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it was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about microsoft's bombastic announcet of hailstorm, promising that "hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control."

what was it, really? the idea that the future operating system was on the net, on microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with windows pport and all your stuff would be up there. it turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. and nobody trusted microsoft with all their stuff. and hailstorm went away.

i tried to coin a term for the kind of people who invented hailstorm: architecture astronauts. "that's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being aulted by an architecture astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. and people buy it! the business press goes wild!"

the hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. or at least, they try. since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the ggest problem to solve is synchronization.

follow the story, here. i started picking on one company that appeared to be particularly astronautish: groove, which was trying to rebuild lotus notes (a giant synchronization machine) in a peer-to-peer fashion.

groove had some early success selling secure networks to the military-industrial complex, but didn't make much of a ripple outside that niche. their real success was in getting bought by microsoft, which brought groove's designer and chief architecture-astronaut ray ozzie to the role of "chief software architect" at microsoft, supposedly the technical guy that would keep inventing the future after llg left so that steve ballmer would have some new territory on which to build his next illegal monopoly.

and now ray ozzie's g achievet arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) microsoft live mesh. the future of everything. microsoft is "moving into the cloud."

what's microsoft live mesh?

hmm, let's see.

"imagine all your devices?pcs, and soon macs and mole phones?working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."

wait a minute. something smells fishy here. isn't that exactly what hailstorm was supposed to be? i smell an architecture astronaut.

and what is this windows live mesh?

it's a way to synchronize files.

jeez, we've had that forever. when did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? there were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. i'm sorry. it seems like it should be. but it's not.

but windows live mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. that's just the sample app. it's a whole goded architecture, with an api and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when windows bes irrelevant on the desktop. and synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of microsoft write on windows 1.0.

it's groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. ray ozzie just can't stop rewriting this app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

and the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.

how on earth does microsoft continue to pour mive resources into building the same frigging synchronization platforms again and again? , they just finished building something called windows live foldershare and i haven't exactly noticed a stampede to that. i'll bet you've never even heard of it. the 3,398th web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the internet. i'm so excited i might just die.

i shouldn't really care. what microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. i'm not a shareholder. it sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact tv dinner that i didn't want on sunday night, and i didn't want it when you tried to serve it again monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and i didn't eat that tuesday night, and here it is wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole god tv dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that i just don't want. what is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. the people? they love twitter. and flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.

why i really care is that microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. between microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college ents, and google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between microsoft and google the starting salary for a smart cs grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. and dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

not loving your job? visit the joel on software job board: great software jobs, great people.

from what i can gather from these portraits, librarians are white, bearded if male, and have gles.

on the same day, 3g iphone was announced, a flickr page leaked pos of three new nseries phones from nokia. the 5800 xpressmedia, also known as “tube” we’ve already heard about. with this leakage, the first s60 touch phone is as good as confirmed. vodafone, according to the spy ss will be distributing the phone, at least in europe. at the back of the 5800 is a 3.2 mp carl zeiss lens.

two other phones, the n79 and the n85 make their first appearance. the n85 looks like a smaller n96. specs include a 5 mp camera and gps with geotagging. don;t expect nokia to pull the punches now in the nseries after the 3g iphone announcet.

the n79 reminds me of the n81 but much softened up with flat keys and a softer overall appearance. we know next to nothing about this phone. the question is, with a $199 3g iphone out in the market, how cheap is nokia going to price its new high-end phones?

via

this is a post from cell phones etc. enled:
three new nokia nseries phones leaked | add your comts

source: wools, license

tomorrow evening, we will be impleting network upgrades in our data center. the scheduled maintenance is expected to occur on 12/11 from 9:00 pm pst to 11:00 pm pst. during this time, bloglines will not be available.

- eric engleman & the bloglines team

we've been busy working on bloglines beta to provide some stocking stuffers for everyone during this holiday season. tonight we rolled out saved. later in the week, we'll talk about a couple of other features: flickr widget and blog preview.

just as it sounds, this features allows you to save a post for future reference. many of our blogliners are active filers to save their favorite posts. it's very easy. let me walk you through the feature.

you'll notice at the bottom of an article a new "save" button located in-between "pin" and "email."

clicking on the "save" button creates a new inline window where you can add a comt and save the post to a specific folder.

to get to your saved articles, click on the "saved" button in the left-hand corner of your screen. simple!

you might ask, "why have "pin" and "save"?" sometimes you want article "pinned" in your reading flow so you're forced to look at it again to really absorb the complexity of the post. other times, you want to file away those posts that stand the test of time. that might sound very nuanced, but remember if you're reading 1,000 articles a day, like blogliners, you develop several different reading modes.

btw - for people using bloglines clic, we've migrated your old "clippings" into "saved."

enjoy!

- eric engleman and the bloglines team

we have another treat for you blogliners who have been patiently awaiting our redesign. today's special surprise is the po widget view available within bloglines beta.we've been experiting with different views in the bloglines start page. in this case, we display pos from flickr inside a po widget. sure beats a text description. we currently only do this for flickr, but in future releases you will be able to apply the po view for other po-oriented feeds.

here's a little before and after.

before

after

as a reminder, you can go to flickr or other pos sites and create a feed tracking a specific topic or tag. in the example above our topic we tracked was "europe." or you can track a specific user on the site. so in other words, anytime a friend posts a picture on flickr, you would see that picture on your bloglines.

have fun!

- eric engleman and the bloglines team

at bloglines, we experit with feeds all the time. we to point out 3 easy ways you can keep in touch with your friends on facebook, flickr and upcoming.org via bloglines.

facebook
need to have your facebook friends' status updates at all times? you can import your status update feed into your bloglines account. here's how you can get your status updates in bloglines. go to your home page. look for your "status updates" section on the right side of the page near your po. click on "see all" and go to your status updates page. on the right side of the page, you'll see a blue rss icon under the header "scribe."

flickr
get a po feed from a friend, family member or other flickr-ino. enter the user name in the flickr search. look at the bottom of the user's profile page. look way to the bottom and you'll find an rss icon. scribe to it like any other feed.

upcoming.org
see what events your friends aretracking. be sure to sign-in to upcoming.org. look for the area on your home page with the le, "my friends' events." (be sure to have added friends before-hand.) click on the link "my friends' events." look for the rss scribe button in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

keep us posted on other ways you use bloglines. if you do post on your blog, be sure to send us an email, so we can highlight your post for other blogliners.

enjoy!

- eric engleman and the bloglines team

we’ve been a little quiet of late, mostly because we’re busy working on our next release. we still have a t of qa to do, but we’d like to share some details.

search

as you can see, we’re actively integrating blog search into beta.bloglines.com. we’ve incorporated some ask 3d's popular features into bloglines blog search. for example, related searches in the right-hand column in the screens below. in case you’re wondering, we’ve retained the filtering allowing you to search based on feed scriber popularity. you also might notice an advertiset on that mockup. keep an eye-out for cpc oriented ads in future releases.

flickr view

we continue to expand our views for po-feeds with a new preview mode for flickr po-feeds.

add feeds

many of you noticed that beta's add page was pretty basic. essentially, it was a stub for future developt. we’ve finished off the next iteration on the page, so you can easily track packages, monitor weather, or see recomded packs.

blogliners, we're here working for you. enjoy!

- eric engleman and the bloglines team

we've deployed all the features tioned in the previous blog post. here's a recap:

search

blog search is finally in beta, and we've incorporated some popular ask 3d features. for example, related searches are displayed in the right-hand column next to results. all of clic's features are still there, but with newer styling.

flickr view

selecting a flickr feed and viewing it in quick view now uses the flickr api to show images at their maximum resolution.

add page

beta's old add page was spartan, to say the least. the new add page has package tracking, weather feeds, and a new feature: packs. you can now add popular categories of feeds with a single mouse click.

enjoy!

- eric engleman and the bloglines team

heather goes onto write about the differences between the user bases.

• bloglines users are also more inclined toward pography websites, while google reader users are more inclined to visit television websites.
• ...bloglines users are 24% more likely to continue on to a retail (shopping & clifieds) website.

it would be interesting to hear from blogliners on your blogs to see if you really do track more pography websites. we launched a flickr feed module in bloglines beta for our pography enthusiasts. we hope you liked the feature and also like bloglines beta.

enjoy!

- eric engleman and the bloglines team

speaking of unencrypted data, letters are being sent around to at&t managers alerting them that someone managed to skulk off with an unencrypted company laptop in tow.

according to the letter, the laptop was stolen on may 15th from an employee’s vehicle. it had an unencrypted file containing names, social security numbers, and salary information for “a number of at&t managet employees.” no location was disclosed, as at&t does “not want to potentially notify the thief of the nature of the data on the hard-drive.”

although the data wasn’t encrypted, the laptop was pword protected. best case, the theft was just a smash-and-grab by someone who plans to dump the drive and resell it. there is no evidence yet that the information has been compromised - not that that relieves any stress for the victims. unless the laptop is recovered, there’s no way to be sure that problems won’t spring up months or years from now.

hopefully this serves as a wake up call to any companies out there not keeping a strict eye on these sorts of things (read: it won’t). it takes all of a few minutes per system to get filevault or tlocker or truecrypt up and running. how much time will be spent dealing with police reports and credit agencies over this?

[via networkworld]

po credit: kowitz

hunter boots finally got it’s act together and updated their website. it’s much nicer now, easier to navigate, better pictures and fast. they’ve even have a spot on their site that aggregates blogs posts, youtube videos and flickr pictures that tion hunter boots. i noticed a bunch of traffic coming from the hunter site and i found out that they linked to me and it was front and center of the main “hunter on the web” section.

the only thing that bugs me about the site is that the store locater is for the uk only. however, the north american distributor is based out of toronto

man made sales inc
1200 sheppard ave east
suite 405
toronto, ontario, m2k 2s6
tel: 416 756 2820
fax: 416 756 9664

contact them about availality around the country as i’ve only spoken about a few places in toronto.

the moving plans continue. later this week, a company s to take away half our stuff. later this month, the other half goes. so there's a lot of cleaning and deciding of what really needs to go. and in britain when you do a clear out, you don't have a garage sale. instead, you go to a car boot sale. that's where a bunch of people gather to sell things out of the back of their cars -- out of the trunks, or as the brits say, the boot. until now, i'd only experienced the joys of buying at car boots. this sunday, a whole new world -- being the guy flogging his stuff.

for my british readers, americans don't do car boots. we have garage sales, where at an individual home, someone puts out all their stuff they want to sell. on saturdays, people know to drive or ke or even rollerblade around neighborhoods looking for sales. there are often signs on street corners telling you when one is happening.

i don't know why brits don't do garage sales and instead gather to do car boots (and here's a good introduction to them). perhaps some houses lack front yards, which may have helped the tradition start. wikipedia's no great help, telling me only that car boots started in the 1980s, which i kind of doubt.

click to continue reading...

i've written before about how the british army trains on the fields around our house, flying g c-130s overhead and operates two fake villages (one "german" and one "iraqi") for further training. well, the troops have been busy. flights keep going over head during the day and night, very low and very exciting. last night, i grabbed my oldest son (since he can stay up late, you know), and we jumped into the mini to chase down one of the planes landing nearby, plus so i could finally grab some pics of those villages. below, some videos and still ss.

click to continue reading...

this week barack obama won the democrat nomination for us president, pitting him against republican candidate john mccain. at the same time both candidates have ramped up their web efforts, with obama's camp calling for web developers to "write software, change washington" and mccain's camp launching a new-look website. in this post we check out the latest web developts in the race to be the next us president.

the obama campaign is currently looking for "exceptionally talented web developers" to take their web presence to the next level. the job requirets show that we can expect some rapid innovation in using the web to win an election:

"this six-month opportunity will allow you to:

• create software tools which will enable an unprecedented nationwide voter contact and molization effort
• help build and run the largest online, grroots fundraising operation in the history of american politics
• introduce cutting-edge social networking and online organizing to the democratic process by empowering everyday people to participate on my.barackobama"

meanwhile john mccain's campaign has beefed up its own web presence. the huffington post recently reported that mccain's new website is now very similar to obama's. the huffpost's sam stein noted mccain's new "obama-like slogan, and an image that seems uncannily similar to obama's trademark campaign logo".

the vanity fair blog did a good ysis of the two websites. according to web entrepreneur and design expert doug jaeger, obama has "the best design, in terms of typography, color, and website architecture." he also notes that "obama has by far the most links under what he calls "obama everywhere." links to facebook, youtube, flickr, blackplanet, faithbase, digg, twitter--he's doing it all. he's more web 2.0 than some of the people i hang out with."

barack obama's official website

i agree that obama's website is a tour de force of web magic, with seemingly every social networking base covered. i was also impressed at how the first page you're confronted with on obama's site is a donation form! it's not done in an 'in your face' style either, there is a 'skip this page' link very clearly marked at the top of the page if you don't wish to donate.

mccain's new site is impressive too. donations, calls to get involved, and social networking are features to the fore, and overall it is a clean and usable design. it does indeed seem to take inspiration from obama's site, down to the "a leader we can believe in" motto!

john mccain's official website

in truth, both are great websites and packed full of useful features and excellent integration with 'real world' efforts - such as getting donations and spreading the word about their respective candidates.

further readwriteweb coverage of the us election relating to web tech:

• is that barack obama in your friendfeed?
• oh boy obama: user generated campaign think tank
• another way to measure elect clout: watch the widgets
• web 2.0 tools favor democrats
• the rth of the political long tail

how changing technology is having g impacts on business

in case you haven't heard yet - the i.t. world is changing. the rise of social computing technologies, generally branded as "web 2.0" and including things like wikis, blogs, social networking, rss, and more are slowly making their way into the business world. this new movet is called enterprise 2.0, and it's no small shift. they're even having a conference about it next week. but the change encompes more than just the introduction of new, social software into the formerly stodgy business world - it also includes the movet of server software from in-house data centers to the cloud, the rise of a mole workforce, the rerth of thin client computing, a self-provisioning user base, and more.

i.t. 2.0

this next g shift is on the horizon, but you can see it coming. today, there still may be plenty of businesses employing "clic geeks" in their i.t. departt, but that's about to change. don't misunderstand - the world will always need a good engineer, but the i.t. leaders of tomorrow - the ones guiding the business in the use of their computer resources, the ones working with the ceos to execute the vision and direction via information technology - they will no longer be what we think of as the clic "computer geek." you know the type - the stereotypical introvert, who's more comfortable behind the glow of computer screen than interacting with the rest of the human race. the one s to speak in acronyms that only he or she understands. the ones who know how to do everything from a command prompt. these folks will be a dying breed...at least around the office.

instead, tomorrow's computer "geek" will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong. so what does the "new geek" need to know to run tomorrow's i.t. departt? an entirely new skill set, as it turns out. here's a short list, but feel free to add to it in the comts:

enterprise 2.0

no, the ceo isn't going to walk up to you and say "hey, i've been thinking we should deploy some enterprise 2.0 software 'round here" - those guys never use the same words we do and that isn't about to change. a good i.t. person, though, knows how to interpret "user-speak" and present them with the tools they need even if they didn't know how to ask for them in our language. if anything, they're going to be more likely to say something like: "sending out an email newsletter seems outdated - i wish there was a better way to communicate with our customers," or "i wish there was an easier way to keep up with the industry news," or "wow, how many different versions of this doentation is saved on our intranet, anyway?" the old i.t. guy might mumble and turn their head, but the i.t. 2.0 guy knows to say "blog! rss! wikis!" instead.

still, it's not going to be as simple as just knowing the terminology. now it's up to you to recomd the platform - will you be maximizing the investt you have in sharepoint, which already includes many web 2.0 tools, or do you need a more customized solution? if so, whose? those are the questions the new i.t. guy will need to answer - and yes, they will still need technical skills to do so, but there's a g difference between knowing those answers and knowing how to properly adjust the mtu size in windows xp.

cloud services

i.t. 2.0 means computing moves to the cloud. where today's businesses are running their servers in-house and behind the firewall, tomorrow's servers will be hosted by someone else. microsoft, for example, will be offering hosted services for many of their server products from exchange to ztalk, sql to sharepoint, and more. the microsoft online services beta is underway and ll gates is talking about a future where millions of servers will live in their data centers.

and that's just one option. google's coming after the business world, too. at first, it was just a simple offering of an easy-to-use but rapidly evolving web office suite that could be easily deployed with minimal expense, but then they added google apps for your ain, complete with admin dashboards and security settings, google sites for team collaboration, and google web security for enterprise. clearly, they're well aware that there's a niche they can fill with a set of web tools that take advantage of this new always-on computing world.

microsoft and google are g names, but it's just scratching the surface of cloud computing. you also have amazon's web services numerous saas offerings, and more. the i.t. 2.0 guy will need to know not just what software is best for the company, but whether or not it should run behind the firewall, in the cloud, or a comnation of both.

the mole workforce

the new workforce won't be tied down. with near-uquitous broadband and a growing employee roster of gen y workers, being mole will be the norm, not the exception. the molity that used to be reserved for only the well-traveled sales force, will now be available to almost everyone. most office workers, except for the very bottom-rungs of time-clock punchers will be issued laptops, not desktops - the blessing and the curse of the mole worker. work-from-home won't be considered a perk, but a necessity.

the i.t. departt, though, will have to adapt their current solutions to fit this new workforce - one that's not always connected to the company network, but surfing unprotected wi-fi from their local coffee shop or their own home wireless network. i.t. will need to find ways to push through the security updates and patches their users need, even if they're never remoting in to the company network. i.t. also needs to be more wary of lost and stolen company laptops filled with company data. many companies are already turning to virtualization to solve this problem. users will only have the illusion of a personalized desktop - their data will really live on servers instead. wel back to thin client computing.

a self-provisioning user base

this new trend, dubbed "tech populism" by forrester research, is referring to the new user base of digitally savvy workers. as the boomers retire and gen y starts to fill in the ranks, i.t. will be dealing with a technologically-smart crowd of young workers who aren't afraid to find their own tools for the job. intranet site too kludgy? they'll build their own on google sites, microsoft live workspace, basecamp, or any of a number of other similar team collaboration platforms available. file too g for email? they'll upload it to box.net, google docs, zoho, skydrive, or whatever other preferred file-sharing/storage service they're used to using. i.t. guys turning a blind eye to this practice will soon have their necks on the line when it's revealed that confidential data is in the cloud protected only behind the salesperson's pword of "fido."

so, what's an i.t. guy to do? they can't lock down the whole internet, no matter how hard they try. instead, i.t. is going to have to know the business - really know the business - and anticipate the needs the company's employees are going to have. then, the challenge will be to research, locate, and deploy solutions that provide the ease-of-use the employees want, but also the security measures i.t. needs.

conclusion

with all these changes, the new i.t. person will be very different than they are today. those that have the skills of an engineer and the knowledge needed to run i.t. 2.0 are going to be superstars, but they also might be rare. engineers used to the day-to-day technicalities of running a company network won't necessarily find themselves out of job - it's just that their workplace will change. they'll be moving out to the data centers where they'll work to keep the cloud up-and-running. meanwhile, back at the office, the socially savvy, i.t. "facilitator" of enterprise 2.0 will be running the show.

earlier this week something interesting happened in the world of social networking: verizon, which this week became america's largest mole carrier after moving to acquire alltel, moved its branded social network to facebook. the company announced a plan to shut down its verizon community site -- a moderately popular corporate social network -- in favor of its 18,000 member strong facebook fan page. right now, facebook pages can't be considered full social networks, but could they ever be the best place to center your social media strategy?

verizon said the move was part of an "ongoing effort to provide our users with the most dynamic and feature rich community experience," and invited users to copy over blogs, pos, friends list, and posts to the facebook group -- which won't be easy since facebook's pages don't support all of those things. justin smith of inside facebook says that social networking company is planning a major upgrade to pages to make them "more compelling for businesses to build a deep presence on facebook."

right now, facebook pages can't be considered a complete social networking solution like ning -- the feature set is just too limited and constricting, plus only businesses, brands/products, and artists can have them. but it is easy to see why facebook pages could be attractive to social media marketers. they're easy to set up and manage, and they with access to a built in audience.

however, even if the coming changes noted by smith add features to make pages more complete mini-social networks, there are a lot of reasons why facebook should not be looked at by companies as a ning-alternative (or an alternative to any full branded social network provider). first and foremost, even though facebook has shown some indications recently of being more open, they're still a very closed platform. verizon may be making a mistake by putting all its eggs in one basket.

facebook pages should certainly be part of a social media strategy for businesses, brands, and artists, but it certainly shouldn't be the only part. facebook's most popular page, that of us presidential candidate barack obama, provides a good example of a complete social media strategy done right. in addition to his 900,000 strong facebook page, obama has a presence on more than 10 other top social media sites including myspace, digg, flickr, youtube, linkedin, and twitter. he also runs his own branded social network my.barackobama.com. obama's complete strategy has helped him to raise record amounts of money online during this campaign cycle and build awareness among the younger, internet-centric demographic.

unless facebook transforms pages into a ning-like platform for hosting external branded social networks that hook into the facebook social graph (which seems unlikely given facebook's clear reluctance to open its walled garden, though it would be a very interesting twist -- and might actually be a ning-killer), there's really no reason to follow verizon's lead and use the site in place of a branded social network.

for every 1000 people who read a tech blog post, there may be one that leaves a comt. lurking in the crowd are any number of people who work for companies related to the ject of the post. they almost never comt, and when they do they often across as obnoxious, self-promoting and spammy. it doesn't have to be that way, though.

there are a number of ways that you can join in a conversation online, even though you have economic interests in it. you who work in the various sectors we cover often know far more about the products, people and trends at issue than we who cover a relatively broad beat do. we like it when you leave good and useful comts. what do those look like?

being transparent about who you are and what your interests are is fundatal, but beyond that there are a variety of ways you can add value instead of being an annoyance. below, we discuss five of those ways; we hope you'll add thoughts of your own about how to comt appropriately - unless you work for one of the comt hosting companies, of course (just kidding!).

the fundatal mood of a good comt

bad comts from companies are loud, self-centered, only semi-relevant and often have the tone of a spurned lover. good comts from companies are super humble, gently engaged with compeors and focused on adding value to the discussion of the whole sector.

a grey area

one comt type that lives in a grey area is the "don't forget about us" comt. that's one of the most common types. it's annoying. this author at least wels emails like this because it's hard to remember all the relevant companies in any given sector. leaving a "what about me?" comt publicly though just looks bad.

here are five ways you can add more value than by just throwing your company's name and link into a blog post's comts. an example is provided for each strategy; these are decent examples, really great examples are still too rare, unfortunately. we know you're capable of really nailing it though and we don't want you to be afraid to try.

1. update us on new developts

when we write about any company or service, one thing that we ought to make sure we do is consider where that company's compeors are in the market. we hope to compare feature sets, user growth and any number of other factors. that's easier said than done, though, so we wel comts from compeors that provide us updates about where their service is at.

this is especially true when we're talking about a new technology that only a limited number of vendors have impleted support for. a good recent example can be found in the comts on our story about c-shirt, the creative commons remixable t-shirts ped on by qr code and mole phones. qr codes are common in japan but are just starting to emerge in other places.

in a comt responding to that post, eric from a semi-compeive company called springleap complited c-shirt's integration of qr codes and creative commons, then pointed out that springleap would soon be adding qr code support to their online clothing service too. qr codes are unusual enough that we were glad to learn about another company moving in that direction.

feel free to comt about updates to your service that we may not be aware of when they aren't so rare, either. if you can focus on the update more than on the "me too" feel, then we'll appreciate you taking the time to broaden our knowledge of the field.

2. clarify your product or market position

never is it as obvious that top tech bloggers have limited knowledge about the things we write about than when we write about you or your company. who knew we could be so wrong?

at those times, a good blogger will wel your clarification. we may not have used your product enough to know about the g differences between it and other products it got thrown in a list with. we might have some real misconceptions about where the company stands in growth, history or target audience. please, let us know in comts so we can be more informed next time we write about you or your sector in the future. this is a conversation!

when we wrote about the adoption rate of microsoft silverlight earlier this week, we said it could be picking up the pace compared to the adoption rate of adobe flash. we were (i was) wrong in our esst of the situation. adobe's john dowdell jumped in to comts and put some numbers in perspective for us. he also offered some ytical perspective of his own, as someone deeply engaged in these issues. his comt wasn't particularly gentle, but that's ok - he works for adobe and we were very wrong in the ertion he was comting on.

3. articulate differentiation

you know your company and your compeors better than we do. tech bloggers tend to know the nitty gritty about one or two niches that they personally engage with most closely, but we often write about far more than that. that's ok, but we could use your help, vendors, in fleshing out the details and differences between various service offerings. our readers to our sites to learn about what tools are available to solve particular problems. there is no way we could articulate the full breadth of options and the differences between them as well as we plus our comting readers can.

as long as you don't stop at "me too," go on too long or talk only about yourselves - comts about differentiation are more than wel.

when we wrote about hedge fund power research suite firstrain in april, we tioned another service called rivalmap. rivalmap's kris rasmussen jumped into comts and let us know his company's product was adding several of the features that firstrain offers (foreshadowing yesterday's announcet of a partnership with newsgator) but that the primary differentiation was a price margin of tens of thousands of dollars!

there are probably even better examples of company comts intended to articulate differentiation. one of the inspirations for this post was a comt left by iterasi (disclosure: a consulting client) in a post about compeor laterloop over at webworkerdaily. company blogger alex williams thanked wwd's jason harris for tioning his company in a review of a compeor, praised the compeor's unique feature set, then articulated some fundatal differences between the companies that harris didn't tion in his review and finally closed the comt with more appreciation for the compeor. that's a model example of a company adding value in a dignified way to a blog post about a compeor.

4. talk up the other team

have you seen the blog posts on places like techcrunch or gigaom about one company announcing a round of funding or being acquired, where that company's compeors leave a nice short comt simply congratulating them on their good fortunes? just a short congrats, signed by the name of a representative of a compeor, with their name linked via the url field in comts to their company's site. that's cly. don't throw your url into the text of the comt or take that time to talk yourself up. just offer a dignified congratulations and the unspoken message is that your niche is further validated, a rising tide lifting all boats. don't act like you're drowning.

a different but good example of this kind of comt can be seen in our april post about the ongoing success of aggregator popurls. we wrote about popurl's new sponsored collaboration with intel.

semi-related compeor diystartupnews.com left the following comt:

"this ia great idea and reminds me of techmemes sponsored news sources.

this is smart marketing move by intel, more companies should look at sponsored branding of sites like this. i should imagine they are getting a good return on their investt. "

well, we bet you think it's a great idea, diy, maybe you'd like a little of that kind of action yourself. also, why enter your url in the "name" field? is that what your mother calls you? we'd love to get to know you as a person in this industry.

criticism aside, that was a good comt - popurls did up with a smart model that's reminiscent of another successful model, techmeme's sponsored feeds. we hadn't thought of that comparison, otherwise we would have tioned it. that was a useful celebration of popurls' success and a good comt to leave.

5. add humor or insider insights

people who eat, sleep and breathe wikis, video hosting or local review sites for example all have jokes, details and perspectives that those of us who simply use and occasionally write about such services just can't have. leave some of that information in comts! we'll all feel smarter, we'll feel like readwriteweb is the place to for deep insider knowledge and everyone will appreciate you and your company for it!

when we wrote about the growing number of serious uses for wikis last month, whit from wiki.answers.com jumped into comts and pointed out that comscore called wiki.answers the fastest growing site of 2007. touche! that was something that we suspect wiki-heads probably knew. (i've consulted for wiki companies and remember now that wiki.answers were tioned as a g player.) as a non-specialist in the field of wikis, though, that's the kind of detail that i just didn't know. it was self promotional, and a link would have been nice, but it's an undeniably important detail in a general conversation about the growth of wikis.

an even better example of offering insider knowledge in comts can be found in a comt from this morning to our coverage of japanese video site nicodou. jane from akibanana.com, a news site that supports a company offering tours of a particular japanese -culture, left an incredibly helpful comt that included two good links to sites other than hers, some updates on the topic of the post and other information that we simply didn't have the context to include in our original post. it was a fantastic comt and gave readers a great reason to click through the comter's name to learn about the company she represents.

conclusion

a lot of this is common sense, but some of it is particular to the emerging culture of the social media market. we're blessed at least in the us to have a very active social media economy - so lots of our readers here have jobs with companies related to the jects of our writing. we want you to participate, you have so much you can add! it can be a great way for you to increase you visility in the market, as well. see our post about the new robert scobles for a discussion about other ways this can be done.

if we saw half as many simple "don't forget about me!" comts and twice as many comts focused on humbly adding value to the conversation from the perspective of someone working at a related company - the quality of conversation in the tech blogosphere would be dramatically improved. we'd love to see that happen.

are there other ways you've seen value added appropriately in comts by company representatives? we'd love to learn about more strategic options; spamminess is really annoying, learning together is fun and fulfilling.

images via flickr cc: "i must be getting old" by idogcow and "wel hands" by dtcchc

blogs, rss, im, twitter and friendfeed - the number of sources of sources of information online can feel like it's multiplying exponentially every day. it's easy, natural even, to feel overwhelmed. especially when we are more familiar with the tightly controlled editorial policies of mainstream media.

the social media space is noisy, though. there are many times when filtering that noise effectively makes a lot of sense (some tools discussed below) - but there are also many times when noise is just what we need.

experits in noise control

there are many ways you can roughly cut down on the noise in your information stream. more emerge all the time and this is a very valuable direction for services to be exploring. we don't want to argue that noise is always good, it's clearly important to spend some time without it every day.

the most recent entry into the noise filtering scene is probably friendfeed's new "best of" feature. late last night friendfeed rolled out the ality to view just the items most popular with your friends on the service for the last day, week or month. it's something many people have been hoping for and there's no doubt it will prove useful. if you're not using friendfeed yet, you can check it out and add me as a friend if you like here.

other services that are good for filtering out noise are del.icio.us popular for a particular tag, aiderss and google reader's overly friendly shared items from friends feature. we'd love to read about your favorite noise filtering tools in comts below.

on the beauty of noise

filtering isn't everything it's cracked up to be, though, and you wouldn't want to live in a fully filtered world all the time. social media noise is an essential part of learning and living on the web. hear are some reasons why.

unexpected opportunities.

some people call it "serendipity," others call it "pive and opportunistic information acquisition." (erdelez, see below.) the less limited the boundaries of your scope of view are, the more likely you may be to find things you didn't even think to look for.

scanning quickly over large quanies of roughly relevant information can turn up invaluable resources, opportunities, context and contacts that you can pively process or opportunistically leverage at will.

future needs

it's one thing to find something you didn't know you needed right now, it's a whole other skill to be able to recall information that seemed marginally useful at best in the past at a time in the future when the need for it arises. who can't remember doing that before?

the ality to recall pively collected information that was gathered purposelessly in the past and put it to use in the future is a particularly powerful form of intelligence. a person with a stantial reservoir of generally relevant information is a great person to have on any team.

maximizing recall

some people worry that being exposed to too much information will lead to not remembering very much of it. scientists say that's not necessarily the case, though. sanda erdelez, for example, wrote the following in her y information encountering: it's more than just bumping into information

a majority of participants in my information encountering y, when asked about their past experiences of "bumping into information," were familiar with the notion of accidental discovery of information and could recall these experiences clearly.

we may be afraid that we won't remember key information that rushed past us in a river of news, but erdelez argues that when prompted about a particular incident of accidental discovery our memories are better than we might think.

we would argue here in fact that the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future. one useful strategy may be to spend some time going through a large amount of information just a touch more quickly than we're comfortable with.

general knowledge

beyond simple recall of particular information in the past, internalized noise can be just as useful in the formation of wis and perspective as introspection, thoughtfulness and other forms of attentiveness can be. spend some time skimming, it'll make you a better person. you'll meet new people, learn new things - don't worry, it's fun.

personal growth

serendipitous search in the offline world is believed to be one of the ways our understanding of the world expands. david pescovitz at boingboing writes about swedish ethnologist erik ottoson's phd thesis led seeking one's own: on encounters between individuals and objects:

"ideals of what is beautiful, useful and reasonable," ottoson argues "materialize in conjunction with the experience of what is available and what is absent or out of reach."

that's more than just a beautiful reason you should read boingboing, it's an interesting understanding of the way that swimming through noise helps us be who we are.

conclusion

quiet time, time off-line, deep thoughts and long books are all beautiful things - essential to a healthy intellectual, psychological and social life. we argue, though, that the opposite of all those things - online social media noise, is also a great opportunity that deserves to have its worth recognized at a time in history when many of us are struggling to deal with it.

so take some time for yourself when you can, find a nice place to sit with a cup of tea and through a few hundred items in your rss reader. if you can relax into it, it'll help you remember some of the reasons why you love the internet.

creative commons pos, christmas 2007 series, by flickr user kevin dooley.

here are some of the highlights from the week's web tech action on readwriteweb. on the product side we yzed adobe's new web office suite, investigated a worrying exodus of sellers from ebay, looked some more at yahoo's search monkey, and showed you 6 tools to save links with. on the trends side we explored the latest web happenings in asia, provided an overview of i.t. 2.0, yzed the exploding popularity of online video, and checked out the readiness of banking customers to use web gadgets.

web products

adobe launches online office suite and new flash-enabled acrobat 9

back in march, we said that adobe was slowly building an online empire. this week, that news turned out to be true. adobe launched their version of an online office suite at acrobat.com, complete with word processor (buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (connectnow), online file sharing (share), file storage, (my files), and pdf converter. to complet this launch, adobe also announced a brand-new version of adobe acrobat, acrobat 9, the ggest release since the initial one that introduced acrobat to the world. the remarkable change in this new version is that adobe is now incorporating flash into the pdf experience.

trouble at ebay

"i think [fixed prices] will disappear online, simply because it is possible - cheap and easy - to vary prices online." that was mit media lab's patti maes in 1999, at a time when ebay's business was booming and auctions were seen as the future of ecommerce. flash forward 9 years, and businessweek this week called online auctions a dying breed, nick carr is wondering if auctions were a fad. indeed, the fixed price ("buy it now" only) format is beginning to inate ebay, and the company has taken recent steps push fixed price even harder. but the death knell of the online auction format is not ebay's ggest problem -- no, that would be the small exodus of sellers from the site.

yahoo! pushes search results customization to users

yahoo!'s searchmonkey platform got a little more public this week with the unveiling of the search gallery -- the platform's official application repository. the gallery has already been open to developers and curious bloggers for a couple of weeks, but yahoo! is now pushing it to the public at large via a "customize" drop down u on all search results. in addition, starting this week developers can share applications via external links even if they haven't yet been approved for inclusion in the official gallery.

6 great tools to save links for later

unfortunately, there just aren't enough hours in the day. this seems to be especially true when you take on a lot of projects. between blogging, researching, emailing, and real life, reading all of your feeds isn't something we can do all the time. sometimes, we see something that we'd love to save it for later without cluttering up our bookmarks. here are 6 tools to get the job done.

see also: rss reset: dump your feeds for a month

see more web products coverage in our products category

web trends

openweb asia: opening the asian web to the world

everyone working on the web around the world would like to connect with people in asia, but it's not easy to do. that dynamic and populous region is often focused inward and it's made inaccessible to outsiders because there is so little information about what goes on there available in the web's inant language, english. openweb asia is a new project that aims to change those trends.

see also: c-shirt: remixable t-shirts by mole phone and nico nico douga and the simulation of real time (two japanese web apps that marshall checked out during his recent trip to japan)

i.t. 2.0: how changing technology is having g impacts on business

in case you haven't heard yet - the i.t. world is changing. the rise of social computing technologies, generally branded as "web 2.0" and including things like wikis, blogs, social networking, rss, and more are slowly making their way into the business world. this new movet is called enterprise 2.0, and it's no small shift. they're even having a conference about it next week. but the change encompes more than just the introduction of new, social software into the formerly stodgy business world - it also includes the movet of server software from in-house data centers to the cloud, the rise of a mole workforce, the rerth of thin client computing, a self-provisioning user base, and more.

see also: introducing the enterprise 2.0 launch pad finalists

the numbers are in, live video online is ing up

live video broadcasting service ustream.tv announced this week that live feeds on the company's website and distributed video players got a comned 10 million unique viewers last month. that's a major validation of live streaming video on the web. when youtube live launches later this year, this medium is only going to get gger.

see also: watch out tv: youtube is taking over

survey: 48% of bank customers want web 2.0 gadgets

worklight, a startup that offers enterprise 2.0 products, recently did a survey among facebook users to find out their willingness to use web 2.0 tools for secure banking. the survey was conducted among 1000 facebook users between the ages of 18-34. the fact that the survey was conducted among facebook users gives it a as towards tech-savvy people. however there are some surprising findings.

see more web trends coverage in our trends category

that's a wrap for another week! enjoy your weekend everyone.

posted by jane copland

do you like this post? yes no

the concept of aggregation is increasingly important on the internet, as the sheer number of information resources increases. the average user wants to track more and more things on the internet; an aggregator quickly bes necessary as one's bookmark list grows to infinity. the first aggregators, what i call 'general purpose' aggregators, like bloglines, google reader, and newsgator, are focused on tracking blogs and news feeds, making it easy to scribe to whatever blogs the user came across.

the new service friendfeed has been getting a lot of attention the past couple of weeks. it's the latest in the line of what i call 'individual aggregators,' services that aggregate all the distributed parts of a person's on-line presence in one place. a person may have a blog, a twitter account, a flickr postream. these services comne all of these items in one place. this trend started with facebook's newsfeed, continued with plaxo's pulse, and then several other services, including tumblr can do most of what the individual. these services are different than the general purpose aggregators in that they're focused on tracking individuals, not feeds. but the general purpose aggregators can do what the individual aggregators can do, because the underlying technology, rss, is the same. it's really just a matter of user interfaces and a key t of information.

the problem

the individual aggregators collect a list of all of the distributed parts of a person's on-line presence. they ask each user to list their twitter account, their flickr account, their youtube account, their blog. this list doesn't exist anywhere in a way that's machine readable. each of the individual aggregators has to deduce this information and then maintain it. or more specifically, each user has to maintain this information on each of the individual aggregators. wouldn't it be better if this list existed somewhere under direct control of the user in a way where it wasn't siloed in a centralized, proprietary service? that way, every aggregator could take advantage of it and users would only have to update the list in one place.

a modest proposal

this problem is actually a general purpose version of a problem already solved by something called rss autodiscovery. in order to make it easier for general purpose aggregators to find rss feeds to scribe to, many publishers included a special line of text in the headers of their html. i have one on my blog:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" le="rss" href="http://www.wingedpig.com/index.rdf" />

aggregators know to look for this line, which tells them where the rss feed for that blog exists. can't we just extend this to include a list of all the other aspects of a person's ideny? have one line for each service the person uses, and change the le accordingly. so, i could include:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" le="flickr feed" href="http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/pos_public.gne?id=35034347955@n01&lang=en-us&format=rss_200" />

for my flickr feed. this doesn't have to only apply to services that publish rss feeds. i could even do something like:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/twitter" le="twitter" href="wingedpig" />

to indicate my twitter account.

by doing this, the list of all the parts of a person's on-line presence is kept under the control of the person, ociated with their blog. it's distributed, open, and easy to implet.

how to make it work

for this to work, a couple things need to happen. blog publishing software has to be modified to ask for and then insert this information into the headers of a person's blog. then,aggregators need to be modified to look for this information, and to periodically recheck it. the general purpose aggregators need to augt their interfaces to allow people to scribe to these new feeds. but none of these things are terribly difficult to do.

i've been experiting with panoramas over the past few months, with varying degrees of success. panoramas are multiple pictures of a given scene, from different views, comned into one larger, (hopefully) coherent, image. since i'm only using my iphone, the individual source pictures aren't that great (fingers crossed that iphone 2.0 has a better camera), but i like the results. i'm using calico to emble the panoramas, and i think it does a good job. one of the challenges is adjusting the exposure/colors of the individual pictures. calico does some of that automatically, but as you can see in these, there's still some variation. a second challenge is getting enough 'coverage' of the scene. as you can see in these panoramas, there are some black spots indicating where i didn't get enough coverage (ie. take a picture). click through each picture to flickr for other sizes.

the first panorama was taken in kauai last month:

the next two panoramas are from northstar, lake tahoe. the first is from off the top of comstock:

and this one is from mid-way down prosser. it's difficult to see, but in the upper, middle of this picture is the truckee, tahoe airport:

a friend, seeing my panorama pictures yesterday, said i could have done a much better job using poshop cs3.