I’m driving from LA to San Francisco today. I’m trying out the WordPress iPhone app to see how much it differs from the Desktop experience.
Author: barce
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Blogging Every Day For Six Months Starts Now
I’ve decided to blog every day for 6 months starting now to see if it will get me 10,000 uniques a month. That’s blogging everyday until February 18, 2011.
In this blog post, I just want to share a few things that make blogging different from writing.
I want to share these things because of this piece of wisdom: Blogging is not writing.
- Each sentence must have a popular Google Ad Word, like blogging or Google. 🙂
- Keep things between 50 and 150 key words.
- Engage folks via social media.
Writing is really about engaging people, really moving them. Blogging is a subset of writing that has to take into account search engines and making words and the code that underlies them very friendly to the search engines.
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Internet Speeds in Santa Monica and Westwood Suck
Internet speeds in Santa Monica and Westwood suck when you compare them to Kyrgyztan (14 mbp/s) or Latvia (24 mbp/s). Never mind that these areas in LA have economies that dwarf these two places.
The average speed in these areas seems to be at about 1.5 mbp/s in Westwood and 10 mbp/s in Santa Monica.
1.5 mbp/s is simply not acceptable in Westwood. 10 mbp/s is simply too slow in a town that prides itself on being the movie capitol of the world, especially for someone like James Cameron who has his offices there. Using a messenger to ship a DVD is still faster than using the bandwidth available there.
If West LA is to have a world class tech scene, we must have more bandwidth. More bandwidth is what allows a place like Silicon Valley to develop technologies first. A good example is AJAX, which sucks when most folks are on a modem. However, leveraging faster than average bandwidth allowed folks in Silicon Valley to learn this crucial technology / technique first.
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4 Ways to Avoid Foursquare Fatigue
As a social media expert, I’ve noticed a severe decline in Foursquare check-ins by innovators and early adopters.
This phenomena, which I’m calling Foursquare Fatigue, can be avoided by following these 4 tips.
1. Use two phones on different carriers. We all know that AT&T’s 3G blows on the iPhone, so carry a spare phone like a Blackberry running Verizon. That way you get all your bases covered. Can’t check-in with the iPhone? Check-in with the Blackberry. Now you’re stylin’.
2. You don’t have to check in all the time. Ya, getting the mayorship for Starbucks is huge and forces you to check-in 5 times a day, but after that 5th cup o’joe there’s a diminishing point of return. Why not save money, not check-in. In fact, don’t go to Starbucks.
3. Check-in with Yelp. Ya, I know. It’s pretty pointless because you don’t get the Foursquare deals, but there’s been less of a reliability issue with Yelp where check-ins are currently faster and less buggy than Foursquare.
4. I have Stalin, who said, “No person; no problem,” to thank for this one. The discovery I made is this: No Foursquare, no foursquare fatigue.” Logic is magic.
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How To Pitch At Capitalize
Last night I got to check out an event in Cambridge called Capitalize hosted at the SCVNGR offices. The audience gets to see a company pitch to VCs. Last night’s company, Peekaboo Mobile, pitched to two investors from Dart. They were asking for $550,000 to $770,000.
Basically, the investors wanted to see 3 things:
- a great solution to a small problem involving a very specific customer, e.g. an app focused on moms that tells moms where stroller friendly businesses are,
- a message that shows how all parties involved are going to make lots of money, e.g. tossing the phrase, “We are going to make you lots of money and this is how,” works wonders, and
- a solid set of numbers showing cost to acquire customer and ROI.
Peekaboo didn’t have these 3 things so they weren’t written a check outright, but they’re still making money. Also it takes a lot of courage to stand in front of a crowd and get scrutinized by VC.
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Installing Snowflake
I forked the code that Ryan King wrote for Twitter called snowflake.
Snowflake works by guaranteeing a unique user id based on a few simple guarantees: time, machine id and sequence number.
My fork has a fix for the ruby client allowing you to query multiple servers.
Here are the prerequisites:
- Java 6 (1.6)
- sbt (simple-build-tool) – http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/
- thrift – http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/
The install process is fairly straightforward:
- Clone the repo: git clone http://github.com/twitter/snowflake.git
- Edit project/build.properties to use sbt.version=0.7.4
- sbt update
- sbt compile
- sbt test
- Copy one of the configs into /etc: cp config/development2.conf /etc/unknown.conf Or you can also just use ‘sbt run -f config/development2.conf’.
- Edit the conf and add a unique worker ID: worker_id = 1
- In the conf: skip_sanity_checks = false
- sbt run
When you run the client like so:
RUBYLIB=./target/gen-rb ./src/scripts/client_test.rb 1 “192.168.0.103:7610,192.168.0.109:7610” test-onYou should get something like this:
557299556602089472 test-on 1