From IsabelWang.com:

In August 2007, I realized I'm marching in place too. I've written a zillion blog posts about the need for commodity hosters to broaden their horizons; shouldn't I as well? So I'm taking some time off to find the next big thing. If you've got ideas, you can reach me at...,

Isabel, if indeed this is your final decision, thank you for everything you've given the hosting industry over the years. You will be greatly missed!

It just so happens I do have a great idea about your next big thing! Invent something, anything, and call it a "widget." Think about it - you'll never have to actually market it yourself. You have an established, worldwide marketing presence by virtue of every book or article in academia, trade publications, news, magazines, etc. that refer to widgets as commodities of value. You'll make billions, and naturally you'll be compelled to share some of that newfound wealth with the person who gave you that awesome idea, right? :)

In all seriousness, absolute best wishes to you in your future endeavors, whether they bring you back to Web hosting or take you on completely new journeys in life.

Hello everyone,

I just thought I would write a little personal note about HostingCon. Unfortunately, I only get to attend one or two conferences any given year. Life is too hectic and frankly, if I'm going to make time in my project load to go somewhere, I want my wife and a beach to be involved :)

So, HostingCon is my big conference of the year at the moment. Last year it was HostingCon and eLearning Dev Con in Salt Lake City, but this year, it's just HostingCon. I'm attending under the auspices of my role as a WebHostingTalk.com moderator (thanks for the conference pass, iNet!), and I'll be attending a number of sessions and evening events in addition to hanging out a good bit in the WHT Lounge (iNet's booth).

I hope this will be an opportunity for me to meet a number of people who I only know by name right now. I love putting faces with names, and I think this is going to be a fantastic opportunity to make new connections and new friends.

Are you attending HostingCon? What are your plans if you are? If you're not, what types of questions do you have about presenters, companies/booths in the tradeshow, etc.? If you have questions, I'll try to get answers and report back while I'm there, so please respond in the comments section of this post!

I have my mobile broadband ready, and my car power inverter, so I'm ready to blog from practically anywhere :)

See you there!

Paul

###

==========[ MORE ABOUT PAUL ]==========
PaulHirsch.com . International Web Developers Network . Web Hosting Talk . Equentity Host

Good day to everyone! After a nice anniversary vacation with my wife and a not-so-nice bout of stomach flu that followed, I'm back, all settled in, and scouring the recesses of the Internet and my rusty brain for interesting discussion items.

How I could have missed this one, I'm really not sure. I first read about the death of digital documents a couple months ago, and for whatever reason, it didn't occur to me to share. Well, let's correct that oversight :)

Chew on this: The Digital Ice Age

It seems the world is rushing to get every last bit of information available into digital format (Google Library Project, anyone?). The rationale behind this is that by digitizing the contents of every written object available, we'll preserve it in perpetuity; at least that's one of many reasons, but a big one.

Somewhere around the Mediterranean, there's a long dead and buried scholar laughing at us from beyond. He managed to preserve a bunch of scrolls for more than 2,000 years with some degree of success, and we, with our infinite technology and mental capacity, can't read a stupid document we wrote 15 years ago.

It wasn't all that long ago the paperless office was touted as the future of business. It seems making everything digital is about as smart as printing books on thermal paper. It's a proposed death sentence for your documents. The only question is whether you've guessed at a digital format that will die later than its alternatives, or whether taking on the gargantuan responsibility of ensuring all your digital documentation is continually converted to a readable format in the future will be the death of you!

###

==========[ MORE ABOUT PAUL ]==========

PaulHirsch.com . International Web Developers Network . Web Hosting Talk . Equentity Host

AT+T made a decision two days ago with some substantial implications. In the following communication between AT+T and the FCC (PDF), AT+T clearly voiced a commitment to support Net neutrality for no less than two years from the date of the communication.

If you're not familiar with Net neutrality, here's the two sentence version. Net neutrality according to Tim Wu (in the Wikipedia link posted above) is a "maximally useful public information network [that] aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally." ISPs stand to gain from a lack of Net neutrality, as they would be able to set up payment structures that give paying Net content suppliers (Web site owners) preferential treatment within ISP networks. So, for instance, if Amazon were to pay Comcast a fee of some sort, Comcast customers would connect to Amazon more quickly and would download content faster.

Use your imagination to see where how the domino effect might hurt Web developers, Web hosts and the Internet public.

I've done the reading for you. If you open that PDF I linked above and scroll down to page nine, you'll see AT+T was kind enough to discuss this topic directly.

Speaking of Tim Wu, here's his analysis of the whole situation.

Thank you AT+T for making such a bold, direct statement that supports the best interests of the public.

###

==========[ MORE ABOUT PAUL ]==========

PaulHirsch.com . International Web Developers Network . Web Hosting Talk . Equentity Host

Chocolate rum, apparently, is what went into the cake the Microsoft development team sent to the Mozilla development team upon the release of Firefox 2.0.

Needless to say, the Mozilla team was surprised, but thankful. And they're getting pounded with traffic about it!

There are plenty of people theorizing that this whole thing is a hoax. There are plenty more who have concocted some pretty crazy conspiracies behind it, some as simple as the cake being poisoned, others as complex as the icing pattern containing a message that require decryption to read.

However, Tony Chor, the Group Program Manager for the IE development team confirmed it was nothing more than one team saying "nice work" to another team for a job well done. Given the complexities of the war being waged on the browser battlefield, the simpleness of the answer to the cake mystery is most welcome. :-)

Keywords: Internet Explorer, Firefox, cake

###

==========[ MORE ABOUT PAUL ]==========

PaulHirsch.com . International Web Developers Network . Web Hosting Talk . Equentity Host