Thanks to siliconvalleywatcher.com, I found this great video of current.com about social networking:
"- You can’t escape the Lords of social networking! ...
- Look guys, we have had some fun together… but now I think I have to move on.
- Why?
- I’m sorry, but its time for me to get a REAL life in the REAL World."
At the 17th International World Wide Web Conference – organized by the World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee and held in Beijing April 21-25 this year – Ivan Herman, the Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) gave a presentation about the introduction to the semantic web providing an example.
About the current web
The present web (call it web 1.0 or web 2.0) represents information using natural language (English, Hungarian, …), graphics, multimedia, page layout which we humans can process easily. While using the internet, different tasks require to combine data on the Web (e.g. hotel and travel infos may come from different sites, searches in different digital libraries, …). Humans combine these information easily even if different terminology's are used! But machines are ignorant! Partial information is unusable; it is difficult to make sense from e.g., an image; drawing analogies automatically is difficult; it is also difficult to combine information automatically (is
What is needed to enable semantic web?
(Some) data should be available for machines for further processing. Data should be possibly combined, merged on a Web scale. Sometimes, data may describe other data, but sometimes the data is to be exchanged by itself. Machines may also need to reason about that data.
Ivan Herman gives a simplistic example (data integration) to introduce the main Semantic Web concepts.
- Map the various data onto an abstract data representation: make the data independent of its internal representation.
- Merge the resulting representations.
- Start making queries on the whole! Queries that could not have been done on the individual data sets.
1. Export your data as a set of relations:
Relations form a graph: the nodes refer to the “real” data or contain some literal; how the graph is represented in machine is immaterial for now. Data export does not necessarily mean physical conversion of the data: relations can be generated on-the-fly at query time via SQL “bridges”, scraping HTML pages, extracting data from Excel sheets, etc. One can export only part of the data.
2. Export your second set of data:
3. Start merging your data:
… and merge identical resources:
Now you can start making queries: user of the data of the book “Le Palais des miroirs” (yellow graph) can now ask queries like “donnes-moi le titre de l’original” or “give me the title of the original”. This information is not in the dataset of the book “Le Palais des miroirs” (yellow graph), but can be retrieved by merging with dataset of the book “The Glass Palace” (blue graph).
But even more can be achieved: We “feel” that a:author and f:auteur should be the same, but an automatic merge doest not know that! Let us add some extra information to the merged data: a:author same as f:auteur (both identify a “Person”), a term that a community may have already defined: a “Person” is uniquely identified by his/her name and, say, homepage; it can be used as a “category” for certain type of resources.
Use the extra knowledge…
… and start making even richer queries:
User of dataset “F” can now query: “donnes-moi la page d’accueil de l’auteur de l’original”
(“give me the home page of the original’s author”). The information is not in datasets of the book “Le Palais des miroirs” (yellow graph) or the database of the book “The Glass Palace” (blue graph), but was made available by merging the two datasets, adding three simple extra statements as an extra “glue”.
You can combine these data with other datasets. Using, e.g., the “Person”, the dataset can be combined with other sources: for example, data in Wikipedia can be extracted using dedicated tools (e.g., the “DBpedia” extracts the “infobox” information from Wikipedia)
What happened in the picture above via automatic means is done all the time, every day by the users of the Web! The difference: a bit of extra rigor (e.g., naming the relationships) which is necessary so that machines could do this, too!
What was done?
We combined different datasets that are somewhere on the web, that are of different formats (mysql, excel sheet, XHTML, etc.), and have different names for relations. We could combine the data because some URI-s were identical (the ISBN code of the books in this case). We could add some simple additional information, using common terminologies that a community has produced. As a result, new relations could be found and retrieved. This could become even more powerful if we could add extra knowledge to the merged datasets: e.g., a full classification of various types of library data, geographical information,
etc. This is where ontologies, extra rules, etc, come in (ontologies/rule sets can be relatively simple and small, or huge, or anything in between). Even more powerful queries can be asked as a result!
The Semantic Web provides technologies to make such integration possible! For example: an abstract model for the relational graphs: RDF (with different “serializations” in XML or text); extract RDF information from XML data: GRDDL; a query language adapted for the relational graphs: SPARQL; characterize the relationships, categorize resources: RDFS, OWL, SKOS, Rules (applications may choose among the different technologies); reuse of existing “ontologies” that others have produced (FOAF in our case).
If you are interested in Herman’s other public presentations visit his page!
If you like pictures and you would like to see, share, rate or bookmark them, vi.sualize.us, Pixdaus and FFFOUND! are services to try out!
vi.sualize.us is a social bookmarking website for visual contents – vi.sualize.us allows you to remember your favorite images around the web, and share them with everyone. You can choose not to share your favorite images, or share only with your friends. Within two clicks, you can save the image reference in your account, and easily look at it whenever you want to, just as your new favorite picture deserves. You can tag your pictures to help to organize them. There's no limit to how many tags you can use, and you can easily rename or delete them later. It's a flexible way to organize your information.
vi.sualize.us provides an array of RSS feeds you can subscribe to:
- Recent images - vi.sualize.us/rss
- Popular images - vi.sualize.us/rss/popular
- A popular tag - vi.sualize.us/rss/popular/color
- A user - e.g. vi.sualize.us/rss/masca
- A tag - e.g. vi.sualize.us/rss/tag/erotic
- A tag from one user - e.g. vi.sualize.us/rss/doubleyou_em/surrealism
- A user’s watchlist - e.g. vi.sualize.us/rss/watchlist/zigotica
- Both of these tags from one user - e.g. vi.sualize.us/rss/kr0n/photography,atmosphere
Pixdaus is a place where anyone can post his pictures, photos and others rate it or share it. If it's cool it gets to the main page and more people can enjoy it. If it's not it gets buried but you still can post it to your blog or website using the link codes under each image. Pixdaus if a fully user generated and operated. It is getting more than 120,000 daily hits. It is a non-commercial site. No any ads are being shown to the users. Pixdaus is being sponsored by its users. You can register and start to post, share and rate.
FFFFOUND! is a web service that allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, and to dynamically recommend each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience. The more you reflect your taste, the better recommendations on the New for you! pages. Go to the top page to find your favorite images. Let the server learn either by clicking on the "I ♥ THIS" button or by posting new images that suit your interest. You can adjust your screen by choosing a tile or a listed screen setup.You can use a bookmarklet which allows an easier bookmarking process. Bookmarked images can be viewed by other users. In order to use FFFFOUND!, you need to install either the bookmarklet or an Internet Explorer extension. If you are an IE user on a Windows XP machine, IE extension is recommended; for all others, please download the bookmarklet. Unfortunately it is an invitation based service, so you cannot just register.
On the 13th of March 2008, Cuban president Raul Castro lifted the ban on the sale of computers, DVDs, and video players, and on the 24th of March 2008 Cubans were authorized to officially get mobile phones, until then mainly reserved for foreigners and government staff.
But the government still keeps a grip on Internet access. According to an article of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, Cuba`s communications minister, Ramiro Valdes, a veteran comandante of the revolution, recently told an international conference that the Internet was "the wild colt of new technologies," adding that it "can and must be controlled." Only trusted government employees, academics and researchers may have personal Internet accounts, which are provided by government servers. Ordinary Cubans are allowed access to e-mail at local post offices. They can view government approved Web sites through an official Cuban "Intranet" that blocks pornography and anti-Castro Web sites. Sanchez sticks to the rules. She never uses the free Internet access offered at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana. Nor does she use improvised Internet setups that some Cubans have installed illegally at home.
One blog – written by Yoani Sánchez (born in 1975) – “Generation Y” represent an honest voice from a woman who lives in Cuba, still a country where freedom of speech is not a natural element of everyday life. Blogging provides her a tool to express herself without boundaries and hopefully the regime of Cuba will not plug up her blog, her free self expression tube.
Yoani Sanchez gets more than a million hits a month (according to Wired.com), mostly from abroad - though she has begun to strike a chord in Cuba. On her site and others, anonymous Cubans offer stinging criticisms of their government.
The causes that pushed her to start blogging in her own words:
“What pushed me to this adventure of witting a Blog was the disappointment left by the end of the controversy of the intellectuals in January 2007. An afternoon, like today, January 30th, we waited -a group of young people- to be able to enter the conference “The gray five years, reviewing the term”. The meeting in the House of the Americas pretended to canalize e institutionalize a debate that already had a couple of weeks elevating the temperature of the Cuban emails. A select list of guests began entering the room “Che Guevara”, while our “group of impertinents” saw -from outside- the midnight arrive.
We were there -markedly protesters- impeded by the custodians and the bureaucrats of entering to opine and count about our encounters with censorship and dogmatism. We put rhyme to the cadence that appealed main organizer of the event: “Desiderio, Desiderio, hear my criterion” , but that didn’t work either. Inside, the voice of the Ministry of Culture repeated the idea that in a place under siege, to dissent is to treason; while in the same corner of G and Malecon the frustration of those not listened to, derived into tiredness and a
massive return home.
A year later, I don’t know what was left to us by those “Words of the Intellectuals” exchanged by email. What was left from that package of complaints and demands that started as criticism to the cultural policy of the revolution and derived in questioning of EVERYTHING. I intuit that the debate was hijacked by the institutions, jailed by the academic world full of concepts and fancy words, and condemned to take the curse of the imminent congress of the UNEAC.
However, it left us -at least to those who were outside- the conviction that we can’t wait to be left inside to the next debate. To me, personally, it added a definitive drop to start with this exorcism called “Generation Y”. It gave me the spatula for the long contained vomit that (sorry for the nasty metaphor) has fallen precipitously over this Blog.”
“… my husband when he says that I have “the soul of a fakir”. I dress with whatever is available, have only a pair of shoes since years ago, and I eat only once a day. Only one obsession of “consumption” walks now my life: to post. The money I make translating from German, showing Havana to a couple of tourists or selling my old books in the university, I invest –when I can- in paying for half an hour of Internet. That’s why my appearances in “Generation Y” are jumpy and not with the frequency of a Log.
-Why do I have a Blog, and not others? Because I am from a generation that has learned to move in a world of technology, including having to assemble my own PC with parts bought in the black market. One of the contradictions happening in Cuba of today, is that those who have interesting things to say, are as a rule information technology illiterates. So, the habitual readers of the Blogs have to be content with people like me, without pedigree, but for whom the mouse is an appendix of our own body.”
PS: For me, being a Hungarian, who lived from 1967 to 1989 behind the "iron curtain", Yoani Sánchez’s blog is a great testimony of courage! A great example of Web 2.0 supporting freedom of speech!
Visit her site!
21/04/2008 – Monday
- Skype, owned by eBay, one of the best-known Internet calling firms which allow free calls among Internet users, announced on Monday that it would offer an unlimited long-distance calling service for customers who want to reach friends and family without computers or Internet access. Skype users pay to call landlines and mobile phones, but the fee is often lower than standard long-distance services. The company said it was offering unlimited calls to landline and cell phones in the U.S. and Canada for USD 2.95 a month. It also offers unlimited calls to phones in 34 countries including Australia, China, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, for USD 9.95 per month, it said.
22/04/2008 – Tuesday
- Yahoo Inc posted a better-than-expected quarterly profit, but failed to do well enough to convince many on Wall Street that Microsoft Corp needs to raise its takeover bid. Buoyed by a $401 million non-cash gain on a stake in China's Alibaba.com Ltd, Yahoo's first-quarter net income rose to $542.2 million, or 37 cents per diluted share, from the year-ago quarter's $142.4 million, or 10 cents per diluted share. Excluding one-time items and stock compensation costs, the beleaguered Internet company reported a profit of $150 million, or 11 cents per share. On that basis, Wall Street on average was looking for a profit of 9 cents per share, according to Reuters Estimates. Yahoo's first-quarter revenue rose 9 percent to $1.82 billion. Excluding payments to advertising affiliates, or traffic acquisition costs (TAC), revenue rose 14 percent to $1.35 billion. Analysts had forecast revenue of $1.32 billion and said the numbers showed Yahoo's efforts to overhaul its search advertising and improve upon its sales of Internet display ads, like banners, had paid off, despite fears of an impact from U.S. economic slowdown. Yahoo kept its 2008 total revenue forecast at $7.2 billion to $8.0 billion, unchanged from the outlook it gave in January, but it did not comment on revenue excluding TAC, which is the figure Wall Street focuses on.
23/04/2008 – Wednesday
- AOL is announcing BlueString’s compatibility with outside services, namely Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, and Webshots, giving users the option to access photographs and videos previously uploaded to those sites without having to upload duplicate files to BlueString stored on a local drive. BlueString – first introduced by AOL last year – is a service that offers users to create media collages with photo, video, and music components in a sort of iPhoto-meets-iMovie fashion, albeit with a more simple set of controls to mold and edit one’s mashups.
- Seesmic, a European video conversation startup, the still-in-alpha “a video Twitter”, has launched a WordPress plugin that allows users to leave video comments on blogs. Users can also upload video directly from their webcam and post it to a personal page like with Twitter. They can also grab content from other sites such as YouTube by copying a video’s URL and placing it in their stream. Additionally, videos that users create can be automatically linked to in twitter (potentially other platforms) and uploaded to YouTube. In the future, seesmic users will be able to record skype conversations, video and chat. seesmic will incorporate RSS feeds for individual users similar to Facebook’s newsfeed. Finally, Lemur sees seesmic partially becoming a crowdsourced Online TV with the most popular producers receiving revenue share.
- There are a lot of ways to collaborate online - wikis, forums, social networks - but there are very few providers that package all the tools together that a group might need. Grou.ps, a social groupware provider, aims to address that problem by providing its users one single package of integrated tools. Like a Microsoft Office for social tools, Grou.ps offers the following modules: chat, blog aggregation, wikis, talks (forum + mailing list), photo albums, links (bookmarks and news), calendaring, maps, subgroups, and people (profiles).
- Amazon.com posted better-than-expected Q1 earnings amid broader fears of a worldwide economic slowdown. They reported that net income in the first quarter rose 30 percent, to $143 million, or 34 cents a share, from the year-ago quarter. The company said sales climbed 37 percent, to $4.13 billion.The results were above the expectations of Wall Street analysts, who had predicted net income of 32 cents a share and revenue of $4.08 billion, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Financial. Amazon says 2008 sales are expected to be $3.9 billion to $4.1 billion, or an increase of 29 to 35 percent from 2007. That is up slightly from a growth rate of 26 percent to 33 percent that Amazon projected for 2008 at the end of last year.
- Apple reported revenue of more than a half billion dollars above analyst expectations and predicted continued strong sales in the current quarter. Apple said that net income in the second quarter rose 36 percent to $1.05 billion or $1.16 a share, compared with $770 million, or 87 cents a share, in the quarter a year ago. Revenue was $7.51 billion, up from $5.26 billion a year ago. Apple shares rose as high as $163.50 in after-hours trading after closing at $162.89. The results far exceeded the expectations of Wall Street analysts. They had expected $1.07 cents a share and revenue of $6.96 billion, according to a survey of analysts by Bloomberg. Apple said it shipped 2.3 million Mac computers in the quarter, 51 percent more than in the year-ago quarter. Revenue on those computers increased 54 percent. But it also said it sold 10.6 million iPods during the quarter, flat with year ago quarter. It sold 1.7 million iPhones. Apple’s stock has declined 17.9 percent since the beginning of January when it peaked near $200 per share. After drifting below $120 per share, the stock has recovered since March.
24/04/2008 – Thursday
- Yahoo is opening the doors of its Web platforms wide open to let outside developers create applications across its network of sites, as well as radically stitching together its online services under the social profile concept. The idea is to let the hundreds of millions of people who use its Web mail, instant messaging, calendar, photo management and other online services replicate the social experience that social networks like MySpace and Facebook have made so popular. This means that Yahoo users will have a profile under which their Yahoo services will fall, and which users will be able to customize by adding applications. This profile will also simplify the map of connections between Yahoo users so that they can find each other and interact more easily and efficiently.
- Weak quarterly sales of Windows software and a below-target profit forecast for the current quarter overshadowed a strong outlook for the year ahead from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research), driving its shares down 5 percent on Thursday. Net profit was $4.39 billion, or 47 cents per diluted share, for its third quarter ended March 31, compared with $4.93 billion, or 50 cents per diluted share, in the year-ago period. Revenue rose 0.4 percent to $14.45 billion. Analysts, on average, were expecting 45 cents per share on revenue of $14.49 billion, according to Reuters Estimates. Microsoft's March-quarter figures last year included 11 cents per share of extraordinary profit and $1.6 billion in additional Windows and Office revenue for coupons issued to consumers affected by development delays. Its shares had risen 6 percent this week on expectations of a strong result. In after-hours trade, Microsoft shares fell to $30.22 after closing at $31.80 on the Nasdaq.
- Since the Chinese stock market has caught people's attention in recent years, Google announced the launch of Google Finance China. Now it's easier to get Chinese stock and mutual fund data through our easy-to-use and familiar interface in Chinese. The site includes popular features such as Google Suggest for stock codes, whether you enter the stock code or name in Chinese or Pinyin, and a display of financial information from Chinese sources on the stock price chart. At the same time they have launched a newly redesigned home page for all our Google Finance sites (U.S., Canada, U.K., China).
25/04/2008 – Friday
- Google Docs introduced two new features in their tool: speaker notes for your presentations and the ability to insert YouTube videos into your slides.
San Francisco's Web 2.0 Expo (attracted about 8,500 web-savvy geeks and associates) is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web.
Some of the presentations are put on Slideshare.com (new slides since my first edition of this post are marked red):
- Google Open Social Platforms: Orkut and iGoogle / Patrick Chanezon – Google
- Blog Your Brand (10 Steps to Building Your Brand by Blogging) / Trisha Okubo – eBay
- Web 2.0 Product Management: Optimizing Metrics & Viral Growth / Dan Olsen – YourVersion
- Copy As Interface / Erika Hall – Mule Design Studio
- 10 Tools for Managing a Creative Environment / Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson – Adaptive Path
- Designing Like We Give a Damn / Maria Giudice and Katrina Alcorn – Hot Studio Inc.
- A Flickr Approach to Making Sense of The World / Dan Catt – Flickr
- Capacity Palnning for Web Operations / John Allspaw – Flickr
- Mobile 2.0: Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond / Brian Fling – mobiledesign.org
- Mobile Ajax and the Future of the Web / Daniel K Appelquist – Vodafone
- Do Try This At Home (Ajax bookmarking, Cross-site Scripting and other web 2.0 browser hacks) / Brian Dillard – Pathfinder Associates
- Why Startups Need Automated Infrastructures / Adam Jacob – HJK Solutions
- Customer Service is the New Marketing / Lane Becker and Thor Muller describe the new wave of open, network-enabled customer engagement
- Open Platforms in Web 2.0 / David Recordon – Six Apart
- Making Email a Useful Web App / Andy Denmark – Tripit
- Designing Your API (Learnings from Twitter and Stamen)
- Taking the Web Offline and On the Desktop / Dion Almaer (Google) & Ryan Stewart (Adobe)
- Announcing Project Z / Tim Bonnemann – Intellitics
- Adding "Where" to Mobile and Web Applications / Ryan Sarver (Skyhook Wireless / Loki)
- Startup Metrics 101: a Product & Marketing Workshop / Dave McClure (Master of 500 Hats) & Hiten Shah (CrazyEgg, ACS, KISSmetrics)
Some of these and more presentation files can also be downloaded from the web 2.0 EXPO page.
CNET’s News.com has a video roundup of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco held this week. One video is about corporate blogging in which Tim O’Reilly, the father of the term “web 2.0”, interviewed Sun Microsystems’ CEO, Jonathan Schwartz about his experiences as a blogger. Schwartz is one of the most senior bloggers running a major company, and he is credited for pioneering the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others, but he predicts the novelty of his methods will soon wear off.
Schwartz says that his number one job as a leader of a company is to communicate. He, as an early adopter of blogging, realized that internet provides a more efficient way to communicate than in the pre-internet era, when as being a celebrity CEO, you got the local media to get your message out in a fairly inefficient and in an environmentally irresponsible way. Internet gives access to the whole planet all at the same time. Why not use the internet as a vehicle to communicate directly and authentically to the marketplace and to the 32 thousand people inside his company, which he says, is his toughest part of his job.
According to a freshly published report of the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the National Commission on Writing, all teens write for school, and 93% of teens say they write for their own pleasure. Most notably, the vast majority of teens have eagerly embraced written communication with their peers as they share messages on their social network pages, in emails and instant messages online, and through fast-paced thumb choreography on their cell phones. Parents believe that their children write more as teens than they did at that age.
At the core, the digital age presents a paradox. Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings. At the same time that teens disassociate e-communication with “writing,” they also strongly believe that good writing is a critical skill to achieving success. Moreover, teens are filled with insights and critiques of the current state of writing instruction as well as ideas about how to make in-school writing instruction better and more useful.
Key findings of the report:
- Even though teens are heavily embedded in a tech-rich world, they do not believe that communication over the internet or text messaging is writing.
- The impact of technology on writing is hardly a frivolous issue because most believe that good writing is important to teens’ future success.
- Teens are motivated to write by relevant topics, high expectations, an interested audience and opportunities to write creatively.
- Teens believe that the writing instruction they receive in school could be improved.
- Non-school writing, while less common than school writing, is still widespread among teens.
- Multi-channel teens and gadget owners do not write any more – or less – than their counterparts, but bloggers are more prolific.
- As tech-savvy as they are, teens do not believe that writing with computers makes a big difference in the quality of their writing.
- Parents are generally more positive than their teen children about the effect of computers and text-based communication tools on their child’s writing.
The survey obtained telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 700 12 to 17 year olds and their parents in continental U.S. telephone households. The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. The interviews were done in English by Princeton Data Source, LLC from September 19 to November 16, 2007.
Read the entire report at the PEW website!
According to Webware.com, over 1.9 million votes were casted for the 300 finalists of the Webware 100 competition organized by Webware.com this year. These finalists were selected by Webware editors from a pool of over 5000 (!) qualifying nominees, but the top 100 were selected by popular vote.
Just slightly more than half of all the votes cast in the Webware 100 went to the top 10 vote-getters. Six of these top 10 are no surprise: Facebook, Firefox, Google, iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube. But the other four may not be as familiar to most Webware readers:
- DeviantArt: A strong online arts community.
- Friendster: A social network.
- Gaia Online: A graphical social networking site for teenagers. A big winner in last year's Webware 100.
- Maxthon: A popular browser in China.
The top 10 of the 10 categories:
Audio: Amazon mp3 / Blogtalkradio / Emusic / Finetune / iLike / iTunes / Last.fm / Live365.com / Pandora / Zune
Browsing: Firefox / Google Reader / iGoogle / Internet Explorer 7 / iPhone / Maxthon Browser / myYahoo / Opera / Safari / Windows Live
Commerce & events: Amazon / Craiglist / eBay / Etsy / Google AdWords / Kayak / PayPal / Woot! / Yahoo! Shopping / Zillow.com
Communication: Aim / Gmail / iChat / Meebo / Windows Live Messenger / ooVoo / Pidgin / Skype / Windows Live Hotmail / Yahoo! Mail
Productivity: 30 Boxes / Basecamp / Google Calendar / Google Docs / I want Sandy / MS Office Live Workspace / Mint / Remember the milk / Yahoo! Calendar / Zoho
Publishing & photography: .Mac / Blogger / Drupal / Flickr / FotoFlexer / Photobucket / Picasa / Twitter / WordPress / Worth 1000
Search & reference: Answers.com / Ask / Google / Google Earth / Google Maps / Hakia / MS Live Search / Wikia / Wikipedia / Yahoo!
Social: Bebo / DeviantArt / Facebook / Friendster / Gaia Online / Google Groups / LiveJournal / MySpace / Stardoll / Yahoo! Groups
Utility & security: Amazon Web Services / BitTorrent / Box / LogMeIn / OpenDNS / OpenID / Pando / ShareFile / Yahoo! Briefcase / Yousendit
Video: Amazon Unbox / FixMyMovie / Joost / Miro / Netflix / uStream / Veodia / Vimeo / VoiceThread / YouTube
Source: Article at Webware.com / Winners
According to AP Business writer, Matt Moore, Bertelsmann AG, one of world’s biggest publishing house – whose units include publisher Random House Inc. and music venture Sony BMG – will publish what could be the first in a series of annual yearbooks whose content is derived from the many hundreds of thousands of user-created entries on Wikipedia.
The print version is planned to contain the content made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia in "The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia" starting in September.
Beate Varnhorn, the head of publishing at Bertelsmann Encyclopedia Institute said the "condensed, one-volume print edition" would bring Wikipedia to a new audience. She said that the sheer number of entries on the German Wikipedia - at last count they numbered approximately 740,000 and would likely fill hundreds of printed volumes - meant publishing all of it was not "a good project for the German book trade." But an annual collection of the most-sought out terms made sense, she said. "A yearbook really can be a documentation of the zeitgeist." "When we studied the list, we found that there are lots of keywords that we never thought could be that interesting," she said.
The entries will be fact-checked. The book will be under a free license, meaning its content can be distributed and copied, including commercially. Copies of the 992-page book - available (unfortunately) only in German - will retail for $31.80. Bertelsmann has agreed to pay Wikimedia Deutschland eV, which promotes the German-language version of the online encyclopedia, $1.59 a copy, said Arne Klempert, the group's executive director.
Source: Article on Newsok.com
According to an IBM press release released today, IBM at the Web 2.0 Expo introduced "iDataPlex", an entirely new category of server uniquely designed to address the technology needs of companies that use Web 2.0-style computing to operate massive data centers with tens of thousands of servers.
It more than doubles the number of systems that can run in a single IBM rack, uses 40 percent less power while increasing the amount of computing that can be done five times. It can be outfitted with a liquid cooled wall on the back of the system that enables it to run at "room temperature", so no air conditioning required. It uses all industry standard components as well as open source software such as Linux to help lower costs.
The new rack system featuring design innovations in cooling and efficiency that can help replace the inefficient "white-box" servers commonly used by Internet companies. As consumers demand richer content and more immediate access to Web-based applications, iDataPlex can allow online gaming, social network, Search and Internet companies to scale rapidly to meet this need.
"With iDataPlex, IBM is making Web 2.0-style computing more efficient and commercializing it for Internet companies and other high performance segments like financial services and research," said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM Systems and Technology Group.
Among early clients who have adopted or are actively considering iDataPlex are Web 2.0 companies and other organizations from China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, including:
Yahoo! Inc., the leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. "Yahoo! relies on ingenuity and technology to reduce our dependence upon energy. Many of our data centers utilize 'green energy' such as passive cooling to reduce our impact," said Laurie Mann, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations, Yahoo!. "We continue to look for ways to maximize our resources. Yahoo! appreciates the direction IBM is moving in with iDataPlex and its commitment to drive greater power efficiency and density in the datacenter."
Texas Tech University, a major research university, law school and graduate school with 28,200 students. "The Internet-style computing model iDataPlex is based on is just as attractive to the Texas Tech University High Performance Computing Center because, like Web 2.0 companies, we need to scale rapidly to support an ever increasing demand for high performance computing," said Sam Segran, CIO, Texas Tech University. "With iDataPlex, Texas Tech will be able to operate more efficiently while meeting the needs of our researchers."
As part of IBM's "Blue Cloud" initiative, iDataPlex helps companies respond quickly to changes in workload demand, thus using energy more efficiently and improving the use of resources like power. iDataPlex provides an ideal foundation for both enterprise cloud computing initiatives and clouds designed to host Web 2.0 applications.
IBM also plans to use iDataplex in its IBM Cloud Computing Centers in other locations such as the IBM Cloud Computing Center at Dublin and at the IBM Almaden Research Center.
Read IBM press release!
Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, gave a very interesting speech at the MIX08 conference (held in Las Vegas this March), and framed the “big picture”, to put things into context, including some of the things that we will see coming over the course of 2008.
One part of the “big picture” was defining the three core principles that Microsoft is using to drive the reconceptualization of their software in order to embrace this world of services that we live in.
According to Ray Ozzie, the first of these three principles is: the fundamental changes impacting the individual, the social mesh, the device mesh.“… we need to think of the Web as a hub, the hub of our social experiences, our social mesh, the hub of our technology experiences, our device mesh. Related to the social mesh, we believe that the interpersonal nature of the Web will ultimately impact everything we do, including the personal aspect of the PC. In scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, all applications – ours and yours – will incorporate the group-forming aspect of the Web: linking, sharing, ranking, tagging on the Web will become as familiar to all of us as file, edit, and view on the PC.
… this first principle also recognizes that we're living in a world where the number and diversity of devices is on the rise. From phones and PCs to smart TVs, DVRs, media centers, game consoles, digital picture frames, pocket media players, digital cameras and camcorders, recently, home servers, car entertainment and navigation systems … Until we believe that the quaint concept that we've kind of grown up with of one PC, of my computer, will give way to the notion of a personal collection of connected devices brought together by the Web. At the principle level, we believe that the Web will be used across all our offerings as a hub to simplify your life in managing and using a world of devices.”
Microsoft’s second principle – the power of choice in the enterprise – is focused more on business and in providing the power of choice as the enterprise moves to embrace the cloud:“Most major enterprises are, today, in the early stages of what will be a very, very significant transition from the use of dedicated application servers to the use of virtualization and commodity hardware for consolidating apps on computing grids and storage grids within their data center. This trend will accelerate as apps are progressively refactored, horizontally refactored to make use of this new virtualization-powered utility computing model. A model that will span from the enterprise data center, and ultimately, into the cloud.
This utility computing model will reshape enterprise infrastructures such as e-mail, communications, content management, databases. And it will also, as a result, reshape enterprise applications and solutions. All our software will be significantly refactored to provide a level of symmetry between enterprise-based software, partner-hosted services, and services in the cloud.
The power of server-service symmetry, the power of choice will enable IT to best leverage the skills of its key personnel and it will provide tremendous flexibility in developing, migrating, operating, and managing systems that are distributed and federated between the enterprise data center and the Internet cloud.”
The third principle stresses that developers need to do: “… embrace a world of small pieces loosely joined, that is a fabric of software and service componentry that spans from the cloud at one extreme to a world of devices at the other.
Watch or read the entire speech!
… application design patterns at both the front-end and the backend are transitioning from being tightly coupled systems with program components being closely interlocked with one another, like the pieces in a puzzle, toward being loosely federated – or loosely coupled compositions and loose federations of cooperating systems.
… in today's world of loosely coupled systems, transparency, standards, and interoperability are key. At the front end, lightweight REST-based technologies have become ubiquitous, RSS and atom feeds are used as lightweight cues and channels between services across the web.
Declarative languages such as XAML are enabling us to rapidly repurpose and recombine UI components into new concepts and new apps. Many of those new apps are now needing to extend beyond the browser or beyond the PC. Users are beginning to expect rich, integrated experiences that are seamlessly delivered across the Web, the PC, and the phone – their entire mesh of devices. Not just Web apps that are ported to a PC or a phone, but instead actually take advantage of the unique strength of each platform. This new multi-device UI environment now requires a host of new front-end development skills.
At the backend, new skills are also required as developers are finding the need to embrace new programming models, new design patterns such as map reduce, models that are more appropriate for the cloud. This cloud-based environment consists of vast arrays of commodity computers with storage and software being spread across just hundreds of thousands of computers, very, very broadly for reasons of performance and scale and redundancy.
Over the next five years, the way we write code on the back end, the way we deploy it across a grid, the way we debug it remotely, the way we maintain it and service it will be fundamentally transformed by our progressive shift to this utility computing model in the cloud.”
Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip and the author of several business commentaries, social satires, and experimental philosophy books, a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, is one of the most well known cartoonist in the world. His web site, dilbert.com, was the first syndicated comic strip to go online in 1995 and it is the most widely read syndicated comic on the Internet. (Dilbert also appears in 2,000 newspapers in 70 countries, making it one of the most successful syndicated comic strips in history.)
The web site introduced new interactive web 2.0 features last week:
- Punch Lines: Write your own punch lines for Dilbert strips and e-mail them to friends. Soon users will be able to write the entire strip, collaborating with others, in what they call Group Mash! One person writes the first panel, another writes the second, and so on. Readers can vote the best ones to the top of the heap. That way you get the attention and credit you need to make life worth living. (A way of crowdsourcing Dilbert's jokes?)
- Animation: They animated Dilbert online. Several strips are already done and they plan to add one per day.
- Favorite Lists: Create lists of your favorite Dilbert comics and share with others.
- Expanded Archive: The free Dilbert archive extends back to 2001. They are working on putting the entire archive online.
- Search: Filter the archive by favorite characters. For example, find all the comics in the archive featuring Dogbert or Catbert or Asok, etc., plus any combination of characters.
- Colour: All online strips are in living color. They look sensational.
- Dilbert Blog: The personal blog of Scott Adams is moving to this page. And you'll be able to vote on comments, and the wisest and funniest float to the top.
"...traffic on Dilbert.com doubled. And the new features, particular the Mash Ups and the archive search functions are a big hit. People either loved that the strips are now in color or hated it, but everyone had a strong opinion. That's what I love about Dilbert readers. It makes my job a lot more interesting."
Visit Dilbert.com!
“History makes people wise.”
Francis Bacon, Sr. quotes (English Lawyer and Philosopher. 1561-1626)
Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago (over 100 terabytes and 10 billion web pages archived), more than 114 thousand moving images, nearly 49 thousand concerts, nearly 250 thousand audio recordings, and nearly 400 thousand different pieces of texts. The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, they are working to preserve a record for generations to come.
To start surfing the Wayback, just type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. The project is designed to take a global snapshot of the Web.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit group that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. It was founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco.
Internet Archive is a real repository of interesting pieces of information for those who are interested in history in anyway. For example, you can find a copy of the first issue of “ARPANET News”, from March 1973, published by the ARPA network Information Center of the Stanford Research Institute. (ARPANET was the world's first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.)
Source: Internet Archive
BBC introduced a music indexing service last week, called Sound Index, which, in every six hours, crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what PEOPLE are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. This information is used to make the exclusive Top 1000 Sound Index. So Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public. The Index can be filtered by you to create the Index you want, you can also tailor it to represent the views of people of different ages and locations.
Currently, the top 10 artists, according to the data processed in this service of the millions of comments, posts, plays and views of different users of Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube:
1. Britney Spears / 2. Mariah Carey / 3. Leona Lewis / 4. The Kooks / 5. Rihanna / 6. Chris Brown / 7. Madonna / 8. Scouting for Girls / 9. Linkin Park / 10. Usher
This Index is currently made up of 19,911,037 comments, posts, plays and views. The Sound Index is currently in a public service beta phase.
BBC is also collaborating with IBM and uses IBM's Semantic Super Computing to crawl and analyse our partners' sites to create the Sound Index. The discography and biography information is sourced from Musicbrainz, a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site, and Wikipedia.
Visit Sound Index!
According to the simple definition on about.com, widget is a small application that can be ported to and run on different web pages by a simple modification of the web page's HTML. Widgets can be anything from voting polls to games to advertisements.
There is a debate among web marketers about their usefulness: e.g on the same medium, BusinessWeek, two different articles appeared on this topic “Why Widgets Don't Work” vs “Widgets: The Future of Online Ads”. I visited a site yesterday which claims to have the largest selection of widgets anywhere on the web: Widgetbox has 49,789 pieces to chose from. That is more than 10 times as more widgets than e.g Yahoo! Widgets has. Today Yahoo! Widgets has (only) 4,775 widgets to chose from, although they claim that they have the only major desktop Widgets platform that works on both Windows and Mac OS.
Widgetbox community has tens of thousands of widget makers and over 30 million widget users is growing every day. Widgetbox widgets have been on hundreds of thousands of websites. You can not only search their database and download these widgets for free, but you can also build your own widgets, since they provide you with easy to use tools to build, distribute, and track your own web widgets. You don’t even need to know any code. Turn your blog into a widget or create a Facebook app in minutes. What’s more, you can turn your widgets into cash when you sign-up for DevShare. They served 559,859 domains and nearly 2.5 billion widgets.
Their mostly downloaded piece is Super Mario Game (the fun classic Super Mario Game in Flash.) with 460 thousand downloads, No 2 is cyber-pet (play with your own adopted virtual animal, with custom name and colour) with more than 305 thousand downloads, No 3 is the Baby Ticker - The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker (a fun way to count down the days to your baby's birth date) with almost 290 thousand downloads. Their top 3 most rated widgets are: Maukie - the virtual cat (to terrorize your mouse pointer), the Baby Ticker (mentioned above) and the My Phozi Snapshot! (you can share your favorite snapshot from the phozi online photobooth.). My favorite is Pong, the first coin-op arcade game and the first mainstream videogame that was available for the mass market.
Widgetbox in april started to provide widgets tailored for Apple's iPhone. There are 16 widgets available to start, including an RSS output of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs; a "live" World Market Watch widget which monitors all major world indexes from Asia, India, Americas, and Europe -- current price, change, volume + charts are displayed; the daily top 10 most interesting images uploaded to Flickr, as decided by the Flickr community; a Blackjack cardgame; randomly presented quotes from the most famous and important people of the world.
14/04/2008 – Monday
- MySpace opens in South Korea with its localized global expansion. Korea is the latest stop on the MySpace trail, with some attention to cultural details that are a bit more focused than some of MySpace’s other localized efforts.
- The Open Geospatial Consortium has announced its acceptance of KML 2.2 as an official OGC Standard. KML started as a file format for Google Earth, a way to save out the list of restaurants or parks or hiking trails that you might have drawn as a custom map.
15/04/2008 – Tuesday
- A meta-recommendation engine for music, movies, and Web video, called “The Filter” is announced to be open for private beta release. The service is backed by Peter Gabriel.
16/04/2008 – Wednesday
- eBay Q1 results announced: core marketplace business showed good strength in listings, revenue, and GMV, but active users grew only 1% year over year. eBay needs to get this metric moving in the right direction soon, or the turnaround will not be sustainable. Business in UK and US hurt by weak economy. PayPal and Skype ahead of expectations.
- Grooveshark Lite is launched by music sharing and sales startup Grooveshark, a flash app that provides access to all the songs in Grooveshark’s library. Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale (the rest goes to the record companies, and the service is 100% legal).
- Facebook Lexicon, a tool where you can see the buzz surrounding different words and phrases on Facebook Walls is launched by Facebook. Lexicon pulls from the wealth of data on Facebook without collecting any personal information in order to respect everyone's privacy.
- Google Earth 4.3 is launched with new features. New navigation (improved the zoom control; addition of the "look" joystick, you can look up at buildings or across a mountain range). More and faster 3D buildings. Street View, the popular Google Maps feature makes its Google Earth debut. Sunlight feature. New languages (Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish).
17/04/2008 – Thursday
- MySpace reveals MySpace India, officially launching its localized site with a rock concert in Mumbai and all the other music-ridden pomp and circumstance for which MySpace has come to be known. MySpace will be working with Star TV, one of India’s largest television networks, to create original content to be distributed through the MySpace India network, and perhaps beyond.
- Universal Music Group, the world’s leading music company, has made an equity investment in Buzznet, one of the Web’s fastest growing social media networks with with more than eight million users. This partnership marks one of the first times a music company will be directly involved in developing editorial programming for a social media site, with both companies sharing in the revenue.
18/04/2008 – Friday
- Google Inc.'s stock soared 20% Friday, restoring $28 billion in shareholder wealth after weeks of worry about an online advertising slowdown. Driven by stellar first-quarter results that surprised industry analysts, Google shares surged $89.87 to finish at $539.41. It marked the biggest one-day gain since Google's initial public stock offering in August 2004, leaving the shares at their highest closing price since January. (Read more: Wired)
- Facelift of Google Video is announced with a number of new browse- and search-related features: you can choose any of three ways to view your video search-results: a traditional list view, a grid view and a TV view, where you can watch an embedded video while continuing to view your search results next to the video for a more seamless browse and search experience.
19/04/2008 – Saturday
- YouTube launched beta versions of three new feature updates to improve overall management of users’ messages, contacts and videos.
"You affect the world by what you browse."
"The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."
- Tim Berners-Lee – English scientist, one of the founding fathers of the internet, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
"We had no idea that this would turn into a global and public infrastructure."
"The Internet lives where anyone can access it."
"So one of the most important things we can do in the industry is make sure that the threat of cyberattacks is minimized as much as possible."
"I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices."
- Vinton Cerf – American computer scientist, one of the founding fathers of the internet
"When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world."
"The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had."
- Eric Schmidt – currently Chairman and CEO of Google Inc. and a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc., member of the Princeton University Board of Trustees.
"Children can take lessons in that school via the Internet and can score extra points like e.g. in Geography or History. That sounds very promising and is a fantastic basis for future steps."
- Anatoly Karpov – Russian chess world champion
"So rather than face the bitter truth, China has placed severe restrictions on the Internet and enlisted America's high-tech companies as their Internet police."
"Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today, a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government."
"Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves."
- Tom Lantos – the only Holocaust survivor to have served in the US Congress, born in Hungary
"I was afraid of the internet... because I couldn't type."
"The Internet is the Viagra of big business."
- Jack Welch – former Chairman of General Electric
"Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world."
- Jimmy Carter – former president of the USA
"The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes."
- Milton Friedman – Nobel Laureate economist and public intellectual (US)
"There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there's just millions of voices and people want to be heard."
- Rupert Murdoch – Australian-American media mogul
"Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles."
- Paul Samuelson – Nobel Laureate neoclassical economist (US)
"I'd say there was a fair amount of skepticism at the time about whether the Internet held any promise. And of course I felt that it did."
"No matter how much Bill Gates may claim otherwise, he missed the Internet, like a barreling freight train that he didn't hear or see coming."
- Jim Clark – former computer scientist, founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon.
"If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit."
"If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities."
- Lawrence Lessig – professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. Founded Creative Commons and is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Software Freedom Law Center.
"What we are doing is taking advantage of the broadband Internet to provide basically unlimited free calls to anyone at a higher voice quality than they can with the phone lines."
- Niklas Zennström – Swedish entrepreneur, first gained fame as the co-founder of the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing network. Co-founder of Skype, the peer-to-peer internet telephony network.
Sources: brainyquote.com / en.thinkexist.com
"So one of the most important things we can do in the industry is make sure that the threat of cyberattacks is minimized as much as possible." Vinton Cerf, American computer scientist, one of the founding fathers of the internet
People would probably be posting letters through the post. People would probably receive in the post paper catalogues to order merchandise from. People would use the telephone even more to communicate. People would probably sit at a table and play games together: good for Hasbro. People would surely be participating in more social activities. Thousands of bloggers and internet geeks would visit their psychologist to help ease their stress resulting from their severe withdrawal syndrome.
I found a great clip on southparkstudios.com which gives – in its special way – a good presentation of such a situation.
Actually, it is difficult to imagine a situation like this since internet is a very decentralized network. Although on the 7th of February 2007 there was an attack on at least three DNS root servers, including one maintained by the US Department of Defense which were flooded with data for about 12 hours in an attack that was notable more for its audacity than any noticeable degradation of internet traffic. It was unclear where the attacks originated, since the perpetrators disguised the origination of the packet flood, according to the Associated Press. There was speculation they may have come from Korea.
According to an article on pingdom.com, this was not the first time the root nameservers have been under attack. In October 2002, a smaller attack had a much more noticeable effect, with some sources claiming that as many as two thirds of the root nameservers were affected and the whole Internet actually slowed down significantly.
What would happen if an attack on the root nameservers is successful, and why are they so hard to bring down?
An attack on the root nameservers is essentially an attack on the entire Internet since they are necessary for the DNS to function properly. Hypothetically, if all root nameservers stopped working, DNS lookups would gradually start failing. Local DNS servers only cache domain name information for a certain time before they need to contact the root nameservers again.
Within minutes - Some DNS lookups would start failing.
After an hour - A significant number of DNS lookups would be failing.
After a day - Most DNS lookups would be failing.
Back in 2002 there were 13 root nameserver locations in four countries. The attack that year made it obvious that wasn’t enough, so since then the number of server locations has been increased significantly. Though the DNS protocol only allows for 13 actual root nameserver addresses, six of these now use a routing protocol called anycast to distribute requests to a large number of different locations. Currently there are more than 120 globally distributed root nameserver locations (according to http://www.root-servers.org/).
According to the article on pingdom.com, this decentralization of the root nameservers has made them very hard to attack even with a large-scale distributed attack such as the one from last week since any attack is automatically diluted and spread out over many locations. Although the article ends with a warning: “there is still a risk that someone, somewhere, will figure out a way to effectively attack and crash them all or at least cause considerable damage.”
Sources: pingdom.com article / southparstudios.com page
An article by Bill St. Arnaud, Senior Director Advanced Networks for CANARIE Inc., Canada's Advanced Internet Development Organization, was wrote on internetevolution.com (“Next-Gen Wavelengths Challenge Internet Architecture”) about the different challenges IT will face in the design of existing Internet networks if the next big threshold of optical networking, the 100 and 1000 Gigabit wavelengths will emerge. Here is an extract:
“1000G wavelength technology will most likely be premised on coherent optical detection, which allows receivers to detect phase, polarization, and amplitude combined with some form of complex modulation formats, such as DPSK (differential phase-shift keying) or DQPSK (differential quadrature phase-shift keying). These technologies have long been in use in wireless systems and have dramatically increased the available bandwidth on these systems.
However, routing manufacturers, in particular, will face significant challenges in designing and deploying routing engines that will work at these speeds. Optical switched architectures, such as bandwidth on demand and bandwidth reservation, will be similarly challenged as the setup time for an end-to-end circuit will represent an instantaneous network capacity much greater than most data traffic flow warrants.
It is very unlikely that individual router interfaces will be able to support 100G and 1000G interfaces. Instead, such optical wavelengths will effectively be an inverse mux of many 10s, if not hundreds of 1G or 10G “lightpaths.” Each of these lightpaths will likely terminate on a virtual router, with the possibility of many parallel routed networks being deployed.”
Read the entire article here!
According to comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, the number of online videos viewed in the U.S. jumped 66% in one year to exceed 10 billion video views in February 2008, representing a 3-percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter).
Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 3.6 billion videos viewed (35.4% share of all videos), gaining 1.1 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 96% of all videos viewed at Google Sites. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 586 million videos (5.8%), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 293 million (2.9%) and Microsoft Sites with 293 million (2.9%).
Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February which means 72.8% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. 80.4 million viewers watched 3.42 billion videos on YouTube.com (42.6 videos per viewer). 50.2 million viewers watched 539 million videos on MySpace.com (10.7 videos per viewer). The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes. The average online video viewer consumed 75 videos.
Source: comScore.com release
"Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money." - Albert Szent-Györgyi
It is a stereotype to say that one of the basic requirements to perform an excellent site redesign is to know what your visitors' (customers’) needs, expectations and opinions of your site are. In spite of this stereotype there are plenty of organizations which do not base their site redesign on their customers needs.
According to Jeannette Kocsis, vice-president of the digital practice for Harte-Hanks, organizations must put the customer in charge in the site redesign procedure.“To put customers in charge of their online experience, the Web site should be built with the customer in mind:
It is important to have an understanding of your market: carry out competitive analysis (e.g. if some of your competitors have a corporate blog, you can check their visitors’ opinions and feedbacks).
A persona-based design will help ensure that the site is being built for behaviors that customers may exhibit.
The site should also provide choices for customers to interact with the brand, including but not limited to email, mobile, chat, and blogs.
Tools should be intuitive and relevant.
Web sites that put customers in charge may also provide multiple ways to receive content such as through dynamic text, RSS, podcasts, or video.
All of these elements are determined through Web site strategy, which is the required starting point.”
Analyze you site’s web statistics: what are the relevant content (information) read by your visitors. Of course the most reliable visitor statistics can only be obtained if your site has a visitor identification system (site login).
Analyze your users’ expectations: focus groups or user testing can help determine whether an intended approach is correct or needs adjustment. You should also use market research, user testing to ensure that the site meets the needs of its visitors.
Using Web 2.0 tools for both external and internal communication is an emerging trend today among enterprises. It is worth to analyze whether your visitors (customers) are prepared for such a change (again, using focus groups is an effective tool to test our visitors’ opinion). Blogs, forums and RSS are among the most widely used web 2.0 tools in external enterprise web communication.
Mini case study: redesigning TCS.com
Enlighten, a web company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, had won the project to redesign TCS.com, a company site of Tata Consultancy Services, Mumbai, India which is part of Tata Group, India’s largest industrial conglomerates. TCS has over 108 thousand IT consultants in 47 countries and had an annual sales of USD 4.3 billion last year.
The main project goal was to position TCS as a global company, to enhance brand building, to generate demand, to introduce a new scalable Content Management System (MS Shairpoint 2007), and to design and develop the site based on key user needs (user-centric design).
Research steps
Stakeholder interviews with about 60-70 participants like HR leaders, sales leaders, business unit managers, executives. Research goals were to gain a better understanding of the buying cycle and research process, site content and features, brand attributes and positioning,
how users see the relationships and grouping between different types of content. There were 19 participants: 15 international customers, 2 analysts and 2 career seekers.
They used remote user research which allowed them to connect with users in their own offices while they remained in theirs. The research team used Likert Scale questions (scale of 1-10) to measure the importance of site features and content and discussion questions about buying cycle and brand perception. They also used online card sorting observed in real time to inform organization of content with using a remote user testing tool: UserVue, an online card sorting tool: WebSort, and analyzed the result with EZ-Calc.
Analyzing the results, they found the top 5 features of the site ranked by average “importance” score (1-10). Their other main findings were:
- Overall, users were comfortable sorting content into groupings by Industries and Services/Solutions.
- Products, enterprise software, development environments formed reasonably cohesive groupings but were more difficult to place within the whole organization.
- Case studies were easily recognizable and often grouped together on the basis of document type.
- Certain individual topics like eLearning and enterprise software were more problematic.
- Create a site structure and navigation system that equally supports users who wish to browse either by horizontal services or vertical industries.
- Provide alternate ways to find content by type (case study, white paper, etc.)
- TCS Products are relevant both within their industry contexts and also aggregated as a type of offering.
- Create special categories as needed to accommodate topics like Enterprise Software (e.g. SAP).
The yield of their efforts is measurable:
Average pages per visit increased from 3.43 to 4.5 pages, visit length increased from 2:35 to 3 minutes. Home page abandonment rate is down, offerings is the most popular channel, Industries Channel funnels traffic to Offerings, About isn’t often the first section visited, but gets the second highest amount of traffic, Worldwide pages – 8% of site traffic.
Enlighten has summarized their thoughts how to assure excellence in site redesign:
Prioritizing features within a large distributed organization is challenging - user research helps in making tough decisions. Try remote user testing when local users are hard to recruit and schedule and when user segmentation requires geographic diversity, but you are on a tight schedule. Prototyping is a great way to make your mistakes earlier and get your internal team and the client engaged.
Sources: MarketingProfs.com article / Enlighten slide (downloadable)
According to one of Jive Software's whitepaper, who is the market leader in social productivity and community software with more than 2,000 customers and over 15% of the Fortune 500, businesses can efficiently use blogs to communicate with its public and to communicate within the organization.
External business blogs three main purposes:
- To bridge the gap between customer and company by letting the customer feel that their views and input are important and help influence company decisions.
- To foster innovation for the company through input from customers passionate about that company’s products or services.
- To increase search engine rankings due to the volumes of fresh content containing keywords and links from other blogs or sites—all key factors in search engine algorithms.
To capture and maintain valuable employee knowledge and thought processes. Employees use blogs to post information, comment on posts, and access those interactions from a single place.
Enterprise blogging best practices
Before setting up a personal or team blog, determine what you hope to achieve through its use. Some possible benefits and ideas for using blogs to reap those benefits.
- Reduce email use/abuse. Use your blog instead of email to post information and receive feedback. Send an initial email to employees you want to read the post, include a link to the post, and request that all further communication occurs within the blog. Blogs help users locate information more easily because the communication occurs in a single linear thread, not in multiple email threads.
- Manage project communications. Conduct project communications via a team blog – post progress reports, issues encountered, and links to relevant information. Add tags to blog entries to enable users to easily retrieve the business processes and knowledge captured by the team blog.
- Tag blog entries for better information retrieval. Add tags to blog posts to make information highly retrievable. Later in this document.
- Moderate blogs with a light touch. Establish general blogging guidelines and post them, along with your blogging policy, but then back away and let employees blog and comment. If someone posts or comments inappropriately, deal with the employee directly, quickly, and perhaps even visibly, and then remove the unacceptable content. A swift and visible response clarifies your company’s position on such behavior.
- Encourage members of your braintrust to blog. Each organization has a few people who have been with the organization the longest, developed the most patents, led successful marketing campaigns, or generally retain knowledge in their heads critical to the organization’s competitive advantage. If these employees leave the company, their knowledge leaves with them. Encourage these employees to blog so that their knowledge is always available from the central repository.
If you decide to have public-facing blogs we recommend the following:
- Choose a good company representative. A corporate blogger should be somebody who is a good writer, is knowledgeable about the company or the topic being blogged about, and has a little charisma. A sense of humor is almost always a good thing for a blog, but above all, be real.
- Post regularly. Many blog fans check their favorite blogs daily. At a minimum, Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, recommends that you post at least twice a week. If you don’t have a single employee who has time to blog regularly, consider forming a blogging team to share the responsibility, or even consider hiring a writer/editor to serve as your corporate blogger.
- Respond to customer comments quickly. Make sure customers know someone is paying attention to what they say by responding to their comments quickly. Also reward them for providing feedback. Send them company hats, t-shirts, or even coupons for a product discount.
Source: Jive Software’s whitepaper, “Clearspace Best Practices Overview”
Yesterday a post was published on thenextweb.org in which a television item broadcasted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on October 8, 1993, “A network called 'Internet'” was featured, showing how the media perceived Internet at the dawn of the Internet era. It is fantastic how Internet developed in only 14 years and changed the lives of millions of its users!
I visited CBC’s website and found an even more interesting video in their archives: “Envisioning a global network”, in which Graham Spry (born 20 Feb 1900; died 24 Nov 1983), a Canadian journalist, diplomat and political activist who was instrumental in bringing public broadcasting to Canada, at the age of 70 gave his visionary interview about a new age of communication where – as he foreseen the future – computers will not only change the way we get information and buy products, but will alter the way people work and live. The interview was given in 1970 when personal computing was only in its very premature state.
Just to have a feeling how visionary was to think about ideas which Graham Spry talked about in 1970: the Kenbak-1 is considered to be the first personal computer, advertised for $750 in Scientific American in 1971. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-scale and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973, after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corp. closed its doors. The Micral in 1973 was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a micro-processor, the Intel 8008. Thi Truong developed the computer and Philippe Kahn the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that didn’t require high performance. Selling for $1,750, the Micral never penetrated the U.S. market. In 1979, Truong sold Micral to Bull.
Some extracts of the interview with Graham Spry:
"We are moving into an age … when databanks and information banks, so on and so on, will change society. And broadcasting will become a part in terms of distribution of a huge system of which the largest element will inescapable be the use of computers."
"This is a new age of communication we are moving into. … All the evidence suggests and confirms that computers, in terms of hardware and software … will be the biggest business in North America."
"There will be simple terminals in the house, we will have consumer information networks."
Watch the video at CBC’s archive!
Acconding to BBC News, a stroll around the ancient city of Pompeii will be made possible this week thanks to an omni-directional treadmill developed by European researchers. The platform, called CyberCarpet, is made up of several belts which form an endless plane along an endless plane along two axes. Scientists have combined the platform with a tracking system and virtual reality software recreating Pompeii.
The platform is a result of a collaboration between the Swiss and German institutes, as well as the University of Rome, the Institute of Applied Mechanics and the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, in Munich.
The teams believe the technology could be used in gaming, education, architecture and planning, disaster planning and training, as well as medical rehabilitation.
Resources: Read more at BBC | digg story
ReadTheWords.com began as a simple concept in January 2008, to assist students with learning disabilities with their studies, by means of auditory learning and auditory processing. They found that the demand for this technology reaches far beyond their originally intended audience. Many others expressed how this technology could help them with their daily lives, and their businesses.
ReadTheWords created multiple input methods for users to create readings: Adobe PDF, MS Word, HTML, cut and paste text files, even website pages and RSS feed URLs can be an input. They created a way to meet Bloggers need who are constantly looking for ways to reach a larger audience and enabled them to create podcasts and share them with their readers. They created a platform for bloggers and website operators to paste an audio toolbar in their website or blog, making it possible for any reader to become a listener. English, Spanish and French texts can be “digested” with their application and you can choose 1 of 14 different readers. Each reader has a unique voice (some even have accents). You may control your reader’s speed, play with your reader’s pitch. It takes approximately 1 minute to generate a 1 hour long recording.
Their service has numerous advantages: you can listen to your reading online (on their site) or download your reading to your mp3 player or broadcast your reading as a podcast and share it by posting your reading in your website or blog. With doing so you can save yourself and your readers time, turn the readers of your blog into listeners and allow them to listen while they multi-task and download your blog.
07-03-2008 - Monday
- Razz, a San Francisco based “leading content service provider for next-generation audio entertainment, for both mobile phone and web users”, introduced its service, Talking Photos, exclusively on Facebook which enables its users to add their voice to any photo or use their favorite movie lines. (http://www.facebook.com/)
08-03-2008 - Tuesday
- Google launched a preview release of Google App Engine, a way for developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure. Google App Engine is designed from the ground up to make it easy to create and run web applications. During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. They expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million page views per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed. (http://code.google.com/appengine/)
- MySpace launched a bilingual community to serve more than 9.7 million Hispanic members. The world's most popular social networking site unveiled eight new communities focused on entertainment, fashion and celebrity, music, nightlife, soccer, events, and news. Hispanic and mainstream groups and media outlets, including the Spanish Broadcasting System, the Spanish version of Billboard, and Gibson Guitars, McDonald's, and Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S), have partnered with MySpace to deliver content and promote activities. (http://www.myspace.com/)
09-03-2008 - Wednesday
- Flickr users can now add video clips alongside their photos.Videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size. Videos are treated the same way as photos and are placed alongside those photos in albums and the main stream. Videos can also be tagged (and geotagged) in the same way as photos. “We don't want to be the biggest video site day one, but the most interesting", said Kakul Srivastava, Flickr's director of product management, according to cnet.com. Over 26,000 members have joined the We Say NO to Videos on Flickr group and NO VIDEO ON FLICKR!!! had 11,000 members only in a few days. Complaints against video on Flickr range from slowing Flickr down, lack of community consultation and video diminishing Flickr’s photo focused purpose. (http://www.flickr.com/)
- Yahoo! Inc. announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of the Hungarian “Tensa Kft.”, more commonly known as IndexTools, a leading provider of Web analytics software for online marketing. The acquisition includes IndexTools' Web analytics business and technology as well as its Tensa R&D Kft. subsidiary. Upon completion of the acquisition, the addition of the IndexTools' assets is intended to expand Yahoo!'s powerful set of services designed to maximize its clients' online marketing efforts. (http://indextools.com/index.html)
- Global event-finding tool Eventful has launched a MySpace application, called My Top Artists. This lets users choose their favorite performers and display them on their profile pages. Eventful will take this input and offer upcoming events from these designated artists, for the local cities of the users. Being an integrated application on MySpace, the My Top Artists app also lets users share this date with friends.
10-03-2008 - Thursday
- RushmoreDrive, the first Web search site geared to black audiences in the United States, opened to the public on 10/03/2008 in a major foray for parent IAC/InterActiveCorp into Web content aimed at specific communities. The company built an engine based on the specialized Teoma technology used by IAC search site Ask.com. RushmoreDrive also analyzed nearly five years of Ask data for the kind of information black users have been seeking, helping them to weigh the usefulness of sites they list on their search page. (http://www.rushmoredrive.org/)
11-03-2008 - Friday
- A company founded by Rupert Murdoch's daughter will help News Corp's MySpace distribute Web shows on television and DVDs outside the United States, as the world's largest social network seeks an audience away from the computer. The move is a play to make shows such as MySpaceTV's "Quarterlife" or "Roommates" available outside of the United States, or create localized versions of the shows, said Travis Katz, managing director of MySpace's international arm. The partnership with ShineReveille, the distribution arm of Elisabeth Murdoch-founded Shine Group, is one of News Corp's most ambitious plays to underscore MySpace as a media platform, distinguishing itself from fast-moving rival Facebook.
Online advertising is predicted to overtake spending on TV in the UK by the end of 2009, becoming the largest medium, projects a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), carried out in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC).
Online advertising in the UK grew from the smallest sector in 2003 to the third largest in 2007, with more than £2.8 billion in expenditures - a 38% year-on-year increase - and a market share of 15.3% (up from 11.4% in ‘06). In just three years online advertising spend has increased by £2 billion, accelerating nine times faster than the entire advertising sector, which experienced 4.3% growth to reach £18.4 billion. Total internet display advertising spend saw a 31% year-on-year increase, whilst the core formats – banners, skyscrapers and embedded rich media including video – grew by 45% to £592 million. Furthermore, spend on embedded formats has doubled during the past two years to account for 79% of total display. In 2007 search grew by 39%, in line with overall growth, to £1.6 billion (£1.2 billion in 2006), while its market share remained largely the same at 57.6% (57.8% in 2006).
The majority of display spend rests with portals and major online publishers, but an increasing volume is being brought through sales networks. Sales houses and networks are responsible for growing and monetising the long tail of internet sites, accounting for 40% of display advertising in 2007.
The top five online advertising sectors: recruitment sector with a 25.7% market share, automotive sector (11.9%), technology (10.4%), finance (10%), property (7.9%), consumer goods, including FMCG (5.3%), retail (5%).
Key drivers for growth
- There are 32.5 million people now online in the UK (with a 52%/48% male/female split), with the average broadband user spending 16 hours per week with the medium.
- Cheap laptops mean more machines in the home.
- Launch of services such as BBC iPlayer and Channel 4’s 4oD are breaking the barrier between video entertainment and the internet as a communications or shopping tool. More online familiarity means more time online, again attracting more advertisers.
- Broadband penetration is 90% of the online population. 54% of UK broadband users have more than 2mb speed, nearly double the 28% who had the same speed in November 2006 (BMRB Internet Monitor, November 2007). The combination of wireless proliferation and rollout of 3g laptop cards provides more people online, anytime.
- Social networking websites continue to have a massive impact on the market, especially as an audience driver. In 2007 adspend for this area was relatively low and coming off a small base, yet looks set to grow steadily in the coming years. CPM values for user-generated content are lower in this sector and they are generally bought through networks. However, the premium channels such as MySpace Music and MySpace Film are sold at a higher CPM rate and overall the IAB expects to see a greater contribution to online spend in 2008.
Yesterday someone left a comment on this blog and I followed a link which led to GroupCard (they modified their name from "SquidNote"), a website where one can prepare a neat online greeting card and invite others to participate in the “greeting process”. In April 2007 John Anderson’s brother called him while manually copy-pasting together a team-wide farewell card for an employee at a remote office... John thought, "Surely there is an easy service that lets someone start and circulate an online group greeting"; with none found, he and a little team started to create one. And that’s how groupcard.com became a reality.
If you have someone in your family or a friend who has a birthday, a new born baby, an anniversary, a new job, or if you only want to say thanks for someone, or some of your friends is sick you can visit GroupCard and choose one of their cards. For 10 bucks they can even make your card more special by designing a custom cover! A GroupCard is fully customizable: you can edit your message, your signature, choose a font type, even modify the angle of your written message, and add an image (e.g. your photo). After you customized your message you give your name, the addressees email and the date and the time when you would like the message to be sent. And as the last step you can invite more people to sign! Enter your friends' email addresses and a brief message and click send. It is easy and free!
In the last 3 months, according to Alexa.com (an Amazon.com company), GroupCrad’s reach (percent of global Internet users who visit this site) increased by 144%. GroupCard is an international service: only 33,8% of their users come from the US, followed by Egypt (7,4%), Colombia (7,2%), Venezuela (5,9%) and Chile (3,5%).
Visit GroupCard!
According to a fresh press release by comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, the average Russian Internet user went online 13 days in February 2008, spent an average of 82 minutes per day online, and consumed 2,322 pages of content during the month. (Total Russian Federation, Age 15+ – Home and Work Locations. Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.)
According to Linda Boland Abraham, comScore Executive Vice President:
“The Russian Internet market has been experiencing rapid development, with its audience growing 25% during the past year. Several Russian Internet brands are leading the way, so it’s clear that there are strong opportunities for Internet-based businesses as this market continues to expand.”Most European search markets are dominated by Google and there seem to be no real local competitors. In Russia however, Russian-language search engine Yandex reached 62% of the Russian Internet audience, making it the top web property in February in Russia, followed by Mail.Ru Sites (51% reach), Rambler Media (49% reach), AOL LLC (42% reach) and Google Sites (41% reach).
According to Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief of thenextweb.org:
“It seems like the Russian search engines are doing the opposite of what Google does, since they’re adding fancy add-ons, while Google still keeps it clean and simple. Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s time for specified and vertical search. Most of us are somewhat used to the complexity of the Web now, so we might as well be able to handle a search engine a bit more complicated than just a white page.”In February, Yandex led all search properties with 47.4% of all searches conducted in Russia, followed by Google Sites (31.2%), Rambler Media (9.7%), Mail.Ru Sites (7%), and Yahoo! Sites (1.3%).
Social networking is a particularly popular online pastime in Russia, as evidenced by the strength of a few social networking sites ranking among the top properties. Odnoklassniki.Ru was the 7th most-visited property with an audience reach of 30 %, while Vkontakte.Ru ranked just behind. Vkontakte.Ru also generated particularly strong engagement among its visitors, who spent an average of 689 minutes at the site during the month.
Sources: comScore press release / thenextweb.org article
This is the question… on an interesting blog of Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid.com, where I found a brilliant cartoon which I think reflects many of the web 2.0 users opinion on one aspect of internet usage.
His short explanation why he stopped Twittering:“It's no big deal. I liked Twitter. But I found it too easy. I think my time would be better spent drawing cartoons and writing books. That's just how I feel.”
And only a couple of days after Hugh was on Twitter again:
"Short answer: Too many people I do business with are also on Twitter. Being off it was impossible. My bad."
Source: Gapingvoid.com page
As defined on rssboard.org, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an XML-based document format for the syndication of web content so that it can be republished on other sites or downloaded periodically and presented to users. An RSS document (which is called a "feed" or "web feed" or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays. RSS content can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader" or an "aggregator", like e.g. Google Reader. The first version of RSS, was created by Ramanathan V. Guha, Indian computer scientist at Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9.
I came across an article on ReadWriteWeb written by Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Seven tips for making the most of your RSS reader”. It’s worth reading, here is an extract:
Oversubscribe
Subscribing to anything that looks interesting. Many people say they find relief knowing that with enough subscriptions, anything important that they missed will come up again later. Other people oversubscribe and then just read "watchlists" - searches for keywords inside their subscribed feeds. Some feed readers make this easy. (I can recommend Google Reader, it is simple – as most Google services – and easy to use.)
Try a River of News View
There's no way to read every item in every feed you've subscribed to, so after reading what's most important - try switching to what's most recent.
Use Multiple Services
Some feeds are really important and are best read outside of the bulky environment of a feed reader. Try starting a Netvibes, Pageflakes or iGoogle page for the feeds you want to be able to quickly check out throughout the day. Drag the link from your address bar to your browser's toolbar and shapow - you've got a one-click way to check a handful of your most important feeds for updates.
Try Out a Desktop Reader
By most indications, Google Reader is the most popular RSS reader on the market and Bloglines is a close second. There are many reasons to try out a desktop reader like NetNewsWire, FeedDemon or Vienna. Desktop readers are faster and more responsive. Almost everything you need is stored locally on your hard drive so it's faster than AJAX. Google Reader is nice and smooth but tends to time-out and freeze if you're subscribed to more than 1k feeds. Local storage of the articles in your feeds means you can access posts that are no longer online, you can see the difference between originally published and current versions and you can read your feeds if you're offline.
Tag Items to Share
Sharing items helps make your feed reading more meaningful and thus easier to do. If you know that people have subscribed to your shared items feed, then it makes even more sense to open up that feed reader and continue supplying the fruits of your good taste.
Google Reader has a popular shared-items feed, but it's not easy to control and if you stop using Google Reader then you lose your items and social connections. If instead you offer people a FeedBurner feed of shared items, you can plug any RSS feed in as the source for that feed. Bookmark items "toshare" in Del.icio.us and grab the RSS that tag in your account produces - publish that through Feedburner and you can know how many people have subscribed. Then, if you stop using del.icio.us and switch to Ma.gnolia - you can just change your source feed of shared items without changing the ultimate Feedburner feed and losing your subscribers.
Read the entire article!
Other sources: RSS Advisory Board / Wikipedia
According to Forrester’s report, “Online Community Best Practices” by Jeremiah Owyang, an online community (an interactive group of people joined together by a common interest) is one of the most powerful tools a marketer can deploy for customer retention, word of mouth, and customer insight. To host a successful community, think of it as you would product development: start by focusing on objectives, chart a road map, assemble the right team, and plan to be flexible. Then build your success by launching the community with the backing of your most enthusiastic customers and staying engaged as the community grows. Above all, remember that control is in the hands of the members, so put their needs first, build trust, and become an active part of the community.
Rolling out a community is not like putting on a play that unfolds exactly as the script specifies. Since communities develop their own needs, you need to be flexible, allowing for adjustments as your customers react to each other. For example, when Adidas created an online community on MySpace.com, the brand developed a six- to 12-month road map that included a design refresh for every three months.
As you develop your own flexible plan, here are the steps you should take:
Decide on your objective and find ways to measure progress toward it. Select one objective –listening, talking, energizing, supporting, or embracing – that aligns with the strategic goals of your company, and develops your plan to advance that objective. Every plan should have success metrics that you’ll use to benchmark and track your performance. A company focused on talking, for example, should measure how many people were involved in the conversation, how they consumed the information, and how they responded, as well as monitor brand metrics like awareness or purchase intent.
Create a responsive process so teams are empowered to act quickly. Dealing with crises and brand detractors is a normal aspect of community management, so be prepared. Establish a flexible protocol that empowers the community manager and/or moderators to quickly respond – without having to be subjected to the limbo of internal politics. For example, when email marketing company Constant Contact launched its community for direct marketers, a fiery member-to-member debate emerged over the provider’s stringent rules regulating use of its email products. By engaging the members directly and quickly with a Webinar, the company’s community team was able to turn these detractors into advocates (see figure).
Remember the needs of the community and prepare to participate. Communities will only succeed if they serve the interests of their members. Provide a place for the members to initiate their own content, or if none exists, provide content that is valuable to the community such as: help docs, behind-the-scenes videos, or sneak previews. The community team at Microsoft’s Channel 9, a developer community, publishes regular demo and behind-the-scenes videos that help its community learn about new products, environments, and technologies. Content is defined by what’s valuable to the community – which means most traditional advertising and marketing materials don’t count.
Create a community policy, focusing on the desired behavior. Set the tone by developing community guidelines that outline the expected behavior of the community. For example, the startup Dogster, a lifestyle and support community for 500,000 dog owners, established three guidelines: “Be Fun, Friendly, and Informational.” Anytime a situation arose in which contributors didn’t meet these three requirements, the community managers notified the offender and removed the offensive content. In the same way, you should prominently publish desired guidelines focusing on the positive, rather than create a long list of prohibited actions.
Prepare for costs and benefits. Make sure you’ve allocated the proper amount of resources to ensure that your community won’t run out of steam. Hidden costs include the labor to kick- tart a community or time spent educating internal folks. Although ready-made tools like Ning, Web Crossing, and Drupal require less capital, they still require ongoing management costs. A good plan shows ROI with estimates of fixed and ongoing costs and anticipated benefits.
Source: Forrester report “Online Community Best Practices” by Jeremiah Owyang
A study written by Irene Mia (World Economic Forum) and Soumitra Dutta (INSEAD, a research institution and one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools), “Assessing the State of the World’s Networked Readiness: Insight from the Networked Readiness Index 2007–2008”, provides interesting findings on the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) in 127 countries.
Importance of ICT
Information and communication technologies (ICT) can significantly contribute to a country’s overall competitiveness and sustained growth by impacting the efficiency of production processes across sectors and industries, accelerating the growth of knowledge-based services and industries, and empowering people to access to unprecedented sources of information and markets. ICT has also radically transformed the way individuals live, work, and learn, improving lifestyles and creating social networks and virtual communities stretching across the globe and providing extraordinary opportunities of interaction.
For example, many organizations from the public and private sectors are reaping rich benefits from the use of broadband: British Telecom has approximately 8,500 workers who work flexibly via broadband from home. On average, they each save the company accommodation costs of approximately £6,000 per annum, they have an increased productivity rate averaging at 20 percent but recorded between 15 percent and 31 percent, they have on average only 3 days sick absence per annum against an industry average of 12 days. All of this adds up to an annual saving of in excess of £60 million per year.
Networked Readiness Index (NRI)
The NRI measures the propensity for countries to exploit the opportunities offered by information and communications technology. It is published annually. The NRI seeks to better comprehend the impact of ICT on the competitiveness of nations. The NRI is a composite of three components:
- the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community,
- the readiness of the community’s key stakeholders (individuals, businesses, and governments) to use ICT,
- the usage of ICT amongst these stakeholders.
Source: Networked Readiness Index 2007–2008 (at NYT)
According to InformationWeek.com, Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, announced the results of a study by Forrester Research on 08.04.2008: it concludes that online retail in the US will increase by 17% this year to $204 billion, with clothing, computers, and cars topping the list of sales categories. "The State of Retailing Online 2008: Marketing Report" is the first of a three-part series of reports based on the study. It forecasts $26.6 billion in clothing sales, $23.9 billion in computer sales, and $19.3 billion in automobile sales for 2008.
US online retail reached $175 billion in 2007 and is projected to grow to $335 billion by 2012. Business-to-consumer (B2C) eCommerce continues its double-digit year-over-year growth rate, in part because sales are shifting away from stores and in part because online shoppers are less sensitive to adverse economic conditions than the average US consumer.
Retailers report that search engine marketing drives 35% of sales, making it the best way to attract new customers. 90% of online retailers surveyed said they use pay-for-performance search placement, while 79% said they would place a higher priority on the tactic this year. Companies said that among offline marketing tactics, catalogs and direct mail take priority over television and newspaper ads. Retailers are less interested in promoting free shipping options this year compared to previous years. 85% of online retailers said they promoted shipping with conditions before, but only 35% plan to focus more on such promotions this year.
65% of the retailers surveyed said they are eager to experiment with ads on social networks and 55% they would focus more on widgets in 2008. The report stresses that social networking sites help build brands but they are less proven for driving revenue than e-mail marketing and free shipping promotions.
The report found that online retailers set aside 53% of their marketing budgets on acquiring online customers and 21% on retaining online customers. Some tools used to attract new shoppers also serve to retain existing customers, the study found.
Source: InformationWeek.com article
By definition of GridCafé, an official site of CERN, the world's largest high-energy physics laboratory and a leader in Grid development, Grid is a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet. The Grid goes well beyond simple communication between computers, and aims ultimately to turn the global network of computers into one vast computational resource.
The dream Grid
Imagine for example several million computers, including desktop PCs and workstations, mainframes and supercomputers, and also data vaults and instruments such as meteorological sensors and telescopes placed all over the world and belong to many different people (students, doctors, secretaries…) and institutions (companies, universities, hospitals…). Imagine that these computers are connected to the Internet to act as a single, huge and super-powerful computer. This huge global computer is what many people dream "The Grid" will be.
If you needed to analyse a lot of data from different computers all over the Globe, you could ask the Grid to do this. The Grid could find out where the most convenient source of the data is without specifying anything, and do the analysis on the data wherever it is. If you wanted to do this analysis interactively in collaboration with several colleagues around the world, the Grid would link your computers up so it felt like you were all on a local network. This would happen without having to worry about lots of special passwords, the Grid could figure out who should be able to take part in this common activity.
The real Grid
Reality is catching up fast with this dream. Where the Grid might be in ten years time, and what it might do, nobody knows. Let’s look at how the evolution of computing has naturally led to the concept of the Grid:
- Distributed computing: whenever the problem of computing power shortage occurs the solution is to link computer resources from across a business, a company or an academic institution. The network of these computers is then used as a single, unified resource.
- Metacomputing: a particular type of distributed computing which was very popular in the early 'nineties. It involved linking up supercomputer centers with what was, at the time, high speed networks.
- Cluster computing: in the 1960’s scientists put some computers together and got them to communicate to solve a problem. Scalability is one of the big advantages of this approach: Clusters can have different sizes. Clusters of hundreds of computers are common nowadays. According to grid.org, in November 2007, 81% of the computers in the “Top 500” listing of the world’s most powerful supercomputers were clusters. But it would be a mistake to assume that clusters are only for big research centers. Indeed, a 2007 IDC report states that 25% of all spending on clusters used for highly computational or data-intensive processing (out of $10B total spent on such clusters) is for workgroup clusters with value $50,000 or less. That’s more than 50,000 such clusters sold in 2007 alone. (Another 36% are for departmental clusters, with value $50,000 to $250,000. Larger divisional and corporate systems account for the final 39%.)
- Peer to Peer (P2P) computing: the nowadays so common file-sharing services use this kind of computing: by downloading a piece of software onto your hard drive, you can connect to a network of other users who have downloaded the same software. Computers can share files and other data directly, without going through a central server.
- Internet computing: the most known example is SETI@home (based at the University of California - Berkeley), which is a virtual "supercomputer" which analyses the data of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Using the Internet, SETI brings together the processing power of more than 3 million personal computers from around the world, and has already used the equivalent of more than 600.000 years of PC processing power! Actually SETI@home is a screen-saver program and any owner of a PC can download it from the Web. The different PCs (the nodes of such Grid) work simultaneously on different parts of the problem, retrieving chunks of data from the Internet and then passing the results to the central system for post-processing. The success of SETI has inspired many other @home applications. (See my other post: “Distributed internet computing @home”.)
Grid projects
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Grid projects going on in the world. Some concentrate on the development of software tools (the so called "middleware"), others on services, others get ready for different scientific applications and others optimise the underlying network.
GridCafé lists several main classes of grid projects:
- Grid-tech Projects - primarily involved in development of Grid-enabling technology, such as middleware and hardware
- Testbeds Projects - devoted to developing and maintaining a working testbeds using existing Grid technology
- Field-specific applications - projects devoted to explore and harness grid technology in the context of specific fields of scientific research
- Grid Fora Projects - devoted to catalyze, stimulate and foster collaboration on grid related projects
- Grid Portals - Internet portals to grid related activities
- Commercial Grid initiatives - Grid solutions and initiatives by commercial vendors
- ...@home - distributed computing projects Internet computing projects
- Grid Outreach initiatives - educational and informative websites on Grid computing
- Grid Consulting companies
Source: GridCafé
Whenever the problem of computing power shortage occurs, the solution is to link computer resources from across a business, a company or an academic institution, or millions of home PCs across the world via the internet. The network of these computers is then used as a single, unified resource. This process is called distributed computing.
"@home" applications are used by millions of people used mostly as screen savers. The tasks involved are totally independent, it doesn't matter whether some tasks take a long time or never return. After a "time-out" period, unfinished tasks are simply sent elsewhere to be processed.
Some examples of public distributed internet computing:
SETI@home
The first large-scale volunteer computing project, launched in 1999, SETI@home experiment uses Internet Distributed Computing to search for intelligent life outside Earth. Today SETI@home is generating about 300 gigabytes a day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year. According to project scientist Erik Korpela, this is about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. SETI@home is still the largest scientific public participation in history, with 170,000 active volunteers around the world running 320,000 computers.
figthAIDS@Home
This is the first biomedical distributed computing project ever launched. It is run by the Olson Laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. They provide free software that anyone can download and install. The software uses a computer's idle cycles to assist fundamental research in discovering new drugs, building on our growing knowledge of the structural biology of AIDS.
Folding@home
This is a distributed computing project studying protein folding, misfolding, aggregation and related diseases. Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
Genome@home
The Human Genome Project is nearing completion, and scientists are working hard to develop the understanding needed to use this wealth of genetic information in ways that will be significant to medicine and humankind. One of the most important ways to do this is to study the other genomes and individual gene sequences that are already available to us.
LHC@home
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which is being built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics laboratory. It will be the most powerful instrument ever built to investigate on particles proprieties. A program called SixTrack, which simulates particles traveling around the LHC to study the stability of their orbits, can fit on a single PC and requires relatively little input or output.
Sources: GridCafé page and above mentioned sites
Article on SETI@home project (The Planetary Society)
Razz, a San Francisco based “leading content service provider for next-generation audio entertainment, for both mobile phone and web users”, introduced its service, Talking Photos, exclusively on Facebook which enables its users to add their voice to any photo or use their favorite movie lines.
Razz’s has two other services:
- Movie Star is also an exclusive application Facebook whit which the user can choose from thousands of movie lines to send to their friends as gifts, produce their own Hollywood film in the Casting Couch game, and get free ringtones from their favorite movies.
- With Razz Tones users can combine their voice with music and sound clips to create free ringtones that are genuinely original. Users can create as many ringtones as they like and share with friends, send to their phone, or post on the web.
Source: Razz website
Toby Ward, an intranet expert examined and compared the major parent categories or channels of 13 leading intranets, like Google, HP, Cisco, Microsoft, SAP, Ericsson, British Airways and Bank of America to find clues, tips, and lessons for crafting an effective intranet information architecture (IA).
The term parent category is defined as major categories or sections that host or provide access to the bulk of the information or content on a given intranet and represent the major or global navigation for the site or portal. Most of these intranets have other navigation links that are not in fact 'parents', but rather are support links that might include the following: Search, Site Map, Feedback, Help, Contact Us, Directory (Phonebook), Login.
The examined leading 13 intranets show that:
- the average number of parent categories is 6, the most common parent is News (6x);
- the 2nd most common parent: About… (4x);
- most of the examined intranets do not have consolidated sections for products and services, and/or customers. Most leave that information to division or business unit silos.
Bank of America (6 categories): My Work / Sales & Marketing / Collaboration / SAP / Portfolio / Employee Services / Managers Services
British Airways (7 parent categories): News / Travel / Our airline / Company procedures / Business info / BA & Me / Off Duty
Cisco (6 categories): About Cisco / Employee Services / Learning & Development / Support & Tools / Products & Industry / Security Information
Ericsson (8 categories): Workplace / News & Events / Sales & Marketing / Products & Services / Projects / Support / Unit Info / Employee Info
Google (6 parent categories): My Office / Survival kit / Internal News / HR / Company info / Communications
HP (6 parent categories): Job Tools & Resources / Benefits, Careers & Policies / Organizations & Locations / Business Performance / Indexes / Help
Microsoft (5 categories): News / Campus / Employee / Services / About Microsoft
SAP (6 categories): Our Company / News / Tools & Support / Benefits & Pay / Career & Learning / My Division
The main challenge of any information architect is that what works at Google or Microsoft, doesn't necessarily work at his/her organization. The keys to success is understanding the corporate culture and how employees work, relate to each other, and the nomenclature used to categorize and seek out information at a given organization.
Sources: Article of Prescient digital
According to several different articles, most corporate intranets feature weak information architectures. I made a summary of four articles written by Toby Ward, intranet specialist who tried to find the key for successful intranet information architecture (IA) in order to avoid common and number one employee complaints about intranets: “I can’t find anything” and “The search engine sucks”. These complaints relate to ineffective information architecture.
It is a stereotype that a well defined and structured information architecture is essential to a successful site, it is a basic requirement. Without it users will be confused, frustrated and at the end will refuse to use the site. By definition, presented by the Information Architecture Institute, information architecture is: "the art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability."
According to Ward, information architecture should have little to do with best practices, and more to do with the needs of the target audience. Other companies with successful intranets don’t necessarily translate effectively to another company’s intranet; one needs to understand what will work for its organization’s employees. When redesigning or developing an intranet or portal, there is a natural inclination by some architects and consultants to reinvent the IA to best reflect ‘best practices’ and/or the IA or labels used by other clients with successful and intuitive IAs. This of course is a dangerous trap, as no outside consultant or architect could truly appreciate and know intimately the culture and the formal and informal corporate nomenclature as those who have worked for an organization for years. Sticking only to best practices may be misleading if we consider how different organizations (even closely related competitors) may in fact differ in very significant ways: in their corporate priorities, corporate values, target audience & customer base, management, culture, geographic locations, personal life experiences and preferences, career path & development, etc.
Therefore tapping employee knowledge is a must and requires care and skill without prejudice and an appreciation for the unique culture of the organization. An information architecture should principally be driven and designed by employees, with the outside influence of best practices. There are four key tools for engaging employees to help craft and test and IA: usability testing, card sorting, focus groups, log (metrics) analysis.
Toby Ward defines 6 “general lessons” to be learned to develop successful intranet IAs:
1.) The vast majority of practical content should be no more than 3 clicks from the home page.
2.) Major parent categories (major sections or channels that represent virtually all the content on a corporate intranet) should be limited to 6 to 8, including sections for:
- About Us (Corporate profile, business structure, bios, directory, etc.)
- News (news stories, announcements, events, etc.)
- HR (human resource related information and tools)
- Products & Services (and/or customer related information)
- Forms & Tools (an aggregate section of links or originals)
- Manuals & Policies (an aggregate section of links or originals)
- Other common parent categories (relevant to some organizations but not others include: Customer service /Career & Learning / Executive Corner /Roles & Dashboards (sales, operations, administrative, etc.) / Library & Reference
4.) Navigational / usability elements such as Search, Site Map, Help, Contact Us, Feedback, etc. need not be in a parent category per se, but should be available in the main navigation banner and/or footer
5.) Card sorting exercises that allow users to determine content groupings and labels are extremely valuable for fixing navigation and usability problems
6.) Do not bury or overlook highly desirable but not necessarily mission-critical items that are usually very highly sought by employees including: Cafeteria menus / Buy-and-sell & Classifieds / Job postings / Weather forecast / Office locations & maps
Sources:
Toby Ward article 1 / 2 / 3 / 4
Information Architecture Institute
Russian IT security expert, Anton Chuvakin, author of “Security Warrior” book published by O’Reilly in 2004 gave an interesting presentation at the 1st Russian CSO Summit in March 24-25, 2008. According to Chuvakin, web application hacking is growing, more malware and malicious applications aimed to attack social websites like Facebook are predicted to appear this year, loss of trust towards internet is growing, and attackers focus more on data and less on infrastructure as seen in the past.
The importance of an effective IT security is more important as ever, since according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center's (IC3) new report, the dollar loss reported from Internet crime reached an all-time high $239 Million in 2007. Counting by country, the United States had the most cybercriminals, with 63.2%, followed by the United Kingdom (15.3%) and Nigeria (5.7%). E-mail was the most common means (73.6%) by which cybercriminals made contact with their victims, followed by Web pages (32.7%), phone contact (18%), and postal mail (10.1%). "The anonymous nature of an e-mail address or a Web site allows perpetrators to solicit a large number of victims with a keystroke," the report explains. By far the most common type of fraud reported was auction fraud (35.7%) and nondelivery of merchandise (24.9%).
The slideshow of Anton Chuvakin:
Resources:
Anton Chuvakin’s slide at Slideshare.net
InformationWeek
Related article on this blog: "Cyber crime is emerging"
Nokia N810 WiMAX edition Enjoy the Web 2.0 experinece with Nokia's new "Internet tablet" which will be one of the first devices to run on Sprint's upcoming WiMax network, a long-range version of Wi-Fi that is expected to roll out this summer. It's not really a phone, but more like a mini laptop with a full QWERTY keyboard, Mozzila based Web browser and e-mail support, music player, integrated GPS receiver. Keep in touch with your friends on Skype, Google talk, or Gizmo. Available: Summer 2008
LG Vu Unlike the iPhone, this handset will feature a live mobile television service from AT&T, so users will be able to get their MTV on the go. It's also got a 3-inch touchscreen and 2-megapixel camera. Partnerships with Napster and eMusic are set to offer fast access to downloadable music and streaming radio, and the phone’s software capabilities should include video sharing, instant messaging and HTML web browsing through the touchscreen controls. Available: May. Price estimate: $300
Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 Sony Ericsson's first Windows Mobile smartphone comes with nine customizable "panels" which are icons that provide access to Google or weather information with one click. The new X1 has a touchscreen interface, but also comes with a pull-out QWERTY keypad and an optical joystick. It will provide DVD quality video on a 3” wide VGA TFT display. I will have a 3 megapixel camera. Available: Second half of 2008 
Samsung Instinct The 3,1” touchscreen Instinct bears a striking resemblance to the iPhone. Unlike Apple's device, this one runs on a faster 3G network. It has a 2-megapixel camera, access to the Sprint Music Store for wireless downloads, stereo Bluetooth, audible caller ID, voice dialing and commands, a full HTML browser, a digital music player that shows album art, support for Sprint Radio and Sprint TV, phone as modem capability, Microsoft Live Search, and integrated GPS with Sprint navigation. Available: June (exclusively through Sprint)
Samsung Soul This phone comes packed with a 5-megapixel camera and a sleek interface with "contextual" navigation keys that change according to a user's need. For example, accessing the music player pulls up play and pause buttons, while the camera brings up buttons for taking and editing pictures.
Source: CNNMoney.com article and product descriptions
Living Legends is a monthly program that invites luminaries from around the world to communicate directly with the YouTube community by answering YouTube users’ questions and becoming a genuine participant on the site. Leaders in film, sports, politics, music, ad more are planed to be presented on this Tube.
The first Living Legend is Rolling Stones. In addition to their video calling out for your burning questions, today's home page features some rare behind-the-scenes footage from the band, along with a few truly unique presentations of their classic "Start Me Up," including renditions by a marching band, YouTube Award Winner and "Chocolate Rain" scribe TayZonday…
Source: YouTube Blog post / YouTube Living Legend
Apple Inc said on Thursday (03.04.2008) its iTunes online music store has surpassed Wal-Mart Stores Inc to become the largest music retailer in the United States. Apple's statement, citing industry data, came on the same day that iTunes faced a new challenge as News Corp's MySpace, the world's largest social network Web site announced it had formed an online music venture with three giant record labels, bringing in Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group as minority owners. Apple said iTunes had 50 million customers who had bought more than 4 billion songs since the store opened five years ago.
As announced on the same day, MySpace Music will offer free music and video streaming supported by advertising, paid-for MP3 downloads, ringtones for cell phones, concert ticket sales and merchandise. According to Reuters, Chris De Wolfe, chief executive of MySpace, said the launch date of the new service was "fluid" with commercial features being added to the site over the next three to four months. He said MySpace is in talks with more music industry partners to offer their services on MySpace Music. MySpace will integrate its 5 million artist profile pages with a range of new commercial services in a "360-degree" offering for the 30 million music fans who use the site.
"It goes from being a promotional vehicle to being a commercial vehicle," MySpace Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur said on a conference call to announce the venture.
The music industry, concerned about the influence iTunes wields in the digital market, wants to develop MySpace Music into a strong competitor: "This gives a great new lease of life for the download market," said Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG president of global digital business, in an interview with Reuters.
Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said MySpace Music was the right step for music companies, but noted, "Apple will not be affected for the first few years because Apple's iTunes store lives on the strength of Apple's devices."
Another news is that News Corp's Fox Interactive Media (FIM) Internet division could fall short of its fiscal 2008 revenue target of $1 billion, as it reorganizes its divisions to better exploit the online advertising market. Regarding its revenue targets, Fox Interactive Media said in a statement, "We expect to be close to our target." The News Corp division that oversees MySpace said in a statement it plans to officially launch its long-awaited online advertising network.
Adam Bain, executive vice president of production and technology at FIM, will be named president of FIM Audience Network. The restructuring will also see the departure of Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett, a former Time Warner Inc executive, the company said. The unit's sales department would also be decentralized to improve accountability. "By integrating the sales teams in this way, each operating unit will be empowered to assume responsibility for its revenue, growth and profitability," FIM Chief Peter Levinsohn told employees in a memo obtained by Reuters.
Sources:
Reuters articles 1 / 2 / 3
Yesterday Twingly, a Swedish a spam-free blog search engine launched a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com.
Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allow them to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. “Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.”
Social search features allow users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole. Twingly claims to provide the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways. Twingly currently has 450,000 approved blogs on the white list and is adding another 1,000 per day.
Twingly.se was first launched in February 2007 on the same day as the two largest Swedish newspapers DN.se and Svd.se began to use Twingly Blogstream to link back to blogs writing about their articles. Twingly Blogstream has become a huge hit in Europe and in only one year over 40 Twingly Partners have started to use our Blogstream Widget, which is tailor-made for easy integration into “traditional” media publishing systems.
Their screensaver, that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written, was launched the same summer and was named the coolest screensaver ever by bloggers.
Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com.
Sources: Twingly.com / Technorati.com article
As users navigate online social spaces, they encounter numerous personal profiles, each displaying a unique constellation of attributes. How do users make sense of this information? To give answers, University of Washington & Microsoft Research Department of Psychology members, Kristin Stecher & Scott Counts published a study (“Spontaneous Inference of Personality Traits and Effects on Memory for Online Profiles”) which was reviewed on 31st of March 2008 at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, in Seattle, Washington.
Since software can be better designed to facilitate social interactions if researchers understand how users construe social information, the importance of this study is that it provides evidence that users spontaneously make personality trait inferences about people from profiles they encounter online, and for certain profiles, preferentially remember this inferred trait content over actual profile content. Stecher & Counts also assessed how the coherence of user profiles interacts with trait inferences to influence memory for profiles. Findings provide a better understanding of specific profile content that makes profiles memorable and the social-cognitive process utilized when extracting information from profiles.
Stecher & Counts provided a few suggestions to users and service providers creating online profiles based on this research?
- For any context where users want to be remembered, users and designers create profiles and profile environments where trait implications are natural and encouraged. For instance, the blogging site that first displays the “About Me” section is organized for better memory than the site that first displays demographic information that has less probability of cueing a trait.
- Services could promote memory for profiles by providing instruction sets that help users convey a trait, even if this is as simple as telling users to do so explicitly.
- A site could solicit trait tags for profiles from other users as a way to check whether profiles are in fact conveying a trait, and if so, what trait they are conveying. Users could rate one another on personality dimensions and adjust their profile content based on their ratings.
- Analyze the language used in profiles to identify the strength of the traits conveyed using natural language processing programs. (Natural language processing programs have already been used in ecommerce to acquire implicit and explicit user data such as mood, values (implicit) and product references (explicit) from user postings and emails.)
Source:
Kristin Stecher & Scott Counts: Spontaneous Inference of Personality Traits and Effects on Memory for Online Profiles
International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media site
Pogo, the online entertainment destination had the biggest US market shares of visits in February 2008 with 12,27% among the Top 10 games websites, according to Marketingcharts.com. Pogo is owned by Electronic Arts, the world’s leading developer and publisher of PC and console video games.
The second best website of this category (Webkinz) only reached 6,26%. The “big names”, Yahoo Games (ranked 4; 5,26%) and MSN Games (ranked 6; 2.04%) are lagging far behind the top.
Pogo.com provides players with a wide variety of (more than 80) free online puzzle, word, casino, card, board, sports and arcade games. The site draws on average 2.6 million users per day (more than 15.8 million per month), who have turned Pogo.com into a strong and vibrant community. Club Pogo™ is a subscription-based version of Pogo.com that offers premium services, such as exclusive games, avatars, ad-free gameplay, enhanced prizes and more. For a one-time fee, Pogo To Go™ lets users download their favorite Pogo.com games (more than 300) to play offline, take on the road, etc… PC versions of select Pogo.com games. Players can win thousands of dollars a month in jackpots or cash drawings by redeeming tokens that they’ve collected playing games on Pogo.com. Almost one-fifth of all Pogo.com games are multiplayer. It offers its players a robust chat feature, where millions of people chat about the games they play and the lives they lead.
The Pogo.com home page provides access to Free EA branded games:
- EA SPORTS™ games feature realistic, perennially popular mainstream sports games, such as golf, football, basketball and baseball games.
- EA SPORTS BIG™ games offer mind-blowing over-the-top games, such as snowboarding, motocross, skateboarding and big-style baseball.
- EA™ titles offer all the action, sci-fi and simulation you can play with popular games such as pool, racing and arcade-style pinball and basketball.
About Pogo’s visitors:
- Pogo.com on average has 15.8 million users a month, who spend an average of 39 minutes every day on the site.
- The Pogo.com audience is 55% female, and features players who are predominantly ages 18 to 49.
- With its strong community aspect, Pogo.com players have formed thousands of relationships that range from friendships to marriages to support groups.
- Over 70% of the Pogo.com audience normally plays card games on Pogo.com, while 50% play word and casino games.
- Roughly 60% of the female Pogo.com audience chats when playing a game, and of those that chat, over 70% chat about the specific game they are playing.
- The Pogo.com player spends on average 7 hours a week on Pogo.com.
Sources:
Marketingcharts.com article
Pogo.com
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia is investigating gross human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law as well as abuses that occurred during the period January 1979 to October 14, 2003. It provides a forum which addresses issues of impunity, as well as an opportunity for both victims and perpetrators of human rights violations to share their experiences in order to create a clear picture of the past to facilitate genuine healing and reconciliation.
This forum was enhanced with a web 2.0 tool, a website which is created (in collaboration with Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, USA) an interactive site which is the first of its kind for a truth commission. Its creators hope it will play a key part in Liberia's reconciliation process, bringing video footage of the TRC's work to Liberians around the world. "By hosting videos on our website, we hope to better engage Liberians at home and around the world in the work of the TRC" says TRC Chairman Jerome J. Verdier.
The website was created by researchers from both the School of Interactive Computing and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech using web 2.0 technologies and leveraging web social networking trends.
As the site accepts sensitive statements, utmost effort was taken to ensure the security of the site. The statements are secured with 2048 bit encryption. Georgia Tech conducted a security audit on the website to ensure its security. The website also uses content management systems to allow TRC staff members to add news and press releases at any point in the reconciliation process.
Sources:
One World Africa article
Balancing Act article
TRC of Liberia website
Yesterday one of my friend’s server was hacked: website was hacked, e-mails were sent to his clients in the name of his company – and he is not IBM, he owns only a small business! In 24 hours only, I read several different articles on crimes committed using internet in someway. For example one on Wired.com (“Teen Involved in MySpace Suicide Hoax Says Adult Also Participated”), another on The New York Times (“Congress to Take Testimony on Internet Gambling Ban”). Or just a couple of days ago another Wired article ("Security Lapse Exposes Facebook Photos") wrote about a security lapse made it possible for unwelcome strangers to peruse personal photos posted on Facebook Inc.'s popular online hangout, circumventing a recent upgrade to the Web site's privacy controls.
According to Ryan Singel, author of the Wired article "Report: Cybercrime Stormed the Net in 2007", security researchers say 2007 was the year online criminals showed off how smart and dangerous they can be. According to the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), between the '06 and '07 government fiscal years the total number of reported government cybersecurity incidents showed an increase from 23,632 to 37,213, with Federal incidents growing from 5,143 to 12,986. This explosion in the numbers doesn’t mean that the number of hackers are increasing in this rate, but hackers perfected automated tools that “wrapped old exploits in new gift boxes, sometimes changing the appearances of files offered as downloads as quickly as every five minutes”, writes Ryan Singel in his article.
A good example for increasing intensity of cybercrime is that anti-virus vendor F-Secure added 250,000 new signatures to its malware database this year, as many as the company added in its first 20 years combined.
Examples from 2007 include hackers selling access to MySpace pages (which can later be used to spam or spread malware), and a targeted attack on Salesforce.com that let an attacker get at the company's customer database. The really malicious attacks are not lures to fake sites that try to steal your bank-account login and password, but sites that redirect you to log in at your real bank but piggyback in with you and make transactions while you are logged in, according to Mark Gaffan who works in security giant RSA's Identity and Access Assurance Group.
In the US where cybercrime is the biggest issue, the government takes these cyber attacks seriously, and has stepped up its training and threat preparedness strategy to try to keep one step ahead. In 2006, the DHS/ National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) successfully executed the first government-led, full-scale cybersecurity exercise, Cyber Storm I. Over 100 public and private agencies, associations, and corporations (e.g. McAfee) participated in the exercise from over 60 locations and five countries, according to Carl Banzhof, author of an article in Computerworld ("Opinion: Government and industry unite in cybercrime battle").
18 Federal agencies, 9 states, 40 private-sector companies, and four international partners take part in a simulation, called Cyber Storm II, which has vital role in enhancing the nation's cybersecurity. Cyber Storm II will continue to strengthen connections between government and industry to help all parties cooperate effectively in the event of a real attack. The theme of Cyber Storm II will generally continue that of the 2006 exercise, challenging the public and private sector to respond to a large-scale, coordinated cyber attack, but with a much higher intensity rate. One of the biggest challenges for the Cyber Storm II community will be to distinguish real threats from "noise" on the network.
How can we defend ourselves? Mark Gaffan’s advice:
- use antivirus software;
- don't download programs from sites you don't trust;
- use bookmarks to log in to financial-services sites;
- remain vigilant of any e-mails dealing with financial sites, and expect a flood of spam in January 2008 advertising a bank's "new products" for the new year. Such e-mails were customized, he said, and used your name in the body of the message to make the story sound better.
Sources:
Computerworld article: "Government and industry unite in cybercrime battle"
Wired article "Report: Cybercrime Stormed the Net in 2007"
Wired article: “Teen Involved in MySpace Suicide Hoax Says Adult Also Participated”
Wired article: "Security Lapse Exposes Facebook Photos"
The New York Times article “Congress to Take Testimony on Internet Gambling Ban”
Toby Ward, President & CEO of Prescient Digital Media, a company focusing on the assessment, planning, technology selection, content and launch of intranets, websites, and web-based tools, wrote a comprehensive article on intranet planning and intranet project methodology which I found useful to summarize.
A successful intranet requires successful planning and execution especially in the following aspects: strategic planning, governance, functional planning, content, design, policies and processes, search, applications.
Intranet is not a technology system or IT project, nor is it a communications vehicle or channel; the intranet is a business system that should represent and support all areas of the business. In fact, the intranet is really only one part technology, and many parts people and process (including planning, governance, content, etc.).
The most critical determinant of an intranet’s success is people. The engagement of both senior management and end users are critical tasks during the planning of an intranet.
Optimal intranet success requires success on all levels of the above shown model (Level 1: Executive Support / Level 2: The Foundation (Planning, Resources, Content and Technology) / Level 3: Motivated Users); each level working in conjunction with one another.
Executive support
The potential of an intranet will never be fully realized without real executive support and a senior management champion (ideally either the CEO or CIO or Chief Communications Officer or equivalent). The number one challenge facing corporate intranets today is not technology, nor tight budgets, but rather internal politics, specifically, the politics of competing priorities and management agendas. The second biggest hurdle is a financial one. To win these challenges one needs a supportive senior management.
How to win executive support? Demonstrate how intranet can help the organization achieve its goals and objectives. One way of pitching this idea to executives, as Shel Holtz, principal of ABC, Holtz Communication + Technology, suggests, is to bring the executive team’s attention to articles from business publications that explain how other companies have achieved bottom-line success through the application of online technology.
Planning
The most critical to the Planning phase, is the incorporation of both the organization’s business requirements, and those of the end user employees. Without solid research and a detailed business requirements analysis, the intranet could significantly miss the mark. The simple trick works here as well: find out the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the intranet, then determine how you can meet your specific, measurable objectives with the audience and its needs.
Sources: Prescientdigital.com article IntranetBlog.com article 1 IntranetBlog.com article 2
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