Very Good Words From a Very Good Vlogger

Blogroll, Links, Personal No Comments »

One of the vloggers that I follow, PhillyD, made a very good post to his blog on motivation today. In it, he says “Keep in mind, just because you want something, everything will not fall into place. If you want something don’t walk, RUN!”

That got me thinking on the essence of our successes and failures in business and in life. There are different types of personalities when it comes to motivation:

1. There are those who believe in chance; that ultimately we are ruled by luck and coincidence. Serendipity, if you will.
2. There are those who’s motivations are ruled by faith in God.
3. There are those that believe that success is a product of action (a point which Phil makes very well in his post)

Now, me, I’m a mixture of 2 & 3 for good reasons.

But my wife pointed out an interesting statistic she discovered online. She’s passing into her 14th year in business, a feat that many businesses can only dream of. But the interesting fact that she pointed out to me was that of all the small businesses that are started every year, only a small 4% make it to 10 years!

That’s an incredible fact!

It’s in these insurmountable odds that many of us go into business and seek to be successful. Motivation and hard work are the keys to being in the minority. Does that mean that all businesses that fail do so because of their lack of motivation or because they don’t work hard enough. No. There are always circumstances that can cause difficulties for businesses, but it is the willingness to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, that drive to get up every morning and make your day the way that you want it. It is refusing to succumb to normalcy and strive for something greater that makes successful businesses.

You have to be in it to win, even when it doesn’t look hopeful. I work with real estate agents every day and it is an inspiring thing to see these agents become nimble and seek new creative ways to market listings and fight to become successful. It’s a difficult market right now for them with optimism waning and external market forces trying to work against them (although locally, we have one of the best markets to be in). They are striving to be different and working hard at it. That’s the motivation that makes you successful.

So I’ve just got to ask: what’s your motivation? Where do you see yourself 10 years from now? And more importantly, what are you going to do to make it to 10 years and beyond?

Visualizing your goals and then PUTTING THEM DOWN ON PAPER puts you way ahead of the rest of the crowd because you begin to know and understand what it will take to get you where you want.

If you want something… really want it… do as Phil says, “don’t walk, RUN!”

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Damon Wayans Has a Startup

Development, Links, Tech Startups, Websites No Comments »

You know, it’s not every day that a celebrity comes out and creates a new online service. But today, Damon Wayans bucked that tradition by announcing his new startup, WayOutTV.

Now, I am just waiting to get access to the beta and I’ll post on it when I do.

Brian Solis over at bub.licio.us had this to say, “The way I described it … was, it’s like Will Ferril’s Funny or Die, but funny.” Here’s the link to his original post on the service.

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A Friend in Need

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We need your help for a friend in need. Please click here for more information. I’ve also placed a link in the sidebar!

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Offline Access to Google Docs

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I just read a great post over at Google Blogoscoped on the currently experimental “Offline” feature that is currently being tested with Google Docs. I was hoping this type of functionality and in a previous post mentioned that through Google Gears, they were setting the stage for this.

The downside, though, is that I don’t have access to the page that where he found the option to go offline. He mentioned that it’s not an option that will be available soon. If anyone does notice the feature, let me know.

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Facebook Makes Changes To Their Development Platform

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I was reading through my feed reader tonight and ran across a particularly interesting story from Nick O’Neill. He reported yesterday that Facebook made some changes to their application developement platform that enabled the use of your created applications on your own website. The Javascript client library update they released enables not only the existence of Facebook applications outside of the Facebook website, but it also enables the use of cookies to access user data.

This just on the heels of Facebook joining the DataPortability Work Group, a group that’s sole focus is to increase the “sharability” of data between services and organizations across the web. (It’s also a group that boasts some very big names like Microsoft, Myspace, LinkedIn and more).

I’ll be watching this one pretty closely.

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What Do You Want To Learn About

Personal No Comments »

So far, I’ve received several positive comments on the post I made several days ago on RSS feeds. So much so, that I have considered making more posts like it.

But I need your help!

I want to know what you’d like to read about. Is it blogs, web technologies, website startup news? Or do you have something in particular that you want to read about.

I want to know, because it’s important to you!

Post a comment or send me an email through my contact form.

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Checked Out Pownce Tonight

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Among many things that I do, I also try to make time to test out some of the new online services that are made available. Pownce is a service that has been in beta for some time and just recently opened their doors to the public. It’s an online service that allows you to send stuff to your friends online.

What can you send, you might ask?

Just about anything. Music, links, photos, messages, events to your friends and even to the general public.

It’s a software that seemlessly integrates into your existing social networks (it offers support for Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and Flickr, and also allows you to search your email contacts to find others who might already be utilizing Pownce).

The application of this is great if you’re wanting to send various things to a lot of people but don’t have the time to keep up with the different email addresses of your friends.

For those that have been following the service, it was rumored that it was headed for its end shortly before their public launch. You can read more about it on Techcrunch here and here

Also, note that Leah Culver is the lead developer on the project who is also in my blogroll.

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What Websites Do I Follow?

Blogroll, Links No Comments »

So, following up on my RSS post, I wanted to give you guys access to the blogs and websites that I follow on a regular basis. So I decided the other day that I would make my blogroll available in the sidebar for everyone to see. Most of these websites offer daily updates on new technology and monitor the tech world (with the exception of my wife… plug).

Oh, and if anyone comes across a website that you think I should check out and possibly add to that list, add a comment and I’ll check it out.

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RSS Feeds and Readers… A Primer For Bloggers and Blog Readers Alike

Blogging, Development, Personal, Websites 1 Comment »

For many of my clients, this post may seem a little too simple. More and more, I get questions on the basics of RSS feeds and how they are used to benefit blogs and news sites and the general blog reader. My goal with this post is to help answer some of those questions and to help proliferate the use of RSS feeds.

RSS Feeds. I love them. They organize my popular websites, improve my productivity, give me only the information that I want to see and help spread the content from my blog further.

So, what is RSS? In short, it’s called Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary or Atom depending on who you get your information from). RSS is a way to syndicate content from your website, blog, etc and make it available for others to access using an RSS reader. Most blogs (in fact almost all, including mine) come with an RSS feed with it that helps to syndicate the content you make on your blog for readers.

For example, say I went to a website like Techcrunch.com and I don’t want to have to go back to their website everytime I want to view their content, so I access their RSS feed and give that web address to my RSS feed reader (in my case, I use Google Reader). This funnels all of my news sources and blogs into one source so that I can get all of my updates quickly without having to visit every single website.

In addition, RSS feeds help me to distribute my content faster and better. You see, when I make a post to my blog, it automatically updates the RSS feed that my readers subscribe to, allowing them almostinstantaneous access to the content I posted.

A common misconception with RSS Feeds

There is also a little bit of confusion with RSS feeds, particularly when readers first look at a feed, often times all they see is code. For example, look at the sample below from my own RSS feed:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<?xml-stylesheet href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~d/styles/rss2full.xsl” type=”text/xsl” media=”screen”?><?xml-stylesheet href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~d/styles/itemcontent.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen”?><!– generator=”wordpress/2.1″ –><rss xmlns:content=“http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/” xmlns:wfw=“http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/” xmlns:dc=“http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/” version=“2.0″>

<channel>
	<title>InspireMedia Blog</title>
	<link>http://inspiremediablog.com</link>
	<description>The mind of John Wooton</description>
	<pubDate>Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:13:21 +0000</pubDate>
	<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.1</generator>
	<language>en</language>
			<atom10:link xmlns:atom10=“http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom” rel=“self” href=“http://feeds.feedburner.com/InspiremediaBlog” type=“application/rss+xml” /><item>
		<title>Tetris Revamped</title>
		<link>http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/</link>
		<comments>http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:34:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>John</dc:creator>

		<category><![CDATA[Links]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Websites]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink=“false”>http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This has to take some time and dedication, but is very cool…

The code you see is not any error, the code is the RSS feed. You see, RSS is written in a XML programming language. XML is meant to be read and interpreted by a browser or RSS Feed Reader. What you should do is ignore the code and copy and paste the web address of the feed in the browser into a RSS feed reader like Google Reader. The feed reader will read the XML code and spit out a readable format that you can read.

Take a look at the screen shot of my blog from Google Reader:

Google Reader

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Tetris Revamped

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This has to take some time and dedication, but is very cool…

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