I think this link has been floating around a bit lately and it is funny how timely it is for me. You see, I’ve been growing my beard and moustache for several months now and I was just commenting last night that it is longer than I’ve ever had it.

Not only is the beard longer, but I’ve been meticulously growing and trimming the sides of my moustache in order to get it long enough to wax. Unfortunately, despite having found the wax, I have not discovered the trick to molding a handlebar moustache yet. I can remember being just a little kid and cutting handlebar moustaches out of construction paper and taping them to my lip, so I’ve definitely wanted to do this for a long time. However, it is far more complicated than I expected.

Anyway, looking at this site has renewed my desire to figure it out. I vow, from this post on, to have a badass handlebar moustache and wear it with pride… and perhaps enter it in next year’s World Beard and Moustache Championships where you must also apparently dress in a silly costume.

It is so refreshing when something goes smoothly online, when a service does what it promises or better yet, actually impresses you by doing more than you expected.

I have been working for the Kids of Widney High for lots of years now. They are a group of students from Widney High School, a special ed. high school in Los Angeles, who write and perform original songs. Part of what I do for them is maintain their site (which they helped design).

Today I decided to look into our use of PayPal and check out a link I saw for a shopping cart. And you know what? Not only was it super easy to get set up, I was actually really impressed with all the options they gave me for customizing the cart, the redirects and even the look of the payment page. I haven’t had a chance to get too deep into all that yet, but it was so intuitive and simple to do that I look forward to spending a little more time getting it all set up.

Thanks, PayPal! I often get very frustrated with online services that just don’t live up to their promises. Yesterday I spent who knows how long just trying to find a manual for my cell phone because of bad design, bad organization and even worse customer service. So, just thought I’d give a little shout out to the folks that are doing it right.

I assume you’ve see the One Red Paperclip dude by now. When I first read about this I thought it was actually a really cool idea, much cooler than that million dollar jackass.

The concept of trading things is neat, and he points out that is all about relative value. So, rewind to when I first read about this and before visiting the site I was thinking this was actually a cool use of the intarweb.

That having been said, here’s my problem with this paper clip bit. He got a house (his goal) after only 14 trades. The evil power of the web seems to have convinced a bunch of idiots to make ridiculous trades just to get on this guy’s site. Now, granted, that was probably exactly what he was banking on when he started this. But man, I was hoping to see this in very small increments, just a few dollars at a time.

What’s interesting is that I was just about to say “this ruined what could have been a cool social experiment.” Except, it was a social experiment. Instead of proving that you could trade a small thing for a slightly larger one it proved that when you combine the possibility of internet notoriety those “slightly larger” things become a house.

Remember when Network Solutions was like a god on the intarweb? I remember bowing to them repeatedly, and being screwed by them repeatedly as well. In fact, I have a class action settlement check at home from them for screwing me on auto domain renewals.

Anyway, I haven’t been there in awhile and checked it out today (for some reason I still use them for WHOIS) and it is interesting to see how they’ve tried to adapt to this new reality. They provided services before, but now they are all about “Create . Drive . Boost”. Interesting. This certainly isn’t the netsol I remember.

I was most interested by the Create option, so I checked out their Do-It-For-Me Web Site Packages. HOLY CRAP! If you want a site design and 10 pages it will cost $999 (thank god it isn’t $1K) for design and $54.96 (thank god it isn’t $55) PER MONTH. That’s about $660 per year. So, for 10 pages, designed by Network Solutions, you would need to shell out $1600 up front. Thankfully you get a free domain. At least the site design doesn’t look like crap… oh wait, it does.

Now, this is not right. I, the consummate web professional, have a very hard time getting that kind of money for custom sites with countless additional options, revisions, pages, etc. Hell, I got laughed at for a $750 price tag on a site with a CMS and blog the other day! Times have certainly changed, but man… are people really paying Network Solutions that much? I would be pretty bummed if that were the case, but hey, they screwed me before, why would I be surprised they are screwing me again?

P.S. The image at left is from their homepage. The chick is artwork – zoom in, she isn’t real. She probably was at some point, but she is crazy airbrushed. Scary. wtf?

What a cool phrase. In case you haven’t seen it, this NY Times article is really cool. It talks about Google Trends and how it is creating an ability to see into the future by analyzing people’s search terms and assuming each of those represents a person’s intentions. String the intentions together, look for trends, and you can essentially watch the tide shift right beneath you.

This is a very cool concept, even cooler that John Battelle wrote about it way back in 2003. I am still somewhat on the fence about whether or not I completely agree, but it is certainly causing my brain to work. The thing I’m struggling with is that my search habits are based completely on reaction. Usually I’ll see something on the web, or in that wacky “real life” and seek more info. Certainly you are seeing my intention to learn more, but usually I’m prompted by something else to do so.

This did, however, remind me of a REALLY cool site called PubSub that allows you to search the future. “Traditional search stores data and then allows you to find documents within that store of data. PubSub operates by first storing your subscription query, and then watching for new information that matches it.”

Whoa, I think I just coined a phrase in my uber clever title. Antirchive. Anyway, despite this looking like a post about my cool new word, this is instead about the incredible amount of thought I’ve recently been giving to what appears to be the total lack of a schema, a rubric if you will, nay a modus operandi for archiving web content. Really we’re lacking a convention for how we should be documenting that we updated our site Friday, September 5, 1997.

Granted, some folks such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine have recognized this hole and taken snapshots of the vast Interspace at certain points and copied that in varying levels of completeness. But, really, I’m sure a huge portion of the folks putting information out there are not keeping copies. Now, the recent trend of blogs, and the idea of posting material and tying it specifically to the time at which it was posted will create a bit of an archive. But from 1997 until about a year ago I would venture to say most folks, with very few exceptions, were opening a page, editing it, and putting it right back up.

Since most of my sites have been portfolioesque by nature, I have a pretty good archive of most of my work. However, now that I work for a college I find that this topic becomes quite interesting. Day to day I am guilty of replacing content, making edits, moving things and otherwise not keeping copies. Most of this stuff is out of sheer necessity, little date tweaks and such would simply create a huge archive of very small changes.

Where this gets really interesting in a college setting, however, is in sites and pages related to academic material. We are in the business of admitting students, and then imparting knowledge upon them (beyond that, God help them). To me this means that anything that comes across my eDesk (yeah, yeah, leave me alone) relating to this business is of utmost importance.

Right now I’m struggling, however, with not only how to archive all this content, but whether it really needs to be at all. I’ve been talking to lots of folks and have honestly been somewhat shocked at how many don’t think it is important. It may not be, but I certainly don’t want to be the guy that makes the decision to delete all this old stuff. It seems to me that 5 years down the road, someone will be interested in what was going on in Human Rights and International Law this semester.

This could be a really long post about how we might go about actually doing this, but I don’t think that is the interesting point. I think what is interesting is that the Internets have changed, grown and evolved in amazing leaps and bounds but it seems to me that no one is concerned with what that all means for the actual content. If we are all caught up with keeping everything up-to-the-minute, what happens to the stuff from a few minutes ago?

Could blogs be our savior? Perhaps after some evolving of their own (seriously, I don’t want to read about your modular furniture Ted), the format of tying the content to the significance of when it was posted will create that convention, and the archive itself.

I mentioned previously that I’ll undoubtedly be posting a lot about MySpace. Has anyone else seen people that are carrying Myspace cards? This is like a business card but designed specifically to promote a MySpace profile.

A friend of ours has MySpace cards, in addition to the over 5,000 friends he has. He is essentially a MySpace celebrity and gets recognized, in real life, from his profile.

This is interesting on a couple of levels for me, the first and most obvious being how important a MySpace profile has apparently become. Secondly it shows that we are living in a time where people are so accustomed to being marketed to that they are naturals at marketing themselves. Isn’t that pretty much what a MySpace profile is? A way to market yourself online?

If self promotion becomes natural will it translate to people becoming really good at job interviews? At getting out of traffic tickets? At talking their way out of cheating on their wives?

In case you haven’t heard of, or seen it yet, I’m addicted to Current TV. Hopefully, though, you’ve heard about this new cable channel that is composed largely of viewer created content (VC2). You submit videos online, people vote on them and then they become part of the channel.

Not only is this a badass new idea, but each of the videos (or pods as they call them) is only a few minutes long and has a progress bar in the corner. This is totally watching the web on TV – the voting makes it interactive, the VC2 makes it random and the delivery makes it watchable without a huge time investment. Lastly, one of the founders, and Chairman of the Board, is Al Gore – inventor of the internets!

Check out some of the pods that are currently running, or take a peek at the full schedule. Coming up shortly are pods on south central farmers, vegan parenting, meth in Montana and landmines in Cambodia.

Be sure to look up what channel Current is on near you, and then start watching it. I’d say that if the TV is on here at the house, 90% of the time it is on Current.

Did I mention they pay for the VC2? $500 for the first and second pieces they air, $750 for the third and $1,000 for the fourth and each thereafter.

So MySpace and our buddy Rupert Murdoch grace the cover of Wired this month. You’ll find that I am not a fan of the MySpace, more on that later. However, there are a couple of interesting things in this article that caught my attention.

I hope, beyond hope, that Rupert’s purchase of MySpace kills it. Fundamentally I love the idea of an online community with this kind of market share, but unfortunately MySpace has proven several theories of monkeys in groups and become quite a bad place. Let’s start with something that Murdoch said that I think has the potential to destroy MySpace (this is some creative quoting by the way):

“[The main challenges of capitalizing on MySpace are] avoid doing anything that might interfere with the runaway growth that has already made MySpace the biggest aggregation of people on the Web. Step two is to turn MySpace’s teeming masses into a wholly new kind of media entity, an advertising, marketing, and distribution vehicle that gives News Corp. a hand on the steering wheel of popular culture worldwide.”

See, now that just sounds scary. That sounds like what I’d expect out of News Corp. And you know that they are in business to make money, not support some interesting new use of technology. So, how long before step two overpowers step one?

Speaking of the business of making money, the article also points out that even at the rate of a revenue doubling every quarter they are still only pulling $200M, less than 5% of Yahoo’s bling. Combine that with the fact they passed on purchasing IGN for MySpace, which seems crazy to me. Sure there are more eyeballs on MySpace but IGN has had advertising, successful advertising since day one. As a business model it makes a ton more sense.

Speaking of business models, the most effective “advertising” on the site right now is free – profiles that promote movies and products and encourage kids to add them as friends. Wired claims that the X-Men profile pulled 1.6M friends, which is a smart deal if the company (or movie, or whatever) is dishing out little bits of information leading up to the release. It is like an old school fan club, only feeding you on the front end. I believe that MySpace does have some fee structure for purely advertising based profiles, but companies can certainly work around that.

This is certainly the first of MANY posts on MySpace, but I was pleased with the Wired article. I have to admit that when my wife brought it into my office and said “you’ll love this, Rupert Murdoch and MySpace are on the cover” that I wasn’t too thrilled. Overall, though, it is a good read and has some interesting insights into what a huge challenge they have on their hands.