People who don't matter to technology anymore

My recent post on who are today's movers in the technology world contrasts with this list of who don't matter to technology anymore. The people on this list are not neccessarily has-beens. However, their influence on the changing landscape of technology has been waning for sometime. Click this link and see who these people are:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/technology/10dontmatter.biz2/index.htm

Who are the most influential people in technology today?

Technology is today influencing many parts of our lives today. The main topic of this blog is about how technology impacts our ordinary lives. But who are the people who are influencing technology? Is it still Bill Gates, the richest man on earth? Can it be the founders of Google Sergey Brin and Larry Page?

Follow this link and tell me if you agree with this list:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/peoplewhomatter/index.html

I prefer Flickr over Picasa Web Albums because of its community

Today, 13 June 2006, Google launched Picasa Web Albums. In case you’re not familiar with Picasa, it’s Google’s free desktop photo management software. Picasa is a quick download that makes it easy for people to organize and edit their pictures using something that’s simple and clutter-free. Google is now trying to bring that same experience to online photo sharing with Picasa Web Albums. The official Google Blog was the first to break this news on 13 June.

A blog post entitled Google Picasa Web Albums Review with Screenshots in computers.net does give quite a detailed description and screenshots of Picasa Web Albums functionalities. But what was more interesting were blog posts which compared Flickr with Picasa Web Album (I wonder why no one bothered to talk about WebShots, another photo online storage service). Picasa Web Album -vs- Flickr gives an unbiased comparison of the two services. Flickr vs Picasa Web Albums does give an excellent comparison between the two services in areas such as price, storage limit, and so on.

My Experience: Why am I so attached to Flickr? Well, that's because the application is built around the community aspects of online photo sharing. Allow me to elaborate. Everytime I logon to Flickr, out of habit I would go to the "comments you've made" link on my Flickr home page to check whether there are other people who have commented on the photos that I commented on. The nice feature here is that every photo that you have commented on will be shown here, together with the comments on the photo, as well as a link to the profile of the people who commented on the photo. This serves as a pseudo bookmark of the photos that you were interested in.

I especially like the links to the people who commented on the photo because I would spend hours just surfing the links of many people whom I do not know. If I like their photos as well, I would be able to make them my contacts (i.e. bookmarks to people I like to interact with in Flickr). I can also leave messages for these contacts. I am encouraged that the community in Flickr tend to be quite friendly and approachable. If somone commented on my own photos, their comments can be found at the end of the link called "recent activity". It has become quite a reflex action for me to click that link immediately after I logged on. You can also create discussion groups centred around interesting topics such as "Beautiful Sunsets". People on Flickr can then contribute their photos into the group's pool for everyone's enjoyment.

As can been seen, the strong bond within the community is truly rewarding as people get to share their photos, interact and become friends. So Flickr is not just an online photo storage website.

My verdict: Use Picasa Web Albums as an online photo storage service that is tightly integrated to Picasa itself. WebShots is another such online photo storage service. If you want to be part of a vibrant social community of people who loves photography and who loves to interact with one another, then Flickr is your best bet. For me, I choose Flickr.

Seth Godin's 56 ways to drive traffic to your blog

One of the things that I've noticed was that bloggers who have very popular blogs do not post on weekends. I have no conclusive proof of this but I have noticed that there are more hits on my sites during weekdays. So if you have breaking news, its best to do so on weekdays. Reading Senth Godin's blog post on 56 ways to drive traffic to your blog seems to indicate that what I felt all along was correct (see point no. 41 of Seth's blog post).

The other thing I noticed was that if you submit stories to digg on weekends, they tend not to make it into the front page. Somehow there are less readers to digg your story, and because of that the secret digging algorithm sort of relegates your story to the end of the digg queue after a couple of days.

The other thing I noticed was that if you announced breaking news (e.g. the advent of Google Spreadsheets) you will get a substantial increase in traffic to your blog. This again was confirmed in point no. 8 of Seth's blog post.

Seth's 56 ways is certainly a list seemingly full of contradictions, humour and good advice. A must-read for all bloggers.

The Person-centered Information Services

Many people today use several devices over the course of their daily lives; mobile phones, laptops, PCs, amd PDAs. With advances in technology, we will see the internet becoming more pervasive and appearing in everyday applicances such as TVs, refrigerators, cars, toys and much more. The day will come when we have to interact with so many different kinds of devices connected with the internet that the neccessity of person-centred information services becomes paramount. Otherwise each device that you personally interact with gives you its own context and that can become downright useless and confusing especially when there are so many other devices around.

The latest announcement by Google regarding the Google Firefox Synch Extension I belive is a step in the right direction. It gives each of us a personal context regardless of which computing device we use, provided of course it runs Firefox. Nonetheless this becomes a step in the right direction where our personal context gets stored somewhere in the internet. And it doesn't matter where we are or what computing device we are using, we get to see what we were doing when we last interacted with the internet. Sun Microsystems tried to do this with their SunRay initiative, however, this was too much of a hardware dependent solution.

I believe more research will be poured into the person-centered information services and Google will be seen to be pushing deeper into this very soon.

Squidoo 101

After all the excitement over the last few days over Google's Spreadsheets, its time for me to come back to another Web2.0 favourite of mine, Squidoo.

Since the inception of Squidoo, it has been getting rave reviews around the internet. Just what is Squidoo? With there being tons of information going around in the internet, what impact does Squidoo have on our cyberspace lives? Today, data and information abound in the internet. In fact, there's so much information out there that it creates an information overload problem. Anyone who has done a Google search can testify to that ! Squidoo simply faciliates the focusing of information into knowledge by the use of squid lenses.

Well, I have just updated my Squidoo lens called Squidoo-101 which takes you through the basics of Squidoo and how to build squid lenses.

Other blog posts that I have done in the past regarding Squidoo are:

1. The Role of Squidoo in Blogosphere
2. Creating Dynamic Content in a Squidoo Lens
3. Combining the use of del.icio.us and Squidoo
4. Squidoo Tips and Tricks
5. Why Squidoo Won't Work
6. Making Money from lenses in Squidoo

Google's Web Office

Whether or not Google's intention is to unseat MS Office, one thing is for sure. With Writely and Google Spreadsheets, the foundation for Google Web Office has already been laid. Would people want to use a Web Office from Google, definitely. I believe that for the most part, people will use a Google Web Office for less intensive kinds of work like writing personal letters, making notes for their latest book, keep track of shopping lists and so on. As far as corporate users are concerned, I think the heavy lifting will still be done by MS Office. Even OpenOffice is not there yet. Google's Web Office by Dan Farber from ZDNet records an interview with Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise on what is the company's plans for building corporate type applications.

Google Spreadsheets - the day after !

Well, its been a day since Google Spreadsheets was launched on 6 June 2006. Phew, there are tons of blog postings and articles in the internet about this latest offering from Google. I have read through many of them and decided that I should give a really short digest of those postings and articles which I think are more interesting and "authoritative" for those of you who have just tuned in on this latest buzz and who want a quick update on what its all about. Here goes !

1. Inside Google Spreadsheets, Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Larsen.

This post is interesting in that it contains two movies showing Philipp putting Google Spreadsheet through its paces. No sound though ! Good overview, not much details on the actual features.

2. Microsoft: Google Spreadsheets is so 10 years ago, InternetNews, Nicholas Carlson.

This article discusses the product from the perspectives of the Google product manager, Jonathan Rochelle, as well as the views of Microsoft spokesperson Heather Gillissen. No details on the features of the product here.

3. Google Spreadsheets: A Good Start, GeekMix.com.

This blog post gives a bit more details on the workings of the spreadsheet as well as what is not so good about it.

4. Google Spreadsheets has fewer functions than MS Excel, San Francisco Chronicle, Verne Kopytoff.

This article takes a fresh but contrarian view of Google's latest offering, the author preferring Excel over Google Spreadsheets.

5. Google Spreadsheets: Very Basic, Pretty Interesting, Harry McCraken.

What I like about this article is that it gives a pretty detailed account of the functionality and features of Google Spreadsheets.

6. Google Makes Strides in Online Office; Microsoft Lags, Forbes.com, Kate Dubose Tomassi.

This article discusses about what how Microsoft lags behind many startups today in the area of online applications.

7. Google Spreadsheets Beta: A Review, Brian's Blog.

This blog gives by far one of the most detailed account and description on the functionality of Google Spreadsheets. Lots of pictures available.

8. Other links include:

a. Spread a Little Google by Michael Calore
b. Google Spreadsheet - its not about Microsoft by MarketWatchh

9. Thanks everyone !

Google Spreadsheets is out !

Yeah, I just got my hands on an account for Google Spreadsheets and have managed to put it through its paces. I do not intend to do an indepth comparison of Google Spreadsheets with MS Excel, I just want to try to use the spreadsheet to see if after so many years of using Excel I would be able to switch to something else.

Verdict: I think most of us can survive without Excel !

Google Spreadsheets is quite intuitive to use. It does take some adjustment for those of us who grew up using Excel. From my first looks, most of the usual formulae are there. Almost what you can do with Excel, you can likewise do with Google Spreadsheet. Click the title to this post to go to a very very short tour on how to use the tool, not much here but nonetheless enough is mentioned about the basic functionalities.

What I miss is the Format Painter tool which we can use to copy a format from a cell and then paint it on other cells which require the same format. I tend to use this quite a lot and I can't seem to find an equivalent in Google Spreadsheets.

Conclusion: Might not be suitable for the heavy financial or scientific kinds of applications. But will be able to meet most of the needs of everyday personal or business applications.

More on Digg - A Complete Digg Tools Collection

Back to Digging. Over the last few days I found Digg to be quite useful as a site which serves up technology news. Due to the community based editorial concept, you get to see news that you would otherwise not see on other traditional news sites, e.g. Yahoo Technology.

Now if you really like Digg, then you would like this website, the Complete Digg Tools Collection. It has got the most comprehensive widgets on Digg that you can find on the internet !

The Future of Personalised Start/Home Pages

Personalized Start Pages is a growing, but fiercely competitive, market. So what are they? Predominantly they're homepages for Web information, gadgets and widgets. The impact they will have on our ordinary lives is that they are going to be very personalised homepages to which we will go to everyday of our lives. They will contain our favourite news sites, RSS feeds, photos and much more.

The kingpins of this domain are still Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. And then there will be a few more start-ups on the periphery. Personally, I find that the most comprehensive is still My Yahoo. Google's is more customisable, but not as comprehensive as that of My Yahoo; and I must confess that I tried getting myself to use MSN but gave up after a while.

I believe that personalised start pages, together with news feeds (e.g. Findory, Digg, CNN, and so on) and RSS feeds, will have a combined effect that is more far reaching that each on its own. Imagine that we can now have information and news that we want presented to us from different perspectives on a single page. Imagine that we can also assess this page from our PCs, and our mobile phones. With the internet becoming more ubiquitous, it will not be long before we have personalised pages on our TV sets, our PCs, our mobile phones, our refrigerators, our cars, in our airplane seats, and ...... the list goes on.

What an impact that will have !

Digg and the news junkie

The internet has definitely turned many ordinary people today in addicts, news junkies that is. And believe me, there are many ways to get your daily news fix; Yahoo News, Google News, MSN, CNN, blogs, and many more. News news news .... we get buried in information and news. Over the last year or so, I've sort of narrowed down to using only a few sources of information for my daily news fix. These are Yahoo News, del.icio.us, findory and now Digg. I use these sites as mechanisms to discover breaking news and trends. They perform this task faily well, and as a result, many people check such sites nearly every day. (Reference: Delicious, Digg and the new balance of power).

Admittedly, most of the users of Digg are more of the "technie" kind. More than half its news are technology or science in nature. Digg has a real-time view of all the activities that happen in the site, including new story submission, Digging status, etc. Now who would want that except geeks and techies? (Reference: spying on Digg).

Now, let's take a look at the social framework or community that makes Digg work. Afterall, news in Digg are submitted by its community, voted and commented by its community, and even buried by its community, i.e. news by the people and for the people. Alex Bosworth's blog gives a very good description of the dynamics of this community. According to Alex, there are several groups of people that make up this community. What's really interesting about these groups is that each of them is required for the system to function, they all came together relatively quickly, and each of them have different and complementary rewards for what they do. In general, this is both good and bad. The bad part is that the news are shaped by the behaviour of the community. (Reference: the Wisdom of browse).

Lately I've observed that people who submit links as news to be "Dugg" by the community are becoming very competitive. They scour the internet for hot and news worthy links and rush to be the first to submit those. I have read many angry comments by people who fight with one another over who submitted links first, very much like children who say "I saw it first !!!". In Digg, there is a feature to bury stories by reporting them as problems, duplicates or inaccurate. I have also seen people who use this as a weapon against others by deliberately burying their rival's stories. There are also people who are so prolific as story submitters that they submit a story every few minutes, 7 days a week ! These become celebrities with huge following.

So if you are new to Digg and have suddenly been caught up with the excitement of submitting and Digging stories, do be prepared to get flamed once in a while. Some comments can be real nasty as well.

In conclusion, Digg is good for those of us who are news junkies and need our daily technology or science news fix. You do not get many business and finance type of news here. Forget about health, sports, entertainment or other kinds of news here. All-in-all, Digg is good. I also kinda like the fact that it saves under your profile all those stories that you Dugg, sort of like bookmarks. The only problem is that they do not have good search or tagging mechanisms for you to manage your bookmarks, especially if you have many of them. That is why I balance my diet for news by using del.icio.us, findory and Yahoo News (more about these later).

Have a nice new-sy day !

Limiting The Digg Effect

In my previous blog post, I talked a little bit about Digg, a community driven, tech-news site. Its users post links to articles called stories. If enough people find the article helpful or amusing, they "digg" or vote for it. Once the article has enough diggs, it is moved from the mildly hidden back-end of the site, and put on the front page for anyone going to Digg.com to see. This article, gives a few simple steps on how to Limit The Digg Effect.

Dig this - Digg Digg Digg !

Now this is interesting. Although I've heard about Digg for quite some time now, I've just begun to use it in the last week or so. For those of you who have missed this (where were we?), Digg is a news website where users submit stories for review. These so called stories normally revolve around a link to a website, and your actual "story" about what was at the end of that link.

After you have done your story, you then submit the story for "review", but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories make it to the front page, called the homepage, the users do. Readers of Digg perform their voting (a la American Idol style) of your story using a "Digg" button next to your story. The more votes or Diggs you get, the higher in ranking your story becomes. Ultimately with more votes, your story keeps climbing up in the ranking ladder until it makes it to the front page. On the other hand, if you do not get sufficient votes after a certain time, your story drops out of the review queue (i.e. it gets booted out). At the end of it all, you get a community of users who both submit, read, and vote for stories.

"So what?", you might say.

So ..... the community gets to consume news or information that they themselves have selected as noteworthy. I kinda like that because I am beginning to use this Digg concept to source for materials that I need in the course of my research and writings. Digg also combines social bookmarking, blogging, and RSS. You are just one click away from bookmarking their materials. This you do after you register your profile. Those articles or stories that you have "dugg" will then appear within your profile area as bookmarks. With one click you can also blog about the stories. RSS is also available for lots of stuff like the frontpage stories, stories that you "dugg" and so on.

Digg is also a social networking website (what ?! Another one ?!). Stories that you have "dugg" may be shared with others in the community. You can also see which stories they have "dugg". Readers may also leave their comments on any story, this is also one click away.

In essence, as an information junkie I now use Digg, del.icio.us, Findory and Bloglines to trawl the internet for information to satisfy my insatiable desire to learn.

p.s. More about del.icio.us, Findory and Bloglines later !

The Role of Squidoo in Blogosphere

Is Squidoo irrelevant in the age of weblogs or blogs? In the internet, content can be static or dynamic, structured or unstructured. In the early days, many websites offer static information. Then, websites were merely static pages with links to one another. Today, there are many websites which still offer static and evergreen content. However, things are now a bit more sophisticated. Wikipedia is an excellent example of a site which is updated and refined by ordinary folks. But Wikipedia content is something that is fairly stable and can be linked to reliably. In other words, its content is quite static, with some degree of refinements.

Blogs, on the other hand, are the very essence of refreshed content. People go back to blogs every day to see what’s new. Good blogs generate stickiness and repeat customers. Essentially, a blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order.

The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”.

Squidoo however is something that lie somewhere between Wikipedia and blogs. The basic premise of Squidoo is that anyone can create a Squidoo-hosted weblog (called a “lens”) about any topic that matters to him or her. You can create as many lenses as you want, on as many topics as you want, and other people can build lenses on the same topic you’ve chosen. The goal of Squidoo is to create a collective grouping of information with the aim of providing users multiple points of view on both broad and niche topics. Its a platform that makes it easy for anyone, even a newbie, to teach people about topics they care about. The assumption is that everyone is an expert about something, and the Squidoo.com platform is designed to make it easy to do that. See Squidoo lens on Squidoo-101.

The Squidoo idea was thus simple and easy to explain: allow anyone to build a single page, called a lens, on a topic that he or she is passionate about. The person building the lens, the “lensmaster”, gets recognition as an expert in his or her area of expertise, and cash. Squidoo shares a percentage of profits with its authors.

I see Squidoo lenses as complimentary to blogs in this information age. A Squidoo lens is supposed to present information on a subject in a more structured manner whereas a blog is more chronological in nature. Information or knowledge is best presented in logical blocks. Likewise, a Squidoo lens captures the subject matter in chunks called modules. A module can be several paragraphs of information, or it can also reference other material in the form of links. The link list, RSS and Technorati modules are such examples of modules which are meant to refer to other materials in the internet.

The lensmaster can thus craft his lens as a master craftsman does by presenting his subject matter as a series of knowledge chunks called modules, some of which contain essays and others which reference other materials. A master craftsman would be able to beautifully weave all his modules as a tapestry. If used in this manner, a Squidoo lens becomes a very valuable piece of knowledge, left behind indefinitely for all to behold.

On the other hand, if a lens is merely a set of links, then it becomes just a directory. Are directories bad? Not really, they are useful in our everyday lives. But they are not really pieces of art are they? Nor are they thesis in nature. But they are useful. Thus, Squidoo lenses have their place in blogosphere as individual nuggets of information containing concise and yet precise knowledge on certain subjects; organized and structured for easy learning.

Blogs on the other hand are like living diaries. They chronicle the lives of the blogger as seen from the perspective of a certain subject. They are not really structured or organized, though some blogs can be. But in general, blogs are just that, web logs. So are blogs less superior than Squidoo lenses, or vice versa? I think neither. They each have their own place in our lives. We track blogs via RSS readers because we are addicted to information or news as and when they develop. But if we need to learn or know more about some particular subject, a Squidoo lens becomes the lamp unto our path.

An avid blogger would thus be able to make use of a set of Squidoo lenses as his or her knowledge building blocks. These can then reference the set of blogs that he or she maintains. Those blogs can also reference the set of Squidoo lenses where appropriate. An ecosystem of lenses, blogs, emails, and links (ala del.icio.us) is thus created in which a “Web2.0 person” shares his or her knowledge to the whole blogosphere Can this be how knowledge is created, shared and presented in this new millennium? Perhaps. Who knows what else will be innovated; findory? MySpace? 9rules?

Creating Dynamic Content in Squidoo Lens

Over the last few days, I was fiddling around with using the RSS Module in Squidoo in conjunction with del.icio.us. I think I have finally got the hang of it all. In my previous post on this topic, I described how this was done. In essence, you may use the bookmarks you saved and tagged in del.icio.us as content in your module. This content is dynamic because as you save more links and tagged them appropriately in del.icio.us, these will appear in your module via RSS. How is this done? Easy, just work through the following steps:

Step #1: Decide what kind of content you want for the module. This obviously has to tie in with the subject of your Squidoo lens.

Step #2: Select an appropriate combination of tags that reflect the content of your module.

Step #3: Begin to bookmark and tag the links that you want in del.icio.us.

Step #4: Using your tags in del.icio.us, click and select the sequence of tags that you decided on in Step #2. This would look something like tag1+tag2+tag3 ..... near the top of the page.

Step #5: Look for the RSS chicklet at the bottom right of the page. Copy that link.

Step #6: Go back to your RSS module in your Squidoo lens and set up that module using the link you copied in Step #5.

Step #7: Publish your lens.

Step #8: You are now ready for some dynamic content !

Step #9: Going forward, as you encounter materials that you want as part of your content, bookmark them using del.icio.us, tag them appropriately and ....... wella ! They appear in your RSS module as your dynamic content !

Isn't that cool? Using this technique, your Squidoo lens will be as fresh as today's eggs ! Give it a try and tell me how it goes. Cheers.

Compare online prices for the Nokia 770

Yep, the Nokia 770 is now on sale on a number of websites. This is what C|Net has to say about the internet tablet.

The good: The Nokia 770 boasts a gorgeous, high-resolution screen that makes stunning Web pages. It has a full-featured Web browser and an e-mail client, plus it supports Internet radio and RSS newsfeeds. The 770 is attractive, easy to use, and great at detecting Wi-Fi hot spots.

The bad: The Nokia 770 suffers from extremely sluggish operation, with most movies and Flash animations too slow to be useful, and it relies only on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for connectivity. Unfortunately, VoIP and instant-messaging features have not yet been implemented, and the device accepts only RS-MMC memory cards.

The bottom line: The reasonably priced Nokia 770 is a neat idea and a slick device, but slow performance and a few missing features keep it from realizing its potential.

Combining the use of del.icio.us and Squidoo

Want to know how to create dynamically updated fresh content for your Squidoo lenses? It was only today that I discovered a cool and interesting way to combine the use of del.icio.us and the Squidoo RSS module. This is how you do it:

Set-up and Configuration

1. Go to "your bookmarks" in del.icio.us and click on the tag that you are interested in (I assume you have already created your tag in del.icio.us)

2. Go to the bottom of that page and find the RSS chicklet

3. Right click the chicklet and copy the link

4. Go to the Squidoo lens that you are interested in creating dynamic content for

5. Add a RSS module

6. Paste the RSS link that you copied in at 6.

7. Save the Squidoo module

This is what you do when you come across interesting articles on the internet

1. As you come across interesting articles on the internet, tag it using del.icio.us using the tag you selected earlier on

2. Also, ensure that you write a concise and brief note for the bookmark of the article that you have just tagged

3. Wella ! Everytime you tag an article with the tag you selected above, your Squidoo lens is automatically updated !

If you go to my Squidoo lens called "Hello I'm Chris", this technique was used to create the module called "The impact of the internet on our lives today".

Cool yah ?

Making use of Feedblitz in your Blogs

Wow, this is one really cool tool to use to drive traffic to your blogs. Feedblitz uses email to promote your blogs. It's own promotion line is:

RSS, Blogs, XML, readers and aggregators can be confusing. Adding email services to your blog isn't. Email RSS feed and blog subscriptions powered by FeedBlitz can:

• Boost your readership to reach the largest possible market
• Give you valuable insights into your readership
• All using the familiar, most pervasive Internet application - Email.

Follow the link in the title to this post to the website. I will trying this out and telling you guys how it went. Cheers !

Something new in Blogosphere ---- Its SPHERE !

Here's a blog search engine that has overtaken IceRocket and PubSub.

Sphere is an impressive blog search engine and one that is sure to rise in traffic. In a very short time it has already reached feedster's traffic levels and surpassed Pubsub (they have a while to go before reaching Technorati).

Read O'Reilly's blog posting on this new entrant to blogosphere.