A Dot Com Entrepreneur Speaks Out

Okay, you know you Stumble too much when you start to see the same sites over and over, or they tell you to “go outside and play for a while”.

I came across this cool looking balloon thing, and read a little more about it. It’s called the Magenn Power Air Rotor System.

So, as an entrepreneur and someone who would like to leave a little Earth for my Grandkids someday, I find myself asking: Why the hell haven’t I ever seen one of these things in use before?

I mean, if I was a local city government, I would be buying these things like crazy. You float these suckers in the air, tethered down, and they instantly start generating electricity. It’s that simple! This could put every power plant in the world out of business, but why aren’t we using them yet?

I look forward to seeing these in use someday.

Have you ever seen one of these? If so, please tell me the details about when and where in the comments!

Guy Kawasaki’s new news aggregation website Alltop is awesome.  I love it!

It’s awesome because I don’t have to configure it, mess with it, etc.  I also like that it does NOT automatically refresh.  I can pull up an Alltop screen and see all of the major headlines from dozens of the most popular sites that I frequent often.  I also don’t have to worry about leaving the room only to return to a fresh new page full of different stories.  The site does refresh every 15 minutes, but you must manually “refresh” to see the changes on their page.

They had very good taste in what websites to pick for the top of the categories.  Something about the cool transparent banner across the bottom of the browser window just turns me on to this trendy site.  I can literally keep the website open and just flip between a few categories that satisfy my interests and be done with it.  I think this site might cause me to use my RSS Reader much less.

I am in love with the Small Business and Venture Capital categories.

The only downside is that it does only aggregate a fraction of valuable websites per category, but the main news is all taken care of.  If you want opinions and niche views, then you are still going to need to use your RSS Reader and subscribe to individual blogs.  Also, because the site is really really new, there are some categories that overlap news feeds…such as Venture Capital, Startups, and Small Business.

As more topics and websites are added, I will definitely fall more in love with this service than I already am.

Check it out!!!!

I love reading FastCompany magazine, but I feel like the same issue has been in stores forever!  Their website updates with the magazine, usually, and that is just not often enough!  I really wish there was some way to make the print magazine business more efficient and quicker.  I mean, it takes the press like one day to print all the magazines for an entire month, so what the heck is taking them so long?

On the flip side, blogs are just too damn fast.  I know I don’t update this blog often enough, but the blogs I read update so often, so frequently, that I am forces to speed read through them or just skim through the headlines.  It’s a little disappointing sometimes.

Darren Rowse and other bloggers have long debated over blog post frequency, and the effectiveness of different speeds, but I am going to have to say leave it at one or two posts per day, PLEASE.

I don’t expect anyone to listen, so whatever.  I just thought I would point this problem out.

All of this hype with blogging is starting to spread to most of the major media outlets. Is this good or bad? Well, only time will tell. Personally, I don’t think this is such a great idea.

I realize that social media is the “wave of the future”, but the whole basis for most established traditional media outlets is their integrity and quality. When major media outlets such as my local media outlet, The Indianapolis Star, try to become “social” then it really doesn’t work out as well as you would expect.

Go to IndyStar.com and check out any article, like this one, and read some of the comments that have been left regarding the article. This is just downright wrong, and I think some of these people need to be educated before posting. Sites like IndyStar.com need to disable comments or start heavily moderating them. It’s quite obvious they just want to get people involved like bloggers do, but they must realize they cater to a completely different audience. They cater to the general public while blogs and bloggers cater to more tech savvy users that are capable of using search, like Google, to find what they are looking for.

There is a lot of great things that the Internet and bloggers have which major news companies don’t. But if major outlets are going to start mimicking - Please do NOT allow for commenting. It’s just going to be a flame war between hundreds of thousands of un-educated people with opinions.