It doesn’t really matter if you read a thousand articles on how to structure your blog posts or how to promote your blog, your blog is nothing without good content. You come up with good blog content depending on what your blog is. A news or corporate blog will report on latest events. Other types of blogs will often times have content based on thoughts, opinions, and ideas. This post will talk about the latter type of blogs.

The best blogging ideas come from observation. I will demonstrate this with a hypothetical situation.

Let’s see a friend shows you some sort of invention he created. You might have an idea how to improve it, thoughts on how to use it to it’s maximum efficiency, or opinions on who the target audience is for this invention.

Now let’s say that when the friend called you over to see the invention, you said you couldn’t come. You would probably not have those thoughts, opinions, and ideas until somebody else wrote a blog post about your friend’s invention. By that point, if you tried to blog about it, your blog post may seem unoriginal if other people have already published their thoughts, opinions, and ideas.

This is the reason that some FriendFeed users say that “noise” is good.

Now that you know that you should go out and find stuff to blog about, the next big mistake is not blogging about it. Way too many times have I seen something before other bloggers did and didn’t blog about it.

On the flip side, you can’t blog about everything due to time and the fact that you could be seen as attempting to post regularly by filling your blog with bad content. You have to maintain a delicate balance between blogging about the most mundane thing and failing to blog when you are the first to see something really cool.

So, how do you know if you’re the first see something really cool? Think about it for a second…

That’s right! You Google it! Googling something not only prevents you from making posts about stuff that others have known for years, but you also become more knowledgeable on the topic.

Now I’ll tell you the key to observation is to look at something in a different way. This is basically the idea behind lolcats. In creating a lolcat, the person that sees a picture thinks “Hmm, the cat looks like it wants a cheeseburger…”

Summary:

• The best blogging ideas come from observation
• You actually need to observe to get blogging ideas
• Do not blog about the most mundane observations
• Google stuff to see if everybody else has talked about it two months ago.
• Look at stuff in different ways to get interesting observations.

CodingExperiments has covered an interactive 3D viewer that uses Javascript. That’s pretty neat, but it’s small potatoes to Javascript Mario Kart. Yeah, you read that right. It’s Javascript.

Now, how does it play? Well, I’ve never had a better gaming experience in my life. The controls are so wonderful, the graphics are better than a PlayStation 3 game, and the AI is very intelligent.

You probably didn’t believe me for a second. The controls are annoying as you can only press one key at a time and the graphics are ugly and slow. The AI still beats me, though that’s because I suck at Mario Kart and that I had trouble adjusting to the one-keypress thing.

Now, what does this example teach us? Let’s see.

• Whatever it is, you have a pretty good chance that it can be written in Javascript, even though it won’t probably work that well.
• Internet Explorer is shooting itself in the foot by having it’s own proprietary standards and not supporting the official ones.
• Sadly, some things have to be left to Adobe Flash and Shockwave.

Now think if you’re going to be playing this a lot. Unless you are some Javascript addict, you are probably going to play Javascript games a couple times and then forget about them. This is a good example for a lot of web applications. If you’re creating a web application that uses way too much Javascript, and making the web application annoying and slow, people are going to go to other web applications or desktop ones.

Javascript Mario Kart is still pretty cool though. :D

Introduction

When FriendFeed introduced it’s “room” feature, something similar to an Internet forum was created. Registered users could post messages on a partitioned section of FriendFeed dedicated to a particular topic or person. An Internet forum is where registered (or unregistered, depending on the forum) can post messages on a website, which is a small part of the Internet. Sound similar? Yup.

The FriendFeed room feature is quite lacking in, well, features. Below is a table showing features that a typical forum (PHPBB, Vbulletin) has compared to FriendFeed.

Feature comparison: Rooms vs. Forums

Forums around longer

Forums have been around way, way, way longer than FriendFeed rooms. This explains why today’s forums are so much more feature-rich than FriendFeed rooms. With only minor problems, few (if any) hate the rooms feature.

However, FriendFeed rooms are simple. You have a simple, clean interface (though the gray text for comments annoys a lot of people) in which to participate in discussion. You can see the conversations in rooms in the main FriendFeed “friends” stream, so you don’t have to go back checking dozens of rooms.

However, FriendFeed rooms are not the only example of simplicity. There is the whole microblogging movement, started by Twitter and followed by Jaiku and Pownce. Even more recently is the ultra-microblogging example of Adocu, where you’re only allowed one word, though you can string a bunch of words together and call it one word.

If you want to go back to the good ol’ days before iGoogle, you can take Google’s home page as an example of how simplicity wins over complex features.

Bottom line

It appears that the three things that a good application has to be is simple (and useful), stable (Twitter fails at this one), and secure.

Technically, the title is all you need.

Introduction

PHP is an odd and inconsistent language. Many developers agree on this, but some of those developers still like PHP while others hate it. A few days ago, a post titled “PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter” appeared on Coding Horror. That post by Coding Horror is one of many negative PHP posts. I believe PHP is good, but I’ll also cover some of the bad points

Blessings

1) PHP has one of the best documentations, that programmers can add comments and code samples to.

This is one of the things that make PHP an easy-to-learn language. The top-notch documentation will usually help you find what you are looking for. If it’s not in the documentation, there’s always something interesting in the comments.

The bad side: Beginners often add code examples that use bad programming practices, resulting in more beginners using those bad programming practices

2) PHP is everywhere.

You can find a decent version of PHP everywhere. Bluehost, the one that I use for this site, has PHP version 5.2.6, which is currently the latest version. Bluehost, unfortunately, only has Python 2.3.4, which makes it difficult for me as a lot of my scripts rely on Python 2.5. Because PHP is so popular, web hosts work harder to cater to the demands of PHP developers rather than Python developers.

The bad side: While PHP is everywhere, the php.ini can be used to change the environment, making it difficult for PHP scripts to run everywhere.

3) PHP is HTML-embedded.

This makes it easy to create templates with HTML pages with one-line PHP scripts inserting the content that goes here or there.

The bad side: This makes it easy to escalate to spaghetti-code. However, it doesn’t mean that it is impossible to write good code in PHP.

4) PHP is beginner-friendly.

This makes it so non-programmers can quickly pick up PHP and start a web service

The bad side: It’s way too easy to have security holes and other bad programming practices in code. This is the programmer’s fault.

5) PHP is open-source.

Being an open-source fan, I love using an open-source technology.

The bad side: For now, businesses don’t take PHP seriously. This is partly because it’s open-source. This isn’t the fault of the language, but the attitude that people take to it.

Curses

1) PHP has inconsistent function names.

There is no one naming scheme for functions. You have the function strpos (); and str_replace ();. It takes a bit of practice to remember the naming conventions.

The good side: You can always consult PHP’s excellent documentation if you get confused.

2) PHP is slower than a lot of other languages.

Python and other languages are faster than PHP at doing a lot of things. PHP simply loses here.

The good side: It’s still a good language to for beginners that are not performance-crazed.

3) PHP developers don’t get paid a lot.

It probably stems from PHP being open-source and that there are many beginner PHP developers out there. For more reading, you can check out “Dealing with the low PHP salary problem“.

You could argue that this is not the fault of PHP itself, but this is still an important issue.

The good side: I’m not sure on this one.

4) You can make bad code easily.

Making bad code means that you will have to spend more developer time going back and fixing it. Recoding introduces new bugs which means even more time has to be spent fixing the bugs.

The good side: This one is the programmer’s fault, but plenty of anti-PHP blog posts list this as a reason on why PHP is bad. I think that you can make bad code in any language. Making a language idiot-proof is a waste of time. As the saying goes, “If you design something idiot-proof, the world will design a better idiot.”

Conclusion

It’s totally your opinion whether PHP is good or not, but I would like to point out that it isn’t as bad as everybody says it is. Yes, you can write horrible code with PHP. That’s the programmer’s fault. It’s wise for a beginner programmer to learn PHP through reliable sources instead of PHP documentation comments showing off bad code.

Some of the things, like PHP being slower, not being taken seriously by companies, and developers getting paid less will simply have to be fixed as time passes on.

Introduction

A difficult part of developing an application is figuring out how to implement a feature. If you don’t develop a feature well, your users will not be happy. If you take too long to develop a feature, people might have moved onto another application that had the feature before you did. It’s tricky business.

The main ways of developing a feature

1) Make a less powerful version of the feature to give your users a taste.

This is what FriendFeed has done with the “room” feature that was implemented yesterday. If you haven’t heard of it, it allows you to create an area of FriendFeed dedicated to a specific topic. At the time of this writing, it appears that there is no mechanism to search rooms or a way to transfer the ownership of a room.

2) Make an implementation of a feature that solves the problems of the same feature in other applications.

This means that you are late in the game of implementing the feature, but this typically will result in the highest quality. In the Internet world, you have to come out with things as quickly as possible to avoid becoming old. Even if you have a really good feature, people might not want to switch to your service if they’re too wedded to their own.

3) Give as many features as you can in a short time span and stamp it “beta”.

This card is one of the favorites to play in Web 2.0. There are plenty of services that come out with features quickly and label them “beta” to signal that there still might be bugs in it. If your implementation is superior than the others that spent time working on their features, you win. If yours is unstable, but still superior, you will only interest the early adopters, which is just fine if you’re a Web 2.0 application.

4) Do the above tip, but make it an invite-only beta and generate a lot of hype around it.

I’ll label this the “Gmail strategy” as Google executed this method perfectly with Gmail. Back when it was invite-only, everybody wanted an invite and it was the cool thing to discuss about on the Internet.

5) Build a basic feature, but allow a plugin system or an API so third-parties can add their own stuff.

This is something that you could do if you are short on time and/or programmers that would write the code fore the feature, but still want to attract users to your application.

The disadvantages of this is that you have to make sure that your plugin system and API is secure so somebody cannot use it maliciously.

I just wasted a morning writing a cute little article on why I think that Windows isn’t all that great of an operating system. You can find it here.

The opinions on something can change pretty quickly. At first, all the bloggers were saying how FriendFeed is the new Twitter. People started flocking to FriendFeed because of it’s simple brilliance. At the start, there were some complaints, such as the lack of an API, but the FriendFolks said it was in the works. When the API was launched, bloggers started comparing it to Facebook and said that FriendFeed was the new cool platform to be writing code for. FriendFeed apps started coming out, along with Alert Thingy, a FriendFeed client written with Adobe AIR.

Once people got used to their shiny new Web 2.0 toy, they started to notice two things.

First, FriendFeed scatters conversations. If a blogger’s latest post gets put on his or her FriendFeed page, people can comment directly through FriendFeed. People that don’t use FriendFeed, but use some other RSS reader to keep track of posts would comment directly on the blog. Those that don’t use FriendFeed don’t know about the conversation going on there. You have the conversations scattered all over, which is something you don’t want with a service that tries to aggregate a bunch of web services into one source.

Some simple workarounds came for this. An example of this is the FriendFeed comments plugin for WordPress. These aren’t really enough to put the conversations back into one piece.

The second problem with Friendfeed is the noise. FriendFeed users started complaining about how much content there was on FriendFeed that they didn’t find interesting. FriendFeed supports a “hide” function, that supports hiding on various conditions, like hiding all of a specific friend’s Twitter posts unless they have comments or “likes” on them. Louis Gray wrote a post that outlines five ways to use “hide” in FriendFeed.

Simply hiding more stuff didn’t cut the complaints. That can be illustrated by looking at the results of this Lifehacker poll asking their readers their opinions on FriendFeed. At the time, 26.1% of people that participated in that poll said that there is too much content to subscribe to with FriendFeed without being completely overwhelmed.

But then the opinions change again. Maybe the noise is good. At least Hutch Carpenter and Robert Scoble seem to think so.

I would have to politely disagree with those two and say that if noise is useful, then it isn’t really noise. Now the most exciting part is to wait and see how FriendFeed, and the opinions of bloggers, changes.

BTW: 50th post!

Introduction

When reading articles on the Internet, I often see blog and forum posts that state that open source software is the way to go. I also see all of the methods of communication above that don’t like open source software, usually because of stereotypes. This post will be dedicated to debunking those stereotypes.

The Stereotypes

You can’t make money off of open source software

This one is debunked very easily. There is a list of 46 ways to make money off open source (the title of that webpage wrongly says that there are 101 ways listed), and it’s been discussed to death on Slashdot.

Anybody can see the code of open source security software, so it’s not secure

That is wrong. There are plenty of very good open source security software out there that does not have its security compromised because it’s open source.

Open source software is only available for Linux

There are so many examples that defeat this myth, that I can’t list them all. I will try to list a few popular Linux apps that are available on Windows.

• Mozilla apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Prism)
• Audacity
• Pidgin
• GIMP
• Inkscape
• Blender

If you want to run a Linux app that is not available on Windows, you can try out andLinux, LINA, or Wubi. This myth is clearly busted.

UPDATE: There is also Ulteo.

Open source software is hard to use

This is a very general statement. It might apply to the user interface of say, Blender, but since you can do such complex things with Blender, you can’t expect the user interface to be intuitive to the beginner. An expert has a different idea of what is intuitive than the beginner.

Now, there are plenty of applications that are easy to use. Ubuntu Linux is known for being a very easy to use Linux distribution. There are plenty of easy-to-use applications, like Amarok, that you can download using Synaptic or Adept.

You have to compile all open source software

On Linux, this depends on what distribution you use. You might find yourself compiling a lot more software when you are using Slackware than when you are using Ubuntu.

If you are not comfortable with compiling, you can use Ubuntu or any of the Linux applications that are available for Windows.

Open source software is all about people having the freedom to contribute code. Since few users have the ability to contribute code, and even fewer have the time to do so, the ability to contribute code is pointless.

This is a very common myth. It is true that few people might contribute code. This does not mean that a lot of the software’s users will not find the contributed code useful. One developer could write a plugin that instantly makes an application the favorite of large numbers of users.

A great example of this is Firefox. Firefox would not have its popularity if it weren’t for the hundreds and hundreds of extensions that make it vastly more powerful.

You can’t get commercial support for open source software

There are places where you can get commercial support for open source software. If you’re running Ubuntu, you can get Canonical’s paid support.

Introduction

UPDATE: You can read a blog post titled “Do Companies Need Social Media Managers?” that covers similar topics.

Companies have already started blogging. They see it as an informal way to communicate with customers.

Personal bloggers, meaning people that blog because they want to, also comment on other blogs, use social networks like Facebook, and might be active on FriendFeed.

Should corporate bloggers do some of these things, or is it too risky for the companies reputation?

Personal bloggers often post about their opinions without much worry, but a corporate blogger must separate personal opinion and what the company wants written in the blog. A corporate blogger has to be careful to make sure that the company is not being misrepresented.

Obviously, a corporate blogger participating in discussion massively increases the risk of misrepresenting the company, but there might be many benefits from having corporate bloggers participate in discussion.

Advantages

1) The company will be seen as Web 2.0 savvy

Going beyond the normal corporate blog and having employees interact more with the community might impress a lot of people, that is, until all the other companies do that too.

2) The company can learn more about the target audience

Assuming the target audience is also Web 2.0 savvy, the Internet can easily be used as a digital focus group that the company can use to get more data about potential customers.

3) People understand that the company cares about customers

A company with bloggers that are participating in discussion on the Internet gives the appearance of caring about customers. A company that focuses entirely on making money won’t have people blogging and communicating about the company.

4) Because banner ads are so old

Traditional advertising is getting less and less effective. Print advertisments are too expensive compared to Internet advertising, and Internet advertising is getting less effective as people use Adblock.

Sparking discussion about a company’s products, services, etc. can help spread the word. This needs to be done carefully as negative discussion could severely harm the company. The company would have to be squeaky-clean to minimize the risk of negative opinions about the company being spread.

On the other hand, being open to criticism and listening to these negative opinions can help fix the company, and showing that the company is willing to fix problems will boost its image.

5) The company can attract intelligent employees

Most people would rather have a secure job with slightly less pay than work at a turbulent company with a not-so-good reputation and get more money.

Being active in blogosphere discussions will give a positive image to the company, and make the company seem like a really GOOG good place to work.

Disadvantages

1) Once something negative gets on the Internet, it’s not going to go away

Let’s take Microsoft as an example. If you have some fun looking around Youtube, you can find Steve Ballmer screaming “Developers” over and over and over and see Bill Gates being given a pie (very quickly). Interestingly enough, Bill Gates himself admits to watching pirated Youtube videos, which is a stark contrast from Microsoft’s stance on piracy.

There isn’t the ability to try again if a bad image is (accidentally) painted of the company.

2) Your corporate bloggers might make a mistake

Nobody is perfect, so your corporate bloggers might voice an opinion that is not shared by the rest of the company. This is already a problem with normal corporate blogging, but as stated above, active interaction with the community dramatically increases the risk of this happening.

3) It might be difficult to interact without breaking the rules

Your corporate bloggers might find it difficult to interact with the community AND put the company in a positive light. To avoid posting something bad, your corporate bloggers might be relatively silent in the discussions taking place in the blogosphere.

4) You risk over-hyping

If you generate a lot of interest and excitement over an upcoming product, and the people discover that the product isn’t that good, you lose credibility.

With corporate bloggers participating in discussion and talking about their company’s products, you risk over-hyping.

Conclusion

Having corporate bloggers participate in discussion in the blogosphere can give you good results, but only if you maintain several delicate balances.