"HTML 4.01 was made a recommendation in 1999, XHTML 1.0—a formulation of HTML 4.01 in XML—became a recommendation in 2000, and was revised in 2002. In other words, at the base of all modern web development is an eight-year-old technology.
... The W3C has long had XHTML2 in the works, a technology that aims to fill the same role as HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, an upgrade or replacement with many improvements and changes to the semantic elements available.
... HTML5 (also sometimes referred to as Web Applications 1.0) is a technology developed by the WHATWG, an open community started by three of the four major browser vendors: Mozilla, Opera, and Apple. HTML5 is not so much a replacement for HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 as it is an upgrade or evolution."
Following the steps of Microsoft, Google continues it's expansion through acquisitions.
The NY Times report: "Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year.
The sale offers Google access to DoubleClick's advertisement software and, more importantly, its relationships with Web publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies." (full story)
The reactions so far?
BusinessWeek agrees: "DoubleClick has something that Google, for all its money and smarts, doesn't: a vibrant advertising business for banners, videos, and other so-called display ads often intended more to promote brands than to generate immediate sales" (full story)
Do a 30-secs search before you say something you're not sure about!
My morning browsing started with a interesting discovery. Google News is finally available in Greek, covering news from over 100 sites with news in Greek. Curious about when this happened (and I hadnt noticed) I started googling for "news.google.gr" I found this article from a site posting about the expansion of the service.
The funny part was when (hopefully out of ignorance) the author of the article wrote that Google's new service is "familiar in philosophy with Site-x". A statement that can be refuted with a 30-secs search which produces the following results - Google News is a news aggregating service, indexing thousands of sites in multiple languages, since 2002. - Site-x is a blog using Wordpress to gather news from other Wordpress blogs using RSS, evolving from a simple blog in 2005
Apparently, the opposite statement is true...
So our tip of day: Do not use un-checked information or exaggerate or (even worse) lie when you post about yourself or your company on the Internet. With each action we take every day (publication of pages on our sites, forum posts, blogs, e-mails, etc) we "spread" an incredible amount of information, which most of the times is out of our control after our action and can easily be checked with a few seconds of search. Even more, this information is available for years to come.
Do a test, search for your full name or the username you regularly use on sites! ;)
Being in IT I know that when you are dealing with large amounts of data you will tend to have some bizzare issues from time to time. Still, it seems that of all industries, credit card departments of banks are hitting me with the worst ways to present themselves as organized companies that a customer can trust. That bad thing is that with the explosion of services that one gets to use online these days I tend to use credit cards a lot.
Scene #1: The Reproducible Card I used to have a "regular" MasterCard. One day, I get a call being told that I'm a great customer and thus I'm going to be upgraded to a "gold mastercard" with a higer limit (almost double than the previous one). I would also get to keep my old card until it expired. Time went by, I got the "gold" card. Then my original expired. And then it was renewed. So now I have two MasterCards from the same company with a combined limit of over 3 times of what I had six months ago. A month after I got the new card I got call asking me if I received the new card and was happy with it. Meanwhile, another department is calling me from time to time asking me if I want a MasterCard.
Scene #2: The Card We Dont Want You To Use My father works at a bank (different from the one in scene #1, these issues tend to be affecting the entire industry) which entered the credit card market rather late. So they came out with a card having some excellent rates and my father convinced me to get one (as a banker, he hates any kind of debt!) So I got it. And used it to buy online some airline tickets for a family trip. After spending 200 euros for the first ticket, I tried to buy the second one. I then discovered there was some daily online spending limit. How convenient. And secure (you cant steal a credit card that is not used). A couple of months of barely using the card a bill comes and around 30 euros is the minimum required amount. With the usual speed of today's life I didnt get to pay it on time. So I try to make a purchase with it only to find out that despite having almost 2000 euros of credit, I cant use the card because I didnt pay 30 euros. At that point I put the card away for good...
The latest hot player in IT, Facebook, made headlines (BBC, 29/10) once again as a group devoted to the fake US presidency candidacy of comedian Stephen Colbert has reached 1 million users in 8 days.
While it can be argued that this is a sign of our times, as our life becomes more digitalized every day, one can only agree that the potential as well as the lessons learned from them 50 million users site are significant.
The potential remains to be seen, as Facebook now needs to turn those millions of users into money, but the lessons are here. Facebook is an excellent case study in information presentation and customization, providing an excellent interface over the web, allowing access to developers while safeguarding users' privacy and more.
So join the Facebook craze and get some ideas for your applications!
Knowledge is scattered in today's corporations. People come and go, systems are introduced with limited or outdated instructions and one day you end up wit everyone phoning a sick employee because he holds the knowledge of the company in his head!
But Knowledge Managementis not just about the company being independent from a few persons' knowledge. KM is about passing knowledge and experience to new comers and more importantly about harvesting and collecting knowledge with the purpose of improving service levels and product quality.
Make the choice, decide that knowledge is the key to create a competitive advantage for your companies. Systems like e-learning, collaborative environments, support content management systems, etc will enable your company to improve it's operations dramatically
What happens when you search for your company's name on Google? If you were used to having to worry only on what is being said about you in the real world, you now need to take a look on what's happening in the virtual one!
A few weeks ago a client faced this exact issue. A blog was writing about his company in a not very cuddly manner (to say the least). His initial response was "We're doomed!". This was partially true. Visitors of the blog had read the story and already commenting on it. In a couple of days after the next Googlebot pass the bog entry could show in search results for the company's name. And you cant change the page or have it removed. After all, it's content was somewhat valid.
The only choice was to respond. A mail was written and sent to the blogger explaining the other side. But more importantly, an official response was posted on the blog. Without even going into the content of the post, this move showed to visitors that the company cared about it's customers and valued every possible feedback. The blogger didnt make any comment about the official reply. Other visitors did though (and in a positive manner) and more importantly, the official reply is now there for anyone that stumbles on the page. The effect of the article has been greatly reduced.
Of course this is a continuing process. Do a Google on your company every couple of weeks. Check your stats for any referrers that you wouldnt expect. Be on alert and ready to respond!
One of the supervisors called a Walmart and ordered the cake. He told them to write: "best wishes Suzanne" and underneath that write "we will miss you"...
Nektarios was arguing a few days ago on the benefits of using specifications. The sad reality for this line of thinking is though at that in most projects: - needs and thus features and thus specifications will change - assumptions on what is important will differ - two sides will be created: developer vs client - estimations on time constraints will fail miserably :)
Enter Agile Development, a completely different way to approach the issue: - customer satisfaction is the first priority - face-to-face continuous colaboration between developers and client repesentatives - acceptance that requirements will change, adoption of required development practices - shorter development cycles: develop, present, test and alter more frequently
Obviously an agile approach will not work on all cases or solve all the issues (as passionate as some of it's supporters might be!). Still, you can bet that it's output will not be like the cake in the photo!
We store more and more data on the net every day. Texts of any kind, photographs, personal data, telephone numbers, even thoughts (if you consider blog entries to be a product of the intelligence as opposed to mind garbagge ;))
But what happen to this data is that often they are tied with the service we have used. The things you can do with your data are thus limited to the features of the particular service. And what happens if (science forbid!) the service closes? Your data is gone with them.
Luckily, services running on the web are more and more providing your data back to... you. In research for this article I looked at the possibilities of Facebook and came up with a decent way to revive my personal site, giannopoulos.info. Facebook provides an RSS feed of my posted items. With the help of Feedburner and some css I am able to post this feed my site as if it was it's actual content. And my site is updated whenever I add something new on Facebook. Of course at the moment you need to be a Facebook user to comment on my posted items but I could script an Essence module to import the data as actual blog entries and allow commenting by everyone.
Still, there is a long road ahead of us. Facebook for example doesnt have an RSS feed for photographs and when I tried to import the feed of ilovehotchocolate.com in my Facebook notes it worked once but then new entries were ignored (as opposed to being automatically imported).So what can you export from your favorite service or site?
In case you havent heard until now, Amazon has developed an e-reader device, named Amazon Kindle.
The $399 device allows you to read books, newspapers and blogs in an 6" e-paper screen. You can buy content by using the device itself which connects to Amazon through a wireless network. You can also access Google and Wikipedia (but just that) to lookup information and even read your documents (but you have to mail them to a special account and get charged a few cents per document).
Now Amazon is trying to create a lot of buzz on the Kindle, with CEO Jeff Bezos going on the front cover of NewsWeek, adding a personal note on the Amazon.com page, and apparently keeping a very low production schedule in order to produce the "we are so successful we have sold out" news headlines. The bad thing is that Amazon underestimated it's success. This created the ridiculous headline "Amazon Kindle sells out in 5.5 hours".
I'm not suggesting that the idea of playing with the availability of your product is bad, but 5.5 hours is so low it is actually negative. Companies are still supposed to have good estimation on their products' success. I wouldn't trust a company that failed in it's estimations so badly. Would you?
Following the steps of Microsoft, Google continues it's expansion through acquisitions.
