Blog Networks is a social networking application that esentially turns Facebook into a massive database of blogs not unsimilar to Yahoo’s MyBlogLog.  The idea is to encourage reading by the casual reader.  I just signed up GosDot and Appfrica which you can check out by clicking the links.

All my social media discussion can be found at the Appfrica blog as it relates to work there..

So if you’re confused, where can you find Jon Gos on the WWW these days?

Appfrica.org
Smashing Magazine
Imaginepublishing.co.uk
Developertutorials.com
weworkforfree.net

I never expected to be a professional blogger but with the increasing amount of gigs I’m getting, that might just be possible.

The biggest is the announcement that Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have decided to leave the company they sold to Yahoo! in 2005!  This is big, not only because they’ve been pretty adamant about staying involved with their pet project but because Yahoo! is in the middle of formulating new strategies to appease angry shareholers after that much publicized Microsoft acquisition failed.  They’re also under increased pressure to breathe life back into their stock which has also suffered in the wake of that same deal.

Technorati announced some new funding, no doubt related to the longtail business model they just unveiled.  Technorati essentially plans to allow bloggers and publishers of all levels of popularity to sell ads.

The Huffington Post is also making a major step towards becoming an even bigger news media outlet.  They intend to compete in localized news markets initially offering a Chicago, Illinois portal and eventually expanding to include other regions of the country. This is apparently part of a larger strategy to move beyond solely political blogging, which has obviously been critical in this election year.

“We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began,” Huffington said.

I’m almost certain this will either lead to acquisition offers by the major media news outlets who are (or should be) afraid of Huffington’s growing dominance on the web.

Lastly, Facebook surpassed Myspace to become the most popular social network worldwide. Considering it was valued by analysts at over a billion dollars only a few months ago, this adds more validity to speculation that Facebook will file for an IPO and go public soon.

Jaiku is joining Google. While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.

But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.

Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders

In the past few weeks Twitter has faced confusion and what some might call a mass exodus of users because of the fact that it was unprepared for such heavy traffic from users. The combination of high traffic, too many calls to the API and the strain of Instant mesaging has brought the Twitter servers to their knees more than once. Now it appears Google is kicking the service while it’s down by purchasing Jaiku, Twitter’s nearest competitor. Now it appears Google may be prepping a big relaunch of the service it purchased last year, Jaiku. Meanwhile new competitor Plurk and FreindFeed continue to experience rapid booms in growth from former Twitter users who seem to be debating on weather or not they want to stick with the ailing service.

Note: This post has been corrected due to an error on my part. I left the original erroneous text but struck it out to avoid confusion.

It’s the new beta test model, where the actual testing and bug reporting is essential crowd sourced, allowing those diehard, bleeding edge, early-adopter users to feel more nerdy while helping Google work out the kinks. They’ve also opened up channels for sending feed back directly to engineers. Here’s somewhat of a GLabs manifesto from Product Manager Kieth Coleman.

People often ask how we decide what to build next. It’s usually a mix of factors, like how many users are asking for it (think delete button, vacation responder, and IMAP, among others), how useful we think it will be (think chat, conversation view, etc.) or how much fun it will be to work on (this is actually really important). We have all sorts of debates about each option, we weigh the pros and cons, and then some of the time we probably make the wrong decision.

Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they’re good or not. When you sign in, you’ll see a new page in Settings called Labs. It has a list of experimental new features, and you can enable or disable each one. Some of the popular ones will become core parts of the product, and we’ll eventually retire the ones that don’t get much use. We’ve put feedback links in there, too, so you can discuss a feature with other users and the engineer(s) who wrote it.

If you think this is just direct competition for Google Docs and 37Signals you’re wrong. Acrobat trumps them both in spades!

The Highlights at a Glance:

• Flash-based
• Uses Adobe ConnectNow
• Uses your pre-existing Adobe ID to log-in
• Allows for online storage
• Sharing of Files
• Works with the downloadable version of Acrobat 9
• Edit and Creates PDFs online
• Each user is given a space called a Meeting Room
• Allows for Screen Sharing via Web
• Can access your web cam from the browser!
• Can share your microphone from browser
• Appears to allow VOIP conference calls
• Advanced Bandwidth Allocation Preferences
• Shows all connected users
• Shared Whiteboard for taking notes and quick sketches
• Native chatting

PICS
Click pics to see more.

I tested it briefly for this article and a few things I can tell you is that it’s fast and dead simple to use. While the fact that it’s Flash-based worries me, it makes perfect sense. They invented Flash and I’m sure are dedicated to proving it’s scalability and usefulness for building web applications. It would be admitting a weakness if they used Ruby for something like this, not to mention with the recent problems Twitter’s been having that doesn’t sound like the best idea these days anyways.

The verdict? Acrobat.com aims to be the new place people do business online. It’s Skype, 37Singals’ Campfire and Google Docs all rolled into one! After Beta testing this once, I’ll never use at least two of those applications ever again! ReadWriteWeb has an even more in-depth review.

WeWorkForFree is a design community that allows it’s members to upload and share their portfolios in order to raise money for international programs that benefit developing nations.

They do this by hosting contests sponsored by donors that need a job completed, but who are also willing to donate money to a good cause. The programs are target small communities in places like Kenya, Uganda and India. Examples of some of these programs include goals like raising money to donate OLPC laptops to classrooms, raising money to send food to Tsunami victims or donating funds to a clinic that shelters refugees from Kenya.

One of the most interesting elements is that artist can apply for scholarships to actually go volunteer for a few weeks in some of the countries where WW4F are established! The idea is to help designers, photographers, illustrators, and other artists get involved in using their talents to benefit the world at large.

The UI of the site will be quite familiar to those of you using services like DeviantArt, CarbonMade and ConceptArt.org with the added benefit of raising money for the people in areas of the world that desperately need it.

We Work For Free is currently in private beta. Click the image below to visit.

Let’s look at exactly who you potentially turn away from your establishment by not offering WiFi:

• Business men and women
• Young Professionals
• Students of all ages
• The Casual User (email, chatting, google)
• Professors/Teachers

Today in Lakewood (just outside of Denver) I drove around for an hour looking for places where I could sit and work for a few hours while grabbing a bite to eat. Here’s a list of the places that I found Lakewood that offered WiFi:

• Starbucks
• Borders
• Whole Foods Market
• Moosehill Cantina
• Village Roaster
• Atlanta Bread Co.
• The Press Coffee Company at Belmar
• Peaberry Coffee
• Chad’s Union Street Cafe
• Baker Street Pub & Grill
• Yard House Rest.
• Belmar Library
• Lakewood Library
• McDonald’s
• Volkswagen of Lakewood
• Stevinson Lexus of Lakewood

What’s ridiculous about this list is two of these are public libraries, two are car dealerships while four are huge mega-franchise corporate entities. The Village Roaster and the Atlanta Bread Co. are also franchises albeit a smaller level than McDonald’s and WholeFoods. That leaves only about six independent local restaurants that have realized that WiFi is an added value that customers appreciate an thus, the businesses that could benefit from it the most have failed to adopt it. Subsequently, the big corporations that tend to swallow up smaller competitors are made stronger. For instance, I’m writing this from Starbucks instead of the local coffeshop New York Bagels.

New York Bagels, which I stopped at for breakfast this morning, looked like exactly the type of place that would benefit from offering WiFi. It had an intimate atmosphere, good food, coffeeshop-style decor and seemed to draw much of the business class from the surrounding at breakfast and lunch time. I can only imagine how much more they would draw if people knew they could go there and still get work done. Unfortunately, the owner told me that he was “still debating” on whether or not to offer WiFi.

Seriously? What’s left to debate?

You aren’t going to chase away customers for offering them more. For the minimal investment of $50 to $100 dollars a month you can serve password-protected WiFi that might actually make you money in the long run:

• Simply offering WiFi (even if you password protect it so only paying customers can use it) you’ll bring in new customers who wouldn’t solicit your business otherwise.
• If you offer free wifi that is maybe ad supported, you can make money by selling that ad space to local businesses. Those business benefit the most because you’ve qualified customers for them in advance by proving they are physically located in the area, have money to spend and are tech savvy enough to get online and find said advertisements. It’s a variation of the impressionistic advertising that advertisers have used for decades.

One argument against offering Wifi is that it causes people to come to your establishment and sit for hours without buying anything. Or that having a bunch of gadgets around somehow ruins the atmosphere of small community oriented businesses. This is the debate that Javaology in Atlanta used for the longest time. These business consider the crosstalk and chatter part of their draw.

I don’t buy these arguments at all. For the customer who sits for hours without buying anything, establish some sort of minimum purchase that they would need to make before they are even given access to your connection. While the connection is still free, you’re forcing them to at least spend money on something else in shop so that you aren’t losing money on them. You might also want to consider offering paid monthly memberships to customers who don’t want to bother with those frequent small purchases. They’ll more than likely be happy to pay a premium up front for unlimited access. Changing the password frequently in this scenario will further protect you from freeloaders.

For the second argument, the tech customer may indeed effectively reduce the “chatter” of people who come to talk business or about their gardens or whatever people conversate about at coffee shops. However, it’s possible that they’ll increase it. I often frequent coffeshops with friends so that we can work on projects together. In this case I’m talking more than I would be otherwise. That’s playing devil’s advocate though, my real argument is that your customers will decide what type of atmosphere they want to create….not you. Trying to control the actions of your customers is like trying to predict the stock market. There’s a science to coming close, but you’ll never succeed 100%.

In conclusion, from my vantage point, there’s few reasons left NOT to offer free Wifi, especially if you’re located in a smaller area like Lakewood, Colorado that isn’t so progressive when it comes to adopting new technology.