Why?

Because when I decided to connect the new Facebook page of my fledgling business, Klout took it upon itself to switch me from an “individual influencer” to a “brand influencer”, replacing my substantial personal Facebook activity with my nearly non-existent Facebook page activity.

Maybe it told me it was going to do this, but not nearly clearly and obviously enough if it did – I certainly didn’t notice anything telling me the potential consequences.

Forewarned is fore-armed. Don’t make the same mistake I did!

I’ve always thought that idea of "how you react to what I say is none of my business" was a cop-out. We are interdependent. Our words, actions and even our thoughts DO have an impact on other people. That’s a responsibility we should embrace, not abdicate.

So I finally set up some monitoring with mon.itor.us, and look what happened:

And it’s even worse from Europe:

I know I’m not paying for an SLA, but 96% uptime? Unacceptable. 2 second response time? That’s RESPONSE time from the server, NOT page load time. Unacceptable.

I’ve tried to resolve the problem with GoDaddy, but they haven’t even acknowledged there’s a problem. That’s why I’m moving my hosting elsewhere. Meanwhile, my apologies to anyone experiencing flaky performance on any of my sites.

HostZilla is offering FREE cloud hosting, unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth.

What’s the catch? Only 100MB web storage. Still, that’s enough for several starter sites.

And when you’re ready to upgrade, their premium cloud hosting plans start at $4.49/month, with unlimited storage. They don’t offer VPS hosting, but based on the reviews I’ve seen and what the hosting is spec’d at, their cloud hosting SHOULD out-perform comparably-priced VPS plans. They also have 24/7 support and a very sophisticated proprietary fraud detection system to prevent abuse of their servers.

Oh, and .com domains are $9.95!

If you’d like to check it out, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d use my affiliate link. Or you can just go directly to http://hostzil.la. I recommend it either way.

You might also want to read the thread on Warrior Forum and see how they responded to various questions from savvy internet marketers.

“Jack, don’t play tonight because there’s one sniper left.”

Hat tip to @mattreyes

“To know and not to do is not to know.” ~ Wang Yangming

Image: Qihuii de Hanabi

I’ve been just absolutely sickened by the whole process around SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), a bill that while perhaps a little more well-intentioned than some of its critics may give it credit for, ultimately criminalizes creativity and innovation and cripples the internet as we know it. Watch / listen to the following as you continue reading:

A huge backlash started yesterday in the tech community yesterday against ubiquitous registrar/host (and SOPA supporter) GoDaddy, based on a Reddit thread that has grown to over 3,000 comments, calling for a boycott of GoDaddy on or before December 29 (“move your domain away from GoDaddy day”). There are lots of interesting resources in it, including several SOPA-opposing registrars and hosts offering discounts. In particular, I suggest checking out http://GoDaddyBoycott.org to voice your support for the boycott and Lifehacker’s GoDaddy abandonment guide that’ll walk you through the entire process.

But it’s not just GoDaddy. There are more than 400 organizations that have voiced their support of SOPA. What do we do about them? I’m not planning on writing 400 letters, signing 400 petitions, and so on. What can we do to collectively take action, in “batch mode”, if you will, toward these companies?

Here are a couple of ideas:

1. How about people who have AdSense on their sites not allowing any SOPA-supporting companies to advertise on their site? You can explicitly name “competitors”, or any other companies, whose ads you don’t want to show on your site. I don’t know how much impact it would have, but it’s certainly an effective way to directly have some effect, as well as to pull ANY support for these companies.
2. How about something you could add to your local hosts file to prevent you visiting any of those sites? No traffic, even accidentally.
3. I see Visa & MasterCard on the SOPA supporter list, but not Discover or American Express. Am I missing them somewhere? Maybe it’s time to change credit cards.

Feel free to poke holes in these ideas — I’m just brainstorming. If you have any other ideas, or even suggestions on how to move forward with any of these ideas, please comment below.

And if you’re still not convinced, maybe Stephen Colbert can explain it better:

This is absolutely the most delicious sweet bread I’ve ever had. While perhaps not a traditional holiday flavor blend, it goes great with holiday foods and is perfect for parties. From the December 2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.

Shared via nfn8
Source : http://www.oprah.com/food/Apricot-Ginger-and-Walnut-Tea-Bread

I read Think and Grow Rich 20 years ago. I thought I understood it at the time. Through a series of serendipities, I’m now re-reading it and realizing how much I really just didn’t get it. I took it in intellectually, but I didn’t really put it into practice — make it a part of my life — not just daily, but hourly, or even minute-by-minute.

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Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66Y_bHeltgM

I do write original stuff sometimes – and some pretty good stuff at that, I think. I’m also a decent curator of content. For example, Linked Intelligence has grown into the definitive unofficial source for all things LinkedIn.

But being a good curator is tedious and time-consuming. And a lot of the reason for that has to do with a sub-optimal workflow. At the moment I’ve cobbled together several tools, each to handle a little piece of the flow, but I’m really not happy with what I’ve got. And what I really want seems so simple and so obvious, I find it unfathomable that nobody really seems to have built this yet. If someone has, please tell me, because I’ll buy it, I’ll review it, and I’ll tell everyone else how great it is!

What I want is a single tool to:

1. Find interesting content to share.
2. Facilitate either sharing it directly or blogging and then sharing.

Wow – does that really seem so difficult?

Let’s get into the specifics of what that means:

1. Let’s start with an RSS reader.
2. Then let me combine feeds and filter them by keyword, author, tag, date, etc.
3. Then let me 1-click share, yet contextualize it for each channel, all in one interface, e.g.:
• Shorter comment and a link on Twitter, LinkedIn; longer comment and a link (and selectable image thumb) on Facebook; longer comment and a selectable excerpt and link on
• Refer to the author with their Twitter handle on Twitter, by name on Facebook and LinkedIn, and by their name, linked to their blog, in a blog post
• If I blog it, give me the option to share my blog post, rather than the direct link, to the other social media channels

I don’t want to completely auto-blog. I believe in the value of human review and commentary. I just want to make the workflow a LOT more efficient. Let me define a narrow set of rules to give me a manageable short list of content to review, that’s likely to have high quality. Queue that up so it’s as close as possible to being ready to publish. Let me review it and modify it – add the human touch. Then go do all the publishing.

Is that really too much to ask? Is there a tool that can do all this? How close to this are you? And what tool(s) are you using to do this?

Images: Will Lion, catspyjamasnz