Well just when I said that Facebook is useless, and it doesn't work for me, they go and release a development platform!

My first impression of it is quite positive. There are tons of ready made applications you can add to customize your facebook account, from music, to politics and everything in between. It also comes with an API for developers to develop new applications. This is quite exciting! I may even try to develop something.

Will it change my opinion about the whole social networking thing? I don't know yet but this is a step in a good direction!

I wanted to conduct a little experiment. I went on google and typed "how to make money using blogs". Number of results returned 226,000,000!

That is one big number. It would appear that blogging is a sure way to make money! Of course that is not the case since I would say 99.8% of all blogs are useless (like this one for example). By useless I mean "not capable of making money from". I'm sure they are useful as an exercise in creative expression, and it is 2007, everyone needs a blog.

The few blogs that do make money (far less than 226,000,000!) are usually run by people who are well known in their respective circles. They are often full time blogs. People read them not necessarily because of the content. They are celebrities among the blog world, and we live in a celebrity, hype driven society!

So here is my list of things to do to make your blog profitable

1. Become an expert in your field with celebrity status!
2. Start a blog

I have never understood why people are so obsessed with social networking websites.  To me they have very limited usage.

Take facebook for example. I do have an account, my wife volunteered to create one for me without my approval. I have a few pictures of me there, few links to my websites, I even imported my RSS feed from my religious blog. Now what? Yes, I click on other people's profiles, I even found a few old friends.  However, that is it.

I log in into my account once in a while. Why do I do that?  I don't know. I get poked a lot, and again, I don't quite know why. I wish I could see what the deal is.

I remember in the old days I talked in chat rooms and I found that this form of social networking is a lot more real (and in real time). The interaction is not just by poking but by actually talking with other people. Some social networking do have chat built in but it is not the main focus of the sites. It seems that the new way to socialize over the net is getting further and further away from actual human contact. Something tells me that this is not so good.

I could, of course, be very wrong and some of you may find facebook and the like to be quite wonderful places where you can keep in touch with all your friends. To me it just doesn't work.

Datura Garden is back and alive again. It took me over a year to regain interest in doing something with this domain. I am now re-incarnating it as a blog about the web.

Learning about the web is one of my big passions, I hope that in this blog I will be able to share some of the things I know.

Blog Platform

I've decided to use the blog engine as a platform for this website. It is super simple to use, it comes with source code, so if I need to grow this site I can easily add or change things around (something that is very important to me).

A great thing about using already done platform and not starting one from scratch, as I always tend to do, is that I can focus more of my time on actually posting useful content.