Knaddison.com

Today I mentioned my fascination with IKEA stores opening in Denver. A friend was talking about how she wanted some new office furniture - Room and Board felt too expensive for what she needs and Scandinavian Design was her best choice. What should she do? I recommended IKEA and lamented the fact that we didn't have one...

Milk Your Wifi - Introduction

In the page announcing and explaining how you can make some money with FON, they introduce the concept of three different FON users: Linus, Bill, and Aliens. This is a pretty neat concept and it's what sets FON apart from the purely "sharing" based networks of WiFi hotspots (which never really took off).

What kind of Fonero: Linus, Bill, or Alien?

When you first interact with FON you decide: Linus, Bill, or Alien?

More on FON Routers By Country

So, following on my last post about Fonero growth by country and after reading about required density for "wifi roaming coverage" I started thinking about density of routers in my data.

Getting the Country Area Density

I picked up the population and land area by country from "GeoHive". It's really an awesome set of basic data for anyone who likes this kind of thing. So, using that and a little bit of Spread Sheet magic I came up with the following table that shows countries ordered from most dense to least dense FON coverage.

Notes about the Data

The data is from August 21 and the last column in the data shows "Routers Needed" meaning the number of routers needed to achieve the "full density" of 25 routers/square mile (roughly 9.6/square Kilometer).

Conclusions

I'm not sure that there really are many conclusions you can draw from this. Singapore, the Netherlands, Andorra, and South Korea all have fairly high numbers and if you look at metro areas in those countries you can see that indeed walking down a street you'd have pretty good luck finding a FON hotspot. It's not particularly useful to know that the USA needs 92 million more routers to have nationwide coverage - as every cell phone provider will tell you there is lots of land in the US that you just don't need to bother covering! It would certainly be more interesting to know the density of certain metropolitan areas - I assume that some similar internal analysis went into the decision to target 25,000 free routers at Manhattan.

Your Mountain Bike YADS

Last night I got reintroduced to the YourMTB.com website which is a pretty cool mountain biking community site. It's built on the Drupal platform and is the first in a series of adventure sports enthusiast sites being created by Enthusiast Group. It's great to see, first of all the functionality that they were able to create, but also a well done, high-quality and attractive site implemented using everyday Drupal modules. Making it Yet Another Drupal Site - YADS.

Mountain Biking Social Networking/Citizen Journalism

It's a social networking and citizen journalism site wrapped up into one with the niche focus on the mountain biking community. So, you can see reviews of mountain biking products or user submitted mountain biking photos but it's also got a community aspect in multiple forms such as forums and community events.

Support the IMBA

They currently have a pretty cool deal going on where if you become a member and add your moutain biking photo to the site, they'll give $5 to the IMBA. That's a great deal and they haven't hit their limit yet!

Fun Features for Drupal

When I say "well done, high-quality" the stuff I'm talking about is some of the small details they've implemented. Specifically, creating new content redirects you to your user tracker page. At first this struck me as an odd place to redirect rather than the page itself. Then I realized the motivational effect this could have - it's like saying "here's the stuff you've created, why haven't you created more?". They are using the userpoints and buddylist modules to help promote networking and giving content to the site. The theme is littered with calls to action to post more photos, videos, stories. This worked well for me - after joining one of the little "calls to action" is what got me to upload my photo - and get the $5 donated to IMBA.

So, I was reading recently about a Wiki+GoogleMaps Mashup called A-Wiki. It's a pretty neat system for making Wiki pages on maps. I took two minutes to add a page for the Denver Art Museum Expansion which is opening soon and very fancy.

So, I read this post in the digg blog with much fascination.

it shows this:

<script>
digg_url = \'URLOFSTORY\';
</script>
<script src=\"http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js\"></script>

Which is pretty cool because then it makes it easier for users to digg a story on your site even if they found the story through some other means. But there's a pretty huge problem with the widget...

The workflow for this is something like:

1. write story
2. wait for someone to digg story
3. find URL of the digg story
4. add widget to my site
5. rejoice

It would be really nice if I could just automatically add that little snippet of javascript to everyone one of my posts and rather than saying "URLOFSTORY" it would be "URLOFORIGINATINGSITE" and then on the Digg end you figure out the most likely story that it should relate to. I know this is tough because of the whole duplicates thing, but that's why you make the big bucks.

Because then the workflow would be something like
1. write story
2. rejoice

And that's clearly a better workflow.

If the answer is "we just can't do that" then I've got a surprise someone else will do a better job and you'll be forgotten.

Search Engine Strategies is a major conference for search engine people. It's coming to Denver in September. Too bad the agenda is so weak.

I'm not planning to go...but I've got to at least mention it.