FreeIQ Launches: Is it eBay for Entrepreneurs?

Congratulations to my friend Brad Fallon and his team for the launch of something truly new in the world of online marketing, Internet marketing, and entrepreneurship: FreeIQ.com.

In some sense, it's like an entrepreneurial channel on popular video site YouTube except, well, it's a whole lot more too. Imagine a site you can go where you can find hundreds of informative videos and ebooks on a wide variety of business and entrepreneurial topics.

To be fair, though, some of what you'll find in this first iteration is what I would consider the worst snake-oil salesman marketing "opportunity" information, but really, that's no different to the junk that predominates on YouTube, Google Video and other multimedia content sites, is it? One of the fundamental challenges in any business space is winnowing out the quality material from the questionable, whether you're in a Chamber of Commerce party or an Internet Marketing workshop advertised through hype-mad radio spots.

A better comparison is against eBay. eBay isn't an auction site, it's a venue for auctions to transpire online. A subtle but very important difference. Further, just as eBay shouldn't be rated by the lame auctions it sometimes hosts and the rip-offs that are interspersed with the legit buyers and sellers, so FreeIQ.com should be recognized as an underlying infrastructure toolkit for the Internet marketing community, not just a nicely organized repository.

Let me explain...

Why do people blog, and how many of us are there?

Recently answered a query from a journalist about blogging and thought that my response would make good fodder for a discussion here too. In a nutshell, she was curious about blogging and seemed not to really get the concept. Her questions were rudimentary, but then again, sometimes it's invaluable to ask those basic questions anyway.

Her first question was one of those classic ones: How many bloggers are there?

My answer: "The key to remember with this story is that a blog is just a tool. There's nothing special about it, no requirements for any particular features or capabilities. Common usage has it be diary-like and allow comments from readers to be included, but they're not required and there's no group that determines if something is or isn't a blog. This means that it's basically impossible to estimate how many blogs or bloggers are out there, unfortunately."

Finally, an autosave plugin for Movable Type!

If you're running Movable Type you'll want to stop what you're doing right now and fly over to Patrick Benny's Web site where he's just released a new version of his terrific [freeware] AutoSave plugin for Movable Type.

Previous versions worked with Firefox and IE, but this latest version (with a bit of help from my own blog, actually) is now completely compatible with Apple's Safari Web browser too. This means that you should be able to get this up and running with just about any Web browser, whether you're running Mac, Windows or even Linux.

Why I'll never sign up for any Blogger Code of Conduct

Well, the tempest in a teapot of Kathy Sierra versus Chris Locke and the general incivility of the blogosphere has finally bubbled over to the point where industry luminaries like Tim O'Reilly are proposing a Blogger's Code of Conduct. Agree to the terms and you too can have the swanky graphic shown on the left, or reject it and you get the goofy dynamite cartoon on the right:

Code Enforced	No Code of Conduct

But I'm not going to sign up for it, nor would I recommend anyone else in the blogosphere sign up, though I have the utmost respect for Tim. Further, I say that without having actually read the proposed Code. Here's why...

Should you enable HTML in your blog comments?

Some colleagues of mine have been engaged in a very interesting discussion that's worth exploring if you're a blogger: should you allow HTML in the comments left by other people? For that matter, should you automatically make URLs clickable?

I believe that the answer is related to where along the continuum of moderation and editorial control you place yourself. If you're a strict control nut and axe any comment that's not favorable or complimentary, well, then you're fine allowing HTML in comments because you are already keeping a close eye on things anyway (you're also missing the point of engaging in an open dialog with your weblog, but that's another issue entirely). If you're a laissez-faire free speech fanatic and allow anything that isn't overly crass spam or pornography, then you are going to have your work cut out for you if you allow people to add HTML.

Before I go further, though, let me explain what I mean by HTML comments.