JoeUser is growing in leaps and bounds. A month ago the average number of
people on the site might be around 30 people. These days it's typically around
80 people at the same time with it being 175 as I type this. So things are going
pretty well. Of course, we've also had a of technical glitches as the site has
grown, we've had to make adjustments as we've started gaining unwanted attention
from hackers, griefers, and other undesirables. If you've had problems
posting articles to your blog in the last couple of days, that's been the cause
-- us adding features in a hurry to combat these types.
Addressing Hackers & Griefers
So now the site is more secure, your blogs are backed up very regularly to a
remote machine in case of catastrophic failure, and we have the ability to ban
people. Pat and I (T-man) became friends 15 years ago. We ran BBSes in those
days. Since that time we've built many net communities. The largest one we've
put together is called WinCustomize.com which gets over 2 million users per
month. With JoeUser, myself, Pat, and his team (DarkStar and Flying
Hawaian) have put what we've learned in that time into this site. So the
banning feature here is pretty cool in how it technically functions (it's based
on IP addresses and other things I won't get into to help make it hard for
someone to come back as someone else). We hope to add less severe
penalties and checks and balances to the system over time so that people can get
a second chance if they misbehave.
Blog Navigator
In the next week or so we plan to release Blog Navigator. Blog Navigator is a
program designed to read JoeUser like a news reader. It's still in the relative
early stages but it is pretty slick. It'll be free to view JoeUser but will have
some cost (probably $19.95 or something) to add non-JoeUser sites to browse
through. There are RSS readers out there, some of which are free, that are
reasonably nice but our goal is to make Blog Navigator so slick and useful that
it'll be worth it.
Premium Accounts
Creating a blog on JoeUser is free. Eventually though we plan to put in place
a way for people to pay a nominal fee in exchange for being able to upload
images and other things to their blog. Over time we'll be adding services
that will be available to premium accounts to make blogging easier. One feature
is that Blog Navigator will be able to eventually download your blog to your
machine so that you have it all locally whenever you want. I don't know about
you guys but I want to have 5 years of my blogs on some remote machine. I want a
way to have it backed up myself locally. And that is something we will be doing
in the coming months.
New Features for JoeUser itself
Some features coming up include the ability to enter in more information
about yourself if you choose. We are going to "force" every user to enter in
their age as we really need to start differentiating between adult users and
minors given some of the content that has come up. Similarly, authors will be
able to check a "Adult content" checkbox when they make an article so that
children won't be able to see the article. It won't be full proof by any means
but it's better than what we currently have (nothing).
The re-organization of the forums is nearly complete. Next week we'll be
consolidating some of the top level categories. For instance, instead of
Books, Movies, TV, etc. It'll all fall under the Entertainment category with
those sections becoming topics of Entertainment. That way there won't be so many
different categories to sift through.
We will also be adding the ability for authors to decide whether people can
comment on their article. The option will say: "Comments on your article? []
Anyone, []Registered users only, []No one. So someone who wants to just
write their blog without any comments will have that right. Or if they want to
make it so that only people who have accounts can respond that's good too.
We will also be adding features to let you upload a picture of yourself and
of your desktop. The personal information you choose to enter can optionally be
made available as part of your profile. Here's a simple version of what
we're thinking of from The Political Machine. It's not done yet but you can get
the idea:
https://www.politicalmachine.com/infoLite.asp?ID=879148.
Advocates
One feature deserves its own sub-heading : Advocates. As some of you no-doubt
have noticed, we don't get many referrals from other blog sites or anywhere for
that matter. What makes blogs special, IMO anyway, is that they are part
of a larger community. We need to become more integrated with the rest of the
blogsphere which will help your articles reach more viewers. The way to do that
will be by becoming an advocate. Since we track referrals, we could give
points to users who are associated with a particular site.
The way it works is that a user registers a given website with the advocate
system. Then, whenever that site sends a referral to JoeUser that user will get
a fraction of a point. We will also have a top advocates list as well to
highlight those users. It's a good way to encourage users to exchange
links with other blogs and sites elsewhere (called blog rolling) as well as give
recognition to those who are the best at evangelizing their blog (the link
doesn't have to be to www.joeuser.com, it
can be to your specific blog).
So in my case, I could register
www.wincustomize.com as a site and then every time they send a link here I'd
get a fraction of a point. Now, most people don't have such an easy advantage
since I can add links to both sites.
As for me...
I'm going to not be commenting nearly as much on other people's blogs. I
don't want to discourage anyone from writing and having the owner of the site
jumping on someone's article disagreeing with them might be a bit overwhelming.
So I'll keep my hands off until you get into the top 10 or so in general. 
It has been a real adjustment for me opening my blog site to the public to
have their own blogs. Particularly because many of the articles people post are
"debate" type topics. I belong to many mailing lists that essentially are for
"expert" debaters to hash our various issues. I confess to becoming frustrated
interacting with people who are new to on-line debating. For instance, my area
of "expertise" in on-line debating is history. History is my #1 hobby and
through reading of history you can eventually get a clearer picture about why
things are they way they are (for example, some people act like the war in
terror is in chaos because the US attacked Iraq even though it had nothing to do
with 9/11. The first nation whose territory we violated with troops after
Pearl Harbor was France -- we invaded French North Africa in operation Torch.
Needless to say, critics of the administration at the time didn't see what
French North Africa or even Rommel had to do with Pearl Harbor, especially with
the Philippines occupied by the Japanese). So I tend to be short in
patience when people think that any events occurring now are somehow
unprecedented or articles that show a distinct lack of knowledge on history
despite asserting a certain level of certainty about what happened. So
I'll be cutting down on the responses.
But I will be making more articles though. I have a bunch nearly done.
Many article just take a long time to do because of the research involved. Which
is probably another reason I tend to get impatient with articles that just spew
out what I consider to be regurgitated propaganda from either the left wing or
the right wing on some issue. For instance, it's amazing how many people,
including "journalists" slam on Haliburton.
I wonder how many people actually know what this company does? Or that it
actually made more money under Clinton? Like many things, finding these
things out is just a few clicks away but it's easier for people to just parrot,
unwittingly, talking points from some political operative as if they are fact.
But that's the type of stuff I enjoy writing about -- things that many people
may not have heard of before. Some people may find it "bomb throwing" but that's
not the intent. It's just that I choose topics sometimes that are so against the
prevailing (and often ill-informed) views of the day. Seriously, how many people
out there that you meet on a day to day basis would know that it was the
Republicans who fought tooth and nail in congress and in state legislatures to
abolish slavery (passing the 13th amendment) while Democrats fought tooth and
nail to keep slavery going. That until around 1965, the Democrats were generally
the party of "white power" in ways that would make either side cringe today? The
whole slapping Republicans with the racist tag is so amazingly offensive to me
because it shows a complete lack of knowledge on history. Republicans just don't
like special treatment based on pigment. That's about the biggest thing that can
be thrown on them. The people who created and supported separate but equal were
Democrats. The people who created the Jim Crowe laws were Democrats. Just
another example of how goofed up current events can get if history is ignored.
Not that Republicans should start feeling high and mighty. The reason why
Republicans are stereotyped as being uncaring of the less fortunate is because
so many of them are uncaring of the less fortunate. I've seen it first hand so
many times. What Republicans need to realize is that while there are many poor
people who just leech of the system, the majority of poor people are hard
working Americans just trying to make ends meet. And Republicans need to start
taking white collar crime much more seriously. In the 10 years I've been in
business, I've had around $600,000 stolen from me. Did anyone go to jail? Nope.
Did the police even get involved? Nope. Because in the business world, you can
be an amazingly dishonest crook and steal all you want. My first publisher stole
an estimated $150,000 from me. I was a college student at the time, what could I
do? He just didn't pay royalties. Not a cent after the product's release. It was
as simple as that. He got money and just didn't pay any. And my experience is
sadly, typical. If Republicans want to get taken more seriously about
their complaining about the taxes "wasted" each year on the less fortunate they
need to start pushing for criminal penalties in financial contract violations
and the like. You can set up a LLC corporation in a few days, put together a
contract with people to sell their stuff, get the money and then declare
bankruptcy without ever paying. Is that right? No. Ever hear Republicans talk
about how we need to stop the hundreds of billions of dollars lost each year due
to white collar crime? Nope. And who really gets screwed at the end of the day?
Working Americans.
What's next
So as the site gets more popular, you'll see a lot of interesting articles
and such. You'll also see commercialism creep in as at some point we'll have to
find a way to pay for this monstrosity. We will keep blogs free though (though
we may require at some point that to use technical support you'll need to get a
premium membership).
It's been fun and it's getting funner and more and more personalities enter
the site. I'm really glad to see that the site isn't dominated by any
ideologies. Of the top 10 you have one right of center blogger (me) and a couple
left of center bloggers. So it's reasonably evened out overall. We want to
make sure JoeUser is a reasonably neutral place for people to write about
whatever they want.
Have fun!
