Apparently I’m a master of the Squidoo lensmasters. Look out!

As of today, out of 25,000+ lenses…

• I’m ranked 17th on the top 100 lensmasters list.
• My lens for Church Marketing Sucks is ranked 20th on the top 100 by lensrank list.
• The same lens is ranked 14th on the top 100 most profitable list. (Which is funny considering how much money I’ve made. Let’s just say this isn’t a get rich quick idea.)
• It’s ranked 37th on the top 100 most blogged list.
• It’s ranked 82nd on the top 100 most visted list.
• It’s ranked 2nd on the top 100 by topic (people & society) list.

Now if only I could get some of my other cool lenses like How to Get Into Dog Modeling, The Tick and Messiah’s Missions Dinner 2006 to be as popular as that one.

Coincidentally, after I explored the world of online video, I discoverd that my west coast friend Josh had already given it a try, uploading his LED Throwies video to YouTube. I still think Vimeo is the nicer of the video sites and I’m not alone. As an update, Google finally verified my video but they urge me to “stay tuned–it will be live shortly.” Yawn.

So today I uploaded another video, this one an Ode to Facial Hair. It’s not really fair to call it a video either, it’s more a slideshow. I was basically experimenting with iMovie’s still picture feature and the Ken Burns effect a while back.

Ode to Facial Hair on Vimeo

I’m finally joining the online video craze. Today I finished editing a video of Speak and Mazie after a late spring snowstorm. I put the video together using iMovie and included music from the Supertones. But the big question was where to put it. There’s a ton of video sites out there, so I decided to try a bunch of them.

Vimeo: Snow Dogs
This one has to be my favorite. The site just looks nice. They paid attention to the details. Plus, no wait after uploading. Every other site had some kind of pokey verification process. My only complaint is that they limit you to 30 MB per week of uploads. This video was 26 MB and less than 3 minutes (formatted to the high res version they suggested), so I can’t imagine how you upload anything larger.

You Tube: Snow Dogs
This is the popular one that everybody’s talking about. I’m not sure why. The site is ugly and not as nice to use. They definitely encourage sharing videos, but it’s just not pretty. They had a short verification process and then the video was live. No fussing about how much you can upload either. That might be why it’s one of the biggest sites out there.

Google
Google Video was supposed to be a big deal. Well, I’m still waiting for them to verify my video. Who knows how long that will take. That’s a pretty big barrier. On the plus side, Google lets you sell your video. Not sure who would buy it with sites like You Tube giving everything away, but it’s a cool feature.

MySpace
Bleh. I uploaded my video twice and both times it had problems and wouldn’t work. Looks like they’re just trying to cram in too many features and not doing it right.

Apparently I’m not the only one getting buried alive in spam. I’ve shut off the comments, though yesterday it was trackbacks that killed the site. I’m not even sure what to do anymore. I’m too busy to put much time into it, and most solutions require more tech know-how than I’ve got.

The only decent solution I can come up with to restore comments would be to use the typekey authentication. It would mean you’d have to sign in to comment. It sucks, but it is good at stopping spam. My only question is if that will solve the problem. I shut off comments and that didn’t stop the attacks–I actually had to change permissions on the comment script. If anyone has any wisdom they can e-mail me. How old school.

If you’ve had problems accessing my site lately you can thank spammers. My site has been getting hit with attack after attack after attack, and every time it hangs the server and you get nothing but a 500 server error. I’ve tried a couple things but it hasn’t seemed to make a difference, and I’m no techie genius.

So for now I’ve just shut off comments and trackbacks. Hopefully it’s only temporary.

37signals is a web 2.0 company behind several successful web applications. They’re also professional, successful, published authors. About a month ago they self-published a PDF-only book about their software philosophy, Getting Real, which they sold only online for $19 (you could also buy a 10-copy license for $50). In 30 days they’ve sold 5,750 copies and raked in $120,000.

If this is your test case for online publishing, it’s the best possible scenario. Getting Real is very well written, edited and layed out. It’s no amateur job. 37signals also has a built in marketing base of eager buyers. So publishers don’t need to be shaking in their boots just yet. But they better be paying attention.

So Flickr–the photo-sharing web 2.0 darling that was snatched up by Yahoo! and made its mark as a site driven by a 2.5 million member community–is telling its members how to use its service:

Flickr is a website for you to use to share your photos. If the images you’re uploading either (i) aren’t photos, or (ii) are images you’ve ‘borrowed’, stock photos, celebrity photos, stuff that appears to be copyrighted by someone else, screenshots, porn or nudity/partial nudity, it’s safe to assume that we will probably have marked you as NIPSA (Not In Public Site Areas). (from their FAQ)

So if you upload images that aren’t photos, like screenshots, art, diagrams or examples of design you’re hoping to get feedback on, your account could be marked NIPSA, and then your photos won’t show up in public areas of the site, meaning you’ll be invisible in Flickr Groups (unless the user is signed in), Flickr badges and RSS feeds. That becomes a big deal when you’re trying to promote said group and people can only see 15 photos instead of 60.

If you’re a company powered by the people, and people have found a neat way to use your system that doesn’t detract from other uses, what’s the problem? Why discourage it? I’m not the only one who has asked this question. And so far Flickr seems to continually come back with the answer that Flickr is a photo-sharing site. So bugger off. Granted they’re not banning not-photo uses of Flickr, but they’re not making it easy to use Flickr for non-photo images.

Today I became a lensmaster.

No, that’s Lens Crafters. And no, it’s not some D&D thing. It’s another funky Web 2.0 deal (I hate the ‘Web 2.0’ lingo, but it’s practical. What are you gonna do?) like Flickr or MySpace. It’s part of Squidoo, a site that lets you create lenses for things you’re an expert on. Essentially, you create single web page that acts as a lens on a specific topic. You fill the page with info and links about said topic to educate the random web surfer.

Where it gets interesting is that each lens can make some cash. Each lens has Google ads on the side and you can link to Amazon or other retailers and earn referral fees. The cash generated goes to Squidoo, charity and lensmasters like me (and potentially you).

So you essentially get paid to be an expert. Not a bad deal.

Continue reading My Very Own Squidoo Lenses →

So I’ve signed up with the current flavor of the month, MySpace. I’ve got my own little MySpace page with my favorite movies and music and a running tally of how many friends I have (yesterday it told me I had 0 friends, but today I’m up to 12–score!).

I’m trying to see what all the fuss is about, and so far I don’t really get it. I think I’m just old.

Continue reading MySpace: The Internet Part 2 →

I don’t ordinarily think of myself as a productive person. I like the idea of it, but productivity, organization and efficiency are all things I strive for but rarely attain. At least that’s how I feel about it–others would probably describe me as productive, organized and efficient. Those people also don’t see the piles I usually have surrounding my work space.

I especially like it when I find a new way to make my work more efficient, like I found today. It starts with Lifehacker, a blog dedicated to productivity, mainly through technology. I stumbled on the site more than a month ago and it wasn’t until today when I actually had time to sift through the 200+ plus Lifehacker RSS entries and see what the site was really about. It led me to a few new upgrades:

Continue reading Productivity on a Friday Morning →