit every page.

It seems that almost all the DirecTV HD DVR boxes locked up sometime last night. The only semi-official information I can find on the subject is from the Satelliteguys forum. I went through DirecTV’s site and was not able to find any official information although their Tech forums have some complaining on them.

DirecTV says that the lockups were not related to an upgrade, but rather some kind of broadcast anomaly. An update was pushed out today which may result in another device reboot.

So far I only had to unplug and plug mine back in (the reset button did nothing). It has not rebooted a second time. My wife missed Dr. Phil today.

I haven’t been blogging about Entrecard or blogging because it really isn’t the type of thing I want my blog to be about, however I do use Entrecard to help bring in readers with the hope that some of them will stick around. Recently the owner decided to try to get VC money, then decided to sell it, and now has decided not to sell it again. This brings up several concerns for me and for many of my fellow bloggers. Mainly that whoever might end up with Entrecard would change it for the worse. I do think some changes need to be made though. Entrecard is unique in that it is both a traffic generator and an advertising mechanism. The traffic generation part, so far, has slid under the radar of Adsense et al. I imagine that it could eventually get noticed enough to kill adsense accounts if nothing changes in the way the traffic generation side works. The flip side of that is that many people who do hit my site also read and comment. I know that I comment on a good percentage of the sites that I read, and I have subscribed to several of them in a reader because their content is interesting. There are sites that I don’t comment on are because they haven’t updated their content since the last time I visited, which sometimes could be weeks or months.

Herein lies a problem for Entrecard and brings to my mind a good feature I think should be implemented. Advertisers should refund or discount the advertising rate based on when the site was last updated. Recently I felt bad for one of my advertisers when I didn’t update my blog in a 24-hour period. That person should have had his advertising bill discounted. In addition, after a set period of a week or two of no updates, blogs should no longer be listed in the campaign tab, nor should people be allowed to drop on them to earn credits. The whole point of visiting every day is to read fresh content, and the whole point of advertising is to help bring more readers to your own blog. If I advertise on a site for 5 days in the future and there are no posts between now and then, then it is a waste of advertising credits.

Here’s an analysis of the current (as of right now) top 5 blogs in the Technology section. I hope I don’t offend any of them, but you can visit them and see for yourself that I’m not saying anything that isn’t true.

1. What a bald guy told me about technology! That’s a great name for a site, by the way. Its last post was September 13 (16 days ago) about Photosynth. It looks like a cool tool, but that’s a long time to not say anything and still be considered the most popular blog in the Technology section.
2. verITableLIFE Another cool name for a site. Its last post was on September 18 (11 days ago) about “Be Nice to the IT Department.” Something I totally agree with, by the way. We don’t get the credit we deserve in many organizations.
3. Technically Easy. This site by another guy named Paul. Good concept for a blog – helping the less computer literate understand computers down to the technical level, not just surface information. This one is regularly updated and should be above the other two in my opinion. Last post was September 26 (3 days ago) about “What is a hard drive.” This reads like a “how stuff works” guide and is very comprehensive on the subject. A well done site with plenty of thought going into the posts.
4. Gadget Space. This one annoys me every time it shows up because it has never been updated since I’ve been a member of Entrecard. The last post was August 28 (32 days ago) on an expensive cell phone. How this one made it to number 4 makes no sense. I perpetuate the problem by dropping on it every day. At least the site isn’t filled with more advertisements than content. Still, looks like someone invested 20 days in a blog and it’s the 4th most popular technology blog on Entrecard. Not saying a whole lot.
5. LiNTEK. Life is Naturally TE(K)hnical. This is my favorite site of the top 5. It is updated multiple times per day recently and I have seen content there that I haven’t seen elsewhere. It looks like he took the weekend off. The last post was September 25 (4 days ago) about Skype for Asterisk but I suspect we’ll get a post today or soon.

So you see, if a limit was set to a week for posts, Technically Easy would be number 1 and then LiNTEK. The other three wouldn’t even display and they would start losing traffic and popularity which in turn should encourage them to post again. Sites that haven’t posted in that set amount of time should also be prevented from dropping on other sites or from being dropped upon.

I don’t know if every category is quite as bad as this one, but I think setting a limit of 2 weeks is probably a good compromise solution that would allow people that are blogging because they like to blog, not because they like to advertise, to get more exposure. Anyway, I hope I haven’t offended anyone, but what I’ve said is the truth, and people who are blogging in a serious way shouldn’t have to sit behind sites that are more there to generate cash than anything else. I know that many, if not all of these sites have other blogs that they write, some of which are updated much more frequently. I’m not doubting that they can blog or write about interesting things, I’m doubting that Entrecard has the best method for determining popularity.

Since the other day was talk like a pirate day, I thought I would write about a different kind of pirate – one that uses and trades unlicensed software. When I was in college I always vowed that I would pay for the software that I used once I had a job and the means to afford it, and I have kept with that promise. I understand that there are many people without the means to purchase software, and that piracy can help them get a leg up in their education to be able to afford to purchase that software in the future. I personally don’t want to ever have to go there again. Everything on my computer is either Freeware/GPL or paid for commercial software.

I’m not sure there is a good solution for piracy though, because some people will perpetually steal software with no sense of moral grounding. I was speaking with an individual who is a recent graduate from College who was in my same boat – couldn’t afford the software, but wanted to have it so he could learn how to use it an make himself marketable. He was also of the same mindset, and while he probably isn’t making a super huge salary, he is starting to purchase the software that he previously downloaded and removing the software that he no longer has need of.

On the other hand, I know of a few individuals who make many times my salary yet feel that they shouldn’t have to pay for the software on their computers. I know this because I have cleaned up their computers from some of the garbage that they downloaded that had backdoors and spyware associated with it. I have been asked many times to reload unlicensed versions of Windows, which I refuse to do, and one time I was told by someone I work for to do it for his boss on company time. I don’t want to get started about how many levels deep that ethical issue went.

The system is broken.

Software Copyright holders attempt to use activation procedures to protect their content, however this is like putting a lock on a screened-in porch door. It only keeps the good people out. Media copyright holders such as the RIAA and MPAA are attempting to go after those who share their content, however this misses the people with hard drives full of movies and music who are collectors. They seem to target the small players too – individuals who have an album or two on a share because they installed some software and didn’t read enough to realize that they were going to be sharing the music on their computers with the world. Broken enforcement.

Software and media needs to be priced at a reasonable level for its utility. The average home user probably rarely uses their office package, so charging $600 is unreasonable. The average web developer who is handed some psd files is probably going to use photoshop all of ten minutes to modify those files and convert them into something he can use. Is that worth $700? I can’t justify spending $700 for photoshop, so I use the GIMP, which is more than adequate to fill my needs. On the other hand, a graphics artist who uses Photoshop for 7 hours a day to make his livlihood should be paying that much for the software. As a computer geek I would prefer to use Photoshop so that I could help those graphics designers when they run into problems, but again that’s not worth $700 to me so that I can hand out free advice to people. Broken cost.

The solution is not easy.

The solution is multi-faceted and must be targeted specifically at the broken issues in the system currently. First of all, activation either doesn’t go far enough or goes too far. When transferring software from one computer to another becomes illegal, or requires repurchasing, that takes activation too far. Activation procedures are also too easy to break. Within hours of a commercial software package’s launch, someone will have figured out how to crack or bypass the activation and those who look for the means to get around it will be able to find it. Again, the good guy suffers here.

For software licensing, I propose a system similar to FlexLM where a user has to check out a key and remain in constant contact with the license server or the software will cease to function. For offline use a key could be checked out for a duration of time just like in FlexLM. Now why should we submit to such a model? Pay per usage. If an application such as Microsoft Office cost $0.50/day to use it, just for example, then I would have it installed on my Wife’s computer instead of Open Office. She uses the software once or twice a week, and ~$52/year is easier to swallow than paying retail prices. Continually updated software is another reason. In such a licensing model, users could always download the latest version of the software and not be stuck in an older version. It breaks down the barrier to entry for most people for a software package like Office. For $0.10/hour I would also have the more powerful Photoshop installed on my computer instead of GIMP. Pricing could then easily be tiered based on commercial or non-commercial use, and upon support levels.

The second part of the solution is enforcement. Instead of targeting the small time sharers such as the MPAA does, they need to target the big-time criminals who are actively cracking and making this software and media available for general use. An end user shouldn’t have to fear that their copy of software might not be genuine and that their list of MP3s downloaded and paid for from Amazon might become a target of the RIAA if they get some kind of malware on their computer that decides to start sharing those to the world.

The third part of the solutin is reporting. I know some of the software alliances have reporting tools on their websites, and I have actually visited them in the past in an attempt to report a violation. The last time I did so, the form was so complex and required so much information that I was not willing to put my own self on the line to report someone else’s infraction. For example, how do I report my boss’s boss, etc. Where are the anonymous tip lines. They didn’t exist backt hen, but today I did find one site that has this, but I don’t know how effective reporting will be.

That’s my solution in a nutshell. Not really much to it – mainly an enforcable and practical subscription model, reasonable prices to remove impetus for theft, and appropriate enforcement. There are a few holes I haven’t covered, but feel free to point them out.

It is much more than a webhost, but this post is about my hosting provider, Linode. Your typical webhost provides terabytes of transfer and hundreds of gigabytes of storage for a fraction of what it actually would cost them to provide all of that. They do it because they know you can’t use all of it, and if you do try they can just cancel your account for any reason or no reason.

I have tried many different hosts in the past but have never been satisfied with the speed or true capacity of the serivce. For example, many providers will provide your database on a separate host. Now in an ideal world this practice is very smart because the hosting provider can tune the database server for just servicing database activity. Overall capacity increases. Most hosting providers do not live in an ideal world and what this ends up introducing to your website is latency. The more ideal solution for most small sites is to run a database server on the same host as the webserver. Linode allows that, but I haven’t gotten to the best part about Linode yet.

The best part is that you get to run the popular Linux flavor of your choice and become root completely and utterly. I’m not talking about some kind of limited shell that you share with other people, and I’m not talking about a filesystem that your share with others either. This will look and perform just as if you had your own Linux server standing out on the Internet.

From the Linode website, here are some features:

• Full root access
• Deploy multiple Linux distributions
• Reimage at any time
• Dedicated IP address, premium providers
• Dedicated Resources
• Guaranteed CPU, burstable
• Xen instances with 4 cores for SMP
• Out of band Ajax and ssh based console shell
• Choose from four geographically diverse datacenters
• Bandwidth pooling between Linodes under an account
• Support for IP Failover, Private back-end networks, Linode cloning.
• Managed DNS
• Linode API

Some practical uses for Linode include:

• Host your web sites and blogs or other custom applications (Apache/WordPress)
• Host mail for your domain and filter spam
• Host Ruby on Rails applications (Mongrel, Lighttpd)
• Remotely back up your important data (rsync, rdiff-backup)
• Function as a primary or secondary domain name server (DNS)
• Host dedicated multi-player game servers
• Dedicated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server
• Use two Linodes for a complete Development / Production environment
• Use multiple Linodes to create virtual computer clusters

Potential downsides:

• You are root, so you have to know what you are doing or be willing to learn. This isn’t a host for everyone. You’ll need to concern yourself with security, web server configuration, database configuration and tuning, email and spam setup if desired, etc.
• Shared resources – this hasn’t bothered me too frequently, but occasionally something happens to another host running on the same piece of physical hardware as mine and it will affect my performance. I need to point out that this is much less likely to hurt you at Linode than it is at a normal hosting provider.

I encourage you to check them out. There is some competition in the field from others who have tried to emulate the business model, and Amazon’s cloud computing initiatives are similar in some ways to this, but I find Linode to be the most well rounded and versatile service of its type out there.

I put Spottt up on my blog last Friday because I’ve seen it on a few other blogs and thought it might be a good idea to try. If it worked half as well as Entrecard for pulling in people to read then it would be worth the space. I read that I would have to wait up to 24 hours for my blog to be approved, so I waited patiently, but when Sunday afternoon rolled around I decided to start looking into the service a little more.

Since I was now looking for the banner, I noticed where most other sites had their Spottt advertisement displayed. Spottt “requires” that the banner be placed above the fold. Their specific definition is no more than 850px from the top of the page. I placed the banner within that limit but then started noticing that most sites with the Spottt banner were not displaying it within the top 850px. Right off the bat I’m disadvantaged because the way it is supposed to work is that you receive advertising on other people’s sites based on how much you in turn advertise locally. People are much more likely to look at or click on an advertisement that is placed above the fold.

On Monday they finally approved my site and started running advertisements. I was clicking through my site to get to the admin page this evening and noticed that there was a scantily clad woman on the ad. I refreshed the screen and up popped a second scantily clad woman. Now TechByPC is not specifically family oriented, but it isn’t anti-family either, and I have no intention of offending any of my guests by displaying a picture of a woman that might offend some. I went over to my wife’s blog and checked it out there as well since I had requested hers be added at the same time. Similar advertising was being shown. Well, they just lost me.