What would you do if you had $50 dollars to spend on your blog???

A Blog About Nothing has posed this question and challenge to all! So I would recommend getting in on this – $50 dollars cold hard cash (or check).. maybe in all ones… at least it’s not quarters..

So I’ll bite. This is what I would do with $50 dollars for my blog.

1) Upgrade my Basic Flickr Account to Pro Account – $24.95

All my pictures and so forth are hosted on Flickr, but you only get a 200 picture limit with the basic account. I definitely need to upgrade this. Flickr is great and if you are hosting your own blog having some place to store photos is nice; saves bandwidth.

2) Start a Blog Challenge -> “The $50 Blog Challenge! Reborn”

Share the love! This may be a product of diminishing returns, but I think passing it along and helping other bloggers would be a great idea.We are all a community of bloggers i.e. the blogosphere – this seems to be a great network tool. Many kudos to A Blog About Nothing.

So that is what I would do with the $50 dollars. Nothing too crazy or exciting. Here are a list to some other responses they all have good ideas.

Zybron Thoughts
Homelife
RotusBlog

Amazon has released a good conceptual product! The Kindle is an e-book reader, book downloader, and blog reader with integrated wireless EVDO/CDMA.

Amazon dubs the Kindle the “Wireless Reading Device”.

Reviews on this puppy are mixed. Robert Scoble of the wonderful scobleizer.com blog calls this device crap about 20 times, so it must be a dud; watch his review here.

Here is my quick review:

GOOD
1) Small portable device
2) Wireless anywhere – truly groundbreaking
3) E-paper is a good idea, let’s save some trees

BAD
1) $399 – way too much money for a simple device that is somewhat crippled
2) Not backlit – has a light dongle WTF?
3) Oddly shaped with no touch screen – The 90s called they want their PDA back.
4) First Gen – don’t be a beta tester

UGLY
Yes it is.

I love shopping on Amazon and I buy a lot of things there, but this device is an immature product. I think it is great conceptual and hopefully they will fix all the things that are just not kosher with it. So I think this is a WAIT WAIT WAIT product. I hope they don’t shelf it because I think it has potential, but this is a TURKEY, gobble gobble.

FDWC (Fear Driven Web Commerce)

It seems every few months or so sites like www.whydiggisblocked.com come about spewing FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). I think this is a marketing ploy to drive more traffic to their sites – these things get a lot of visibility on Digg and Reddit. Before this iteration there was www.whyfirefoxisblocked.com. It’s not the users that need to change, it’s the sites that think their visitors should have to conform to some statistic. The web is not a one size fits all business model. You have to be flexible and change for the users.

I visited the sites to see what I was truly missing with having Ad Block Plus installed and what I found was amazing. IT WAS ABSOLUTE CRAP. ReadWriteWeb has a nice write up on the Economic Idiocy of blocking social media… short conclusion: basically these people are idiots.

Traffic is good for a site, it is healthy, in fact, it is the lubrication that keeps everything going or something. It’s about the conversation that this Internet technology creates. It is amazing. If you need ads to keep your site alive, I’m sure a lot do, find a better way to drive funds than smacking banners and ads all over your page. I don’t know, GET CREATIVE or INNOVATIVE.

Endorse a product, ask your users what they like, anything something, but not that same crap that we hate. I’m so numb to banners on websites as it is. There has to be a better way than isolating traffic to your site; that just seems counter productive.

So, today is the day that we should all be thankful for the various things in our lives: our family, our friends, our loved ones, our pets, etc etc. For all those things I am very thankful. But I think I am going to do something a bit different…

The top 5 technologies I am thankful for:

#5 SMS
Short Message Service – My preferred way of communication. I can keep in contact with a lot of people in a short amount of time. I’m just not a big phone person, I think having a conversation on a phone takes too long when you want to ask a simple question. Phone calls are not obsolete; they just have their place.

#4 Apple iPod
I don’t know where I would be without my iPod. I would be drowning in a sea of CDs and that’s no good. Having my entire music library in my pocket is quite an amazing thing. Also the ability to add the many podcasts I listen to is great.
(more…)

Google has rolled out a new service for their GMail e-mail service: IMAP. To enable IMAP you have to login to https://mail.google.com and enabled it via Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP. I’m guessing by this point just about everyone should have it, since I have it and I’m usually one of the last to get these new features. After you enabled IMAP you can connect to GMail using your favorite mail client; like Thunderbird.

IMAP is a protocol, much like POP, but way cooler.

Gmail IMAP is sweet; I am mightily impressed! Basically, the best feature of IMAP is when I delete a message off of my local mail client (Thunderbird 2.0) that is hooked into GMail it also deletes it on the GMail’s web application. So, I can use Thunderbird while I’m at home. When I’m at work, school, or abroad I can use the the web application and everything stays in-sync. BRILLIANT! Also at work we use IMAP, so this isn’t a new way to do things, but it’s great that Google is expanding their services.

There are many benefits to using IMAP on Google’s GMail here are a few.

1) No longer tied to just the web browser for mail (or POP yuck!). For those who are not familiar with POP, it basically downloads all your mail from the mail server. Thus, it is hard to keep everything in-sync, which is a necessity now-a-days for people on the go. Isn’t that everybody?

2) Security, security, security. To use Google’s IMAP service you have to connect over IMAP secure, which is port 993. This encrypts all your mail traffic so no one can sniff your mail; keeping all of your passwords and mail safe. Depending on the program you may have to select SSL before you can access IMAP secure (IMAPS); I use Thunderbird 2.0, so I selected SSL when I configured Thunderbird.

3) More security for sending mail. Another great aspect of IMAP is the ability is that you can send mail via Google’s SMTP (Send Mail Transport Protocol) server; this is your outgoing mail. I know that this was available for POP, but it should be mentioned because it uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) so all of your outgoing mail is safe and secure.

4) Better for sharing devices. You can hook your GMail into your phone, PDA, laptop, desktop, anything and keep all your e-mail up-to-date. This is a great time saver, you can spend your time on more important things than making sure all your mail is synced.

5) Labels translate into folders. I was worried about how Google was going to handle the transition from their “labels” onto an IMAP client. Don’t be worried all your labels become folders and I think it feels a little more usable in this aspect.

The only problem I have with using the IMAP service with GMail is that all my contacts are on the web application. I don’t think this is specifically a Google problem; they didn’t write the IMAP protocol. Since I have all my e-mails I ever sent or received with my GMail account I can easily rebuild all my contacts.

Google does a nice job of laying out the instructions of various mail clients here.

In Google we trust.