Ampers & Dot

The power of the social web is truly awesome. With the interactivity inherent in social media, the public finally has a say in just about everything that goes on. Don’t like something? Blog about it. Have an opinion on something? Comment on it. Want to find others that feel the same way you do about something? Find them through social networks and band together to strengthen your voice.

The general public has never been so empowered than with help of social media (at least since “Gen Y-Bother” and its brutal social apathy has taken this country by storm… but that’s an argument for another day). The participatory web allows people to connect with others that have similar interests to band together to make a change. For non-profits and activists groups this really is an incredible opportunity to make a difference.

There are a number of startups popping up to help connect people online for a good cause (a few cool ones around Boston, actually - like MakeMeSustainable.com and Good2Gether.com (both were previous Web Innovators presenters)). And someday I should dedicate an entire post to these type of startups… but that’s not what today’s about.

Nope, today’s post is about something much less philanthropically focused and considerably less honorable. This is about consumer advocacy through the social web. What do I mean by this? Banding together people online with similar interests to help companies produce better products. That’s right, the internet can do that too.

One of the biggest examples of this recently has been MyStarBucksIdea.com, an appropriately URLed site that allows Strabucks customers to provide ideas for the coffee behemoth. Users then get to vote on ideas and whichever ones do well enough, the Starbucks execs will then hop down from their gold-plated throwns, slip on some money suits, and help make these ideas come to life. So far the idea has produced that lighter crappier coffee and the discussion of punch cards. BUT it’s still a great idea.

Another impressive example of consumers pushing a big brand (the sole reason I’m writing this post): Nike and the McFly 2015’s. Remember Marty McFly’s shoes in the greatest film of 1989, Back to the Future part II? No? Seriously? Oh, well I sure as hell do!

Well it turns out there are a lot of others like me online, enough so to create and support, McFly2015.com, an online petition to get Nike to create the shoe that fits snug with the push of a button. As Wired reports, the McFly’s will be in limited production by the end of July. Sign me up!

The reason I see this to be especially cool, is that there is no way it would happen without the internet. Nike would have no idea there is a cult following behind such an obscurely awesome sneaker, but with the influence of the social web, Nike can easily see the demand and thus, create a supply. It makes you wonder why companies spend millions in market research, when all they need to do is watch the web; the answers are out there, provided free by customers every day.

So what product changes would you like to see? Blog about it and it might just happen. I’ll write up a few of mine later- right now I’ve gotta go get in line to get some sneakers…

So as a big Office fan (UK first, but the US has really come to be its own impressively funny show) I present to you, the Top 20 tweets that warrant a “That’s What She Said” response, as found on Twitter.  If you’re unfamiliar with the concept… why not watch this video first.

More importantly, I’m a Twitter enthusiast. I enjoy the conversations created with it, the people I’ve met through it, and I love the community that thrives around it. But one of the things I really love about Twitter, is that it’s a seemingly constant stream of irrelevant nonsequitters (as opposed to those awkwardly relevant nonsequitters…). Getting bits and pieces of conversations on Twitter is actually just as fun as reading the whole thing. And to take advantage of people’s disjointedness on the 140 character forum, I created this list.

Quick disclaimer: I did zero background checks on these tweets. The people listed here might have actually meant some of these to be dirty, might not be very funny, and some might not want to be up here. If not- let me know and I’ll find someone equally funny that can laugh at themselves. Also, this is my first relatively inappropriate post… so hopefully it’s worth the laugh.

Last preface: it should be noted that the amount of time this took due to the incessant Bloaty the Fail-Whale showing up unexpectedly… let’s just say that I’m glad Bezos is throwing cash at Twitter. So let’s call this a celebratory post for those little birdies to lift that fat jerk to safety.

Wait… it’s a whale… shouldn’t he stay in the water? Those damn birds are trying to kill it! Hasn’t anyone informed Twitter of this!?

Ok never mind. Let’s just dive into the list of the best “that’s what she said” quotes:

1. @ GorgeousNerd: “The Incredible Hulk satisfied my explosion quota for the week. BOOM.“
2. @OHSNAPiTSEG: “LOL look at the size of this thing!“
3. @socialmedium: “tweeting all day makes you a little loopy“
4. @arleigh: “I think someone is sneaking toys in the back door every time I take a full trash bag out to the car.“
5. @brendalogy: “Voice is coming back, slowly and surely. But still feels like a mighty tennis ball stuck in there.“
6. @Humanoide: “The rides are fun, but we’re all wet… Just finished lunch, going back for more thrills!“
7. @da7ve: “taking a good beating every so often only makes you stronger.“
8. @honeybyfire: “I am playing with balls of all shapes and sizes lol“
9. @machineplay: “ouch. :( that’s so hard.“
10. @jstichweh: “Are you going to ride it all night long“
11. @matholemu: “calendar coordinating is rough, but it gets me excited to see what’s coming up!“
12. @JohnPierre: “huge! way too big. goona switch to trackball“
13. @NickCaiello: “English peeps if you need a ride call me“
14. @mario85: “What is aTrojan Horse Back Door, and how did I get 4?“
15. @tricias: “I would have a play with this but there is no time tonight.“
16. @thecolor: “says I’m sooo bad. I’ve not plurked since this morning.“
17. @mashable: “Twit in an elevator. Twitting it up while I’m going’ down.“
18. Update: Redacted upon request - SORRY!
19. @MarlanB: “I love getting tweets from the mars probe. It’s like a mini-Discovery Channel.“
20. @AllieM: “i just googled myself…it’s so fun…ok now going to bed…night C:“

If you enjoyed these as much as I did- why not follow me. I’m @znh on Twitter and will likely have my own embarrassingly out of context quotes at some point too.

More importantly: let me know of better ones! What have I missed?

Subtitled: “good luck with that”

I’ve addressed Mobile Phone Operating Systems before, concluding that it’s a rapidly developing (and awesome) market with the iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Google’s Android. Well during the Boston Gadgetry Meetup last month the group pretty much only talked about how the Palm OS is barely even mentioned anymore.

Well it turns out that there’s an OS sibling neglected even worse than Palm: Symbian. You know Symbian? That functionally ugly operating system that mainly resides on Nokia phones? Well, in all fairness if you haven’t used a Nokia then you likely didn’t know Symbian even existed. And even if you owned a Nokia, you might not have known you were using the Symbian OS.

As the story goes, yesterday Nokia (the hardware manufacturers behind such such horrible products as the Ngage, the E90 Communicator, and the 7380 Fashion Phone, as well as such beauties as the N95 and … well, that’s it) bought the Symbian Operating System. The goal behind all this (as the Engadget post will tell you) is to open source the OS to make it competitive with the rest of the market.

What does this mean? “Open Source the OS” refers to opening up the code so that software developers can build things for it. Exactly the way Google’s Android is set up. And the way (sort of) that Apple’s iPhone OS is (marketing itself as…). By opening up, it invites developers to actually make it better. This has been a hugely important push for Android in competing with Apple, while Apple pushes to compete with WinMo and Blackberry’s OS.

What do I think of this? First, I think it’s good. All operating systems should be open for development because ultimately it will make better products for the end user. BUT I’ve argued before that the mobile development community is already far too segmented. There are too many options for good developers out there that to build an application to reach the masses, you’d need to recreate it for each OS… or more likely- it will really only be built for one and the public will miss out on it.

What would I like to see happen? Nokia to drop Symbian and make Windows Mobile phones! As ugly as hell as some of Nokia’s phones are, these guys aren’t afraid to push the envelope to make crafty devices. The Nokia N95 is, and as a loyal HTC fan I hate to say this, the BEST hardware in the American market. It has a 5mp camera, impressive 3G chip, and a solid chunk of memory. But it runs by far and away the WORST operating system.

Well anyway, this is what I’ll discuss tonight at the Gadgetry MeetUp tonight at the Hill Tavern in Beacon Hill. If you want to attend, RSVP on the page there, or shoot me an email. I’d love to hear an argument about how the hell anyone expects Symbian to compete- open or not.

UPDATE: TechCrunch just copied my post… but with much better detail and factual coverage read it here

In an attempt to get back on writing more frequent (and quality) blog posts, I’ve begun trying a few new methods for being productive in creating blog material. And as interesting as that is, today I’m talking about the opposite: ways not to be a productive blogger.

This goes along with ProBlogger’s running series of “Ways to let your blog go” - if you’re looking for other demotivators for blogging make sure to read the collection. Or if you are looking for real tips, just read ProBlogger regularly- it’s about as good as a blogging-blog gets.

Also, hopefully my new methods help my productivity enough that I actually get around to the “productive” post… because otherwise this would be a pretty disappointing list.

1. Sit down at the computer and just start writing.
The whole “Just sit down and start typing” thing works well if your problem is getting material out. But if you’re like me and have seriously trouble with brevity then all this will do is draw out your posts beyond an interesting level. You’ll end up with introductions longer than the post itself (something I’m known for (which isn’t good)).

Instead, try keeping a notebook of thoughts (or a running .doc if you want to practice writing) so that when you sit down you already have enough thoughts to start pulling it together.

2. Just go hunting for a topic when you’re ready to write.
The internet is a vast wasteland of worthless time sinks. Hunting for a topic will get you off track and then three hours later, after you’ve watched every crazy Parkour video on YouTube, you still haven’t started your post.

To fix this, try keeping a “blog topics” folder of bookmarks (favorites for you IE weirdos) so that whenever you are ready to start writing you can open up the folder and have dozens to choose from depending on your interest that day.

3. Get wrapped up in finding pictures
I’ll never discredit the value of images for a blog and to be perfectly fair: I miss opportunities on this blog by not using more images. That’s my bad. But at least I don’t waste too much time digging around for the perfect picture to compliment my post.

Keeping an image repository would be ideal, but the biggest tip I have for this: compromise. It’s ok if the image isn’t exactly what you want- the power of your blog should be in the writing anyway. Unless you’re a photo blogger, people aren’t coming to your site for the pictures.

4. Writing blog posts while your email is open.
I consider myself relatively talented at multi-tasking and can write well with distractions. But not blogging. When writing for a blog it should be a cogently readable thought. I find that if I jump to emails or other distractions while blogging then the topic will be fine, but the text will suffer.

I find time to write blogs usually early in the morning before the bulk of the day’s email comes in, or on weekends. If this is tough- then just close the inbox. Minimize isn’t enough. Close it.

5. Pushing out a disinteresting topic.
This is a huge one for me. Even if I’ve done well and have notes and links already in front of me, some times I’ll start writing a post and will realize it just isn’t that interesting. This happens. It’s ok. BUT- I find that if I force myself to push through it then it will take two or three times as long to write and will likely end up crappy anyway.

If the topic isn’t going well- save it to a draft and start over with something new. Truth be told, this post was outlined a few weeks ago but I just didn’t like it. So I saved it and waited until a bit more inspiration hit me (ironically, I couldn’t come up with this fifth bullet, which you see now is pretty important).

Blogging should be fun. People forget that sometimes, but blogging should be something you do because it’s enjoyable. I find that if I get hunting for pictures, digging around for material, or I don’t like the topic, then I’m not having fun. Fundamentally these tips are all about making blogging easier and thus, more enjoyable.

And that was a productively written blog post.

This video made the rounds a few weeks ago, but if anyone missed it take a look and enjoy a good laugh.

It brings up an interesting concept though: the social norms for Facebook are completely skewed from reality.

I’ve always argued that the anonymity of the internet is what helps degrade any societal norms (such as the brutal depths of Digg’s comments, the horrific nature of most video game forums, or the dehumanized interactions on the WordPress support pages). Because people have no connection to their real life persona, they feel the openness to say whatever they want.

The strange thing is, that on Facebook it’s not anonymous. It’s actually very much the opposite. It’s public and out there with your name, picture, birthday, everything, right up there. The problem is that it’s still an online forum so people are conditioned to behave however they want. Facebook has set up a system where it’s ok to be annoying and write inappropriate things on friends’ walls. And that’s what Facebook is all about- virtualizing relationships.

In a virtual friendship you can do whatever crazy thing you want- throw sheep at people, poke your friend’s mum, or write obscenities on their walls.

So the answer to the title question- Could Facebook actually be any more annoying? - is yes, if these practices make it into real life.

So would you like to be my friend? Confirm or ignore.

In a surprise addition to the running series on Making Money with Web 2.0 (for previous entries, read up on Part 1: Advertising, Part 2: Freemium, and Part 3: Sell T Shirts) I thought it would be fun to add a fourth segment, to actually give hope to some of the startups out there.  See, I’ve been unnecessarily negative about the online economy, because in all actuality there are hundreds of companies out there pulling in hoards of cash because of their new innovative ideas with the interactive web.

Well today I want to talk about a monetization plan that bas been increasingly popular recently. This concept has as many holes in it as any of the other web 2.0 schemes, but interestingly, it actually works. The most plausible way for a startup to make money in the web 2.0 world is site flipping.

The idea behind site flipping is that you don’t need to worry about a monetization scheme, you just need to build something cool enough to draw in a large user-base. The more people you can convince to use your site, the more valuable it becomes because once you have a strong, dedicated, and large community, you sell them to someone bigger for a huge amount of cash. Then, making money is their problem, not yours!

In an attempt to make their money back, the big guy (likely Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AOL, or whomever) will take your community and try to sell stuff to them (and now we’re back to the advertising model, yippee!). Hell, this even works with blogs now thanks to the likes of Conde Nast buying Ars Technica for $1.8 billion. (Note: Conde Nast- I’m for sale, too!)

The two best ways to optimize the amount you can sell your community for are A) create a specifically segmented community so that targeted advertising is incredibly easy (meaning that if you have a community that is built around music, then it’s easy to advertise music to them(assuming people still paid for music)), or B) get your user base to reveal as much personal information as possible so that they can be targeted even more directly (this is how Bebo is worth anything… I guess).

Really the only trick for site flipping is that you just have to keep enough money in your pockets long enough to get bought out. So as long as you have enough capital up front, you’ll be fine.

Ultimately this model is successful because of the growing conglomerate mega-tech companies out there are constantly battling with each other and need your community as ammo. I mean hell, Microsoft bought a small chunk of Facebook for targeted advertising purposes which valued each user at $300 ($15 billion valuation for 60 million users). AOL bought Bebo for a relative steal at only $21 per user ($850 million for 40 million users). Your users are valuable consumers to someone else. You don’t need to sell to them because they will.

The problem, obviously, is that 1) you’re going to piss off your users and you lose your company and 2) the big guys still rely on advertising to make money.

This model is incredibly similar to the house flipping concept that was so popular for a few years there. Go buy a dilapidated home, fix it up and sell it! It’s just that easy! I mean hell, the housing market did so well with this model, I can’t imagine how the same concept won’t work with the web as well.

So that’s it. That’s the end of my running series on Making Money with Web 2.0. I hope you enjoyed it and didn’t get too discouraged. Until the bubble inevitably bursts there is an incredible amount of opportunity out there to take the big guy’s money. So go get it, they’re pretty much handing it out on the street corner.

So today was scheduled to be about selling t-shirts through your web 2.0 company in search of profit (and amazingly, no: I’m not joking), but because I’m short on time (got caught up reading Groundswell last night -and yes, if you find anything I write here interesting, go buy it now) it’s going to be a short-on-content post. BUT- this is another challenge for my blogging ability: can I actually write a short post?

Here’s the short of it- make a startup, do something to drive in traffic, then sell t-shirts to the hoards of visitors. It works pretty well actually.

Good Example (though not entirely web 2.0ey): Homestarrunner.com. I mean, these guys built something so amazingly hilarious that it drove in millions of viewers. There were no ads on the site, no membership fees. Just a t-shirt store. And they cleaned up.

In the middle of the t-shirt craze is Cafepress, a pretty cool site that helps people make their own shirts to sell. You can even set up a little shop on Cafepress- they take a cut of your sales- but you get to make fun shirts. Definitely something that’d be fun to play around with at the very least and the interactivity can be deemed as web 2.0ish, I think.

And on th worst-example end of the spectrum you have VC Wear a company that forgot the “do something” part of this business model. Instead of driving in traffic first, VC Wear just sells shirts targeted towards people who find making fun of web 2.0 really funny. I mean seriously, who makes fun of web 2.0 stuff? There’s no audience for that. Right?

And that’s it- I wrote a short post!

Following up on last Friday’s post on advertising (wow Zach, way to stick with the constant posting… jerk), today’s all about the “freemium” model of web 2.0 monetization. Freemium refers to the concept of offering standard services for free but then charging for premium features. The theory being that you attract the masses with the free services, then pull in the power users by offering just enough added functionality to make the product worth some money.

The best example of freemium is Flickr. Most people see Flickr as just another online way to upload and host pictures… for FREE. But, for $25/year the photo-sharing site offers additional image storage and sharing options for “Pro” users. The added features are supposedly good enough that if you’re a Flickr power user, it’s an obvious choice.

Makes sense, I guess. The only problem is that I’m not a power user so I don’t really get it. But what about something for which I am a power user? Say, Firefox (Internet Explorer just doesn’t make sense to me anymore), WordPress, or Twitter?

The concept is that the added features have to be compelling enough to make the free version seem less desirable, BUT while still keeping the free version as valuable as possible to draw users in to begin with. This is a daunting task and one of the main reasons that freemium models are met with skepticism.

But let’s look into the three examples I gave earlier: Firefox. What if you had to pay for extensions? Right now I use about a dozen or so add-ons to enhance my daily browsing (shortlist: New Tab Homepage, Advanced Dork, Quick Restart, SEO for Firefox, ColorZilla, Better GReader, Better Gmail 2, MeasureIt, Send Tab URLS, and about a third of a dozen (4) others). YES: I would pay for this functionality (well, some of it). New Tab Homepage opens new tabs into my homepage- yeah, I’d pay five bucks a year for that. ColorZilla let’s me find the color of anything on a page and returns the Hex code- an absolute necessity for blog designing. YES: I’d pay for it. And same goes for the others.

So what about WordPress (the blog platform that powers this site)- would I pay for add-ons here? Right now I’m using many, many plugins - the ones that you can see are: AJAX Comment Preview (the cool thing that lets you see your comment (go test it out by commenting!)), Get Recent Comments (to show you the active conversations), the AddThis button (little thing that lets you share my posts with others (that you never use…)), and the rest are all behind the scenes things that I would ABSOLUTELY pay for because they help my blog function.

The last example: Twitter. Right now many have argued for making Twitter into a freemium service. With its incessant downtime, why not be able to pay to have the damn thing work? The service makes about $0 a year and has server problems about six times an hour. Let’s change this.

And here’s how: for $20 a year give people the functionality of unlimited friends and unlimited messages per day. The free service would then be throttled down by limited friends to 500 (so Leo Laporte with his 42,000 friends might want to pay for this…) and limit daily messaging to 15 per day. Most people don’t have 500 friends, nor do they Tweet more than 15 times per day. But the power users, who exceed these numbers, would be happy to fork over about $2 a month to be unlimited.

There, I just solved your problems. (Can I have a cut of the premium money? No? Damn.)

But lastly, the real problem with freemium: as soon as one company starts charging, someone else will figure out how to do it for free. The public will get swayed by the freeness which will take your users, and revenue, out the door. And that’s Plurking annoying.

What would you pay for online?

If you came to this blog looking for ways to make money with your web 2.0 product, you’d probably better leave now because this post will only confuse and annoy you.  Also, if you’ve got a web 2.0 product, you probably shouldn’t be Googling “how to make money with web 2.0″ anyway, you probably should have thought about this a while ago.

But, if you’re like me and you’re fascinated by all the startups out there without business plans, then keep reading because we’re gonna have some fun and hopefully help me understand some things.

One of the biggest problems with the “web 2.0″ world right now (aside from an abundance of blogs that make fun of web 2.0) is that there is an abundance of money flowing into startups that will have trouble turning a profit.  This is eerily familiar to the dot com boom, that basically happened due to crazy over-valuations of websites that couldn’t actually make money.

So how do companies make money online right now?  A) Advertising B) The “Freemium” model or C) Selling T-Shirts.  Honestly, that’s pretty much it.  So as an exclusive three part blog post (yes, this easily could be one long blog post, but I’m cheaply splitting it into three sections (first for time, secondly because I really need to shorten my posts…)

So today we’ll be talking about the first market for making money online: Advertising.

Advertising
This is by far and away the biggest revenue stream online.  Google built an empire out of advertising and as ads become increasingly targeted based on all the info you’ve put out on the web (yes, it’s going to get creepy very, very soon - and no, Facebook’s Beacon wasn’t that horrible of an idea, it just came around too soon), we will become inundated with more advertising than we can stand.

But I also don’t think it’s very effective.  Right now there are fundamentally two advertising models; one where advertisers pay when you click on links and other model that charges for every thousand or so times an ad gets displayed on a page.

This model has been successful because it’s easily measurable the way no advertising has been before.  In the print world advertisers would pay insane amounts of money for physical ad space, but have little understanding of their return.  Now with click throughs or pay-per-impression, marketers can know immediately how many people actually clicked on a link, or exactly how many thousands of people saw their banner.

Four problems with this: 1) as the culture becomes more web-savvy (and not that stupid “digital savvy” person who downloads ringtones and watches lots of NFL) we will become increasingly able to avoid paid links.  We’ll be able to see through the ads and get only the content we want- I mean seriously, when was the last time you saw a Google ad along a blog’s sidebar and decided to click on it? Basically this ends up becoming a battle of trying to trick readers into clicking on links- and what does that achieve?  High bounce-rate, that’s all.  Especially for Web 2.0 companies that target the digital crowd- we are less likely to click on links.

Problem 2) We don’t really look at banner ads.  In print media a full page ad might be interesting; it might be artistically cool or have some model in it or something to catch the eye.  But banner ads?  Not interesting.  Maybe they are flashy or have some annoyingly enticing mini-golf game, but again- they’re trying to trick you into clicking, not actually advertise to you.

Problem 3) I’m not looking at your ad.  Yes, I just mentioned the mini-golf one, but aside from that I have completely trained my eyes to avoid ads.  I skim over them at an astoundingly impressive rate.  Maybe this is my superhuman skill, but I think most of the public is able to avoid looking at these ads.  So yes, 1,000,00 people visited a page that had your banner up, but how many actually saw it?

Problem 4) It’s not that much money unless you’re a huge player in the market with millions of page views- you won’t make that much money on it anyway.  This model really only works for a small amount of the web and NOT for small startups with Web 2.0 products.  Building a company and expecting to be ad supported will take a LONG time to reach profitability.

To end my rant on online advertising I’ll throw a twist in: I’m all for better targeted advertising.

If I’m in the market to buy something, let’s say a 2GB SD card, I could go to my favorite places (TigerDirect or NewEgg) or, what I’ll likely do is ask the Google.  And here’s where things get awesome: while writing this I decided to actually Google “2GB SD Card” and low and behold: TigerDirect is the top ad supported option and NewEgg is the Google shopping choice (plus that price is pretty good, should you actually be in the market).

Good work, Google.  I’m actually ok with that.  Did Google know that I like those places? No… but I’d be ok with it if they did.  Strangely enough, better targeted advertising would make online shopping a breeze.

Is it invasive? Yeah, maybe.  But if it helps save you money, would you be all that worried?  Ok, next post (likely Monday) will cover the problems with the “Freemium” model.  Oh, and just so you don’t have to spend the weekend researching, I’ll also explain what that is.  Happy weekend, all!

I’m going to take a break from making fun of web 2.0 business models today, to make fun of some idiot who web 2.0ed himself into jail.  Actually, let’s strike that and save the use of “web 2.0″ as a verb for something much funnier later on. The verb “web 2.0″ will need to be reserved for something much funnier that involves a huge financial loss and some really shiny looking logos.

Anyway, as the story goes, this 23 year old moron from the UK posted around 80 videos of himself breaking the law to YouTube.  Before I get much further, you really must jump over to YouTube and check out his channel, which is still active even though he’s now been banned from the video sharing site.  What the hell was he thinking?

You idiot.  He willingly added videos of himself doing drugs, driving at insane speeds, and even stealing crap.  Seriously, I don’t know what to tell this guy.  If there were a Darwin Awards for crime this guy would have to win some sort of prize.

A local city councilmen was hilariously quoted saying, “if more criminals were as obliging, the city would be even safer”.

Hopefully more criminals do oblige, because from my point of view this is just way too funny to miss out on.  As one of the worlds’ biggest “America’s Funniest Home Videos” fans, I’m truly excited for what this evolution in home video will bring us.  No longer will Fox’s “World’s Dumbest Criminals” only have surveillance footage, it will have first hand accounts with running commentary, of people doing incredible stupid things.

Now here’s an idea for a web 2.0 startup (and by “web 2.0″ I mean that it’s interactive  and there is no business model): People send in videos of themselves doing illegal activities and then everyone votes on who’s law-breaking antics were stupidest.

This will both cut down the crime rate (because everyone would be arrested), plus give me something new to laugh at online.  It’s really a win-win, I think.  Oh wait… actually, I think I just invented break.com.  Damn.