I’ve long been a great fan of all things Google, even when they weren’t exactly producing top quality stuff (like Google Wave), I stuck by them through thick and thin. That being said, it’s been more good than bad, sure they had a rough patch with Wave and Google Buzz, and yes Google+ isn’t exactly the Facebook killer it was tauted to be. However, think of all the really cool stuff they’re doing, consider the fact that I literally LIVE on Googles Cloud, all my email is on GMail, there isn’t a single day that goes by that I don’t get my daily dose of blogs via Google Reader and I do Google Searches at least 10 times a day. So overall Google is still pretty good in my book.

Be that as it may though, one of the hallmark of successful innovators is that they know when to call it quits. Google has already shelved Google Buzz, and spun off Google Wave as Apache Wave. Which begs the question of what would replace Buzz.

If you’ve wondered what happened to my 30-day challenge to blog everyday….well it didn’t go so well. So far, I’ve fallen short last Friday (although I posted twice the next Saturday) and then missed posting this Friday and Saturday as well, turns out my challenge is pretty much over. Although, I’m still persevering, I guess even if I complete the remaining 20-odd days, I’ll always ‘know’ I missed 3 days!!

Now I’m not one to make excuses but the reason I missed these last 2 days was because I was trying to get my blog migrated from nearlyfreespeech (who are awesome by the way) to dreamhost. It took me a while to figure out all the nooks and cranies and nearly 4 hours to complete the migration. I’ll blog about migrating your wordpress once it’s done.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled onto a website by mozilla claiming “The internet we know and love is at risk”. Now I’m not one to panic but this was some serious stuff here, Mozilla is a company I admire and respect, so if it tells me something serious is going down, I stand up and pay attention.

Further reading brought on a couple of key points, namely that Mozilla was talking about the new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was designed to stop online piracy, but what it would effectively do was make give copyright holders essentially too much control over their copyrighted material. Now copyright holders undoubtedly have legal rights to their work, but giving them the right to shut down YouTube because someone sang their song and posted a video takes that a bit too far.

Mozilla also claim:

The fact is that this legislation as written won't stop piracy. But it would pose a serious threat to social media and user generated content sites (like YouTube) across the internet. It could also undermine some of the core technical systems underlying the internet, creating new cybersecurity risks.

As a non-profit committed to keeping the web open and accessible to all, Mozilla wants to ensure that this legislation does not jeopardize the foundational structure of the Internet.

Day 3 of my 30 challenge to blog everyday, and I’m already running of ideas and places to blog. I’m now in the waiting room of a my car workshop waiting as the foreman changes the tyres on my car. A couple of years ago, working in these environments would be unthinkable, you could either go to the workshop or work from the office, you couldn’t do both, but now…I can.

A couple of years before that, everyone was bunkered down with wired connection that made silly noises when connecting, in the good ol’ days we used to call that dial-up, rewind just a tad-bit more and you’d reach a age where you had to wired up to make a phone call. No cellphones and if you wanted to contact someone you’d have to have their 7 digit phone number and a pay phone to make that call from. Sounds a lot different from what we have today, but it’s true.

I recently finished the first chapter of Bounce, and found the content surprisingly similar to material I’ve read from Talent is overrated by Geoff Calvin,  Mindset by Carol Dweck and a chapter from Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw entitled The Talent myth (I didn’t read outliers), and it seems to be the same ol’ vertabim if you want to get better at something, practice it a lot.

I personally haven’t read Outliers, but in it Gladwell expounds the virtue of practice and even creates a new 10,000 hour theory. The theory implies that with the right amount of practice anyone can achieve excellence in their fields. It even goes as far as saying that with the right amount of practice that excellence can never be denied to you, In essence guaranteeing that you will be great so long as you put in 10,000 hours of practice into your subject.

Why 10,000. The theory actually stems from 10 years of practice, but the practicality of it is that you can only consistently spend 1,000 hours every year practicing. Spend more than 1,000 and you’re likely to fizzle out. Upon reading this, I did a little calculation in my head. If I worked 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that’s just 40 hours a week. A year has 52 weeks, and that means roughly 2000 working hours. Practically that amounts to 1700-1800 hours (minus holidays and leave). Which means to be an ’expert’ in any field requires about 60% of your working hours on practicing your ‘art’ or your area of expertise and that’s time a lot of people don’t have. Or is it?

While blogging over the weekend, I stumbled across an interesting article on marketing blogs. Part of the article advised on creating a blog identity, a sort of superhero that represented the blog. This would make your blog more memorable and thus help differentiate your blog in a very very crowded space. A superhero could be something quite simple, just a adjective and a noun and one of my favorite blogs, the evil HR lady springs to mind. Although I read the blog so often, I can’t remember the name of the author, but the branding is persistent and it just sticks. So I thought I’d create an online persona that fit my blog and a logo to go along with it. After all, keith’s blog is just as memorable as John’s blog or Mark’s blog, there really is nothing ‘sticky’ about it.

I’ve started this blog ‘journey’ about 7 months ago and so far it’s been great. The experience has been a real eye opener on how technology and social media work, and now I’m beginning to develop an understanding on how hits make their way over to keithrozario.com.

For instance, even though I grew my twitter followers from zero to 350, the traffic from twitter seems really paltry. Something of the order of 2-3 hits/month. With the amount of effort I put into twitter, to say 2-3hits/month is disappointing is an understatement. I think the reason for this is that people go on twitter to search for news, not for tutorials or how-to’s.Most of my blog entries are either reviews of certain web apps or tutorials, and not so much ’news’, and that’s probably the reason twitter isn’t getting me those hits. Another possible reason is 350 isn’t the right amount of people to generate those hits.

Previously I shared how I reached my target of getting 1000 hits/month on my blog. To many that’s a pittance of a target, considering some bloggers average that in a day. However, blogging isn’t just about getting the hits, to me it was also a period of self-discovery, to truly see what I could do and what could be achieved once the gloves were off, and to be honest I loved every moment of it.

Even though I work in IT for one of the biggest corporations in the world, I felt I couldn’t really explore the cool IT stuff I’m so passionate about. I may for a Fortune 500 company that reports profits in the Billions of dollars, but up until last year I was using a laptop that had Windows 2000 installed. That’s a 10 year old piece of software (and OS mind you) that I was running, and people say IT moves quickly??

As the final part of my series on stuff you can do with Amazon, I’ve already blogged about how you can share files using amazon S3 and hosting a static website on amazon S3. Now as a final part on what you can do with your FREE amazon web services account is to host a torrent file. A torrent file would allow you to share stuff online, and not pay for the full bandwidth cost of doing it, provided your leechers share the burden as well.

The concept is really simple, Amazon S3 can act as a torrent tracker as well as a storage facility, so it’s an all in one package that ensures that your torrent is tracking and there will be at least 1 tracker :)

Yesterday, I blogged on how to share files on Amazon S3, today I’ll show you how you can host a webpage on amazon S3. Now Amazon S3 is a simple storage service, and all it does it store files, but if you store a html file you can change this simple storage service into a webhost.

How does it work? Simple.

If you store a picture file (jpeg for example), and then share a url to everyone. Chances are people will click that URL and it’ll open the picture in a browser. However, if you share a html file, then people clicking on that URL will be able to view a web page on their browser and they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, because that’s essentially what webhost do anyway, they merely store your html file.