John McDonald

Obviously, this isn’t to insult any individuals, heck I’m even kind of a millennial and kind of a musician depending on how I feel on a given day.

Anyway, I’ve been driving around Florida on the holiday rounds, listening to various radio stations as they fade in and out of reception range. I couldn’t help but notice that “New Rock” stations haven’t changed in the last 10 years. Generation X still rocks.

I wish I were exaggerating but here’s the bands I hear over and over again on “New Rock” radio:

• Nirvana
• Alice in Chains
• Smashing Pumpkins
• Soundgarden
• Metallica
• CandleBox
• Rage Against the Machine
• Tool
• Pearl Jam
• Blur
• Radio Head

Again, I have nothing against it. I grew up on Gen X rock & metal and I love it. But they are not even playing new albums: A lot of these guys are already: dead; middle aged; and/or retired. They’re just replaying the old radio-friendly hits from the 90’s. (What confused me even more was hearing Soundgarden on the “Classic Rock” station hours after hearing it on so many “New Rock” stations.)

But hasn’t anything else been written in the last 10 years? I tried to think of fresh rock but there’s a blank. Either I’m already too old to “get it” at 26 or millie musicians need to start coming up with excuses. I’ve thought of a few:

5. Talented Civic musicians don’t make it to 27  (don’t worry, I’m not that good)
4. We can blame the old folk running the industry and writing the songs (I’m looking at you Lincoln Park)
3. We realized the country is so screwed up that screaming about it won’t help. Aka sidetracked by a poli-sci or econ degree (this is my excuse)
2. Too broke to afford gear at the pawn shop
1. Since we’ll be running the world soon, we wanted to leave something for the coming Artists to do

Hey buddy, what are we going to do this weekend?
The same thing we do every weekend: Try to take over the world!

Luckily, we keep it to the board games and no one gets hurt fighting wars in distant lands.

Here’s a painting of us playing Axis & Alies. (Painted by the love of my life, Aisling, for a project a few years ago in college. You can see more of her art over here)

Its just one of many incredibly nerdy board games we have in our arsenal. If you like Risk but wished it relied a bit more on planning and strategy, there’s a lot of other games you might wish to know about. Warning: They’ll take some time to play and you’ll need to convince two or three other people to sit still for a few hours.

• Axis & Allies - the 1981 classic that got us started
• Shogun - The older one. The movement system makes chess feel simplistic
• Risk 2210 - Its like the classic with lunar colonies and nukes
• Civilization - Yeah its like the video game, but with dice
• Illuminati - I give it a 12/12, the most realistic guide for anyone looking to take over the world
• War! In the Age of Imperialism - Huge time sink, epic game
  

I like the reviews at Board Game Geek because its crowd-sourced. You can see a lot of individuals’ opinions and see what complaints and raves you’re likely to agree with.

I’m always looking for new bookmarking and social networks that can help me get in contact with other people who work in website publishing, so I’m always on the look-out for these social media websites that are set up in a way that appeals to webmasters.

With that in mind, I’ve added a profile/account to Lifestream.fm and Mixx.com and all I can think is *jackpot*

I’m really excited about these two services because they are right to the point of what I’m looking for in a social website. And they’re fast!

Lifestream.fm

If you subscribe to one of my blogs or another and you wonder why I haven’t posted there in a while, chances are I’ve just been busy with another domain or project that I dreamed up.

Instead, just subscribe to the Lifestream version of my online activity - an almost up-to-date list of every RSS feed I can claim as my own content. The Lifestream account will keep you updated with all of my main websites, all of my article directory submissions, and even my comments and activity on Digg, Reddit, Furl, Mixx, and Dropjack.

Here’s the link to my profile: JohnMcDonald on Lifestream

There, now ya can’t say you don’t know what I’m up to!

Mixx.com

Mixx is like a lot of other social bookmarking sites that I visit - but its actually social. There’s more room for groups, and the people are more active in the comments and network building. Within an hour of signing up I had found a dozen groups of people looking for content in the exact topics I like to write about, and I had two new fans who wanted to be kept up to date of my activities. One of them is a blogger I enjoy reading, maybe now he’ll leave some comments on my site!

Get on Mixx to get your bookmarking fix: JohnMcD on Mixx.com

And if you submit interesting links I’ll even vote for them!

Alright. I’m off to do more internet related stuff. If it seems slow around here, its because I haven’t integrated these services well enough quite yet. Look forward to something of an overhaul around here soon as I move this site more toward a live-update feed.

Independently publishing college, financial, and political information isn’t worth much if people can’t find it. Social Bookmarking sites can be a great critique for any writers and web publishers who want to learn what their target audience wants to hear. When stories you submit get voted to the top, you know its something that people are genuinely interested in and willing to share with others. If the story is ignored? Well, its time to re-write the titles or revamp content.

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.

*Update - this site has become useless.  It seems to have been bought out by a spammer, because only about three users have permission to post new stories, and they only link to:  one specific hosting company, one medical affiliate, and one makeup affiliate.  Otherwise, there’s no moderation or upkeep - so front page stories are filled up with dozens of spam links.

What a waste.

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

IndianPad went useless too - some mod decided to ban about half of the user base and disable all the links, even the ones that had gone popular.  As a result, traffic has dropped off a cliff and this site is on the fast-track to irrelevancy.

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.

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.