Without any further hesitation, here are some links to my profiles on my other favorite social bookmarking websites:

Bringr.com:

I can handle the bright pink color scheme, but only because they’re raising money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Here’s my collegekid profile on Bringr.com. Always a lot of interesting stories “brought” to the shakeit page

MyLinkVault.com:

My link vault allows users to set up a page of their favorite links and put them up briefly on the front page of upcoming stories. The site moves fast, so there is a lot to see in a short time. Here is my collegestudent profile on linkvault, a different way to see what I’ve been working on.

DropJack.com:

DropJack lets you put up links, but the upcoming ones are only temporary for about one month. If they get some votes and get published on the first page the links are permanent. This is my graduate profile on dropjack, linked to my published stories on that site.

Furl.net:

Furl seems to be a place where you can store up bookmarks, but sometimes it seems like other people can see them, too. Honestly, I’m not even sure how the public display works. They’ve just introduced groups so I think I will be learning more about how to connect with people on this site and find sub groups of people who are interested in some of the same specific topics I’m writing about. Here’s independent one on furl.

Indian Pad:

Indian Pad is a social bookmarking site from, you got it! India! World news seems to be popular, so do some American editorials that aren’t in line with the typical American media (I mean global news with a real global view). This is my college profile on Indian Pad

Propeller.com:

Propeller is Netscape / AOL’s social bookmarking site. I haven’t quite hit the front page yet but I hear it can deliver huge traffic. At first I was a little wary of the way it displays a page in frames, but overall the backlink quality has been excellent and improved over time. If I could find more time, I would definitely spend it here learning about the community. Here’s korr on propeller.com and netscape.com.

SquidUtils.com:

Of course, Squidoo is one of the “new web” communities I love the most. SquidUtils is a great site for lensemasters looking to increase traffic, and one of the cool options is being able to call up a page that displays a publisher’s RSS feed. Here’s my feed: independent1 on Squidutil

There’s the places I find links and spend some time reading other interesting stories I might want to link to. If you’re signed up or signing up, toss me a friend invite and a short note saying who you are! I definitely can’t recognize every handle and alias, I know I’ve come up with dozens on my own since its hard to find anything that isn’t already used by someone, somewhere.

This site is hosted on Dreamhost, and since its been up and running the load times and up-time have been great. My education bookmarking website is also hosted on Dreamhost, and I have to say this has been great. Some other shared hosts won’t allow beta software like Pligg, but this one will even install it for you. I had a hard time manually extracting the Pligg files and setting them up properly, so I set the website up in the advanced automatic installation mode and installed a pre-coded visual template. All I had to do was find certain parts in the existing style sheets to make a few modifications regarding the text content of the website. If you can use a Google search to determine which files have template areas and text you want to change, editing this to make your site unique and personal isn’t much different than writing any other digital document.

If you’re signing up for Dreamhot check out this Dreamhost code list for all the discounts available. The best Dreamhost code depends on your website’s software and traffic types, just like the decision of who is the best website host for your plans. Dreamhost has excellent prices, few restrictions on the type of content you post (as long as it is legal!), and they offer a lot of options for server-side software installation that’s useful for new webmasters like myself. I would definitely recommend this for anyone looking to get started.

What’s up with the discount code? Well, anyone who signs up for the rewards program can create their own discounts and get paid when someone uses it! That’s right, you could make money giving people discounts. I figure that’s a pretty good deal for everyone involved because its a service that I use and enjoy myself and so have no reservations about recommending. You can learn more about Dreamhost’s rewards program here, or even sign up if you want!

By now, most people are probably familiar with the blog format of combining news and content posts with open commenting system. Mainstream newspapers have incorporated a lot of blogging technology into their own websites, allowing a broader discussion and more interaction between the writers and readers.

Another 2.0 breakthrough that hasn’t quite yet matured is social bookmarking and news submission communities. Once users register, they can submit links to interesting websites based on a selection of categories relevant to the topic of the social bookmarking site. Once a new page is submitted, other users can view the links, vote, or comment on the quality of the site. The best sites will make it to the front page, and the process creates a democratic ranking system that helps filter the noise out of the internet without necessarily decreasing or compressing the total volume. The site provides its users with a constantly updated front page of the best of the internet - and great publishers can get great exposure if their articles are particularly interesting and entertaining.

One area it hasn’t caught on as much is in education-specific fields. The educational information on the internet is incredibly fragmented, and there is no real central hub where it can be accessed, discussed, and prioritized. This is where my 2.0 education bookmarking site Scholar Links comes into being. At the moment it isn’t much more than a beta site built on beta software, but as it grows it will be a place where the democracy of the internet can rate, promote, and discuss some of the literally millions of valuable educational links on the internet. If you find something of worth, you can share it here. If you publish your own education site, it could be a useful source of education niche backlinks.

Well, Blogspot and Squidoo offer unique web creation software and unique modes of marketing web pages. Each community offers insight, links, and a new perspective on how to approach the internet business.

• Jacksonville SEO - Jacksonville SEO is a collection of about 20 articles I wrote as I was thinking out a business plan that will soon be fully operational. The first trick was to actually rank for Jacksonville SEO as a search key word, now I need to set up a professional landing page offering the services and providing contact info.
• Free College Aid - A place for collecting links to other interesting education blogs on the net, and its been a great place to store drafts and ideas for later posts at my main college blog.
• Politics Undergroud - Again, a great tool for me to collect links of interesting political opinions in the blogosphere. When I’m lucky I can get the article’s original author to come back for some more comments on the topic. The internet has no doubt done wonders for the civil politics debate.
• Gluten Blog - No wheat - its gluten-free for me. The Gluten Blog is a place for me to record recipes on the fly and store links of my favorite Celiac resources.
• Jacksonville Artists - A side-project to help my artist friends and of course the love of my life Aisling

Squidoo sites:

• Free College Lens - More free college resources for students, parents, and anyone considering continuing their college education
• Website Building - A Squidoo lens web page about building web pages. Including a more thorough introduction to Squidoo and free hosting services.
• News and Politics - News feeds, debate, politics, news, what else do you need?
• Florida Bright Futures - A lens about the history and possible future of the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship program. Also links to a requirements and Q&A page I’m running on shared hosting.
• Dreamhost Coupon - If you’re interested in setting up a shared hosting account with Dreamhost (the same company hosting the JohnMcDonald.info domain) this Squidoo lens includes some discount coupons that can help you save some cash.
• Web hosting types - Free, shared, dedicated? What is it all about and how can you use different types to maximize your online strategy?
• Search Scholarships - My first lens, one of my first websites of my own. A summary of the scholarship hunting process with links to more detailed accounts of the specific steps involved.
• Website SEO - Of course, if you’re going to be building all of these websites, you have to make sure that someone sees them, right!?
• College Financial Aid - A primer for college financial aid, links to free resources, and tips on applying for the FAFSA.

The downside is the mounting debt - and the relative value of a currency that isn’t tied to any hard commodities.   As the currency becomes more available, demand for it declines and this is reflected in its reduced purchasing power.  There is no actual limit to how many dollars could be printed (or more accurately these days: digitally transferred), but there is a limit to the amount of goods they can buy.  As the quantity of money increases, the global markets respond in near-immediate time the new value of the dollar in terms of oil, gold, rice, or whatever you might want to buy.

Thanks to an “independent” Federal Reserve, we’ve enjoyed 90+ years of a fairly easy money supply.  It promises to be one of the most generous currencies in modern history (click here for the full history of the federal reserve and central banks in the U.S.).  The only side effect is debt and higher prices, I mean, the next generations can worry about that, right?

Well, it seems the time has come.   Today, debt-servicing alone consumes more of the federal budget than the entire New Deal program did before the outbreak of World-War 2.  The dollar is dropping at double-digit rates, and the central planners at the federal reserve don’t know what to do but make the flow of cash even easier to trigger.

After 9-11, record-low interest rates were instituted to prop up a staggering economy - easy money and herd mentality led to a huge inflation in home prices.  We called it wealth.  People started taking this “wealth” and borrowing against it, thinking they could just get into more debt chasing this paper inflation “wealth.”   It seemed like such a great idea that the banks did, too.  Trillions of dollars built out of an accounting trick started chasing after real assets with real value, prices could only go up…

Then at some point in 2006, it seems like everyone who was going to buy a house already had one.  The dead-beat renter of five years ago now had his own sub-prime mortgage.  With no one to rent and home prices at a record high, it was a great time for landlords to start unloading.

But wait - who is going to buy?  And the houses sat on the market.  And the talking heads said “buy buy buy!”  But no one was buying anymore.

Enter the credit crunch:

In a year, housing prices would crash double digits.  The Federal Reserve responded again with even more rate cuts, bringing the interest rates down on some securities to a negative range.  It couldn’t create buyers.  The banks held these mortgage promises as reserves, and by early 2008 the bank reserves were negative.  To keep the banks in line with law and to keep your debit card & check books working, the federal reserve decided to trade more dollar-denominated securities for those bad mortgage promises.

Of course, global investment markets realized that the dollar had just literally become an instrument of sub-prime debt.  The dollar reached a new low.  Some manipulated job numbers and CPI figures were thrown around to ease the bloodletting, and today we’re just a few notches above that last low.

Nothing has changed about our strategy of devaluing our way out of this debt to ourselves, but we seem to be at an eye in this storm.  If we’re lucky, things might actually bottom out after another 10-20% drop in currency and real estate.

Now if anything, we have the reverse problem. Since the cost of publishing is so low, we’ve probably reached a point where a lot of the information floating around is of diluted value. The good news is that the total amount of available information has never been higher - and the democratic nature of web 2.0 applications promises an idealized internet where the collective wisdom organizes and assigns value to competing content.

Don’t just call me an optimist, I think of website building as a modern newspaper or television station. An individual, with proper distribution of his/her ideas and a sufficiently compelling argument, can have a profound impact on public perception of events & debates. Typical barriers to entry like limited broadcast frequencies, federal licensing, and expensive distribution mechanisms are gone. Marketing has gone viral, and what is left is a simplified game of wits, where ideas and opinions go head to head with fewer distractions. (As long as you can ignore the trolls and spammers, anyway)

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!

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.

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.

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.