My PhpBB extension for image quizzes is coming along quite nicely. 18 hours, 657 lines of PHP and 250 lines of HTML later users are now able to create quizzes and take quizzes. Most headaches I had were session handling, I couldn't figure out how to do it properly with the session handling build into PHP, so I resorted to just passing stuff around in very non-SEOed (lately the word SEO makes me cringe) obnoxiously long URLs.
If I had tried to do everything perfectly then I would have never finished, I think it's important to get a first version out before polishing it too much, see what the users do and then improve on it. Obviously it should mostly work, and it does. Currently it's just in Finnish and I enabled it just on one forum to have a limited test. I hope that people will like it and that it would cause people to spend more time on the forum (which I'm not sure Google Analytics knows how to measure), maybe even get some new visitors that come just to take the quizzes.
One benefit I didn't anticipate from integrating with PhpBB was that it's possible to know who the people taking the quizzes are, so I can construct a scoreboard for them. People love scoreboards, it makes them want to improve their score over and over in order to not look bad. My plan now is to see the effect the quizzes have, polish the code a bit, then create a new PhpBB installation (actually all my installations are virtual, not actually separate instances of the software, using a mod I made) which is focused just on image quizzes and redirect my existing quizzes there.
I love the feeling of publishing stuff on the web, not knowing at all if it might be popular or not.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Monday, February 19, 2007
Microsites - extending PhpBB to support image quizzes
One of the features I imagined any fansite should have is a quiz of some kind to test your knowledge of the series in question. One popular site I have is a Naruto quiz, which I made one evening just for fun. Adding images to that quiz required me to edit things in the database manually and copy images into the image directory manually as well. I want to improve that by creating a PhpBB extension that lets forum users create their own quizzes by uploading images. I have several motivations for making this.
First of course that it is one of the planned features for the microsites I've been talking about for the past few posts. Secondly it allows me to easily create new quiz sites similar to the Naruto Quiz, which seem to easily become popular. Thirdly I can use the feature right away on the forums which I host and get people to make their own quizzes - I'm sure they'll be more creative than me and create kick-ass quizzes.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Microsites - Kickstarting a forum
In previous posts I have been describing my idea of using my online Japanese book & record store as a platform for kickstarting microsites around the bands / series sold, the theory being that if there is a popular microsite hosted under the site's domain and with a link back to the products being sold, this will attract customers and result in more valuable conversions than if the microsite was just a separate entity with AdSense ads or Amazon Affiliates ads on it (one purchase from my own store is A LOT more valuable to me than a purchase through Amazon would be).
I'm already very busy with my studies and running the web store as it is, so as the first easy part of the microsite experiment I decided to attempt to launch a forum around the band Antic Cafe. One thing I have learned is that people go crazy over prizes, so I decided to offer a prize to the most active person on the forum. In addition I dedicated some valuable screen estate on the store's main page to promote the forum. Here's what happened:
(162 absolute unique visitors)
The forum was promoted on the web store from the beginning. I marked the beginning and ending dates of the competition in black. It is clear that the competition had a major effect on amount of visits. The 11 members of the forum have written 147 posts up to now, which while modest seems like a good start for such a niche (Finnish fans of the Japanese band Antic Cafe) forum. I neglected to measure how many conversions this forum has created, but I'm not sure if that's even possible. Suppose a web store visitors goes to the forum, then comes back and buys an Antic Cafe record, is that a conversion? There seems to be no way to know if they got excited about the band on the forum or would have bought that record anyway.
I would like to launch the main microsite as well (this forum would be just one part), but I don't want to do that with completely pathetic production values. Also the forum might well be 80% of the microsite's value in the end, so why even bother with the rest?
Features I imagine that each microsite could have:
One option to consider might be to extend PhpBB to support these things. Perhaps there are already plugins for these? That would at least make it very easy to have just a single login that could be used for all of the microsites (since OpenID isn't here yet).
I'm already very busy with my studies and running the web store as it is, so as the first easy part of the microsite experiment I decided to attempt to launch a forum around the band Antic Cafe. One thing I have learned is that people go crazy over prizes, so I decided to offer a prize to the most active person on the forum. In addition I dedicated some valuable screen estate on the store's main page to promote the forum. Here's what happened:
(162 absolute unique visitors)The forum was promoted on the web store from the beginning. I marked the beginning and ending dates of the competition in black. It is clear that the competition had a major effect on amount of visits. The 11 members of the forum have written 147 posts up to now, which while modest seems like a good start for such a niche (Finnish fans of the Japanese band Antic Cafe) forum. I neglected to measure how many conversions this forum has created, but I'm not sure if that's even possible. Suppose a web store visitors goes to the forum, then comes back and buys an Antic Cafe record, is that a conversion? There seems to be no way to know if they got excited about the band on the forum or would have bought that record anyway.
I would like to launch the main microsite as well (this forum would be just one part), but I don't want to do that with completely pathetic production values. Also the forum might well be 80% of the microsite's value in the end, so why even bother with the rest?
Features I imagine that each microsite could have:
- forum
- polls (but forum already has polls...)
- quizzes (can you recognize these members/characters from the band/series X?)
- personality tests (which X are you?)
- embedded videos (">veoh! youtube is so last year)
- fanart submission, voting (maybe just a thread in the forum from which these are pulled?)
- info pages for the series (through a wiki or pulled from forum threads)
- news (perhaps an embedded RSS reader)
- gallery (some clever system to get legal-size thumbnails linking to images elsewhere)
- fan fiction
- links (perhaps by automatically monitoring server logs for incoming links and favoring those)
- exclusive band member / manga author interviews
- exclusive content from the band / author
One option to consider might be to extend PhpBB to support these things. Perhaps there are already plugins for these? That would at least make it very easy to have just a single login that could be used for all of the microsites (since OpenID isn't here yet).
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Did some site reorganizing
I run a small village of microsites on different topics, it's sort of an experiment to see what sorts of traffic I can get. I had the domain jackvalenti.com, which I bought on a whim and set up an unofficial page about Jack Valenti there along with AdSense ads. Well, after spending nearly $100 on the site I am averaging ZERO visitors per day, so to avoid some site fees I am moving the content to a subdomain instead. From now on Jack Valenti page will be here instead.
Another more successful, but still an infuriatingly unsuccessful small site I had was a sweepstakes site. It runs on pligg and used to be in English. Every day I would check the stats on Google Analytics and every day I was getting around 200 visits, but nearly 100% from Finland through one nice inbound link I managed to get, so I will yield under the pressure and turn the site into a Finnish site to serve those visitors better. From now on it will be here: kilpailut.
One thing I have learned while trying to promote my sites is that people respond well to prizes. I had a forum that I was spending some promotion efforts on, but hardly nobody registered to that forum. Then I offered a prize for registering and posting on the forum and suddenly people (in the target group, not just prize scavengers!) started registering and posting. Prizes are expensive though, difficult to say if it makes sense to give them out. On a forum it is very important to reach a critical mass of posts at first, so it may help at that and possibly pay off in the long run.
Another more successful, but still an infuriatingly unsuccessful small site I had was a sweepstakes site. It runs on pligg and used to be in English. Every day I would check the stats on Google Analytics and every day I was getting around 200 visits, but nearly 100% from Finland through one nice inbound link I managed to get, so I will yield under the pressure and turn the site into a Finnish site to serve those visitors better. From now on it will be here: kilpailut.
One thing I have learned while trying to promote my sites is that people respond well to prizes. I had a forum that I was spending some promotion efforts on, but hardly nobody registered to that forum. Then I offered a prize for registering and posting on the forum and suddenly people (in the target group, not just prize scavengers!) started registering and posting. Prizes are expensive though, difficult to say if it makes sense to give them out. On a forum it is very important to reach a critical mass of posts at first, so it may help at that and possibly pay off in the long run.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Microsites feature - forums
In my previous post I wrote about my intention to leverage the traffic I get to my online store to start microsites around product groups, such as different bands. I took my first step into that direction by tweaking PhpBB and doing some mod_rewrite trickery to allow me to easily create several forums which appear distinct, but are actually all running on the same software and database. This allows me to maintain only one installation of PhpBB and create a new forum in about 20 minutes instead of a complete new installation.
Obviously a microsite is going to need more than just a forum, but I imagine that for a successful microsite the forum would be the most important part of it. To test out the system I created two forums around two bands whose products I sell, Maruru forum and Antic-cafe forum.
The reason for starting several small forums instead of one big one is to create a sense of belonging / identity for those using them. People seem to feel stronger attach ment to smaller circles. For example people will feel a connection to those attending the same school as them, at a lesser level to those living in the same city as them, even lesser to those from the same country. I want to find the optimal "circle size" to get people to feel that attachment, while not limiting fruitful conversations that could have happened if those circles were combined.
For example I could have created a "japanese music" forum instead of having "maruru" and "antic-cafe" as separate forums. Perhaps I should have, not sure, still experimenting. Certainly someone who is an enthusiastic fan of Antic Cafe would feel less at home at a generic forum for all Japanese music. Still there clearly has to be some minimum size at which an active forum is still possible, if there wasn't I could create a forum for people from Vatican who like Michael Jackson and are into cross-dressing. It would be a small group, but man would they be into it.
Obviously a microsite is going to need more than just a forum, but I imagine that for a successful microsite the forum would be the most important part of it. To test out the system I created two forums around two bands whose products I sell, Maruru forum and Antic-cafe forum.
Deciding scope
The reason for starting several small forums instead of one big one is to create a sense of belonging / identity for those using them. People seem to feel stronger attach ment to smaller circles. For example people will feel a connection to those attending the same school as them, at a lesser level to those living in the same city as them, even lesser to those from the same country. I want to find the optimal "circle size" to get people to feel that attachment, while not limiting fruitful conversations that could have happened if those circles were combined.
For example I could have created a "japanese music" forum instead of having "maruru" and "antic-cafe" as separate forums. Perhaps I should have, not sure, still experimenting. Certainly someone who is an enthusiastic fan of Antic Cafe would feel less at home at a generic forum for all Japanese music. Still there clearly has to be some minimum size at which an active forum is still possible, if there wasn't I could create a forum for people from Vatican who like Michael Jackson and are into cross-dressing. It would be a small group, but man would they be into it.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Microsites
I run a webstore, which means that I get very targeted audiences to my website. They will often even specify their interest by doing searches, or by looking at certain items. Mostly they are only looking, not buying, which is fine of course. Lately I have been wondering whether these targeted visitors could not be used to launch "microsites" related to certain products or product groups.
Take for example a person who searches for "dir en grey", then looks at products from the band dir en grey. Clearly they are quote interested in this band. Perhaps I could tell them "hey have you checked this fanpage for the band?". This could be a very relevant thing to say, and when things are relevant they tend to not be irritating. The trick of course would be that these fansites would actually be sites that I have launched myself (perhaps clearly indicated by being a subdomain of my site, say dir-en-grey.bemmu.com). They would become destinations in themselves, possibly growing and sending back more traffic to the webstore than I originally sent to them, also being nice baits for Google to index.
The microsites could contain a standard feature set and customized skin. For example a forum for talking about dir en grey, but with a forum template showing the dir en grey members. Forums have the effect of getting people to come back to check if their posts have been answered. Another good one is quizzes, which tend to be viral since people like to post the results on their homepages or recommend the quizzes to their friends.
Of course this is nothing new, there are plenty of dir en grey fansites out there, but I would like to make the process of launching these microsites very organized. All the sites would actually share one codebase. There might be 100 different microsites for different bands or manga series for example, but only one forum software running, customized to display a different skin for different audiences, but only requiring one login to use any of those sites. Same for the quizzes or possibly other features. The skins might have been outsourced somewhere, quizzes could be created by the users.
This whole idea might be impossible in that a certain amount of manual labor is always required for the maintenance of those sites. Forums need moderators. Quizzes also need moderation, since if they can be freely created by users there can be inappropriate content. Still by being clever I imagine that I could organize the creation of such microsites to be more efficient than the normal work of creating a fansite (of course these would not really be fansites in the traditional sense, but feature-wise they would be the same).
Amazon and other big webstores might be missing a great opportunity when they are only pushing products at the visitors, where they could be pushing communities as well.
Take for example a person who searches for "dir en grey", then looks at products from the band dir en grey. Clearly they are quote interested in this band. Perhaps I could tell them "hey have you checked this fanpage for the band?". This could be a very relevant thing to say, and when things are relevant they tend to not be irritating. The trick of course would be that these fansites would actually be sites that I have launched myself (perhaps clearly indicated by being a subdomain of my site, say dir-en-grey.bemmu.com). They would become destinations in themselves, possibly growing and sending back more traffic to the webstore than I originally sent to them, also being nice baits for Google to index.
The microsites could contain a standard feature set and customized skin. For example a forum for talking about dir en grey, but with a forum template showing the dir en grey members. Forums have the effect of getting people to come back to check if their posts have been answered. Another good one is quizzes, which tend to be viral since people like to post the results on their homepages or recommend the quizzes to their friends.
Of course this is nothing new, there are plenty of dir en grey fansites out there, but I would like to make the process of launching these microsites very organized. All the sites would actually share one codebase. There might be 100 different microsites for different bands or manga series for example, but only one forum software running, customized to display a different skin for different audiences, but only requiring one login to use any of those sites. Same for the quizzes or possibly other features. The skins might have been outsourced somewhere, quizzes could be created by the users.
This whole idea might be impossible in that a certain amount of manual labor is always required for the maintenance of those sites. Forums need moderators. Quizzes also need moderation, since if they can be freely created by users there can be inappropriate content. Still by being clever I imagine that I could organize the creation of such microsites to be more efficient than the normal work of creating a fansite (of course these would not really be fansites in the traditional sense, but feature-wise they would be the same).
Amazon and other big webstores might be missing a great opportunity when they are only pushing products at the visitors, where they could be pushing communities as well.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
eBay API experiences
Lately I have been trying to learn how to use the eBay API to list items and learning exponential representation for complex numbers in Algebra. Using the eBay API is the harder one out of those. Just a minute ago I finally succeeded at listing my very first item by using the XML API, it was a bit more complex than I thought! My mental model for how the API would work was that I would pass my eBay user id and password, along with the item details wrapped in some XML.
Nope, there are several different kinds of keys involved. All in all I currently have NINE different pieces of authentication! I have a DevID, an AppID and a CertID. Then there is the eBayAuthToken and the REST API key (which I admittedly only used once for testing, it is not needed for the XML API). But wait, that's only five? Yes, but you see eBay has two servers -- production and sandbox. The sandbox is for testing, which is useful since listing things on the production server costs money, so you definitely don't want to end up listing ten thousand items by accident. The sandbox and production servers have completely different authentication keys, except the DevID appears to be the same (making it nine different keys total).
The eBay developer site doesn't make this sandbox and production server difference clear. When talking about authentication keys, they casually mention that oh yeah, there is the sandbox server too. But what they don't say (on the intro pages at least) is that you need completely different keys for those. So imagine my frustration at attempting to access the sandbox with my shiny new production keys. With all those different keys I was getting really hopeless and uninformed, mostly reading reddit instead of focusing on the problem.
Somehow after a lot of digging I managed to figure it out. A DevID identifies a developer. A developer may have multiple applications, with each application identified with its own AppID. CertID is a magical entity the purpose of which I don't understand, but things seem to work when I bundle the same CertID that came with the AppID. The eBayAuthToken must be generated on their web page, and generating that requires providing correct DevID, an AppID and a CertID for the server which you are trying to use (sandbox or production). In other words you cannot get an eBayAuthToken for the sandbox server by using the production DevID, an AppID and a CertID + vice versa. The REST key is needed only for... you knew it, making REST calls.
After I finally had my keys I started to read the API reference. I tried to pretend calmness, but actually I was a bit shocked of seeing all the possible method calls and the arguments they take. Huge list. Maybe I'm not enough in the XML camp, but in my mind things work like this: you get a template string of a working XML call, then you change the things which are different from what you want and send that string at the server, which then does something cool. It's pretty difficult to try to come up with something that works by just looking at an API reference if there are 20 different arguments that could go wrong! Luckily, the developer center has very nice examples of using the API, so I was able to get things working by copying and pasting their examples.
Another thing which seemed like a showstopper at first was that they require usage of SSL to access their server. That is an excellent thing of course for security, but complicates things a bit when you are just trying to get a minimal example to work. I was planning on using PHP, but felt a bit intimidated at the thought of figuring out how to get SSL working on it. Just to get acquainted with the API, I decided to stick with Perl as they had some nice Perl examples in the developer center, complete with instructions on how to install SSL support for Perl.
So I had my keys, I had an XML request constructed from the example and I had ActivePerl installed on my box, with LWP and SSL support, aaand... it worked!
Update: After 30 mins of reading some example code I managed to figure out how to make the same request using PHP, HTTPS with cURL! One thing I was worried about was how image uploading would work, but turns out that you can just specify an image URL and eBay's server will go and fetch it -- no need to figure out how to actually upload the data, what a time saver! Just a bit more effort and I'll have this code integrated with my web store.
Nope, there are several different kinds of keys involved. All in all I currently have NINE different pieces of authentication! I have a DevID, an AppID and a CertID. Then there is the eBayAuthToken and the REST API key (which I admittedly only used once for testing, it is not needed for the XML API). But wait, that's only five? Yes, but you see eBay has two servers -- production and sandbox. The sandbox is for testing, which is useful since listing things on the production server costs money, so you definitely don't want to end up listing ten thousand items by accident. The sandbox and production servers have completely different authentication keys, except the DevID appears to be the same (making it nine different keys total).
The eBay developer site doesn't make this sandbox and production server difference clear. When talking about authentication keys, they casually mention that oh yeah, there is the sandbox server too. But what they don't say (on the intro pages at least) is that you need completely different keys for those. So imagine my frustration at attempting to access the sandbox with my shiny new production keys. With all those different keys I was getting really hopeless and uninformed, mostly reading reddit instead of focusing on the problem.
Somehow after a lot of digging I managed to figure it out. A DevID identifies a developer. A developer may have multiple applications, with each application identified with its own AppID. CertID is a magical entity the purpose of which I don't understand, but things seem to work when I bundle the same CertID that came with the AppID. The eBayAuthToken must be generated on their web page, and generating that requires providing correct DevID, an AppID and a CertID for the server which you are trying to use (sandbox or production). In other words you cannot get an eBayAuthToken for the sandbox server by using the production DevID, an AppID and a CertID + vice versa. The REST key is needed only for... you knew it, making REST calls.
After I finally had my keys I started to read the API reference. I tried to pretend calmness, but actually I was a bit shocked of seeing all the possible method calls and the arguments they take. Huge list. Maybe I'm not enough in the XML camp, but in my mind things work like this: you get a template string of a working XML call, then you change the things which are different from what you want and send that string at the server, which then does something cool. It's pretty difficult to try to come up with something that works by just looking at an API reference if there are 20 different arguments that could go wrong! Luckily, the developer center has very nice examples of using the API, so I was able to get things working by copying and pasting their examples.
Another thing which seemed like a showstopper at first was that they require usage of SSL to access their server. That is an excellent thing of course for security, but complicates things a bit when you are just trying to get a minimal example to work. I was planning on using PHP, but felt a bit intimidated at the thought of figuring out how to get SSL working on it. Just to get acquainted with the API, I decided to stick with Perl as they had some nice Perl examples in the developer center, complete with instructions on how to install SSL support for Perl.
So I had my keys, I had an XML request constructed from the example and I had ActivePerl installed on my box, with LWP and SSL support, aaand... it worked!
Update: After 30 mins of reading some example code I managed to figure out how to make the same request using PHP, HTTPS with cURL! One thing I was worried about was how image uploading would work, but turns out that you can just specify an image URL and eBay's server will go and fetch it -- no need to figure out how to actually upload the data, what a time saver! Just a bit more effort and I'll have this code integrated with my web store.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Another day another launch
Check my new site out if you are looking for expired domain names. It's the best list available, period.
Internet Explorer quirks
I am hacking my new site to get it to work on IE. After trying for a while I am instead applying for a gun permit and looking for the home address of the Microsoft employee responsible for implementing PNG support for IE.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Half-Life map creation: carving (the next 3 hours)
This post has moved here: Half-Life map creation: carving (the next 3 hours)
Friday, November 17, 2006
Neverwinter Nights 2
Instead of writing tutorials on Half-Life, I decided to start writing tutorials on Neverwinter Nights 2 instead.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Google makes ads more difficult to recognize
I was searching for Yu-Gi-Oh card information and clicked on the first organic link I found, like I usually do.
The page I arrived to was an MFA (made for adsense) site. I thought gee, how is it possible that an MFA site got such a high pagerank that they could be the first result?
At first I thought there must be some new SEO trick out there, but then I noticed that what I had clicked on was in fact an advertisement. They used to be separated with a different color but now seem to have a white background like other search results. Aligned to the right there is a "sponsored link" disclaimer, but on a wide screen it is easy to miss.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Half-Life map creation: my first 3 hours
This post has moved here: Half-Life map creation: my first 3 hours
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Israeli CS player continues to play regardless of bombs
An Israeli Counter-Strike player is pushing the limits on CS addiction. He was seen playing on his usual server, even though the area he lives in might get bombed. When another player asked him what the situation over there was, he replied "I just heard a siren so perhaps I should seek a bomb shelter, but what the hell, my house walls should give me SOME cover". And he just kept on playing.
Via ircquotes.net.
Via ircquotes.net.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Kevin Rose says "haha totally" in response to comment
"that's fucken hilarious that kevin rose got his comment pwned by his own system"
There's a story on Digg about a Youtube vid where a weird nakedindian cowboy talks about what bad kids shouldn't do on YouTube (with a cigarette and a cowboy hat... yikes). Someone suggests that the video should be playing above the TOS at YouTube, to which Kevin Rose says "haha totally".. and GETS BURIED. -59 diggs and counting on the comment. We must save him, quick, go to the article and Digg him up! Otherwise who knows it will start raining frogs.
In other news, Paul Graham had breakfast. Again.
There's a story on Digg about a Youtube vid where a weird naked
In other news, Paul Graham had breakfast. Again.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Can you speak Japanese?
I met Kimmo yesterday and he thought I was prejudicous to think that that there wouldn't be any people with Japanese skills among anime/manga/jpop fans. Maybe I am wrong and there are actually tons of such people! The reason we had this conversation was because I was complaining how I am often wanting to have someone to help me with manga translation issues (not scanlation, real work) or adding products to the manga shop, but that people with the necessary skills don't exist. I would gladly be proven wrong, so if such a person is hiding out there somewhere then please contact me!
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Computers ARE part of the crazy utopia!
I spent two years studying Japanese at a university in Tokyo. Every day I spent around 5 hours with other students, doing reading comprehension and kanji exercises. We had spoken language classes as well. It was tough, exhausting but I think about the experience with warm feelings now that I have some distance to it.
A type of exercise I particularly enjoyed was having debates. I even attended an extra curricular debate club once, which was interesting because the debaters were all Japanese but they debated in English. They seemed so "in the zone" when doing the debating, forgetting about trying to speak perfect English but instead aggressively getting their point out. I decided not to join this club though as I felt I didn't need any more English exercise and because I'm not a club-attending personality.
Our in-class debate exercises had some great topics, nothing really controversial or anything, but interesting none the less. The university I was in is called ICU or "International Christian University", but some people liked to joke that it actually means "Isolated Crazy Utopia". It was surrounded by a small forest, which truly was crazy considering how tightly packed the area around it is. I'm seriously digressing here, but just look at the picture below. The green parts are the university and around it are very tightly packed houses.
A type of exercise I particularly enjoyed was having debates. I even attended an extra curricular debate club once, which was interesting because the debaters were all Japanese but they debated in English. They seemed so "in the zone" when doing the debating, forgetting about trying to speak perfect English but instead aggressively getting their point out. I decided not to join this club though as I felt I didn't need any more English exercise and because I'm not a club-attending personality.
Our in-class debate exercises had some great topics, nothing really controversial or anything, but interesting none the less. The university I was in is called ICU or "International Christian University", but some people liked to joke that it actually means "Isolated Crazy Utopia". It was surrounded by a small forest, which truly was crazy considering how tightly packed the area around it is. I'm seriously digressing here, but just look at the picture below. The green parts are the university and around it are very tightly packed houses.
Our debates were often about about kind of save-the-world utopistic stuff. As if we could actually save anything just by talking about it in class. Well I liked to take it seriously though, even if it was just language exercises it's that much more meaningful if you imagine that the debate is serious. One thing we debated about was what to do about poor people. And I suggested that computers could be the solution. I don't think they understood me at all. Instead of computers they need food and shelter. They were happy with that answer.
So let me continue the debate here. Computers can be part of the solution in my opinion. Not so that starving people can play Half-Life and watch videos on YouTube, but because with a computer almost anyone can become instantly employed. There are plenty of options for making money online and if you have modest expectations of what you can make, survival is possible through the net. Basically I believe that if I have an Internet connection then I will never go hungry. This happens to apply to me because I already have some skills which I can use to work over the net, such as programming and Japanese translation.
I'm not saying that we should fly over some starving country and drop iBooks with a satellite link to the net from an airplane. But even in poor countries not everyone is absolutely poor and there are people who are able to take chances. In India there are now some small companies which hire people to type in text. All you need to know is how to read and type. Materials are sent from abroad to be typed into digital form and then these people do the bulk work and send the results back over the net. This is a service for which there is a need as old archives and such get digitalized. Amazon's Mechanical Turk lets anyone make a few dollars through repetitive simple work. With RentACoder developers can compete to do programming work online.
Taking the digitalization as an example, not even a net connection is required to take part in the work, as the company takes care of that part. Then after acquiring a basic way of supporting oneself it becomes possible to advance to other skills and better pay. My explanation was a bit rambling, but the point is that through the Internet money can be made and your location doesn't matter. I really like the MIT Media Lab $100 laptop project, because through it more and more people can have basic skills on using a computer and take part in the global workspace. I've even personally hired some people through RentACoder. It works great!
So this is what I meant by computers being part of the solution for poverty, dear ICU debate teacher. Of course basic education is needed as well, but a computer is also a learning device. I'm sure many kids in developed countries have learned to read and write (or type) by using a computer. I personally learned English a lot through Sierra's adventure games and learned the basics of Japanese through material which I downloaded off the internet. With free laptops distributed by the millions for free to kids in developing countries they will have this chance as well. Based on what I've read a version of Wikipedia will be included with the computers, among other educational software. I hope they don't forget the games, they provide great motivation.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Microsoft fined -- crazy?
Microsoft got a 270 million euro fine. Umm... seems strange that EU can fine a largely American company. I mean if you think about it, they really should fine Microsoft as much as possible if they are allowed to. After all, it's money coming straight from USA to EU's coffers. Let's fine every American company to their full worth and EU will definitely become the superpower of superpowers! I'm sure we can find something to accuse them of.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)