Community Matters

I’ve seen these on Comedy Central a couple of times now. VW ads that I think are supposed to be funny. They aren’t even on VW’s own website, but Karen found them on Adverblog. They are so terrible that they almost upset me. If you want to make fun of Germans (or if you are a German company that wants to advertise in the US by making fun of Germans), please at least try to get someone with a credible German accent. And have a story line that at least remotely pretends to make some sort of sense or be funny.

Maybe I’m just too old.

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One of the cornerstones of the so-called “Web-2.0″ is the social network. People meet online and share things. Photos (flickr), recommendations (LinkedIn), tags (del.icio.us), anything (box.net).

It’s an incredibly powerful concept - but with so many sites and so many communities I am beginning to wonder about the richness of each of these communities. It takes a lot of people, at least some of which share some interests with a user, before such a community will really be useful to such a user. And with so many communities trying to get our interest… I guess there are plenty of people out there on the net (more than a Billion I hear), so I shouldn’t be concerned… but then I’m concerned if I actually manage to benefit from all the communities that I am a member off.

If only I had more time…

… assuming it is running Linux, that is. I have a hand full of Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS routers. All of them flashed with updated firmware - using DD-WRT version 2.3 at this point. What you can do with that is actually quite impressive:

• full WDS support
• full Client Bridge support
• boosted transmit power
• split network (so the 4 port switch and the wireless run different, firewalled subnets)

I use all of the above features (and some more) in my home network and this week finally found the time to get everything working the way I want it - with a truly separate “external” network which has this web server and the systems of the neighbors on it (they surf through our DSL link, connected with a WDS access point that’s sitting in their house and connects to one of my WRTs over here). That subnet is separate from my internal network that has all of our systems (Linux and Mac boxes, plus the Windows machine I have through work - but that I’ll soon replace with another Mac - a MacBook Pro!). A real DMZ that allows controlled access from the internal network to the external server. Etc. And all that built with ultra-cheap mass market access points (around $50 each). Nice…