Those that have read my blog know that I do get on my soapbox from time to time about the state of education in the United States. I can't help but be concerned about the future for America's young adults. Too many students are not opting to stay in school to continue their education. If U.S. students continue their lack of motivation in pursuing an education, I can't help but be gloomy on America's place in the 21st century as a world leader.
It looks as if Laura Scott, pingVision, had some free time on her hands. There are reasons free servcies on the Internet are free. Laura wants you to start asking yourself, "why?".
Is the future really free?
It seems we've entered an age where there's a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren't investing out of philanthropy. There's value there. YouTube is "free" but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why?
Here's a hint: It's not about the Tube. [Read more at Laura Scott's Blog]
"Blogging as a business is business. It takes business training and skills to make money with your blog."
- Lorelle VanFossen, "Business School for Bloggers: How to Make Money With Your Blog", Blog Herald, April 7, 2008
Last December, I mentioned my excitement about Drupal's project lead, Dries Buytaert, along with Jay Batson starting a company called Acquia. While it was known that the $7 million startup would focus on Drupal for the enterprise, what was not known was the products and services that would be offered by the company. In a press release today, Acquia finally unveiled its roadmap to commercially support Drupal.
The company announced the two initial products and services it will be offering, Carbon and Spokes. Carbon is Acquia's commercial supported version of Drupal which will focus on social publishing applications. Spokes is an update will be an enhanced update notification sercice that provides "site owners personalized alerts with actionable recommendations". At this time I'm, not clear as to whether Spokes will be available for just Carbon or for all Drupal distributions. Both services will be available through a subscription offering.
Michael Silverman has a great article on The Content Wrangler regarding content management. The full title of the article is "Making The Business Case for Web Content Management: First, Admit You Have A Problem". The article is a one-stop place for explaining content management, why a business or organization should implement a content management system (CMS), and tips for choosing and implementing a CMS.
"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes. Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."
-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.
Interesting observation by Karl Rove as well as good commentary by Charles Cooper.
In an illuminating interview published in the June 4 issue of The New Yorker, White House political aide Karl Rove suggested that a nexus exists between the spread of technology and a centrist-conservative outlook on the world."There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture," Rove told the magazine. "One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people's principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand."
Did you hear the reports about all that money to be made from online advertisements? In 2006 alone, Internet ad revenue was estimated at $16.8 billion USD. You have also likely heard of bloggers making thousands of dollars in just a short amount of time through online ads. If you believe this is another post about making money from online ads or how to optimize your site for the search engines, you are going to be disappointed. I'm not here to tell you how to make money online but when you shouldn't be making money from advertisement on your site.