Thank you to all of my friends on your support and congratulations! If you didn’t hear, I finally finished my novel yesterday, and I wanted to share some lessons from the experience.

I decided to do video this time because I need a break from writing (except for Mashable; I will be back on the case very soon)

I’ll have more to report as I try to take this moment in, but I completed my first novel, a science-fiction thriller, at about 11:00.

Although the story’s done, I still have a lot of work to do. I’m going to take a break from it, read some fiction for fun, and then get this thing printed and do my edits. After that, I’ll be asking some close friends to read it as well and we’ll find out if it’s up to par.

In the meantime, here’s some statistics (as of 1/24/2009):

I’m finally done. Wow.

Thank you to everyone who emailed, called, IMed, and tweeted me during my blog’s downtime yesterday. Nobody is quite sure what happened, though people had theories, but in the end I (eventually) got to my hosting and we went back in time and restored the website.

I’m going to be changing a lot of how I manage the blog. There’s going to be restore points because I’m going to use SVN and I will be redesigning the blog. This is a long overdue project I have wanted to undertake, but never had the time. But I anticipate a little more time soon.

Once again, thanks for the help everyone! Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside you all care.

- Ben

What a simple question, but one we don’t ask enough.

As you know, I have an entrepreneurial bent, so I love to figure out ways to solve problems, and then implement those solutions. But first, you’ve got to pick a problem out, one that bothers you.

I put the question to the Hacker News Community, and the response was immense: 183 replies, all of them either problems entrepreneurial developers wanted to see solved or comments on those problems. Here were the top ideas, scored by the Hacker News community:

IE6, for those of you who are not programmers or designers, is the bane of our existence. Rewriting CSS that works in Firefox, Safari, and IE7, but then breaks in IE6 is one of the most frustrating experiences possible. I’m certain that IE6 wastes millions of dollars each year in wasted manpower and design flaws. No, it’s not global warming, but it’s still a problem that causes massive inefficiency and stifles innovation.

A larger problem that millions of people are already trying to solve. But one I don’t think we’ll be solving before I’m in the grave.
(more…)

There were a few interesting conversations yesterday and today on the role of “Internet presence” in the job hunt. Will a blog help you get a job? What about an online resume? Should you beef up your LinkedIn account in case employers look at it?

The omniscient blogger Robert Scoble started with a list of ways to socially network if you are laid off. Then he stated that “if you don’t have a blog, you don’t have a resume,” which led to this argument over his words.

Sorry I had to go through the history of a conversation, but I needed to frame the picture. A post on Mashable by Dan Schawbet discussing how to use social media to build an online resume also piqued my interest.

All of this conversation needs to be filtered. We need to ask the big question:

To answer that question, I need to say this: what you put online isn’t going to get you a job. It’s what you have accomplished and what the interviewers believe you could accomplish that will get you the job. Having a blog on marketing isn’t going to get you a marketing position at Apple if your competition has successfully executed major marketing campaigns for Fortune 500 companies. What a blog will do is accentuate your experience, your strengths, and leave a lasting impression.

So what do I suggest? Be passionate and be professional. Employers will indeed Google search you, so make sure those inappropriate pictures never, ever get taken and put online. After that, just do what excites you. Creating a blog when you hate to write is a waste of your time and the time of a potential employer. It’s clear as day whether or not you put time into your website. Pointing out your accomplishments in a video or an about page can help, but it only helps if you’ve actually accomplished something.

So instead of worrying about what Scoble is saying about online presence, focus on making solid, meaningful accomplishments and conveying that experience when you finally sit down with that interviewer.

Image credit to stayrudee at Flickr

By every definition (except revenue), Twitter was a major success in 2008. It grew from under 500,000 unique visits to nearly 2.5 million in November. Despite major stability problems and the infamous fail whale, Twitter has prospered and spurred its own mini-economy: Twitter applications.

Twitter applications are the websites and programs that use the Twiter API to do anything from collect data to creating a desktop interface for tweeting. Most are small and simple applications, and nearly all of them are free to use. Now there are literally thousands of applications for Twitter, and if you’re a frequent twitter user, you’re probably using at least several.

But what’s the value of these apps to their creators? Users have gained from being able to share twipics or making venn diagrams, but are Twitter applications a reasonable way to achieve a financial payday?

To answer that question isn’t sufficient. In order to get the full picture, we need to answer three related questions:

• 1) Can you make money off of Twitter applications?
• 2) Do you have a reasonable chance of making a payday off of Twitter applications?
• 3) Can Twitter applications be built into successful business models with a positive cashflow?

Q: Can you actually make money off of Twitter applications?