JoeUser is growing in leaps and bounds. A month ago the average number of people on the site might be around 30 people. These days it's typically around 80 people at the same time with it being 175 as I type this. So things are going pretty well. Of course, we've also had a of technical glitches as the site has grown, we've had to make adjustments as we've started gaining unwanted attention from hackers, griefers, and other undesirables.  If you've had problems posting articles to your blog in the last couple of days, that's been the cause -- us adding features in a hurry to combat these types.

Addressing Hackers & Griefers

So now the site is more secure, your blogs are backed up very regularly to a remote machine in case of catastrophic failure, and we have the ability to ban people. Pat and I (T-man) became friends 15 years ago. We ran BBSes in those days. Since that time we've built many net communities. The largest one we've put together is called WinCustomize.com which gets over 2 million users per month.  With JoeUser, myself, Pat, and his team (DarkStar and Flying Hawaian) have put what we've learned in that time into this site.  So the banning feature here is pretty cool in how it technically functions (it's based on IP addresses and other things I won't get into to help make it hard for someone to come back as someone else).  We hope to add less severe penalties and checks and balances to the system over time so that people can get a second chance if they misbehave.

Blog Navigator

In the next week or so we plan to release Blog Navigator. Blog Navigator is a program designed to read JoeUser like a news reader. It's still in the relative early stages but it is pretty slick. It'll be free to view JoeUser but will have some cost (probably $19.95 or something) to add non-JoeUser sites to browse through. There are RSS readers out there, some of which are free, that are reasonably nice but our goal is to make Blog Navigator so slick and useful that it'll be worth it.

Premium Accounts

Creating a blog on JoeUser is free. Eventually though we plan to put in place a way for people to pay a nominal fee in exchange for being able to upload images and other things to their blog.  Over time we'll be adding services that will be available to premium accounts to make blogging easier. One feature is that Blog Navigator will be able to eventually download your blog to your machine so that you have it all locally whenever you want. I don't know about you guys but I want to have 5 years of my blogs on some remote machine. I want a way to have it backed up myself locally. And that is something we will be doing in the coming months.

New Features for JoeUser itself

Some features coming up include the ability to enter in more information about yourself if you choose. We are going to "force" every user to enter in their age as we really need to start differentiating between adult users and minors given some of the content that has come up. Similarly, authors will be able to check a "Adult content" checkbox when they make an article so that children won't be able to see the article. It won't be full proof by any means but it's better than what we currently have (nothing).

The re-organization of the forums is nearly complete. Next week we'll be consolidating some of the top level categories.  For instance, instead of Books, Movies, TV, etc. It'll all fall under the Entertainment category with those sections becoming topics of Entertainment. That way there won't be so many different categories to sift through.

We will also be adding the ability for authors to decide whether people can comment on their article. The option will say: "Comments on your article? [] Anyone, []Registered users only, []No one.  So someone who wants to just write their blog without any comments will have that right. Or if they want to make it so that only people who have accounts can respond that's good too.

We will also be adding features to let you upload a picture of yourself and of your desktop. The personal information you choose to enter can optionally be made available as part of your profile.  Here's a simple version of what we're thinking of from The Political Machine. It's not done yet but you can get the idea: https://www.politicalmachine.com/infoLite.asp?ID=879148.

Advocates

One feature deserves its own sub-heading : Advocates. As some of you no-doubt have noticed, we don't get many referrals from other blog sites or anywhere for that matter.  What makes blogs special, IMO anyway, is that they are part of a larger community. We need to become more integrated with the rest of the blogsphere which will help your articles reach more viewers. The way to do that will be by becoming an advocate.  Since we track referrals, we could give points to users who are associated with a particular site.

The way it works is that a user registers a given website with the advocate system. Then, whenever that site sends a referral to JoeUser that user will get a fraction of a point. We will also have a top advocates list as well to highlight those users.  It's a good way to encourage users to exchange links with other blogs and sites elsewhere (called blog rolling) as well as give recognition to those who are the best at evangelizing their blog (the link doesn't have to be to www.joeuser.com, it can be to your specific blog). 

So in my case, I could register www.wincustomize.com as a site and then every time they send a link here I'd get a fraction of a point. Now, most people don't have such an easy advantage since I can add links to both sites.

As for me...

I'm going to not be commenting nearly as much on other people's blogs. I don't want to discourage anyone from writing and having the owner of the site jumping on someone's article disagreeing with them might be a bit overwhelming. So I'll keep my hands off until you get into the top 10 or so in general.  

It has been a real adjustment for me opening my blog site to the public to have their own blogs. Particularly because many of the articles people post are "debate" type topics. I belong to many mailing lists that essentially are for "expert" debaters to hash our various issues. I confess to becoming frustrated interacting with people who are new to on-line debating. For instance, my area of "expertise" in on-line debating is history. History is my #1 hobby and through reading of history you can eventually get a clearer picture about why things are they way they are (for example, some people act like the war in terror is in chaos because the US attacked Iraq even though it had nothing to do with 9/11.  The first nation whose territory we violated with troops after Pearl Harbor was France -- we invaded French North Africa in operation Torch. Needless to say, critics of the administration at the time didn't see what French North Africa or even Rommel had to do with Pearl Harbor, especially with the Philippines occupied by the Japanese).  So I tend to be short in patience when people think that any events occurring now are somehow unprecedented or articles that show a distinct lack of knowledge on history despite asserting a certain level of certainty about what happened.  So I'll be cutting down on the responses.

But I will be making more articles though.  I have a bunch nearly done. Many article just take a long time to do because of the research involved. Which is probably another reason I tend to get impatient with articles that just spew out what I consider to be regurgitated propaganda from either the left wing or the right wing on some issue.  For instance, it's amazing how many people, including "journalists" slam on Haliburton. I wonder how many people actually know what this company does? Or that it actually made more money under Clinton?  Like many things, finding these things out is just a few clicks away but it's easier for people to just parrot, unwittingly, talking points from some political operative as if they are fact.

But that's the type of stuff I enjoy writing about -- things that many people may not have heard of before. Some people may find it "bomb throwing" but that's not the intent. It's just that I choose topics sometimes that are so against the prevailing (and often ill-informed) views of the day. Seriously, how many people out there that you meet on a day to day basis would know that it was the Republicans who fought tooth and nail in congress and in state legislatures to abolish slavery (passing the 13th amendment) while Democrats fought tooth and nail to keep slavery going. That until around 1965, the Democrats were generally the party of "white power" in ways that would make either side cringe today? The whole slapping Republicans with the racist tag is so amazingly offensive to me because it shows a complete lack of knowledge on history. Republicans just don't like special treatment based on pigment. That's about the biggest thing that can be thrown on them. The people who created and supported separate but equal were Democrats. The people who created the Jim Crowe laws were Democrats.  Just another example of how goofed up current events can get if history is ignored. 

Not that Republicans should start feeling high and mighty. The reason why Republicans are stereotyped as being uncaring of the less fortunate is because so many of them are uncaring of the less fortunate. I've seen it first hand so many times. What Republicans need to realize is that while there are many poor people who just leech of the system, the majority of poor people are hard working Americans just trying to make ends meet. And Republicans need to start taking white collar crime much more seriously. In the 10 years I've been in business, I've had around $600,000 stolen from me. Did anyone go to jail? Nope. Did the police even get involved? Nope. Because in the business world, you can be an amazingly dishonest crook and steal all you want. My first publisher stole an estimated $150,000 from me. I was a college student at the time, what could I do? He just didn't pay royalties. Not a cent after the product's release. It was as simple as that. He got money and just didn't pay any. And my experience is sadly, typical.  If Republicans want to get taken more seriously about their complaining about the taxes "wasted" each year on the less fortunate they need to start pushing for criminal penalties in financial contract violations and the like. You can set up a LLC corporation in a few days, put together a contract with people to sell their stuff, get the money and then declare bankruptcy without ever paying. Is that right? No. Ever hear Republicans talk about how we need to stop the hundreds of billions of dollars lost each year due to white collar crime? Nope. And who really gets screwed at the end of the day? Working Americans.

What's next

So as the site gets more popular, you'll see a lot of interesting articles and such. You'll also see commercialism creep in as at some point we'll have to find a way to pay for this monstrosity. We will keep blogs free though (though we may require at some point that to use technical support you'll need to get a premium membership).

It's been fun and it's getting funner and more and more personalities enter the site. I'm really glad to see that the site isn't dominated by any ideologies. Of the top 10 you have one right of center blogger (me) and a couple left of center bloggers. So it's reasonably evened out overall.  We want to make sure JoeUser is a reasonably neutral place for people to write about whatever they want.

Have fun!