TechnoBuck.com

I checked Google Trends (trends.Google.com) to see which of the main Content Management Systems is more popular and I noticed that Joomla is more popular and it keeps growing in terms of preference.

Being a user of both platforms I like both, but we need to keep in mind that they are for completely diffferent things. Joomla is platform more suited to Portal, Community and online store websites. Although you can blog in Joomla as well, I can tell you from my own experience that when you are talking about blogging, nothing beats WordPress.

I started in Joomla and later moved to WordPress just recently, and the learning curve for WordPress is shorter than Joomla but both are really easy to learn. Also both platforms have very active and big developer communities.

This graph does not necessarily show which one is the best, it’s just a popularity test. Also on the graph you can clearly see that Joomla appeared on Google´s radar screen in mid 2005 which is more or less the time that Joomla was born, derived from Mambo. Despite being so new it has grown in popularity at a much higher rate than WordPress.

What I don’t like about Joomla is that recently they announced that they apparently announced their desire to push the external plugin developers to be compliant with the GNU/GPL license. While at first this might sound good because it is free for users, it is not good for developers because it means they would have to give their commercial plugins for free, and it would discourage their support to the platform. Sometimes, external developers make a platform much more robust, and if there is no benefit to them there is no sense in supporting it. If Joomla keeps pushing for this, then who knows if it continues to be as strong as it is now.

This confusion in legalities is one of the reasons that made me move to WordPress, I don’t want to be in a position of having a website for several to later find that some developers are not supporting it and I have to move it to another platform. I better move now and not later.

Technorati Tags: cms, content management system, drupal, joomla, WordPress

I found a video trough Blip.tv and it has helped me a lot to put my feet on the ground. This is very important now that I’m documenting my path towards financial independence in Internet, but although this dream implies reaching a goal financially speaking, in reality what’s behind it are things that are priceless such as freedom and spending more time with the family.

On such video, we see the Dutch Jil Van Eyle, that according to the interview, he had everything in life, but his destiny changed at some point of his life and he losses his Porshe, his company, his money and his first daughter Monica is born with a decease called Hidrocephalia. All these experiences made him change the way he looked at the world and he now appreciates things that were not so important before. After having all these experiences he creates the concept of “Teaming”.

I believe I have to leverage on Jil’s experience in changing the way we see life and not wait until we suffer a tragedy to realize about what’s really important in life.

I couldn’t find an English version of the video I watched in Spanish, but I did found one in English one that explains a little bit this concept. 

Technorati Tags: help others, Jil Van Eyle, teaming

I found this interesting video posted by Stephanie Booth and I liked it very much because it addresses the challenges and strategies behind multilingual blogging.

I agree with her that there are only strategies to this which are:

1) Two separate blogs: One blog for each language. As she says “it is monolingual blogging” but twice

2) Total translation: Manually translate every post, but as you know it requires a lot of work

3) Machine Translation: A low quality solution as there is machine that can translate as good as a human. Probably the worst option of all.

4) Blog in only one language: If you blog in english, your audience is much more wider but if you blog in your local language you lose the opportunity of going global

I’ve been thinking about all this this for several days, and actually I wrote something about this days ago, but watching CNN in Spanish made me think of the right approach to take. I don’t know if you have ever had a chance to watch CNN in Spanish but if you noticed, this show is not a direct translation of CNN in english.

CNN in Spanish has its own group of Latino news presenters and the content it is suited to like a Hispanic audience. Yes, sometimes, it contains news or conent that are translated from english, but they try to make everything as Hispanic as possible.This made realize the fact that a blog, is not much different than a TV News show. It is more important to be “Multi-Cultural” rather than just “Multi-Lingual”.

You could translate a piece of content in perfect local language, but if the content in question is not suited to attract local audiences then it doesn’t really matter.

So because of this, I’ve chosen to work on two separate blogs, one in english and another in Spanish. Although I will try to translate most of the posts, this would not be possible all the times. I need to make sure that the content I’m presenting for each language is attractive to the audience for each language.

UPDATE: I have completely given up the idea of of blogging in two languages, so I killed my blog in Spanish sometime ago, and I decided to blog only in English, you might wonder why, well the reason is that most of the information I read and listen in podcasts, about Internet Marketing, is already in English, so every time I think about it, I think in English as well. Also most of the audience interested in the subject is used to read it in English, so my advice is, take into account who your main audience is and blog to them in their language. Only try to blog in several languages if your audience asks you to do it and is large enough to justify the effort.

Technorati Tags: bilingual, Blogging, english, multilingual, spanish

Ever since I started this blog I’ve been making myself this question several times. As you know, I’m from Mexico so my first language is Spanish, but I feel I can manage decently well the english language, although I know it is not perfect.

The idea behind having multilingual websites is to try to get traffic (mainly Google) from people whose main language is not english, so in essense I think this is not a bad idea and from my perspective it gives me an advantage that not many english speaking webmasters have.

I already have some experience with multilingual websites, specifically with only one which is called HispMarketing.com which as you might have noticed it has to do with Internet Business and is in English and Spanish, so let me talk to you from this experience.

What were my results with this website?

So far, the results haven’t been what I had expected and here is why:

1) When I tried to join Kontera, they rejected me because my site was not in english. In reality is not that my site is not in english, the problem seems to be that ad networks tend to prefer very focused websites so they can pefectly match with their target audiences. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense, if you have a bilingual website, in reality you are trying to eat two huge different worlds at the same time, and this is not good for ad networks.

2) I noticed I had trouble about getting indexed properly by Google. I think this has to do with the fact that usually Google uses your index page to crawl your website and then Google goes from there to the rest of the pages. When you have a bilingual website, the index page has information in both languages so I guess Google gets confused because it is seeing content in both languages. In my particular case in HispaMarketing.com, I have an index page that has information in both languages so at the end it is not ranking well neither for the spanish or english words.

So, what I’ve learned from this experience is that it is better to stay as focused as possible in one niche in one language. Even if you pick a very narrow niche like “dog training”, it is a very different niche if you go to the same niche in spanish like “entrenamiento para perros”. What I found is that what determines a niche is the characteristics of the audience and not the nature of the product itself. In essence either “dog training” or “entrenamiento para perros” are the same thing but the audiences are very very different.

When do I recommend having multilingual websites?

I would recommend having a multilingual website if it is kind like a corporate website whose only mission is to promote your brand or company to the world, so in this particular case, you don’t care about ranking well for set of keywords in particular, you just care about branding your company for several languages. It comes to my mind a site like HP.com, where they do have their site in different languages but this site is just about the company and not their products.

I hope this makes sense to you and if you have had similar experiences with multilingual websites please let me know.

UPDATE: HispaMarketing.com is now longer live. This was the blog I had before TechnoBuck.com, and it was made with the platform named “Joomla”. In September 2007, I stopped blogging in HispaMarketing.com and moved all the posts I had written there to TechnoBuck.com that is made with the platform “Wordpress”, which is what I recommend if you want to setup a blog.

Technorati Tags: bilingual blog, multilingual blogging

Hi, the last time I wrote was almost 3 weeks ago, just days before the Solectron – Flextronics acquisition was officially completed (October 1st, 2007). At that time I thought I was going to be fired within a matter of days. Well, I’m still working on my day-to-day job but not for a long time, as the new company told me that I would remain with them up to December 2007. At least now I have a little bit more of time to start planning about what to do about my future.

What is the next step?

If you have been following this blog for a couple of days you might have noticed that I’ve been making a lot of changes and tests of posts. My intention is to feel comfortable with the look & feel of this blog as well as having the right plugins. I think it is almost ready and you will start to see me posting more often.

In the next couple of days I will post my strategy for making a couple of bucks on the Internet, so let me work on this offline and then I’ll get back with what I figure out.

Technorati Tags: financial independence, self employed, unemployment