Blogs, Social Networks and Podcasts: Corporate Communications 2.0

These are the notes I took at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007

Telekom Austria and myheimat.de think that corporate bloging must be global and external:
* global as in everyone must write, not just CEO's or something
* external as in you must interact with your readers, you shouldn't write only for your company or something, but globally (just like a personal blog) -- you might of course scale, like start with one area and then expand and expand
* you should have guts and talk about anything, even bad about your clients :-P
* of course with this, corporate culture is going to change, but isn't it great? In the end, you must turn into a better company
* maybe the blogosphere isn't the best place to talk about certain stuff
* people should understand blogging before engaging into this
* you must know how to handle with huge traffic (and comments, trolls, spam and so on) - this can be solved with a social network instead of just "blogs", and even with blogs you could try to do something like /.
* if there are other forums or fan-stuff about you, use that, more prioriatily than creating your own blog platform...

Tuesday afternoon on Web 2.0 Berlin 2007

A Conversation with Neil Holloway, Microsoft Europe

Microsoft doesn't get advertising potential in IPTV, and are talking about closeminded methods of using IPTV to enhance advertising... I really see a big market here.

Microsoft doesn't get mobile computing and mobile web.

Microsoft doesn't talk about the Facebook deal.

Microsoft will buy 20 to 30 companies until the end of the year, most of them web 2.0. The statement came in the form of "we don't want to be the 2nd or the 3rd, so we'll buy and buy"...

First thing "good" (for them) I've heard is already after the schedule and as a response to a question. Microsoft wants to generalize their XBOX platform to be a "media platform" (XBOX, Media Centers, IPTV...)

High Order Bit: Introducing Ginger

Ginger is basicly the upcoming version of Netvibes... They're now betting in aggregation of social networks data and widgetise the web using standards (maybe creating some for social widgets?)

Creating Passionate Users

Awsome presentation... Tells you about why does your "help" of "FAQ" or "User Manual" doesn't usually help, people aren't in a "I want to learn this" mood, but in an WTF mood, thinking they're stupid because they can't do what they want with that stupid application... And how to understand the people in that mood and how not to make them have that feeling.

Tuesday on Web 2.0 Berlin 2007

I didn't take notes in everything, but here are the notes I took Tuesday morning...

From Forums to Communities

7 keys to building a successful web 2.0 site
* Close contact to the community and optimum support for your users
* Be innovative: Create features that encourage users to return often (release often)
* Markets are conversations: offer space and reasons for discussions (create the means and the motivation)
* Go viral! Unconventional actions create new links to your service
* Be present
* Do it because you believe in it

People follow bsssss, but they follow (more and more easily) great ideas

Be open, keep it simple, do not spam (obvious, but people usually forget this)

creating "web events" are more simple and effective than creating "web communities"

Metaverse Marketing: Games and Virtual Worlds in Product Promotion

http://www.pelicancrossing.com/inDualityInfo.htm <- IBM VW's "universal client"

* Investing in VWs is doing what your users will want soon
* What can be done?

• create an avatar (act of self-expression, comparing to personalization of myspace profiles, for instance)


• they (avatars) communicate with others (compared to twitter and other communication web20 tools)


• avatars create content (like in web 2.0, once again, people have tools and use them to easily create content)


• they do things together and share a social experience (there's no comparison in web 2.0, so this is what makes the difference) - this remembers me an earlier talk about how web isn't using "space" but "time", so VWs have an extra "feature"

* How to do it?

• Don't just "link"


• find the approaches you can realize within a VW that you can't do any other way, and experiment with them


• Communicate with your comunity... face to face


• give residents something to do (crowdsourcing, involve them directly, they're _there_


• provide them possibilities to have shared experiences with your brand

* advertising

• it works in VWs but not if you just link to a website


• you have to keep avatars inworld


• advertise your inworld activities

* measuring stuff (you can measure a lot of stuff, you can even know what they want...)
* strategy for VWs is similar to strategy for Web 2.0

There's a lot of privacy issues in Virtual Worlds, lots of stuff that scares me. What scares me the most, perheps, is that most people don't see nothing wrong in all this issues. As one person said here, most people don't/won't see VWs as "being online", they see it as "being somewhere", so they assume to have the same set of privacy settings... If one person buys a house and goes there with someone, he assumes his conversation isn't being logged. This works IRL, so it's what's expected in a VW...

What is Web 2.0: The Rules for Creating Successful Online Products in the 21st Century

"Hey, Google is announcing today the GPhone" - great way to wake up the audience :-) The thing is, he didn't need it, he's a great speaker... ( the slides will be on slideshare after web2.0expo).

Nice talk about mashups and remixing... It also shows quite well that you can compare web stuff to music stuff, and the concept behind web 2.0 is exactly what's now starting to happen to music... So yes, music 2.0 is quite a nice definition.

Key web 2.0 design patterns

• The Long Tail


• Users Add Value


• Network Effects by Default


• Some Rights Reserved


• The Perpetual Beta
• (not that I like his "definition" of beta...)


• Cooperate, Don't Control


• Architecture of Participation

Creating services is the big thing, not applications... (Compare creating a "Blogger" to having a blog...)

He told about how to deploy a wiki in a company, something that gave me a smile, but his example can be applied to a lot other stuff... As a matter of fact I think that any web application should be deployed more or less that way, and if it doesn't have success than the application sucks, not the deployment method...

He said that it is illegal to download an youtube video... I had this discussion once, I really have to double check this again, but I think it is not illegal. Anyway, content needs to be open. Companies shouldn't be worried about "how do I take my valuable data out of Google?", they should be earning money out of it by opening up and make money by giving that data...

Ahem... Defining bandwith as what empowered the web 2.0 boom is commiting a mistake... That's like vertical scaling: and a major fuck-up if you consider the bandwidth you have in the mobile web...

He just described (without knowing) why half the people that has an oppinion about Google's personal search results think it is bad: they're taking into account what they think they know about one user, instead of using the network effect and the wisdom of crowds...

If you create something that already exists, as it is, but if it is more easy to use, people will switch to your app...

Everyone has a mobile so it's potentially on the web... mobile web is one of the next big things...

He tells something I completely disagree: "the best online products and services [...] iTunes, Sony CONNECT, Zune Marketplace"... Yes, he knows that COnnECT is dead, but even if he considers Zune Marketplace as a "copycat" of iTunes, iTMS website is completely not a "best online product", it even isn't good!

"Nobody needs to ask permission to anyone to create an aggregator" (talking about the model of the blogosphere)... Once again, I have questions about the correctness of this sentence (even if I think it should be that way), I've discussed this a couple of times and I would really like the sources for that sentence...

Challenges of RIAs:

• Loss of page views (ajax'd stuff makes you be everytime in the same page...)


• RIA content is non-cawlable (sometimes, breaks SEO)


• stop breaking the browser (using standards would fix that...)

This notes do not describe at all this presentation, so you should go and download it. This ended being only personal notes for future reference...

Questions/Slides: dion(at)hinchcliffeandco[dot]com

Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches

Ah, I'm having a great time in Berlin! But instead of a personal blog post, this is a "live blogging"-like post. These are my notes on the "Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches" workshop Cal Henderson (Flickr) gave. As you'll see in this and future posts, this isn't me talking about the workshop but just the notes I took from it...

---

-- Stuff you have to care about...

• * What is scalability
• * Traffic growth
• * Dataset growth
• * Mantainability
• * High Availability
• * Performance

-- Scalability

• * Vertical (get bigger)
• * Sometimes is alright... quicker... and sometimes less expensive, if the software isn't written for H-scalability or when rearchitecting it goes more expensive than to buy just "more RAM" or somthing
• * Horizontal (get more)

-- Architecture

• * finding the right balance for good/fast/cheap

-- App servers

• * state and sessions? please no sessions or at least not local sessions, if you want a scalable app... -> store in a central database, instead of using sticky sessions

• * no sessions can be implemented:
• - stash everything in a cookie
• - sign the cookie
• - using a $timestamp you can easily see when the cookie expires
• * "super slim sessions"
• - no account info in the session (use the previous cookie) but you can fetch database stuff and stuff it in a
• "super slim session"
• * the ramsus way - architect your app so that app servers don't know about the other servers,
• so they can scale horizontaly without problems

# presentation
# markup
| page logic
| business logic
$ database

• * Availability - everything doubled, if you can re-double it in another datacenter

-- Amazon

• * S3 - storage
• * EC2 - compute
• * SQS - queueing
• * all scale horizontally, it is cheap when you're small, it's not really cheap with scale

-- Load balancing

-- Parallelizable == easy

-- Databases

• * usually the hardest part to scale (unless we're doing a lot of file serving)
• * when starting, vertical scale should be used
• * usually you need (specially on web) more read power than write power
• - database replication (writes go to master, reads go to master or slaves)
• - this sucks when you need to scale writes, 'cause you'll have to add a lot of new slaves to be sleeping...
• * caching avoids needing to scale
• * About MySQL clusters: MBD allows a mesh, RSN will be great in an upcoming version

-- Federation (at this moment we're talking about /big/ scaling)

• * Simple things first: divide your tables and put each slice in each cluster

-- Akamai...

-- Serving Files

-- High Availability

• * RAID 5 is cheap, RAID 10 has speeeeeed! ;-)
• * MogileFS
• * FlickrFS ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/flickrfs/ )
• * Amazon S3 (cheap!)

-- Field Work

( iamcal.com/talks )

Berlin, here I go

Wow, what a couple of days. I've been preparing everything, both at a professional an a personal level, and I've been really really busy. The few free moments I had this last couple of days were dedicated to work some more on my musical project Merankorii [1].

I'm going to be in two birthdays of two close persons (one in Portugal, the other already in Berlin), maybe (but I doubt) a quick visit to Barcamp Berlin [2], then Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007 [3], where I count to meet a lot of cool people, besides the obvious conference itself. If you're also going to Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007 [3] and want to meet me, just indicate so in my Web 2.0 Berlin profile [4]. I still don't know about monday, but tuesday I'll go to the Berlin at Night party [5], and wednesday to 1st Girl Geek Dinner Deutschland in Berlin [6] and maybe an Elis concert [7]. Thursday is the last day of the expo, so after it I might visit (at last!) K17, and assist to a somewhat random gig [8]. The rest? Well, I'm going to be there until sunday, so I want to use the time to rest (a lot) and visit the city. Thanks to a friend I have a cool guide of the city, but I still have to look it for more than 30 seconds... The only thing I already know is that the guide has a section of cool music stores, so I'll probably do some shopping :-) Also, I'll follow some of the recomendations you people left here on the blog (thanks!) and by e-mail.

Taking into consideration the quality of the stuff I want to attend at the Expo and the number of people I want to talk to and that wants to talk with me, I think I'll probably won't have the change to liveblog the event, nor even to do such an in-depht summary as I did for XTech last year. Still, you should expect some notes on this blog from monday to thursday.

[1] - http://www.reverbnation.com/merankorii
[2] - http://barcampberlin2.mixxt.de/
[3] - http://berlin.web2expo.com/
[4] - http://web2berlin.crowdvine.com/profiles/6095
[5] - http://berlin.web2expo.com/conference/berlin-night.php
[6] - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/240276/
[7] - http://www.last.fm/event/214616
[8] - http://www.last.fm/event/289216

Tell me about Berlin!

Dear Lazyweb:

I'm going to be for the first time in Berlin, and I don't know nothing about the city. Can you please give me some hints about what you think I must visit? Also, I'm looking for hints about:

• Good music stores;
• Good music/alternative nightclubs (to see what kind of music I'm looking for check out http://www.last.fm/user/Mind_Booster/ )
• Good Jazz clubs
• Every stuff you might want to add ;-)

PS -> If you're in Berlin or are going to be there from the 2nd to the 11st of November and want to know the person behind this blog, tell me ;-)

Web 2.0 Expo: attention to all attendees

I was hoping to write something more complete, talking about me going to the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin next month. For now, just two notes: the first one is that I'm going, and the next one is that if you're going and already paid, you're screwed. Despite the conference price being in Euros €, they did all credic card withdrawns with the right number but in pounds £. Since one pound is 1.44 Euro (more or less) be carefull and check your accounts. The organization (CMP) told us that they did this mistake to everyone, and that they're working on refunds.

This isn't the first thing that makes me really sad with the event's organization, but I'll probably write all about it at a later time. Please alert all your friends you're know that are going...