Discuss With Us is a web2.0 app that is currently still in development, based around the Q&A model we’re all familiar with at this point. Unlike the other Q&A applications we’ve seen, Discuss With Us uses a weighted “passion” system to determine which response suits the question the best. As an example of this I found the questions, “What pet is the best?”. There were several answers already available, but I decided to enter a new one, “Snake”.

After I entered this new answer my passion level for the answer automatically was defaulted at “Middle of the road” which gave it a 7% weight, with the top answer, dog, having a 30% weight. I feel Snakes are way cooler than dogs so I decided to change my passion level to “Hell yes”, which brought the weight up to 12%. This is a really well thought out system which is why I like it.

The site design itself is very plain and leaves a lot to the imagination, and a little more color and navigation wouldn’t hurt at all. When you go to the signup page you’ll see a large disclaimer as it appears that this is actually a sponsored case study done by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which makes it less of a web2.0 app and more of a survey.

Overall the concept is nothing new, but they do their best to give it a new spin.

I haven’t been able to do a whole lot of posting due to being extremely busy at my job, but guess what!? I’m back! That’s right folks, superjustin.com will be back in the next week or so with some great new reviews, including those of which that have been flooded into my inbox, sorry for the delay in getting to those by the way.

Here is what you can expect:

• A brand new design
• A complete re-organization of existing categories and reviews
• Better reviews for the latest and greatest in Web2.0
• Every review is free and will be posted daily.

Koonji is Hindi for ‘Key’ or ‘Cliff Notes’ and that’s exactly what the beta-staged Web2.0 app that I’m going to review today is offering, a way to share your knowledge in various topics in a step-by-step format providing the user with the best experience possible.

Koonji’s are simply step-by-step guides on almost any subject, you have the ability to search through existing Koonji’s as well as publish your own.  The social-networking craze has brought up new applications almost on a weekly basis, with not all of them being useful.  Koonji has a great concept and such a means of helping others or helping yourself will keep them alive for a good time to come.

Koonji also provides a toolbar that allows you to grab information when surfing the web which allows you to easily Koonji things.  I personally didn’t download the toolbar because I don’t like having them installed in my browser, but from what I can tell it seems to be a good option for those looking to use the service frequently.

It’s been a while but here’s another review for you. Plugoo is a service that provides an instant messenger directly on your website without having to give out your MSN/Yahoo/AIM address to a complete stranger. Plugoo supports MSN, AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, and even Jabber which is an amazing selection for the service.

It’s incredibly easy to setup your first Plugoo and took me about two minutes which included account activation and customizing the look of my Plugoo. Customizing your Plugoo includes the following options:

• Title
• Colors and Text Sizes
• User Authenticating
• Messages can be sent to your mailbox when offline

Not the biggest selection of customizations but more than enough for more of us to be happy with. I’ve setup a Plugoo for testing purposes here so if you want to leave me message feel free to.

Messages go through pretty quick and any tests that I did it took no longer than 15 seconds after I first initiated the conversation.

Spruz is a brand new web site creation system that is one of the most enhanced, in depth, and feature rich system I have ever seen while still keeping it simple for new users.  New users go through a simple wizard that helps get you off your feet and create your first web site.  Like any other system you have pre-built templates, but in Spruz’s case they provide you with about 100 so you have plenty of choices.

Site’s can be edited from a link directly on the site, so there isn’t any need to load a separate web site to change your own.  Advanced users can customize the CSS of their sites further in a simple editor.

Other advanced features include being able to edit your site’s properties easily, a file manager for easy uploads, and custom scripting to several different several sections in your web site, so you can make the site your own.

Here is the absolute kicker - You can include such things as a forum,shopping cart!, and full FTP access to your files.  If you’re interested in running a web site but aren’t sure where to start and don’t have the patients to learn HTML, then you probably shouldn’t have a web site (kidding), you can check out Spruz for yourself and get all the features you’ll ever need.

I tend to do a lot of my work at home because I like the relaxed working environment, and because I don’t like bringing my laptop to work it usually leads to me sending a lot of e-mails with large attached documents that fill up my e-mail pretty quick (IT hates me :)).  I finally realized the need for me to store my documents in one location online rather than sending them to my e-mail every time I updated one as this lead to problems where I would have the proper updated files, etc.

So in my search I came across a few services, but one that really caught my eye was ThinkFree.  They offered everything I needed and were absolutely free which made is ten times easier to sign up on the spot, and the fact that their tag line is ‘The Best Online Office On Earth’ kinda helped too!

So what do they offer?  Good question!  You get a free account with 1 GB of storage which was plenty for what I needed it for, and more importantly they offer online collaboration so my colleagues can edit the files anytime they want from their own computer, which is a huge time saver in any business.

The MyOffice interface offers three document types:  word, spreadsheets, and presentation; giving plenty of options for you and your office.  The interface itself is very clean and Web2.0ish, files are easy to navigate to and if you have a ton of documents uploaded you don’t have to worry about the screen looking cluttered.

What’s even better is that you can tag your documents for easy searching later on, or for the other people collaborating in the project.  The ThinkFree team really hit it out of the park with this one, and I highly recommend the application for anyone that needs an online document solution for business or personal.

Okay, so this post is in response to the post I made yesterday regarding the change of the Text Link ads referral links to that of TinyURL format links.  I received an e-mail this morning from Alex over at WP Text Ads letting me know about his Wordpress Ads Management plugin that allows you to sell text ads directly from your site without having to go through any type of outside source.

This begs the question - Would I be better off selling my text link ads myself, or letting Text Link Ads do it for me?  Their are definitely advantages and disadvantages to doing either so let’s go over the big ones.

When you let Text Link Ads sell your ads you get the advantage of a gigantic marketplace in which advertisers specifically choose your blog to advertise one, you don’t get this when selling your own text links and you need to hope that the visitors that are coming to your blog are willing to buy your text link directly from you.

Which brings my to my next point, pricing.  You can choose your own price when selling your own text links instead of having to use the TLA ads engine to determine how much your ads are worth, which is based several factors including Pagerank and Alexa rank.

Not only do you get to choose your own price per text link, but you also get the full amount without having to worry about TLA getting half of what you yourself have earned.  I’d like to think that being able to set your pricing scheme as well as getting the full amount paid will make up for not having that big database of advertisers to sell to, but I don’t think that it can unless you have a popular website that gets tons of traffic.

The Test

I’m going to test this anyway, so I’ve added the WP Text Ads plugin to SuperJustin.com and will be selling Text Links at the top of the navigation on the right on every single page on this blog for a mere $30, and other pricing/placements are available.  if you’re interested purchase one, it’s a great opportunity to get some targeted traffic from a popular website.

Marketplace

After installing the plugin I realized that the plugin provides a Marketplace for you to enter your information into the WP Text Ads marketplace so advertisers can find you easier.  Good luck in selling your text ads everyone!

I’d like to start off by saying that I really don’t like this.  As most of you people that are already signed up for Text Links may know, TLA has changed their referral link structure to use that of tiny URL (http://tinyurl.com) and will no longer be using the old referral links anymore.  I received the following e-mail message explaining the changes:

Justin,

As a Text Link Ads affiliate we?re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:

Homepage URL
http://tinyurl.com/3a4mgv

Starter Promo URL
http://tinyurl.com/2pf3ub

** Please note that our old affiliate URLs will no longer work in one week so please update today. Thank you!

I’m sorry but when I think of Tinyurl, I think of people trying to mask bad content in a way that no one will know what they are clicking on, I have never and will never click on a tinyurl link unless I create it myself.  In my personal opinion I think that the old referral links worked just fine, and were just the right size,

The trick is to hide the referral link from your visitors, and make it look like it’s just another ordinary link on your website, this can be done by a simple Meta redirect.  You’ve probably heard of this tactic elsewhere, and it actually helps.  Instead of my links being

http://tinyurl.com/3a4mgv

it’s

http://superjustin.com/now/tla.html

Simple - Yet Effective!

Growing up as a geeky little kid born in the 80’s my interests floated around a lot and it wasn’t until I received my first computer at age 9 that I realized where my true interests lie. I eventually got into learning HTML, making simple websites with tables - nothing special, but it kept me busy. My love for web development has only grown into other languages such as PHP and C# .Net which is why news of HTML 5 with new elements makes me a very happy boy.

IBM posted a great article on August 7th regarding the new elements and how each one will affect web development in the future making easier clearer HTML code with less work on the developers part. The main idea behind these elements is to provide cleaner markup by replacing the use of div/span with more suitable elements such as header and nav.

Here is a list of the new elements that will accompany HTML 5:

Structure
section
header
footer
nav
article

Block Semantic Elements
aside
figure
dialog

Inline Semantic Elements
mark
time
meter
progress

Embedded Media
video
audio