How to specify the newline character (\n) in the find and replace? It is Ctrl-q, Ctrl-j.

Group Purchasing sites have flourished rather quickly over the past few months. With the success of groupon.com in the US, entrepreneurs quickly copied GroupOn’s business model and replicated the same concept to all parts of the world.

The concept of GroupOn is nothing new. During the Internet boom, I still remember faintly a few sites such as mercata and mobshop which are essentially GroupOn for geeks. For example, digital cameras or laptops can be purchased with group discount if the site can get more than 100 buyers. It flourished for a while and then probably the deals weren’t that attractive and eventually all these sites got shut down.

In Hong Kong, there are a couple of group purchasing sites as well - www.ubuyibuy.com, www.gigonzone.com, www.gobuya.com, www.funshare.com - I am sure there are a least a few more but they just haven’t entered into my radar screen yet.  Initially it was quite eye catching - each of them were having very great deals with some good restaurants, ice cream joints, beauty parlors. However, after a few months, I must say the deals that they have are getting quite repetitive. Sure, people will need to eat every day and they are always looking for the newest and greatest deals. But how many steaks, specialty ice cream do you really want to eat in a month? And for some deals, the discount is just so-so and you may get the same discount just by walking in.

While GroupOn is getting a valuation of US$1.5 billion, I am asking if it is a bubble or a fad? Only time will tell…

I recently have looked at Google Webmaster and Google Analytics closely. It seems like they are both providing the same services… So should I use Webmaster or Analytics? or both?

The answer is you should use both - since they serve different purposes.

Webmaster

Webmaster can help you to be searched and discovered more easily on the web. From webmaster, you can find out what keywords (ranked by popularity) people are using to discover your website. Also, it has a set of tools that help website owners improve their visibility within the Google search engine (e.g. a tool to submit sitemap).

Setting up Webmaster is very easy. You just need to confirm that you are actually the owner of the site (by putting some snippets of code on to the server).

Analytics

This set of tools is actully not developed within Google, but rather, it was acquired by Google. This is actually a tracking tool for your website. You will be able to find out all the web traffic metrics (e.g. page hits, number of users, location of users, browser used, etc) for your website with Analytics.

In order for Analytics to work, you will need to place a few lines of Javascript on every page of your site. Whenever a page is accessed, the page will send the info to the Analytics server asynchronously. And the Google Analytics webpage will display info about your website nicely.

Eventually Google should merge these two tools together… Probably this is not a high priority for Google for now.

Today it is my first time contributing to the Wikipedia. Surprisingly the whole process takes very little time, from getting an account to editing an entry.
 
A lot of people, like me, get info from Wikipedia and would believe what is written is more or less correct. Therefore, Wikipedia can be a tool for great marketing tool too if somehow your name / your company is mentioned in Wikipedia.
 
Definitely you should not advertise yourselves shamelessly. There are a lot of volunteers who can take your edits out in a short period. Below are a few strategies you may want to take:

1. Be a volunteer in your field of interest and help edit and refine the articles.
2. Be neutral and not to over promote your business even you are a volunteer. Sometimes, humble opinions count. 
3. You can just want to mention your company name on the page. 
4. Sooner or later, you or your company may have a page in Wikipedia as people may start writing about you!

A new year’s resolution is to have your own page on Wikipedia!

Recently I came across a Japanese equivalent of Youtube called Nico Nico Douga (www.nicovideo.jp). Just like other video hosting sites, users can upload, and watch videos. But what’s so special about this is that users can comment on the videos and those comments will be overlaid directly onto the videos, synced to a specific playback time. The videos are very similar to those VH1 MTVs with funny commentaries overlaid on the top.

It is co-founded Mr. Hiroyuki Nishimura, dubbed the bad boy of the Japanese Internet by Wired Magazine. He is also the co-founder of 2channel (2ch.net) - a very popular bulletin board system (BBS) in Japan.

The site has been localized to Traditional Chinese, German and Spanish.

According to Wikipedia, the site is launched in early 2007 and is now the ninth most visited sites in Japan. The site is still not cashflow positive yet.

Wow… I can’t believe it. Even Facebook cannot deal with the irregularities of IE8.

Facebook seems to have changed their messages interface recently. In this new version, I cannot reply to any message by clicking the “Reply” button. I need to go back to the good ol’  Firefox to send/reply a message in Facebook!

When will the dominance of IE disappear? It is the worst nightmare for web developers.

A very interesting concept from Kluster. If you have a wonderful idea about a product and want to get it produced, you can send the idea to Quirky.com (together with a US$ 99 fee) and your product may get produced and you will earn money from the goods sold.

Similar to the namethis.com project by Kluster, Quirky.com mobilizes the crowd to choose the best product each week and refine on the ideas submitted. People who submit comments to the product will also get a cut from the goods sold. For ideas that don’t gain any traction, of course you will lose the $99 you paid. But then, you will also get feedback, market info and data on your product so that you can further improve your idea!

Now, you can get a $50 credit with the code KLUSTR. That means you can turn your dream idea into an actual product with only $49.

The new Microsoft search engine (www.bing.com) has gone live. It has received decent publicity through viral marketing (through my friends on Facebook) and in the press (e.g. Wall Street Jornal). I have tried bing.com a few times to perform some searches but it doesn’t really give me any excitement.

Maybe it’s a lot better than Microsoft’s previous live.com. On the other hand, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t stay with Google. My first few experiences with Bing.com were alright as the search came up with what I needed. But it was quite uneventful and lacked the Wow! factor that will make users come back again and again.

If there is any Bing advocate out there, can you give us any good reasons / features that make Bing way more superior than Google?

A recent Nielsen report says that the user retention rate of Twitter is much lower than the rate for Facebook or MySpace. Although Twitter has been creating quite a whirl wind in the mass media (with endorsement from CNN, Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey) and I personally have got more followers on my Twitter recently,  I have some concern whether Twitter can stay for long. Personally, I think Twitter is too messy and unstructured (although there are tools that help people organize their tweets) and it is nothing more than the status update that is found on Facebook. And when will Twitter be profitable? Not in the foreseeable future.

So what’s so hot about Twitter? I don’t really get it.

Several executive from Twitter, Google, and WordPress are currently in Iraq to see if they could bring the latest web technologies to Iraq! Kudos to the current US government that is very technology-savvy!

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/21/iraq.twitter.technology/index.html