Last week we finished up the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program and while some people may or may not have reached the 3,000 fan target, the real question is: does the number of fans really matter? Last night I was watching a video of Seth Godin where he says “it’s worthless to have lots and lots of friends on Facebook.” With so many people selling the importance of having fans, followers, and friends though, how could Seth Godin, a thought leader in marketing, make such an assertion?

It’s Relationship Marketing
Seth has a valid point. If you don’t build…

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Last week I wrote that Facebook may be launching an audio product given the addition of audio within the page insights area. I reached out to Facebook for comment and found out that this wasn’t actually a soon to be released product, but instead an audio product that already exists. The “Music Player” application originally launched with pages and lets you upload songs for your fans to listen to.

While I wouldn’t exactly call this a robust application, it provides enough support for you to at least get songs posted on your page. This tool would be most useful for…

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Did you forget your hardware-based password and now you’re locked out? If it’s an IBM ThinkPad you may be in luck but it involves a bit more than just removing the backup battery. SoDoItYourself has an article detailing the retrieval of password data from an EEPROM.
The process is a fun one. Disassemble your laptop. Build a serial interface and solder it to the EEPROM chip where the password is stored. Connect this interface to a second computer and use it to dump the data into a file. Download a special program to decipher the dump file and dig…

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The folks at Openschemes.com have written up an article on how to convert a USB serial port adapter to a low voltage serial interface for interfacing with microcontrollers. Though you can always just buy one, this is a fairly quick and cheap solution, especially if you are in a pinch or don’t have access to a retailer. The specific models you should watch for, are the ones with two chips, a microcontroller and a line translater.They go through the process of finding exactly where to patch in to add an extra interface. It only takes a couple wires and…

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Remember Mauritius from High School geography? We didn’t either, but apparently it’s a small island nation east of the southern tip of Africa. It seems they are trying to develop an industry in eco-friendly data centers. The plan is to use a pipeline to gather cold water from the ocean, run it two miles to the island, and use it as inexpensive cooling. Because rooms packed with servers generate copious amounts of heat it’s easy to see how this can reduce the cost of maintaining a data center.
The thing that struck us here is, how eco-friendly is this?…

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The Wii-Optical-Drive-Emulator (WODE) makes it possible to load Wii and GameCube ISO files from an SD card or USB storage device. This hack uses the ribbon cable for the optical drive to connect to the Wii, requiring no soldering. The WODE is based on an ARM9 processor, runs Linux, and features a backlit LCD screen and 4-way center click joystick. Storage can be hot plugged and then an ISO selected using the stick and LCD display. Selected ISO files appear in the game channel as if an original disc had just been inserted into the drive.
The developers claim…

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This is Day 30 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
There’s an old proverb which says “He who fails to plan, plans to fail” and while there are people that will debate the importance of planning, mapping out a guide for the next month will make things a lot easier. What blog posts will you be writing? What content will be most effective to drive new fans to your Facebook? What steps will you take to promote your Facebook Page? While we’ve listed 29 techniques to boost your fan base,…

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We’d like to spend some time talking about documenting your project and sharing it with the world. For many, the goal is to become an Internet sensation, hopefully for the right reasons. Taking a bit more time to make certain you do a great job of sharing your information will pay off. Here at hackaday.comwe focus on technological wonders but these guidelines should work well at improving the desirability of anything you might want to share on the interweb.

1. Pictures
Yes, you need to have a picture to go with your project. Even if you did something that…

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