Sometimes life throws you surprising ironies that you can’t help but just bury your head in sorrow, like an ex-girlfriend becoming your boss or the office jerk winning the lottery.

Google aspires to overcome facebook as the number 1 social networking site by launching things like +1 and Google+, however in a surprising twist of fate the number 1 user on Google+ was none other than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. You almost hear the collective ‘DOH!’ from the googleplex echo through silicon valley. Homer Simpson would be proud.

The situation is made even worse by the fact that the 2nd most popular user on the social networking site is Google co-founder Larry Page, missing out on the  number 1 spot by more than 20,000 followers. Marks probably thinking to himself, If Google can’t even beat me in their own back yard how do they intend to beat me when facebook really starts competing?

Social media and sites like twitter have done fantastically well to enable to arab uprising or finding bone marrow donors. However, a group of people decided to use social media to answer some fundamentally important question , or rather just one very important question…who missed call me?

The web site (very aptly named) whocallsme.com allows user to post up missed calls from numbers they don’t recognize and people with similar calls usually try to respond. The response rate is pretty good although it mostly focuses on calls from credit agencies (quite obvious once you think about it)

Imagine for a moment you’re an ancient social activist, somewhere in Babylon or Persia, or even ancient Rome, and you’ve just uncovered a secret of money laundering among elected officials. Armed with this information and a burning desire to expose the elected official you march out to tell the world of his exploits and hopefully stand over him in the expectation of swift justice to be executed.

How would you do it?

If you like most ancient social activist (if ever there were) would go out to the streets and shout it aloud, you’d meet the judges and the kings, and you may have your story heard. However, if you were known to be a troublemaker (as most social activist are) you’d probably not be taken seriously (at best) or even executed (at worst). This was how it was in the ancient world, where money bought power and the control of information was strongly held by those with power and by extension the money.

Mission Accomplished…GWB style!

When I started this blog on my birthday, I wasn’t so sure what was going to happen. I didn’t have a target, I didn’t have a goal and all I wanted to do was to start a website and keep it to myself.

Over time as I learnt about the awesomeness of wordpress, and the wonderful stuff you can do on the web, I knew I had to share that or at least write about it. So I started blogging about setting up wordpress blogs or Joomla on nearlyfreespeech, dreamhost and amazon web services. If you didn’t know how much I loved wordpress, let me tell you now…I Love it a Lot !!(arms stretched wide open)

So I set about a goal to create a blog that would get a modest hit rate of 1000 hits a month, and as of yesterday I finally crossed that target and now have had 1003 hits in the past 30 days….AMAZING!

A couple of days ago, I met some guys from Amazon web services strutting their stuff out in a brilliant presentation about cloud computing. Now I must admit I haven’t been the most ardent cloud computing follower (I wasn’t really sure what it meant) , but I was ‘converted’ by these guys….to the point where I wanted to dive in and learn about the cloud.

And in keeping with my belief that the best way to learn is to do, I decided to host a website on Amazon Web Services and see if it really could be setup in minutes (as promised by Amazon). Amazon also promised year long free trial of their EC2 platform, basically you get a very small virtual machine hosted on Amazon for free (for a whole year), which was too damn ridiculous to turn down. So if Amazon was spot on their promises you could setup a wordpress site on Amazon in minutes AND it would cost you nothing for the first year…now that IS interesting.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being….

QR codes may be making that all important comeback. Apparently QR codes were all the craze a couple of months ago, but now (just like the Royal Wedding) seem to be out of fashion. Fortunately, though there seems to be life left in this brilliant invention. The Wikimedia blog recently made a strange (yet interesting) announcement that they’re launching QRPedia.

Wikimedia are the guys behind wikipedia and they’re using the great power of QR codes by offering a fantastic service via the wikipedia API.

Don’t worry if you didn’t understand that last sentence,here’s what it really means…The scenario is something like this, imagine you’re out in a Museum and you’re admiring a wonderful piece by a Van Gogh (as an example I’ll use Starry Night) , at the display there is also a QR Code which you can scan on your device (much like the guy in the picture is scanning QR Code). The QRCode takes you to the specific wikipedia article regarding Starry Night (or Van Gogh, it’s entirely the Museums choice). So far so good.

What’s different now, is the wikipedia API can detect your language setting. So if you’re phone is set for French or German, it will take you to the French Wikipedia article on starry night and you can enjoy more facts about starry night in your native language.

I’ve been using twitter for some time now, as I hope to make it the default social media for promoting my blog. Thanks for platforms like bufferapp and bit.ly, I can track how often people visit my website from twitter. The result aren’t good, in fact I’d be lucky if a tweet was able to garner 2 hits to my website, most of the time it hovers around an agonizing ZERO!!

So what am I doing wrong?

In the broad spectrum of the animal kingdom where you have the Lone Predator on one end and the Hyper-Connected Ants on the other , Humans are surprisingly much closer to the Ants than we are to that solitary Puma trolling the Jungles of Peru (although it may be a lot more interesting to be a puma). Humans are built (or even programmed) to be with other humans, to share our thoughts and emotions and to connect on a emotional level with others. It helps us build bonds and survive, but also has massive physiological effects on our bodies and mind.

In an amazing book by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler that dealt with surprising power of social networks, aptly titled Connected addressed this particular drive by humans to connect with others. The book was a best-seller and even made it to Oprahs Fall Reading Guide (which means it has to be really good if Oprahs reading it).

What is a top-level domain, in simple terms it’s the part of the url after the last ‘.’ , so in my case my blogs url is http://keithrozario.com , my top-level domain would be .com.

There’s a long list of top level domains besides the regular ‘.com’ that you should be aware of if you’re hoping to start a website. Consider the case of Guy Kawasaki who bought 55 domains for his startup truemors, just to prevent cyber squatters from getting their hands on an obscure truemors url. If that doesn’t convince you, take a look at one of my favorite blogs, the EvilHRLady who in her own words: