Managing projects is hard. I’ve come to learn this over the last year. [poor] Project management is also without a doubt one of the factors why Hippstr has been delayed for almost a year now. So I’m going to share with you a few of the tools, services and practices that have helped improve my productivity and my team’s.

Those who are around me often will know I never shut up about how great basecamp is. And it really is.

“Basecamp is the smarter, easier, more elegant way to collaborate on your internal and client projects.”
37signals

Basecamp is a really simple and easy-to-use project management system. With great to-do management, a forum like “messages” section and milestones (There’s more but this is the important sutff). Read More …

There is a subtle difference between the <b>, <strong>, <i> and <em> html tags: they are commonly misused when styling text as bold or italic.

The <b> and <i> tags are presentation elements and are to be used where there is no “semantic” meaning, for example in a site footer. The <strong> and <em> tags are used where emphasis is to be put on a word and there is semantic meaning, as above with “subtle”.

Semantic: “relating to meaning in language or logic.”
New Oxford American Dictionary

Why does this matter? The correct use of these tags help computers understand language. Currently,

“… web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines.”
Wikipedia

By correctly using these tags we help computers understand in what context we meant something we wrote. The most important use of these tags is for accessibility, em and strong tags are read with emphasis on a screen reader while i and b are read as normal text; since they’re designed for presentation use only.

It’s been about a year and a half now since I originally conceived the idea of HiPPstr; a new social network, a unique social network. During that time, I’ve learnt a lot; more than you could imagine. Today I’m going to talk about social networking as a viable business model. People keep pressing the question to me, how will you make money?

My answer is usually, I Don’t Know. The obvious path is targeted advertising, the current model that supports all the big social networks, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Although is it a viable business model? There are two problems at the moment, with social networking as a business.

1. The founders are developers not business men.
2. Ads at best, break even.

Most of you will argue the first point is good, which it is but not if you want to make money. Developers are interested in having a successful product; if you offered them 100m dollars, they would sure take it, but it’s not usually their goal. On the other hand we saw the disaster that was caused by the so called Web 1.0 start-ups, founded by business men. I’ve said since the start that my goal with HiPPstr is not to become a billionaire but to advance technology.

So, if none of “us” want to make money, where does the problem lie? Social networking start-ups can only live of VC funding for so long. Bills need to be paid but more importantly so do employees.

How is this fixed, the current problem is that the internet is still expensive. It’s expensive to get 1 million visitors at once and it’s expensive to handle that traffic. So the answer to this problem is not more advertising but better infrastructure, infrastructure that is paid for by the ISP not the content provider, infrastructure that allows for cheap bandwidth.

In this particular article I’ve used Social Networking as the example but this applies to the new internet: IPTV, Social Networks, File Sharing, Video Conferencing, VOIP, etc.

Is social networking a viable business model, not yet.