I realize this post may be of no interest to most, if any, of you. However, I am using it as kind of my own de.licio.us bookmark — a place that I come to often, and can modify as needed. Here goes:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Mixx
• MySpace
• Digg
• OpenSocial
• Not social media, but important to me: Wordpress API

The inspiration though is not the link to Zamzar. The inspiration is in the comment that if you just changed the extension from docx to doc that file would just work. I took the comment as either incredibly dumb or wickedly sarcastic, I’m not sure what the true basis was. However, here is the inspiration.

What if a brilliant software company were to come up with an application that sat in the tray that listened for extension changes and responded far more intuitively than Windows “if you change the extension the file may become unusable ” message. What if this software noticed that I changed .docx to .doc, and recognizing that this was a “reasonable” conversion and popped up a message saying “Hey… that’s a valid conversion… do you want me to make this file conversion for you? Oh and while I am at it, do you want to to overwrite your existing file or just save this as a new file?”

That to me seems like a very valid, awesome, and as someone who has to send clients files all the time — very useful tool. I have no idea whether something like this exists. If it does, awesome. If not, I can see a simple set of file conversions that just make obvious sense to me:

• Image type conversions. Jpegs to PNGs, Tiff to anything usable.
• OpenOffice to Microsoft Office. As much as I like OpenOffice nearly all of my clients are Office users, and I can just send them that format.
• Spreadsheet to CSV. Oh yes, you can do this within pretty much every spreadsheet tool, but hey why not build it in to this conversion tool.

This may be a really stupid idea, but if you built it and it was successful, Mr. Gates (Bill not Robert) may be knocking at your door to buy the technology. It’s just a thought.

Ok, Ok… so it is about a month old. But for someone who has been heads down coding with looming client deadlines for over that entire month, this was news to me. And why do I think it is the end of the world? I mean, Sun is not a bad company, are they?

When large companies get involved with Open Source things go south. No matter how philanthropic an organization appears from the outside, the politics of power and personal agendas ALWAYS screws up something as pure as a product like MySql. For sure they will want to “move the product to the next level” (corporate code for monetize this bitch until she screams). Sorry for the coarse terms, but that is how it seems to go with big companies.

Remember, Wall Street does not give a damn about Open Source. They want numbers. And the last time I checked, Sun (NY: JAVA) was a public company that must make a buck.

Oh Well. By the way… I don’t blame MySql for taking the money, I’m just disappointed from a user perspective.

   preg_match_all( '/google.com/search?q=([^&]*)/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $match );
   $keywords = urldecode( $match[1][0] );

Your junior PHP programmer should be able to implement this without even trying to decode anything.  Actually, your junior PHP programmer should be able to take this snippet, and with very little effort extend it to all of the major search engines so that you could see not only what the user searched on to find your site, but also which engine they came from.

Now, you might be thinking… “whoop-de-do, how does this help me?”.  Well, ever thought about targetting affiliate links to users on your site?  Your programmer (yes, the junior programmer), should be able to take the keyword, and with little effort drop in a few related Amazon product links.  Or EBay links. Or other large brand affiliate links.  I say large brand, because you will want a program that can return related products for a wide range of search keywords.

Half of the battle to earning affiliate bucks is getting the right offer in front of the user. Well, the half of the battle is largely addressed with this. 

So my formal education is in economics. My best comparison of economics to this question is that economics is very much the attempt to put logical true versus false comparisons on a touchy/feely situation. The best (neh worst) of both worlds. And that is exactly why I went the econmics route in college. I very much like to see things in a true versus false world, but I have a strong yearning for touchy/feely.

Back to the original question though, the answer in my mind then is that I think it is best to be a combination of both marketer and programmer, if you already have the programming skills. If you are starting from the programming side and can bring yourself to open your mind, build up your marketing skills. However, if you are on the marketing side…. find a good programmer. The Internet is littered with people who tried to leap into programming from another side (ie, designer, marketer, even content writer). I read your code when I get contracted to either add features or fix bugs on the sites you’ve written. I see all of the security holes in your code (I would not exploit them except in a proof of concept manner, probably). When you are capturing user data, and as such are assumed to be protecting that data, you need to know what you are doing — leave that work to the professional coder.

Programmers — you need to read more, start to learn about Internet marketing, SEO, and monetizing websites.