Posts: My Mistakes

ActoMistake: Compromising the Conversation

As element #1 of revenue generation for ActoGuitar, I had thought affiliate marketing was the way to go. While I do believe affiliate marketing could be executed quite well in the context of a forum, I think it ultimately requires too much control over the forum's conversation; it requires a...

My Mistakes

Errors in Incentives

This one is one of my dumbest mistakes, which is both disappointing and amazing: disappointing because its stupidity is borderline embarrassing, but amazing because the most valuable lessons come from the dumbest mistakes. With ActoGuitar I had tried incentivizing user contribution by...

My Mistakes

Forgetting About the Core

For ActoGuitar, a blog section was added that pulled in the XML feed of the various guitar-related blogs. The ideas was to create more content on the site. In hindsight, this seems to have been a mistake; real value will be through reconstructing media so that it facilitates comprehension and...

My Mistakes

My PHP Skills Suck

I recently coded a small PHP script that was little more than a contact form. It was one of my first PHP scripts. I was quite proud. Then the web host that the site the PHP script was on contacted me, and informed me that spammers had hijacked the script and used it to send out 20,000 spam...

My Mistakes

ActoMistake: Thinking Competitively

On ActoGuitar, I recently added a forum that allowed people to share their music. The goal was not only to enrich the community, but also to encourage people to post on the forum, so as to build a community that is more interactive, and that we can create a dialogue with to understand their...

My Mistakes

Learning Technology

Another mistake I made is with this blog: you'll notice it's not center aligned in Firefox. I spent some time trying to fix the CSS code, but got frustrated and then quit. I'm decent at CSS and HTML and working on learning PHP, but still have quite a ways to go. I'll fix this mistake soon enough....

My Mistakes

More on Content Mistakes

The mistake I referenced earlier about trying to sell mass-produced content is still one that bothers me quite a bit. In hindsight, it just seems so naive. What's really unfortunate for us now is that the expertise model that we were talking was really about owning the customer; we didn't...

My Mistakes

Moderators' Forum: A Stupid Mistake

At ActoGuitar , we had a moderators' forum for the past couple of a months. This was a really stupid idea. Here's why: 1. There weren't any friggin' moderators! Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, as we do have a small moderators team, but I don't know if it's something that...

My Mistakes

Trying to Sell Mass-Produced Information

Without a doubt, the biggest mistake I made with the ActoGuitar project was trying to sell the content as just that -- static content. We had pitched it as an interactive course: "read the wonderful content, which contains audio and video, and ask questions to our expert staff!"...

My Mistakes

 
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