Slashdot Mirror

What is happening in both Brazil and Russia is that people in the big towns and people who have international connections tend to use Facebook. You can't keep contact with your friends in Europe with Orkut or Vkontakte, and after a while, Facebook wins because it's a better system and because people don't want to use two systems (people do use two systems for a while, but then Facebook wins). There are many many more examples, you can take a look at the pretty old, but still valid State of Facebook Competition that I wrote last year.

In USA there was a social difference between MySpace and Facebook, where the students used Facebook and annoying kids used MySpace. Eventually Facebook won because it was less annoying to browse around. Now it's the nerds that are using Google+, but they kind of fail to attract more people. If you want to read something from a nerd, just read his (or maybe "her") blog, Twitter, FB and so on... No need to register for Google+ for that.

Here in Sweden Facebook has had a little of backlash among kids, because they don't want to be on the same site as their parents and teachers. But I think it's something they have learnt to handle now.

Seriously: Get your moralist myths against the wall and shoot them! Kids get hurt by beatings, rapes and overprotecting parents, not by seeing nudity or learn about sex. That is fact and nothing for sane people to debate.

I'm been running Elftown for 9 years, and we allow all ages and we ban the moralist pigs who say that they will report us to the police (Well, very rarely, of course. We just tell them to get their act together or we'll ban them).

And I very much want my cousin's children on FB. Otherwise I'll know nothing about them.

I think the way to go as an advertiser is to select a site whose visitors you want as customers. Then pay that site for every sale to someone that is also a member of the other site. In this way you get away from screaming "Come and buy!" and get more into sponsoring which is generally giving a more positive thing.

The publishers would show the ads that make branding (not selling ads) on their pages according to how the advertiser want them. When the ad is shown, it's done so in an iframe that sets a cookie. If the customer goes directly to the advertiser to buy (regardless of following the link) without passing any other publisher's ads of the same kind, then the first publisher get credits. The advertiser can also write "We are considered a good seller by: Slashdot, Elftown .. and so on" on their site.

This would take us away from the damn "forcing the user to click" hell. With this method the advertisers can buy trust from the site they are playing the ad on, instead of visibility, and it's often way more important.

This kind of advertising would work great both for advertisers and publishers on sites like Slashdot or my own Elftown. It would not work for the crap-sites (well, no advertiser would use them) that has no valuable content, no returning customers, but that make huge amounts of money on that people click on their ads to get away from the site.

The downside for advertisers is that they have to pay for their old customers that return, but the price for that is lower than paying for "new customers" that usually aren't old, but fraud or allowed but similar type of clicks.

I don't make much money at all and can't live on it, but I guess they made more money by having really crappy content so that people are more likely to click the ads.

Is there any better ways to make money from a free website except by forcing people to click on links? It is great advertising to be present on my site, but my visitors will simply not click on ads and advertisers don't pay for branding.

Mandriva isn't perfect, but I'm not in the mood to learn another package system after learning RPM (and Mandriva's urpmi-tool) so Ubuntu isn't really interesting until I really have to.

I'm really not happy about that they aren't shipping Firefox 3 though. Right now I think I have a badly (halfly) updated Mandriva 2008-2008.1 system that can't run Firefox 3 properly. I have no spelling-control (I hope that isn't seen in this posting...) and GIF-images bigger than 420px*152px will not show (Firefox 3 in Wine 1.0 works just fine though, and it works fine on my mother's Mandriva 2008.0). So an upgrade with RPM-dependency Firefox 3 would be nice. Although I have to say that the installation programming and instruction documentation for Firefox 3 on Linux are way beyond shit. No instructions available in the dist, only a link to a non-working URL, no checking if you have the libs needed, no bloody nothing! Even Sun's Java was easier to install correctly... (And that demanded looking at a web-page, doing some very specific copying to the right dirs and an ldconfig-command, if I remember correctly.).

Then the deletionists could simply set the importance of an article to 0, and then others who think it's important (or it has become important) could simply increase it. And people searching Wikipedia would find the unimportant article, but last in the list.

What they do make money of is taking requests. People pay for getting a special piece of art created for them. And no one could be happier than the artist if those pieces are copied as much as Mona Lisa as it's free marketing for their services (which is producing art, not revealing secret information that you're not allowed to copy). If you think about it, you realize that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is a great example of art paid by product placement (where the product in this case is the religion) but it's not a bad piece of art even if you don't like the product in question.

I however have no problem with copyright (as long as it's limited in time) that makes it illegal to sell things like for example DVDs, t-shirts and books that are based on copyrighted material. What I have a problem with is government trying to restrict and control information charing between individuals.

I've thought a lot about adding applications to my social networking sites Elfpack and Elftown, but so far it only seems to make the user experience worse.

Windows: 93.75%
Mac: 4.93%
Linux: 0.71%
Unknown: 0.26%
Playstation: 0.26%
The rest: less than 0.10%

As Elftown is an artist community, there is a little bias towards Mac, but it's not big and these numbers are very close to the internationally average user. Elftown runs on Linux and is of course 100% Linux compatible. To be honest, I don't care much about (Safari or Firefox) on Mac though, but they seem to work fine except a few problems I've forgotten about now.

If you just want to read/look at scifi stories and art, Elfwood http://www.elfwood.com/ is much easier to access, and it's free. And at the spin-off sites like Elftown http://www.elftown.com/ and Writersco http://www.writersco.com/ you can have a much more intime conversations with or between the writers and artists. But there are also some pretty bad amateurs there, but many see that as a feature, not a bug.