inventium: the element of creativity
inventium systems: smart people building interesting products
Inventium Systems
Smart people. Interesting products. Cool Clients.
Highly targeted technical research and development.
Blog Post Engineering version 0.7.2 launches July 27, 2010
Just a quick note: Blog Post Engineering is an ebook I’m building and maintaining using a software development model.
The latest version is 0.7.2, code named “Barger”.
As far as I know, there aren’t any other ebooks being built in the problogger community along a continuous development cycle.
More information on the toolchain, best practices and project management for Blog Post Engineering will appear here in the future.
In the meantime, if you’re a small business person, and would like to offer a subscription style information product, please contact me for details on your project if you want help.
Tags: Blog Post Engineering
Content Creation versus Content Curation
Content curation is a growing opportunity on the web, and like every other new thing, it’s not exactly clear whose definition of “curation” is best, or which will be the most widely accepted (“best” and “most widely accepted” aren’t always the same).
Content Creation
Definition: Content creation is the act of creating unique content.
This is a de facto definition reflecting content actually being published on the web in mid-2010.
The definition hinges on the word unique. For a working definition of the word unique with respect to web content, it’s implicitly accepted that content passing Google’s duplicate content filter may be classified as unique.
How Google determines duplicate content seems to be a trade secret. One way they could be doing it is by using a document similarity index.
The key point: “Unique” does not imply novelty or originality in any way. A large fraction of the unique content published in, say, the Problogger niche, the personal finance and personal development niches is not original, and has very little novelty.
Content Curation
Content curation makes no claim to uniqueness with respect to individual pieces of content, but well-curated digital content can provide novelty, with originality coming from presentation and perspective.
Here’s two examples of curated content taken from blogging: lists of plugins, and tutorials for acquiring a technical skill.
Lists of plugins come in two basic types:
- The plugins vary in capability and are used for different purposes. Example: your first 10 plugins for WordPress installation.
- The plugins have similar capability and are used for the same purpose. Example: 3 different plugins for backing your WordPress installation.
Another type of list which curates content is one collecting different methods for accomplishing the same task. For example, there’s at least 3 different ways to install WordPress, probably many more.
Tags: Content creation, Content curation, How to blog, List post
Facebooks’ “Like” button and the end of private privacy
Near the end of April 2010, Facebook announced their Open Graph initiative with an API allowing developers to rapidly integrate Facebook tools such as the “Like” button into arbitrary web pages.
What does this mean, exactly?
That’s a really good question, and the answer isn’t at all obvious. Certainly, the amount of consumer data Facebook will collect is staggering. The precision with which they will be able to sell targeted demographic data is unparalleled.
And the difficulty of overcoming Facebook’s barriers to personal privacy amount to, essentially, this:
- De facto, privacy on Facebook doesn’t exist. If it’s on Facebook, you had best treat it as public.
- Private privacy no longer exists in the Facebook ecosystem. If you want to be “private,” everyone knows what you’re treating as private. That is, your privacy is public.
One pernicious side effect is that you don’t control your presence on Facebook.
Don’t want pictures of yourself posted on Facebook? Don’t allow anyone to take pictures of you. You can’t really stop someone from posting their own pictures, and if you’re in one of them, too bad for you.
Tags: Facebook
Blogging at Inventium Systems
Most of Inventium System’s effort in the last 12 months has been focused on developing Website In A Weekend, where blog posting has proceeded almost daily since June 2009.
The initial concept of Website In A Weekend has now been implemented, and the site is being used as a platform for building credibility and trust for launching more specialized products and services.
Blogging here at Inventium Systems will also resume on a more regular basis, and consist of about half news from various Inventium Systems projects, clients and ventures, as well as commentary on events, products, services and applications currently evolving on the web.
Startup Weekend Silicon Valley April 30 – May 2 2010
Startup Weekend Silicon Valley is being hosted by Paypal, at the Town Center building on the eBay campus.
Walter and I worked on a global status application, “Statustar.” If you’re familiar with gravatar – globally recognized avatars – this is much the same sort of notion: you should be able to display and update your status from any platform.
Our first platforms are WordPress and Facebook. The WordPress application is built as a plugin. For Facebook, Statustar runs as a native application.
Revenue Streams for Small Web Businesses
As an exercise for motivating our work at the first Stirfry Incubator weekend intensive, we graphed out various ways for generating revenue from web site businesses.
Later, I copied the information to a mind map, which is posted below.
Activate both and reload to view the mindmap
Contact me for mindmap.
Inventium Systems is a small, fast-moving technology startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.