Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering says…

“In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,”

Now you have to take this with a little forethought … ALL OF THEIR PRODUCTS…

This means if you login to Gmail then surf Google’s news listings then jump over to youtube… then use google+ they will track your use…

If you watch a video about making pizza you will now see pizza advertising when you go to other sites… not just Google’s sites but any site that uses Google Advertising.

If you visit a site about hamsters that has google advertising  you will see hamster videos when you go to Google’s YouTube…

It is going to get really big brother and it will cause a lot of people to turn off Google Advertising by blocking adsense.

That will mean content publishers may have to look for other options to earn revenue.

Personally I run over 14 content sites of various types of content.. this site is technical content but I have sites of a variety of different content types…

In recent months I have noticed many more people who block advertising and this means I don’t have time to devote to that content type … I must devote my time to where I am earning money.

This is true for everyone.

If there is backlash from this .. content developers are the ones that will be screwed.

But eventually it will mean more paid content sites … sites that require membership. And then the user or visitor will get screwed.

For any other stock this may be dramatic but when you consider that the price of a single share of Google Stock still costs $587.57 then you have to take this with a grain of salt.

Normally businesses will split their shares meaning if you buy in early for say $100 a share then Google will double down and you will have two new shares both worth $50. This allows investors that may want to get into the stock to purchase new shares at a price level that they feel is more reasonable.

Remember when you purchase stock after an IPO has been made the original company does not get more money. The only way that a company can get more money is when they sell new shares.

After the stock has floated around the stock market .. after the IPO or Additional Share Offering.. the price is meaningless to the Company other then to set the price of remaining shares that the company may hold as an investment.

Large companies often buy back their stock when it drops in value. Home Depot has been notorious for doing this during down times in the market but most companies do this.

If you are buying stock today then you are purchasing it from a share holder not the company.

This is really why the Stock Market is a SCAM ..

Unlike Bonds which are considered a Loan to the company .. stock that is floating around in the market really has no attachment to the original company.

Also consider there are different types of stock. There is Voting Stock where you can purchase say 5 to 25% of a business and then you will have the ability to vote on who is the CEO and how things are run.

There is also nonvoting stock. Basically what you just bought is a piece of paper with the companies name on it.

If the company starts doing things you don’t like then nonvoting stock gives you no rights.

If the CEO of the company is seen eating a hotdog and this drives the stock prices down to $0 then you lose everything.

And if the company goes bankrupt or dissolves then you are basically screwed out of your investment.. you can’t drive down to the business and say I have 200 shares of your company I want my money back… because it has no attachment to the company and they have no obligation to buy it back.. you have to find another SUCKER to pawn it off on.. good luck ..

so …

Maybe its time investors wake up.. start buying bonds which are paid back even if the company goes bankrupt.. you may not get 1:1 return but you would have the right to tell the company to sell every last office chair to make sure you get something….

That is unless Obama comes in and treats you like General Motors and takes away all of your rights and give all of your stock to the UAW Auto Workers Union as a gift…

Stocks .. are a Scam.

Unless you are buying 51% of voting stock from a company that you and a partner opened… that way you have control over business decisions.

The website offers free and paid hosting and distribution of files and is owned by a European multimillionaire that was living in New Zealand.

Unfortunately for many users of the service their files seem to be gone forever because movies and music were being downloaded from their data center in Virginia, USA.

The legal use of this service allows people with files too large for email or ones that would eat up their hosting transfer agreements to offload these files for distribution.This is something that both businesses and personal users have taken advantage of for some time now.

An author of a windows software package could host their distribution package and provide passwords by email after users register to use the software.  This was a really simple solution for startups or weekend warriors using their skills for a second job.

I have spoken to more then a few people who are afraid that eventually most of the file hosting sites will be taken down.

One of these people runs a website graphics package business. They design packages of icons and other graphics along with backgrounds that are to be used to enhance designs. The distribution zips that they sell for a pretty reasonable price are password protected and hosted remotely because he uses a free hosting solution. Although he doesn’t make a ton of money it does offset his costs for a couple bills. It is a hobby turned business that he is now reevaluating.

Lets get back to SOPA

This takedown was not due to SOPA it was performed by the Obama Administration a day after a large fund raiser in Hollywood.

Say what you want but he can’t blame that on George Bush.. heh

Wikipedia has decided to go offline and its owner has already tweeted an announcement that kids better do their homework early before they can’t get it from Wikipedia.

WordPress is also up in arms about SOPA and has released some Plugins for users to install on their websites to shutdown their sites on Jan 18th…

I don’t know does this really matter?

If you saw a previous post I talked about WordPress, Blogger and other large membership sites who are against this law and how some simple google searches revealed that millions of pages on their sites are dedicated to warez and other simply pirated content.

We are not talking fan sites that allow downloads of GLEE Cast Member backgrounds for your computer or phone.. they are right in your face pirate pages offering Software, Passwords, Cracks and other nasty stuff.

I tell you Matt could put me in charge of emptying all of that content and it would be a lifetime of work..

Anyway if you want to protest I suggest that you start now and don’t shower for the next couple days.. and go out for a 5 mile run and get really skanky…

Then you can install a AntiSopa Plugin and you are set.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/sopa

Dressing like David Hasselhofff is optional

This process will also work for top level domains that are hosted separately.

There are some drawbacks before you get started and you should understand that combining websites into a network may require much more work then simply moving your sites between hosting companies or rearranging your domain structure.

Getting Started

1) The first thing that you need to do is make full file and database backups of the sites you want to combine.

Don’t just make a WordPress Export … you want to make cPanel downloads if you can and verify that the data has not been corrupted.

2) Setup your new install for your WordPress Network. If you already have an established site that you will use as the primary domain for the Network then you want to dump your cache, remove any unused themes or plugins and verify that all of the plugins that you are using are Updated and friendly with the current install of WordPress and also that they support Networks.

Unfortunately it is difficult to know if there will be any problems with a plugin

3) Use the internal WordPress Export tool to export all of your sites to xml files.

Keep your websites alive and do not delete the files because any linked media that you intend to import must be available.

See Final Note.

4) Use cPanel to create a wildcard sub domain for your primary domain.   To do this simply add a new subdomain and name it *.yourdomain.com    use an asterisk character for the sub-domain name then save.

5) Activate Multisite and select the subdomain not the subdirectory option.

6) install the WordPress MU Domain Mapper plugin if you are using more then one primary domain name on your install.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/

7) Create blog accounts for each site you want to install.

8) Verify your themes and plugins are compatible and copy any additional plugins as necessary.

9) Import all of your sub domain sites into their new blog locations.

10) Verify the setup of all plugins and themes. You may need to adjust and change a large number of settings to get your site looking as it did before.

YOUR SITES SHOULD NOW BE WORKING ON THEIR SUB-DOMAIN ADDRESSES…

11) If any of your sites need their own parent domain you can attach that domain now by using the SuperAdmin account.

Final Note

Expect to lose some settings along the way. The WordPress Export Tool is not always the best and you will need to verify all of your user accounts and setups.

It is important that you do not delete your installs as they will be needed during the import phase.

If you have problems with your user accounts you can try forcing a password update

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/reset-all-user-passwords/

Finally just expect problems .. you may not have any but if you approach this with the mindset that you need to be protective of your database, users and content then you will be prepared when things happen.

Visit every plugin page that you will be using and verify that people are not complaining about problems with MultiSite. Themes should work however remember to copy parent themes and children.

Become very familiar about user levels and what you can do with Multisite .. you do not need to make members of subdomains members of your parent site.

When you perform upgrades you will need to verify that each plugin has been updated on subdomain sites.

All in all this can be a difficult process and will require additional learning from a normal install.

What is the advantage? Yes that is the question. The primary advantage of a Network site is allowing memberships for bloggers however you can do this manually.

You should investigate how others use Multisite prior to going live with it.. as questions if you can and then set up a demo site for yourself.

Today I was reading a post on WordPress.org where they announced that they are breaking tradition of  being nonpolitical HAHAHAHA if anyone sucked obama’s dick harder then Social Network Executive Staff for the past few years … well maybe Whoopie Goldberg or Oprah but .. anyway back to SOPA…

The problem with SOPA is that it allows the commercial venture not the courts to cause a take down notice that can be enforced in a number of ways .. not limited to just knocking off the sites domain name which would have them using IPs? big deal right they will get the cracks and warez and gayporn out there however they have to even if it means delivery by little red wagons.. .

So I am reading this post on WordPress.org and thinking to myself hmmm how big of a problem is this for these social nework website providers like WordPress.com Blogspot.com and so on..

So I start Googleing things like

|keygen site:blogspot.com| which brought back 35MILLION HITS

the same search on WordPress.com brought back 1.3 Million hits..

I don’t know but does that seem excessive?

I mean i never really thought about it until i saw that post

http://wordpress.org/news/2012/01/help-stop-sopa-pipa/

by Jane Wells of Automattic  jane.wordpress.com UX lead for WordPress

….

That seems like a lot of Warez and Crap to me..

What are these people doing with their lives that there are 100+ million sites or pages dedicated to this stuff?

I thought there were like 12 sites or something not MILLIONS GEES.. what the hell is going on?

…

They had the Primaries in Dixville Notch last night and only 9 people showed up out of 67 in this town for the republican primary…

of the nine who did vote 3 of them voted for OBAMA???!!!!

Its a fricken Republican Runoff and they voted for OBAMA… ??? WTF MAN…

Well at least they showed up on the right night and voted.. but they are RETARDS… GLUE SNIFFERS… CRACKHEADS…

but think of this

the other 58… who didn’t show up??? they were making WAREZ SITES ON BLOGGER AND WORDPRESS.COM

…

Come on people??? Geez

whats going on here..

The world is going to implode on its self and 97% of you are going to be in the basement saying .. Just 3 more minutes God I have to download KanyeWest PimpOmaster 3000 for the XBox… and God will say HEY you dont even own a XBOX.. and then…

YOU KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING????

DO YOU KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING???

—- but back to Automatic and WordPress.com and google BlogSpot.com having all these sites.

It makes you wonder if some how they are profiting from this some way if they dont decide to dump theses sites.

At the very least they are compiling logs which they sell.

Or they are advertising their service or someone elses………

i don’t know.. but i find it strange… and I wish people would wake up and start doing whats right.. going to the polls and voting.. and voting for candidates that care about the future of our country and the world.. rather then voting like its an episode of America’s Next Top Model or something..

Sad people… its sad.

Is this all you are getting out of your life? Is this how you live the few years God gives you?

sad..

Noting that there are 90,000 active accounts the number of people that actually contribute to the site has fallen dramatically in the past few years.

Wales says that the average contributor is a Male age 26 and as he says it Geeks grow up and get married or just find other things of interest.

“We are not replenishing our ranks,” said Wales. “It is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important.”

Administrators of the Internet’s fifth most visited website with over 3 million entries are working to simplify the way users can contribute and edit material. “A lot of it is convoluted,” Wales said. “A lot of editorial guidelines … are impenetrable to new users.”

The WPMU version of WordPress allowed for the creation of multiple websites to be hosted within the same install. This was to allow quick creation of users websites that were hosted on WordPress.com. .. yes most of the code in the WordPress.org package that you install to make your website work is the same product that runs millions of websites on www.WordPress.com .

What are some of the considerations you should take into account when deciding to use a WP3x Multisite Network?

First you should understand that although you are getting most of the same code that WordPress.com is using you are not getting all of the optimization behind the code that allows large numbers of websites to be hosted on a single server.

Along with code optimization WordPress.com has quite a bit of Server Tuning.. they use different HTTPD servers then you will most likely use on a shared, VPS or even a dedicated server. Their PHP, MySql and Memory Caching is highly tuned to provide quick response. This is something that takes a lot of skill to manage and setup.

With that in mind don’t think that you can simply enable the option and begin to host thousands of sites.

Not to mention WordPress.com has a lot of limitations on Plugins, Themes and other options that users can make use of.

If you start loading up the options for your members then you will also load your server.

Database Corruption

Corruption of the Database is my primary concern with any multisite install. Quite simply there are a lot of flaky plugins out there not to mention people that use or develop themes that directly access the database instead of using WP Calls.

If you have corruption of your database you could end up with all of your sites going down and recovering from that may be close to impossible.

Again these problems are not seen on WordPress.com because they test everything extensively before deploying it but you can never tell what one of your users is going to do at 3am.

Limits on Account Functions

If you install all of your sites with their own cPanel account then your users can make use of all of the features found in cPanel and add ones on their own. They can create Email Addresses and manage Domains or check server logs.

If you place all of your users on a MultiSite then users will be limited in the available functions within their account. They may come to you to make changes and expect you to do it for free. Nothing is free.. but allowing a customer to do something as simple as setup an Email account on their own will cut down on support labor time and headaches.

What is the best use of a WordPress Multisite Network?

Networks are best if you are creating websites of the same type or support subdomains for the same site… or maybe a membership site where you allow members to have their own site.

If you are deploying sites of dissimilar content you may have dns glitches with the top site or primary domain showing up intermittently while subsites load.. so you probably want the primary domain to be hosting related or something of that nature that announces the sub sites. In other words you don’t want the primary domain to be a porn site if you are hosting subsites for churches….

Personally I would never build a network unless i was building a membership site like ning .com

but they could be useful for a complement of site subdomains

support.yoursite.com
form.yoursite.com
gallery.yoursite.com

where the primary goal is to separate content to make it easier to manage

or

alaska.mycompany.com
newjersey.mycompany.com

where each office would have an administrator and support their own content.

Both of these options are primarily in-house use of multisite networks and this is probably best for most users.

Final Note

You should not be scared of creating the next best social network for your users by using Multisite Networks but you should understand that the level of support for these sites will be just as high as independent installs.

You will find it more difficult to backup single user accounts with dozens, hundreds or thousands of similar tables in your database. Most likely you will need to resort to WordPress Export or a Plugin vs PhpMyAdmin.

You will also need to improve your testing mentality and never allow a plugin on a live server that has not gone through testing on a dev server.

All of your files will need to be watched for exploits. You don’t want the actions of one administrator taking out all of your clients sites.

You should consider a dedicated server and using nginx and memcache along with other features that will optimize and improve the function of your site.

Although managing 100 multisite network sites may be easier then managing 100 independent installs your ability to get to the point where you can support multisite in that level of hosting will be exponential.

Most of the information that you need to learn will be undocumented. This is simply a fact of people who are doing it not wanting to release months or years of knowledge for free. And that as your site changes and expands unknown problems will occur that no one has ever stepped into.

If you are contemplating a Large membership site … start by using multisite for the methods I described above first.

Learn how to upgrade plugins across 5 to 10 related sites.. it is more difficult then a click. Then dive deep into user management and control. Finally brush up on DNS and Server Optimization.

Then when you are ready have a site where you need to deal with 50 or more users all wanting some type of support and changes to their sites.

After that consider all of the work you will need to perform and you may find that like me… for the most part assigning one administrator from the company you are working with and one full install in a cPanel account will get you by for most things.

About 20 files are updated however most of the updates are not related to the security problems they are simply format updates to show the new change in version.

For all you GoDaddy blogging Haters out there you might be interested in … probably not … but the fix for the cross-site scripting vulnerability that affected version 3.3. was thanks to Joshua H., Hoang T., Stefan Zimmerman, Chris K., and the Go Daddy security team.

for more info

http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.3.1

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?new=19669%40branches%2F3.3&old=19590%40trunk

There are a number of new features that some people will like but first I want to hit on the things I don’t..

It seems that they are starting to place options that you can use before unlocking the phone. You can respond to incoming calls with a text .. jump to the camera and other options.. well why lock the phone if you can do these things? I guess we will have to see how it works out.

On the good side they have added a long dictation speech to text option that will allow you to capture as much as you want. This isn’t a bad option for people that need to send email or even make posts to their blog.

There is an API for integrating spell checkers that will go well with the ability to dictate long text messages but expect auto replace to cause you problems.

Widgets are now adjustable in size and you can multitask slightly better.

WiFi Direct is a new communications option to allow your phone to connect to other devices. This will allow you to connect to your Computer or a Wifi TV to stream media… Really? Streaming media off your Phone to your TV? I don’t think I will use that option.

Anyway upgrade if you can and see whats new.