John McDonald

Sounds great right? Maybe too good to be true. Well, if I’ve learned anything in the last 18 months of working in the world of college scholarships and financial aid, its that free money for college is out there in large amounts.

History: FreeCollegeBlog.com was my first attempt at a Wordpress website, my second site overall. As soon as it was set up, it had included many of the functions and features I had downloaded and installed for Joomla.

The idea came about because I wanted a place to keep track of all the information I was finding online that related to work. Many nights I would be up late researching scholarship or internship opportunities but I’d have a mess of links and half-written thoughts cluttering up an email that was sure to get lost to more important communications.

Since Wordpress worked out so well, writing a web page was suddenly as easy as writing an email. With a few modifications, Wordpress can be made into an extremely effective content management system optimized for author, reader, and search engine alike. If you like to write and you haven’t got a Wordpress website yet, I suggest setting one up and learning some more about it. Its not too hard to educate ones self in this software, because its quite straightforward and the documentation at the homepage is excellent.

So far so good: Through the Free College Blog I’ve met several web publishers in the subject and traded some good conversations over contemporary educational issues. My site is starting to pick up in traffic, and most of the users end up finding it through search engine queries and from what I’ve seen I’m able to answer the questions they ask Google. Right now, I get a lot of questions about the Florida Bright Futures program, so if you have one, drop me a comment on the Free College website!

What can I say? I like school. I want to help other people get there. I’ve personally witnessed enough success stories, students who overcame great odds to graduate and get a degree and move onto a career they really appreciate. I probably won’t work in education financing forever, but I will always want to contribute in some way or another…

History: I wanted to set up discussion forums at UndergroundPolitics.com but I was afraid that the software installation could damage the barely functioning Joomla that was already set up. The test solution was Scholarship Forums. This site has been up for a while but barely received any attention. I almost feel like internet forums are an aging technology and the users are moving toward newer technology like social news networking. As a result, its (way) low on style and it barely even ranks in the SERPs for its own domain name.

Purpose: Free college of course! Of course, that’s a good economic example of limited supply and unlimited wants, but the people who are going to get access to that limited supply of free tuition are the ones who: study the topic; ask questions about scholarships, FAFSA, and loans; and learn how to get an edge in the applications process. A few users have found it, but so far its not really helping anyone. If you have any scholarship questions, check it out! Send your kids, your students, your employees. In a day or two I’ll try my best to answer any specific questions.

John McDonald on Reddit: (find me in politics and college)

Reddit. What can I say, its like Digg’s older more sophisticated brother.

It offers more categories, a faster response time, and a more transparent voting system. Rather than digging and burying, you simply vote up or down - and you’re free to change your mind later. Comments load a hundred times faster than digg, and each comment can also be voted up or down (well I guess that’s the same as Digg).

The social difference in Reddit is huge. Reddit has a distinct personality. The politics are to the left, yet significantly libertarian. Users tend to favor increased government investment in public services like health, education, and infrastructure, yet the members are decidedly pro 2nd amendment (or tend to be) and this libertarian streak extends to most social and personal freedom choices you can name. I have a feeling college education is common among the posters, and not just because Ron Paul was a huge hit here.  Lately, the fan-dom has shifted toward Obama’s brand of liberalism. It might seem like a radical right/left shift to happen over just a few months, but the “redditors” simply backed the best social libertarian they could find.

Hey, maybe if we give the government & politicians some money, they’ll leave us alone in our personal lives. Maybe, just maybe I could buy into that if I were a little bit more optimistic.

Digg is an immensely popular website with a great concept.  Each submission category is divided by topic - I like politics and education myself.  Anyone who registers can introduce a story, and if other users are interested or entertained, they can “digg” the article.  A digg is like a vote, and if a web page gets enough diggs in a quick enough period of time, it will be launched to the front page and subjected to more burst traffic than most shared webhosts can handle.  (Cached and optimized sites usually survive this “digg effect.”)

A front page story might get 20,000 unique visitors, hundreds of comments, and 100-200 backlinks pointing back to the source article.  As far as publicity and generating buzz in the blog-o-sphere, nothing else comes close.
Digg fully incorporates the social aspect of News 2.0.  Users can make friends lists and send comments to friends in the form of “shouts.”  A few people try to use friends networks to rigg the system, but Digg cracks down on this and offenders are usually caught and banned (their websites will usually be banned as well.)

Unfortunately, Digg might be a victim of its own success.  There doesn’t seem to have been many upgrades to the network architecture or code efficiency despite its growing popularity.  Today, a new user to Digg might first notice the unbearable slowness that the pages load, and never even notice the great content and features it provides.

If you’re also interested in politics or education, click the link to find me (Korr) on Digg.com.

FreeRepublic.com is often cited by FoxNews, not only as a source of unpaid editorial opinion, but also in sniffing out some scandals that were first broken on this major conservative social news network. FreeRepublic has been around for a long time and it sort of broke ground in this whole world of blogging and social news submissions. Users get a homepage they can edit any way they like, and they can submit stories or leave comments regarding other users’ posts. There are no “friends lists” like on newer social news networks, but there are “ping lists” where users interested in similar topics send notifications to each other if a story pops up that they think the mini-group would be particularly interested in.

Free Republic is no fly-by nite operation. This website has been around since the Clinton years and its become part of internet legal history in a landmark ruling regarding intellectual property. To this day, FR only allows excerpts from certain sources, and doesn’t allow other sites to be re-published at all. Of course, the newspapers suing FreeRepublic really missed out. Its a great way to get articles published and to the readership. Its a shame when people try to fight new technology, but in the end I think FreeRepublic wins as social networking news has spread across the internet and into every political and population demographic.

I haven’t had an account of mine own for very long. Readers who have not yet registered to participate in the discussion are often referred to as “lurkers.” I registered finally last year, and the conversations have been good. I have been able to generate more comments for my own stories too, because I’ve published a few of them here if they’re relevant to the site’s conservative theme and mission. You can find me on FreeRepublic as Underground.

Underground Politics News and Discussion Forum

This is my first website. It started off as a place to stash various essays and opinions I have written about politics, but by the time I got Joomla set up and vaguely modified for my uses, I realized I have basically already lost most of what I wrote in college. That doesn’t really bother me too much, because as an undergraduate I had a pretty superficial view of the power structures and inner working of modern government. I had read enough Machiavelli and Orwell to know that there was something more to political science than what was covered in the lecture, but it has only been in the last year or two that the “big picture” of media, economics, party structures, and religion is starting to become clear.

I’m honestly not too happy with this website.  At first glance, Joomla offered everything I could possibly want for building an online store-front, a social network community, or just about anything else.  I realized after the fact that its technical complexity was way beyond my initial ability, and the entire way its been structured is a nightmare for myself, users, or search engines to navigate things.  To make it worse, its quite ugly if you ask me!  For all its features, Joomla can get expensive quickly, and people want cash for upgrades like templates and functional modules for comments and article management.

On the bright side, its given me a political outlet where I can ramble on about economic, international, and party-based developments that I might otherwise forget.  I’ve built up quite a collection of reference materials and personal editorials, so I’m ready for any political debate.  I stay fiercely independent, so don’t think I’ll fall into any partisan logic-traps.

Of course, I don’t know everything or have all the best solutions every time, but I welcome your comments and disagreements  and heavy debate in the forums or on any of the articles I’ve posted.