The public musings of a collaboration lifeguard
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Pressure from the cloud
01021 days
by Simon Scullion
in Internet
No, we’re not talking meteorology here!
I have been keeping an interested eye on some of the developments from Amazon with their Amazon Web Services, so when I saw the from friend/colleague/troublemaker , it made me sit up!
Oh, dude! It’s a war, and cloud is a battlefield. #orcl swallows #sun, and days l8r, #ibm announces the end of licenses. http://is.gd/ueWt
He is referring to , announcing the availability of IBM technology in the cloud, running on , with an innovative approach to licensing.
On Amazon EC2 you can run many of the proven IBM platform technologies with which you’re already familiar, ….. By choosing Amazon EC2, you can get started in either of two ways. You can pay by the hour only for what you use, through Amazon EC2 running IBM. Alternatively, you can bring many of your own IBM licenses to run on Amazon EC2.
This got me thinking of the impact that this could have on certain internal applications that suffer from performance and scalability issues. For example, global instances which see spikes as people come online across different timezones. Do you scale for the spikes, or the average load and take the performance hit during peak use?
Amazon’s EC2, combined with applications such as IBM’s Websphere Portal, is now giving the enterprise an interesting choice. Do we put the application server out in the cloud, and have the flexibility to scale up and down according to demand?
Yet many corporations are still wary of the cloud, preferring to keep things on the inside, under their watchful eyes. So how would a large organisation replicate and offer something capable of this internally? I imagine virtualisation would be at the heart of any attempt, but the investment required would be significant, if not exorbitant, both in infrastructure and software. Could they even get close to competing on cost, ease of administration, billing…?
When will we see new expectations – I’ll call them “cloud-induced” - take hold in the enterprise, where factors such as flexibility, agility, almost-zero required investment, take an increasingly higher priority? It strikes me that it will rapidly become harder for IT departments to provide and manage internally-hosted solutions that meet user expectations, as awareness of the cloud’s capabilities grows in the business.
Think about it. All Amazon ask of us is a credit card number….
Oh the irony!
21304 days
This caught my eye via google alerts, emphasis is mine.
In a perfect world, all email clients would render our designs the way we intended it to be. Seeing as how browser compatibility for the web is still some way off, email client standardization would be eons away from reaching display nirvana.Together with Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes is a very difficult email client to comply your designs with.
I left a comment explaining how Lotus Notes 8 is somewhat improved in this area.
Source:
Chris Brogan: What Social Media Does Best
11310 days
by Simon Scullion
in Internet
has a in his series on social media.
This list is a must read!
- Blogs allow chronological organization of thoughts, status, ideas. This means more permanence than emails.
- Podcasts (video and audio) encourage different types of learning, and in portable formats.
- Social networks encourage collaboration, can replace intranets and corporate directories, and can promote non-email conversation channels.
- Social networks can amass like-minded people around shared interests with little external force, no organizational center, and a group sense of what is important and what comes next.
- Social bookmarking means that entire groups can learn of new articles, tools, and other Web properties, instead of leaving them all on one machine, one browser, for one human.
- Blogs and wikis encourage conversations, sharing, creation.
- Social software, like Flickr and Last.fm and even Amazon.com, promote human-mediated information sharing. Similar mechanisms inside of larger organizations would be just as effective.
- Social news sites show the popularity of certain information, at least within certain demographics. Would roll-your-own voting within the company be useful?
- Social networks are full of prospecting and lead generation information for sales and marketing.
- Social networks make for great ways to understand the mindset of the online consumer, should that be of value to you.
- Online versions of your materials and media, especially in formats that let you share, mean that you’re equipping others to run with your message, should that be important (like if you’re a marketer).
- Online versions of your materials and media are searchable, and help Google help you find new visitors / customers / employees.
- Social networks contain lots of information about your prospective new hires, your customers, your competitors.
- Blogs allow you to speak your mind, and let the rest of the world know your thought processes and mindsets.
- Podcasts are a way to build intimacy with information.
- Podcasts reach people who are trying out new gadgets, like iPhones, iPods, Apple TVs, Zunes, and more.
- Tagging and sharing and all the other activities common on the social Web mean that information gets passed around much faster.
- Human aggregation and mediation improves the quality of data you find, and gives you more “exactly what I was looking for” help. (See also, ).
- Innovation works much faster in a social software environment, open source or otherwise.
- Conversations spread around, adding metadata and further potential business value.
- People feel heard.
I could pick any as a favourite!
Marketing Pilgrim > Is Google Sick of Flash Web Sites? New Feature Encourages Users to “Skip Intro”
21338 days
by Simon Scullion
in Internet
from caught my attention today, commenting on google’s latest feature. As part of its search results, Google is letting us skip a site’s flash intro.
So you know what we are discussing, here is an . Check out the [Skip Intro] link to the right of the result.
The new feature in itself I didn’t find particularly notable. However, Andy closes by saying (emphasis mine):
This suggests that Google is algorithmically detecting homepages that are all Flash, and taking it upon themselves to help you skip the intro.
What do you think about this? Great for searchers, but taking liberties with a site owner’s right to display a page as he intended?
Now this made me sit up!
This “right” Andy mentions was taken away with the advent of RSS. It brought into play a whole new way of users navigating the sites they now only rarely visit. Gone are the days when a site owner could “control” the landing page to their site, and what the user had to wade through just to get to what they wanted. Flash intros should be a thing of the past, and I don’t see why google is “taking liberties” in helping people actually get to the content they are looking for. I think site owners should see it that way also.
It surprised me, to see this question coming from a marketing blog resplendent with its RSS feeds and the like. If online marketing types are advising people to move towards RSS and social media, they need to also be explaining some of the consequences.
Close to 3mb broadband I guess
61473 days
by Simon Scullion
in Internet
Still way behind by modern standards mind. 
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Blog this song!
01527 days
by Simon Scullion
in Internet
You bet!
Great stuff!
Via: (also seen elsewhere already!)
On Facebook? Shop at Overstock? Then read on…
01532 days
by Simon Scullion
in Internet
Some for all us Facebookers out there. Particularly at this time of year, when we are all turning to the internet to help with the task of Christmas shopping.
Here is some poor guy’s story, painfully making it clear why Facebook’s is a bad idea in its current form:
I purchased a diamond engagement ring set from overstock in preparation for a New Year’s surprise for my girlfriend. Please note that this was something meant to be very special, and also very private at this point (for obvious reasons). Within hours, I received a shocking call from one of my best friends of surprise and “congratulations” for getting engaged.(!!!)
Imagine my horror when I learned that overstock had published the details of my purchase (including a link to the item and its price) on my public facebook newsfeed, as well as notifications to all of my friends. ALL OF MY FRIENDS, including my girlfriend, and all of her friends, etc…
ALL OF THIS WAS WITHOUT MY CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE.
I am totally distressed that my surprise was ruined, and what was meant to be something special and a lifetime memory for my girlfriend and I was destroyed by a totally underhanded and infuriating privacy invasion. I want to wring the neck of the folks at overstock and facebook who thought that this was a good idea. It sets a terrible precedent on the net, and I feel that it ruined a part of my life.
Be careful out there folk, and think about what these things involve.
Via
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