The points system doesn't exist to promote fairness.  It doesn't exist to encourage competition.  It's not even designed to encourage bloggers to blog more.

The points system is designed spefically to promote articles and bloggers that have already gained a readership.  It doesn't care what you write about.  It doesn't care whether you're a liberal or a conservative.  It doesn't care what color your skin is or what sex you are.  It simply designed to promote those who have already succeeded.

And it does this because we assume that those who have gained significant readership of either their articles or their blogs will have written things casual visitors to the site might be interested which in turn might make them more likely to return visit or create a blog themselves.

That's why we have it.  And as a practical result, people who consistently write about cool and interesting things tend to gain readers over time who in turn return to read other things they've written. 

That's what motivated me to create this site in the first place.  I have seen so many good bloggers creating truly insightful things on the net on various "blog" sites only to find that they never get read.  Never get comments. And hence get lost in the noise of cyberspace.

But on Joeuser, what you write gets syndicated to other Stardock.net based sites.  Recent articles all get their shot by being listed in the newest articles.  People who consistently blog have a good chance at being ranked highly. And so that same great blogger, here on JoeUser, is likely to gain a readership. 

I've seen, over the past couple of years, bloggers who have left for one reason or another. And they quickly discover that all the comments and readers they got on JoeUser don't transfer too well because, despite how obvious the JoeUser idea is, it is still (to my knowledge) the world's only blog community on the net (of course, given the technical hassles JU has, it's obviously non-trivial to implement such an interconnected system <g>).

The foundation for all this is the points system.  Without it, we're just another blogspot or live journal or whatever in which people write in perfect isolation.  And I don't know about others, but if I wanted to write things that no one else was going to read, I'd keep a private journal .

The pilot episode of PowerUser.TV is nearly complete and for the third segment of the first episode we cover Yahoo's acquisition of the popular widget enabler, Konfabulator.  Myself and Andrew Powell (developer of Kapsules) talk to Kristin Hatcher about what we think it means to widget developers everywhere.

In about 10 days we are going to do a points audit on the site.  Every time someone makes a comment, post, etc. they receive points for it. It's recorded in a log.

I know, from casual inspection, that some people have far more points than their available # of comments and articles could possibly warrant. 

Now I have a confession to make, I've been very competitive in my life and I've played the system my share of times. I haven't done so here since I'm the #1 user because I know the easiest way to get lots of points -- get other sites to link to what I write which brings lots of readers.  I have many articles with over 50,000 points for instance that have only a couple of comments.  All because people came here to read them.

But many others have taken other routes that we're aware of to get their points up.  That's going to come to an end soon as all scores will be recalculated based on what is actually present on JU.

Stardock has released IconX 1.1.  IconX is a program that enhances your existing Windows desktop icons. When run, your desktop icons instantly look better. IconX can add shadows to your icons, graphical backgrounds to your icon text, sound effects to different mouse interactions with your icons, animated effects for different events, and even automatically have icons zoom up on mouse over (something users used to do by hand with DesktopX).  Users can save their different setups as IconX themes that can be shared with others. Users can also replace their desktop icon images with PNG files instead of only being able to use .ICO files.

IconX is available on its own or as part of Object Desktop.  Its home page is https://www.stardock.com/products/iconx

DesktopX PRO allows users to export widgets as GADGETS.  Gadgets are like widgets in nearly every way except for one crucial difference: They don't require a parent program in order to use. 

As cool as widgets are, there's only so much work that a typical ambitious software developer is going to put into something that they then have to say "Oh, yea, um, to run my widget, you need to go to <insert site here> and download this widget program in order to use what I made." 

Even with Yahoo's recent acquisition of popular widget enabler, Konfabulator, it still requires users to go off and download the 8 to 10 megabyte Yahoo Widget enabler (Konfabulator) just to use a 600k widget.  The same is true of DesktopX widgets and all the others.

But with GADGETS they're stand-alone.  The Neowin gadget is one example. They're still only 800k or so, use little memory and are easy to create but they don't require any extra downloads.  The Vista Explorer is another gadget example. It's only 500K (the 1.5 meg ZIP file contains both a Vista web browser AND file manager, both gadgets).

So getting to the point: Stardock is about to launch DesktopGadgets.com.  A place for people to submit their gadgets either to give-away OR to sell.  When the user uploads their gadget, they set their price. Sales are split 50/50 between the developer and the site.  It'll be heavily moderated so only high quality gadgets will be allowed.

If you are interested in creating gadgets, first you'll need DesktopX Pro. Once you've created a gadget that you think is good, contact me ([email protected]) about being part of the opening launch of DesktopGadgets.com.  And if you know someone who makes gadgets already make sure they know about this news item!

The second segment of PowerUser.TV's first episode is now on-line for viewing.  Next Monday will be the official unveiling of PowerUser.TV.

This segment has myself and Kristin Hatcher discussing a new website called SimplyFired. It is a website dedicated to letting people share their termination experiences along with a contest in which the winners will meet The Donald.

A long-time friend of mine is facing real difficulties right now over at the site he helped create -- deviantART.com.

It's almost a text-book example of business men vs. engineers on the surface.  The idea guys, the founders, the visionaries versus the suits, money men, and biz guys.

In these situations, the biz guys almost always win because they are the ones who have put together all the legal paperwork for the company and can make sure they are legally unassailable by founders who, too often, agree via a handshake or via email.

At Stardock, I founded the company alone. I was both the engineer and the biz guy.  I don't have to contend with a board of directors or shareholder votes.  This comes up on occasion when some infuriated customer or user sends a nastygram to our customer service department because I've told them off or whatever.  Typically, companies don't reach the size of Stardock without investors and business developers.  I would be the first to admit that we'd probably be a lot more successful financially today if we had a few suits helping to run things.  But next time I'm tempted, I'll remind myself of what Jark has gone through.

We now enter the realm of raw speculation.  But back in 2000, a couple of guys had an idea -- to create an art community called deviantART.  It would be a bit different than other sites in that the focus of the site would be about the artists and not the users. This was a radical idea at the time.  When Stardock created WinCustomize.com the focus of the site was on the users first and the artists second.  It was assumed, with I think good reason at the time, that there's a lot more users than artists.  But deviantART believed that there were millions and millions of would-be artists out there and no central place for them to congregate.

As a result, deviantART automatically gave each artist their own sub-domain and encouraged them to interact with one another.  For instance, mine is frogboy2.deviantart.com.  The primary visionary in all this, from what I recall, was a 28 year old visionary named Scott Jarkoff.  With his friend "Matteo" they coded the basics of the site. 

The site grew at a steady rate until they teamed up with a very young guy named Angelo who was, I believe, around 19 years old at the time.  From what I've seen, he is a gifted young business man.  And he was able to provide the site what amounted to unlimited bandwith.  He also brought in guys who created a network infrastructure to support much higher traffic.  The site was relaunched and quickly grew from being an Alexa ranked site of around 6,000 to an Alexa ranked site of 800 (800th most popular in the world).  Today it's in the top 500.

Both guys deserve immense credit for what they've done.  But there is always the question of ultimate control.  At the end of the day, one guy is going to call the shots at any company.  And that guy became Angelo (Spyed).   Over time, he came to control not just the behind the scenes business but slowly emerged as the front-man for the company.  As a result, he tended, especially in the media, to get the lion's share of credit for deviantART even though it was really mostly Jark who had the vision and overall idea and most importantly, the elbow greese to put the site in a position to go to the next level.  Jark and Matteo created deviantART.  Angelo took it to the next level. 

A lot of the issue today has to do with a basic disagreement -- what was Angelo's involvement at the beginning? Can he really be considered a co-founder?  That's not for me to say.  But I don't think it's accurate to put Angelo on the same level as Jark and Matteo.   To me, the issue is simple -- remove Jark and would there have been a deviantART? The answer, I believe, is no.  Take Angelo out and there's still a deviantART albeit a much smaller, niche site.

Stardock today is a multi-million dollar company.  But if some big time business guy came on and took over as CEO and took Stardock to being a multi-billion dollar company, would it be right to call him the founder?  After all, if Stardock were a $10 billion company, then of how much significance are the days when the company's grosses were measured in the low millions range? Is that time really significant next to the billion-dollar verison? 

How you answer that is probably similar to how one would look at the deviantART situation.  deviantART today brings in around 20 million unique visitors per month.  Once Angelo took over, the site went from being a 300k uniques per month to a 3 million uniques per month within a year. How significant is the time when the site was really little more than a niche art site with some cool ideas? 

I'm an engineer so I take things literally. Jark and Matteo founded deviantART and Angelo made it a business success.  Jark's motivation was probalby doing something unique, cool, and interesting and his initial desired reward comes in the form of kudos, acclaimations, and glory (for lack of a better word).  Hence, I suspect that that what stings Jark more than the money is that Spyed (Angelo) seems to have rewritten things such that he was the visionary and driving force behind the site rather than Jark.  As a result, Angelo's in the position to reap both the financial benefits and the glory of the site.

Don't underestimate glory.  I confess that I myself worry more about "the community" than making "big bucks" very often.  Money is merely a score-card, recognition matters more to me and I suspect Jark is much the same.  Perhaps from Jark's standpoint, Spyed is attempting to get money and recognition for things that he hasn't warranted said recognition.

I think we'll know more over the coming weeks.  In the meantime, I guess I'll take solace in the words of my wife "See, it may a bit of a bummer not to have partners to have helped build the business but you don't have to worry about someone usurping me."  Well, not for a high price-tag anyway.

Stardock has released Natural Desktop 2006 v1.5 today.  Natural Desktop is a desktop enhancement program that looks at your current local weather, the time of day, the time of year and then applies a wallpaper, sound track, and animations based on that data.

If you're stuck inside working on a summer day, Natural Desktop is just the cure for that.  Listen to morning doves singing in the morning or cicadas in the afternoon, crickets in the evening. The sound tracks were put together by famed composer, Mason Fischer to sound just like what one would expect if they were outside.  The wallpapers were created by Ryan Bliss, owner of the well known wallpaper site, Digital Blasphemy.  The unique animated weather elements were designed and programmed by Matt Crocket, well known here as "Tiggz".

The program is immensely configurable with users turning on and off various elements of Natural Desktop along with being able to add their own sound tracks, wallpapers, and other parts to the included library of sounds and graphics.  Version 1.5 is a nearly complete rewrite by Laurence Parry who has gone through and implemented a host of optimizations and new features.  Natural Desktop is only $9.95. Proceeds from it help pay for WinCustomize.com and support other unique, cool projects of this kind.

New features & changes include:

• Fast zip-code lookup that gives the user the option to find multiple local weather stations to choose from.
• Will display an extended 5-day forecast for most places in the US.
• Enhanced support for European and other international locales for weather reporting
• Links to infrared and satellite images now available.
• Clouds move at a speed based on the local weather conditions (wind speed)
• Preferences now stored in local directory rather than registry for faster performance.
• Lots of fixes, tweaks, etc.   

Screenshots:
  

Website:
www.naturaldesktop.com   

Here's a page that gives a brief run down on a whole bunch of graphics design programs that work with vectors (instead of bitmaps).  Check it out.