This kind of thing didn’t surprise me, coming from Ted. He’s one of the most vigilant awesomeness advocates I know. But, one thing I realized during that conversation…. if he could get the stack of front-end engineers together with the purpose of producing awesome stuff, there would be almost nothing stopping them except for one thing. The same kryptonite which stops all great developers – marketing.

Competition, Collaboration, Complaining

Marketing is the bane of a developer’s existence. It’s the thing we ignore, but we need.

Marketing is similar to tourism. The locals hate tourists, yet they depend on them for their survival in the modern age. It’s a love/hate relationship. Development is no different. We need marketing, but we hate it too. It’s so fake. So contrived. So finicky. Why can’t the quality stuff just get to the top of the list and get popular simply because it’s awesome? It’s sad really.

But, it’s needed. And, there are plenty of people out there who love to market. They just don’t like developers.

Why do developers have to be so agitating, so controlling, so vigilant and annoying to work with? If marketers could just have an idea and get someone to build it without complaining, the world would be a much better place, right? I mean, marketers know the market. It’s what they do. They know what people want, so the developers should just listen to them.

Ah, conflict. Gotta love it.

So, here’s the point… I live in both worlds. I see both points. I understand both pains because I’ve been both. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to shine the spotlight on little projects that developers are creating which are awesome. On the other side, I’m going to highlight some marketers who are pushing some great stuff.

In doing so, I hope to make some connections, smooth out the rough edges, and bring two communities together. There’s nothing we can’t accomplish if we actually get along. My vision is to see developers with great ideas and great talent build awesome stuff, and have a great local marketer pick that up and make it huge. On the other side, I want to see marketers with amazing ideas get their stuff built by some crazy awesome developers. Everyone would benefit from this.

It should be noted that I skipped one major aspect of the community, and that is designers. I didn’t do that on purpose in this article, and I do recognize how different each skill is. I do think design is a major aspect of adoption, usability, etc. Thus designers play a critical role in the awesomeness quotient of a project as well. We’ll add designers to the batter when we get the first two ingredients playing nicely and that’s when the world will explode and finally realize that San Diego has some major powerhouses in all three specializations.

Tiny Geo-Coder

Thanks to Emily Chang at eHub and Jackson West at LifeHacker.com, the Tiny Geocoder became an overnight smash hit.

With 8 hours of submitting my site to eHub it had been picked up and written about. Not long after, LiveHacker picked up the story and wrote a short article on the tiny, fast service that gives you latitude and longitude in exchange for a human-readable location. Less than 24 hours later there were over 30,000 new mentions across the internet. Today, there are over 70,000 links and mentions and over 200k queries.

With that kind of popularity comes a massive amount of suggestions, business deals, and more. I’m definitely a fan of that. So, of course I had to oblige and add in reverse geocoding too (thanks to many of your suggestions).

And of course, I couldn’t just leave it at that. Cody Marx Baily a.k.a. superphly contacted me and we partnered up to create…

…. drum roll please ….

TinyGPS.org

TinyGPS.org. Think of it as a shortening service for locations. Sure, you could type the address and make people map it. Or, you could just send them a URL like http://tinygps.org/15. With that, you’ll get links to the weather (Weather Underground), where to find beer nearby (Beer Mapping), events in the area (Upcoming.org), good restaurants (Yelp), news about the general vicinity (Google News), and even social media posts by others who are in the area (Brightkite).

We’re going to keep adding services, and might even embed a few into the page itself instead of linking off. But, for now, it’s a great way to share a ton of relevant things around a location without a massively large URL.

So, I’m very happy to have such a successful product make it “big”. It’s been fun watching the stats roll in and see how people are using it. I hope this trend continues with some of the other fun projects I am working on.

Thanks for making it fun to build things! This beer’s for you!

Please listen for a second.  I’ll try to keep this short, but if you don’t want to read anymore, please do me this one favor.

Click this link, register, and vote for our team and our idea:
http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-

Now, for those of you who are a little hesitant, here’s why I want you to click, register and vote.

See, I’ve been a little busy these last few years down here in San Diego.  Of course, I’ve always been busy, but this is different.  A few years ago I started searching for something more than money.  I’ve always been committed to my faith, but I’ve also been a pretty decent business-minded guy too.  Even now I consult other small businesses and non-profits on revenue strategies.  I know how to do that pretty well.

There’s something else I’ve been looking for.  I’ve been looking for a team and an opportunity.  A group of leaders who are self-sacrificing, looking for the betterment of others and willing to do what it takes to give a pure gift.

In 2003, San Diego went through some pretty ferocious fires.  I heard about them and watched a little on CNN while I was at Western in Bellingham.  But, I didn’t pay much attention, as most of didn’t who weren’t in the middle of the crisis.

But, then there were the floods in Centralia and Chehalis two different years that destroyed homes, businesses, and livelihoods.  Now those, we paid attention to.  We were in the middle of them. We had 18 inches in our home and it ruined everything.

Then there was Katrina, Hurricane Ike, the California Firestorm of 2007.  It’s in everyone’s back yard now.  It’s everyone’s problem at some point.

Here’s the problem we’re living with today.

The same problems exist today that have existed for a hundred years.  We still aren’t able to communicate to the people we need to most in times of emergency.

When the phone lines are down, how do you call 911?  When the internet is down, how do you find a map out of your area or the next shelter?  When the radio stations and tv stations are retelling the same stories every 20 minutes, but not talking about your area and whether the fire is over that hill behind your house, how do you find out?

That’s the problem.

But now we’re living in a world of opportunity.

The world is crazy and always has been.  But what’s changed in the last few years is the maturing of one of the worlds I’ve been living and working in for the past 15.  The internet has become a big and awesome place.  We’re now all publishing massive amounts of things.  Text, videos, audio, location-aware devices like GPS is able to all be published.  Real-time.  Like our own TV broadcasts but more than just TV.  It’s all possible today. Not only possible, but actually happening.  And by more than just internet geeks like me.

Some people find all that scary.  Those people are right about the possible threats of publishing so much info about ourselves.  But there’s also a whole world of possibility that we haven’t tapped yet.

So here’s the point.  With all this information being published by people in real-time, we have a chance to fix the problem.  We have the opportunity to make sure the officials and groups who can help us in times of disasters have all the information possible.  Every bit of it.

We need them to know when we’re out of water, food, shelter.  We need them to know when fires cross the roads.

That’s why the team I mentioned earlier exists.

Together, we’re creating the world’s first service which will take all the things that we are publishing and turn it into something useful.

We’re already talking to official public information officers in San Diego and Houston, government officials, traditional media outlets, publicly funded media outlets, citizen journalists and so many more stakeholders.  But this isn’t a company. It’s a project.  This project should have existed years ago, but it doesn’t.

Soon it will.

We’re building it.  For free.

I believe in this team.  I believe they’ve sacrificed time, effort, and skills to help save their fellow neighbors during an emergency.  This is a noble cause.  They deserve this.

Please, go to this link.  Register.  Vote for our cause.  We’re in the running right now for a $10,000 prize which will be split between 15 people.  It’s worth about 1/100th of the amount of time they’re putting into it. It’s a drop in the bucket to them, but it would mean so much to validate their work.

http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-

Please, take the time for us.  I would really appreciate it.

And feel free to encourage your friends and family as well to do the same if you feel led.

Sincerely,

Nate Ritter

The Problem

The problem sounds simple, but is in fact, relatively complex to solve at the moment.

I want to update the map on my site, showing our current location, with as little work as possible on my behalf.

Options and Thoughts

• I’ll be using my jailbroken iPhone while in Europe
• It would be great if we could push the current geo-location (latitude and longitude) of the phone to a server of my choosing (in which I could then take those coordinates and do all kinds of things. (This has been the biggest issue so far.)
• I would rather not have to “tell” the phone to push my location. If it updated once per hour automatically, that would be optimal.
• I want to record a history of locations so that eventually I can tie in photos taken, blog posts written, etc all to a location and coordinate that with a map, just for fun. A true traveling journal.
• I am currently looking into how the Google Maps location system works and I assume they have a hidden/unpublished API call that does that for them. If so, I will find it, and I will use it. I’m working on tracking that down right now to simplify the current mapping solution.

The current solution: iPhone + BrightKite + Dapper + TinyGeocoder

Disclaimer: I know there are a million ways to solve this problem other than how I will describe here. For my purposes, this has been the simplest way of doing it. Yes, I could have used FireEagle. I know BrightKite is coming out with an API. I did try to talk with the guys at Twittervision, etc, etc, etc. Trust me, I’ve been working and thinking about this for a while. Regardless, feel free to comment and I’ll let you know if I knew about your proposals/modifications and why I didn’t choose them. If I didn’t know about what you comment on, I’m happy to say so, change my solution, write another post, and give you credit for it.

I like bullet points, so I’ll describe HOW I setup my solution first, and I’ll give you code in a moment.

1. Signed up for an account at BrightKite. Checked in to my current location.
2. Went to Dapper and created these new BrightKite location-checking Dapps. One of them checks my current location (or any user’s for that matter), and the other I will be using another day to map my historical route (I’m leaving explanation of that for another post, too).
3. Using the Dapps, I retrieve my current location and send it to my Tiny Geocoder so that I get a valid and code-useful latitude and longitude.
4. Using the lat/long, I push that into the image source, which is a Google Static Map.

So now, all I have to do is update my location at BrightKite, which can be done via SMS text message, through their website, or via email (all available for use on my iPhone except for SMS once we’re overseas). BrightKite records my history and the Dapp changes to retrieve a new location. And voila, he map is updated based on that new location. Simple right?

So, what’s left? I have two things I still want done. (1) I don’t want to have to tell anything my location. I want it to be figured out for me using my current as-close-as-we-can-get latitude and longitude. I know Google can do this with their maps, so it’s just a matter of time before I find out how and exploit that feature. (2) I want the iPhone to push my location. I don’t want to have to tell it to update. This will definitely be something I’ll have to figure out on my own I think. There is an application for the jailbroken iPhone that allows you to run apps in the background (usually once the “screen saver” thingy comes on, the apps shut down to save battery life). But, this one is going to be the trickier of the two.

The code

Honestly, this is it:

[php]

$bkite_url="http://www.dapper.net/transform.php?dappName=BrightKitecheckedinlocation&transformer=JSON&v_Query=nateritter";
$bkite_json=file_get_contents($bkite_url);
$bkite_loc=json_decode($bkite_json);
$loc=$bkite_loc->fields->Current_Location[0]->value;
$geo=file_get_contents('http://tinygeocoder.com/create-api.php?q='.urlencode($loc));
[html]
<img src="http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=<?php echo $geo; ?/>&markers=<?php echo $geo; ?>,red&zoom=8&size=325x130&key=MY-GOOGLE-API-KEY"/>


Now, let me explain line by line:

1. Setting up the URL to the Dapp that gets my current location from BrightKite. If you want to get yours, just replace “nateritter” with your own username and there you have it.
2. I get the contents of a JSON-formatted response from the Dapper server into a variable
3. Because I’m using PHP5 on my server, I use the PHP function json_decode() to put the response into a PHP-useable object/format.
4. I put the string location (like say the address or city/state I most recently checked in at) into a variable.
5. I use my own, never seen before, geo-coder to switch the location into a latitude/longitude format (like “39.9938,-167.939″). This is the format required by the Google Static Maps API.

Then, you’ll notice the HTML is just an image, really. That’s the beauty of Google’s Static Maps. It’s just an image. No crazy JavaScript to produce a map. It’s awesome. It’s all supposed to be on one line, so ignore the weird formatting on this blog article here and assume one line.

1. I create an Google Maps image with the proper dimensions that I want to fit my sidebar using the geo-coordinates produced by the Tiny GeoCoder.

Done and pretty.

Normally, I’d put the code up for download, but it’s so simple and already created for you that there’s no need. Just copy and paste.

Obvious things you need to change are the Google Maps API key and your own username in the BrightKite call (Dapper URL). Otherwise, you should be good to go.

One more disclaimer about the Tiny GeoCoder

First, you have to understand that the Tiny GeoCoder was built by me for the one and only purpose of sending an address or other string-based location in and getting back the latitude and longitude in a very simple format. Nothing more. Nothing less. It doesn’t use a lot of error checking, so it could be wrong on occasion. If you send it “San Diego”, it will choose the one it finds first, so it’s better to be specific (there is a San Diego, TX and a San Diego, CA).

Second, I currently do not cache location requests in the Tiny GeoCoder, but now that I’ve published this, I think that would probably be wise. If anyone wants to help me do that, I’d be happy to listen since I’m not an expert in that area.

Third, a result of not caching locations means the Tiny GeoCoder could get overloaded with requests and break down if it gets popular. If this happens, please contact me here and let me know (not in the comments, please).

Fourth, I’m obviously not charging to use it, but I’m not against doing so if it gets beyond my control in terms of scaling or popularity. I want it to be free, but the only way that’s going to happen is if people help me keep the costs low on it, both in labor and in server costs. So, please participate if we get to that point and help keep it free.

Ready, set, travel

Please feel free to offer advice, comments, criticism, and critiques in the comments below. I only post these kinds of things because people respond to them. Without that, I’d probably just talk about what I ate for dinner, and nobody really cares about that kind of stuff.

Discuss.

One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin, recently touched upon the subject of signal to noise in social media and the web in general. It’s interesting to me that his perspective comes at such a fortuitous time as this. Literally, the day a few of us will be getting together to discuss the very issue.

Signal to noise ratio. It’s the term used by radio operators to describe the amount of quality sounds they’re able to hear over the static. Blogs and Twitter are perfect examples of this. There are zillions of blogs out there now, and thousands more being created every day. Are any of them valuable? Twitter asks “what are you doing” and I have to admit I put much more than what I’m doing into that little box. In fact, Lisa Brewster and David Horn have dubbed the problem infamously “Nate limiting” (as opposed to “rate limiting”). As honored as I am to be a part of the meme, I also want to find a solution to the issue.

There’s quite a few people now talking about this issue. What we need now is not aggregation. That just puts all the noise in one place. Although, aggregation might be a necessary step to see that it doesn’t work first.

We’ve gone from a top-down approach to publishing content into the era of “user” contributed content (don’t get me started on the word “user”). Now we can publish anytime, anywhere, on almost any consumable media.

So, what happens next? AllTop, Guy Kawasaki’s creation.

AllTop cracks me up, actually. If you don’t remember the original Yahoo!, you probably don’t understand why. Yahoo! started out by being a directory of organized interesting and relevant (“top”?) websites. Then Google came along and kicked their ass because we wanted more content than just a directory. Now we’ve got too much content and we just want the “best”. See the pendulum swinging again? It’ll go back and forth like this until someone solves the issue with a filter of some sort.

Enter “Nate limiting” and the content, priority, and “friend” filter. There will be a solution, it just might take some work on the human’s part to tweak it right.

The only thing that’s come close so far has been Facebook’s feed preferences (screenshot below).

We need more than a closed filter though. What do you think the solution is? Would the general population even use a solution like this?

As some of you know (if you follow me on Twitter) my wife and I have been on vacation for the past week. “Vacation” is a somewhat deprecated term these days because who, really, goes on vacation? Do you really not check your business email? I check mine daily, even while I’m supposed to be on vacation.

Anyway, the point is that I haven’t been able to post anything new lately because we’ve been traveling quite a bit. But, towards the end of this trip, I’ve finally found a few minutes where I can sit down and give you all something great.

The Story

Before we left on our road trip, I took a few spare hours that were set aside for packing and instead decided to try to help make the world a better place, or at least help you help make it better.

Matt Herzberger (@mherzber) sent me a message with an interesting idea. Matt saw the @MissingChildren Twitter account I created, which sends out messages when a child goes missing, is endangered, or is found across the nation. Within the same family, he wanted an account which would allow people to submit ideas on how to practically make small steps toward changing the world for good.

Originally, we went through the ideas he had for it in about 20 minutes, and I said I could definitely do something like that for him. It was a great idea and for a great cause – making the world better. Although, in about 5 hours, I was leaving for a vacation and wouldn’t be able to code anything for him until I got back.

A few minutes later, the idea turned into a spec, which turned into a prototype, which turned into something I just couldn’t get out of my head. It was simple and brilliant, and the code itself could be worth quite a bit to extend this idea of world-changing into other realms (like, great business ideas, etc). So, 3 hours later I had the new service called @MakeChange tested and working.

The Overview / Back of the Envelope Drawing

There were a few things we wanted as “features” to this concept that was a little different from the @missingchildren account.

1. The ideas were to be anonymously reposted onto the @makechange account.
2. It would be best if the messages sent to @makechange were direct messages (behind the scenes).
3. Everything except the moderation of the posts needed to be automated, including the re-following that’s needed to accept direct messages from other twitter accounts.

Here’s what we came up with on the back of an envelope (versus an earlier idea I drew on the back of a napkin):

The Code

The code turned out pretty straightforward. I am sharing it for your benefit. Hopefully it does greater good than just what we’ve put it to use doing.

Of course, if you use it, I’d love to hear about what you’re using it for, and I’d love the attribution as well.

Cheers!

Download: MakeChange Twitter Account PHP Code (.zip) (follow the directions in the readme.txt)

Requirements:

• PHP 5.
• Ability to create and run cron jobs.
• A Twitter account.
• A dedicated/separate email address which will receive Twitter notifications of when you’ve been followed by another user.

Questions/Comments?
Feel free to comment here and I’ll try to answer to the best of my ability.

Mark was kind enough to make the following changes:

• changed code structure to be a bit simpler
• removed class wrapper
• removed the use of do_action to speed up processing
• added detection of ‘upload_dir’ from the WordPress database, and if it’s not set some can edit this code
• to define the exact dir if they want to
• added a page template, “duh_gallery_template.php”
• Note: To create a new page that uses the template, create a new page and set its Page Template to use duh_galler_template.

Demo: Here’s a working demo of the Duh Gallery

Original Release: Here’s the Original Release Page for the WP photo plugin.

Download: Here’s the Download page for the most recent revision.

Enjoy

A few months ago I had an idea at 2:30am. I talked about the “50 photos” project before, but this time, it’s grown up a little bit.

This time, there’s a real voting application behind it.

Photographers

As a photographer who licenses your work under Creative Commons, you can submit your Flickr URLs to any work which could be considered appropriate for the theme, “Old”. Photographers who’s photos are voted by popular demand to be a part of the book will receive $1.00 per photo per book sold. Because there will be a limited print run of only 50 books, if you have one photo accepted into the book, you could receive up to $50.

Photo admirers

I’m not a great photographer, so I sit with this bunch. But, this is still a very exciting place to be. Every photo submitted by a photographer can be voted on by anyone else. Just login and start voting. It’s pretty simple.

Interested in the book?

This will be a very limited run book. We will only ever print 50 copies of this book. Anyone interested in owning one of the 50 books can either fill in their email address when they login (go to the “my info” area), or, just give me your email address here.

I promise I won’t use, sell, rent, or do anything with that email address except for two things — (1) to contact you to tell you the book is available for purchase and/or (2) to confirm your identity if your Open ID provider goes down.

What is this project about?

The simple version is that I had this idea to give honor to the creative commons licensed photographers who are awesome. These are the people who take brilliant photographs and don’t get paid (except in attribution) for their work, yet it’s published all over the world in newspapers, magazines, and on the internet. They rarely hear how awesome their work is, and I wanted to give a little back to them.

So, the idea was to get 50 photos under a particular theme (in this case “Old”). Get the photographer’s permission to print a limited number of them in a commercial work and sell them. Each photo sold would make the photographer $1.00. It’s not a lot, it’s probably more than they’ve made off their awesome photos yet. This just validates the photographer’s awesomeness more than anything. It also makes for a pretty expensive book.

So, after printing costs and everything, it’ll probably cost between $80-90 per book. But each one will be special. You could easily pay $100 for a photo book from great, well known photographers.

Think of this as the independent label for photography.

Please, spread the word about this project and come and vote on the photographs being submitted.

I’ve spoken and posted in the past about how geeks can help in emergencies. Today I flew up to San Francisco and spoke at a Net Squared event for non-profits about how they could best put Twitter to use.

My experiences in the San Diego fires of 2007 gave me an interesting outlook on how Twitter, as a tool, could be applied in different circumstances. Just a few months after (and some even during) the 2007 firestorm some agencies are scratching the surface of what’s possible with this service.

At the outset of my talk I made sure to be clear that Twitter is a tool. It’s a good one for some cases and organizations and useless for others. Don’t make Twitter the hammer and start looking at everything like a nail. Twitter does some things very well, but it doesn’t fit every organization’s goals.

Britt (who is awesome by the way) asked me a question in our pre-talk interview. “How could Twitter be used for non-profits?”. A question like that is too broad to answer. It’s like asking how a website could be used for a business. Instead, I came up with a set of advantages Twitter has which may be used to help determine if Twitter could be useful for your organization. If one of these criterion benefits your community without too many hurdles for adoption, then Twitter might be the right tool for you.

Twitter benefits

1. Speed Using twitter, you can very easily publish information more than once per minute. If distribution speed is critical, regardless of the information being distributed, Twitter may be the tool for you.
2. Non-website (source) based alerts Instant messaging, SMS/text messages on cell phones, RSS/Atom feeds, email alerts, badges/widgets on other sites, and other methods of distribution are available. If your community can’t be tethered to a website for it’s communications, Twitter can provide other methodologies to get that information out to them.
3. Community publishing There are a few (slightly more technical) ways of aggregating a group of twitterers posts, which means you could have more people — even your community — pitching in to help publish pertinent information.

The limitations of Twitter

Yes, there are some limitations to Twitter — seemingly huge obstacles to its usefulness.

1. Only text and links can be posted. No maps. No photos. No videos. Text and links are all you get.
2. 140 character limit. URLs will get shortened wherever possible, but 140 characters is tough to get used to.
3. No conversation threading. This can be tough to deal with when you’re used to discussion forums and such. Connecting with your community in this way is almost limited to real-time dialogue, which can limit the conversation’s depth and longevity.
4. The API has a 70 post per hour limit. Note that from what I could tell, the web UI doesn’t have this limit, but I’m sure they wouldn’t like you posting more than that unless it was an emergency anyway.

There are other limitations as well which I’m not necessarily documenting here. But, the ones listed here can seem insurmountable. Trust me, they’re not. They merely make you work around them. But that work around is only about 15 minutes of work and then you’re set.

But why stop at Twitter?

Twitter was a great tool for the emergency situation we went through in southern California, but why stop there?

Here’s the thing. If you need criterium #2 (non-website based alerts), then publishing to Twitter should be your end goal.

The limitations to Twitter are definitely not insurmountable. So lets use Twitter for what it’s good at and go find something else which can help with the things it’s missing. We’ll put together a quick example prototype using services and websites which already exist.

The end result of the next 15-30 minutes, if you follow me, will be a website which will aggregate photos, videos, blog posts, tweets (twitter posts), for whatever context you would like. We could, for instance, create a site which would show all the different types of media and content on the San Diego fires. Additionally, it would be updated automatically whenever new content is created by you or anyone else (if you want to be that open) on whatever subject you’d like.

The prototype

We’ll do this in steps. But before we do, here’s the back-of-the napkin diagram of what we’re building.

1. Grab RSS feeds from any websites you can. YouTube, Flickr, other Twitter accounts, blogs, etc. Many times, if you’re creative, you can get keyword (or “tag”) filtered RSS feeds. So, for instance, you can use the public Flickr feed for photos and add a few things to the URL which will let you filter based on tags.
2. Create a Soup.io account for your emergency, event, or organization. This part should be pretty easy.
3. Add the feeds to the Soup.io account. There’s a little tool or gear-looking icon in the bottom left of the screen. Click that and click the “Me Elsewhere” section. In the form that shows up, select “RSS feed” and paste in the feed’s URL. Do that for each service you want. Here’s an example of what it could look like.
4. If you need that criterion #2 (update alerts via something other than the website itself), you can head over to TwitterFeed.com and sign up for an account. This service allows you to take an RSS feed (like from the Soup.io account you created) and push it back into a Twitter account.
5. Grab the RSS feed for the Soup.io account you just created. Paste the URL into the TwitterFeed service you created along with whatever Twitter account and password that you want new information to post to.

Now, one thing to note here is that if you’re dealing with emergencies, you probably want to have a script produced for you which will do the the RSS to Twitter push. The reason is that TwitterFeed.com only pushes up to 5 new items every 30 minutes — certainly much less often than you’d want in a crisis. It’s not too difficult for a developer to do and could most likely be contracted for about $100 or so.

Although I could, I’m not going to develop and distribute a script like that here. Doing something like this would probably irritate Soup.io a little because most service providers don’t like to be hit more than once every 30 minutes or more. In a crisis, you’d want to hit it probably once every 5 minutes or more. Plus, this is a prototype. Just a brainstorm.

Net Squared

This whole concept and prototype is what I talked about at the Net Squared event last Tuesday. If you missed it, I suggest keeping an eye on the NetSquared blog. They should have a podcast and video up soon.

NetSquared also has asked a specific question about how if and how non-profits could use Twitter, specifically. Feel free to join the conversation there as well.

If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, please feel free to contact me.

[tags]community, non-profit, netsquared, citizenspace, tara hunt, hashtags, twitter, soup.io, tumblr[/tags]

Loic is getting paid to get people to vote for something. What is being voted for and who these people are is relatively meaningless (to me at least, sorry @jberrebi, I’m sure it’s very meaningful to you to game the voting system. Nice work.). But the fact Loic is getting paid is huge.

Ok, backup. What the crap is “Non-Zero” again?

What I dubbed project “Non-Zero” was/is going to be a way to pay people to tweet things for you, specifically promotion of urls. The idea is that I could come to this site, select a price I’m willing to pay as an advertiser and enter in the url that I wanted people to land on.

That creates a marketplace.

Next, some twitterer/tweeter/person-who-uses-twitter would come to the market, register that they wanted to take up the offer and add it to a few tweets. Since the url would contain who the twitterer is, and the tweet itself would be archived, we could just pass the url through the marketplace, log that someone clicked on it, and record the transaction. That’s just simple PPC, just like Google Adwords.

There are a few tricks to this though.

#1. How do you stop people from gaming the system? Google has a hard enough time with it. What makes you think you can do better? The short answer is I don’t know. I have a few ideas of how to stop that problem, but I’m sure the hackers are smarter than me in this area since they’re smarter than Google too.

#2. You could fix it by doing CPA. True, this could help fix the system, but then again, there’s lots of ways to game that. A little more difficult, but still possible.

Anyway, not to get too far into the details, you get the point. It’s kindof a PayPerPost setup in a way, but smaller. I’m sure Arrington would call me evil for even thinking up this idea… but whatever. At least it would be press.

Now, the fact I’ve even posted this idea to the world is proof that I probably won’t do it. I haven’t decided if it was my moral boundaries, distaste for advertising (I don’t want to be the one who corrupts Twitter), or because I already have 6 side-projects to work on right now, and the 7th would probably kill me. But, at any rate, the idea is out there and we can watch to see who jumps on it and makes the millions thousands of dollars I probably would have if I weren’t so ADD

P.S. The project title, “Non-Zero” came from a book title which proposed that you can and we do have economics indicating not everything that has to do with capitalism is a zero-sum game. You can create markets, and the argument is that all markets, are in fact non-zero-sum games. We can discuss the philosophy behind this in another post sometime, but I love the idea.

[tags]twitter, advertising, marketing, ppp, pay per post[/tags]