John McDonald

Blogging about politics, life, and the web

Posts by author John McDonald

Scholarship Forums

February 26th, 2008

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.

Reddit

February 26th, 2008

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) so you get a quick view of how the community responds to and accepts the various perspectives.

The social difference in Reddit is huge. Reddit has a distinct personality. The politics are to the left, yet significantly anti-authoritarian. 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 social 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 back the best challenge to authority they can hope to win.

Of course, that means that since Obama has been president for a while, he has lost a significant amount of clout.  While there might not be any better choice running in the mainstream spotlight, he still isn’t living up to some of the site’s more popular ideals.

Digg

February 26th, 2008

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.

Update:  Digg is in a bad state lately (as of October 2010).  Kevin Rose has stepped down as interim CEO and the last front page design has knocked a huge chunk off their daily traffic and membership activity numbers.  While they finally seem to have the slow speed issues solved, they’ve almost completely messed up the original democratic mechanism that made the site so interesting.

Underground Politics

February 25th, 2008

Underground Politics News.

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.
Update:

Joomla did finally fail in a spectacular way: by inviting someone to hijack my email servers for commercial and possibly illegal purposes.  Luckily, my hosting company helped me get everything sorted out and a new incarnation of the domain is back online.  Unfortunately, there just isn’t much time to update it and I wasn’t able to save everything.