Internet Marketing Design Innovation ...

Heart of Google

" The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing). "

 

Get the entire post : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html

MyMaps ?

Google just launched MyMaps and i did just one but what is the porpuse of it?

Beats me but well...

Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services

"Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.

The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing. In this post we will look at how this important transformation is taking place already and how it is likely to evolve."

Read it all : http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_30_when_web_sites_become_web_services.php

Web Architecture - biz and tek

" An elephant is no more complex than a hummingbird. A finely-crafted mechanical watch is more complex than a one ton granite boulder. The three billion base pairs that comprise the human genome form an artifact of staggering complexity.

Can I meaningfully compare the complexity of the architecture of one software-intensive system to another?

Assuming that one can even calculate the complexity of a system's architecture, what value should you expect in that number? Simply knowing that system A has complexity X versus system B (or a different implementation of A) has complexity Y may be a fascinating curiosity, but then what? Does one try to do something (refactor the architecture) to optimize the value of the metric? Possibly, but the danger, of course, is that one may end up optimizing that number but at no material value to the use or economics of the system, or even worse, atthe cost destroying some other important aspect of the system. "

Read it all : http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/gradybooch?entry=architectural_complexity

News on new programming

" Recent Advances and Remaining Obstacles in Web Application Technology
I like to keep a close eye on advances in browser-as-rich-client technology, as I think it's one of the most important areas in the continuing maturation and mass adoption of the Internet.  I think there are still several hurdles to overcome before the browser can compete with the desktop in terms of rich client firepower, but the obstacles are falling almost on a daily basis. 

Recent Advances
Some exciting developments have popped up recently, here are a few of the highlights:

Comet:  Comet is a technology that keeps an HTTP connection alive between the browser and the server so that messages can be streamed back and forth in realtime.  This is very rarely used right now primarily because the technology is so young and there's no easy way to implement it, making for a high barrier to entry.  The stuff going on with the cometd framework is changing that, however, and I'm especially interested in what's happening with gCometd, which is a Java implementation of comet.  Once comet grows up and extends into areas like server-side event-handling it's going to have as much of an effect on the rich browser application experience as AJAX had.
Offline Access:  One of the big weaknesses in rich Internet applications is the lack of offline access, but there's a lot of work being done to fix that.  In particular, the Dojo Javascript framework now has strong support for browser-side storage, and there's work being done on top of that to enable entire applications to be run offline.
Synchronous Server Calls:  A big mental barrier to overcome when programming rich browser applications is the lack of support for synchronous calls to the server--asynchronous is really the only game in town.  It's not just: call function A, get result, call function B.  It's more like: call function A, wait for your callback function to be called, receive the result, and then call function B.  Certainly not the easiest or most straightforward way to write an application.  However, there are some interesting and creative solutions to this problem now thanks to projects like jwacs and Narrative Javascript.
Threading:  The one topic that's sure to give any programmer heartburn is threading, but the fact is that there's a lot you can't do without the capability to write multi-threaded applications.  To that end, there's a lot being done to facilitate multi-threaded Javascript applications in one form or another, such as wrapping server-side Java calls and using interpreted languages on top of Javascript.
Microformats and Live Clipboard:  Even though Live Clipboard has completely fallen off the map recently (seriously, Ray Ozzie, where did you go?), I still believe that it's a very useful and cool technology and I hope it takes off (moving structured data between sites is just too useful to let die).  Microformats, however, are very much alive, and once they're built into the browser itself I think there's no doubt that they're going to become as ubiquitous as RSS.  They will be the standard way to publish structured data, and I love having a standard format for widely-used data such as contacts and events.  Sites are already building in support, it's just a matter of time. "

Read it all : http://www.jasonkolb.com/weblog/2007/02/recent_importan.html 

Should you innovate - a technical standpoint

The view from Clever Age a small but hedgy french tech company

" Devez-vous innover ou vous contenter de suivre la tendance générale ?

Tel est le paradoxe quotidien de l’informatique (mais pas uniquement). A l’heure du web 2.0 subsistent des applications clients/serveurs sur AS400 à plus ou moins juste titre. Avec le web 2.0 est arrivé le buzz autour de la société 37signals et de ses applications Basecamp ou encore Ta-da list basé sur le framework Ruby on rails. A contrario, dans les grandes sociétés françaises et internationales, les seules technologies présentes sont J2EE, .Net et dans une moindre mesure PHP (ce dernier a su acquérir ses lettres de noblesse ces dernières années). En dehors de ces technologies, point de salut. Nous pourrions nous dire que toute société de services se doit alors de maîtriser ces technologies pour pouvoir accompagner des grands comptes dans leurs projets. Pour autant, ces mêmes sociétés de services doivent-elle se priver de ces nouveaux outils qui ont fait et font leurs preuves au jour le jour ?

Il y aura toujours des partisans du "ma société fera uniquement du Java/PHP/.Net". Ce positionnement peut paraître raisonnable et raisonné pour une société s’adressant à des grands comptes :

Les grands comptes lancent des projets quasi uniquement sur ces technologies,
les compétences python (utilisé dans les frameworks Django, Turbogears, etc) ou ruby (utilisé dans le framework Rails) sont assez peu présentes en France et lorsqu’elles existent, elles sont concentrées dans un petit nombre d’entreprises (dans le cas de python). Pour ruby, cela est encore plus vrai. Dès lors, il pourrait paraître risqué pour une entreprise de se lancer dans un projet utilisant un de ces deux langages.
Ce manque de compétences s’explique par un manque de formation à ces langages."

Read the full post : http://www.clever-age.com/veille/blog/devez-vous-innover-ou-vous-contenter-de-suivre-la-tendance-generale.html

Clues to Brainstorming

1) Keep things visual. You have an idea, and while between two people it may be easy to be on the same page, it doesn’t always happen. So, if at all possible, draw, document, build, to make sure your vision is the same. This is probably the most valuable tip (hence it’s the first). Only if both want the same thing will things move it that direction.

2) Don’t be afraid of ideas. Any idea is a good starting point, and in a good brainstorming session, you want to get those out (again, into paper) as much as possible. You also want to have way too many, so we can weed out the worst ones afterwards. The reason why you don’t do it in the first place is because an evolution of a bad idea can be a tremendous idea. So, no ignoring ideas. No playing “devils advocate” - anything deserves attention.

3) Bring fresh people into the idea. Maybe this doesn’t need to happen on the first meeting, but you can easily “freeze” your creative juices if you don’t keep the drum going. Fresh views into your idea will be extremely valuable. Tell people what you’re thinking about, get them at a table, give everyone pens, and hack away at ideas. Seriously, combining the experience of people with their perception of your idea will generate great output.

4) It’s never early for a prototype. If you have an idea that needs to get out, a prototype may be the best solution. This doesn’t always work out well with web applications because you’re building things presented on flat screens, but why not build a prototyping toolbox with shapes and notes, so you can actually build a physical wireframe of what you’re trying to tell the rest of the brainstorming team?

Via : http://blog.webreakstuff.com/2007/01/successful-brainstorming/

Finding Bill Gates password

" Last night's Daily Show, with Jon Stewart interviewing Bill Gates about the Vista launch was fun.

Jon: What's your password?

Bill:

Jon: You don't have to answer that. Is it 'Gates'?

Bill: I'll tell you later.

Jon: Hey, do you have pets?

Bill: Well actually, we keep putting off having pets. Our kids put on a lot of pressure.

Jon: Did you ever have a pet when you were younger?

Bill: Sure I had a dog.

Jon: What was the pet's name?

Bill: That's not my password."

To read more on it : http://www.alexbarnett.net/blog/archive/2007/01/30/What-is-Bill-Gates_2700_-password_3F00_.aspx

MyBlogLog security gaps

It appears there is one downside to having the MyBlogLog profile script on your blog and SoloSEO’s Michael Jensen has discovered it. (disc)

He used automatic refresh on Opera, a fake MyBlogLog account and an experiment on hundreds of blogs, including TechCrunch. He discovered that it’s easy to display any profile continually on blogs using the MyBlogLog script and generate lots of free traffic.

Tks to http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/

Web 2.0: How High-Volume eBay Manages Its Storage

eBay's storage engineering team ("Eleven people," Strong said) utilizes 2 petabytes of raw digital space on a daily basis to run the site and store its data, yet has to add about 10 terabytes (or 75 volumes) of new storage every week to cover new transactions, Strong said.

ADVERTISEMENT That follows alongside the eHarmony story: That highly successful social networking site has to purchase additional storage about every 90 days.

eBay said it uses a traditional grid computing system with the following features to build the site:

about 170 Win2000/Win2003 servers
about 170 Linux (RHES3) servers
three Solaris servers: build and deploy eBay.com to QA; compile Java & C++; consolidate/optimize/compress XSL, JS and HTML
time to build site: was once 10 hours; now only 30 minutes
in the last 2.5 years, there have been 2 million builds.
Then, the content is deployed to a system of about 15,000 servers.

eBay uses a number of different products in its storage setup, including switches from Brocade, software framework from IBM Tivoli, NAS (network-attached storage) hardware from NetApp (5 percent of the system) and large arrays from Hitachi Data Systems (95 percent of the system), Strong said. It also runs Oracle DB, he said.

"Oh, I'm sure I'm leaving somebody out. There's probably something from each of the major storage manufacturers somewhere in our system," Strong said.

eBay maintains four copies of most of its databases, according to Strong.

eBay's main data centers are spread out over the continental United States, and it also has co-locations all around the world, he said.