I think it’s a voice that needs to be heard. Bad news isn’t popular, and critique of pet projects that fail often ruffles feathers. I received quite a bit of grief when I expressed displeasure at the ThrivePDX effort for example. Everyone jumped all over me in comments here and on Twitter, but the event (and the whole effort with the indie techies and SAO) failed in a big way.

Ideally we can have open, honest discussion about not just successes but also failures. And in the spirit of openness and honesty, I’d like to ask the author of the Silicon Lumberjack to identify him or herself. Please don’t be that passive-agressive stereotype.

• Prerequisites – things to think about as you plan to make money. A quick overview of some considerations that will help guide your monetization strategy.
• Revenue Sources – options for income and a look at the plusses and challenges of each one. I’ll talk about advertising, sponsorship, affiliate programs, membership sites, and product sales.
• Lists – a quick look at email lists and how to effectively tie one into a blog revenue stream.
• Resources – where to go, what to read, and who to follow to learn more about making money with a blog.

Tickets are on sale now for WordCamp Seattle and I’d love to have you join me for what should be a great event.

If this sounds vaguely familiar it might be because this presentation will be similar (but not identical) to a talk originally presented at the Portland WordPress User Group earlier this year. That talk was very well received so I’ll start with it as a foundation and incorporate some improvements as well.

Recently Ben Brooks and Marco Arment have commented on notifications and I think that while they miss the point, they’re too jaded by iOS experiences to understand how the Android notification system, when configured what I’ll term as “correctly”, just works.

Both Ben and Marco make the point that if everything becomes an in-your-face notification, then any notion of importance is lost. They’re right. The other notion is that notifications should be easily ignored/dismissed if desired.

The Android notification system allows the user to control these things on a granular basis. In my case, the only time my phone will buzz is with a (relatively rare) SMS message. It doesn’t buzz me for Twitter mentions, emails, or anything else that’s likely not of urgent importance. If you want it to bug you constantly, you can configure it that way, but that’s not required. To address the second issue, it’s easy to drop down and view, or shove up and hide, the notification list. There’s a “Clear” button if you want to dismiss them all, but if you want to scan quickly through the notifications and pick out certain ones, you can do that as well.

In short, I think the Android notification system (when setup as desired) addresses the concerns. That said, those in love with iOS might think that the vast amount of configuration options for notifications would be quite un-Apple-like. The problem with Apple’s one-system-fits-all approach is that a single system won’t ever make all happy.

Later (let’s say early to mid 2000s), spam became a problem and most email management tools, well, sucked. As a result, I started consuming information via other methods including RSS. I hated dealing with email.

Fast forward to 2010. Gmail (and especially Gmail with priority inbox) rocks. Spam is filtered. People are getting smarter about how to send email.

I like email again. I’m encouraging people to send email. I’m subscribing to things via email. With the right tools, I enjoy using email again.

Here’s a neat Instapaper-to-Pinboard trick: sign into Instapaper and go to the Account Settings page. About halfway down, you’ll see the Pinboard integration option. Once you authenticate with Pinboard, whenever you “Star” an item in Instapaper, that link will be saved to your Pinboard account.

Bam.

The big differentiator between Posterous and a traditional blog platform like WordPress is that all content is published via email. Sending text to Posterous creates a text post. Including a photo or video attachment results in those being shown on the post. If multiple photos are attached, a gallery is created. Posterous’ other notable feature is that it can then notify other social networks of your content. Photos can be sent to Flickr or Facebook. Links to the Posterous post can be published to Twitter or a Facebook news feed. Videos can be sent to YouTube, Vimeo, or the like.

My overall impression was that post-by-email was a great solution for moblogging from a smartphone, but the limitations of the service mean that I wouldn’t consider it for any sort of permanent blog/web presence. The look/feel can’t be customized, and my of the “nice to haves” of a full blog platform (Gravatar, OpenID support, threaded comments, etc.) are missing. I know that Posterous is under development and I’d expect to see these type of features in the future, but for now I don’t think it can be seen as anything more than a plumbing system to mass-publish content across the web.

As such a plumbing system, it works great. I had no problems using their email interface to specify if I wanted my content to go everywhere (in my case Posterous, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook) or just to a subset of the services. One gotcha that I ran into was that because I have my Facebook feed setup to import from Flickr, when I posted a photo to both Flickr and Facebook it showed up twice on Facebook. This isn’t a fault of Posterous at all, but rather me needing to be more granular in my cross posting. The one Posterous-to-Facebook annoyance that is a limitation is that when posts are made with photos on Posterous, the photos get put into a Facebook album and the blog post gets pushed to the Facebook news feed, but there’s no connection.

Overall Posterous worked great for pushing a variety of content to a variety of places. The rather spartan web interface, lack of customization, and lack of extensibility limits its usefulness for a more traditional blog or website presence. A lot of Posterous’ functionality could be duplicated via WordPress plugins. For a simple publishing mechanism, Posterous is great, but for a full-featured blog platform, WordPress remains king.

The quick backstory for those of you wondering What Is OpenID Delegation: Delegation allows one to use a URL that is not an OpenID provider as their claimed OpenID URL. A bit of code that is embedded in the headers of that URL contains redirection code so that OpenID requests are sent to the actual OpenID provider.

In my case, I’d been using Vidoop’s MyVidoop product as my OpenID provider. I added code to the header section of http://www.aaronhockley.com so that I could give that out as my OpenID URL. When I made an OpenID claim using that URL, the code would redirect the request to Vidoop, where I would authenticate, and be redirected back to the relying party. The sites that use OpenID record my aaronhockley.com address, but I authenticated using Vidoop’s secure system.

With Vidoop about to disappear, I needed a new OpenID provider. I chose VeriSign’s PIP system due to their support for two-factor authentication. After signing up for PIP, I updated the code on aaronhockley.com to point to VeriSign’s servers, and that’s the end of the story. I can continue to use aaronhockley.com as my OpenID URL even though my provider has changed, and all of my accounts across the web that are linked to that URL will still work without any disruption in service.

Folks have asked: “Why?” There are a number of reasons, some major, some minor, but all leading me to think that my life will be smoother once I’ve converted over to OS X. As a photographer, it makes sense. Much of the world of photo software revolves around the Mac. Having looked at Windows 7, Microsoft has made some nice updates for networks and corporations, but I didn’t see too much there that would really benefit me as a one-man photography shop. When I look at software innovations and I look at new tools being released, more often than not these tools seem to be arriving on OS X.

I’m still getting things set up and need to start the heavy migration of my photos and Lighroom catalog along with some other random data that I store locally. Twitter has a been a great migration resource… with so many of my tweeps being Mac users, I can throw out questions looking for software recommendations or wondering about hardware and I get back a bunch of useful information from people I trust.

What else should I know? What random bits of Mac or OS X coolness do you want to share with me as a comment?

* I bought the MacBook Pro, 15″, 4GB RAM, 512mb video. It’s this one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There was a lively discussion with over 30 comments left on the post. Commenter Matt Behrens noted that Facebook’s terms indicated that a user could remove his or her content and that Facebook’s license would expire at that time.

Not anymore.

While researching for my presentation, I discovered that Facebook updated their terms of use on February 4th. The section about a user being able to revoke the content license by removing the content from Facebook is now gone. There is no verbiage that indicates a user may remove Facebook’s license. Facebook now claims a perpetual license to any content posted on their service, with no way for a user to terminate that license.