John Kenney

Online storage is an excellent cloud-based service that businesses of all sizes should take advantage of. We are pleased to publish a guest post by Shelly Towns, a writer and tech enthusiast, who writes for Maytech.net.

Description: Most online file storage providers have a list of features to sell about their services. But how will these features benefit your business?

Today’s cloud-based computing solutions include a number of online file storage options for businesses that need a place to put their big files. For some companies, however, their needs for online, off-site storage are eclipsed by their lack of in-house technical experience. This generally results in solutions to file storage and transfer that are unsustainable, inconvenient and usually expensive.

Security is important to most businesses and the concept of sending potentially sensitive materials across the Internet into and from their storage facility can be scary. One of the benefits of selecting a high quality online file storage provider is they tend to have all the latest encryption schemes to ensure ones business intelligence remains private and proprietary.

Being able to control access to the files in ones online storage account can make the difference between having something useful and simply a dumping point. Well constructed file storage infrastructure will provide the ability to set up and control access to individuals, teams of workers, or even the general public. Having real time insight into who is accessing what resource as well as the ability to instantly remove access can be just the type of feature a business needs to compete.

The benefit of proper branding is not lost on most businesses. Better online file storage services will provide their clients with the ability to install their company logo and color schemes which will readily identify the web-based online file storage with the rest of the company’s website. Additionally, it can sometimes be confusing when a user is taken to some completely foreign domain name in order to transfer large files to or from the company. Being able to integrate the file storage services right into the company domain is another branding hurdle overcome.

One of the main reasons businesses consider using a file storage service has to do with saving on bandwidth costs to serve extremely large files. Storage costs can run into big money as well. By using a service that has the ability to mirror files in their data centers across the globe, users will get access to their downloads faster and will have the ability to upload files to the company easier because the targeted destination is much closer to them geographically.

Sometimes business operations only need quick, easy access to or from the files. Using an online file storage solution that provides easy to install web page widgets can save the business, time, money, and the ill will often caused by attempting to institute technical solutions that wreak havoc for their end users.

Communications are key in most business transactions. Online file transfers can sometimes leave both the end user and the destination company scratching their heads as to what the current status of a transfer may be. With notifications, automated messages can be emailed to users when their files have been uploaded to the target successfully. Likewise, it may behoove operations for the company to receive a message when an upload has been initiated and subsequently completed.

Compatibility issues are a nuisance and can turn normally good business relations bad. With so many standards, platforms and various technologies, getting things to play together can be tough. Instead of trying to insert square pegs into round wholes with an online file storage solution, seek out a provider that solves compatibility issues. The hassle and headaches this prevents will be well worth the small hosting fees the business pays for those services.

A final benefit which cannot be overlooked is the concept of backing up ones data. How many times has word come down that some challenge–server crashes, hard drive failure, network not accessible–has caused irreversible data loss? Even one time can be too many times. An online file storage service which provides offsite file backups will surely save the day for a business if and when the worst happens in relation to data file loss.

Author’s Bio: Shelly Towns is a writer and tech enthusiast. She enjoys researching upcoming technologies, new programs, and file transfer service.

We are pleased to publish a guest post by Carol Brown that addresses the ever timely topic of what type of laptop a graphic designer should buy. Since we just bought ourselves a new laptop, we can confirm that these are the right issues to think about. Carol is a writer with WebGuru India.

There was a time when graphic design professionals relied on desktops for their work. Graphic design on a laptop was not a suitable option for the millions of designers across the world. This was because the laptops were slower, too delicate to use, and of course, far more expensive than their desktop counterparts.

However, things have changed drastically in the past few years. The advent of new technologies in both computer hardware and software have enabled laptop brands to make laptops with performance that exceeds the desktop PCs of just a year or two ago. They also cope with heat dissipation issues better and are more rugged.

As a result, graphic designers can now purchase a high performance laptop for their work instead of a desktop machine. Apple Macbooks are obviously very popular among designers because they are very capable for any kind of website design related work. The downside, however, is that not all designers can afford Apple products – they are much more expensive than their Windows counterparts.

Today, the nice thing for designers is that they can buy laptops from brands like Dell, Toshiba, Asus, and other for half the price of the Apple models. These types of Windows machines offer great bang for the buck.

Designers looking for a capable and powerful laptop for their graphic design work need to assess the models according to some parameters.

• Large screen: A laptop for design work should have a large screen. Designers should pick a model that has at least a 16 inch screen – bigger is definitely better. However, screen size in inches is not the only way to measure. Screen resolution in pixels also plays a decisive factor. Many laptops today sport a default resolution of 1366×768 pixels. However, graphic designers can opt for a laptop that offers a resolution of 1600×900 pixels. Design professionals should opt for large screen laptops because screen real estate is ideal for working with two or more apps at the same time. Here portability is not the priority.
• Fast processor: A laptop meant for multimedia and design work should have a fast processor and oodles of RAM. The Intel Core series CPUs are really fast and they help in smooth multitasking. There are some models running on AMD Phenom triple core CPUs but they are a tad slower than their Intel counterparts. It is hard to gauge the true capability of a CPU just from the tech specs though. The latest Intel Core series CPU based on the Sandy Bridge architecture are the fastest according to industry experts. They not only offer fast performance but also consume less battery. If you want to see how a specific processor stacks up, here is a great resource for checking processor speed.
• Lots of RAM: Designers should opt for a model that has 6 to 8 GB of RAM as anything less is not suitable for multitasking. To get maximum RAM memory, you should choose a laptop model that comes with 64 bit operating system installed (e.g., Windows 7). This is essential because only 64 bit Windows OSes support more than 4 GB of memory. Once you’ve worked on a machine with 6Gb or more of memory, you’ll never want to go back.
• Separate graphics card (GPU): If you can afford it, all web designers should opt for a machine with a separate graphics card. Many of the latest processors have on-board graphics cards that will work fine, but these types of graphics cards share the system RAM and processor power with other functions. For maximum performance when using powerful apps like Photoshop and CorelDraw, design professionals should get machines with discrete GPUs, such as cards from Nvidia. These cards should have memory of 512 MB or 1GB. Some laptops, such as high end models from Sony and HP, sport Nvidia Optimus technology. This technology enables users to switch from the integrated graphics to the discrete GPU in the laptop without requiring a reboot. Designers should also make sure that the GPU used in the laptop is capable of supporting dual monitor setups. This is often a prerequisite for hardcore graphic design work.
• Warranty: Since designers are not always computer jocks, a laptop for design tasks should come with longer warranty and excellent customer service. Designers should check out the support policy of a company before buying model. The multimedia laptops can be expensive and spare parts can also be costly to replace, so a good warranty can save you in the long run. The laptops also come with useful apps preinstalled. It is useful to buy the models that come with OS recovery DVD and driver CDS.

Hopefully these tips will help get you going in the right direction in your quest for a new graphic design laptop. In addition to the items above, designers may also also want to consider investing in some laptop accessories like cooling pads and cleaning kits etc. These accessories can be useful for proper maintenance and increasing the longevity of the device.

Author’s Bio: Carol Brown writes for WebGuru India, a pioneer in the field of website design and seo services since 2005. Carol and other WebGuru India writers have published many articles on web design, graphic design, web development and SEO and internet marketing.

We are pleased to publish a guest post by Ashvin Sawmynaden with a new take on SEO. Ashvin is a web marketing specialist currently working on the ACCESS Formation Surete Aeroportuaire website.

The search engine optimization world is one that can literally scare people out of their skin. With the number of unrepentant scammers running around, the speed at which things keep changing and the tons of things to learn, it is often frustrating to most people. Small businesses and blog owners are particularly at risk as they may not have the required knowledge for more advanced and effective SEO techniques and are often left chasing tips and hints that will eventually enable them to boost the visibility of their website.

However, the complex world of search engine optimization comes at a cost. There are techniques that are no longer very effective and can even downright hurt your website, but that are nevertheless being used by a lot of webmasters. Worse yet, even some shady agencies actually recommend these burnt out techniques, thereby ensuring that more people keep wasting their time implementing things that will never help their website visibility. This article lists the most popular three SEO techniques you can stop worrying about.

Tons of links in your footer

The idea of putting tons of links in your website’s footer is one that is done even by huge websites. However, having so many links in your footer only makes it look extremely spammy. Moreover, it increases the total number of links on your pages for no reason. Most of the time, this is made worse by the fact that all these links are actually already prominently displayed in the main navigation menu.

The bottom line is that your footer should only include a few of your most important links, along with those typical links you expect to see, such as your contact and privacy policy pages. You can also forget about having your entire sitemap in your footer. Keep in mind that search engines are now also taking a page’s load time into consideration, and you will understand that it’s a good idea to keep your number of internal links to a reasonable amount.

Two-way link exchanges

Two-way link exchanges were a very popular practice before Google caught on to it and began ignoring them, much to the dismay of many webmasters around the world. The practice involves putting a link on your website and in return obtaining a link from that same website you just linked to. However, this strategy, known as a two-way link exchange, is no longer effective and constitutes a big waste of time.

The truth is that Google can detect such obvious link exchanges and no longer considers them a factor in rankings. Such traditional link exchanges merely indicate that you are actively trying to obtain higher rankings, which, ironically, is frowned upon by Google.

The Keywords Meta tag

Google, along with the other search engines not many people care about, has clearly stated that it no longer takes the Keywords Mega tag into consideration. This should not be surprising when one considers how much they were abused by spammers back when Yahoo was still the leading search engine. While many people have acknowledged the fact that these keywords are not effective, they nevertheless keep using them as their belief is that it does not actually hurt to do so.

However, you do run the risk of your competitors scraping your Keywords Meta tag to know which keywords you are targeting. Obviously, once they’ve done so, they will very likely attempt to outrank you in search engines, thereby effectively taking your hard-earned traffic away.

Doing things rights

Instead of wasting your time on these techniques, you should focus on implementing things that may not look important but are nevertheless extremely effective in increasing your website’s visibility. These include ensuring that all your images are properly optimized with relevant names and ALT attributes, making sure your content is visually appealing (by using headers, images or even both), and having great Meta Descriptions that will make search engine users actually want to visit your website.

Author’s Bio: Ashvin Sawmynaden is a web marketing specialist currently working on the ACCESS Formation Surete Aeroportuaire website.

We are pleased to publish this guest post about text messaging by Howard Gibbs of Specialty Answering Service.

With the development of cell phones, smart phones and iPhones, people now have a miniature computer in their grasp for instant communication. The convenience of text messaging is having an impact on the way small businesses do business.

Communication in the business world has rapidly changed over the last few years from pagers, fax machines, and telephones to emails and online video chats. Small business owners must be willing to adapt and embrace new methods of communication or their company will quickly become outdated.

Text messages offer an alternate yet effective way for clients and business owners to keep in quick communication of each other. As a method of increasing customer service through rapid response, text messages can be relayed instantly and are usually responded to just as fast. Customers no longer have to call a company for information about a product or send an email via their home computers, cell phones, or the like.

When businesses offer a “text messaging” line for customers to initiate an inbound contact, they can alleviate any time consuming telephone conversations and give prospective customers immediate response to their queries. Think this is impersonal? Think again. The text message itself is evolving to be one of the most highly personal and frequently used methods of communication.

Texting also means that there is virtually no downtime in waiting for someone to read the request and respond appropriately. Small businesses owners are often glued to their cell phones. They become extensions of their person. Because of this, cell phones become an excellent method of communication when contacting a small business. Cell phone communication via voice can be somewhat intrusive if the business owner is meeting other clients, engrossed in their daily operations, or otherwise unable to speak.

The beauty of the text message is that cell phones can be checked practically everywhere in a noninvasive manner. There is no need to leave the room, worry about cell phone ringers, or insult any parties you may be engaged with by answering your phone. In addition, if a small business is using an answering service to manage their phone calls, most services be willing to offer text messaging as a means of communication.

Text messaging also serves as a great way to let people know about longer requests that may necessitate an email. Most telephones are equipped to receive emails but the text message can give the business owner a quick “heads up” limiting the need to read or correspond with the email. Imagine how convenient it would be to schedule to communicate with your local plumber and schedule an appointment via text message.

Text messages are essentially a guaranteed, noninvasive means of communication in the business community. As a whole, small businesses benefit from text messages because they serve as quick alerts, reminders, mini messages with names and phone numbers, short questions, and can be used when it is imperative that contact be made. Seating text messages in a more prominent position at your communication table means you will be keeping up with the changing genre of communication as well as embracing new ways to improve customer service.

Author’s Bio: Howard Gibbs of Specialty Answering Service has been reading, writing, and breathing telecommunications for the last 25 years.

We are pleased to publish a guest post about affiliate marketing by Kenneth Parkar, a contributing writer associated with the Debt Consolidation Care community.

Due to the tough economy, many people are starting businesses at home. This often includes creating a strong online presence through your own website, social media pages, and blog postings. Unfortunately, even when you have a good idea, many people are at a loss as to how they can popularize their website so that the business grows and makes more money.

One excellent way to jumpstart your business online is to create your own affiliate marketing program. Affiliate marketing is a very widely used marketing technique and there are thousands and thousands of companies that have set up such programs.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing is a type of structured marketing program which engages other people to promote your website, your products, and your services. Affiliate programs come in many forms, so you will need to make some choices about how to set up yours so it fits well with your business.

Once you have your affiliate program in place, you will need to figure out ways to promote it so that people see it and are persuaded to join it. People who join your affiliate marketing program are known as ‘affiliates’.

Once an affiliate joins your affiliate marketing program, you will provide them with links and banner ads that point to pages on your site that you want to promote. Typically, these will be custom designed landing pages engineered to convert visitors into sales, but they can also simply point to your home page (or any other page you want).

The affiliate will include these links and banner ads on their own websites, social media pages, blog postings, etc. It is up to them where and how these links are used.

They are responsible for driving traffic to their own content and you benefit from their efforts because those visitors will see your links and ads. As people visit that content, some will click on your affiliate links and be directed to your website. Once these visitors land on your website, it is up to you to have good content that helps to convert them from visitor to customer.

Of course, you will need to pay your affiliates for their help in marketing your business, but the really great thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t pay anything upfront to your affiliates. You pay only when they deliver a tangible result to you – typically that’s either a sale or a lead. To pay them, you can set up a commission schedule pay them for any sales they generate. Or you can pay them on a per lead basis or you can use any other mechanism which makes sense for your business.

Does Affiliate Marketing Really Work?

Yes, definitely. Affiliate marketing programs are being used successfully by thousands and thousands of companies around the world. They can work for most any type or size of company.

They work because if you are able to get lots of affiliates to put your ads on their sites, you can get a huge amount of visibility with no upfront cost. This can dramatically increase traffic to your own website – and this can lead to a big increase in your sales. Since the affiliates get paid too, everybody wins.

Of course, for your affiliate marketing program to be successful you will need to provide really good services or products that people want to buy. If you can’t do that, then you won’t be able to keep your affiliates interested in working with you. But if you can do that, then affiliate marketing can help take your business to the next level while helping you to make more money.

Author’s Bio: Kenneth Parkar is a contributing writer associated with the Debt Consolidation Care community and has written articles for various financial websites. He has expertise in the Debt Industry and has made significant contributions through his articles. Follow the company on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/debtcc.

In the space of 24 hrs, Target has permanently lost me as a customer.

I used to think they were an excellent company: good products, good prices, and consumer oriented. The first two are probably still true, but the last one isn’t – and apparently I’m not alone in thinking that.

Here’s why Target sucks: I bought 5 plastic storage boxes 2 weeks ago. The boxes appeared to be on sale for $5.44 each – there were big ‘SALE’ tags stuck over the regular price labels on the shelves. I happened to like the boxes, but this was purely a price-driven choice – these were the lowest priced boxes they had. I grabbed 5 of them and headed for the checkout counter.

At checkout, I noticed the total charge was higher than I had expected, so I made a mental note to double check later (I should have done it right then, but I was in a hurry). I checked that evening and saw I was charged $9.99 each for the boxes – and I was charged twice for another item that they’d called for a price check on.

After noticing the problems, I immediately called the store and explained the situation. The woman said it’d be no problem, if I could come in, they’d sort it out. I told her the store was quite a distance and I might not be able to make it over for several weeks. Again, she said that’s fine, we’ll handle it.

But it didn’t work out that way at all…and now I won’t be shopping at Target ever again.

Fast forward 2 weeks to yesterday when I was able to get back to the store. At customer service, the double charge was refunded no problem, but the front line rep choked on the sale item refund. She immediately escalated to a ‘GSA’ named Tracy.

Tracy was thoroughly unimpressed by my story: Why had I taken so long to come back? (because the rep said it would be okay.) Why hadn’t I gotten the name of the rep I spoke to on the phone? (I didn’t know I’d needed it.) Why hadn’t that rep recorded the call in their records? (how could I know she was supposed to do that?) Did I have any proof that the item was on sale? (no, I didn’t know I’d need proof.)

After pressing the issue, she found a circular from that week that showed that the same item, but in a different color was on sale that day for $5.44. My actual item – or more specifically, my color – was not actually on sale.

So technically I hadn’t been mischarged – instead, Target had stocked the wrong item in the sale racks. This still seemed worthy of a refund to me since I’d never seen the circular and even if I had I wouldn’t have detected the subtle difference in the sale vs. non-sale items anyway. Tracy remained unmoved. The possibility of mis-stocking an item apparently seemed unlikely to her (the items were still in the same place today when I was there, although the ‘sale’ sign had been removed).

To get me off her back, Tracy escalated the decision to her boss over the com system. The ruling: no refund. Period. Sorry, Charley.

Are you kidding me? I was dumbfounded.

The next day (today), I called the main customer service line listed on the company website (they don’t make it easy to figure out who to call in such situations). Again, the front line guy heard my story and immediately escalated the issue. The next woman then asked a series of questions which implied that she was deeply skeptical of my story. 15 minutes and lots of product codes and receipt numbers later, she said ‘no’. I protested, so she escalated to her boss. Same verdict: no refund.

6 Target reps and not one seemed even the slightest bit interested in giving me a refund – not one seemed to show any concern whatsoever that maybe they’d actually made a mistake and mis-priced the item. Simply wasn’t  in their DNA to give a shit.

So this afternoon, I packed up a pile of stuff I’d recently bought at Target – about $100 worth – and drove back to Target and returned it all. When the rep asked why, I said ‘I was pissed at Target and was never going to shop there again.’ She said ok and proceeded to process my refund. Not a glimmer of interest in why.

After doing some searching tonight for this blog post, now I know why she was completely unfazed: she probably gets that all the time. Turns out there are lots and lots of people who have bad customer experiences at Target.

A quick search pulls up all sorts of sites dedicated to angry customers venting: Target Sucks, I Hate Target. Plus, there are plenty of individual blog posts like this one. And it sounds like the employees aren’t too happy either. They have their own sites: Target Sucks and Target Stores Suck. Looks like publishing anti-Target stuff is something of a cottage industry.

Some of the stories are quite funny. There’s the woman who had a light pole fall over and total her car in the Target parking lot. She got nothing from them. And another guy who put big signs to put on his car saying how target had ripped him off. He eventually got a refund and agreed to remove the signs.

Sorry for the off-topic post, but I needed to vent.

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I’ve helpfully posted this complaint in a number of other spots. My day job as a web publisher comes in handy in situations like this. My3Cents.com

I am very disappointed by the new version of Google’s Keyword Tool. In my opinion, the new keyword tool is a big step backward and basically sucks.

Google’s Keyword Tool is a keyword research tool that is part of Google AdWords. Until now, it has been the most accurate, most accessible, and most useful keyword research tool available.

But there are major problems with the new version which result in much lower quality and accuracy keyword suggestions.

Sadly, Google announced this week that the new version of the Keyword Tool is coming out of beta at the end of August. At that time, the old tool will no longer be accessible. In recent months while Google has been testing the beta in general release, Google has provided an prominent link from the new interface to the old interface. That has allowed me to put off the day of reckoning.

But with the imminent demise of the old version upon us, I’ve taken some time to carefully test and compare the two versions side-by-side. The result is not pretty. My conclusion: Without a doubt that the new version generates just incredibly, dramatically worse keyword lists than the old version.

New vs. Old: Suggested Keywords Comparison

The main problem with the new version of the tool is that it generates much less useful and relevant alternative keywords than the old interface does. Like by a HUGE margin. It is shocking how different the results are.

I just compared the suggested keywords generated by the two versions using a set of ~35 keywords/phrases related to ‘web tools’ (list pasted below). While the new tool always generates worse results, this particular set of terms really highlight how extremely bad the new tool is.

New Version Results

The new tool generated a list of 800 keywords (as it does for every set of keywords no matter how long it is). The vast majority of these 800 suggested terms had absolutely nothing to do with ‘web tools’.

When sorted by ‘global search volume’, only 7 of the top 50 results even contained or was even vaguely related to ‘web tools’. Instead, as you can see in the screenshot below, the results are full of irrelevant terms like ‘joomla’, ‘drupal’, ‘ecommerce’, etc. Even wackadoodle terms such as ‘art design’ and ‘fashion design’ make it onto the list.

In other words, the new version generates a list that is essentially useless.

Old Version Results

On the other hand, the old version generates a highly useful list of 150 terms all of which are tightly related to ‘web tools’. Every single one of the terms in the list contains the word ‘tool’ combined with variations on ‘web’ and related ideas: ‘webmaster’ ‘web design’ ‘free website’ ‘seo’, ‘online’, etc. There is not one term that’s off target – and certainly nothing remotely approaching the uselessness of ‘art design’.

In other words, the old version generates an extremely useful and accurate list of suggested keywords.

As you can see plainly by comparing the two lists, the difference in keyword relevance between the old version and the new version is night and day. It is quite remarkable.

Other Problems

There are at least two other major problems with the new version:

1. In the new version, when you click the advanced option to include only ‘ideas containing my search terms’, the new tool, which moments before eagerly pumped out 800 terms, suddenly becomes incredibly parsimonious and oftentimes offers up just a handful of terms. When I tried this for the list of 35 or so ‘web tools’ terms, I get LESS terms than I started with – only 26! And even the new ones in this list are not terribly relevant or useful. This boggles the mind.
2. The old version had a fantastically helpful option to see data limited to just ‘the keywords I entered’. This generated search counts and CPC stats, etc. limited specifically to your target list. The new version simply does not have this feature at all. That means that even if I can piece together a decent master list on my own (with or without the help of the new Keyword Tool), I can’t even validate this list using Google search volume and estimated CPC data.

I have to assume these major changes have been made by design and that Google has purposefully chosen to restrict/reduce the accuracy and relevance of the keyword data that they are sharing with us customer types.

Needless to say, I am not looking forward to losing the old version at the end of August.

List of ‘web tools’ related terms that I used to test both versions.

Buzzr is a new hosted website building platform based on Drupal, a popular open source content management system (CMS).

Buzzr aims to make it much easier to build websites in Drupal by creating a user-friendly front end for the Drupal CMS. In a sense, Buzzr is a sort of WordPress-for-Drupal.

However, while WordPress is primarily designed to build blog-based websites, Drupal is fundamentally a more powerful and versatile website development platform that can be used to make virtually any kind of website. However, with this richness comes complexity that puts Drupal out of reach for many people.

Buzzr is trying to capture some of the superior functionality of Drupal while improving the interface to make it accessible to a much wider range of people. I think they have been largely successful in doing so.

Buzzr has been developed by Lullabot, a renowned Drupal development shop based in Rhode Island. Buzzr is in the early stages of roll out.

Buzzr is similar in concept to Drupal Gardens.com which recently launched in open beta. DrupalGardens is another simplified version of Drupal that has been developed by Aquia, another leading company in the Drupal community.

In the past week, I have tried using both Buzzr and Drupal Gardens to see how they work. I use Drupal to build most all my sites and I was interested to see how these new hosted Drupal platforms compared with the ‘real’ Drupal.

I will be posting separately about Drupal Gardens at some point, but this post is focused on the features of Buzzr.

Goal: Build a Simple Content Site

To make my testing as real as possible, I tried to put up the same relatively simple content website on both Buzzr and Drupal Gardens. This is a site is actually want to build, so I was looking to see if either platform would make it easier for me to create than doing so on a normal Drupal setup.

The site I tried to build had the following characteristics:

• How-to oriented website with ~20 web pages
• Webpages are largely text-based with a few images per page
• Design is a fairly basic 3-column layout
• Needs to support running advertisements, including header ad, ads in sidebars, and ads in body text
• Need to be able to fine-tune page layout, text styling, etc., ideally using custom CSS to augment default options
• Needs to support ‘taxonomy’ – the Drupal term for ‘tags’
• Needs to support ‘views’ – a powerful Drupal method for organizing content into lists

The above features are slightly more complex than a basic content site you might see for a small business or an artist or a personal website, but not a whole lot more. As well, it specifically includes some features (esp. ‘views’) that are somewhat unique to Drupal.

This type of site would be relatively easy to build in regular Drupal (at least it would be if you already knew Drupal and had a development environment in place to do it which I do). This type of site cannot be built in WordPress – the problem being that WordPress has no well functioning equivalent to Drupal’s Views module.

Buzzr Capabilities

Buzzr (and Drupal Gardens) have a wide range of built-in capabilities and I wasn’t able to look at all of them. Since I was trying to build a real website as quickly as I could, my focus was mostly on the capabilities required for getting this site built. As a result, there are a goodly number of Buzzr features – e.g., image galleries – that I didn’t look at in any depth.

Here’s a overview of Buzzr’s capabilities grouped into 4 major buckets. Again, I had a specific focus, so your experience may differ from mine, particularly in areas like ‘capabilities’ where specific website requirements are likely to vary quite substantially.

Admin User Interface

Buzzr has a very nice looking user interface (UI) for the ‘admin’ side of using the platform – basically the menus and other stuff you use to build and manage your website.

The buzzr admin UI consists of up to 3 menu bars across the top of the page, plus various editing and configuration layouts on the main page. You can find many pics and videos of the Buzzr admin setup in the Buzzr 101 section of the site.

I would say this interface is pretty darn nice. It is very graphical and much more intuitive than Drupal’s native admin controls which can be awfully cryptic.

The main admin options of ‘add content’, ‘manage content’, ‘design and layout’, ‘manage users’, and ‘site settings’ seem pretty sensible.

I won’t go into each piece part, but I wasn’t crazy about some of the screens. For instance, I did not like that there is no ‘menu’ option directly in the webpage editor – and there is no way to modify a menu title separately from the page title. As a result, when you initially create and save a page, the entire page title pops up in your main navigation menu. You can visit the ‘navigation menu’ page to change this and have it be subordinate to another menu item, but this isn’t too satisfying – and you still can’t change the menu item title there either.

A general criticism I’d offer of the layout is the size of the admin menu bars: they take up too much screen real estate. With all 3 menu bars open, they take up the top 180px of your screen. If you are on a 1080px or 1024px tall screen, these menus are taking up nearly 20% of total height – and that doesn’t include your browser frame and whatever toolbars you’ve got going. As well, many of the admin page layouts are too generously proportioned – e.g., the ‘Manage Static Pages’ page. This all needs to be more economically done to avoid too much scrolling and loss of focus.

Functionality

One way that Buzzr (and Drupal Gardens) keep the Admin UI clean and simple is that they support only part of the entire range of functionality available in Drupal proper. Since Drupal proper supports an enormously wide range of capabilities through ‘contributed modules’, this is a necessary thing for Buzzr to do.

The question is: has Buzzr chosen the right functionality to include to meet the needs of the most people? I think the answer to that is probably yes – or at least it is within striking distance. Since I know they will be adding additional features over time – e.g., I was told that they will be adding groups, calendars, contact page, and color picker functionality later this month.

The main things I personally needed to build my site were these:

- Basic content pages supporting text and images
- Upload and manage images for webpages
- Taxonomy (aka, ‘tags’) to allow grouping pages together
- ‘Views’, a special Drupal module that allows you to create lists of pages based on certain parameters (e.g., a tag)

Before I run through these quickly, I wanted to note a very important feature of Buzzr that was not required for my website, but that looks like it would help lots of other folks: their innovative Form Builder. This is a really outstanding Buzzr feature that combines two very complicated Drupal capabilities – CCK and content type manager – into one simple to use interface. This module allows you to very easily build a ‘custom form’ that contains any number or type of content fields. Using this tool you can create, for instance, a complex custom page for product spec sheets or product reviews or any other similar type of page that requires structured content. As an added bonus, Buzzr / Lullabot have contributed this module code back to the Drupal community in the shape of the Form Builder module.

Basic content pages Buzzr handles basic content pages very nicely using the ‘static page’ content type. A ‘static page’ contains several fields: page title, body text, tags, and date and time. It does not contain a ‘menu’ field as mentioned above. You are able to upload images to a static page.

In addition, Buzzr offers a number of additional pre-defined content types, including image galleries, blog posts, ‘press post’, and ‘custom pages’. The WYSIWYG editor is very nicely implemented. There is an option to switch to an HTML editor, too.

Upload images In the WYSIWYG page editor, Buzzr allows up to easily upload an image from your hard drive. The uploader allows you to adds image a title, tags, and other descriptors. You can also change the image size to fit properly on your page. You can also adjust aligned (e.g., left, right, center).

The part I did not understand was how the image library worked. While it worked fine to upload into the page directly, I would have actually preferred to upload into an image/media library so I could reuse the image on multiple pages with just the one upload. The images I uploaded directly to a page did not show up in the media library and I could see no other way to upload an image. Perhaps this is in the tutorials somewhere.

Taxonomy (aka ‘tags’) Tagging is a pretty basic capability that most all website builders offer and Buzzr is no exception. Buzzr allows you to tag every piece of content (pages, images, etc.) with one or multiple tags. These are nicely displayed on each page in the default templates.

That said, I would have liked to see a bit more full featured implementation of tagging. For instance, there is no master screen where you can look at and refine your tags and you can have only one tagging ‘vocabulary’ whereas Drupal proper and Drupal Gardens allow you to have more than one. This is useful if you want to tag one type of thing (e.g., pages) with one set of tags while tagging another set of things (e.g., images) with a different set of tags.

‘Views’ capability One of the best features of Drupal is the ‘Views‘ module which allows you to create lists of content based on user-specified parameters. For example, you can create a list of all content pages with the tag ‘websites’ or all pages of a certain content type or published by a certain author. In Drupal proper, Views is extremely flexible and supports very complex parameters.

My needs with my sample website were more modest: In Buzzr, I simply needed to create pages based on individual tags. So, for example, I needed a page that lists all pages with the tag ‘websites’; and another showing all pages tagged ‘SEO’, etc.

Unfortunately, I almost was not quite able to do this in Buzzr. Buzzr does have a simplified Views module, but it turns out to be a bit too simplified. Instead of generating a page with just posts tagged ‘websites’, it created a page with links to all tags used on the websites. While I maybe could have worked with that, it turns out each of these subpages contained the same complete list of all posts on the site. I’m thinking the feature isn’t working quite right – or maybe I didn’t configure the page correctly.

[Update: Via email, Buzzr CEO Ed Sussman has offered several clarifications about the Buzzr custom pages (aka 'simple views') feature. First, he said that there is a bug in Custom Pages that is causing the tag links not to work properly. He says this will be fixed shortly. Second, he noted that they have not enabled the ability to generate 'single tag pages' using Custom Pages, but that this is built into the code and may be enabled in the future. Lastly, he pointed out that Lullabot / Buzzr actually built the underlying code for this feature and contributed it back to drupal.org as a contributed module called Simple Views. This looks like a really fantastic module that hugely simplifies the well known 'Views' module in Drupal. They are to be commended for contributing it back to the community.]

Design

Buzzr has some very good design tools, but overall I would say it needs some further work. It is probably a step or two behind the theme editing features that I saw on Drupal Gardens.

The design interface has several parts: ‘select style’, ‘navigation menu’, ‘design tool’, ‘design (advanced)’, and ‘widgets/layout’.

‘Select style’ allows you to select from a dozen or so ‘themes’ (the Drupal term for ‘template’). These all have basically the same page layout and vary mostly in terms of the ‘skin’ – meaning background colors, font styles, and colors, etc.

‘Navigation menu’ allows you reorder items in your main navigation menu via a drag-and-drop interface. As far as it goes, this works very nicely actually, but it looks like you can have only 1 menu and that’s not ideal for many situations.

‘Design tool’ allows you to change various theme relates settings. For instance, the global font and font size are set here. Backgrounds for the header and the site are also set here. The site logo and favicon are also here. This is good stuff, but pretty basic stuff.

‘Design (advanced)’ is a simple interface that allows you to see and edit the entire CSS file associated with your theme. You cannot change basic page layout here, but you can change lots of other styling elements of your website. For people who know CSS, this is great, but others will struggle to know what to do here.

‘Widgets / layout’ is one of the most interesting parts of Buzzr. It is basically a drag-and-drop tool that allows you to manipulate the layout of your website. Here is where you determine how many columns your site has. It also has a bunch of pre-defined widgets (called ‘blocks’ in Drupal-ese) which you can add or move around on your page. These widgets are basically small content blocks which you can put into your columns. The pre-defined widgets include ones for text or images, for tags, for a mini-gallery slideshow, and so forth. There are also widgets showing users and social widgets for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

In terms of my specific needs, it appears that most of what I needed design-wise could be done reasonably easily in Buzzr. The drag and drop widget tool is very effective.

One sticking point was reformatting the header to get a 728x90px ad to fit alongside the site name and site slogan. With some encouragement from CEO Ed, I found that I could manipulate the CSS for the header to achieve the desired positioning. This involved firstly adding a new block to the page via the ‘widgets’ editor and then using the ‘design (advanced)’ editor and Firebug (a Firefox plug-in) to modify the CSS for the default header block and my new ad block. With a bit of fiddlign, I was able to put the two blocks side by side in the header.

Help / Support

Buzzr provides pretty strong and easy to understand documentation. The website provides a very helpful how-to section plus hands-on demos in a series of nice video tutorials. Since the whole thing is designed to be straightforward and user friendly, this documentation is plenty to get you going in building out your website.

While the documentation is quite good, a concern I would have is that there is no obvious venue for support beyond this info – like if you still don’t understand something, how do you get help? On Drupal Gardens, they’ve got very active user forums to help you out. I found these invaluable as I worked through building out a site there. It may be that Buzzr is intended more as a platform for Lullabot clients than as a general use website builder. If that’s the case, they don’t make that obvious.

But I can’t complain too much about support because I received an immediate response to the one query I did send them via email – and that came from their CEO, no less. Obviously that’s not scalable, but it does suggest their commitment to the product.

[Update: Ed Sussman, the Buzzr CEO, has now sent along numerous emails clarifying various points about Buzzr. He's been very helpful.]

Pricing

Buzzr has a tiered pricing scheme that seems fairly reasonable if you are planning to put up one or two sites. Prices start at $19.95 for the ‘Bronze’ plan. This seems designed for a smaller site typical of a small business or independent professional. If you have a larger site and require more hosting resources, then you can choose one of the 3 more expensive plans ranging from $39.95 to $119.95 per month.

The monthly price includes on-going upgrades of the Buzzr platfrom. This is a major benefit over a self-hosted version of Drupal since, unlike WordPress, the upgrading process is not automated and really quite a pain in the a**.

Buzzr has a 7-day trial period where you can demo the platform. This a great way to try out the platform and see if it is a good fit for your needs. I used only this option because it took just a few hours to conclude that I wouldn’t be able to do what I wanted to build out my site.

Even if I’d been able to get the website up and running, pricing might have been an issue for me because I would have wanted to host multiple small websites on Buzzr. Via email I learned that you may be able to get a price break if you put up a number of websites.

Conclusions

Buzzr appears to be very promising Drupal website builder. It is a relatively new product, but has many outstanding features and excellent potential.

Via email, CEO Ed Sussman offered this comment about Buzzr and it’s future:

“Buzzr is designed to be a real time saver for the average website owner who wants the power of Drupal in a more user-friendly package. We’re very pleased with the capabilities of Buzzr today, but we’ve got many important enhancements in the pipeline for the coming months. When the fully packaged version of Buzzr is released in September, you’ll see some really great new time saver tools beyond anything now in the public beta. I think people will be excited and they will clearly see things that set us apart from Drupal Gardens.”

Unfortunately, despite the great features, I was not able to get my website built in Buzzr. It currently doesn’t quite support my needs. Some of the problems I had were:

• Couldn’t generate ‘views’ type pages for individual tags
• Couldn’t [easily] manipulate layout of header to include an ad [as described above, this was eventually accomplished via custom CSS]
• Couldn’t change menu item titles [turns out this is wrong - titles can be edited, but the edit screens are very confusing and should be clarified]
• Cost to host multiple small websites on Buzzr is too high [but it should be noted that Buzzr costs are comparable to other similar tools - they appear high only in the context of my specific set of needs which calls for many small sites]

Note: Text in brackets above are edits / clarifications added after the original post went live.

Despite these issues, I would definitely recommend that others try Buzzr and see what they think. There are a number of really strong positives and surely the platform is going to continue to expand and improve.

Here’s my take on Buzzr’s notable features:

• Modern, very easy to use admin user interface that makes Drupal very accessible to non-programmers
• Strong set of Drupal functional capabilities that will meet the needs of many websites
• Excellent Drupal feature innovations in both the ‘simple views’ and ‘form builder’ modules that simplify and enhance Drupal usability
• Commendable generosity on the part of Buzzr / Lullabot to contribute their module innovations back to drupal.org
• Nice mix of content types and other specific features out of the box
• Built-in support for image galleries with lightbox-type overlay/slideshow (caveat: I didn’t test this too thoroughly)
• Simple, easy to understand theme structure (in contrast to Drupal Gardens which has mind bogglingly complex themes)
• Beautiful drop down menus based on Drupal ‘Nice Menus‘ module (note these may require a bit of CSS styling to get the right look)
• Excellent drag-and-drop widgets tool that makes it very easy to organize your website page layout
• Nice social media, newsletter, and other community features

If your website needs match up well against Buzzr’s current capabilities, you could be up and running with a high quality Drupal-based site in a matter of hours. Since using Buzzr is so straightforward, it’s well worth giving it an hour or two to see if it’ll work for you.

I’ve been doing a lot of driving along the east coast this year and have noticed large variations in the cost of gasoline from state to state. I was thinking this was due in part to differences in state and local taxes, but never stopped to figure it out.

On future trips, I’d like to be a little more strategic and buy gas in states where the taxes are lower. Here’s a chart showing tax burden for each state.

The range from highest to lowest is pretty significant – more than double. Alaska is the cheapest at 26.4 cents. California has the highest taxes at 67.7 cents.

For the states I’ve been driving thru, the taxes from lowest to highest are:

- New Jersey: 32.9 cents

- South Carolina: 35.2 cents

- Virginia: 38.3 cents

- Massachusetts, Maryland: 41.9 cents

- Georgia: 47.8 cents

- Pennsylvania: 50.7 cents

- Florida: 52.9 cents

- North Carolina: 53.7 cents

- New York: 67.5 cents

- Connecticut: 68.7 cents

So for me, the best states for buying the cheapest gasoline are going to be: New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia followed by Maryland and Massachusetts.

The worst states for buying gasoline are New York and Connecticut.

After my dismal experience yesterday with Lakoff’s attempt to create a wholistic model of progressive and conservative thought, I’m drawn to the idea of memes and how the thinking on each side is a loose constellation of memes. Some are more foundational. Some are more emergent. Some enduring, some ephemeral.

The memes idea is appealing because it would allow for narrow, but contradictory beliefs to coexist more easily – and for beliefs to shift more fluidly over time in response to events and trends as they obviously do (on both sides).

It also is a more organic way to imagine diverse constellations of human actors to develop collective beliefs – since neither progressives nor conservatives are meeting all at once to ratify grand philosophies, it is really the only possible way for them to develop: piece by piece, bit by bit.

While memes are commonly used as a framework in technology and social media, they don’t seem to have found much of a home in theories of political thought. There are very few citations found when you do a google search. Those that are seem very narrowly focused at the level of specific rumors or facts. Everyone instead seems to be looking for the big, unifying idea when maybe things are not that coherent.

Anyway while doing a bit of googling on this topic, I came across a recent article titled “The liberal meme that regulations don’t cost jobs“. This echoes a comment posted on my blog the other day that left me baffled. I’ll leave the article to speak for itself, but it illustrates the dynamic perfectly.

I especially like his reference to the article in the Wall Street Journal about Italy. I read that same article and had the exact same thought: an obvious example illustrating why and how regulations constrain growth.

A commenter on this blog (Dan) has repeatedly suggested I read Moral Politics by George Lakoff. He’s suggested it will explain all when it comes to why conservatives are the way they are and vice versa for liberals. Naturally, I never did it, but I’ve been more and more wondering about this question and seeking some insight.

Today there was a piece in the New York Times called The Gulf of Morality that tries to get at how and why the two sides think as they do. And who should be the first person they quote, but Professor Lakoff who makes this ridiculous comment:

conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don’t think government should help its citizens. That is, they don’t think citizens should help each other.

This is absurd on its face – especially given my post earlier today about conservatives giving a lot more of their income to charity, being more likely to devote their own time to charitable causes (volunteerism), and when they do volunteer, to spend almost double the amount of time doing it.

So if this is what this guy thinks about conservatives, how can Dan be recommending him as the font of wisdom? I wanted to know more. Since I’m too lazy to read an entire book, I took a shortcut and listened to a lecture he gave at UC San Diego in 2005 about the topic of his book ‘Moral Politics’. It’s an hour long and I’ve listened carefully to it twice.

Here are some thoughts:

- He is a very erudite fellow who speaks well and clearly and has a wide ranging scope of knowledge. He spoke for an entire hour without pause, except for one sip of water, and without a note or a slide to guide him. Most impressive.

- The ‘family model’ approach that he uses as a foundation seems somewhat randomly chosen – perhaps it seemed like a promising way to get the outcome he had in mind. Especially after hearing the descriptions thereof, I have a hard time believing that the family model is either determinative or complete as an explanation for how either side thinks in totality. I know for my own family, it obeyed none of the qualities he attributes to people who become conservatives. None of my conservatives friends (save one) seem to fit either. At best, his models are loosely instructive – or maybe all of us are in the ‘other’ bucket where we have elements of both models. I suspect a very, very large number of people are in this middle ground.

- His profiles of conservatives (‘strict father model’) and liberals (‘nuturing parent model’) are highly selective and preferential (he’s a liberal). In particular, he attributes three qualities to ‘progressives’ that seem to me to apply to conservatives quite well or even better. Building off his ‘family’ model where family behavior determines political thought, the three qualities that make for a progressive are:

1. Progressive parents want to protect their kids. That’s why liberals advocate for environmental safety, consumer safety, worker safety, etc. Surely conservatives want their kids to be safe too? Perhaps not in the same way or to the identical degree, but surely not zero.

2. Progressive parents want their kids to be ‘happy and fulfilled’ so they can pursue their dreams. He says liberals want people to be ‘free’ and to have ‘opportunities’ by living in a ‘prosperous’ society. This is motherhood and apple pie. Surely conservatives want happy kids and prosperity, too? I would be shocked if you heard words like ‘freedom’ ‘opportunity’ and ‘prosperity’ spoken more on a channel like MSNBC than on Fox News.

3. Progressive parents want their kids raised in a supportive ‘community’. Who doesn’t? He says that to have a good community you need:

leaders who care about the people in the community and are responsible. And you want community members who care about each other and are responsible to other members of the community and to the community itself. People who do community service.

What kind of community is that? One where there is cooperation. For cooperation you need trust – and for trust, you need honesty and openness.

So this explains why liberals volunteer so much more than conservatives in their local communities. Er, oh, no, actually they don’t do that. So we are to believe that conservatives care nothing at all for community and yet volunteer more of their time in community organizations?

But seriously, do liberals actually believe that conservatives don’t want a supportive community? That they don’t prefer cooperation? That they prefer lying over the truth? That they don’t want prosperity? That they don’t want their kids to be safe? Please. It is ridiculous. Except maybe in the most general of way, these sorts of simplistic academic ideas are not where the communication breakdown between the parties is occurring.

- My takeaway about part one of the talk is that he’s constructed two models that nicely fit into his own preconceptions of what the two sides stand for. He’s offered up some nice bits for his favored progressives – qualities to his liking that he’s apparently plucked out of thin air. Rather than follow the same ‘plucking’ procedure for conservatives, he’s found an objective-sounding basis (Dobson) to build a not entirely flattering portrait of conservatives. He does grant that conservatives are ‘moral’, but he’s framed that morality as self-serving and essentially corrupt at it’s core. It’s not an especially promising foundation for the rest of his lecture, but it does seem to be making his (mostly progressive) audience laugh – and that’s important.

- He observes that Rationalism has had a profound effect on the Democratic party and says that a foundational part of progressive thinking is that

government should be in favor of the material interests of all the people

This is nice to know, but by implication he is suggesting that conservatives are not in favor of the material interests of the people? I guess the unstated point he’s making is that conservative government is for some certain favored parts thereof (the rich, presumably), rather than ‘all’. I expect a lot of conservatives would disagree with this vehemently.

- He asserts that by the Rational model, people should be voting ‘in favor of their self-interest’, but that they often do not and this disappoints him. He laments that progressives put together these long lists of beautifully designed programs that address the voters self-interest, but voters often don’t vote for these programs. Why? Because conservatives are appealing to them on a whole other level to do with frames and metaphors.

This is probably quite so, but could it also be that the programs that progressives think are in the self-interest of people are not actually the programs that the people think are in their self-interest? In my opinion, liberals often think they know what is best for other people, when they don’t have much of a clue. In other words, it might not just be that conservatives sell their programs better, but that they actually craft better programs? The thought doesn’t appear to have crossed his mind.

- He goes on to talk about Reagan, Goldwater, and various historical events in the conservative movement and concludes that conservatives:

have a deeper understanding of how the mind actually works [than progressives do]

Finally, something I actually agree with – full stop. And I’d go further and say that not only do they better understand how the mind works, they better understand how the physical world (i.e., reality) works than do progressives – this is a contributing factor to why people vote for their programs. But that’s for another episode.

- This leads him to a lengthy bit about conservatives banding together and getting extremely organized: endowing centers in universities, creating think tanks, magazines, and book publishers, and buying up media properties. He speaks of this partly in a tone of respect that they were so clever and disciplined, but also somewhat derisively since clearly these ideas are wrong-headed and destructive. He observes that what you have is a ‘right wing idea factory and messaging machine’ that is pushing ideas into the public sphere. Part of this is very reasonable, he opines, but part of it is ‘lies’. Lies being where these idea factory folks are using language to overcome weaknesses in or absences of fact.

Throughout this bit, he repeatedly asserts or implies that progressives are driven by rational thought and facts. That in the fight for hearts and minds, they are hampered by their determination and in-borne nature to be pure truth tellers. This part doesn’t really work for me because a) since when did we start giving demerits to people or groups for being too organized and disciplined? and b) it is nonsense to believe that liberals are data-driven truth tellers.

On this second point, I continually notice that liberal opinion pieces cite data much less frequently than do conservative pieces. A few years back when I was reading both the WSJ and the NYT daily, I did an informal tally each day for a month or so of the number of citations of numbers (excluding dates and the like) in the opinion pieces. Conservative columns, including conservative columns in NYT, were much more likely to use data than liberal columns (all these think tanks are busy generating data, so why not use it?). I would also add that when I do posts for this blog, I am often looking for data (especially nice charts) to understand issues and illustrate points. It is not very often that I find data coming from liberal sources. It isn’t just that I don’t pick the liberal version of the data – it simply doesn’t exist. So, in my view and contrary to Lakoff’s point, progressives are not driven by ‘facts’ and certainly are not driven by facts to a higher degree than are conservatives.

- The lecture sort of peters out in terms of valuable commentary until the end when he offers up a gem of a closing point using Hurricane Katrina. Here he articulates that Katrina was not so much caused by nature, but by man. Why? Because research into global warming proved that category 5 hurricanes were an inevitable result of global warming and that the particular disaster in New Orleans was caused by Republican budget cuts of FEMA and of the funds to build the levies as well as poor policy choices on how to run FEMA (i.e., it should not be first responder).

Parts of this are probably true, but the main premise is absurd. We ‘knew in advance’ that Katrina would hit and destroy the levies, etc.? That category 5 storms were an inevitable human-caused menance? I don’t think even hours before it hit did anyone know what was going to happen. I also checked the records of Category 5 storms throughout history. 2005 was the worst year in history with 4 storms, so that’s something, but there have been only 2 since then and there were only 2 in the 1990′s. Perhaps there is a trend in there, but it is far from ‘known’ in the general case, let alone that a storm would hit New Orleans specifically where it would cause this type of damage.

If remote possibilities like this are ‘known’ and must be protected against, we are looking at trillions of dollars in investments to shore up all sorts of things against all sorts of remote risks. Clearly, liberals want to do this, but it is not affordable even under the most generous of budget regimes. So a lot of this is messaging and positioning on his part to make his case for the progressive agenda – which is all well and fine, but it isn’t fact.

I also think that the budget fights over the levy had been going on for decades through any number of presidencies and congresses (and are still going on even after the Dems controlled all branches of government a few years ago). By this logic, if Republicans are solely responsible for the Katrina damage, then Democrats are solely responsible for the mortgage crisis because they were the strongest advocates for loosening mortgage qualifications to increase home ownership in low income areas which was the starting point of the unraveling.

—-

Overall, I don’t think I am feeling a whole lot wiser about the underlying reasons why conservatives and liberals think like they do – especially in the particulars. Well, that’s not quite right: I do understand that a lot of liberals have been influenced by what Lakoff has said and written, however flawed it may be, and as a result, this is what a lot of liberals think that conservatives think. I don’t think it is a terribly accurate portrayal, but it is out there and it is well articulated and it is entertaining to listen to.

But when you get right down to it, do I understand why liberals so strongly oppose domestic energy development any better now than I did when I woke up this morning? No. And I think this is where the problems emerge from his generic models. If I look at the issue of domestic energy and I wanted what Lakoff says progressives want: ‘prosperity’ for my children, not to mention ‘safety’ and to be part of a supportive community, then I would want there to be a lot more domestic energy production. It would keep us out of wars, create huge numbers of jobs here, and generate massive tax revenues for funding all sorts of liberal programs, among other benefits. In the largest sense of community, it could also be viewed as being a good world citizen by increasing supply of a limited resource which drops global prices and enables peoples the world over access to many things they cannot now afford. But no, absolutely, positively not. Not now, not ever. For all his insistence that liberals are, above all else, excessively rationale, this appears to be an irrational position to hold.

My conclusion is that this position on oil, among others, arises from some other dynamic which is not contained in his explanation. In this sense, Lakoff’s ideas are a disappointment.

In Paul Krugman‘s post today, he references a useful database created by the Paris School of Economics called The World Top Income Database.  I’m sure it is full of lots of useful info, but I went for the easy stuff and grabbed the excellent chart below.

Like other similar charts I’ve posted have shown, it shows a sharp change wealth held by the top 1% in the past 25 years or so. I’ve been wondering about the causal mechanics behind this.

What I never realized before is how sharply it changes in a particular year – 1987 – and carries on from there. At that point, the USA started to diverge significantly from other countries.

So the obvious question is: why? What happened in that year? I don’t really know.

Liberals will surely point out that that’s when some Reagan tax cuts went into effect and that top rates have stayed relatively low since then – and maybe they’d be right.

However, I am generally of the opinion that much of the wealth among the top 1% accrues not primarily because of lucrative jobs (i.e., compensation subject to income tax), but because of returns on capital (subject to capital gains tax). I like the capital-driven theory because it would have a multiplicative effect vs. a largely linear one (although one can surely argue that compensation for top performers has exploded in all fields, so it is faster than linear). But the problem there is that the capital gains tax actually went up significantly at that same time income taxes went down (bottom chart) – though they, too, have since come down as well.

Perhaps when you put the various rates together over time and you combine with other policies (like severe restrictions on capital investing by the non-rich), you can get the necessary result. Hard to know, but if it is causal, it argues for maintaining progressive taxation (vs. currently popular flat tax ideas) and probably even to make the top rate higher. Warren Buffet would like that.

The key thing would be to pick a threshold that is actually genuinely ‘rich’ vs. merely affluent, particularly when cost of living variations are taken into account. Something like $1M per year in combined income (compensation + capital gains) seems about right. And it needs to have an effective indexing mechanism so it doesn’t become another Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) in 30 years by slowly growing to encompass an ever larger percentage of taxpayers.

An alternative approach is a wealth tax along the lines of what Spain just reintroduced. France has a similar thing. This type of tax is based on total assets held whether they are earning or not earning. I’m not sure if this sort of thing actually yields enough revenue to fix much of anything, but perhaps worth considering.

I make a point to read the New York Times every day, especially the OpEd pieces. I very often disagree with the OpEd pieces, but what are often even more remarkable are the comments. One from a piece today was especially remarkable for its concise and utterly unsupportable point.

The piece is titled The Gulf of Morality and it speaks to an issue that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately which is why/how liberals and conservatives can’t communicate.

I plan to post on the piece itself shortly, but the comment that got me is this from Stephen in New Haven (boldface by me):

Conservatives are a psychological and human anomaly. Although they like to think they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, all they really do is climb over other people on the way up. To put it bluntly: Conservatives are selfish people.

This behavior is completely at odds with human development. Selfishness does not help the group survive. We evolved to live in social groups who look after one another.

Over the many years I lived in Massachusetts, I often heard statements like this and they seemed at odds with reality as I knew it. In other words, if I looked at actual Republicans I knew were they more selfish than the Democrats I knew? No, generally not. Plenty of Democrats are selfish – possibly even more so.

Nevertheless, Democrats rarely pass up an opportunity to profess undying concern for others, but do they do more than Republicans to actually improve the lives of those people? In particular, do they personally do things? Answer: no. I could share specific anecdotes, but won’t.

You can see this in study after study of charitable giving and time spent volunteering for charities or good works. The Blue States (Democrats) systematically give less to charity – and have for years and years since I first became aware of this type of data. The Blue states consistently show up at the bottom of the charitable giving rankings. The Red States are generally towards the top. Of course, the correlation isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty darn strong.

This phenomenon is well documented by multiple studies by multiple entities. Here is 2008 piece by Nicholas Kristol, who’s about as liberal as they come, sharing the bad news. He cites studies by Arthur Brooks and Google that showed a “30%” and “nearly double” edge to Republican households over Democrat households in charitable giving.

A quick google search also yielded this excellent analysis of some of the data Kristol used to draw his conclusions done by a company called GeoIQ (they found a way to use the geo skills to enhance the data with some great charts).

Some newer data can be found here: Frasier Institute. See table below for actual data from this report. As I’ve seen before, this data shows that my beloved home state of MA which is stuffed to the gills with liberals finishes 40th (out of 50) in percentage of income given to charity. In past years, it was even worse. I think it used to be 46th or something. California is 30th out of 50.

Here’s a chart from the GeoIQ post (big version) that captures this visually. The orange states voted Republican in 2008 (aka the Red States). Blue voted Democrat (aka the Blue States). The larger the dot, the higher the charitable giving for that state as measured by the ‘Generosity Index Ranking’ – a metric compiled by the Catalogue for Philanthropy (or maybe now the Frasier Institute?).

Tables below from Generosity in Canada and the United States: The 2010 Generosity Index. They are hard to read here, so please click images to see them in a larger size.

High levels of sovereign debt are causing enormous problems in Europe and elsewhere around the world right now. A few charts.

US debt: US debt levels have jumped sharply in recent years and are rapidly approaching 100%.

Worldwide debt levels as a percent of GDP: Debt levels have skyrocketed worldwide since the recession began. Many developed countries now have debt levels well above 80% of GDP. I’m not sure what the ‘right’ amount of debt is, but it is surely a whole lot less than the current levels.

Source: Chartsbin.com (if you visit their site, you will find an interactive version of this chart which is very cool)

Worldwide debt levels per capita: Debt levels per capita are growing very quickly. US per capita debt has grown by about 50% since 2007 and is projected to grow by another 50% by 2015 to give us the 2nd highest in the world.

Brookings credits IMF Fiscal Monitor, May 2010; IMF WEO, April 2010 as the sources of their data.

Brookings also has some related charts that show per capita debt per working age person in 2007, 2010, and 2015. They project about $80,000 per person in 2015. That’s a pile to have on each person’s shoulders – and this is not even actual workers, but simply people of that age range.

Good writeup today in the Wall Street Journal about income equality and mobility. Very detailed data from a 2005 Bush Treasury Department analysis.

The chart tracks households across two year – 1996 and 2005 – to see how much people moved from one quintile to another. It isn’t too surprising to see that there is a lot of stickyness at the top and bottom.

• At the top end, 61% of workers that were in the top quintile in 1996 were still there in 2005
• At the low end, 55% of workers that were in the bottom quintile in ’96 were still there in ’05

Apparently the analysis shows that income mobility has declined in recent years. I guess that is bad.

In a related thought, I’d like to see an analysis of the composition of the top 1% – e.g., a tally by profession. Based on how the Occupy and other folks talk, everyone seems to assume that the list would be 99.9% would be a greedy corporate baron. But won’t the list also have piles of actors, media personalities, and athletes? How about doctors and lawyers? Are these folks bad, too? Perhaps I’ll dig into this and see if there’s any data around.

Read this this morning in the Wall Street Journal:

Credit Suisse analyst Ed Westlake puts it this way: “From a transportation perspective, which is more environmentally risky: Shipping crude across the Rocky Mountains to the British Colombia coast, loading the crude onto tankers which sail down the California coast, through the Panama Canal and into the Gulf of Mexico or building a [southern] pipeline to the latest safety specifications?”

Quite so.

In a related column on the First Enercast Financial website that uses the same quote, there is a bit more discussion of the reasoning of opponents of the pipeline and a good analogy is offered. The underlying issue is simply opposition to use of oil – especially ‘dirty oil’ as an energy source and this is an attempt to restrict access in the hopes of reducing usage. Quite likely these folks would like to kill it at it’s source – the tar sands fields. But killing either the pipeline or tar sands generally is misguided for many reasons, imo.

This deep felt opposition to fossil fuels development is one of the most fundamental economic problems with the liberal / environmental agenda. If anything, we should be figuring out to how to develop and use a lot more North American oil, coal, and gas.

A column in Politico also characterizes Obama’s decision as a “punt” and goes on to quote a labor union president as follows:

“Environmentalists formed a circle around the White House and within days the Obama administration chose to inflict a potentially fatal delay to a project that is not just a pipeline, but is a lifeline for thousands of desperate working men and women,” Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’s International Union of North America, said in a statement. “The administration chose to support environmentalists over jobs — job-killers win, American workers lose.”

Per my post yesterday, it is awesome to see a union president also using the term ‘job killer’. How great is that?

It is also interesting to see how environmentalists beat out even unions in this case. Democrat against Democrat. Must have been a tough call Obama. No doubt he will throw the next one over to the unions – got to keep everyone happy.

And it reminds me of a related type of schism in the Democratic party over Cape Wind. In that case, it is environmentalists vs. environmentalists. The green energy part of the movement wants the thing. Other parts don’t and they are fighting to the death. I’m amazed the project continues at all given how long it has taken and how expensive it must be to keep going. I imagine there are large government incentives and subsidies at the end of the line that help grease the skids.

I came across this blog today by Scott Grannis, a supply side economist who worked in institutional money management and is now apparently retired. It has some great info. Lots of charts – I like charts.

This one about private sector vs. public sector jobs over the past decade or so is especially helpful.