Showing posts with label web2expoberlin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web2expoberlin. Show all posts

November 13, 2007

My trip to Berlin in 10 little items

berlin semaphores

  1. Berlin first impressions: it's great to be a walker there;
  2. 15 Portuguese people on Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, that I know of;
  3. Berlin's public transports are great, but it's somewhat hard to get used to them;
  4. The idea that Portuguese hospitals are a lot worse than other European countries isn't quite true: they are worse but not that much;
  5. You have to love Berlin's traffic lights;
  6. German people have something against double beds, maybe it's something that comes from Jewish traditions?
  7. I hoped that music there was cheaper, but that's not quite true: average price at 17.50 €. On the other hand, every store is better than any music Portuguese music store I know of regarding stock quality. Plus, they have quite a lot more percentage of stuff in vinyl;
  8. Movies and Books, specially books, are obscenely cheap there, comparing to Portugal. And their bookshops' are awsome. And it seems that adiobooks is the next big thing there...
  9. If you're to go there, remember: go to the DDR museum and the cinema museum. If to choose one of those, choose the first.
  10. It was great being there, and mind-thrilling too. There's a lot of new stuff gereminating in my mind... You might see the results sometime.

November 08, 2007

Cory Doctorow on Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

* 11:34 - He's making a great speach about why copyright acts nowadays are ridiculous. Nothing new here until now, but it's being great...

* IPRED2 - the worst copyright law in the world (we pay for fighting copyright; p2p gets illegal)
* CPCM - aaaaaarghhh...
* The database directive - absurd
* Extending copyright harms economy

What can you do?
* http://www.eff.org/
* http://www.edri.org/

November 07, 2007

What Happens To Print as the Web Rises

Features people want about in news websites (this works for newspapers and tv's):


  • Blogs

  • community blog (blogs for users)

  • article Comments

  • blog comments

  • Blogroll

  • Video

  • Podcasting

  • Social Bookmarkting

  • mobile

  • most popular

  • registration(they don't like registration, I mean)

  • ratings

  • social networking

  • User Generated Content

  • RSS

  • RSS per Category

  • Message Boards

  • Full RSS stories



Wow, now a new model: user generated content (news), they liked the article so they bought the article to the user (yes, they PAIED for it), they edited and published... Too bad it is a german site O:-)

Mobile in Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

Mobile to Web and Back: Designing for People



Great presentation, this guy really knows how to say what I think about mobile :-) Mobile's the future, not because it is a trend but because that's what makes sense... I really need to take this guy (Kwame Ferreira) to Portugal and speak about this, maybe you'll have more news about it soon :-)

The Impact of Mobile Web 2.0 on the Telecoms Industry



This could be an interesting presentation, but after the previous one I cannot think any other word to describe it but "boring". Also, this guy doesn't really grasp where's the value for mobile operators. He thinks that when a user takes a picture with a mobile phone and automaticly sends it to flickr, operators have nothing to win with it. He calls this a problem and thinks that people shouldn't have the content to migrate from the Operator to the interweb... something like "as a user I love it, as an operator I hate it"... I really think that Operators should love it too! His problem is simply that he divides "Mobile Internet" from "Internet", and both are the same. Wake up!

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...

November 06, 2007

The Beauty in Standards

( HTML + CSS + DOM and JavaScript ) = beauty web

Never mixup any of those layers... Never do stuff like
<a href="javascript:...">
or
<a href="#" onclick="...">

Now, with Ajax... You should use "Hijax", his recently created buzword. It's basicly adding one more layer to the "old" HTML+CSS+DOM&JS model, making it Hijax = HTML -> CSS -> DOM + JS -> Ajax. Basicly, you hijack the requests and use AJAX...

OK, now he said for the first time something I don't agree (twice in a row): first he said that something that fallpits in the definition of "web chat" (he was talking about Meebo or any web IM) can't degrade gracefully (meaning that you couldn't do a chat app without AJAX). Not only I disagree, I can even give an example: HCL uses Aardvark, which means that if you are AJAX-enabled you do it AJAX-style, but if you're not AJAX-enabled you'll still be able to use it. Second, he said that in those cases people should use something like Flash... But if you do it you're excluding people then you're doing something broken (as he said himself).

...

OK, I said it on the microphone. He basicly agrees with me, but gives me another example: video-editing. The thing is... if you're doing that kind of app, why do it an webapp? It's useless as an webapp! Is it the "you don't need to install or update" thingie? 'cause if it is, you can actually do it without using a web browser.

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...

November 05, 2007

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 )