MAKE is a company that attempts to bring together the growing community of DIY’ers (do-it-yourself). They host several different services, including a physical mailing magazine, a DIY tech show called the Maker Faire, an online blog themed after the magazine called Makezine (http://makezine.com/), and the Maker Shed. The Maker Shed is where the company brings in most of its profit outside of the magazine subscriptions, though it does do some on-site advertising. The Maker Shed supplies DIY’ers with ‘projects in a box’, otherwise known as kits. These kits include the books and how-to’s as well as physical components necessary to do some of their projects. The blog, although somewhat similar to Tinkernet, which I discussed in a previous post, has less of a software focus to it. Just an all-around really neat website to read, so I’d definitely recommend you check it out.

If  you like to experiment with new projects once in a while, look no further than Tinkernut. The website attempts to remind people that the term “hacking” is not just for villainous cyber criminals, but also for anyone with a curiosity for how things work and how technology can improve lives. Tinkernut is a blog filled with do-it-yourself (DIY) projects that can your life easier or just something fun that will spark your interest. So if you’re looking to pick up a new techy skill or just want to figure out how you can revive your computer’s dead hard drive, pay them a visit at http://www.tinkernut.com/.

Just as a bit of fair warning, don’t check this website out if you’re already hungry and don’t have access to food. Chow  is a blog which is updated daily with new recipes and cooking techniques, allowing their viewers to look around if they’re interested in spicing things up a little bit with some new cuisine. Also, if any of you are like me and make every decision at a restaurant based off of the pictures in the menu, Chow has excellent pictures of every one of their recipes so you can see what you’re considering before you commit to the recipe. Check em out at (http://www.chow.com/).

Over their high school spring break of 2005, the siblings Dave, Catherine, and Geoff Cook initially created http://www.myyearbook.com/. It serves as a social discovery platform, a tool for consumers to search other users using a variety of criteria, such as physical location, age, name, interests, gender, etc. Social discovery is different form social network in the way that Facebook is different from the “find friends” feature within Facebook. Social discovery is the process by which users find and connect to each other while a social network is the result of the social discovery.

Since its launch, myYearbook has continued to add features such as flash games, instant messaging, and something particularly unique: “chatter”. Chatter is a real-time stream that incorporates media sharing and gaming to bring members together. Chatter was integrated into the website 2009 and by 2010, the website reported that the Chatter feature surpassed 1 million posts a day.

myYearbook now maintains a reported yearly revenue of $20 million and has over 32.7 million users. They are in the internet’s top websites for teens and have begun working their way into the tablet market. The website is still run by the siblings today.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website that was started by David Karp in 2006. For those who don’t recognize the term, microblogs allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, images, or links. Twitter is another popular microblog, though Facebook and other social media websites have implemented their own form of microblogging in the form of status updates. Anyway, David launched Tumblr in 2007 and it quickly became popular among the teen and college-aged user segments.

As of February this year, Tumblr had over 46.2 million blogs and over 13.4 million unique visitors in last year. The website has an 85% retention rate, compared to the 40% retention rate held by Twitter, and is reported to receive 25,000 new users each day and host 40 million new blog posts each day.  David Karp was named one of the top 35 innovators in the world in 2010 has an estimated 40 million dollar net worth.