Steven Cox - Founder of TakeLessons. Build Something You're Proud Of

Need help with your writing? 50 sites to give you the edge.

I'm always looking to improve my writing skills. Here's a list of 50 free writing resources to help you bring out your inner journal god (or goddess):

San Diego Tech Company MojoPages on $5mm raise

Congrats to our friends over at Mojo Pages on a new $5mm raise. I believe their enhanced model of providing a white-label solution to news sites is timely and needed. Jon Carder and the team have been working hard on the site for a few years and this vote of confidence is a good sign for the company and the San Diego tech scene.

MojoPages Raises $5 Million For White Label Local Business Search Engine

Cool photo tool

Want to spice up your photo set? Check out this cool new tool by Animoto. This took me about 2 minutes to do. Just import your photos from Flickr, wait for it to be rendered, and auto-post to your blog.

Craigslist Simple Business Model

In a world of constant pressure to maximize the bottom dollar, it's nice to see Jim and Craig's wild success with a very simple formula:

Focus on the customer - keep the site clean - keep troublemakers out.

I love that model...

Link: Craigslist Chief Having Too Much Fun to Exit - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times.

Ning has came a long way

Ning is a site that allows anyone to set up and administer their own social network. It's came a long way over the past couple years. In the past, it was more like setting up your own classifieds section. Not very useful.

With the new roll out, it looks like the team has hit a home run (or at least extra bases). I wanted to try it out, so I set up the Dayton OH Stebbins High School reunion site in about 45 minutes. It was drop-dead simple. Anyone can do it. 

I believe that valuable online social networks will mimic real-world networks. It's simply impossible to have 30,000 friends (myspace). Most sociologists agree that somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-150 is the right amount. However, with better tools, this number might increase 25% or more (in my opinion).

This means that most people will belong to multiple online networks (segregated by location, interest, profession, etc.) and these will be smaller networks of 150-250 people. David Silver agrees in his rockin' book, Smart Start Ups.

Congrats to the guys at Ning. I think they've done well with this release.