Fastest growing blog

Two recent Best Blog pick went up the Fastest Growing blog. Congratulation!

RawSugar

This blog is now at 59ideas.com.  

Took some time to look at Raw Sugar while I’m at Ma.gonlia.

Some people classify RawSugar as a social bookmark like del.icio.us. From my brief look at it, it is more. More like Squidoo. (By the way, Squidoo is becoming more interesting since last mentioned.)

From the Demo presentation, it looks like it is just the perfect tool I need for Ken and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

One thing I don’t understand. 59ideas is a perfectly fine username in my opinion. But RawSugar said “The username field contains illegal characters“. Now which character in “59ideas” is illegal?

Turns out that I cannot start a username with number with a number! Why?

I like the RawSugar idea and the reward program idea even better. I’m a firm believer of this motto:

Ideas is nice, but Money drives.

Power of the Fauna Theme

This blog is now at 59ideas.com. 

Try this,

1. Go to Google and search with site:wordpress.com
2. Click on a couple of the websites

Notice anything about them?

All the sites are using the Fauna Theme. All except one, which may have just changed its theme.

This is very interesting. Any idea why?

links for 2006-02-08

Most of today’s surfing focused on open source PHP-based forum. phpBB is one of the more popular forum around but I do not quite like the style of it.

Phorum may fit the bill since it has the threading layout which I prefer.

links for 2006-02-07

Today’s surfing and links focused on Singapore blogs.

Posting from del.icio.us to WordPress

Sometime one wonders if there really is a ghost in the network.

For the last few weeks I was wondering how to collect the “massive” amount of surfing I’m doing into this blog. del.icio.us is a natural choice, but there is no easy way to extract the bookmark into a daily post.

I had noticed there is a “daily blog posting” feature under settings in del.icio.us. Looks promising. But …

… if you click on it, you will see a rather ugly table with no explanation whatsoever, so go figure out. I didn’t bother.

Then today, I came across this post. Old news you said? I wasn’t very motivated to use del.icio.us before. But now I am.

What are the engineers at del.icio.us doing all these while? Letting such an important feature look so ugly and undocumented.

• job_name : any title you want
• out_name : your WordPress Username
• out_pass : your WordPress Password
• out_url : http://[username].wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php
• out_time : the time to post. (in GMT) 0-23
• out_blog_id : leave blank
• out_cat_id : 2200 (doesn’t work,  probably leave blank)

SiteAdvisor – watching what you clicked on

This blog is now at 59ideas.com. 

First we scanned for virus. Then we scanned for spyware. Now we scan for rogue sites.

SiteAdvisor “helps protect you from all kinds of Web-based security threats including spyware, adware, spam, viruses, browser-based attacks, phishing, online fraud and identity theft.“

It is about time someone come out with this idea. The web is becoming very unsafe with many traps waiting for the unwary.
Just the other day, a friend of mine went to ‘morzilla’ instead of mozilla.com.

Misspelled domains or typosquatting is a multi-million dollars business. It is tough arguing for or against it.
But scam like this is much worst.

It frustrating to see online scammers getting away with their act and we can do nothing about it. I had thought of creating an online registrar of scam sites but SiteAdvisor took it a step further.

As a plugin for browsers, it attempts to detect and inform unwary users of rogue sites, protecting them from risks.
It is interesting though to see how SiteAdvisor intend to make money and who are investing them.

Just like adwares/spywares, think about how much money scammers are making. Would they stop without a fight? The ensuring battle provides enough fuel to keep SiteAdvisor going.

Think about how much the anti-virus market is worth. Protecting user is a lucrative business. A successful SiteAdvisor might be target for acquisition by one of the big AV boys.

As for my less techie friends, I will suggest they install this.

What is Edge Competencies?

This blog is now at 59ideas.com. 

Ran across this word today – Edge Competencies.

What does it mean? I set out to learn more.

In a standard manner I

• lookup google and yahoo
• check if wikipedia has an entry

The term edge competencies is coined as a direct contrast to core competencies.

Here’s my understanding of it.

Core competencies is a oft-heard concept in management consulting and business strategy. In a nutshell, it refers to a set of things that a company do best compared to its competitors. This “set of things” is not easily copied by competitors. The result of which is that the company will gain competitive advantage and differentiate from competitors.

Edge here refers to the edge of the company – which is where the company meets the outside, the customers, the suppliers, the world at large.

The argument of edge competencies is that competitive advantage has shifted from the core of the company (within) to the edge of the company (outside).

So instead of figuring out how to leverage the internal resources, think of the external, the knowledge that is encapsulated in the masses.

Ring a bell? Do you see edge competencies is the essense of Web 2.0? Leveraging on the capabilities outside of the company, mix and mash, tapping into the wisdom of the users.

Readings:

• Edge competencies
• The Rise of the Edge: Why Edge Competencies Matter

Omnidrive

This blog is now at 59ideas.com. 

Omidrive is yet another idea in private beta. An online storage, it got good review at TechCrunch so I waiting to see it happen.

Last few days, I was checking out online storage because I’m now using 3 portable harddisks for storage and backup. The other day, the new guy in the office formatted athe harddrive on his desktop which housed some backup. I left it there because I ran out of space on all my storage.

Only one thing to add about Omnidrive. It is a surprise to see a site planning to go international use a country level domain like omnidrive.com.au. If they ever take off, they might need to buy over the .com domain or change name.

Update: Omnidrive did get a .com. Wonder how much they paid for it?

More ideas in the blogging

More ideas in the blogging at TechCrunch. Michael Arrington blogged about 10 ideas he’d like to see.

Of the list, I like many are thristing for 3. Potable reputation. That is seriously a killer.

On 5. Facebook in some country, surely someone in China must have done it already. Let me dig for it. If not who like to throw me some money to get it done? (seriously!)

Tell you a secret … I do have a secret plan in my diary for 7. Open Source Yellow Pages. For China that is. There is no dates, so please don’t hold your breath.

I like 8. Podcast Transcriptions. Might be a possible one for me if the English standard of the Chinese are a little higher here. Maybe someone in India can have a shot.

This is too much I have too many ideas competiting for attention! I need to focus!

Update: Right within the comments of the article, are 2 answers to my post

1. Someone is offering Podcast transcriptions in India
2. There is a Facebook clone in China.