Hot Grog is a new website I setup to quickly read the internets. It uses RSS to grab news headlines from various sources and dumps them out in a simple list.
There's a few different pages covering various topics. Web Buzz is a great page to see all the fun stuff as it happens across the internet.
ReviewMe is a new site that is trying to setup a marketplace where bloggers can offer to write honest reviews in exchange for money. The money comes from companies or individuals who want to get reviews. I think it's an interesting idea. Getting reviews can be tough sometimes, so having a straight up chance to buy an honest one can be a good deal. I'm testing out the system with Lux Delux, having just put in a review request for a blog that looked interesting.
ReviewMe is also spicing things up with an initial pool of $25,000 that they are paying out to bloggers to review the service itself. That's what this post is: a sponsored post from ReviewMe. I will apparently get payed $30 in exchange for this review of their system. The pay-out is dependent on each individual blog's traffic standings (as best as ReviewMe can estimate them at least). The only imposition on the review is that it must be at least 200 words long, and it has to state that it is sponsored.
I had a bit of trouble signing up initially, but once inside their system is pretty good. They got some good early buzz, and there's a variety of interesting blogs that have signed up in their system. I'm awaiting the results of buying my review before making further judgement.
Have a question? Put it in the email body and send it to q@askforcents.com (leaving the subject line blank) and you'll get an answer. Actually, you'll get at least 2 answers. And you'll usually get them in mere seconds. This forms the alpha testing of a service Ask For Cents, clearly meant to have a cost associated with it eventually.
I had a lot of fun asking random questions. About how the service works, tech questions, what the future holds, social policies, love tips, and more. The answers I got back ranged from funny to informative to literal to snooty to wrong. It's like a magic 8 ball, except you get a real human answer. Try it out now while it's free.
The service is run by Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk service. It allows computers to send work packets to humans to be filled in exchange for money. Pretty awesome idea IMHO. Answerers are currently making 3 cents per question, but inform me they are hoping for more valuable ones in the future.
Back at last year's IndieGamesCon I attended a good session on marketing from Kelly Heckman. In it she talked about building up a brand for your company, for your products, and for yourself as a person. The last item is what concerns me at the moment.
Having a weblog is an excellent way to build up your 'personal brand'. Unfortunately, I think that sillytech was hampering this somewhat. It's a group blog, and even though I have a page there to myself, it's not really mine. So I decided to start a personal blog that's all my own. Actually, I decided to take the sillytech code and create a personal skin that uses the same content database, but only shows my stuff. So nothing will change at sillytech, however I now also have a blog that's just for me. From now on I'm going to be spending my efforts building up Dustin Sacks' blog instead of sillytech.
The design is still a first version. I know I need a better picture of myself, and I want to put my blogroll up also. Any other comments you have on the design or layout or colors are appreciated.
Programmer and author Paul Graham just wrote an interesting article entitled Hiring is Obsolete. It's geared towards young programmers, but there's some nice stuff in there for everyone.
The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn't cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker. ... Actually college is where the line ends. Superficially, going to work for a company may feel like just the next in a series of institutions, but underneath, everything is different. The end of school is the fulcrum of your life, the point where you go from net consumer to net producer.
The other big change is that now, you're steering. You can go anywhere you want. So it may be worth standing back and understanding what's going on, instead of just doing the default thing.
So it seems to me that posting a resume that includes some quality buzzwords onto the net is a good way of getting recruited. I checked my logs and saw a hit from a search for "resume or cv and j2me or j2me developer or mobile game", which would explain this email I just got:
Hi Dustin,
I wanted to take the time to reach out to you after having had the opportunity of coming across your resume online. I am an account manager with [company name removed] which is the leading recruiting agency for the video game industry. I have several clients in the wireless games space that are looking for experienced software engineers for full-time employment, specifically J2ME & BREW Engineers. Currently I am trying fill positions for these clients in the S.F. Bay Area, New York, Montreal and London. Based on your background, I believe that they would be very interested in speaking with you in more detail as would I.
![Chart comparing food consumption in different countries [image].](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/13/business/20080514_FOOD_GRAPHIC.gif){kind=link}