I’m not sure I can blame Google for trying to wrap a beast of a product into a simple interface and I’m sure they’ve tried their best.  But, man oh man one wrong checkbox and you could get screwed. 

You might say “well, that’s why you have daily budgets!”  That would be true except that when you have a small budget paired with ads being shown evenly through the day, you have a different sort of problem. 

Excuse me while I go heal myself.

Through constructive feedback garnered through the communication channels provided by Crowdspring, designers “improve” their design as you critique.  You quickly weed out the poor designs from the ones worth pursuing further until you have your perfect design.

Crowdspring guarantees a number of responses or they provide a refund.  What they don’t tell you is that a designer may throw out 5 mediocre designs for you to consider and each qualifies as an individual response.  Therein lies the “rub” so-to-speak.  Depending on your bid price, you’re bound to get a varying caliber of designers – and rightfully so.  A hotshot designer is competing with at least a dozen to 2 dozen other designers (known as “creatives”) doesn’t want to waste time on several projects only to find out that he’s lost on all but 1 of the projects.

With my project, I found 80% of the submitted designs to be extremely poor – the other 20% were worth pursuing further.  Considering that Crowdspring takes your payment upfront and charges a 15% “commission” as well, you really have no choice to pursue alternative design channels.  For logo designs, the guarantee was 25 responses which at the outset looks like a fair deal but quickly turns otherwise considering multiple submissions from single creatives.  Pair this with rough prototypes for the initial versions and you get to 25 pretty quick.

Ultimately, I found a design that was professional through an seemingly out-of-left-field designer who submitted at the very last minute making the experience a “close call” and while I’m happy that I got my money’s worth, I’m weary to go through the process again.

Instead, I’d consider 99designs.com, another “design competition” site that has lower rates, higher response guarantees, and a larger base of creatives.

Youtube feels too exposed and the idea of Youtube watermarked on personal video just seems strange.  Google Video gives only 1GB of space which is hardly enough for video content.   I’m willing to pay and so I settle for Motionbox at http://www.motionbox.com with unlimited space for about $40 per year (caveat: only 5000 views of your video are included annually).

Uploading video isn’t too difficult through the Motionbox website or with their Uploader tool but what *is* missing is a good pre-upload conversion tool that takes a video with any video or audio codec and converts into the perfect average streamable format before uploading to the server.  This means that I have to use a conversion tool like Handbrake or Windows Expression Encoder and then upload a new format of the same video.  Considering that video sizes are heading to 100MB per minute of captured content, this is extremely important.  Motionbox, you listening?

To get set up:

[1] Sign up on http://www.atten.tv

[2] Download the Attention Recorder (available for Firefox).   Install it and restart Firefox.

[3] Turn on the Attention Recorder (click the brand new Red Square icon that should now show up next to your address bar in Firefox.)

[4] Go to your favorite website.

[5] Go to http://www.atten.tv and see it show up on the home page (if you are logged into atten.tv as a broadcaster already).

It’s my belief that this will catch on – people love being voyeurs and stars of their own show.  Myspace is the best example of this and one step further than a static profile is what you are doing and what you are watching.

I am really bad on phone “keyboards” – that’s why I stick to my QWERTY-based RIM Blackberry  7290. I know it’s an old-school model but I like it anyway.  T9 does help on regular phone models but I still find it to be a bit strange.  Now I understand why people look at me funny when I zoom through on the keys of a keyboard when typing.  It’s the same reaction I have when I see folks hammering a way at those tiny phone buttons!

Here’s the way I see it: there are a lot of ostracized children out there that get picked on in grade school; sometimes to the point at which they *wish* they could do some damage.  They feel alienated and effectively turn *into* aliens because society (as a whole) has managed to set them apart and at a distance.   Cho executed on a plan that I’m sure other so-labeled outcasts have concocted many times in the past.  Imagine if you simply put a gun in the hand of one of these frustrated kids.  I’m not sympathizing with Cho – what I’m saying is that society is partly to blame for this and that while it’s easy to compress explanations and accountability into one person (Cho), it’s much harder to divide it up and take partial or major responsibility.

It’s sad that Americans must now live in a state of fear both in the global arena and domestically.  I know that there was a time when I took safety for granted and the real “bad places” were the bad neighborhoods in the city.  It’s slowly becoming the case that your own neighborhood – perhaps even your own neighbor – could be dangerous.

If Cho were alive and if it were possible to rewind back and fix the problem, what would the solution be?  One could analyze and study his personality and lock him up as a psycotic threat to society.  Or, if we rewind much earlier in his life, just being kind and accepting of him as a person might have prevented this tragedy.  What would the earlier accomplish other than saving the world from *one* potential threat – while others with the same complaints itch to make their statement at the expense of other innocent people?

1. The stories often bring down the sites due to heavy traffic.
2. The traffic is “shallow” and tapers off after a few weeks.

What this signifies in my opinion is that people are curious as to what’s happening in the technology startup world but not necessarily looking to use many of the services that are talked about (unless they are really compelling).  Instead, they digest the articles as they would The New York Times.  I suspect that similar websites (like Read/Write Web and Mashable) face the same problem.

I discovered KillerStartups  a few days ago after reading a post about them on franticindustries.  A RSVC (read, submit, vote, comment) website like Digg, I think this is the kind of “feature” TechCrunch and similar news sites really need to create a different kind of value – allow research to develop through the community.   They have the reader base to launch something like this fairly easily and I’m sure we’d learn a lot about where to focus entrepreneurial talent.  That being said – the Techcrunch reader base is very techie (read: early adopter) so I’m not sure whether results would be representative of a wider audience.

I do see the value in having a way to centrally authenticate yourself when visiting the dozens/hundreds of registration-required websites and I think OpenID is on the right track to solve that problem – provided it gets the momentum it needs.

Then through my blog-hopping, I came across this little post about how today’s teenagers and adults differ in how they manage online identities (and even e-mail addresses).   In short: teenagers have no problem with having a handful of e-mail addresses and creating new ones when they’ve forgotten the password to one of them.  Adults, on the other hand, are always looking to have some kind of single sign-on system – perhaps a unique enough username (mine is “niyogi” if I can manage to beat my brothers to registering on a site – otherwise “sniyogi” or if I’m really late “saniyogi”) that will be easy to remember across the sites they browse.

Soon, it will be the case that you’ll know when your child has grown up when they start wanting to consolidate their online identity rather than explode it into fragments or recycle it.

Enter Google Docs and Spreadsheets.  Google purchased Writely a while ago and ended up integrating Writely’s web-based replacement for Microsoft Word and the thing just works (with fairly minor annoyances).  I’ve been using Google Docs for to-do lists, functional spec writing, and ideastorming.  Features like revision comparing, web collaboration, and document publishing along with exporting to PDF, Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice documents makes this offering versatile and handy to say the least. 

Many shrug off Google D&S as being too lightweight for production use and having such a tiny set of features that OpenOffice is a better (and free) option.  I think OpenOffice is great and we run it on all our PCs as well but, again, the idea of being able to pull up your documents from any PC from anywhere in the world is neat.  (I was able to pull up docs from airport terminals in Dubai and Singapore.)

Blogged with Flock

These are members of the same party – mind you.  Granted Republicans may engage in similar battles during the primaries, we’re seeing minority representatives making intra-party accusations against one another.  What I expect this to do is weaken the Democratic party altogether and cause some voters to rather *not* vote for the ultimate Democratic winner than submit a vote for the Democratic candidate.  My belief is that within the Republican party, once the primaries are over, everybody kisses, makes up, and join forces to defeat the Democrats.  I believe this is what we saw with George Bush and John McCain (although I can’t remember when).  Republican voters that were John McCain folks saw that he lost but then decided to stay within party lines and vote generally Republican (Bush).

Democrats on the other hand end up becoming so passionate about their presidential hopeful that they become sore losers and would rather sulk.  (I wonder how many Howard Dean aficianados ended up voting for Kerry in the last election.)  Luckily the Democratic party is balanced out by sheer numbers.