I purchased the domain name a few months ago, so I guess it’s about time to setup some content on the website… I’ve been using Blogger for a while now (my posts below were all on my Blogger account), and now I’m upgrading to a Wordpress blog on my own domain, how exciting! haha…

I don’t really have much to report at this time, but I suppose it is worth welcoming everyone to the new blog location. Since I’m growing up and using word press now, the blog name has grown up from Box o’ Thoughts to Thought Box - change is always fun!

Jason, Travis and I are looking at starting a company. We have a pretty sweet idea and we’ve got a lot of skills, but this whole starting a business thing isn’t an easy undertaking. More than anything, I’m intimidated as hell at the proposition of doing all of the stuff we’ve outlined as key steps to developing the business.

Basically, without giving a whole lot away, we’re trying to carve ourselves into an internet marketing niche that can serve a huge community with content that is interesting and fun while yet providing a great forum for coporations to get their propoganda to the masses.

This is something that I can definitely see as a success down the road, but the basic implementation needed to get us started and into everyone’s bookmarks is a little daunting to think about. Not only do we need to develop a great looking site, but there is some functionality that we’ll need implemented right away (such as a database and dynamic pages) that I’ve definitely never developed before or had to work with. Aside from that you have the constant issue of defining a revenue model, setting goals and acquiring enough content from corporate marketing departments to make your site sufficiently sticky. Needless to say, this is all incredibly new to me.

I’ll be searching through some internet documentation to see what I can find in regards to starting an internet only business. Hopefully I will find enough quality information specific to our online marketing idea to help smooth out some of the wrinkles I already see in our business plan that could potentially become problems. I mean, what’s the best way to develop something that needs a scalable infrastructure in terms of bandwidth, processing power, and storage? There are options like Amazon’s web services, but those can tend to be somewhat expensive - especially when you’re in beta!

Anyway, if anyone is seriously interested in joining our little team, let me know. The three of us would really like to dive through the first few steps in the development of our plan by ourselves, but I have a feeling we’ll need some quality web developers and the like once we get the ball rolling. Hopefully we’ll be successful and can walk away with some serious money in the future, but I am sure it will be a great learning experience no matter what happens.

It’s been a while since I’ve had some time to get a post up, and one of the reasons why is because I have been spending a lot of time preparing for the Omniture Web Analytics Competition at BYU. For those who don’t know, I’m taking a Web Analytics class this semester and we’re encouraged (maybe required?) to participate in the competition. This was my second semester participating in the competition, but unfortunately we worked with the same website’s data. Though you’d think I had an advantage, being familiar with http://www.costumecraze.com/, the Omniture people made it clear at the opening meeting that we needed to come in with new information this time around.

I can’t share any specific information due to my signing a non-disclosure agreement, but I can talk a bit about the SiteCatalyst product! To be completely honest, SiteCatalyst is an absolutely fabulous tool that still needs a little work. Currently, you have great flexibility and customization available to you (though sometimes you end up paying quite a bit more for some of those options) as an Omniture customer. The task of keeping up with all of your key performance indicators is pretty simple with the advanced dashboards you can create. From my experience, which is admittedly little, SiteCatalyst blows the competition away in sophistication and the level of customization available. Granted, those who use Omniture’s tools are paying out the nose, so SiteCatalyst better be good.

I do, however, have a few complaints. Omniture has broken up their reports into three main sections: Commerce, Traffic, and Paths. This is really helpful in some regards because it breaks up the many reports available into three different categories, yet I found myself extremely frustrated on several occasions. Because these three categories are very rigidly constructed, getting reports on data from both traffic and commerce is impossible (or at least hard enough to seem so). For example, should I want to find a report that gave me the percentage of site traffic that came from a specific domain and the revenue from that domain I would be out of luck. For some questions you can look up two different reports within their respective categories, but this is not always the case.

Without giving out specific information, I was trying to do research on CostumeCraze’s global presence (where commerce and traffic were coming from geographically) and I could not find reports that really helped me drill down on the issue. SiteCatalyst provides traffic maps, showing which countries around the world are providing site traffic, but I could not find anything that would help me see the revenue that matched up with that traffic. The data already being tracked, so why can’t I get to the information I need? There were ways to work around the problem, sort of, but I’d rather just have interoperability between the three categories.

Omniture does offer other services, and it’s entirely possible that Discover (a new app they use) or another piece of software solves some of the problems I see in SiteCatalyst. Unfortunately, I haven’t had access to any of the more advanced tools, but I can probably research it a little bit. Either way, web analytics is a pretty interesting and I encourage those who are web developers to look into Google’s free analytics tools (http://www.google.com/analytics).

The great thing about the CP80 initiative is that it is about choice. It isn’t an argument that pornography should be made illegal in all forms or that laws should define that only adults may access it, but it is about giving a family or organization (I don’t want to leave business situations out of this) the choice of whether or not they want to allow pornographic content to come across their wires.

For those who are unaware, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and during the Priesthood session of the October 2006 General Conference, President Hinckley asked all the men of the Church (I’m assuming much of what he said applies to women as well) to “Rise Up, O Men of God”. During that talk he read a letter that was written to him by a brother who was (or at least I’m hoping I can use the past tense) heavily addicted to pornography. In the letter, the brother pleads, “…please plead with the brethren of the Church not only to avoid but eliminate the sources of pornographic material in their lives.” President Hinckley later tells us “…there must be self-discipline enough to turn it off.” Yes, I believe he was using the pronoun it to refer to the computer itself, but if it were possible, I think he would prefer we turn the pornographic material itself off.

The Family Movie Act is a great example of a way in which the US Government has given the family a say on what they can do to control media entering their home. The Family Movie Act is not about forcing rated R movies out of the house, or about forcing the movie industry to censor their products, but it gives families a choice about the kinds of media they watch. The CP80 solution to internet pornography is basically to require website to “rate” themselves just like movies are forced to be rated from G to PG to PG-13 to R, etc… Once a website is “rated” by switching to a different port, families can now decide whether or not they want that kind of media entering their homes.

There is no limit to freedom of speech, since those who want to access pornography will be able to, and it will not make it any harder for people to get to their website (the URL isn’t going to change, they’ll probably just be forced to have a landing page – something many digital certificate companies require for certification anyway [my roommate works at DigiCert]). Oh, and as for enforcement? I’m sure the government is OK with fining people like crazy if they violate; when do they not like collecting a lot of cash, they just need to make the fine hefty enough.

Just because it’s hard or seems like a large task doesn’t mean we should just give up. I don’t look to take away the right that others have to indulge in whatever they would like to indulge in, but I would very much like the ability to keep destructive materials out of my home. I have seen too many families, marriages, and lives destroyed over pornography to the point that I barely trust myself enough to say that I will never give in to it. Think about how much time you spend on your computer everyday! Think of how many idle hours some of you have spent just floating from one site to another online! What’s to say that Satan won’t hit you someday with a temptation strong enough to steer you or a loved one to something you would never partake of under normal circumstances. We will all face temptation, but I think it is wise counsel to eliminate as many situations and opportunities as possible when it comes to serious transgression.

Those of our generation can make a difference because we actually understand the technology behind the magic that is the internet.If we can’t stand as disciples of Jesus Christ on something like this, when will we stand on his side? I don’t know what legislation will pass, I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I think true discipleship asks us to stand up in situations like this. We wanted the ability to choose before we came to earth, shouldn’t we continue to fight for it now that we’re here?