Subject Matters

I installed Pocket Blog at my Qtek 110 and I am writing this post using it. Now l can post wherever l am. True meaning of ‘communicator’ word now is much more clear.

Having at moment some troubles with it I still think I will make it work properly.

Kevin Werbach provides interesting summary of what we are seeing around us: “Something that gets me quite jazzed these days is the way so many innovations are linking up and leveraging one another. It’s not just, ‘hey, check out that cool company!’ Blogs, search-based innovations, tags, and so forth allow both new startups and established platforms like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! to build on one another. The emergent whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

San Francisco will tomorrow become the first jurisdiction in the country to declare that bloggers should be treated no differently than traditional media. That’s what the San Francisco City Attorney will state at a meeting of the city’s Board of Supervisors. The Board is considering an amendment to the city ordinance that would require full disclosure of who is paying for political messages.

The proposed language exempts “news stories, commentaries or editorials distributed through any newspaper, radio station, television station or other recognized news medium” unless the medium is “owned or controlled” by a candidate, political party or committee.

So are blogs a “recognized news medium?” Yes, the City Attorney will say at the Supervisors’ meeting tomorrow. What’s not clear is whether independent individuals who are paid to do partisan blogging would fall under the press exemption. For instance, would a campaign consultant be able to blog without disclosure? What if he or she were not being paid directly by a campaign, party or committe? What if someone were being paid for technical consulting and was “volunteering” to publish dirt on the opposition? I couldn’t reach the City Attorney’s office for comment.

…continues

As Google goes into video blogging, Microsoft goes into video download service for handheld devices.

Microsoft has finalized a service that has been in testing which lets PDA, Smartphone and Portable Media Center owners download content from outlets such as MSNBC, Fox Sports, IFILM, DIY and CNBC to their mobile devices.

Some of the content is available for free, but a premium membership unlocks much more at a cost of only $20/year. Subscribers set up a profile online to determine which content they want to receive and it’s automatically downloaded to the Windows Media Player 10 library on their PC. From there it can be synchronized with PDAs, Smartphones and Portable Media Centers. The only requirement is Windows Media Player 10 on both the PC and mobile device.

For more information visit the MSN Video Downloads site here: http://www.msnvideodownloads.com/

[ Via ВargainPDA.com ]

Personally I found Microsoft’s move to be very smart. I don’t remember their other initiative with service to be placed ahead of emerging market in such a nice way. Think about it. Many of people waiting for boarding at airports - for example - could be interested to play with (and perhaps pay for) this service. Most of them usually do not have time for looking for and watching video with more common devices, including notebook or desktop computers.

If you have a Wi-Fi connectivity device (most of which are Windows-powered Pocket PCs) chances you will use this service will rise. And if you still don’t have a Wi-Fi you will give a good thought to purchase one. That makes a good sense for new markets development, which is the right thing for Microsoft’s further expansion.

Google Experiments with Video Blogging PunkOfLinux writes “TechWeb has an article about Google’s plans to start a video service that sounds similar to Picasa. Excerpt: ‘While there’s no formal announcement yet, Google co-founder Larry Page said Monday that the well-known search engine concern would soon let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google’s servers, partly in an effort to learn more about how to more efficiently search and display information about video-based data.’”

John Robb writes about Joe Reger’s new venture:

The concept is simple. Data is usually locked up in monolithic applications (CRM, ERP, etc.). Application seats are expensive. Training is expensive. Etc. People that need the data often can’t get to it.

What if human readable data flows (via RSS) could be generated by these applications? It would allow the development of easy to read weblogs (that republished these RSS flows) that almost everyone in the company would find valuable. The combinations are almost limitless and the flow is completely automated.

The flip side is also extremely valuable. Using a weblog model of data entry, it would become much easier to train people to enter data in a timely fashion. Further, they get immediate feedback on their efforts since the data they post is transformed into an entry on the blog.

To be honest that seems a little bit eccentric for me as ERP consultant. In ERP applications users typicaly get regular output in the form of report. Alerts are another form of output for irregular information. Then there is one more way of getting information called query. I can hardly imagine these to be replaced by RSS. What I am thinking about is typical scenario where some user is processing each transaction on a one by one basis. Then RSS-like presentation could be very interesting to think about. The examples could be order approval, cost account/element assignment,  order shipment, etc.

But as for CRM it’s quite another matter. As Reger explains:

Let’s take the example of a sales force working at a Fortune 100 company. This sales force works on long-cycle consultative sales that generally take 60-90 days to complete.

Traditional Blogging:

Members of the sales force make blog entries each time they talk to or visit a potential client. This practice is valuable because it creates a repository of sales tactics and results.

dataBlogging:

Just like in traditional blogging, members of the sales force make entries each time they visit a potential client. However, and this is the key, because their blog entries have additional data fields on them they track quantifiable information like Chance of Close, Effectiveness of Pitch, Hours Invested, etc.

Graphs are generated from the extended data attached to each blog. For example, an Effectiveness of Pitch vs. Hours Invested graph will determine whether spending more time selling is worthwhile.

The Advanced Data Search feature is used to find entries based on quantifiable data searches… in much the same way that somebody might query a database. However, it is done simply through a web interface by anybody.

The extended data for each sales call is published in RSS feeds, meaning that other enterprise systems can consume it… a simple integration between the dataBlogging system and more complex and possibly more difficult-to-use legacy systems.

Google Prefetching for Mozilla Browsers kv9 writes “A post on GoogleBlog reveals that Google has enabled results prefetching for Mozilla based browsers, which means that the top results of queries are being loaded in the background and pages will load faster. More info on the Mozilla Prefetching FAQ and the Google Webmaster FAQ”

Open Source Social Bookmarking Service comforteagle writes “This past week I launched an open source social bookmarking competitor to delicio.us - de.lirio.us. After running it for a while open to the public it appears to be running relatively bug free so this is the invitation to the Slashdot crowd. The code is entirely open and the content is cc licensed, so I’m sure it won’t take too long for folks to cook up some additional tools aside from the blogging feature. For those not familiar the meme is social bookmarking, which is basically a service to share bookmarks publicly instead (or in addition to) only within your browser. There are lots of other additional benefits, but that’s the gist of it. More details here and here.”

Tom Foremski writes for SiliconValleyWatcher:

I was at HP Labs Tuesday morning, chatting with Josh Tyler and Philippe Debaty about their work in trying to determine how people will use camera phones. A primary goal of HP Labs is to be able to predict novel uses of consumer technologies and develop supporting computer products or services.

But in today’s world, these researchers are realising that they cannot do things the old way, and that they have to get out of the labs.

If you want to discover aggregate social behaviors around photos and sharing, take a look at Flickr’s millions of users. There are communities on Flickr that could not have been predicted. And this is true of all true platforms–in the current sense of technology platforms for groups: unpredictable behaviors and communities will arise.

Using 20 HP Labs researchers is not going to reveal many, if any, novel uses. How many people using a platform technology would it take to flag the potential for large aggregate social behaviors, I asked? ..

Clearly, these researchers will need to change their approach. They should be out on the Internet crouching in the bushes and taking notes on what people are doing, and then determine new product development. In fact, these should be boom times for anthropologists. Surely, now is their time(!)

Spotting potentially large aggregate social behaviors, and being the first to monetise them, is going to be the name of the game in the consumer digital space.

John Robb has a wish: “Here’s a product I would like to use. When I was at UserLand we used a group instant outliner to coordinate our efforts. It was very, very helpful. The only problem was the desktop to desktop synchronization. One way to fix that would be to offer a group outliner as a subscription-based Web service. A group instant outliner that works like Google Maps (as an example of the real-time, responsive, visually intensive Web service) would be amazing. Let me say it again: it would amazing.

WSJ writes:

Four years ago, Jimmy Wales launched a free online encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Now, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, and Mr. Wales is building on its success with a new venture. This time, he intends to make a buck.

Mr. Wales’s closely held company Wikia Inc. has begun promoting its first for-profit endeavor, an ad-supported site called Wikicities.com that is based on the concept behind Wikipedia. Through Wikicities, groups of Web users can create their own free Web sites and fill them with, well, nearly anything. Among the topics being discussed on the nascent site: Macintosh computers, college hockey and real-world cities like Los Angeles, Beijing and Calgary.

A9.com with Syndicated Search joeykiller writes “Search Engine Watch reports that Amazon now lets you add your own search to their A9 search engine. Users can opt-in to use additional search engines in addition to A9.com’s own when searching. Amazon has chosen to use an extension of RSS 2.0 for this, and hopes that this format will enable search syndication in the same way RSS did for content. Several add-on searches are available already, among them New York Times, Wikipedia and NASA.”

Dave Pollard develops concept of online collaboration tools pack:

Ideally, using a combination of

1. Skype (free global VoIP telephony),
2. White-boarding (everyone online can see what anyone posts to the white-board),
3. Document-sharing and
4. Mindmapping or some similar session annotation tool (everyone can see what the group’s ’scribe’ has documented as the findings, decisions and next actions from the collaboration)

would be a close approximation to an in-person collaborative session. But that’s a lot of technology to juggle on your screen, to hog and interfere with your bandwidth, and (if you opt for the more powerful tools in these categories) can also require some outlay of money. My experience has been (thanks in no small part to the valuable insights of online communication wizard Robin Good and Skypemaster Stu Henshall) that video-conferencing (seeing the people you’re talking with online) is a “nice to have” not a “need to have”, especially when bandwidth limitations force you to choose which applications to have running at any one time.

I am confident that, as bandwidth and processing power continue to expand, we will soon see:

• A single, free, reliable, easy-to-use, professional-looking application that will provide what I’ve called Simple Virtual Presence — the four applications listed above plus the option of videoconferencing (illustrated above), and
• A simple, free, easy-to-use collaboration space where the results of the online collaboration sessions, and a library of relevant resources and links, are stored, with wiki-like capability so it can be maintained by any and all in the group.

Paul Graham about good writing:

A lot of people ask for advice about writing. How important is it to write well, and how can one write better? In the process of answering one, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay on the subject.
I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

Yahoo Fights Back in Battle With Google ChipGuy writes “Om Malik has a great analysis of how Yahoo is fighting back the Google assault. ‘A handful of blog-evangelists, a couple of key buys - (Odd Post and Flickr) have turned Yahoo from a dot.has.been to the new darling of the chattering classes.’ Yahoo’s new initiatives like Yahoo 360 are even apprently making Yahoo Web 2.0 compliant.”

Paul Boutin writes @ Slate:

Editors and relatives often ask me if there’s an application that lets you scrawl notes on a Web page. Instead of e-mailing a link to a news story, you could circle what you think is important before passing it on; rather than bookmarking a page, you could slap on a sticky note. The funny thing is, that kind of Web page annotation software has been around since before Netscape. Yet hardly anyone uses it, and none of the top browser makers has embraced it.
In 2001, Microsoft bought Web page markup technology from a company called E-Quill but hasn’t incorporated any of its features into Internet Explorer. The iMarkup toolbar, which debuted to rave reviews in 2000, hasn’t gotten much buzz since. You can still get iMarkup — a 30-day trial is free and it costs $39.95 if you want to keep it after that. One screenshot says it all: You can highlight parts of a page, post sticky notes, draw freehand, and insert arrows, links, file attachments, and sound bites. Taking notes on the Slate home page won’t change what other surfers see. But when you revisit the page, iMarkup will remember what you wrote and slap your notes atop the live site. In one simple step, you can e-mail your annotations (or a screenshot of your annotations) to a friend. Using a free iMarkup plug-in, they can then view your notes overlaid atop the live site.
After playing around with iMarkup for just five minutes, I was convinced that it’s a useful tool. But after a few more days of tinkering, I realized that Web page annotation has flopped because it doesn’t offer a compelling reason to change how we use computers. You could take notes in iMarkup, but it’s more straightforward to jot down your thoughts in Word. You could also use it to collaborate with colleagues, but it’s easier to send an e-mail or instant message. Then it hit me — there is a compelling reason to scribble on Web pages and news stories. This is the killer app for political bloggers.

Read a full story

News.com writes about the old technology that’s suddently become the hottest new thing:

Start-ups and industry giants such as Microsoft continue to devise newfangled systems for delivering desktop-like applications over the Web. But search giant Google has taken a different path, using older technology to build its newest applications such as Google Maps and Gmail.

That’s prompted developers to take a second look at old-hat technologies that have been kicking around on the Web since the 1990s, such as JavaScript and Dynamic HTML.

Those older technologies–such as the JavaScript scripting language, the Cascading Style Sheets recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for applying styles to multiple Web pages, and other coding bells and whistles–are sometimes grouped under the marketing term Dynamic HTML, or DHTML.

John Reynolds adds:

The basic message of AJaX is that modern browsers, through a combination of JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest, provide an advanced client that allows you to write rich client interfaces without the need to deploy a plugin.

So far so good, but when you look at the mechanisms that are currently available to take advantage of AJaX, a boatload of JavaScript embedded in an HTML file, you will probably experience a sickening feeling of deja vu all over again.

AJaX totally blows the idea of seperating presentation markup and code snippets. The result brings back memories of pre-custom tag JSP pages… a little puddle of HTML markup embedded in an ocean of Java code (only this time it’s JavaScript).

The promise of AJaX is exciting, but until tools and frameworks automate the generating of “AJaX” we’re back to some pretty ugly and potentially buggy UI code.

Lee Gomes wrote in WSJ: “What’s new is that Ajax lets them do so in a speedier way. In the past, to change even a small part of a Web page required reloading the entire page. But Ajax knows to fetch only the part of the screen that needs changing — like the edges of the Google map window as you move around…Because less information is being sent from the main server, things move more quickly. That takes Ajax applications a big step toward the Holy Grail of having the kinds of speed and responsiveness in Web-based programs that’s usually associated only with desktop software, like Microsoft Office.”

Molly Wood alarms that “Google’s going to build a Web-based thin client-type hosted environment-slash-operating system replacement.”

Think about Gmail, which, in a broadband situation, is probably more responsive than Outlook; and Google Maps, which doesn’t show any signs of redrawing as you drag the image all over your screen. That’s the power of Ajax, which removes most of the server communication, almost making you forget you’re using the Web. Now think about what would happen if you had a word processor, a spreadsheet app, a photo editor, an instant messenger, a browser, a music jukebox, and any other “software application” running inside a Web framework that’s as fast and responsive as any desktop you’ve ever used. Now imagine being able to access that environment from any Web-enabled computer (or device), anywhere. Remember Bill Gates saying, 10 years ago, that traditional software was dead and that all software would eventually be delivered over the Internet? Well, I think Google was listening.

Richard Koman at SiliconValleyWatcher picks curious topic. Annalee Newitz believes that porn was behind VCR industry development and now it does the the same thing with web. I heard that handheld devices and WiFi are widely used by some porn users because of virtual anonymity. You do not have ISP who can track what sites you are visiting. Instead your handheld device is anonymous at WiFi network (to be correct, the same thing is with your notebook). So will porn boost a handheld industry as well?

EFF evangelist and techsex columnist Annalee Newitz is holding forth at Etech on the history of the camouflaging of pornography and sex toys, and how this drives development of free speech and privacy technology. She starts with the equation: “Everybody wants porn + nobody will admit it + everybody loves tech = innovating ways to look without being seen.”

One of the driving forces behind VCRs was the porn industry. The VCR became a way of camouflauging porn consumption. Before 1976 you had to go to a theatre — local people knew you were going to theaters — a very public experience. Now people could watch dirty movies in their own homes. The adult industry flocked to this new technology. A cheap way of disseminating porn.

Meanwhile back on the Internet, quality wasn’t very good. (She shows an ASCII art image from www.asciipr0n.com.) “Porn built the Internet. It’s such an obvious use of the medium; because it’s so private and widely available. It broke one of the prongs of the Miller rule (contemporary community standards): it’s unclear what the “community” is when you’re downloading and uploading to and from everywhere in the world.

Private past/anonymous futures. It’s likely that Congress could require porn sites to geographically locate users. So some workarounds:

• prepaid porn cards
• user-friendly anonymous proxies (Anonymizer)
• Anonymizing networks like Tor (”Roger did not design this for porn; but it is my prediction that people will use it for porn.”)
• Anonymous IM - Off-the-record messaging: www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

Annalee’s bottom line is that “what’s good for porn is good for free speech.” And: “Today’s porn tools are tomorrow’s human rights protections.”

Tom Foremski writes at SiliconValleyWatcher about search spam aka “search engine optimization” and tells us about Become, company who runs shopping search site Become.com. Its founders, Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, claim to have a spam-proof ranking technology, called Affinity Index Ranking (AIR). And that’s only for starters.

They applied for patents for their technologies. And just in case somebody does figure out how to influence its search results, they also applied for patents for… potential spamming technique!

“Its an insurance policy,” Mr Yang smiles. “We can sue the spammers for patent violation if we have to. I don’t know if that will work, nobody has tried it and if Yeogirl is right, we won’t need to.”

Michael, Yeogirl. My congratulations, gentlemen! It’s a really brilliant move! And thank you Tom for this post.