Second Life is one of those companies that just continues to amaze me in regards to how it is connecting with ‘real’ society and also how it continues to be a very profitable and expanding business/network. Always open with their metrics, SL released a newly updated Virtual Economy Metrics Excel notebook document (what no Google Documents or OpenOffice? how 1.0 icky) highlighting their various growth patterns.
Some highlights:
Total Hours Used:
Sept 2003 51,699
January 2007 10,817,668
Currency Exchange Summary
July 2006 USD Sales: $2,203
January 2007 USD Sales: $622,839
TechCrunch is estimating that Second Life is pulling in around $670,000/month in ‘hosting revenue’ or real estate sold in SL. That’s almost 8.1 million dollars per year, and with the kind of growth they have been showing that’s only going to increase in 2007.
I’ve blogged about many security and privacy issues over the years and I’m always on the lookout for new tools that will help me protect my privacy and keep ‘the man’ from snooping on what I do online. DemocraKey.com popped up on my radar and I checked out the website to see what it actually offers. DemocraKey is a small collection of tools bundled up to run on any flash media or even your ipod. The applications included are Clamwin (virus scanner) Torpark (private browsing) and Thunderbird with a GPG plugin to allow secure email transmission. It’s a 50mb download so it should fit on almost any removable flash media you may have.
Imagine carrying a portable security suite with you wherever you go. Walk up to any computer, quickly scan it for viruses, and then defeat any internet access blocks to view any website you want anonymously. It’s here, and the DemocraKey 2.0 Lite let’s you have it on your iPod.
I’ve used TorPark and some Portable Apps for several years and think they’re both great projects. Torpark takes a great privacy tech in Tor and bundles it with every geek’s favorite web browser Firefox which produces an incredibly easy to use private browsing experience. No configuring proxies, no funny business, just launch the browser and wait a few seconds for the Tor circuit to initialize and you’re off browsing.
Features
* Protect your computer from viruses with a security enhanced version of Firefox
* Visit sites that are blocked by your school/employer/government
* Hide your internet actions with Tor
* Encrypt personal emails with GPG
* Scan your computer with portable built in Antivirus software
* Runs from any portable media – iPod, USB key, Digital Camera…
* It’s FREE and Open Source!
I follow the so called Web 2.0 industry fairly close, I monitor and review new startups and hold accounts with dozens of Web 2.0 and older 1.0 websites. Keeping track of all these companies becomes quite a chore and after the initial buzz has warn off a lot of times these 2.0 startups fade into the oblivion. Movers 2.0 is a Metrics tool that attempts to track the overall popularity and rank of the top Web 2.0 properties.
The Movers 2.0 project was created by Eran Arkin, one of the developers on the eSnips team, in his spare time (which is not much these days). He was looking for something similar online and couldn’t find anything that allows people to track Web 2.0 metrics without working too hard. After we got addicted to it here at eSnips, we decided to let everyone enjoy it.
Topping the list is of course YouTube followed by MySpace and Orkut from Google. The most interesting aspect of the system is the Alexa traffic graphs and the convenient Compete links for each listing. Another cool feature is the Weekly and Daily movers. This shows the current hot companies and how fast and far they’re moving up.
Recently DG of Speaking Freely ran a popular story that bubbled up on Digg and del.icio.us about what to do with your PC when you have no Internet connection. I read the article and was generally unimpressed by DG’s ideas for the lonely few who can’t get online.
Here’s what he said in a nut shell:
-Clean out and categorize your bookmarks.
-Delete programs you don’t use.
-Unplug your PC, take the cover off and clean out the dust.
-Write your next blog post.
-Run any maintenance programs you don’t have auto-scheduled.
-Write down your logins and passwords for all your sites, blogs, email accounts, Adsense, affiliate programs, where you purchased your domain names, etc. All that information is the key to your business.
That last one is really long, and the whole list makes me want to stab myself in the eye. Here’s 10 Better things to do with no Interweb (in no particular order)
1. Don’t do any of the things here.
2. Play one of your games. I know, some of them are online only but I’m sure you have a few that you can play in single player or offline practice. Game on.
3. Organize your Porn collection. While this task is very lame in the organizing sense, it usually leads to distraction and the excitement level rises sharply.
4. Create and Edit a Video. No you can’t upload to GooTube but you can shoot, cut and burn some movies while you’re waiting to get back in connection.
5. Listen to Music, Burn Some new CD’s. Yes this is an oldy but a goody but still presents some fun, listen to your tunes, burn some new mixes for the road and see what old music you can discover.
6. Photoshop some Images. Take some family shots and some of your friends passed out drunk and have some fun. You can’t get fresh material from Google Images or Flickr but you can have some local hard disk fun making new images for the Fark forums.
7. Screw around with Linux. You provably have 86 Linux discs burned sitting around from the last 6 months. Take some old hardware or if you dare your own rig and have some Linux fun. Create that media server you always wanted or attach those laser beams to your toaster.
8. Design a new Website. Fire up Photocrap once again or Fireworks if you prefer and create a new layout and design identity for your super popular Kevin Rose uber mega ultra fan site.
9. Watch TV . Yes this is a lazy one but for those with a nice TV card you can just fire up the old boob tube and watch some Family Guy and Stephen Colbert.
10. Hardware Upgrade. This of course depends on your access to new goodies but time spent offline can be spent buying and upgrading essential hardware.
That’s my list, I hope you like it and I hope you spend your offline time wisely.
(no the screenshot above is not just an empty black screen)
Forget Google Documents and Zoho, Writer by John Watson and BigHugeLabs.com is lean and mean and gets you started immediately. I like Writer for a few reasons, first because it’s black and has the uber geeky green text, and second because it’s so very lean. It welcomes you and asks you to begin typing, saving a document just happens with no fuss and composing new documents is easy as well, all without opening an account even.
The application I was thinking of using this for is composing some of my blog posts, or at least using this tool to check the word count of my WordPress postings. It has a blog posting feature built in, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Here’s what John says about Writer, or rather himself…
Writer was written by me, John Watson. I’m a freelance web developer and I’d love for you to hire me for your next web project. You can find out more about me at: http://watson-net.com/
