Why Social Investing May Not Be Such A Good Idea

It’s once again a great pleasure to offer a guest post from our good friend Marriott, who works in the financial industry in Washington, D.C.  Marriott last wrote about climate-ready crops in May.

In December 2008, kaChing received the blessing of the SEC to become a Registered Investment Advisor.  kaChing is a social networking and investing website that allows individuals to create sample and fictitious portfolios. They can then share these portfolios with other individuals on the network and compare their successes and failures.

Now, in principal, this is a great feature of education that is much needed for the modern investor. Individuals can learn as they invest the money they wish they had, or they can follow other individual’s portfolios to see how they succeeded and failed. The idea of using play money to learn about investments is not original to kaChing. Over the years there have been several ways for individuals to test their investment ideas, methods and strategies before putting their life savings into play. That’s a great system.

kaChing’s recent move ruined what they had, in my humble opinion. By becoming a Registered Investment Advisor with the SEC, they have gone into the business of selling advice on investments. It works basically like this (my own spin is applied): if you are an 18 year old hotshot with some investment ideas and your allowance doesn’t provide you with the capital to make investments with real money, you can open a trading account through kaChing. If your ideas, no matter how crazy, actually start to do well and other social investors take notice, then you can charge a fee for the ability to track your portfolio. Of course, kaChing will take a small part of this fee for providing the connection services. Once people pay the fee to track your portfolio they can link their own grown up money accounts to your fictitious one and try to replicate your stellar returns.

Despite my beliefs in the free market, the survival of the fittest, and stupid is as stupid does, I have a few major problems with kaChing’s new business model.

Continue reading ‘Why Social Investing May Not Be Such A Good Idea’

Tropophilia Featured On Alltop!

As of this morning, Tropophilia has officially been added to the “Twenty Something” section of Alltop!  This is big.  Alltop aggregates feeds around a diverse array of topics, and it’s often the starting point for lots of people when they head out onto the internet to research or pleasure read.  An honor, to be sure!

We’re at the bottom of the page now, but expect to see us slowly rising to the top over the course of 2009!

Special Birthday Edition of Monday Links: January 5th, 2009

Though our first posts were published in December 2007, Tropophilia was officially launched one year ago on January 5th, 2008.  In that introductory post, we announced our mission:

While we hope that you come to understand some of the changes that are happening around our world, we also hope that we cause some small amount of change in YOU. Whether we expose you to a new idea, or change your mind about an old one, we hope your perspective on life is changed - however so minutely - after having visited Tropophilia. If you’re not a tropophiliac before you arrive, we hope you’ll be one when you leave.

This blog has certainly changed us for the better, and we hope in some small way it’s done the same for you.  Tropophilia has inspired us to read, write, think, re-think, debate, learn, and grow.  We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far as much as we have.

We thought that we’d take advantage of this special edition of Monday Links for a little introspection and retrospection, as we reflect on some of the happenings on Tropophilia over the past year.

Content

According to the Internet Archive, we had published 32 posts to eleven different categories by January 19, 2008.  Today, we have just under 300 posts published in 59 categories (check out our new full-page archive to explore all our posts by date and category).  In addition to Taylor and Jarred’s content, we’ve had 17 guest posts from friends such as Dan, Joel, Eric, Bruce, Marriott, Jarry, and James.  We also have over 850 comments on our posts, signifying the robust conversations that have emerged among our growing community of readers.

Here are some of our favorite entries from this year:

Statistics (as of 12/30/08)

  • Google Analytics also tells us:
    • 28.67% of our traffic is direct (i.e. people coming to Tropophilia on their own, without clicking from another site), while 27.59% of our traffic is referred by another link on the web
    • 43.75% of our traffic comes from search engine results (over 90% of those from Google), with our top five keywords being:
      1. tropophilia (423 visits)
      2. bomomo (116)
      3. cons of social networking (111)
      4. 6 word essay (96)
      5. facebook political views (60)
    • 45.2% of our visitors use Firefox, followed closely by Internet Explorer (43.88%), and then Safari (8.61%), Chrome (1.11%), and Opera (0.68%)
    • 68.03% of our visitors are — as far as can be tracked — new visitors to the blog
    • Most of our visitors are from the United States (73.72%), with the top states being North Carolina (12.41%), California (10.94%), Florida (8.34%), New York (7.06%), and Washington, D.C (6.73%).  Internationally, we get most of our visits from the UK (5.44%), Canada (3.55%), and India (1.86%).

Design

In a way, Tropophilia has almost come full circle in terms of visual design.  Check out how we appear in the Internet Archive’s index from January 19, 2008.   We launched with a double-column variant of the excellent K2 theme — much as we have right now, though the width was narrower.  Not long into the life of the blog, we added a second sidebar to the left side of the main content.  We kept this format for most of the year.  After an ill-fated tinkering with a completely new theme in early December, we’ve come back to our roots with the dual-column look.  We love it for its simplicity and the priority it gives to the main content.  We’ve also introduced a new logo up top, which we also hope you like as much as we do.

At launch, we had a “What We’re Reading” widget in place that tracked our online bookmarks of cool articles.  This eventually was replaced with our “By The Way” section, where we would post small updates and links.  Several months ago, we removed “By The Way” and replaced it with feeds from our Twitter accounts.  Finally, in the past few weeks, we have reintroduced the “What We’re Reading” widget with a fresh commitment to keeping it populated with interesting links and notes.

We continue to tweak things here and there to see if they stick.  As always, we welcome your feedback on any design changes and suggestions.

Other Awesomeness

This has been an exciting year for Tropophilia: not only for the interesting conversations that have come out of our posts, but also for some special opportunities it has given us.

In June, we were invited by Brazen Careerist to join their new start-up community of blogging 20-somethings.  Since then, Taylor and Jarred have been featured a number of times on their front page and it’s been a major source of traffic.  Just a few weeks ago, one of Brazen Careerist’s founders (and noted columnist and career coach) Penelope Trunk cited posts by each of us as reasons she’s inspired to keep pursuing her startup business.

Taylor and Jarred have also been doing a little guest blogging.  In May, Taylor attended the Council on Foundations conference in Washington, D.C. and was invited by Sean Stannard-Stockton (who runs the Tactical Philanthropy blog) to write up some of his thoughts from the panels he attended.  Later that month, Jarred wrote a post for Sarah Perez’s blog speculating about how the battle over the social web would be fought, and who would probably win (hint: Google).

Speaking of which, as we’ve noted in several places, this blog played a big part in making Jarred feel confident enough to pursue and eventually get a job offer from Google.  So even though he knows you often found the posts boring or too detailed, he wants to thank you for humoring him as he cultivated and explored his (super geeky) passions and turned them into a dream job.  Here’s hoping that 2009 will help Taylor to do the same.

New Year Resolutions

While 2008 was a great start for the blog, we want to make a conscious and concerted effort to ensure that 2009 is even better.  So, here are our resolutions for Tropophilia in the new year.

  • Keep a steady pace of posting, at least twice per week but aiming for more.  Utilize the post scheduling tool more effectively to spread posts out, and communicate better with each other about up and down times for writing.
  • Continue to evangelize Tropophilia through guest posts and comments on other blogs, Twitter, etc. so that we reach and exceed 100 subscribers (right now we’re hovering around 75).
  • From Taylor: produce more original content, fewer link posts, and longer features every once and a while.  Follow up on guest-posting commitments and respond to comments (sorry for the slack, folks!).
  • Introduce one or two additional regular, sustainable weekly features beyond Monday Links, and commit to keeping them up.  If you have suggestions for what you’d like to see (return of the Tropophy [Taylor's note: please God no] or Satellite Challenge, perhaps, or something completely new), let us know.
  • Publish at least five guest posts, and potentially add a third full-time blogger (we want Eric *clap* *clap* *clapclapclap*)

Thank You!

Thanks for reading Tropophilia.  We’ve enjoyed writing for and sharing with you over the past year, and look forward to 2009 being even better.

We’d love to hear what your favorite posts and conversations from 2008 were, what you’d like to see from us in the new year, and any other comments or questions!  And remember, if you ever want to write a guest post, we’d be thrilled!

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user The Facey Family.

Breaking The News

I told myself that, this time, I really wasn’t going to blog about it.  As with my recent post on the future of writing, I felt that there is sometimes too much hyperbole about the Web tolling the bell for familiar habits and industries… and that I had done my fair share of furthering the exaggerated panic.  This time, though, is a little different.

Newspapers are dying.

This isn’t particularly breaking news: I remember discussing the topic in 2005 during a French class in Paris.  The competition for French newspapers like Le Monde at that time was coming mostly from the free alternatives that were available on the street and in the Metro.  Several American papers were quick to see this trend, and began to offer a free mini version of their full paper; the Washington Post Express, for example, is popular with commuters in D.C.  Today, however, the newspaper industry’s number one enemy is — surprise surprise — the Internet.  The speed with which readers are moving from getting their news in print to finding it online is bringing the industry’s predicament to a nasty head.

Continue reading ‘Breaking The News’

New to Me in ‘08: Web Services and Software

This is a continuation of year-end posts.  As a I said in my music post, I wanted to reflect on (in this case) programs and services that I couldn’t live without in 2008.  Some of these debuted in ‘08, while others are simply new to me.

Web Services and Software

lala–JRod and I haven’t been bashful in our adoration of this site.  There’s a reason: this is an amazing service for music lovers.  DRM-free MP3 downloads (note to non-techies: that means you can burn, share, trade, etc at will) for $.89 (paging $.99 iTunes Music Store…), or unlimited streams for $.10 a song.  It communicates flawlessly with iTunes, automatically loading newly-downloaded tunes into your library.  It also uses Music Mover (a free-standing program) to find the music you already own and make it available anywhere there’s a web connection.  My workday is now filled with the joyous sounds of Fleet Foxes and Sigur Ros, and I’m more productive because of it.  Amen.  (PS–as evidenced in my music post, lala also boasts a simple and great embed tool)

Mint–A great one stop shop for tracking multiple bank accounts, credit cards, and investments.  I tried a similar site (Wesabe) for a while, and ultimately brought my personal finances home to roost at Mint.  This site has improved remarkably throughout the year, adding much-needed features like the ability to customize categories of purchases, the inclusion of stocks, and student loan tracking.  I don’t know that I could live without Mint at this point.

TripIt–Another indispensable addition to my life in 2008.  Being in a long-distance relationship necessarily means lots of travel plans.  On top of that, my work requires fairly regular time on the road.  With TripIt, I simply forward every e-ticket, hotel reservation, and rental car arrangement from my email account to TripIt, and it’s automatically imported into a comprehensive itinerary that I can pull up quickly or print out for reference.  I love this site.

GoodReads–Were niche social networks a trend of 2008 or was that “like soooo 2007″ already?  In any case, I started using GoodReads in earnest in 2008 and it’s one of the few non-Facebook social networks [did anybody try that Doostang thing?] that holds my attention.  GoodReads does one thing (tracks the books you and your friends have read/are reading/want to read) and does it well with a simple interface.

Continue reading ‘New to Me in ‘08: Web Services and Software’