Author: Sharon Sarmiento

Danah posts a treatise on the success of MySpace and compares it to the cooling off of Friendster (though they just got a chunk of change recently and have secured a patent on social networking). Social technologies succeed when they fit into the social lives and practices of those who engage with the technology. People […]

Superstars Suzanne Falter-Barnes and Travis Greenlee’s business-building course, Fill Your Groups Now! starts this week. Quoth them: You know how you spend all this money on info products and they’re just grossly general? They say things like ‘Now, go out and determine your target market’. Period. Well, I always want to throw my hands up […]

Big-ass thanks to Tim for featuring the book (and me) in his podcast. Here’s the scoop!

Usually once a week I get an email similar to this: Well, Andy! I read your book and know you tell people to use TypePad for everything and then I see that you yourself use WordPress for your own blogs. You’re probably getting some kind of kickback from the makers of TypePad! So why DO […]

I use Skype’s IM feature much more often than the voice telephony. You can tell Skype to start an IM chat whenever you double-click on a contact (the default is to start a voice call). First go to Skype’s options panel. The General settings appear, and the options are at the top. Another bugaboo is […]

I wanted to add fields to the author profiles in WordPress so users can input their city, state/province and country. So glad to find these plugins: Usermeta and Userextra. Drop them into plugins and activate Go to Options > Userextra and add your extra fields. Now users will see an extra option under My Account […]

Just spent an hour futzing with CSS code and PHP for the Coachamatic re-launch. There was some little piece of code that was making the sidebar appear below all the content on the homepage but correctly on all the other pages. I realized how to fix this much faster: Set the number of posts on […]

Lee is traveling the world and just reported that in a Shanghai bookstore he saw two copies of Blogwild! NO WAY!

From WSJ (via Slashdot) Detractors say that the kids are wasting too much time online browsing dangerous sites, instant messaging friends, and posting to Myspace. Parents are worried that serious learning is being neglected in the quest to ‘dazzle up presentations with fancy fonts instead of digging through library books.’ Some parents however are ‘enthusiastic […]

The makers of the Blackboard elearning system have secured a patent on ‘Internet-based education support system and methods’ and have immediately sued a competitor. Thanks to the brainiacs on Wikipedia, there’s an entire collection of prior art/examples for virtual distance learning going decades – sometimes centuries – back. Better than that is the online reaction […]