There are alot of opinions on the best TLD (Top Level Domain name) to use when registering domain names. Alot of people say .COM’s are best, although there seems to be an increasing minority that says TLDs don’t matter so why not use the much cheaper .INFO domains.

After researching into this subject, what I learnt is this:

• If you have to tell people your domain name (e.g. what your email address is), then .COM is definitely the best. Everyone knows what .COM is.
• If you’re using SEO (Seeach Engine Optimization) to get listed on search engines, it doesn’t matter what TLD you use. It has been suggested that .ORG and .EDU domains seem to get better quality scores and thus should be listed higher up in search results.
• Especially if you’re doing direct advertising (e.g. Google Adwords) and don’t expect alot of word-of-mouth marketing, then it definitely doesn’t matter what TLD you use (and you should use the cheapest TLD that fits with your marketing campaign).

As such, I’m big proponent of buying .INFO domains. I figure they’re cheap, they can be SEO just fine, and as long as I have a .COM (or in this case a .NET) email address to tell people, I’m good to go!

The world is changing, but do you know what that really means?

A disturbingly true look comparing the past to the present and a glimpse of things to come. All to show you how, shift happens.

Shift happens …. are you ready?

As a long-time fan of Internet Explorer (the only browser I’ve used since NCSA Mosaic!), I’d been looking forward to IE7. I’ve always figured that being made by Microsoft (let’s just ignore the political views of the company for a second), IE should integrate better into the Windows OS and have wider support (with all the Microsoft IIS web servers out there).

When IE7 came out ~2 months ago, I discovered that it broke a few sites I was developing (wandering.net being one of them). I spent a few hours “working around” the problem (couldn’t “fix” it because IE wasn’t handling the XHTML code properly). That forced me to install Firefox, in order to check that my IE fixes were working properly in Firefox.

As I used Firefox more and more, I quickly recognized that it was superior to IE (and even IE7) in many usability functions. Some people say Firefox is faster (I can’t tell the difference on my broadband connection), but the small nuances really stand out. One of my particular favorite, is when you start typing a URL into the address bar. IE will list the matching sites in alphabetical order, but Firefox will list the matching sites based on how often you access them. So in Firefox, when I start typing “google.com”, it will list “google.com/analytics” followed by “google.com/adsense” (because I go to “analytics” more often than I go to “adsense”).

One more (belated) convert to Firefox!

Because of all this, I have been paying more attention to “visitor browser information” on my site statistics (e.g. Google Analytics & awstats). I was pretty amazed at on most of my sites, Firefox commanded >40% of the visitors (and on some sites, ranked as high as 80%).

Yes, we all know sex sells. And more often than not, it just seems like the Internet is used for porn. But it’s never really struck home about how much drawing power sex has until about a week ago…

I started TubeBattle as a new mashup: video sharing (a la YouTube), community-driven content & rating (a la Digg). Even as I write this, TubeBattle is the only site of its kind. I’m sure someone out there is busily copying the idea, but that’s OK because I’ve got developers working to some kick-ass new features ;).

TubeBattle’s growth has been pleasantly surprising, quickly gaining a strong user-base. I’ve introduced new and interesting battles for people to participate in, such as:

• Top rated videos from YouTube, Digg and TubeBattle users
• Viral videos that people are talking about on blogs
• Movie trailers
• Music Videos

TubeBattle has the ability for users to leave feedback, and I kept getting requests to apply the battle format to sexy videos. I was undecided for a long time, unsure whether I wanted TubeBattle to go in this direction…

Going back to the basic tenent of TubeBattle’s philosophies (that it’s a community-driven engine), I created the Sexy Videos battle. And in just under a week, we’ve blown past 1,600 votes for that battle (and surpassed 5,000 votes today, it’s 9th day of existance). The number of votes cast each day has been increasing, and traffic to the site has broken previous records.

So coming back to the “business lessons” learnt here:

• Start with a philosophy for whatever you do (work, website, etc) and let it guide you - don’t change mid-stream.
• If you’re in “business”, then take yourself out of the equation - sell what buyers wants, not what you want them to buy
• Many people use the Internet for many things. But the bulk of it is for sex stuff

There are many personal ironies in the fact that I’m learning about this reality now… one of which is that I work and live in Las Vegas!

I must say, setting up the wifi connection on my Wii, was surprisingly not-obvious!

As I previously mentioned, the Wii comes with wifi, so it’ll connect to the Internet if you have a wifi-router. I figured that it couldn’t be that hard (famous last words).

Due to my heightened sense of paranoid (been working with Network Security people for too long ), my home router has a hidden SSID and secured by WEP. This is what happened when I tried to configure my Wii…

• Go to Options (bottom left on the Wii Menu)
• Select Wii Settings
• Click on the Right arrow (middle of the right side of the screen) to get to the next page
• Select Internet
• Select one of the Connections (e.g. “Connection 1″)
• Select Wireless
• Because I have a hidden SSID, I could not use the default Auto-find. Consequently I have to do the Manual Setup
• Enter the SSID code (aka “the name of the wireless network”)
• It has been awhile since I setup my Mac (my most recent computer), so I take a guess at the SSID
• Press OK. Wii thinks about it, then says something to the effect of “network not found” (sorry I don’t remember the exact error message!)
• Run upstairs to my PC, login to wireless router, make sure I correctly remember the SSID
• Run downstairs to re-enter the SSID into the Wii
• Press OK. Wii thinks about it for well over 30 seconds, then returns “network not found”
• Growl. Thinking that I might have mistyped the SSID, I enter it again
• Press OK. Wii thinks about it for well over 30 seconds, then returns “network not found”
• Run upstairs and google “how to setup wifi for wii”. It returns 1,260,000 results, none of which actually steps me through the Manual Setup process (OK, I admit I didn’t actually read all 1,260,000 links, but I didn’t see anything in the first 3 pages).
• Sigh. Walk downstairs, to see if there are any buttons or options that I may have missed
• Looking closer, I see two triangles (like the ends of an arrow) on either side of the place where you enter the SSID. Eureka!
• Turns out the “right” button will move me to the next page, which prompts me for the wireless encyrption type of the router. Select WEP.
• Not being able to remember the WEP key I try to guess it (come on, do you remember your wifi-router’s 10 digit hexadecimal key?)
• Press OK. Wii thinks about it for well over 30 seconds, then returns “network not found”
• Sigh. With head down, I trudge upstairs.
• I log into my wifi-router to get the WEP key. Roll my eyes, and mentally admonish myself for having forgotten such a simple WEP key
• Walk back downstairs, and enter the WEP key
• Now that I know about the “right” button thing, I’m smart enough to keep scrolling right to see all the options before clicking on OK
• Scroll through 5 pages of “other” options. None of which needed to be changed from default, so a total waste of time. Sigh again. Press OK
• Wii returns a “successfully connected” message
• Make mental note to blog my findings, as a warning to others…

Here are some useful links about Wii and wifi that I did find on google (but didn’t help me with my specific problem):

• Official Nintendo site all about how to setup and troubleshoot wifi. It’s got a section dedicated to WEP, but not a word about where you’d actually enter the WEP key (yes, I’m still bitter about it!)
• Wikipedia article on Nintendo’s wifi system