SFSW.net ::: Tech News

Social Networking - the future

2010-03-27T03:34:00.001-07:00

From an article on Google Buzz by Robert Scobie - this is an answer about malleable social graphs and if Facebook will sink other crowd gathering networks...

I worked on a social graph application in 1999 which attempted to form groups on one hand and published professional reviews (usually very acidic) on the other. It used an analogical search function (which these applications seem to lack) and would be the key to being mallible. Not being a share holder I will not say what it was but the sharing of places to go, and the resultant conflict between masses of people with banal interest (think of crowds who attend a popular sport event - temporary - simple reasons for attachment) and the small groups of specialised interest have very different algorithms. Map location is not the first 2D associative array.

A malleable graph must work on a variable number of dimensions and FB may have the best chance of gathering enough interesting things about your trails of interest to suggest things to do - but if that is their plan - to become a social mind - then it may work better if everyone uses the same platform.

For example today I don't really feel like going to a 3 hour film but I do not yet realise that. If I go and wander the shops I may be interested in Sushi restaurants and if I can see my friends will gather at a pub, I would like to be invited, rather than informed? So the app needs to know not just what I may do, but be oriented at making connections to those nearby. But if my friends all wanted to see a 3 hour movie, I may not prefer to join them for lunch. That human behaviour is just a little hard to predict. But it is nice to be informed.

The trouble with business focused apps is they attempt to sell to advertisers rather than people.

I think opportunities like this may well work better on FB where people randomly express themselves in a fairly banal way. Buzz may well work better for discussions like this. Opening up new ideas and connections. Being invited to in depth discussion seminars with luminaries - that would not work against a social graph that did not reveal the inner workings of one's mind. Buzz works for people who think, Twitter does also, but very on the web, link-wise - but is "followers" an inaccurate term?

These location based apps and FB fail in one respect as it is not about desire (advertising). It is about reaction and incidence (information).

Technology Revolution

2009-08-24T05:15:00.000-07:00

It is bearing down upon us with ever increasing speed, the post information revolution will change the way we think, we act and indeed the way we breathe.

Like most of the technology revolutions, this one is creeping up on us all, gently. It will encroach upon our lives like a vine, obviating any need for replaceable human tasks and supplanting the need for the mundane with the pursuits of the individual mind.

Meantime the world worries about climate change and the real costs of energy. A trend to real worker efficiency will see the internet used in more extraordinary ways more commonly. The "remote operation" will become commonplace to fix mechanisms using internet controlled robots. Governance does not require presence either.

It is the humans who work together who require presence but costs of operating the business will be greatly reduced by enhanced ability to conduct meetings without it.

There is always a dark side to evolutionary robotics as conveyed in sci-fi movies where invitably we believe the machine will generate logic. Science fiction often precedes invention. AI has come a long way, but an artificial "will" has not yet been programmed.

Programming is in itself a wonderful thing - being able to create software is a passion. Customers look at you for your "web design" but the real beauty is under the bonnet. Strive always to write a better engine.

Ready for the Big time?

2009-03-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

I notice websites being mentioned on twitter or a local newspaper, getting more than 20 simultaneous users - then becoming unavailable to anyone else!

These sites have not considered scaling in their design or are badly hosted.

NZ Govt plans for optic fiber questions by big telcos

2009-02-25T04:11:00.000-08:00

The new National Party run government of New Zealand have a very unusual policy of investing 1 billion dollars in our network infrastructure. The big telcos are questioning the governments intent saying that it would provide for a whole new industry of problems to solve, like optical modems in every home? And how will homes deal with 100 Gigbytes of bandwidth? Of course except when downloading huge files, they will barely touch the sides. It is excessive and the socialist move by a conservative party - by investing in technical highways seems horribly misdirected. Education will do far more long term good. Unless there are inventions we have not been told about yet. Like being able to transmit experience, learning and skills over broadband. Now that would make the Governments investment worth it.

See Stuff NZ article

The value of high speed broadband

2009-02-06T22:39:00.000-08:00

The value of high speed broadband can not be understated. That is if you are a movie producer, TV producer or any kind of business who sees an advantage in the zero cost penetrative medium - when the web is used intelligently, it gets an audience, an accumulative audience. But it is also hyper competitive - what works today may not tomorrow - and it is really the human talent behind the evolution of websites that work that really is the basis of what the internet is capable of delivering. High tech high profile internet "busts" sound terrible until you realise that there are still some who commission software projects like the latest snake oil - but a quality software project may take the work of a team of ten programmers which when subjected to the realities of the market may get absorbed into a larger unit due to business consolidation displacing others in the process. And thus the market gets to produce less product focused on a market need, and diversifies as individuals are able to make their own mark. The value of readily available high speed broadband appears to be simply video delivery. The value of video delivery is in teaching and it does not require the internet to be a replacement television network. The value of all this online video is, as a form of knowledge, limited. It is linear (you have to watch it all) and it is atextual (meaning it requires simple tags to create links to it, these tend to be a combination of targeted generics basically pitching every similar business against each other if they could spark/fake up enough "relevance" that the search engines can be seen to take notice. Search engine or whatever comes next to tell us what to watch - success in this realm has to do with connectivity, sure, but it has far far more to do with software. That is why international giants like YouTube exist - they are not ahead in upload and delivery technology - but they do have an audience. Just how committed that audience is, well it depends on the nature of the content. It is not riveting. I followed (for a while) three of the leading channels on YouTube, they are good and entertaining to watch. But do I want to go back?

More important, do I want to watch them again? How about fostering the development of content, like the BBC does. The deal with the TV license has given some of the most extraordinary documentaries for the world to see (for a fee, online, or from your local DVD hire). It has provided capital and now there is a library that new audience will want to see for years to come.

The main value of high speed broadband is to foster our citizen led film industry. We produced Peter Jackson. Now with a video camera in every ten year old's hands - someone will produce a zero budget master piece.

Companies who compete internationally are benefit by reliable predictable broadband availability. But to broadcast to the world, we must decrease the cost of international bandwidth or the massive increase in internal bandwidth will bottleneck our international bandwidth. Think, how does the motorway work when you jam more cars onto it? What if we increase maximum available bandwidth to every downloading teenager - that does not auger well for the availability of international bandwidth. There must be provision for that first. We are slow on the internet internationally, but locally we have a service that is adequate if the software is written to deal with a crowd rather than one, maybe two simultaneous users.

That is the problem. The new government is about to spend 1 billion on broadband availability. Great, spend half on international bandwidth and then train sofware professionals who can write software that scales successfully. And New Zealand will discover a new industry.

It is worth considering more carefully than a chant for "more bandwidth!" - it is really at a point where we are not efficiently using what we have.

See also:

LA Times

The Web Advertising Model

2008-12-16T01:11:00.000-08:00

There has been much written about the web as a medium for advertisers. It seems to me that the prevailing tide does not support the theory of trickle down profits from mere numbers boasted about on some web assets. I am not saying that it does not work, it does in a whisper - village - kind of way. But image based impactual advertising requires a new breed of intellect if it is to survive the move of intellectual stimulation from magazines, newspapers, televisions and onto the web as a common medium for all. Why should we? 3G receivers allow us individual access to thousands of video shops of content. So content has a value? Hello?

Content has always had a value. Getting people to pay for it is not really a problem. The most rapacious pirates in the world do not sail about Somalia, but are most likely teenagers doing it because it is a bit of a lark and they do not have much pocket money, but still want to be in on the latest Spiderman movie. Policing the web against piracy may not be the answer. But in this phenomena lies the solution to advertisers.

In this blog and on sfsw.net in 2009 an exploration of how to make the web a most profitable place for the advertiser is part of the agenda. The first thing I feel is important is to ignore social networking as a medium for advertising. What?

Did I just say that? Yes. There is no point advertising when the product is self indulgence. Good art incorporates "the other" and advertising is dependent upon it.

If you watch Robert de Niro prattle on about his shopping trip, it may also be fundamentally a bad vehicle to plaster an advert upon.

It is a question of what is the web good at? It is good at demanding that users fill in forms to a collective hiss. It is good at delivering and organising content and allows the full intellect of conceptually brilliant artisans who write software to create machines that do work for us. Not idle chores so much as systems. From the thousands of advertising systems - The Google's model has been most successful. It is so much more than advertising, though.

Targetted content is only a part of the picture. Video has its limits, it tends to be singular in idea delivery (takes much time)- whereas the web provides multiple paths into everything. Images do so much. But what do we want the web to do for us? It is great at selling software. It is brilliant at distributing music. It is getting quite good at being a super convenient video store. But what is it best at?

Come back to this blog, this deserves expansion in a future posting.

Modes of Software

2008-08-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

The world is changing its dynamics and nowhere is this more apparent than in computer language use and infusion into the fabric of the world. And its about to take another leap.

EarthMine is like GoogleEarth with its phototags - criticised as some kind of invasion of "privacy" - a charge to which Google said that there is no real privacy left to protect when it comes to whats there - but now it goes a level further. The EarthMine is a 3D map of every coordinate in a city. (Of course it is not being updated live, maps tend not to be).

Being able to realistically model and make changes to a city's infrastructure by 3D mapping every building, street and eventually things like cabling would make city management vastly more sophisticated.

Such new objects require a different approach to programming. We already have "object orientated" languages that allow the complex interrelationship of "models" of things like business relationships and even friendship. Web 2.0 is really a bunch of programmers seeing that another layer of logic is required for us to have a "smoother" web experience.

Web 2.0 is not a technology. It is a range of technologies that together allow a "smooth interaction" - some of these are in fact just animations to lull our senses but users respond well to that, so it is factually a part of communication. Modern javascript libraries like jQuery are a treat for programmers as they package into an integratable form things like slow fades and movement decay (so the programmer can just worry about what they want to achieve). Compartmentalisation allows relationships to be discrete. It is essential that interactions between elements are understood and controlled.

Now we have new "environments" for friendship, first "ecommerce" and then "social networking" evolved new software techniques and spawned new languages. Learning new languages is not difficult but sometimes the differences are subtle.

The Good Old Hacker Community

2008-07-10T00:42:00.000-07:00

Security researchers are criticizing hacker Dan Kaminsky for keeping quiet about technical details of a critical DNS flaw.

If he did publish the way that the hacker community traditionally do, and if many of the world's D.N.S. software manufacturers were unable to compete with the simplicity of the hack - they would not work out what was wrong before the infrastructure caching invasion set for possibly days or longer sites for the highest bidder (i.e. gambling, pornography, virus launching, dangerous, harmful, spam sites) but hidden in DNS subnets. If you consider how the DNS works, it would mean damages in the trillions of dollars.

Therefore, some toleration of the occasional fraud of publicity seeking sensationalists is a small price to pay when faced with the potential loss of value from web facing business, in fact - instant brand degradation and cut off from the rest of the world, making business takes a pragmatic stance on computer viruses. Treat any old story as important.

Is this one important? Well if it is, then the only harm will come from DNS software that is not fixed, and may still exist in between routes. Of all the doors to leave unlocked, DNS? It is like a mutual blind spot. It is only the one that could really cripple things.

When you think of the freely available 2048-bit encryption software that is readily available and used for host control technical access to the internet for good reason.

That DNS keys are cheaply calculated 16 bit values is enough to make me fret with fear. If Dan Kaminsky has fixed that in much of the DNS software world-wide, well he had done humanity a massive favour.

In my view an "exploit method" is subject to the author's copyright and just because the "hacker community" have an open source exposure requiring proof of concept, creating a sort of hacker no-go territory (no hacker worth his salt would use a published exploit!), is not necessarily protecting the rest of us who are subject to the upgrade whims of mega-corporations, and changing terms and conditions littered with retroactive legal agreements and mostly unread clauses.

The Hacker Community correctly sees itself as a modern form of Robin Hood, but the use of a secure and safe internet is far better for humanity than a broken one.

The hacker community may amuse themselves in their wisdom but underestimate their value to the real world because of their magic code. Publication of all exploits. Then at least it would be lame, if for example some terrorist used one that was "in the open" to compromise the security of a satellite system that used hardware that could not easily be upgraded, and launched a military attack in the area the hacker lived in, that would genuinely suck.

Anarchy has its rewards, and of course, it's risks.

Hosting outage

2008-05-21T05:26:00.001-07:00

CNN coverage

sfsw.net went off line for some hours yesterday - due to a huge storm in Atlanta

We are now switching to backup services but while we do, here is our man on the ground with his expanation.

Things will be back to normal shortly. Our more crucial client sites will be switched to backup servers first, then our other sites if the main site does not return.

Severe storm cells came through North Georgia Region this evening. AtlantaNAP experienced an over current fault outage on one of our 2 main feeds. The feed is the original feed that has the most load currently connected to it. The amount of systems connected to the load is the amount of lightning and over current that will try to be passed to the system – i.e. if you don’t have very much load on it - like our new feed is currently only at 1/6th load - then current does not try to flow to it very much. Our first system is currently at 65% load so it tried to absorb much more of the lightning strike than the other one and hence the main breaker going into over current fault.

I have spoken with all of our key electrical engineers associated with the building at this point. According to Georgia power / our PSSI and Cummins engineers – we likely took a lightning strike to the utility very near the facility which caused an over current fault on our main incoming breaker on our first set of switchgear. The breaker is designed to trip in the event of this kind of fault to protect the gear (your computers) inside the building from being burned up by the lightning strike.

When this type of fault happens - the computer that is the brains of the swithgear will not start the generators until an engineer verifies where the fault is. This is because a fault inside the wiring plant could also cause this kind of over current in the event of a main short if a feeder wire of main current in the building were to become damaged.

In that case it would be very dangerous to turn the power back on manually or to force a manual start of the gen sets and push current to the system with a fault remaining. Lives and machinery could be lost.

We dispatched several of our staff visually to inspect for faults – (we did not want to turn something on and have it fry everyone’s gear) and found none and verified it was likely a lightning strike and manually started the generators to restore power. Unfortunately the ups system is only designed to carry that load for 10 minutes which was not enough time for us to safely verify and do a manual start.

This is apparently a rare event – to get a direct utility strike like this – that close that does not get dissipated before it hits us. The farther away from your site the strike occurs - the more other load and grounds it has to dissipate before it gets to you.
The good news is we did not burn up any equipment.

Some of you did not lose power because you were connected to the other lightly loaded feed coming in and it was not enough load source to overwhelm the breaker since it is only 18% loaded at this point.

Some of you lost network connectivity because downstream feeder switches that your computers are connected to are only single power supply units.

We are in the process of examining a facility wide network upgrade that will move to a newer chassis based solution throughout the facility - we started looking at this as a way to offer new services capability that many f you have been asking for - it is a costly upgrade and will bring redundancy but also brings some pitfalls as well since you have more connections into a single chassis. We are still looking at this currently and will keep you up to date as to the direction we decide to move.

They have told me that under normal operating conditions there is really nothing we could have done and we should simply be glad we had good equipment installed that kept our computers from being fried.

I am thankful that I am not looking at a lot of damaged equipment that could not simply be turned back on - that would be a disaster I do not want to deal with. At this point it seems like the new switchgear with over current protection was a good investment.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this outage has caused. Unfortunately there's not much you can do to protect yourself from freak events like this!

We are working hard to get the server back online ASAP.

SFSW.net - developing a new functionality

2008-03-01T15:36:00.000-08:00

Starfish Software was named after an earlier enterprise shared with a genius entertainer who is still marketing wildly and creates better stuff on the internet that I ever will - spending tens of thousands no doubt or more on top of the line designers. That is his thing - that the eye is pleased by what it sees.

Starfish Software has an entirely different agenda. It is the bits of workability that I aim to provide, and inventing new thingees is part of it. Hence, I spent five minutes putting a bunch of googley widgets on the site, only to notice Windows XP, Mac-OS and even browers getting in on the widget act.

It is a nice wee paradigm - the little browser universe run application in its own window but melding into the browser, safely and without doing any harm to your computer as it is "in the browser".

Yeah, right. How is an application delivered over the internet any different to one that lives inside a "browser environment" supposed to protect you? You go out and buy games, these are sometimes entire universes of fictional "reality" where you are expected to go around shooting "people".

There is another appplication that is entirely different, and yet nearly the same as that, Second Life - a virtual world where anything is possible.

Anything? Well anything that is socially accepted by our shared annonymous not so secret work of human expression.

Is it useful? As a paradigm reality that we can engage with people that we would not normally engage with we can risk communication at a whole new level without physical threat.

Developing software for environments like SL is yet another new frontier for software writers to engage with. Is there a demand for it? Not here. One would not want to find SL populated by plenty of programmers offering God like services. But one suspects one will.

The next phase of sfsw.net shall be in providing more than the best international hosting space we can find and the best damn domain support service at a fixed price - but your choice of Content Management branded with your look, and software that suits your requirement from corporate to individual.

All on-line. All easy.

Junk war rages on despite spam act

2007-10-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

Junk war rages on despite spam act - 01 Oct 2007 - NZ Herald: Technology News from New Zealand and around the World

A few weeks ago there was a major change in the way NZ business faced emailing potential customers. The new Spam legislation is a double whammy to NZ Business. It elevates Email from a cost free method of contacting customers to a large potential for liability if one is found guilty of emitting spam.

The problem is that most NZ originated spam is worthless. We can legislate using the crimes act for locally sourced spam, but the problem is internationally sourced spam. Email filters are eliminating 95% of all emails to protect us from spam.

And ISPs seem to have no answers. Filtering Email is just not cricket. It is not an email service when as a system it does not work.

How many people look at their inbox without an ounce of fear? How many Emails are being filtered out before you get them? There simply has to be a better way.

Opt-in mailing can be taken a stage further - customer management of email lists. Where should this management occur? At the client end? At the server end?

ISPs taking on this responsibility (in between server and client) are either: filtering out real mail; or, not filtering enough mail. How can they get it exactly right?

new SFSW services

2007-09-26T21:13:00.000-07:00

New Zealand

If you have a mailing list that requires new postcodes or reformatting for New Zealand post, get in touch with us for advice that may save you thousands of dollars.

When all else fails, try SOA best practices

2007-09-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

When all else fails, try SOA best practices: "'We have a best practices driven approach that SOA is architecture,' Bloomberg said. 'Architecture consists of best practices for leveraging IT to meet changing business needs. It doesn't start with the technology. It doesn't start with vendors. It starts with asking what do you want to do and what is the best way to do it?'"

In other words, a "services oriented architecture" seems to exist but nobody is about to lay claim to having found the right one yet as it is a burgeoning activity. If software is designed as a set of intricate services that are linked or are not linked; it sounds simple enough. But design is everything. If you do not fit things together properly early on for the activity, then when do we have? Lots of little activities. Each one may have a level of complexity but part of the idea of SOA is to keep services independent of each other. That is avoiding complexity.

The idea being to create parts of a system that can operate independent of each other. They do not contain parts of each other but send "function calls" to each other using WDSL and SOAP protocols. These are just ways to communicate that both end will understand and can verify.

The idea of foreign calls or "SOA viruses" or more accurately interceding services can be prevented by the protocol. It provides glue to link legacy systems to web access, as well as provide for inter-system functionality.

But the quote above implies that the reason for SOA is that IT is too hard to adapt to changing business needs. I would argue that changing business needs are just a factor of instability that arises when uncertainty exists in the business model. That an evolving business tries to adapt software to meet it needs but its own evolution is pegged to its understanding of IT capability.

No, the idea is to allow software to be adapted to suit new business conditions. The days of "the software is like that, so the business must follow" are over.

New Location

2007-08-23T01:57:00.000-07:00

This newsletter is now part of the new sfsw.net site:

You can bookmark this location:
newsletter.sfsw.net

Skype outage

2007-08-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

Skype say that a Windows update caused an international reboot of Windows machines. Geekzone says that is rubbish, as it does not match the Microsoft update schedule. But, twice, late last week my Windows box rebooted itself perhaps following an automatic update (but no virus or spyware found).

Microsoft updates are able to reboot machines - I wonder if that was what actually happened?

International simultaneous reboots would make it hard for P2P to recover if everyone has the same timeouts. If so, it should have also affected BitTorrent, Joost, etc.

It is also possible that a new issue within the Windows update affected how peer to peer worked - and it makes me wonder about automatic updates as a security risk.

When Worlds Collide: Gates and Jobs on the Same Stage

2007-06-02T17:03:00.000-07:00

When Worlds Collide: Gates and Jobs on the Same Stage - Post I.T. - A Technology Blog From The Washington Post - (washingtonpost.com)

A memory lane journey on 16K of RAM - the original pioneers of microcomputing are now owned by Gates and Jobs - but these guys did write some pretty amazing stuff before we put gigabytes in our machines.

I remember computers that took cartridges - from the expandable TRS-80 (and clone Dick Smith System 80) that broke the mould giving the user a huge 48K of memory - Commodore PETs were State of the Art before that with 16K or 32K if you were extraordinarily cool and wealthy - the smooth phosphor of the tiny screen in a retro space age packaging is memorable. Catridges were used as a consumer level bus - fixed slot bus extenders featured on the extraordinary SORD (128K RAM was just one of its breakthroughs) of the early 80s (PIPS - its early concept of intelligent pages is a precursor to Javascript and Web pages, even user negotiated content management), the Epson 400 - hi res green screen with graphics to die for (256k RAM I think) - the last machine before the IBM PC (640K RAM) dominated and made Gates a huge fortune. The first attack of the clone IBM PCs ensured that IBM did not benefit as much as Microsoft from the early part of the boom shipping DOS then Windows Version 1.0, 95, 98, 98 SE, XP, and now Vista. Meantime Apple has gone from Appledos, to Mac OS to Mac OSX (a well tamed Linux derivative). I sold the very last IBM AT (the second generation IBM PC - now would be considered so slow and clunky - I sold the very last one sold in New Zealand and probably the world, just as the PS2 came out. The price for the genuine IBM AT was just under $14,000 in 1986 I think. The PS2 broke the mould by nearly halving the cost at $7,000. That was probably why I took up programming.

Wi-Fi

2007-04-22T19:07:00.000-07:00

Danger on the airwaves: Is the Wi-Fi revolution a health time bomb? - Independent Online Edition > Health Medical

There are articles appearing now about the dangers of widespread WiFi adoption. We all love progress but if it is bad for our long term health, there may well be advantages in the investment of enough digging machines to install optical fibre cables in every city as appears to be the case in Auckland's rebuilding of its central Queen Street.

AM Radio picks up when there is WiFi and a good old fashioned AM Radio is full of electronic noise over Queen Street. One day the internet has a severe outage, and the AM Radio was clear over Queen Street for an hour or two.

WiFi has its uses - where human contact is casual it may make little difference. But when it is constant it may bear a health risk as do mobile phones.

I say leave the old co-ax in place for your local network for the time being. When optical fibre systems are cheap, they will become the norm.

Architecting Systems

2007-04-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

UML is the probably the best diagramatical representation of logic for fitting together complex websites. But does diagramming entity relationships enhance or regulate creativity?

The secret is in mastering the macro expression in language that most closely matches the structure and then becoming able to express concepts accurately in the language. The key to great programming is susinct language and yet so many programmers will over express the path to the goal by being hurried along by sales for a demo model of the system.

Lack of architecure affects many forms of system maintenance. When dealing with a legacy base, and introducing a strict technology such as XSLT processing, we have to be very sure that our code is completely bug free both as code and whatever final HTML grammer is generated has to work in the browser universe.

There are two kinds of XML processing but only one guarantees browser independence. And until browsers are more stable than the current crop and have implemented XSLT Version 2 we are stuck with a powerful macro language which at server end can combine simple templates with database generated XML. Adding internal functionality like sorting columns makes for a useful and flexible user interface.

But it is a three to six month project for the first one. Take a modular approach all the way and resist the chant of sales persons who want the thing to "just work". The job of the Xtreme Programmer is to think outside the square in debugging and sometimes producing workarounds. Its not a life.

Architecture is the vision of structure. The fleshing out of this structure occurs befofe implemnetation. The beauty of Object oriented design is that it is not that hard to write a buffering object and then reuse it in lots of other objects. So you need a video stream. Later on you hook it via a buffering object. Its simple code jigsaws that easily fit because the object contains the data interface in conceptually labeled XML structures.

Intel 10 Tera-Instructions Per Second by 2015

2007-02-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

Intel Wants 10 Tera-Instructions Per Second by 2015, Starts 80 Core Chip - Tech News - Playfuls.com - Science & Technology

Intel have a plan to develop a 80 core CPU capable of 1 teraflop of computation. Intel's pioneer teraflop computer was 2000 square feet, the new one is the size of a thumbnail, and only consumes 63 watts of power.

This means that we will enjoy technical advances many times the progress to date in terms of speed and the ability to address huge arrays in memory. In other words going beyond hi-def TV and mobile phones. Imagine what comes next?

The Simple Way

2007-02-11T20:54:00.000-08:00

Why do site optimisation by trying to trick search engines into delivering content based on fake blogs that point at the site? It seems to get hits, seems a good reason.

Making a noise on the web does depend upon TRACTION.

Traction is defined as the tendancy for humans to communicate with each other about something that is truly impressive they have experienced so they want others to see it too.

Social networking at best is revealing new tricks and techniques to a hungry audience. Oh I found a great deal at this site - but Fred over there found that and ... but it seems really just a bunch of webmasters who want to gather a crowd so fake a lot of noise. It always works. But is there a better way to build a site's growth programme.

Real social network may have a limited value, but fake social networking may results in governmental fines and charges of misrepresentation.

By the use of real blogs written by people who are really interested, we lead real curious buyers around the web. It is not just the noise that the crowd makes. It has to be the content, as well. Fake blogs are search engine manipulation, pure and simple. They have no value.

The hits that arrive via faked URLs do not usually end up being of any value. It is the noise of the gathering crowd that is of interest.

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/12/022226&from=rss

Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life

2007-02-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life - playing Second Life (a virtual world simulation where designed persona live in a virtual world) may take a lot of time. But a "new" game seems set to claim some of these wasted hours! Go on, get a First Life!

Vista wreaks havoc on games, report

2007-02-01T15:58:00.000-08:00

Vista wreaks havoc on games, report

Web 2.0 marketing I MySpace advertising I Youtube marketing

2007-01-25T15:58:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 marketing I MySpace advertising I Youtube marketing

In depth - pecunix reporting

2007-01-15T22:34:00.000-08:00

In depth - pecunix reporting Gold based payment system.

Micro Persuasion: The Small Wide Web

2007-01-09T17:58:00.000-08:00

Micro Persuasion: The Small Wide Web

less=more

Web applications that are widget based are very popular due to the modular nature they assume as part of a web production.

An example of a widget based production:

A company has a CRM system
They do not want to expose it to the world
but want to get your input

they create you an identity that is easily accessed

they create a widget linked to your identity that gets only the data that is tailored to your experience

they can now safely plug your content into their CRM without exposing anything of its private information

Achieving this kind of application is easy. Designing it before others inhabit this space is the challenge - imagine a world full of post-it notes.

What makes your widget more important than others is the CRM that it is populating and what that means in terms of your data capture.