Blogoforum - blog+forum on community and idea

Who the hell is phillhow

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:43:32 GMT

My main interest is the delivery of technical support on the Internet. I will write mainly about that. The nature of "help" sites is changing from a very static Q and A format with users on one side and experts on the other; to a more dynamic distribution of information in well organized pieces that serve to educate rather than rather than just answer questions. Right now there are 5 main types of help sites: The contest or game style sites like Experts-exchange... Q and A taken to the extreme. These are on the decline in importance. Conventional forums like Codingforums. Not a popular as they once were, and many are badly run or neglected. Some will survive, but only as a reminder of how things were. Social news and discussion sites like Digg. These are very inconsistent in quality, and most like Digg fail to remain focused on the tech areas. They are sort of backward Q and A. Someone posts what they think might be an answer and the questions sort of find it through community voting. Right now these sites are the darlings of the geeks among us, but whether that is short term or long term is yet to be determined. Collections. Collections of related articles, collections of downloads, collections of snippets, directories of sites or blogs. Sometimes the answer to a problem, but without much support. There have always been collection, there will always be collections. They may evolve to support different types of collections like del.icio.us; evlove further or turning into something a little more organized and usable. Article and tutorial sites like Experts Round Table. The devlopment of permanent content generated from discussion, research and peer review looks like a good idea. It probably will not appeal to the Venture Capitalist, because it is the only current format where a small group of experts can compete with much bigger sites without needing advertising or big bucks; by generating a little buzz and making quality content available for free. Which reminds me to post http://www.expertsrt.com to give them a little buzz from here. I am going to be up front and tell you that I think Experts Round Table and other sites trying a similar approach sre the future of tech help on the Internet. I'm not going to post links to the big sites with wal to wall ads and paid subscriptions. The greed owners and their VC friends already make too much money. Over time I will be reviewing some of the help sites on the Internet with bias toward free sites, ad free sites, and sites that generate mostly original content. I will also comment on trends point out the good the bad and the ugly; and do everything I can to promote good article sites especially Experts Round table. BTW, if you think you would like to be a tech writer; instead of hiding your work on a blog, contact a tech article site. Then you will get support and help developing your article. I know my friend COBOLdinosaur at Experts round table would be glad to hear from you. See y'al later. ** If you need as answer ask anyone who calls thenselves an expert; I you want to learn find a teach, Mentor or guru. Experts only know the answer Mentors know why it is the answer. ** - 2 replies

RE: Hi there

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:26:56 GMT

Sorry for the extremely delayed reply, Things were a whirlwind for me during the this year-transition. I ended up winning a local Radio Jockey hunt and joined the Radio station as a Trainee. At the same time I switched jobs and now I am working as Tech Writer for a company called Pure IT Usability Research. Somewhere around the same time, I acquired my own domain, 42 Quirks (http://42quirks.com) and keep posting to it pretty frequently. So things have been moving pretty fast for me, and I have barely had the time to catch my breath. What's Blogoforum up to these days? What are you up to these days? Regards, Shri. - 1 reply

Hi there

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:52:27 GMT

Hi Shrikant, while I work on implementing new features for Blogoforum, I am very pleased to see you here! What are you currently on? - 1 reply

Welcome, and one tip

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 08:19:33 GMT

Thats a great post Philhow. Welcome to Blogoforum. You came on the right time here. I'm brewing new ideas on how to let people to create their own communities here. If you're interested we can exchange a few words here or by email regarding how would you your community to work. Meanwhile here is one trick (undocumented) you can do. Navigate to a topic of your interest, say http://blogoforum.com/tag/review+site+support+technology+web . You will find "edit forum description" there at the top right. You can set title and description for that place. Try it. Denis Krukovsky Blogoforum - 1 reply

talkinghub got Pagerank 7

Thu, 18 May 2006 13:04:05 GMT

talkinghub pagerank reached 7: http://livepr.raketforskning.com/?u=talkinghub.com . This is a surprise. This is good surprise for me! How did talkinghub get here? I would I know! I have 2 web projects which are pretty popular. They are http://dotuseful.sourceforge.net/ - Java Swing tree library, and http://dkrukovsky.blogspot.com/ - "Make the Software Shine" - writings on software design. Both of them are pagerank 5. talkinghub.com is first one with PR 7. talkinghub was produced as a result from "How to Write Software" - I got an idea that it would be interesting to people if I will publish step-by-step story on how to write software from scratch. First post on it: http://dkrukovsky.blogspot.com/2006/01/how-to-write-software.html Some people were inspired in it and cheered me up. Thanks! If you are reading this please leave a few words about you. I got Java hosting at http://rimuhosting.com/ : http://write-software.blogspot.com/2006/02/hosting.html If you will go with RimuHosting - tell them that you were referred by Denis Krukovsky. talkinghub went live at 2006 February 6: http://write-software.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-write-software-now-live.html First post: http://talkinghub.com/forum/tag//i-will-be-posting-content-here-instead-of-blogger-soon-2.html It wasn't talkinghub that time - the name has come later. BenjiSmith advices to make the service more understandable: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.309199.3 Thanks Benji! Tag-based classification was added at February 16. Talkinghub got a name at 2006 February 19. That's the story so far! Now thanks all the people who supported me in my journey! Marcus Troiano runs an IT news blog and has a collection of some nice photos: http://marcustroiano.com/blog/ He liked the idea and gave me some useful comments. Thanks Marcus! A guy named CyberCoded runs blog - http://www.cybercoded.net/ - and makes money on small (and not so small) web software solutions - http://www.cybercoded.com/ . Thanks CyberCoded for your suggestions to me. Want to have a forum for your solutions on talkinghub? My short advice on cybercoded.net: you might want to create "Applications" page and briefly describe all your applications there. Ric Shreves runs software writings at http://ricshreves.net/ , blog on open source at http://postdb.ricshreves.net/ , and some other projects. He invited everyone to read my story. Pete Freitag runs blog on software development at http://www.petefreitag.com/ . It looks like he runs his blog on his own blog software. He even wrote "How To Make a Tag Cloud" article - http://www.petefreitag.com/item/396.cfm - where he described how a tag cloud works on his blog. Hey Pete, I like talkinghub tag cloud better. Nice man runs tech blog at http://www.cybernetnews.com . He opened my eyes that I need to fix my website layout to work under IE. David Kadavy runs good blog - http://kadavy.net/ , eats fat for money and recommends to write on Ruby. I wonder how do rubbyists do "Rename Method" refactoring? David Braverman - http://blog.braverman.org/ - blog on software and politics. Shrikant Joshi develops http://colayer.com/ - interesting view on information exchange. Thanks Shrikant for your suggestions. Max Ischenko runs Ukrainian developer's community at http://www.developers.org.ua/ , blogs on software development at http://max.textdriven.com/ , and develops book exchange service at http://knigoman.com.ua/ . Chris Jenkinson develops open source forum software at http://chimaera.starglade.org/aterr/ , maintains Wikipedia Forum article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum , and thinks to add tags to his forum at http://chimaera.starglade.org/forums/post/309 . Andrew Nesbitt runs popular tech blog at http://atariboy.wordpress.com/ . Thanks for your advices Andrew! Pete Cashmore runs popular blog on web 2.0 startups: http://www.mashable.com/ . Pete likes Wordpress forums more: http://www.mashable.com/weblist/talking-hub/ . Hey, no designer had an opportunity to touch talkinghub yet! Meredith runs blog on social web: http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/ Berlin Brown runs SpiritCompany at http://www.newspiritcompany.com/ , develops public service (not released yet), and released Calc System recently: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.333643.24 Amanecer runs .net blog at http://amanecer9.blogspot.com/ Victor Zambrano runs design company at http://www.frwrd.net/ . AJAX site. Lindsay Donaghe writes about software and photography at http://www.macrolinz.com/macrolinz/ . Hey Lindsay, more suggestions from you? Bob Stumpel keeps list of web 2.0 services at http://www.openbc.com/cgi-bin/forum.fpl?op=showarticles&id=1333506 PRWeb publish press releases for you: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/3/prweb355096.htm Paul Terry Walhus developed a web 2.0 app which runs slide show of 1400 web 2.0 apps: http://web2slides.com/ Gavin Bowman runs a software company and business blog at http://webhelperbrowser.com/blog . Anyone I forgot please post your complaints here! Thanks people for your support! Denis Krukovsky author, talkinghub.com - 2 replies

RE: How Web Startups Can Benefit from Each Other

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 14:34:13 GMT

Hi Denis, I'm a vc in sydney australia I like what you are saying Feel free to pitch me about your idea for web startups should support each other. - Daniel Nerezov My profile: http://youngentrepreneur.com/forum/member.php?find=lastposter&t=6582 - 1 reply

RE: talkinghub got Pagerank 7

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 14:22:35 GMT

Hi Denis, Thanks for the mention and glad the ideas were useful. I'd still recommend giving people some way to identify themselves in a post without typing their name in the post body. It would help in following the threads, but it would also be nice to include as another way to organize the posts. If you liked a post by someone, you could read other things that they'd posted. In your case (if I could filter posts by your name), it would be an easy way to follow the progress of talkinghub's development, for instance. RSS feeds would be useful. To keep people coming back if a thread they participated had new activity and make it easy to find those previous threads. I don't know how hard it would be to implement, but possibly make use of a service like tagthe.net. It takes your text and pulls out likely tags... that way you take the burden off of the user to come up with relavent tags for a post and make things easier to find. I like the idea of letting people start their own "hub". That's pretty cool. Keep up the good work! Lindsay Donaghe - 1 reply

How Web Startups Can Benefit from Each Other

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:29:57 GMT

Are you a small startup developing some new idea? Are you sure your idea is good, or you do have some worries about it? Or you are completely confident with your idea, but have some worries about how to convince the world about it? Then I'm like you. I have an idea I believe in, and I work on implementing it and making it popular. The first part was relatively easy. Software development is my profession, and basic functionality come up fast. My idea is now live and work here. Now the second part. How to tell the world about how good the new service is? How to ask people's feedback and make the service they'll actually love? This field is unclear for me. Are you in the same position? Are you built something and looking for users to gather feedback and continue development? Thinking about creating user community around your product or service? This is where startup people can help each other. Startup people can be each other honest supporter and beta tester. Startup people can give feedback to other startups, and receive feedback back from them. Startups can help each other to grow and mature, and to form a supportive community around. So here is my manifesto. I am willing to be beta user and provide feedback for a product or service I will find interesting. I will ask for feedback on talkinghub service and propose other startups to review. Are you a startup looking for feedback? Post your product or service here. Do you find talkinghub idea interesting, or have improvement proposal? Please provide your feedback here. Do you have other thoughts on how startups can collaborate to help each other? We would love to read your ideas here. Good luck then. Denis Krukovsky. - 1 reply