Per chi volesse seguire l’ultimo keynote di casa Apple:
Live Streaming MacWorld Expo 2008
Streaming fornito da Daily Tech Talk
Live in italiano ma scritto
Come sopra ma in inglese
Il sito Apple in aggiornamento
Per il momento e’ stato presentato Time Capsule un sistema di backup con airport extreme e Time Machine e l’affitto (video noleggio) di film direttamente da iTunes (da subito in USA piu’ avanti per il resto del mondo).
POI ARRIVO’ LUI…
ShareThis
Conrad Johnson, one of the centers of gravity in the Houston jazz scene, passed away on Sunday. I had only a few lessons with Prof and he kicked my butt, he must have been 80-something at the time.
Wy wife and I were recently doing some online shopping together. We were looking for lamps for our living room. My wife was the one at the controls, and at one point she got frustrated and said “This web site really sucks. I can’t even look at their furniture.”
I had mixed feelings about my wife’s comment. My shopper side was completely with her. The web site did suck. It was hard to look at furniture. My designer side, however, felt a pang of empathy for the poor designers who probably worked really hard building this.
This situation reminded me of the reality TV shows where they do house makeovers. On one that I remember watching, a couple was having a hard time selling their house. They had open house after open house, yet nobody was making an offer.
So the crafty real estate agent (as part of the show) decided to video tape the next open house. They taped people as they walked through the house, catching all the little comments that couples make to each other out of earshot of the realtor. This was just like the comments my wife and I were making to each other about the web site.
The raw comments were astounding. “This room is fugly”. “I hate these curtains…what a horrible sense of style”. Not only did people attack the style of the house, they attacked the people who were responsible, the house owners!
Obviously, those people wouldn’t make such comments to the face of the house owners. It just wouldn’t be polite and they would get kicked out of the house immediately. (In the same way my wife and I probably wouldn’t tell the site creators to their face that their web site stunk)
But what surprised me is that once the house owners heard these comments, they didn’t fight them. Sure, their ego was bruised. But they realized that they were seeing evidence of why the house wasn’t selling. So they quickly agreed to allow a house decorator to come in an redecorate their house (for a fee) so that it would show better. Their earlier reluctance to put more money into the house before the sale evaporated when they saw the tape.
And, of course, after they redecorated the comments of the next round of people were very positive. “Oh, nice”. “I like this”. Etc. And, as you might expect, the house sold relatively quickly after that.
So while it was a tough pill to swallow to hear people complain and rip on the style of the house, it had a powerful effect of immediate change.
The same rules apply on the web. If you don’t know how people truly feel about your web application, you can’t make the hard decisions you need to in order to improve.
In a recent set of interviews I did for a client, we were hearing some of those negative comments. And since I was doing the interviews myself, I wasn’t sure how to communicate this extreme displeasure back to the site owners. Should I tone it down? Instead of saying “people hated it” should I say “well, there’s a lot of work to be done”?
In the end, I thought about this TV show and let all the comments go through untouched. The site owners heard the true feelings of the people who were using their web application, and realizing that they had a lot of work to do, set about immediately doing it.
Sometimes the only way to make the necessary changes is to take a direct hit to the ego. It hurts, but boy is it effective.
With the news of mergers happening here and there round the globe the developer community is not far from getting affected. The latest news of Oracle and BEA acquisition is bound to leave developers amidst some sort of uncertainty as to why has this taken place at all and what effects will it have on them.
BEA is known for its well diversified technology stack of Weblogic Java Application Servers, SOA products and the Aqualogic suite of ESB and BPM products. Also to mention that BEA holds a strong integration of all the above suites into its Weblogic Workshop which has been built around the Eclipse platform.
Oracle on the other hand too has an array of similar products including Appservers, ESB, SOA and BPM. Then the question arises as to why Oracle is acquiring BEA? Some insights to the things apart from the product suites clash should be taken in consideration here to understand Oracle’s point of view.
Oracle entered into an acquisition with BEA Systems after it offered $19.375/share which is nearly a 40% premium over the October 2007 price when Oracle had done its first bid. This can be seen as a state of urgency on the part of Oracle to acquire BEA. Some speculation can be allotted on to the latest SOA offerings of BEA which could have made Oracle think for a big upgradation in their services.
Thinking other ways, Oracle might just be preparing for a tussle with the other giants such as IBM and SAP for gaining the market share in providing SOA infrastructure. With the BEA acquisition, Oracle will be in ready position to flash a list of clientele from BEA’s portfolio to match with the competitors. With the future plans of BEA for SOA, Oracle’s merger plans must have been really thought out.
It might be also a case of killing the competition. Big players often tend to downsize the smaller fish by making them surrender. This can be a case with Oracle too. Having a chance to get the customer base from BEA, it can simply kill off the competition by either junking off all BEA products off the line or by carefully integrating BEA products with its middleware and offering separate flagship services, just as it has done after acquiring PeopleSoft and JDEdwards.
Organizations today are keen to have a single suite of products to manage their businesses and middleware competition is on the rise. This probably makes Oracle’s target to claim for a one vendor many solutions more justified. But for the developers its more than a platform choice because now it would be choosing between their career paths too. I also have worked on Weblogic App server with Oracle database as the backend. With this acquisition, developers like me will have to decide on which path to opt for.
If Oracle junks off BEA products for killing the competition it might give rise for fear within the Weblogic community. Hopefully, if Oracle makes a decision of providing a flagship line of BEA products, the developer community will be more than happy to flash the name of Oracle on their resumes. This will be clear only in the mid of 2008 when the acquisition will be completed. The major question now lies as to what would a Java EE developer do in such a situation?
This edition of Ask nextSTEPH covers accepting credit card payments online.
A client of mine asked:
I have a client who wants to pay for a service with American Express. I have a PayPal account. Can you tell me what to do to take credit cards?
Send your client this link:
https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=username%40domain.com
With “username” being your email username and “domain.com” being your domain.
You can also have your webmaster code it into your website.
Ask nextSTEPH by submitting your blogging questions via the comments. One question will be selected to be featured next month. The person who asked the question will also receive a complementary blog consultation valued at $120 US.
The Congress-Bundestag Program has a branch specifically for career and technical education post-high school training, The Congress-Bundestag Vocational Youth Exchange Program. This is an all-expenses paid opportunity for post-high school training - students need bring only spending money! Congress-Bundestag is an awesome program!
From Nacel’s website:
This unique program, funded by the United States Congress and the German Bundestag, allows graduating high school seniors to spend a year in Germany living with a host family, participating in a training or school program, and most importantly, getting hands-on work experience through an internship with a German company. Participants have been placed in fields as diverse as the arts, architecture, auto mechanics, carpentry, child care, computers, culinary arts, early education, health care, hotel management, international affairs, journalism, and veterinary science, to name a few.
To be eligible to apply, students must be U.S. citizens and meet the following qualifications:
- Graduate from high school in January or June
- Be between eighteen and nineteen years of age (some flexibility available)
- Have a “B†(3.0) academic and/or vocational grade point average
- Be highly recommended by their school
- Demonstrate leadership ability and willingness to serve as a young ambassador of the USA
The program encourages applicants from all economic, ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds
The application deadline is January 31, 2008
Share This
The buzz created by the million SEO Contests over the year partly died off. But a new SEO Contest has risen to start an annual competition for Search Engine Optimization.
(more…)
Technorati Tags: SEO, SEO Contest
Many people were wondering what Google was doing with Jot, the wiki service that Google acquired in 2006. The answer came last week with the launch of Google Sites. According to Google, Google Sites, “…was designed to allow you to easily create a network of sites and share them with whomever you choose.”
The response to Google Sites has been lukewarm. Dan Farber of CNET wants to know, “What’s all the fuss?” Dennis Howlett wasn’t impressed. Ditto for The Global Geek Podcast.
Google Sites Requires A Google Apps Account
I wanted to see for myself so I dove into Google Sites to see what they have there. The most important thing to state up front is that you need to be a Google Apps customer (free or paid) to use this service. Most probably got started with Google Apps to leverage Gmail on their personal or business domains. Since the launch of Google Apps, Google has integrated Calendar, Docs and now Google Sites as add on functionality for your domain. So what does all that mean? It means that Google Sites isn’t a service you sign up for with an email address and get started. It’s one part of the larger domain application offering by Google.
Google Sites Is Not For Public Facing Websites
From a design perspective, Google Sites does not have the features to allow an individual or brand to represent to the world in a totally unique way. You can add a logo and change colors of links and backgrounds. You don’t have access to CSS or much ability to reconfigure the base layout of the site. As it stands now your final product will look very basic. It’s more about utility to get access to the features than it is about designing a site for the world to see.
Google Sites Is Meant For Collaboration Amongst Defined Groups
There’s no interactivity available to those who are not a part of your domain. For example, each page can have comments and file attachments but only those logged in to their apps account on your domain can get to these features. So don’t look to build an ad-hoc community with Google Sites. You’re better off using a bulletin board or CMS application to do that. Google Sites will work best for work groups and maybe families who all want to be on the same page. Another example of this is the fact that there is email subscription to updates but no RSS feeds available.
Google Sites Is Optimized For Use With Other Google Apps
It is very easy to integrate videos from YouTube as well as gDocs and gCal. Other services don’t integrate so easily. For example, I tried to insert a Flickr slideshow into a page and the embed tags got stripped out. But adding a Picasa slideshow was a snap. The features for adding dynamic content rely heavily on Google Gadgets as well. If you’re not using the suite of Google applications it is pretty obvious that your feature set will be limited.
Google Sites Is Easy But There Is A Learning Curve
Building pages and integrating content (subject to the limitations mentioned above) is easy. Everything involves either pasting links or dealing with a WYSIWYG editor. Each team member who uses this will need to take some time to learn the layout and options for adding different types of pages to the site. There are currently five different types of pages you can create and a user needs to understand the features of each one in order to make the right choice. And it’s also a fact that this will be a new system for just about everyone.
Google Is Targeting Services Like WebEx Office
WordPress, Drupal and systems like them are not going to lose market share due to Google Sites. The real target are online business collaboration tools. WebEx Office, 37Signals are two examples of services being challenged by the new Google offering. These are systems whose user groups are typically on the same domain (Gmail). They’re sharing files (GDocs). They coordinating schedules (GCal). Sometimes they’re chatting in real time (Google Talk).
You Can Build Limited Websites With Google Sites
I built a website in order to learn the system and see what I could do. See The Brother Love Shrine to check out what I came up with. It’s not too bad I think. But other platforms offer much better tools for creating artistic websites. You do have the option to share all the sites you create with the entire world. Or you can limit them to the people on your domain. It’s also important to point out that there are no stats available for this service and you can’t add Google Analytics tracking codes. This is yet another sign that sites built on this platform are really not meant to be serious public websites.
The Best Feature Of This Service Is
The ability to create multiple sites makes Google Sites a very powerful application. This gives every logical work group or project within an organization the ability to have their own collaboration space. You can invite everyone on your domain to a site. Or you can invite select people. You can also invite people from outside the domain to be a part of the site. This is helpful for consultants working with clients at other companies. There are also basic tools for allowing you to create a site directory as each site can have one or more categories added that can be browsed from a single page.
In short, if you’re looking for a collaboration tool that can leverage your use of other Google apps services then this is probably the best one out there. Google Sites is also a good tool for building a budget intranet that has most of the basic features that smaller companies will need. I plan to create a screencast soon to show others how Google Sites works. Til then I hope that this post provides you with some information that can help you make a decision on whether or not this new offering is worth your time and effort.
Share This
© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.
Web2Submitter is a boon for anybody wanting to take advantage of targeted Web2.0 traffic.
It is very simple to use and really does save you a stack of time on those BORING WEB2.0 SUBMISSIONS!
An upgrade has been released today which I believe will be the first of many as more Authority sites are added to its database.
Here’s the surprise. I knocked up an Ad on USFreeAds titled “Web2Submitter Review And Video Review” using H1 tags, bolding, all the stuff we are meant to do and… Nothing! Not a peep from Google. Not even in the first 500 organic listings. Hmmm!
At the same time I knocked out a quick 30 second Ad on craigslist and forgot all about it.
So the next day around bedtime and I was drinking my coffee, (it honestly relaxes me and helps me sleep), checking to see how my campaigns were doing.
Called up Google and saw nothing obvious but the craigslist Ad at #5 was not expected. I really had no idea it was mine and was expecting results from Web2Submitter, Jack Humphrey, Squidoo and Digg sites but not craigslist.
Anyhow, I clicked on the link and blimey was I surprised to see it was my long forgotten Ad. I was so surprised I made a short video of it which I’ll be posting tomorrow as I could not do the audio today as the family were visiting. Will that make this a video blog?
The video isn’t about Web2Submitter but I would definitely recommend you pick up a copy of W2S if you are submitting to Web2.0 sites. http://www.ademartin.com/r/web2submitter.html
Here’s the stupid thing, I wanted this Ad to stay live so what did I do… this is dumb with a capital D but, Hey I was tired OK? 
- I reposted the Ad!! What does reposting the Ad do? Right, gives you another url so the link from Google becomes useless. Said I was DUMB!
Anyhow I shall send my new craiglist Ad a little link love from this blog and a few others to see if it pops up again. Web2Submitter Video Review
Don’t forget to be “Social” and bookmark this post if it has been of any interest or value to you - Thanks, I’ll do the same for you if you leave a comment with a link to your site.
Ade
pinging, Social Bookmarking, submitting to authority sites, tagging, Web2.0, web2submitter
Quick Post. If you would like to know more in SEO I believe that this site will give you great idea about SEO. The Checklist for SEO Practitioners is a good read. I like the information provided since it is simple and easy to understand.The site gives the following groups of information .
In General a Good Read. This is not a long post just a heads up for all of my readers. This just gave me an idea to make an SEO Checklist.
© 2008 Thanks for subscribing to my feeds please visit the Tech At Hand Dot Net author for more great content.