Category: Web

Two things I’d like Google to Do

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Just a short post while I’m thinking about this.

Number 1 – Integrate your winning search engine into Google Reader

The number of times I’ve read something and forget from which feed or when I read it is unbelievable. I have to go trawling though my feeds BY HAND!!!!! looking for it. Its a hit or miss affair with a less than 50% success rate. Very frustrating.

Thus I have to either post items to my Link blog ( you’ll see it in my side bar) or star it. Neither of which are substitutes for a good search facility.

It would do wonders for my blogging 🙂 !

Number 2 – Integrate Google Notebook into Google Reader

Again, a good tool for bloggers.

Right now I have a ton of stuff about Microsoft/aQuantive waiting to be blogged about. And it would do so much to help if the notes pointed to the original material instead of to Google Reader ( I use the Explorer extension to right click and add  the selection to my Notebook)

While we’re on the subject, Google might want to add a “Share” feature to post stuff from your Notebook to your shared Items feed. Its such a pain when you come across something worth sharing and its NOT in Google Reader

(this is turning into more than two things, but hey, I’m helping improve things)

Number 3 – Make it easy for bloggers NOT on Blogger to work with Google Reader

But this I mean the “Add to Google” button that bloggers use. Mine either flat disappears or doesn’t work. And I can’t remember the page where you get them from ( I DO remember that it took me an age to find in the first place).

Secondly, work with other blogging engine to get them to allow users to add a clip of their shared items to their blog. My solution at the moment isn’t nearly as good as what Google provides via JavaScript ( making it impossible to add to WordPress).

Number 4 – Allow us to see how many people subscribe to our shared items feed

For no reason than this would be really cool.

In fact, this plays into Google’s hands. the more people add an items to their link blog, the more popular the item is. And the more people subscribe to a link blog, the more authority  that link blog has, thus helping Google better rank items shared. In short, its the RSS/Atom version of their PageRank system.

Update 1:

Maybe Google should make a new acquisition:

Joke apart, Google Notebook is really an online yellow sticky, while Zoho’s Notebook is a full-featured multimedia application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily, be it text, database, spreadsheet, image, drawings, audio, video – you name it.  The only thing the two “Notebooks” share is the name, otherwise they simply play in different leagues.  I tend to agree with Read/WriteWeb:  “Zoho Notebook offered different things than Microsoft OneNote and more things than Google Notebook.“

Windows Home Server AntiVirus

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

I’m following up my previous post on this.

I left a comment on McAffe CEO David DeWalt’s blog (great blog, if you ask me) asking about a WHS version of McAffe Antivirus.

I just received an email reply from Customer Services (they prefer me not to post it). Although they do not have a home-use version at the moment, they will consider it if future demand dictates. Which means I’ll have to go to the Small and Medium Business section to buy it.

I’d like to congratulate McAffe for their great response and customer service (Even though I’m not a customer, yet). Which brings me to the latest post at the Security Insights Blog:

McAfee’s goal is to help our customers protect what they value. Everyone – parents, small businesses, Fortune 500 enterprises, government agencies – have information and assets that they value. And McAfee is here to help you protect them. But what about McAfee? What do we as a company value? Clearly, our employees rise to the top of that list. The more than 3,800 of us are the heart and soul of McAfee.

Of course, our customers are just as critical to us, as are those who have chosen to trust in us as an investment – our shareholders. McAfee is a partner-focused company, so the thousands of companies with whom we partner are indispensable to our success. Our suppliers provide us with the necessary tools we need to operate. Finally, we value our communities-including our natural environment and our local neighborhoods-for these are where we live and work.

And that’s how I like to demystify “corporate responsibility” from confusing buzzwords we read in the media to real meaning within a company. At McAfee, our approach to corporate responsibility simply involves our commitments to protecting what we value: our employees, customers, shareholders, partners, suppliers, and communities. With that introduction, welcome to the Corporate Responsibility thread of our corporate blog.

You’re on the right track…

Windows Home Server and SageTV

~ rbonini

There is quite a bit of news about WHS floating around this week.

Rick at One Man Shouting has this to say:

Lots of Software partner announcements as well.  The most interesting in my opinion is the SageTVintegration.  Basically you can pump all your media to your Home Server, including PVR functionality, and use simple extenders to deliver your content anywhere. I’m not sure if SageTV allows for live TV watching, but it’d be awesome to move to a model where the only TV tuners in the home were connected to the Home Server, and all your channels and saved content were available to any TV, PC, or portable device.

Wish I’d thought of that. It makes great sense. And since my Server is in the Office/TV Room adding a tuner or two and hooking it up to the ariel would be trivial. Not sure if SageTV works in the UK with Freeview or not but its definately something worth investigating.

The SageTV website has this to say:

Enjoy all your TV, Video, Music or Photos anytime, anywhere using SageTV Placeshifter to connect to your Windows Home Server from any broadband connection

Connect your TVsat home to SageTV on Windows Home Server with SageTV Media Extender

Handles nearly every Video, Music and Photo format

Works with Cable, Satellite and Broadcast TV around the world including NTSC, ATSC, PAL and DVB

Now if I can just get the Antivirus sorted out…

Here is the Press Release

A flicker from Flickr

~ rbonini

I’m not a Flicker user myself but this story totally makes me want to stay away:

Rebekka is a single mom and art student living in Iceland. She’s an artist and a talented one at that. She does amazing things with her camera. Recently she discovered that a gallery Only-Dreemin had been ripping her off. They’d sold thousands of dollars worth of her images and when she caught them and tried to make them give her the money that they stole from her they refused. So Rebekka did what anyone with a following on the internet might do and she posted about her frustration and plight on her flickrstream. And her story resonated loudly with the flickr community. Her story made the front page of digg and by days end she had 100,000 views on this particular photograph with hundreds of supportive comments.

So what’s got me pissed today? What’s got me pissed today is that according to Rebekka, Flickr has removed her image from their site. That’s right. Not only did they remove and kill her image and her *non-violent* words of protest, but they censored each and every one of us who commented on her photograph, who offered support to Rebekka, who shared in her frustration by wiping every single one of our comments off the face of the internet forever.

That is bad. So Microsoft is not the only “evil” tech giant…

Help out by lending your support: Digg Thomas Hawk’s post.

Norton Antivirus 2007 for WHS

~ rbonini ~ 5 Comments

Unfortunately I’ve not yet got Antivirus on the Server. So, having a bit of time on my hands I hit went to Symantec, since Norton Internet Security has served me well over the years.

It was not to be. Their server products are only available in 5 user license packs for some reason. And it seems their US store is cheaper than the UK store. I spent 20 fruitless minutes looking for the server products before finding them buried at the bottom of the products menu. The US store sells 5 user licenses of Antivirus 10.1 or 10.2 in 5 user packs for $47.69 and the UK store only sells it as part of a package for Small Businesses for £200+. No use to me.

I tried McAffe next. McAffe sells a minimum of 2 licenses for their Total Protection product for Small businesses for $64.79. The UK store sell the same product only in a 5 user license pack for ÂŁ59.52. Now if you take the exchange rate in to account there is only  about ÂŁ30 difference between them. But I would be buying 4 licenses that I don’t need.

Over to AVG. More of the same. Again 5 user licenses for ÂŁ211 for a year. Waste of time since I’m looking for a single license for a single server.

Trend Micro don’t sell their Small Medium Business offerings online.

So this is essentially a wild goose chase. So if anyone has managed to get a single license of a serve edition antivirus solution, please let me know in the comments.

"Patents Pending"

~ rbonini

I really should be craming for an exam, but this is more fun.

Over the past few days there has been a huge amount of hoohah over Microsofts Claim that thereare 235 patents that have been violated in OpenSource products.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz posted a lenghly reply that attack the root of Microsofts way of doing business:

With business down and customers leaving, we had more than a few choices at our disposal. We were invited by one company to sue the beneficiaries of open source. We declined. We could join another and sue our customers. That seemed suicidal. We were offered the choice to scuttle Solaris, and resell someone else’s operating system. We declined. And we were encouraged to innovate by developers and customers who wanted Sun around, who saw the value we delivered through true systems engineering.

So we took that advice. We started by securing the software assets we were building – so that we could convey them under trusted open source licenses to a community we’d just started nurturing. We redoubled our focus on innovation, in hardware and software, that would differentiate our offerings. Not just as good as the competition, but vastly better. We supported Linux on our SPARC systems, and forced ourselves to open up every business we operate – Solaris wasn’t the hammer for all nails. Nor was SPARC. Nor Java.

In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.

If that didn’t sting enough, Tim O’Reilly compared Microsofts claim to the one McCarthy made about here being 206 commmunists in the state department:

Does Microsoft’s claim that Free and Open Source Software infringes on 235 Microsoft patents remind anyone of Joseph McCarthy’s famous claim about communists at the State Department? Whether or not it’s true, citing such a number without providing any detail is such a classic FUD move that, to me at least, it just makes Microsoft look ridiculous. More recently, it’s reminiscent of the bluster of the SCO case against IBM.

The question I keep asking myself is: If it comes to it, who is Microsoft going to sue? Open Source Software by its very nature involves a cast of thousands.  The second issue involves the way that Microsoft is going to prove it. The only way it can do that is to show that its own propiotory code is exactly the same as the code in said Open Source Software. Which negates the whole idea of keeping your code under wraps.

Perhaps, and this is a long shot, Microsoft should follow Sun and reap the benifits:

In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.

Net result? Our contributions, from Java to OpenOffice to Gnome and Mozilla, now account for in excess of 25% of all lines of code within your average Linux distribution (yup, read that sentence again – or see the report, here, page 51). We joined forces with the likes of Google and IBM and Red Hat to drive the Open Document Format, accelerating document interchange. ODF is now accelerating globally, as the standard trusted by governments and academic institutions for multi-generational document interchange. It is an unstoppable force, no threat can kill a country’s drive for independence or self-sufficiency (remember, the network’s a social utility, too).

Advertising

~ rbonini

From Tim O’Reilly’s Post What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital?:

When you put together all the possibilities for the future of advertising, you realize how little we’ve seen yet as digital life truly spreads beyond the computer and becomes pervasive. As digital display surfaces proliferate, so too will portable sensors (and your cell phone is becoming one of those) and controllers (your cell phone is becoming one of those as well). As David warns, we’re going to need some public discourse about how much is enough. But there are also going to be huge opportunities for companies to do what Google did with its early, uncompromising stand on relevant contextual advertising rather than blaring display ads, and to find ways to use those new digital environments in a way that is consumer-friendly and ultimately empowering.

Just take a look at the way Youtube has just added Ad’s (take alook here as well).

I think Youtube has taken the path of least resistance when it comes to ads. I’d keep an eye out for the whole idea of the user choosing to watch the commercial  changing once people have gotten used to the idea. And on that note, I’d like to repeat what Tim said:

we’re going to need some public discourse about how much is enough

Live Software or Web 2.0?

~ rbonini

I just read this by Tim O’Reilly over at the O’Reilly Radar ( aggregated by Planet Intertwingly and via Scoble’s Link Blog – thats Web 2.0 for you)

It strikes me that one of the big differences between the 1.0 class of data aggregators and the 2.0 class is the difference between “back office” and “live” applications. The credit card company mines its database to select you for direct mail offers; it may even get close to real time in monitoring your card activity for fraud or credit limit detection. But Google or Amazon mines its database in real time and builds the results right into its customer-facing applications.

If Google or Amazon were your bank or credit card, they’d let you know which merchants had the best prices for the same products, so you’d be a smarter shopper next time. They’d let merchants know what products were popular with people who also bought related products. They’d help merchants stock the right products by zip code. They’d let you know when you were spending more on dining out than you have set in your family budget. They’d let you know when you were approaching your credit limit, with a real-time fuel gauge, not just a “Sorry, your card has been declined.”

If Google or Amazon were your phone company, they’d give you access to your entire call history, not just your last ten phone calls. They’d build a dynamic address book for you based on everyone you’d ever talked to — and they’d build p2p phone number lookup from your friends right into that address book. They’d get rid of 411, and just help you search for what you need, and then make the connection for you.

This is one reason I think that Microsoft’s term, “Live Software” is so right on. (I thought of naming this piece “Why Live Software is a better name than Web 2.0.”) It’s unfortunate that Microsoft has chosen that name for its own products only, because it goes right to the heart of what makes Web 2.0 applications so interesting: they are alive, or as close to it as you can get with a computer. They learn from and interact directly with their users (and more specifically, provide services to individual users that benefit from the aggregate interaction of the system with all of its users.)

Tim is right on as usual. This is the whole idea of Web 2.0. It shows how Google is becomming much more than a search engine (not that it’ll be buying banks next).

In the past, computers really were dumb terminals connected to a mainframe. Then we got he Personel Computer revolution that mved the mainfraom into a beige box that you plugged your screen into directly. Now our Desktops are turing into terminals again. The avaliability of Software as a Service over the web is essential to using our computers. The enxt Google will take all this one step further and render our pricy desktops using without a highspeed broadband connection (or Verizion Fiber-Optic for you guys in the States – we still have our broadband in Europe 🙂 ).

Soon, Banks and the like will realise the power of the Google Way of handling data. The ways of aggregating this infomation over the web makes it even better to savour the possibilities.

Just to highlight Tim:

It’s unfortunate that Microsoft has chosen that name for its own products only, because it goes right to the heart of what makes Web 2.0 applications so interesting: they are alive

Reminds me of Frankinstien:

It’s Alive!!! <Evil Laugh/>

Mix 07 – Live

~ rbonini

Unfortunately I’m stuck at home and not at Mix. It is a pity since I learned a ton just from watching last years sessions.

Fortunately they’re streaming Ray Ozzie’s keynote.  

There are three streams:

I’m already connected, listening to Microsoft’s fine classical music collection. And belive me it is fine.

I hope my internet connection stands up to the full force of 500kbits…

Update: I’ve got no video. Only sound. Anyone have any idea why?