DygiScape

How would you like to get eleven years in prison for consensual sexual acts as a minor? Well, that’s what happened to Genarlow Wilson, from the state of Georgia. The whole story and legal documents are available at WilsonAppeal.com. It’s a bunch of BS if you ask me since GA enacted the “Romeo & Juliet Act” which is designed to prevent situations like this from happening.
As Calacanis suggests; if bloggers would share this story and spread it around - it might make a difference. Heck, just a link even.

Blogging, Tech News freedom, Government, internet

YouTube recently announced they will be offering monetary compensation for video content producers. Jason Calacanis did the same thing with Netscape, and well it’s a decent idea, but did it take off? According to Calacanis, compensating users for their community efforts helps the community grow. Further, will this benefit YouTube and their video community?

Jason Calacanis took Netscape.com under his wing and completely restructured the static news homepage to a revived social news/bookmarking web site. It was good, and then he had a rather unique idea of paying 1% of users to generate content for Netscape. It was awesome until you read that he put a bounty out for the top users of Digg, Reddit, and Newsvine. This shocked the social news community that money would be shaping the news and were insulted by the offer. Jason paid users who have migrated from Digg and other social news services to post for him.

Looking back at when I initially posted about Netscape, June 17th 2006. Here is an Alexa traffic chart showing the traffic pattern:

The solid red bar is the launch of Netscape Beta. The arrow is around when the announcement of paying for content was made. As you can see, it may have resulted in a small spike of traffic, but has since declined. Why did this ingenius idea fail? It could be the tone of Calacanis when he introduced his idea to the online community. It could be that users didn’t want to see paid users versus themselves as regular users. It was probably a combination of factors. I strongly believe that Calacanis wanted to try to save Netscape by using all means possible (using cash!) and unfortunantely, it didn’t work.
YouTube on the other hand, has a trend of constant growth. It’s amazing and I don’t know if monetary compensation would really show growth.

I wonder how offering cash for content will pan out for YouTube. First off they announced it not via the blogs or social media; which may have helped with PR. Second, their announcement isn’t asking video publishers on Google Video, iFILM or Metacafe to flock on over to YouTube. I believe this was a good move to not hold money over their competitors heads. The ones that will prove benefitial will learn of it and will provide videos to YouTube.
What do you think about YouTube compensating their video content producers? Share your opinion in the comments!

[tags]YouTube, Netscape, Money, Revenue Sharing, Internet, Web 2.0, Internet Communities, Jason Calacanis, Ideas, Trend, Video Sharing[/tags]

Geeky, Tech News OpEd, social media, Success, web 2.0

Google helps webmasters everyday with their blog, I find their transparency for such a large search engine fascinating. One of their entries consists of tips on enabling webmasters to have greater control of their website listings with robots.txt. This may be SEO 101, however, it exemplifies the efforts that Google is focused on - quality results for web surfers.

The key is a simple file called robots.txt that has been an industry standard for many years. It lets a site owner control how search engines access their web site. With robots.txt you can control access at multiple levels — the entire site, through individual directories, pages of a specific type, down to individual pages. Effective use of robots.txt gives you a lot of control over how your site is searched, but its not always obvious how to achieve exactly what you want. This is the first of a series of posts on how to use robots.txt to control access to your content.

Geeky Google, internet, seo, web

I just saw this on my weather feed…

Personal northern va, virginia

I will try to work on doing a “Weekly Roundup” on my status with things.

Work: Having a good time taking on tasks. Eager to seek out new challenges. I’ve become more accustomed to the environment. It’s not as difficult as it was before and now I have set myself a goal: Try something new on a daily basis. This will keep me keen when and stable when trying things I am unfamiliar with. I almost want to pick up the book titled, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” You don’t become successful from reading a book or emulating one’s success. You become successful from innovation, creativity, and initiative. I might skim over it next time I am in Borders, but I am becoming successful at what I do because I am doing the best I can, and doing it by those principles. Overall, things are going smoothly while my colleagues are remote from the office.

Friends/Family: My sister had attempted to have a simple but clear conference call with my mother and I. It’s objective was to close the loop on my own current events. What it became was the validation that my mom couldn’t handle the situation involving my car being burgled (I still doubt thats a word BTW) and habitually seems to contest my independence. Anyhow, things are fine now with that.

Since my car’s burglary occurred, I unintentionally dropped an additional $500 on fixing the door lock. That $500 screwed me up with everything since I owed that to my former roommate (and friend) Chris. Now that money is between us, it seemed to have caused irreparable damage to our friendship. I know I will get him the money, and I know the hardships he is dealing with too.

Along with that, Sarah got her job at the Disney store and I’m happy she works there. However for that good fortune, there is a price. The price of losing values and freedom of expression. What I mean exactly, is dress code policy and overall the general appearance of folks in Virginia. A strong majority of people around here are “white collar,” driving their Audi’s and BMW’s everywhere with suits and ties collared around their necks. Not one bit of individuality is expressed. It’s almost sickening from a perspective of a native Tucsonan. I hope professional employers would attempt to embrace differences and individuality rather than pass judgment and cast negative overtones when one has a piercing or a tattoo. At my work, it’s atleast flexible and none of that personal dynamics is played out - so there is hope!

Anyhow I plan on working on things (financially) so they will change soon!

Personal, Work

I am one for being progressive, but this story concerns me. Experts suggest that when young teenagers show more skin that it is not a cause for alarm for parents. WTF?

But some psychologists and child-development specialists believe nothing about the teenage drama has really changed. While young women may express their sexuality more overtly than they have in the past, for the most part, their behavior isn’t cause for alarm. It’s a necessary step in growing up.
(ABC News)

[tags]news, teens, society, psychology[/tags]

Geeky OpEd, Personal

I find this interesting, as it exemplifies the poor choices police officers sometimes take. In this example … well, I’ll let the syndicate speak for itself.

Officer Nicholas Evans, who lugged the woman’s cart and its load to the Manatee County Jail after arresting her last week, has won praise for his apparent compassion. He was behind the wheel of his patrol car as he pulled the cart from east Bradenton to the jail north on U.S. 41.
(HeraldTribune)

Funny, Politics internet, News, police

Check this out, Warning Sign Generator. Make your own warning, caution, safety, danger signs today.

[tags]Warning Sign, Signs, LOL, Internet, Generators, Pictures, Images[/tags]

Funny, Geeky internet, memes, web

Using highly scientific methodology as well as algorithms snuck out of NASA and Google, we analyzed cities across the US to find the top 10 places to get your geek on.

Source: Wired

Washington DC is on the top ten list. Thats only about 38 minutes away, so I believe the tech savvy bleeds over into Northern VA (NoVA).

[tags]Technical, News, Society, Geek, Washington DC, NoVA, Virginia, Sterling VA, Cities[/tags]

Geeky, Tech News Personal, technology, virginia, Work

The popular blogging bug going around, “Five things you don’t know about me” is going around, and it got me. Shawn Christopher tagged me. Here goes…

1. I rode my bike into a large patch of cactus when I was 8 years old. That was a very painful memory!
2. I am from an Italian heritage, but don’t like a lot of cheese. (My family gives me crap all the time on this…
3. I have a scar on my stomach.
4. I met my girlfriend at a gas station.
5. Moving to Virginia is the first place I ever moved to outside of Tucson.

Along with this meme is to tag five others.

Sarah, Catch You Next Tuesday, Erick, Scott Hough, TimALoftis

[tags]Blogging, Internet, Trends, Meme, Tagging, Information, Personal[/tags]

Funny, Geeky, Personal internet, memes, Personal, web