Hmm first covered Topix.net in November 2005 (pictured above) and here’s how they look today, a year and four months later:

Tomorrow? They will likely be emphasizing topix.com. Let me disclaim before getting too far that this blog has been treated very well by Topix.net. Their algorithm has an almost uncanny ability to pick out what is news and what is not from this blog, something that often changes from post to post. I’m impressed.

But I’ve never been impressed with their .net domain name.

Something mentioned here repeatedly — especially when reviewing other sites and services — is the importance of business sites owning their .com. This is a drum I’ll keep beating until the vast majority of domains purchased are no longer dot coms (likely never). You can take all the .us, .tv and so on, they are worth a tiny fraction of the value of the .com. Sure there are exceptions like the absurdly difficult to type de.licio.us, but the advertising has been out there for 10+ years and people think dot com by default. Places like the podcast/videoblog company podtech.net are leaking traffic to type-ins and only helping to freely promote their .com counterpart.

Topix.net is another site that launched without owning the .com. They must have realized the error of their ways and paid $1,000,000 for topix.com, Rafat Ali reports:

About 50 percent of visits to Topix come through a search engine, and about 90 percent out of that is through Google…Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10 percent, that would essentially be a 10 percent loss in ad revenue, CEO Rick Skrenta said in the story. Topix will run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile, in order to get over any unpredictabilities in Google and other search results.

There’s a serious, important business financial lesson to be learned here. If/when you have the choice to choose a business/product/service name, get the .com domain first. Even if you aren’t opening for business for a year or more, you need the domain early on. Get a blog setup and write about the process of launching your business.

Choosing the right domain name
If you are an already established business offline starting develop a presence online you might have to come up with a creative take. Just remember some simple guidelines for choosing good business domain names below. Some of these don’t apply to non-business sites and depending on how you classify this blog (personally I don’t classify Hmm as a “business” site), you’ll note we’ve violated several of them.

1. Keep the size of the domain as short as possible, preferably under 10 characters and using one or two words
2. Watch for domains using combinations of words that spell something very different than intended (therapistfinder.com anyone?)
3. Tread carefully with gimmicky domains like Flickr without the ‘e’ — you know people are going to flicker.com which is one of those domain parking for $$ pages.
4. Avoid using words in domains that can be shortened like “you” (MakeYouGoHmm is a bad example: we’ve had to purchase numerous domain variations because of mistypes). Worse is: ‘for’, ‘4′, and ‘four.’
5. Keep words in normal order for example on yesterday’s Hmmcast I mentioned bandboston.com as possibly the worst domain name for a rock band that sold millions of albums. Bostonband.com would be better, but that was already taken.
6. Be careful with names that can be easily pluralized by mistake (a few mainstream publications have wrongly linked to this site as makesyougohmm, hence we bought that one and redirected too)
7. Using more than one hyphen in the domain looks like spam (bad example: this-is-my-domain.com), it is preferable to use words without hyphen like makeyougohmm instead of make-you-go-hmm. We do have an established domain that uses a hyphen and don’t own the non-hypenated domain which I wouldn’t do again if I could start over. We’re sending type-ins the other way, but it’s not the same amount of bleed as not owning the dot com. Consider it a tradeoff for a really good name if you can get the-name.com as opposed to thename.com. Also it pays to see how good the non-hyphenated name is as you might have/build a much better site with the hyphen.

I’m sure there are plenty more suggestions other webmasters could recommend. Please use the comment or trackback area below to add to the list.

So my domain name sucks, now what?
If you don’t have the money to buy the .com for your domain and stuck with a dot com domain that could be improved, you still have options.

Time is perhaps the biggest enemy, so buy a better one and work at building the new name ASAP.

The longer your site is establishes itself with a lousy domain name, the more time consuming and difficult it will be to migrate to a new domain. Will there be search engine listing problems? In the short term probably yes, but what’s more important long term? Making it easy for both new and experienced site visitors to find you without being bookmarked, or being a hard to remember and type domain name?

Eventually your existing domain can become a redirect and the search engines will learn. The content is what drives pages over time more than the domain name. Of course there are other factors like a tedious directory structure that/looks/like/this.html.

At the end of last year we switched our group blog project from a third party free hosted blog service to our own domain and server. Our group had spent nearly a year adding content to the blog elsewhere. It took Google less than a week to adjust their engine to point to our own new domain and other sites continue to build up the new domain.

Best of luck with your domains both new and existing being easy to remember and type.

A mind map is a visual organizational tool with related words and concepts linked with a key concept by means of lines and arrows. On the Tablet PC there are a couple well known mind mapping tools, most notably Mind Manager by Mindjet which starts at $229 USD on the PC and Mac. With Mindomo you can create free mind maps.

Mindomo has their own registration system (too bad no OpenID) which requires first name, last name, email, username and password. Email address doesn’t accept + for Google filtering. Fill the form out and then confirm by clicking the validation link sent in the email. Then it’s onto creating your own mind map. It launches in full maximize mode, but you can resize by clicking around the edges.

Here’s a basic right mind map I whipped up in a few minutes on virtual worlds:

You can add images, background, hyperlinks and assign tasks. The map starts out private, and Mindomo allows you to create up to 7 private mind maps. It wasn’t very clear how to make the mind map public, so I went searching on the site and ended up in the forum. when you choose “save as” make sure you click on the “public” folder on the left.

I resaved my virtual worlds mind map as public. Next I deleted and then opened my Virtual Worlds mind map saved to public below:
http://www.mindomo.com/view.php?m=5a99211fae82775fc23057154d54ef05

Mindomo is taking the Google ad-supported model and puts a long, thin, unobtrusive ad strip in the right sidebar:

When Mindomo leaves beta a premium version for 4.99 Euros a month will offer a more secure environment, unlimited private maps and more.

Mind mapping is the kind of thing that feels best in your own handwriting and thus is perhaps best suited to Tablet PC users or traditional yellow pad and pencil. Still, Mindomo is worth looking over for the many people who don’t have tablets and don’t want to go old school with ink and/or lead. I can see using Mindomo for a few things, sort of like I’ve been using Google Spreadsheets and Docs online. I wonder if Google will either buy this or launch a competing product. It would fit their growing suite of online applications.

Who doesn’t want a more secure PayPal? Recently they started offering these security key devices to customers. You can sign up for one by visiting paypal.com/securitykey.

Took a week or so for our business account security key to arrive.

After visiting PayPal and entering in the serial number on the back of the new security key, you’ll be presented with a new second step after entering in your login/password. You need to push a button on the security key and then enter the generated six digit code into the PayPal form.

Business PayPal customers can get one key at no charge while other PayPal users need to pay $5 USD. I attached ours to my keychain, so that’s prime mind share real estate for PayPal. Smart move.

So you’re paying for hosting and wondering if the promised uptime measures against your actual site uptime? If you’re willing to use some of your computer bandwidth downtime, then you might give Pingdom GIGRIB a try, which lets you monitor up to 10 websites for free. I have been using it for the last couple months to check Hmm, tdscripts and just added VTOReality, sites that are located on three different dedicated servers.

This site has been up 99.81% over the last three months with the following uptime/downtime stats:

March 2007 (thus far): 100%
February 2007: 99.9%, 40m
January 2007: 99.39%, 4h 31m
December 2006: 99.96%, 6m

I’m satisfied with these numbers and very happy with our hosting companies, although January was admittedly a bit of a letdown, the overall average is very good. Really anything in the 99.5% and up range is what you should shoot for with your site and hosting. If your hosting companies promises or “guarantees” 100% uptime, now you have access to a free tool that can verify and dispute their claims.

Just register for the site (free), download and run the software. You can then register checking for up to 10 of your sites. Before doing that you can check and see if somebody else is using one of their 10 sites to check yours by using the following format (replace bolded domain.com with the domain):

uptime.pingdom.com/site/month_summary/site_name/domain.com

The application will run as a background process and run test pings to other sites and share the results back. Pingdom offers a commercial service ($9.95/month) if you want to have them monitor your sites without using any of your bandwidth or running their software.

Early this morning I noticed several of Chris Pirillo’s websites were down and dropped him a message on Skype. As of this writing they’re still down. On the main GIGRIB page I see Forbes.com has been down for a couple minutes. Happens to every site.

This morning I had to go through the somewhat painful process of retiring some older, inactive projects and programs.

Our mainstream online busines operates with one primary employee: me. I have one part time employee and do some work with other programmers here and there so I sometimes it is correct to use “we” instead of “I/me/my” when describing our mainstream online projects. This got me thinking about how to retire some old projects/programs. You see lots of how to start articles, but not as many of the converse situation which became the genesis of this piece.

Looking over my home site tdscripts.com, there were a few older programs (5+ years old) that hadn’t been updated in awhile. One of them the company that the program specifically worked with is now out of business, so the usefulness of the script was negated the date that third party company went under. I’ve continued to carry the script with a link to it on the homepage and a message saying it was no longer available, knowing that the day would come that I needed to officially retire the program.

As my script site enters its eight year anniversary, this morning I went through the list meticulously and pondered our small business strategy:

- scripts retired that were previously for sale would just be put under a ‘retired’ section. They would not be given away. While I won’t say never, I don’t really like the idea of giving something away that was previously for sale. Seems like a slap in the face of those who bought the program. I wouldn’t like it as a customer and I like it even less as the owner.
- we will continue to offer support to customers on retired programs with no given expiration date. I suspect there will be some date in the future that the scripts will be obsoleted before the need to cut off future support inquiries. I don’t believe in cutting off support options to customers and would recommend against a policy that eliminates or greatly diminishes support for retired products.

I realize big companies like Microsoft have product lifecycles but this is one place where a smaller shop like ours can be more nimble and less corporate. Our offline business has operated in a small town for over 13 years now and we know a lot of people in town. Similarly I have a small town mentality with running our online business even though I don’t know as much about most our customers online as I do offline and despite it extending to the world. By that I mean I’d like to keep any policies customer customized friendly as possible. It still fascinates me in our small business offline when I see people at the grocery store and ask them how somebody in their family is doing and they seem surprised that I remember their name and family.

Being a number sucks and we try and run our business so that customers don’t become numbers. I like doing business at the local small town bank. They know my name and a little bit about my family and never make me go through the whole show me your ID routine. They also will watch out for us if something weird happens on one of our accounts and call us personally about it. Big bank chains don’t do that. We have accounts at big banks, but mostly because we travel and need to be able to access money in other states too.

It gets harder and harder every year keeping that direct connection with customers. It’s something that big corporations don’t do very well. They have much higher turnover rates and customers rarely identify with customers directly. In all too many cases, the customer can’t even access the higher level officers in a corporation. Advantage for small businesses.

- for projects, I added a current status update and then went through where things were at with each major/flagship mainstream site.

Retiring projects/programs a negative? Not always
Some might see retirement of projects/programs as a negative and I’ll admit feeling that way somewhat. The more I think about the process, however, it reminds me that I’ve worked on some projects/programs that have lived very good lives. One of the programs retired today earned more than $50,000 USD. There are many, many programs out there which never make that kind of money and some which make a lot more and still someday face an inevitable retirement. Big or small, eventually every project/program ends.

Inching closer to the 10 year mark at tdscripts.com (still 2+ years from this writing) it’s important to analyze and utilyze the most important resource I have: time. I enjoy working on new projects and programs, especially where/when I’m able to learn something new and part of staying young mentally is to continue working on new projects and programs. I also enjoy updating older programs/projects with fresh ideas. It’s a refreshing, rejuvenating process.

Retiring a project/program feels a little bit like reaching the end of a fiction novel. I remember being somewhat sad to see the characters I created end their journey. That might sounds strange, but those who have spent time creating people to live in a world, the end means you probably won’t get to see them again. Unless of course you do a sequel, but I’ve never been a huge fan of sequels.

Just in case anybody is curious about the project you are reading now — makeyougohmm.com — awhile back I admitted that it is a five year project that probably (but not guaranteed) will be renewed in July 2008. It continues to grow in traffic, scope and my own interest level but it’s not my flagship site, as was suggested to me recently by a few folks. Some people see this site and think it’s my biggest site when actually it’s not. It is the biggest blog our company owns that I contribute to, but it’s not the biggest site in either traffic or income.

My flagship site is tdscripts.com and will probably be the last site I retire from on the web. Then again, I’d like to get back more into fiction writing someday so it’s entirely possible that a writing site, perhaps one not yet even officially launched, will be the last site. One of my goals remains launching at least one new website every year. This means at some point unless we add more online employees retiring some older site(s) will become necessary someday. Haven’t had to retire any mainstream websites yet but someday I probably will. I’ve killed off a few domains I registered where I had ideas but never actually launched sites, but then I don’t call that ‘retirement’ because something has to actually live and breathe before it can be retired.

For those who think: why retire a site? I’m not saying retirement as in taking completely off the web, but there does come a point when the dust is pretty thick on some site(s) and one has to look at things objectively and realize work on X site is no longer continuing and admit that the project is retired. That’s what I did today with a few programs and projects but not actually with any websites we own. Someday that will happen too.

There remains a major difference between retirement and death worth noting: a project/program/site can always come out of retirement.

Your turn.

Have you retired any previously active projects/programs in your business or personal life online? Started a blog and realized: bummer, I don’t have time for this any more? How did you handle the retirement process and move forward? Any tips/tricks to share?

We’re closing in on midnight of Valentine’s Day 2007 as I write this and some of you are surfing around still wondering what to do about Valentine’s Day. Don’t fret because Hmm has got you covered with this last minute gift idea list and it will only cost you is a little bit of time and thought.

1. Send a vcard.

If you forgot to buy your sweetie a print card for Valentine’s Day (of course you didn’t), you can hop over to Metacafe and send and/or upload you own Valentine’s Day vcard (video card).

Who is Metacafe you say? Ahh, well YouTube has your heart covered too with their dump cupid promo:

2. Make him/her smile. Humor is timeless. Does your significant other have a good sense of humor?

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

3. Send something you’ve just discovered. Wanna find something totally random for your better half? Get the SU Firefox add-on here. Stumbleupon something Valentine’s Day related by clicking on “all” in the Stumbleupon toolbar, choosing keyword and typing in “valentines day.”

4. Send something eerie. For the Hannibal Lecter types, send a creepy e-card or image. On second thought, don’t, I’m joking.

5. Send some Valentine’s Day factoids. Does your heart belong to an analytic type? Bad Cupid’s list of Valentine’s Facts might be right up his/her list. Here’s a couple to get teasers:

# Franklin D. Roosevelt spent every one of his 13 Valentine’s Days as president of the United States tooling around the White House in his wheelchair completely naked.

In early days, locksmiths charged half price on Valentine’s Day for making duplicate keys for chastity belts.

6. Show your MySpace lover MySpace love. If your sweetie has a MySpace then here’s how to add a heart comment.

7. Musicify him/her with a sweet Dairy Queen slow jam. This could be the perfect sexy melody to go with some DQ ice cream.

8. Send your anti-Valentine’s Day sentiments. While this one will probably go down badly with most Valentines, if neither you nor your sweetheart celebrate Valentine’s Day sending along a reminder that Valentine’s Day sucks might be useful because, well, you know.

9. Send a sappy song.. Let’s not forget the broken hearted while massaging the red blooded and strong beating. What would a list of Valentine’s Day related internet gifts be without a list of breakup songs? While writing this, I’m listening to the podsafe song “People make mistakes” by Aaron Short. Naturally, I don’t think I made a mistake, but some reading might have in the past and perhaps sending a broken hearted song could creak open a past flame’s door. Never hurts to try.

10. Send podcast podsafe tuneage.. Speaking of podsafe and on a much more practical note, you could send your podcasting sweetheart music.podshow.com so she/he could use podsafe music in his/her podcast.

11. Send and require receipt of a mutual love note.. The idea of mutual card swapping is for those who want to send and receive:

A Mutual Love Note is a special type of valentine that gets revealed only when two people have sent each other a Mutual Love Note. If only one person sent a Mutual Love Note, the other will not find out about it. Your Mutual Love Note will be revealed to the recipient only if the feeling is mutual, in other words only if the recipient has also sent you a Mutual Love Note.

12. Send your artistic brilliance. Sure Picasso, we know you’re out there. Think of the spud dude, only it’s Mr. Picassohead.

If you’re looking for other online generators, there is a growing, updated Hmm generators list here.

13. Yeah, yeah, yeah send an e-card of course. Mitch has compiled a short list of ecard possibilities. Remember to personalize every ecard because it will mean a lot more to the recipient.

14. Tell him/her “I love you” in many different languages. Just break out your email and write Nagligivagit in Eskimo and dozens of other languages. Be sure to give him/her the link or babelfish for translation.

I’m sure you can think of many more but since Valentine’s Day is on the 14th, this seems like a good number to stop in this particular list. You can use the comment section below to add other great last minute Valentine’s Day internet gift ideas. Very well, I’m off to spend some quality time with my Valentine.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Download Hmmcast #61 mp4

Windows Movie Maker 2.1

Today’s Giveaway of The Day (thanks darkmoon for the early head’s up in IRC) is post2blog:

set of unique functions such as automatic images (Imageshack, Flickr, FTP) uploading and live spell checking. Program integrates itself with Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Word, FeedDemon, RSS Bandit and Sharp Reader.

This program regularly costs $39 (seems a bit spendy considering there are free alternatives), but you can get an uncripped version legitimately for free if you hurry. Remember, you must not only download but install before the day is up. So even if you don’t have time to check this one out right now, at least download, activate and install and then you can come back later and see if it’s worth, well, free.

I was telling darkmoon that the comment section of GiveawayOfTheDay is just as valuable, if not more than the actual giveaway. That’s where you’ll find people saying what they think of the daily giveaway (some comments are kind of brutal) and also offering similar applications, often for free. For example, in the post2blog giveaway comments I learned about another free blogging-related tool called SEmagic.

GMail + IMified = Blog via IM inside email
I saw and bookmarked IMified yesterday, but Paul O’Flaherty reminded me about it again this morning with this:

GTalk to WordPress.. I just love that idea.

I’m not a big IM guy but really like how Gmail is integrated with GTalk. For those who enable it, it can allow a quick, convenient exchange without launching any external apps. Paul’s comment made me curious if I could post to a Wordpress blog while reading my Gmail using GTalk + IMified. First I added imified at gmail.com per the IMified instructions and typed ‘help’ in the GTalk integrated Gmail chat window:

The IMified bot shared the menu:

* Main Menu **
1 - IMified Notes
2 - IMified Reminders
3 - IMified Todos
4 - My Account

type ‘M’ at any time to return to this menu

Next I selected option 4 and was given a link to the My Services page at IMified.

The service options available include: 30 boxes, Backpack, Basecamp, Blogger, Google Calendar, Movable Type, Remember The Milk (?), TypePad and Wordpress. Clicked on the Wordpress image. I went into my Mac Mode Wordpress powered blog admin area and created a new user account and then copied over the username, password and path to the xmlrpc.php file. This successfully added to the IMified menu. Inside GTalk when I queried the bot with ‘4′ I saw the new menu (emphasis mine):

* Main Menu **
1 - IMified Notes
2 - IMified Reminders
3 - IMified Todos
4 - Mac Mode
5 - My Account

How to post to your Wordpress blog inside GMail + GTalk + IMified
STEP 1. I typed ‘4′ and the bot responded with: “What is the title of your blog entry?” My response? Test post using IMified bot inside GMail using GTalk
STEP 2. imified: “What is the body of the blog entry?” Response: IMified is available at http://www.imified.com/. Then I hit enter to see if I could add more.
STEP 3. imified: “Should I puslish this entry? (y/n)” Yes, that was the exact response with spelling error. I was curious if I could add more to my test post, so I typed some more text including an HTML link and submitted to the bot.

This kicked me back to the main menu with no other explanation. I checked my Mac blog to see if the entry was published. Nope. Apparently, you get one — and only one — chat window to make your post. No adding on is allowed at this time. I repeated STEP 2 and 3 and this time answered the question ‘y’es.

imified: “Woops! Server said: parse error. not well formed.”

Grrr. Tried a third time stripping out my HTML (how would you link to an image?). Result?

imified: “Blog entry has been posted and published!”

STEP 4. I checked Mac Mode for the published post and there it is without the hyperlinks active.

I’m not sure how useful this particular example of IMified will be if it’s text only blog posts. Maybe the IMified folks will sort this out because it would be cool to do some quick blogging through Gmail this way, but without links or the abilty to include any kind of HTML that makes it much less useful.

Update 8:42am PST: I posted to the IMified troubleshooting forum about this issue and Dave the developer responded right away that they fixed the spelling error and were reconsidering better HTML options.

Second Life blogging
For those inside Second Life, check out the free SLURLblogger tool by Ordinal Malaprop. I wrote how to use this tool back in September at VTOR.

Just enter in the URL of any image online and pic2color will extract the colors along with hex code (see picture above). Press the “finetune” button and another window will popup with integration with GenoPal™:

GenoPal™ is based on patent pending technology that based on how your mind perceives color. You will notice that the colors proposed by GenoPal™ are pleasant and visually close to each other. This is because GenoPal™ is based on how your mind perceives color and not on the measurement of light (RGB).

Sounds like a mind trip with color but could be useful to webmasters and designers.

M&M character creator is a flash generator that lets you create yourself as an M&M. You can choose color, eyes, mouth, facial hair, legs, arms and more.

After a minute or two I reinvented myself as the following M&M:

Maybe there should be an M&M MMORPG. Talk about a lot of M’s that would be: MMMMORPG. The bad guys could be heat sinking droids that could turn you into hot chocolate. Level up and earn new skills. Get married, have baby M&Ms and get an M&M pet.

What kind of M&M would you be?

Update 3/26/07 6:36pm PST: If you’d like to generate some other cool things online, check out this online generators post.