I've been thinking about Twine a lot recently. I see a lot of potential in the semantic web and I think a lot of people will be thinking that way once Twine is here. Smarter systems that start learning from our siloed information all over the web and on our desktop, then start making intelligent connections for us based on that learning, are going to change how we work. They're going to start doing the connecting we've always had to do ourselves, between our own information and relationships, and between what we know and what 's related that we have yet to discover.

The concept of intelligent systems, software that learns, applications that become more intelligent and more useful the more they're used and scale, is really appealing to me. Thinking about it today inspired a product idea I'd really like to build. I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner, since the basis is similar to something I programmed way back in 2003 between the end of high school and my freshman year of college. It was a learning algorithm that determined who a sales lead in an SFA system should be routed to based on sales representatives' past experience with similar types of leads. It worked pretty well, despite my lack of experience leading to a very inefficient implementation; the company that had contracted me to develop the product applied for a patent on that part of the system.

It's been a long time since I've had an idea for something that's not been done a thousand times already. I think I'll work on this one after I finish the work on W3Counter.

Last time I subscribed to cable TV service, the bill for basic service and cable internet was nearly $100 per month. Even with the short-term bundle pricing, all the taxes and fees the cable companies tack on make it an expensive service. I decided it's not worth it. I don't subscribe to cable TV. But what are my alternatives?

Apple just announced the addition of movie rentals to iTunes for $3.99 a day. I don't know why anyone would pay that. With a Netflix subscription at just $8.99 a month, you get physical DVDs in the mail, plus unlimited movie streaming on your PC. There are over 6,000 movies available to stream so far, far more than iTunes has available to rent, and you can watch them whenever and as many times as you'd like.

Especially with the major networks starting to cancel prime time TV series due to the writer's strike, dropping a huge bill in favor of streaming video makes a lot more sense to me. I watched a movie between classes on my laptop today, streamed in very high quality from Netflix, and have a new DVD coming tomorrow. Not a bad deal.

I need a new website for W3Counter, and I can't design it. I need to reorganize the site and there are going to be lots of new service plans and features to show off.

I'm thinking of holding a contest at SitePoint, but I don't know if I'll get good results from this. I'm not 100% sure what content should be on the homepage yet, and designers entering a contest they may not win won't take a lot of time to think through the functional/marketing aspects of the design for me if I can't pin it down in the brief. Even though I'd offer at least $700-1000, which would bring in some of the better designers in the contest area, I'm still unsure if this will result in locking me into buying a design I don't really want.

On the other hand, hiring a designer/agency with a decent portfolio is probably going to run at least 3 times that much to start. W3Counter doesn't turn much of a profit right now, so that's a lot of my own money to invest in the design.

What do you think? Contest or designer? Any recommended designers you've worked with?

With room to grow once again, I've been working on the other features I planned for W3Counter back in the fall. The main task, which I hope will allow me to sell to bigger customers than my normal $5/month individual webmaster, is providing private instances of the entire service. The plan is to have three distinct products in the next six months — the hosted, individual service; a white-label private instance for designers, service providers, and networks of many websites; and a white-label version of the entire service for resale. Continued »

Like every year since spinning off W3Counter from Website Goodies in 2004, it's exceeded its hardware capacity once again in December. Initially the service shared a Celeron 2.4/512MB server with all of my websites. It then grew into its own Pentium 4 3.0GHz/1GB server, then into a 2-processor 4-core Opteron/4GB setup. This time it's outgrown the hard drive IO capacity of a single server, evidenced by maxing the IO wait stat on `top` and the daily afternoon site slow downs. Continued »