I have no idea why, but the phrase “web 2.0″ has been receiving some negative attention towards it. Perhaps it is the idea of the cheezy gradients and thick striped backgrounds that are causing this to happen. Perhaps something else. To me, web 2.0 has always been an idea that is astounding and amazing in its goals and ideas.

To clarify, I have always loved that Web 2.0 revolves around:

1. Design - If it were not for web 2.0, I would not have so many clients requesting redesigns. Web 2.0 style allows me to touch up corporate sites, make them look clean, beautiful, and most of all attractive.
2. Usability - What good is an application or website when it doesn’t have any rich content? Web 2.0 turns around and adds this to its list of goals to make the end user not only attracted to the site because of a fantastic design, but also because they can actually get something out of it. Make sense?
3. Standards - As a coder, I sometime hate the strict standards mostly due to the fact that IE and Firefox don’t get along too well most of the time. Standards however, help everything be organized and efficient.
4. Sharing - That’s right. It’s all about sharing. Blogs, videos, podcasts, wikis, and RSS are all about sharing data and interacting with each other. You can even see it in action here where Askllora.com is a product of this great interactivity maze.
5. .COM Giants – Put all the above points together and you get some great results: Youtube, eBay, Wordpress, Blogger, Technorati, Engadget, and of course Askllora!

Popularity: 10% [?]

It seems as if it has become a tidal wave when everyone has started talking about affiliate programs and how you can make money from them. There’s even dozens of ebooks claiming to tell you the way to make millions from affiliate programs.

I’m not going to lie, unless you want to get yourself into dirty, sinful, no good adult affiliate programs, you’re not going to make millions. However, affiliate programs can bring in good income. The key to any affiliate program lies within the name itself. You ‘affiliate’ yourself with some company and give them leads. And in order to do that you need traffic.

Traffic is the key to nearly 99% of how the internet operates. If you don’t have customers, who are you going to sell to? So your task is to figure out how to gain traffic whether it is by email subscriptions, paid traffic, website traffic, advertising, you name it. I won’t go into details in this post, but stay updated on how to spend less and earn more!

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’m sure many of you have been eyeing an expired domain and were wondering, how long will it take for the domain to be available again!!? Click on the image below to see the domain life cycle.

Summary:

Typical TLD (top level domains) such as .COM, .NET, .ORG expire on the date listed in their WHOIS data. Once a domain expires, it has a 45 day period during which the registrant may renew their domain. After the initial 45 days, the following 30 days are a grace period allowing the registrant to redeem the domain for a certain fee. If the registrant does not redeem the domain during the grace period, it is then put on hold and deleted from the registry within 5 days.

Popularity: 11% [?]

While reading my usual ComputerWorld issue, I came across a very interesting and useful article which applies to IT and poor budget management staff. In our scenario, however, I am gearing this article toward domainers, web developers, and anyone spending money. I have noticed in myself that I myself spend hundreds of dollars on things like scripts, domains, subscriptions, contracts, etc which either end up not used for a long time(domains), or if it’s an application, it gets lost in my hard drive. So all in all, these costs add up.

Here are some ways to change your thinking and cut those spendings which will do you little good anyways.

1. Always Saying Yes – Most often than not, for web developers, every new ebook, every new piece of software, or anything else is just like the latest fashionable pair of jeans for the girls at the mall. You just have to have it. This action will and does spin your budget out of control and before you know it, you’re up to the limit on your credit cards, you’re borrowing money from your savings account, and so on. To avoid this, simply stop buying new junk! You probably don’t need it anyways but if you do, wait for a bit before buying it. Truth be told, the price on whatever you’ve been eyeing will probably drop and make it more affordable. There are however some things that we all must get as soon as they get out on the market which we see potential in and an urge we can’t resist. If that’s the case, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
2. Planning to Stop Spending Once Projects Go Live – This is another big misconception about handling your budget. Every single one of us, to a degree, plans a return on some project, sale, or development in the future. This is where it gets dangerous. We set in our minds that we will have a certain monetary return on a certain project and we begin to believe in it. Spending goes up, and thinking goes down. Plans don’t often become a perfect reality, and projects can fail. So keeping spending to a limit until you reach that point where your project went live and gave you a good ROI.
3. Know Who to Hire – I myself, contrary to popular belief, do not know every programming language that exists, nor do I try to which leads me to some points where I must hire someone for a project. This was a difficult thing for some of my fewer projects, but now with more knowledge, I know who to work with and how to proceed with keeping costs oriented in these situations. When hiring someone to work, it is better to research your project. Consult with coworkers, friends, Facebook buddies, etc on what you might need. Perhaps if you’re building a backbone for a website, you might have heard that ASP is really great to use. However, things are not what they seem. Hiring a .NET developer may be the usual price as hiring a PHP developer, but if you’re hosting your sites on Linux servers, you’ll run into an additional $40+/mo costs if you were to create your site backbone in ASP.
4. Outsource - The term outsource usually gets people to thinking “cheaper”. In reality, it may not always be so. In my experience of working with one coder (ASP coder from the above example), I wanted to hire him to do some XUL coding for a Firefox plugin I had wanted to develop. This was something close to a nightmare. I’m not saying the guy isn’t bad, in fact he’s very nice and talented in his field. But sometimes we would have a hard time communicating with each other on what I wanted. This not only cost me time, but put my project on hold because we couldn’t agree on a price for developing what I needed. The key here is that outsourcing can hurt you or it can help you, so refer to #3 on this list and do your research first.
5. Plan Before You Act – This is the trouble with many people these days. I once read a quote once that went: “I think when I speak, but I do not think what I speak.” We can apply this to the internet world. We spend money while we’re thinking, but we’re not thinking about what we’re spending. Often times, I have clients who want the perfect design from me, but they have no idea what they want forcing myself and them to go through a guess-and-check routine of finding what they want. If you’re that person, get a piece of paper, write out what you want, and then contact your developer. It will save both you and them a lot of time, money, and frustration.

Popularity: 13% [?]