UserDriven

Firefox and Google

Rumor that the Mozilla Foundation (aka the FireFox browser) is making $30+ million a year from their Google search box: Mark Pincus Blog: Firefox = Foxy Cash Cow

Using Fundable to Fund Fundable

Just noticed an increase in traffic coming from Fundable... Welcome!

You are probably looking for the Userdriven Fundraising post that kicked off the modest campaign to say thank you to Fundable for creating such an excellent system by Using Fundable to Thank Fundable!

Please consider joining the fun - we have until June 29th to get 100 people to join in - if we don't reach 100, everyone gets refunded automatically.

So either it costs you nothing or, for just five bucks, you can support and encourage innovation and also be part of an elite 100 who can take pride in doing something so recursively obtuse as using Fundable's own group fundraising system to thank Fundable for building a group fundraising system :-)

Sign up here.

(We have no connection or affiliation with Fundable other than starting the above Fundable campaign to say thank you to Fundable)

UPDATE: Some additional good commentary at: pc4media

The Rescue of the Truck Rescue Photos

Just noticed that the link with the photos referred to in a previous post (One of the most hilarious photo sequences ever...) was down, so that post has now been updated with copies of the original photos.

Google Sightseeing

"Why bother seeing the world for real?"

The cornucopia of the commons - the power of userdriven systems

"How can a tiny European upstart like Skype Technologies S.A. do a number on a trillion-dollar industry? By dialing up a vast, hidden resource: its own users. Skype, the newest creation from the same folks whose popular file-sharing software Kazaa freaked out record execs, also lets people share their resources -- legally. When users fire up Skype, they automatically allow their spare computing power and Net connections to be borrowed by the Skype network, which uses that collective resource to route others' calls. The result: a self-sustaining phone system that requires no central capital investment -- just the willingness of its users to share. Says Skype CEO Niklas Zennstr�m: "It's almost like an organism."

A big, hairy, monstrous organism, that is. The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. "There's a fundamental shift in power happening," says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. (EBAY ) "Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in."

Behold the power of us. It's the force behind the collective clamor of Weblogs that felled CBS anchorman Dan Rather and rocked the media establishment. Global crowds of open-source Linux programmers are giving even mighty Microsoft Corp. fits. Virtual supercomputers, stitched together from millions of volunteers' PCs, are helping predict global climate change, analyze genetic diseases, and find new planets and stars. One investment-management firm, Marketocracy Inc., even runs a sort of stock market rotisserie league for 70,000 virtual traders. It skims the cream of the best-performing portfolios to buy and sell real stocks for its $60 million mutual fund...

Exclaims Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos: "You invite the community in, and you get all this help."

It's surprisingly good help, too. New research indicates that cooperation, often organized from the bottom up, plays a much greater role than we thought in everything from natural phenomena like ant colonies to human institutions such as markets and cities...

Ultimately, all this could point the way to a fundamental change in the way people work together. In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the notion of the tragedy of the commons. He noted that public resources, from pastures and national parks to air and water, inevitably get overused as people act in their own self-interest. It's a different story in the Information Age, contends Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the pioneering PC software VisiCalc and president of consultant Software Garden Inc. in Newton Highlands, Mass.

Instead, he says, there's a cornucopia of the commons. That rich reward may be worth all the disruption we've seen and all the more still to come."

(Businessweek: The Power Of Us)

UserDriven Consumerpedia

Here is the Consumerpedia entry for this UserDriven blog. It is also a test of the "Claim This Page" feature.

Please feel free to add glowing praise about this most humble UserDriven blog over on Consumerpedia ;-)

Domain name mapping is broken at This Is Broken

While reading This Is Broken (a most excellent blog!), I noticed something odd - namely that their domain name mapping was broken.

Meaning that if you go here: http://www.thisisbroken.com, you end up here: http://broken.typepad.com.

Mark Hurst (the founder of This Is Broken) may change the above setup after he notices this post, so please take the above as just an example of this type of problem and please do not bother commenting that it has been fixed!

It appears that Mark has set up a simple "forward" of the domain name to his blog instead of "mapping" the domain name to his blog.

This is rather understandable in that, while TypePad (where his blog is hosted) makes it fairly straightforward to map a domain from their end, domain name registrars definitely do not.

Also, this is not meant to pick on Mark - it is rather to leverage his This Is Broken audience to help encourage awareness of this issue so that domain name registrar companies might recognize that it is very much in their self-interest to make this a much much easier thing for the average user to "fix" (see #5 below), and thereby also help users to "fix" the bigger underlying problem - namely that, for example, while TypePad is a most excellent blog hosting service, should you ever wish (or need!) to switch away to a different service in the future, having everything nicely and neatly under your own domain name instead of theirs is a rather Good Thing...

Since the thisisbroken.com domain name is registered through GoDaddy and the site is hosted at TypePad, here is a tour through the incredibly non-obvious (broken?!) solution:

Note that to be of the most general help, the generic "exampledomain.com" and "exampleblog.typepad.com" will be used going forward.

1. First, you will not be able to do domain name mapping at all if you don't already have a TypePad Plus or Pro account (meaning you would need to upgrade from the TypePad Basic account). To upgrade, sign into your account, click the "Control Panel" tab, then the "Account Info" tab, and then the "Upgrade/Downgrade Account" tab, and follow the directions from there.

2. Assuming now that your TypePad account is either a Plus or Pro account, and that you are signed in, go to your "Control Panel" section, select the "Site Access" tab, then the "Domain Mapping" tab, click the button that says "Begin Here: Map a Domain Name," enter your exampledomain.com domain name in the form and click the "Get DNS settings" button, then on the next page click the "Complete Final Step" button. If this is the only blog set up under your TypePad account, then simply click the "Add Domain" button, otherwise if you have more than one blog under this TypePad account, click the "My weblog" radio button option and select the name of the blog you wish to map the domain name to and click the "Add Domain" button, then on the next page click the "Close Window" button.

3. Go to GoDaddy, sign in, go to "Manage Domains" and select the exampledomain.com domain name you wish to map. If you already have the exampledomain.com domain name forwarded to the exampleblog.typepad.com blog, remove the forwarding setting (yes this will "break" the exampledomain.com domain name for a short while, so do this during a period of low site traffic) and then wait for your GoDaddy account to show that the name is no longer forwarded at all (usually takes an hour or so). Note that you _may_ be able to avoid this step and keep the forwarding live during the next step (setting the CNAME), but I have never been able to make that successfully work with GoDaddy and ended up with even more downtime undoing and then redoing everything in the "proper" sequence as described here.

After finishing the de-forwarding stuff, click "Total DNS Control," then "Total DNS Control And MX Records," then "Launch Total DNS Control Manager" then click "Edit" to the right of the line in the CNAME section that says "www @ 3600," then change the @ in Step 2 of the form to the underlying blog: exampleblog.typepad.com and click "continue," then on the next screen click "update," and then wait patiently for a few hours or so until it propagates through the Internet DNS system. When it has done so, you will once again be able to reach exampleblog.typepad.com from the "www." version of the URL (http://www.exampledomain.com).

Then comes a very non-obvious step, and that is to set (reset) the forward on the domain name so that the exampledomain.com domain name is forwarded through your GoDaddy control panel to point to http://www.exampledomain.com. To do so, from the GoDaddy control panel select the exampledomain.com domain name you wish to forward, click on the "Forward Domains" button (which is the bottom center button of the cluster of buttons above the domain names list), then where it says "Forward To:" enter the full "www." version of the URL (http://www.exampledomain.com), and then click the "Save Changes" button below.

An aside: for a few weeks around three months ago GoDaddy broke this step and would not permit a domain name to forward to itself - but fortunately they undid that change as this appears to be the only way to get the non-"www." URL (http://exampledomain.com) to be successfully resolved to end up at the URL of the underlying blog instead of a GoDaddy default placeholder page. This is when I first started trying to encourage them (to no avail) to consider completely "un-breaking" their domain name mapping process (more on this below).

4. Then it is back to TypePad to finish the domain name mapping process (where TypePad republishes all of your links so that they are of the format http://www.exampledomain.com/2005/06/post.html instead of http://exampleblog.typepad.com/2005/06/post.html). Go back to your TypePad account to your "Control Panel" section, select the "Site Access" tab, then the "Domain Mapping" tab, click and select the box under "Active" that is to the right of the exampledomain.com domain name that you just did all of the above for, and then click the "Set" button at the bottom of that page. Then you will have to republish the blog. If the option is not present there, then you can get to it by going back around to the "Weblogs" tab, selecting the "Edit Design" option for that blog, and then clicking the "Publish" button.

5. Finally, please also be sure to write to GoDaddy customer service to point out to them that it would be a Very Good Experience if they were to simplify Step 3 from above to be simply: "Enter the URL of the TypePad blog that you would like this domain name to be mapped to:" and then have all of that stuff happen automagically. But please do not be too hard on them since they still have the best system, service, and pricing by far of all domain name registrars (and in one of the coolest and most savvy business moves ever, they even permit their resellers like Domaindo to "private-label" their stuff at even lower prices but with all of the regular GoDaddy functionality and customer service!)

Stunt City

Very creative commercial at Beam.tv (via NiXLOG)

Washingtonienne

From blog to book in just 392 days.