Am I Famous Now…

Work obligation and the still not solved problem to add (at least) 4 more hours to the regular cycle AKA day, have kept me out of blogland in the last weeks.
Once 400 feeds and the feed reader permanently open in a third screen, last weeks around 10 blogs daily, mainly blogs of friends.
A huge difference. A dream, an oases of peace.

An echo chamber free life.

It was an enjoyable and relaxed period.
Selective reading compared to the obligation of knowing what was going on… and reading everything at least 80 times.
Bored of Digg and all the blog entries about Digg.
Bored of A-Listers and their grudges.
Bored of over hyped authors who don’t tell much more than common sense.

It was a coincidence. Being busy and drained too. Not burnt out, just *yawned*.
Informational overload, but nothing new. The blogosphere going more and more main stream. Old Media venturing online and a further myspacification/youtubification of the internet.

And then there were more social networks.
And a blog getting a big head CEO.
And twitter.
And the Twitterloo.

All good old Web2.0

Time to say goodbye now and kick off Web3.0.
Good old BE Jeff disagrees with me, he thinks it’s too early for Web3.0, but for a thinker I already am too late.

I wonder if there actually is a thing I haven’t seen yet online.
In 1999 I already planned a virtual 3D shopping center with a (now tax convicted) German partner. Since that day nothing has really amazed me.

Web 3.0 won’t be a revolution. Web2.0 wasn’t either. But Web4.0 will.
Web4.0 will take the internet offline. To your desktop.
To your breakfast table, a table serving as computer with touch screen and a reserved area for your plate, a non-computer area. Your hard drive will be online.

Concepts and numbers will be mashed up.
Numbers make no sense anymore. Was it 2.0, 3.0 or 4.0?
Lets just ditch web2.0, web3.0, web4.0 and any further future web generation naming convention for the web.

The internet, or web, will further evolve. Even without numbers.
An eternal Beta state. Or Gamma.
Maybe we should consider renaming our cars too. What about BMW Z4 Beta?

Me, I think I still prefer being an alpha male. An Alpha Plus 2.0.

Update : Om Malik today has a similar entry.

With every update for Wordpress everyone who actually bothers to read the readme or howto sees the warning/instruction

Step 1: Backup Database Tables and Files including .htaccess
…
Use phpMyAdmin or other appropriate tools provided by your webhost, to backup the database used by WordPress.

Luckily the Wordpress codex points at phpMyAdmin for the database backup, because the Wordpress export feature is officially useless as a backup tool.
There are several backup plugins for WP, but most don’t serve the optimal purpose.

As blogger you should not only backup your database when you upgrade but you should regularly back your data up. But honestly, who visits regularly the options to backup the database.
I known many website owners, or bloggers, who’ld love to know how to regularly backup the database in order to avoid losing all their posts every time they screw up their Cpanel config.
Luckily the mysql backup process can easily be automated with a cron job.

Since many bloggers have cPanel, here is a short howto automate your mysql database backup with a cron job in cPanel¹.

There is more. Follow the white rabbit →

Today PCWorld.com published their list of 50 most important people on the web. When scrolling over the list, I could only wonder what they have been smoking at PCWorld. I can’t imagine there is any carpet left over anymore.

Over/Under rated

Of course everyone expects other names in such a sort of list, but IMHO there are some names no one can discuss. People such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon) at #24 and Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (Kazaa, Skype and Joost) at #15, indisputably are internet pioneers and revolutionaries. Everything they touch, everything they do changes worlds.

Bezos today is one of the most watched CEOs and even VCs. Not only did Amazon change economic structures worldwide, but today Amazon has become much more than just a book store. And S3 is one of the most wonderful platforms for developers online.

Zennström and Friis might not have been the first ones with P2P technology, but both Kazaa and Skype set new standards in their field. One might argue the real value of Skype and that Ebay paid too much for Skype, but surely Skype has changed much more than Cuban has ever done with Broadcast.com. I hope the person who decided to pay $5.06 billion for Broadcast.com has already been executed. If not for that fatal economical error, because Cuban now thinks he can ramble on and on and say nothing. Worse, people even read his ramblings. Who has ever allowed this guy to put his stamp on the online world? Luckily PCWorld hath spoketh and doesn’t find him influential.

What’s up with Jobs at #2? Why is Jobs at #2 and don’t I find Linus Torvalds in the list?
Torvalds is not influential? Imagine tomorrow he would decide to sell the Linux trademark or change the rights? That would be an earthquake.
Not someone who first left, and then came back because he was the cheapest Fisher Price nerd Guru who was available. Preaching his easy-to-use platform to geeks groupies. What would today’s Mac OS X be without Linus?
DRM? Who made DRM main stream? Exactly, the same person who now tries to save his auctions and preaches anti-DRM.

Out of Order

What’s up with all the newbies who just nipped online, admittedly have built something amazing, but have no track of durability yet?

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (YouTube founders) at #10. See Cuban higher in this entry.
Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress) at #16. Akismet is great, Wordpress is acceptable but still has to prove it’s a lasting player. And not another Movable Type. But credit due where credit due, if everything works out well, Matt can become another Linus.
Robert Scoble (Podtech) at #25 (remark, that is immediately behind Jeff Bezos!). What/Who is Robert Scoble actually? Other than an overpaid blogger? If only I had that much of time to blog. Is Scoble really more influential than Dave Winer (#39)? No seriously, Winer already annoys the internet since Octobre 1994 on an almost daily base!

More HOAXes

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (DailyKos) at #23 (that is right above Bezos!) , PerezHilton (celebrity blogger) on #41, Nick Denton (Gawker) #45.
WTF???

Dearest PCWorld editors, please occasionally leave your hardware piles and get laid.
And stop smoking the carpet!
That’s all.

If today you log in to Blogexplosion you see since months the same message

To start, let’s clear up the biggest question: Has BlogExplosion really been sold? The answer is: yes. BlogExplosion was sold, but at this time, the new owners have requested to remain in the background while they get ready to integrate BlogExplosion into their network of sites. While we can’t say who the new owners are, we can say that we are extremely pleased so far with the work that they have done to support us.

BE had almost been sold once more. Go read the story. My chronicles how I tried to buy BE.
And wanted to make BE BE-worthy again.

Oboe Locker, by MP3 Tunes, is one of the promising free online music storage services. In the standard free version, Oboe offers you 1GB free storage, and with some luck you might get a free upgrade to unlimited free storage space.

Oboe Locker comes with sync software, allowing you to sync and listen to your music on any computer world wide, without the need for a VPN network with your home computer. The music player is web based, plays in your web browser.
So now, even when you’re at $tarbuck$ you can listen to your own music, without having to store it on your notebook.

Synchronizing your music with Oboe Sync is easy. If you use iTunes or Windows Media Player, Oboe Sync will automatically detect in what folder you have stored your music and propose you that folder for the synchronization. Alternatively you can also select your own folders.
The sync process itself is dynamic, using the maximum upload speed as long as nothing else communicates. When bandwith is needed for another service, Oboe Sync frees the upload highway. I can easily Skype while syncing.
Files in your locker benefit album art, unlimited album art is available in the Premium Service.

With Oboe Sync you can also download your Locker easily on any computer. Be careful if your audio files have digital protection such as DRM. Oboe Locker counts as a device.

Some features I’d like to see in a future version of Oboe Locker are a bandwith/upload throttle and certain plugins.
If you are in a network, Oboe can clog the network’s upload if the network isn’t dynamically configured. Yes that is all you home users with 2 or more computers at home.
Support for more media players, especially WinAmp since it is widely spread.
Plugins for fe. last.fm and also versions for portable devices with WiFi, or even 3G phones. Imagine how cool it could be to listen to ALL our music on your 3G phone with unlimited data plan, and not just to the size of your phone’s memory card.

And to exceptionally behave as a cool kid, I have 2 priority codes for Oboe Locker Free Unlimited, giving you immediate access to unlimited storage.
And if all that wasn’t cool enough yet, I also have 2 invites for Joost^TM Beta. More about Joost^TM Beta in another entry.

48 Hours from now on (Comments will not be taken into consideration anymore after Saturday 3th March, 2007 07.00PM GMT).
Earn your invite in the comments. Specify which invite you want… and be creative.