Last year I helped Bangs, an up-and-coming rap artist, set up his own WordPress site while working with him at the Artful Dodgers Studios, Gateway.

Bangs, through his Facebook promotion, the ineffable wonders of global buzz, and 1.1 million views on youtube, is in the right place at the right time, and surfing a wave of global interest that could go anywhere, or nowhere…

My guess is that the timeline goes something like this:

• Bangs uploads to youtube, and begins sharing via facebook
• Bangs puts up his website at Gateway
• Someone connected to the ABC gets the Facebook post
• Hungy Beast tracks Bangs down to Gateway via the website
• ABC’s Hungry Beast showed the clip while their credits played, and described his song as “refreshingly polite”.. their comment is at the very end of the episode at the Hungry Beast website.
• Bangs performs onstage with Snob Scrilla, and charms the right people
• Nova gets interested (Nova video interview)
• Bangs is suddenly flying around the country doing gigs and interviews!

Here’s hoping that he can make the most of it, best wishes, Bangs!

This is the track thats caused such a fuss:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmJbJs-9ST0

Bangs’ website is here, designed with Bangs in Artisteer, driven by wordpress, hosting sponsored by memeLab.

Wordpress Training Melbourne

Just the pace of this brilliant video is overwhelming: it does a great job of conveying the staggering pace of social media adoption worldwide.

Another clip really worth checking out is Kevin Kelly speaking at TED.com; he points out that the web is only 5000 days old!  His predictions for the next 5000 days are thought provoking.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

Wordpress Training Melbourne

There are a multitude of very similar sounding plans available online, so once you’ve found a few hosts which meet your basic requirements, the choice comes down to reliability and expense.  Here as elsewhere it is very true that ‘you get what you pay for’.  That is to say that if you are creating a mission critical website which absolutely must be available without fail, you should handball this whole process to your IT department / webdesigner / pet geek.  If you want to get the ball rolling without the associated (significant) expense, read on.

For my mission critical sites, and those of my clients, I manage an Australian reseller account, which gives me greatest control over the hosting environement.

For my recreational and pro-bono sites, I use Bluehost.

Why choose Bluehost?

I have found Bluehost to be very reliable over the past few years.  Reliablility on the web comes down to how infrequently the host server ‘goes down’ or becomes unavailable.  Many hosts boast 99.9% uptime, but often this is an optimistic figure.

Bluehost satisfies all the basic requirements for the setup I advocate:

• Provides PHP, and MySQL (required for WordPress)
• Fantastico WordPress installer (completes a vanilla install of wordpress in about 4 minutes!)
• Unlimited Addon domains (you can host multiple different sites with different domain names for the one cost)
• Unlimited Subdomains (you can create subdomain1.mysite.com.au)

I monitor my sites using free independant monitoring services, so I am comfortable recommending Bluehost as an entry level setup.

Wordpress Training Melbourne

Kiva is a non-profit organisation which facilitate micro loans to entrepreneurs all over the world. It inspires me each time I revisit the site and its reports. I was moved again today to support an internet cafe in Peru.. my US$25 contribution contributes the mere $625 Mr Yuri requires to get his business off the ground.

Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle, and what effect it has on the people and institutions lending it, borrowing it, and managing it along the way. To do this, we are using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive.

I get some insight into the difference that these loans make when I read through field reports. When I first heard of Kiva, I watched a video by John Larson, a CNBC reporter; today, I watched a followup report on CNBC in which John visits the borrowers he supported in their communities in Kenya.

To learn more about microfinance, I recommend reading the following page at Kiva.org: About Microfinance.

At the moment, I am supporting this worthy fellow in Peru, who is setting up an internet cafe (maybe one day I might be able to post from there!).  Check Mr Yuri’s profile.

Wordpress Training Melbourne

The Australian Government wants to implement filtering of the Internet, ostensibly to restrict access to unsavory illegal content.  Unfortuately, it will be ineffective (trials have shown that the filter blocks huge numbers of legitimate sites), expensive (costing over AU$44 million in the first year and AU$33 million per year thereafter).

Draconian? Maybe.  Effective?  Absolutely not. Please sign the petition to voice your rejection of their proposal.

The GetUp factsheet gives a good overview of the issue.  Here are some quotes from the factsheet:

Lack of transparecy

Senator Conroy has said that a number of western democracies already have a similar scheme in place. In fact, as Senator Conroy later admitted, no western democracy in the world has introduced mandatory server-level filtering. In countries where it has been introduced – countries such as Saudi Arabia, China and Iran – the schemes have not effectively done the job for which they were designed. In each of these countries, the filter can be easily avoided. No country in the world goes as far as dynamically analysing web traffic in real time, as Australia is proposing.

Australian connection would become 87% slower

The measures will make the internet up to 87% slower,4 which is bad for access to information, and terrible for e-commerce. The Government has invested $10 billion in the development of a high-speed broadband internet – an initiative that will be drastically undermined by this ISP-level filter.

Wordpress Training Melbourne