Although Open Home is an $3.99 app, I'd really call it a platform. With it, you can skin or customize your Android interface, add Live Folders, shortcuts and such. And there's tons of custom skins, fonts, icon packs for sale in the Android Market to enhance it. There's even an experimental 3D cube interface in the latest version as you swipe to other home screens, the screen rotates like a cube. I haven't dropped the $3.99 just yet, but I did install Open Home Lite, which is free. It wasn't until after installation that I realized the software adds two extra home screens to the Nexus One. I don't have enough apps and shortcuts to fill up seven screens just yet, but I'm heading in that direction, so the extra space will come in handy. Each of the screens can hold a custom descriptive title as well check this old but relevant video to see how one user categorized the screens on his HTC Magic.

Aside from the extra home screens, Open Home adds dedicated search on the left and an interesting little slideout drawer on the right side of the screen. Simply tap and swipe the star to pull out the drawer. I'm thinking of placing the most used apps in the little drawer so that they're available from any of the seven screens. And I don't even have to give up my Live Wallpapers since Open Home supports them on my handset. Perhaps one of the best features of all Open Home allows for home screen rotation to landscape mode, something I wish Android would support natively.

I'll be playing some more with the free, lite version of Open Home, but I'm already inclined to drop the $3.99 it's a small price to pay for two extra home screens and customization features.

Images courtesy of Better Android Apps

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

Google's Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One

Blogs.mu has been around for a while but I'd bet you haven't heard of it. I'd also bet that if you have heard of it that you forgot all about it. If you fall into this latter category then consider this a refresher about the easiest way to run a WordPress blog network without installing WPMU yourself.

For the uninitiated, WPMU stands for WordPress Multi-User. It is the same WordPress that you can download from their .org site except that it allows you to create unlimited blogs from one upload to a web server. It is powerful and built from the same code that runs WordPress.com. Though I highly doubt the out of the box ability to run millions of blogs form a single installation without countless hours of coding.

The folks at blogs.mu have come close to doing exactly that for the end user of their service. They have taken an off the shelf version of WPMU and spent the hours coding, hacking, theming and delivered it as a product that anyone can use with all the bells and whistles build in.

I've run a couple instances of WPMU over the years on my own servers and if I needed to run it again I would go about doing it on my own. However, I am a tech masochist that stubbornly decides that sub domains are the the best way to run these installs and then spends days hacking around Apache and other config files. Blogs.mu has taken care of all of this.

They have even taken care of themes, plugins and advanced user management for you. Believe me, this is a big deal when you want to run a network of blogs. Being able to manage bloggers, themes and plugins effectively can leave you more time to create editorial or your own blog posts.

Blogs.mu is a free' service but one that I would recommend that you pay for. Partially, because their business model and your ability to unlock some of the best tools depend on it. You can use their free version to get your feet wet and create a couple blogs to use as demos for the decision makers at your job or within your group of friends. Then upgrade to the paid version once you are comfortable and ready yourself to blog like a pro.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Multiple Partner Blogs is a post from: TechStartups.com

Munch from Belgrade seems to have shoehorned Google's Android OS onto a dual-boot Nokia N95. The demo videos are rather grainy, but you can make out Android booting up and Google Maps running fullscreen. Munch vows to release the code for installation October 5th on his blog.

If you manage to get this running on your N95 when it's released, leave a note in the comments.

[via gizmodo]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fever and the Future of Feed Readers

Time was, every self-respecting geek lived and died by his feed reader (or aggregator, if you prefer). Just several years ago, the number of subscriptions in your RSS-chomping tool of choice made for bragging rights. 200? Oh, I can get through 500 feeds a day. More subscriptions meant you were more in the know. Really good lists of subscriptions were traded amongst friends, but cautiously, just as one might hold back a recommendation to a superb but little-known restaurant.

At the time, the only real debate was around the best way to present all this information. Some preferred a river of news, others preferred their content categorized and neatly filed, like sections in a newspaper. But everyone was in agreement: having all this fresh content collected for you in one place was a boon. It was a change in mindset, and it seeded the demand for what is now being called the Real-Time Web. (Incidentally, the Real-Time Web is next year's Web 2.0. If you'd like to appear cool and aloof, start disdaining the expression now).

Today, at least in the web-tech echo chamber, feed reading is quickly falling out of fashion. Too many sites producing too many feeds of dubious quality means information overload, and a creeping sense of obligation to keep up with a torrent of questionably relevant content. Some have gone back to checking a handful of bookmarked sites, as we did in the early days of the web. Others rely on social aggregation sites like Reddit, Digg, and Hacker News to show them what's worth reading. Both strategies are highly manual and, to me, distressingly unoptimized.

Abdicating Aggregation

Another camp all but eschews the idea of trying to keep up with feeds. Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of the superb social coding site GitHub, is one of the more visible advocates of this approach, saying in a tech conference keynote last year:

Stop using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever the kids are using these days. It's not worth your time. [L]et other people do the filtering for you. Use your time for other things.

This statement initially rings true. We're in the age of social networking, after all. I've told social sites about my friends, and my friends are always talking about things, so just show me what my friends are talking about and I'll always be in the loop, right? Then I can focus on my own interests and projects. Sounds great.

The problem with abdicating your content consumption to other people, though, is other people. Perhaps it's overestimating my ability to find interesting things to read, but I don't trust my friends and the Internet at large to educate and entertain me. In the venn diagram of my interests and my friends', there may be 80% overlap, but most of the content that I'm going to find deeply engaging is probably in the leftover 20% at the margins.

There's also a sort of collective danger to the strategy of exclusively consuming information through social osmosis: if everyone does it, who's going to find the interesting stuff? Who takes the reigns as the editors, the arbiters of taste? Going back to a post I wrote in 2003, who will be our cool shit aggregators?

If everyone took Wanstrath's advice, nobody would do any filtering and nobody would consume anything. Realistically, we're in no danger of that, but we're also not seeing a radical improvement in the way we consume information on the web. Surely someone's investigating another strategy?

Blending Subscriptions with Social Data

Google Reader is, as evidence of the slowly dying field of feed reading, pretty much the only regularly-updated, widely-used aggregator left on the web. Bloglines has been gasping for air for over a year, and NewsGator is positioning itself towards the enterprise, presumably trying to scrape some money out of the generally unprofitable business of aggregation.

Reader has been something of a playground for Google, and one of the products for which the behemoth has been most responsive to public feedback. When Reader launched, its interface was nigh-unusable. It was updated, improved, and gradually became the only feed reader worth using and not just on the web, something it pains me to say as the owner of licenses for multiple desktop aggregators that eventually had their price driven down to free, and have since seen little attention from their developers.

Today, Google seems hellbent on cramming its otherwise clean and speedy products with cumbersome, poorly conceived social features. Presumably they see social networks as a threat to their valuable side business of, uh, completely free products, and this is their ham-fisted response. In Reader's case, the user response has been one of confusion and derision.

Seeing content filtered through my social lens seems like the marriage of traditional feed reading to Wanstrath's more osmotic approach. Reader's implementation doesn't prove this to be a happy union. The tool is now cluttered with smilie faces indicating content that my friends liked, only Google has fairly incomplete view of who my friends are because they've yet to create a social experience that encourages me to share that information. Reader's myriad competing ways to share, vote on, annotate, and remember items further detract from its former appeal.

I've given up on Reader, but I'm not ready to give up on feed reading just yet. I wanted to try one more experiment.

Enter Fever

Fever is a feed reader designed and built by Shaun Inman, the developer behind the popular Mint web traffic analytics product. Like Mint, Fever is $30 (USD) and runs on your server a ballsy proposition in an age of free software running in the proverbial cloud. It is unapologetically for power users.

Fever's proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs. Fever's precise formula for this isn't discussed on the product's relatively curt homepage. Take it or leave it.

I forked over my money, spun up a virtual server, and have been using Fever for several days now. Installation was as straightforward and slick as you could hope for given that Fever is a self-hosted web application. Special features aside, it handles the basics well imagine Google Reader before all the social bloat and with a far more attractive design. Fever's design is not perfect, but it's easy on the eyes and pleasant to use. Put another way, Fever doesn't make it harder to read feeds much as you always have.

The $30 question, though: does Fever really float the best, most relevant content to the top in a personalized way? Can it dig through all the noise on the web and show you what you need/want to know at a glance? The free answer: sort of.

For starters, it's easy to pollute your corpus of signal feeds, which Fever calls sparks. Fever needs sparks that contain a lot of links. If you put top feeds from Digg, Reddit, and the like into Fever, you'll basically just end up with your own dim, mostly irrelevant slice of the web. Fever really needs folks like Waxy, Laughing Squid, and Trivium to keep churning out link blogs full of references to good content. Without those sort of quality, URL-rich feeds, your Fever's view of what's hot is going to be lukewarm.

For this reason, Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I'd love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs and, indeed, linking outside one's own site just aren't as prevalent in those communities. Fever did similarly poorly given a number of sparks for top world news; a paucity of URLs means Fever can't replace Google News for figuring out what's on the front pages of the world's newspapers.

It's disappointing that I can't depend on Fever to be a one-stop shop for my daily information intake. With my current heavily-curated collection of subscriptions, I can rely on Fever to be a sort of no-bullshit Techmeme, but little more. For the topics of world news, music, art, culture, humor, food, and drink, I still need to read a number of feeds entry-by-entry.

Given Fever's initial cost, plus the ongoing cost of hosting a server on which to run it, I can't imagine that it's a tool that will last long in my tool belt. I already regret the time I spent setting it up and tuning my feeds, and I can't really justify keeping it around for the sole purpose of being a less-encumbered Google Reader.

The Future of Feed Readers

I'm not sure what the solution is here. Feed readers as we've known them are dying, but it's as yet unclear what will take their place. Filtering feeds for relevance algorithmically seems all but fruitless; filtering through the social graph is only a slight improvement, but misses the rare content that may only strike a chord with a small audience.

If there's one thing I'm convinced of at the end of this exploration, it's that there's more work to be done, and more businesses to emerge in this field. Social networks alone aren't focused enough tools to bubble up and share quality content. My hope is that a surplus open data of the sort we're trying hard to share at Twitter will help spawn a new generation of tools to manage the flood of content. I don't think it's a problem that Twitter, or any other pipeline for information, can solve on its own.

With all that said, perhaps the right approach really is to abdicate one's consumption of content to whatever you're passively exposed to, and to occupy your mind with other things. The act of creation is almost always self-affirming, and the act of consumption so rarely is.

TUAWInstall Windows 7 on a Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Fix Problems by Reinstalling Windows

As a tech blogger, part of my job involves reviewing software which is so interesting but frequent installation (followed by un-installation) of software programs also tend to slow down the computer.

To deal with this problem, I did a clean installation of Windows last weekend and re-installed all the important software programs from scratch. As expected, the boot-up time has reduced and the computer's performance has improved significantly. Luckily, this task is not as complex as it may sound but here are a few things you should remember before taking the plunge:

Pre-Installation Checklist

1. Get Magical Jelly to retrieve a list of product keys that were used to install Windows and Microsoft Office on your computer. Print this information.

2. Get Belarc Advisor to create a detailed report of all software programs, hotfixes and hardware devices available in your system. Print this report as well.

3. Uninstall all software programs that had to be activated at the time of installation (e.g. Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office). It's important that you do a proper un-installation of these programs through Add/Remove Programs because simply deleting the folder from Program Files directory will not free up the license on the manufacturer's activation server.

4. Install Driver Max to create a backup of all device drivers currently installed on your system. This will come handy after reinstallation incase you are not able to locate the driver installers on the vendor's website.

5. Create a backup folder on c: (say c:\old_files) and add the following files to this folder

i. Your Outlook pst file that has all the mails, contacts, tasks and other Outlook items.
ii. If you have purchased any custom fonts, copy the relevant ttf files from the c:\windows\fonts folder. c. All documents, Live Writer drafts, pictures, music and videos from your My Document folder.
iii. Backup your custom dictionaries from Firefox, Microsoft Word, Live Writer, etc.
iv. Export all browser bookmarks and copy them to the backup folder.
v. Open your Firefox add-ons window, take a screenshot and paste that image in the backup folder. This is a good way to remember your favorite Firefox extensions.
vi. Export your podcast subscriptions in iTunes as as OPML (XML) file.
vii. Product keys (serial numbers) of all licensed software.

6. If you have a partitioned hard drive (say C: and D:), just copy* the backup folder created in step 5 to the D: drive. If you don't have a partitioned hard disk or if the size of partition is small, install Live Mesh, add c:\old_files folder to your Live Mesh account and wait until all the files are uploaded on to the web. Mesh offers 5 GB of space and it may therefore be a good idea to burn all the heavy files (like videos, music, etc) onto a DVD instead of transferring them online.

*You can copy large folders across drives through Windows Explorer or the xcopy utility.

Re-Install Windows from Scratch

Now is the time to do a clean installation of Windows. This is probably the easiest part. You can either boot your computer from the original Windows installation CD** or, while you are running Windows, pop-in the installation CD and run the setup.exe program just like you would install any other Windows app. Always choose "Fresh Installation" instead of "Repair".

**If you installation media doesn't include the latest service packs, try creating one yourself. Windows XP with SP3 is available as a downloadable ISO while you can slipstream SP1 into Vista fairly easily.

Post-Installation Tips

It can take around 30 minutes (or more) for the whole installation to finish. Now jump to the Windows Update website and let your browser download all the hotfixes, security updates, driver updates, etc. If your computer is unable to connect to the Internet, chances are that your computer doesn't have the proper network drivers. No problem as you can easily get the drivers from the dump that you created using DriverMax utility.

If your display is acting funny or there's no audio, just install the right drivers from the vendor's website (preferred approach) or use your backup media. Once all the patches are installed, Windows Vista users can free up few gigabytes of disk space by making SP1 permanent. Windows XP users may skip this step.

Now turn on the Firewall and install all the other software programs and associated updates in any order. The next important step is to clone your disk image via DriveImage XML (free software), Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. Windows Vista Ultimate also comes with a "Backup & Restore Center" that you may use to create a complete backup image of your entire computer to another drive, external disk or a DVD.

These disk images will come very handy after few months when your Windows PC get slow again. You won't have to repeat the rebuilding exercise as the PC can be easily restored to the original state through these disk images.

Don't experiment on your main PC

If you are tech enthusiast who loves to try new software / browser add-ons, I would strongly recommend that you don't install these software on your main system - instead get Virtual PC (it's free), create a Windows XP / Windows Vista virtual machine and use that environment as your new playground.

Another recommendation - do get a cane of compressed air to remove all the dirt from components inside the computer case. Sometimes software may not be the reason behind your slow and slugging PC - the culprit could be the dust sticking on the CPU heat sink.

How to Rebuild your Computer and Reinstall Windows Without Headache - Digital Inspiration

Mister Jalopy is having fun with a cool new tool called Mulitcolr.

Idee has built a remarkably easy to use tool for searching Flickr for photos according to color palatte. Besides being completely straightforward and great fun, Multicolr is surprisingly useful to test different color combinations... It should be a standard installation at every paint store. And this is no one off tidbit, Idee is doing other fascinating stuff. Like TinEye Mobile - an iPhone app where you snap a photo of an album cover and it returns YouTube, Wiki and AllMusic data about the release. These folks are worth keeping an eye on.

The comedy music duo Paul and Storm have assembled a very naughty photo gallery on Flickr of Snack Foods That Sound Like Sex Acts

via BuzzFeed

photos by Paul and Storm

ShareThis

T.D.I. International, Inc. v. Golf Preservations, Inc., 2008 WL 294531 (E.D. Ky. Jan. 31, 2008)

In a thinly reasoned opinion with meager facts, a Kentucky federal court meekly voted that keyword advertising is a trademark use in commerce, at least for purposes of a motion to dismiss.

The case involves competitors in the golf course drainage system installation business. Bailey worked for the plaintiffs before starting up his own competing venture. The plaintiffs claim (among other things) that Bailey misappropriated trade secrets when he walked out the door and that his new venture engaged in trademark infringement by buying keyword advertising (apparently the "XGD" trademark, which as of today still triggers a Google AdWords ad for the defendant).

The court describes the precedent cited by both sides regarding the "use in commerce" question (a2z and 1-800 Contacts on the defense; GEICO, American Blinds, Buying for the Home, Edina Realty, JG Wentworth, Rescuecom v. Computer Troubleshooters, Paisola) before throwing up its hands and punting:

The Court has given careful consideration to the arguments and authorities presented by both parties. In light of the uncertain state of the law on the specific issue presented in this case, the Court does not find the Defendants' arguments sufficient to warrant dismissal of the Plaintiffs' Lanham Act claims at this stage in the proceedings.FN1 Accordingly, the Court finds that the Plaintiffs have alleged facts sufficient to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face."

In the footnote, the court notes that the plaintiffs alleged other conduct beyond just buying keywords. The case doesn't recount these facts, but they might very well support a use in commerce determination without needing to address the keyword advertising issue at all.

Either way, this case reinforces the pattern that Second Circuit-controlled courts aren't finding trademark use in commerce from keyword triggering and all other courts are. In that respect, this ruling is reminiscent of the American Airlines v. Google ruling, where the court declined to dismiss the complaint without any substantive explanation.

What happens if Wordpress.com folds? What happens if they change their mind and start charging me, or I leave them for someone else, or whatever? By choosing Wordpress.com (or Yahoo.com, or anyone.com) as my OpenID host/provider/whatever you call it, what happens to my ID should I choose to move it?

What do you know/think?

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I have been slacking a little over the last month on the updates, so time to play catch up.

First of all some big news, Blogcatalog has now surpassed MyBlogLog in traffic levels, if you believe Alexa data. They are in exactly the same niche, and share plenty of users, so whilst I don't trust Alexa data extensively, this is a significant achievement considering it wasn't long ago when people had trouble differentiating the two services.

If you switch to a 7 day view, you will see that Blogcatalog overtook MyBlogLog 24th January.

The observant will also note when looking at a 3 year chart that MyBlogLog had much more explosive growth over a short 3 month period, were purchased by Yahoo, and since that time has been a little bit in decline which is a shame because I still love MyBlogLog, and if I have a choice between MyBlogLog and Google Analytics for stats checking, I am more likely to have a glance in MyBlogLog than Google Analytics.

BlogCatalog has had a much more gradual growth, working to differentiate themselves by introducing lively discussion forums and member groups, and bringing bloggers together to support good causes with Bloggers Unite.
The growth has been viral, "grass roots" growth, with from memory one mention on Mashable, one mention on Marketing Pilgrim, and very little if any coverage on large technology blogs. Blogcatalog would be a great example of what Guy Kawasaki was talking about yesterday.

Forget A-list bloggers. Lousy reviews by them cannot tank your product. Great reviews cannot make it successful. Focus on big numbersany Technorati 1,000,000 blogger can be a channel to reach people. If enough people like your product, the A-list bloggers will have to write about you.

Some key recent enhancements (click through to see working examples on some of these widgets)

Blogcatalog Discussions & Groups

Discussion Forums and Groups

There are frequent enhancements to the features in the various discussion areas, the latest one being a new widget for the discussion groups you have joined - other features include practical enhancements to the discussion features, in many cases making them more useful than Facebook, where it is very hard to track discussion in the groups you join.

BlogRank Buttons (just released)

This was announced just a few hours ago

BlogCatalog ratings are based upon various metrics including votes using a widget on your site, voting on the site, visits from Blogcatalog to your blog, and overall Blogcatalog activity in various forms.

Communities Widget

This is a way to display your profile on other social media sites introduced in December. Quite simple, and useful if you don't want to give juice to the sites for reputation management.

On this one I am not sure who got there first, as MyBlogLog also launched a similar widget in December

There actually seems to be some bugs in the code generated, or maybe it is just my laggy connection, but I couldn't seem to get a version that displayed both the names of a service, and icons next to them.

BlogCatalog API

I am not that great a programmer but I have managed to play around with the Blogcatalog API and create some simple applications (still to be released) by combining data from Blogcatalog with data from other APIs. Blogcatalog has had their API available for some time.

MyBlogLog should have had their API launched months ago by my reckoning, and it finally entered beta a week ago. It seems like it might have more features than the current Blogcatalog API, but once you have opened up, opening up a little more isn't too difficult.
With wider adoption (the tech bloggers have been wooed by MBL in the past) the new MBL API is being greeted as the possible saviour of Yahoo.
Sure, it is possible MyBlogLog have more data stored, I am not sure what data Blogcatalog collect, have a wider audience, and MyBlogLog have the "social starfish" available via API, but it isn't much more work for Blogcatalog to allow access to that data.
MyBlogLog have however been working on infrastructure heavily for the last 12 months - I would hope their API is now ready for some heavy usage.

I would love to have seen some cool apps made with the Blogcatalog API by now

Support For Wordpress.com, Myspace, or Yahoo! 360 Blog?

This is something that MyBlogLog have had for some time, Blogcatalog announced support for Wordpress.com, Myspace and Yahoo! 360 yesterday.

Who knows, maybe you can even see my recent visitors in a feed reader, in fact that would be an interesting addition.

Tagging & Reading

Quite a few months ago I wrote about Blogcatalog parsing tags from your feed itmes and then listing your content on varous tag pages, just like Technorati. At the time they only offered support for a few blogs, using a specific format for tags and categories. I noticed a couple of months ago that they now have my blog being picked up and fed into tag feeds

In addition on your profile pages it is now possible to read the feeds of the blogs you have added to your neighborhood

Ok now for the big one

Blogcatalog SezWho Partnership

Blogcatalog today have just announced a partnership with SezWho, who provide special plugins to integrate with Plugin Systems on various blogging and discussion forums.
The good things from my perspective:-

• SezWho doesn't require any form of browser plugin
• This doesn't replace the existing comment system, thus a blog owner retains the content on their site, and if they choose, can remain dofollow. That isn't true of other replacement comment systems with similar features.
• No browser plugin is required - I often had problems using various browser based comment tracking with incompatibilities, and I also had problems with their plugins, though I must admit I haven't retried with cocomment recently, maybe that situation has improved. Comment tracking that required me to click a button was always awkward, and subscribing to RSS feeds for comments on individual posts just became a chore - we will see how this works in the long run
• Comment ratings - this could be likened to the thumbs up / thumbs down on SEOmoz where you gain points, but this is a distributed rating system that means you gain in reputation for leaving high quality comments across multiple blogs - I am not sure whether this gets gamed heavily, but Ihope that it will encourage better commenting, especially on dofollow blogs.

Warning:- I may be more inclined to just delete a URL from a spam comment rather than deleting them totally, so that other readers can also vote your comment down
yes, sometimes there is a little evil in me

Negative points?

• Only support for Wordpress self-hosted and Moveable Type - in many ways I would look on this as a plus, as it might encourage more people onto their own hosting, though I hope they can come up with a solution for my many blogging friends on Typepad.
• Installation is a little complicated for a novice, though there is a WordPress widget (regular readers know I don't like Wordpress Widgets though for SEO reasons)

I should also point out that as I am writing this I haven't tested the integration on this blog with the threaded comments, but I don't expect there to a problem, and by the time many people read this I will have everything up and running.

Setting Up SezWho

Log into Blogcatalog, go to your account and manage your blog

You will see just after the feed management section a big button to create an account on SezWho. |Click it, wait a moment or 2, and you will be issued an API key, and you will be given a link to click to download special versions of the SezWho plugins.

Goodbye MyAvatars

I have been using the Wordpress plugin MyAvatars for over a year now, but it is time for it to be retired.

MyAvatars uses images from MyBlogLog, and unfortunately on popular content it is starting to cause me problems on page loading times. This isn't something that was a major problem for me before, because I had a very fast connection, but it has started to cause me real problems, maybe because MyBlogLog switched over to the Yahoo image platform, or maybe it is a problem that always existed.

This doesn't prevent people viewing my content quickly, because avatars and widgets are generally loaded in parallel, but on a slow connection it can start to hurt a little.
When your total page sizes can reach over 1MB, and most of that is avatars on comments, it is time to reconsider.

One caveat, I am not sure if the SEZWho Blogcatalog plugin will add avatars to trackbacks, I will have to take a look.

Benefits

Big immediate benefit for Blogcatalog is press coverage, as SezWho are in California. I think it is a good match as both are heavily aimed at promoting discussion between bloggers, both on blogs and off them.

I am also not a fan of applications that try to do too much - SezWho seems to do just enough to be worthwhile whilst leaving me in control of content left on my blog, and commenter ratings will certainly help in making the decision on whether a commenter is generally well behaved. I don't mind short jokey comments or great post Andy if it is from someone legitimate, it is when someone comes in as a first time commenter, you rarely know if they are genuine.

About Blogcatalog & SezWho

My blog has in the last 9 months grown into quite an in depth resource on all things "Blogcatalog". I first started writing about them when they relaunched around April 2007 with an initial investment of $40000 to purchase the existing property.
Full coverage of Blogcatalog can be found by browsing my Blogcatalog tag.

Primary competitor for Blogcatalog is Mybloglog

SezWho when they received $1M investment from KPG Ventures back in October 2007 were given quite a luke warm reception on Techcrunch.

Competitors to SezWho include Disqus, Intense Debate and coComment

Specific Disclosure - I do some consulting with Blogcatalog on a very much low key, part time basis, though I also give coverage to their competitors and try to remain impartial - I have given MyBlogLog extensive coverage as well, most recently in a joint interview with Ian Kennedy on Collective Thoughts

Further coverage no doubt on the Blogcatalog blog though the press release isn't posted yet.

Related posts

• Wordpress 2.1 Launch date set (1)
• Traffic Or Topical Community - What Comes First? (28)
• Supporting Your Most Valued Communities Without WIIFM (24)
• MyBlogLog vs Blogcatalog - Differentiation (41)
• MyBlogLog Spam Hack Update & Widget Performance | Linkbait Idea (2)
• MyBlogLog API - How Far Forward Are You Thinking (3)
• I Bet You Missed Some of These (March 07) (4)
• Exclusive: Blogcatalog vs Technorati? - Sharing The Love & Tagging (nofollow removed) (20)
• Blogcatalog
  Blogger Social Networking Hub (9)
• Blogcatalog Slam Dunks MyBlogLog? (29)

last shot f this great installation in Melbourne.
posted by kosso using mobods : [permalink]

There are many benefits to using open source software for web applications: rapid development cycles, leading functionality in many market segments, and of course the price. But actually deploying those applications can be a huge, daunting nuisance. The WordPress installation instructions, for example, may brag of taking only five minutes - but that presumes you are already running MySQL and PHP and a web server and are comfortable configuring them.

Bitnami is a relatively new effort to do something about this. They've created a series of application stacks that enable wizard-driven installation of popular open-source software across Windows, Linux, and Mac. Each stack is fully self-contained, including all the necessary servers and management tools, as well as the application in question, and each installs to a separate directory so that it can be isolated from the rest of your computer.

The range of software that BitNami covers is large and growing. It includes WordPress and Roller for blogging, several bug-tracking systems, CMS systems including Drupal and Joomla, the phpBB forum software, DokuWiki and MediaWiki wiki servers, and more. They also have a general-purpose LAMP development stack (as well as Windows and Mac variants) and have recently released a RubyStack tuned for Rails development and deployment.

I've installed several of the BitNami stacks, and they've performed as advertised. You'll probably find that you want to make some changes if you actually move them into production (for example, to change the URL of the delivered application). Fortunately, BitNami also offers support forums with quick and helpful responses. Recommended if you want to check out some of the software that they're covering without spending hours on setting up all the dependencies first.

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I caught with Jeff Whatcott today about his new job at Acquia, the new, $7M funded Drupal startup. Acquia will sell general support and updates for Drupal, but also Drupal functionality as a service, sort of like SaaS for plugins, if you will.

You may remember Jeff from the Flex SDK open sourcing at Adobe, his previous employer.

What's Acquia Up To?

Being just a casual call, there wasn't anything earth-shattering we talked about - just a basic intro and some discussion. They're starting up more public, involved conversations later this quarter, so I'm sure there'll be more.

In the meantime, it's fun watching the blog posts of people come on to the company. As their FAQ says:

We are a new software company. We will provide an incredibly valuable set of software and network services for the popular Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. Our goal is to amplify Drupal and make it rock even better and louder for more audiences.

In talking with Jeff, what's interesting here is the idea to be a software company. Actually, primarily a software as a service company. Sure, there's the usual open source support - providing certified stacks and one-neck-to-ring support for it. But, more than that Acquia has the desire to provide and sell additional features to the Drupal world, primarily as a service. I suspect these will be things like modules, or components, provided behind a URL hosted by Acquia.

As an example, the FAQ uses auto-updates from the cloud:

A simple sounding example is an automated upgrade/update service. But though this sounds simple, this can be a very sophisticated problem. We'll aim to provide a variety of features to help simplify this over time, like enabling you to create rules around when and how to do automated updates, insuring multiple servers are updated simultaneously with the same updates, detecting whether you've accidentally forked your installation from the public versions (and handling this in various ways), and other functions.

SaaS and The Open Source Company

More narrow and new than updating and patching, as an example of thse services you could think of the services Auttomattic/WordPress.com provides: Akismet spam filtering, Gravatar avatars, etc.

These WordPress.com services are nice because they centralize a data and even process (figuring out if a blog comment is spam or not) and allow people who are running their own copy of the WordPress software to call out to that service. So, each WordPress install doesn't have to maintain all of the data and do all the analysis for comment spam filtering. Akismet does that.

That's just an example from a different open source company. Who knows what Acquia will do?

More broadly, providing services is an excellent and respected way of commercial open source companies to make money, Google being the prime example. You've always got to have something non-free to sell if you want to make money at an open source company, and services look to be an excellent non-free asset for companies. Here, selling components, functionality, and features as a service looks mighty tasty. It'd be wise for other open source folks to track Acquia and other's (like Auttomattic) success.

Community

Speaking to the Drupal community, Jeff said they were quite keen on helping the community and, at the same time, trying to keep separate enough from them so as not to take them over. This is always the sort of difficult thing for an open source company.

On the one hand, you want to make the claim that you're the authority (committers and community leaders on the pay-roll on a given open source project. On the other hand, you want to assure the community that you're not going to take over. That balancing act is one of the core concerns of community management and it's tough. Even the word management implies in community management could set semantic-sensitive people off.

The task isn't impossible at all, and being sensitive to it is half the battle.

Public Web Sites

The only other thing we talked about was what kinds of sites Jeff saw using Drupal more: public or intranet sites? Public web-sites were the vast majority. The idea of Drupal is to provide all of the plumbing, or modules, for doing various types of web site functionality - blogs, user management, straight up pages, etc. It seems like users of Drupal are looking towards it to be their general web site management framework.

Jeff was eager to avoid the CMS label, which is sort of valid. CMS systems typically suck and are over-priced: it's better simply to say you help manage web sites than to pull in the hoary limbs of a CMS. To overstate it: I guess once you get a TLA attached to some use of technology, it's sort of downhill from there.

I asked this question because it's easy to shove any open source web page management thing (a CMS ;>) in front of the SharePoint train to see what happens. SharePoint, of course, is more focused on behind-the-firewall content management. Sure, I bet people use Drupal behind-the-firewall, but the plan for Acquia seems to be squarely on public websites.

I love my CMS! is rarely heard when it comes to web site management, so it'll be fun to watch Acquia help the overall Drupal community service that lack of love.

Disclaimer: Adobe, Jeff's previous employer, is a client, as is Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: adobe, auttomattic, chumby, drupal, execs, sharepoint, support

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Many of the commonly misused accessibility features are HTML attributes. It is my feeling that they get misused either by developers who mean well but don't quite understand how the attributes help end users, or by developers who add them simply to be able to tick "accessibility" off their to-do list and shut up their manager, client or whoever is pestering them about making the site more accessible.

Here are a few examples of HTML attributes that are often misused or overused:

• The accesskey attribute. A potentially useful attribute, the accesskey attribute creates a keyboard shortcut for a link or form control. However, it is so badly implemented in most browsers that it's safest to avoid using it. Very few users are aware of it, and with current implementations it can conflict with shortcut keys used for other functions in the browser.

  That said, accesskey can be useful to some people if many sites use the same shortcut keys. Many public sector sites use the same shortcut keys since they follow a guideline which states which keys to use for what. It doesn't solve the user agent problem, but at least it makes the use of accesskey consistent.

  It is quite common to see accesskey use go completely overboard though, with just about every link and form control having an accesskey attribute, especially in the administrative interfaces of CMSs and other tools that claim to be accessible.

• The tabindex attribute. Changing the order in which elements receive keyboard focus from the order they appear in the markup can perhaps be useful in some hypothetical cases. I can't really think of any such cases, but that is not how the tabindex attribute is normally used. Instead it is often used to define the tabbing order of elements that are already in a logical order in the markup. This wouldn't really be noticed or cause any problems if it weren't for the fact that elements with a tabindex attribute take precedence over all other elements when using the keyboard to navigate.

  A good example is the comment form in a default WordPress installation. The form controls (input fields and submit button) all have tabindex attributes despite already being in a logical order in the source. The effect is that keyboard users will skip straight to the comment form when they start tabbing through the page. Very annoying and completely useless, though probably well-meaning.

• The title attribute. The developers of several CMSs that are popular in my part of the world have apparently learned about the title attribute and that it can be used to clarify the target of a link. So they want to use it for all links that their CMS creates, mindlessly repeating exactly what is already in the actual link text, sometimes with "Link to: " prepended. That is completely useless and does nothing to improve accessibility. All it does is increase document size.

• The alt attribute. Overly explicit and verbose alt text is a nuisance. One of my favourite examples used to be csn.se, the website for the Swedish National Board of Student Aid. Until a few weeks ago, the site consisted of old-school nested tables and spacer GIFs.

  Somebody, probably a well-meaning person, added alt text to the many spacer GIFs and other presentational img elements that were used on the site. So far so good. But unfortunately the alt text should have been empty to indicate that the images were purely decorative. Instead, the text "Typografisk luft" ("Typographical space") was used for spacer images and "Webbplatsens hrn" ("The website's corner") for images whose only purpose is to create rounded corners.

  There isn't just one or two of them either. On the English About CSN page I could count to no less than 185 spacer GIFs with alt="Typografisk luft". Take that, screenreader users. It makes for a superb example when demonstrating what not to do though, so in a way it is unfortunate that they have now updated the site to get rid of the spacer GIFs. They do misuse the title attribute though.

In early August this year, Patrick H. Lauke held an excellent presentation where he brings up many of these overused accessibility features. The presentation slides can be downloaded in several formats from Too much accessibility. There is also an audio recording of the presentation, which is really great since you can listen to Patrick talk while going through the slides.

Patrick also brings up several other features that can improve accessibility if used correctly, so I highly recommend that you take the time to go through the entire presentation. You will come away with a much better understanding of why the HTML attributes I mention here can be problematic when used wrong, and how to use them well.

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Posted in Accessibility.

Today we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. You can download the final release using one of the links below:

• If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site.

• If you are a non-MSDN subscriber, you can download a 90-day free trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite here. A 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which will be a slightly smaller download) will be available next week. A 90-day free trial edition of Team Foundation Server can also be downloaded here.

• If you want to use the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (which are much smaller and totally free), you can download them here.

• If you want to just install the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime, you can download it here.

Quick Tour of Some of the New Features

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 contain a ton of new functionality and improvements. Below are links to blog posts I've done myself as well as links to videos you can watch to learn more about it:

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. This means you can use VS 2008 to open, edit and build existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 applications (including ASP.NET 2.0 applications using ASP.NET AJAX 1.0), and continue to deploy these application on .NET 2.0 machines. You can learn more about how this works from my blog post here:

• VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support

.NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (no separate download required). In addition to including all of the features in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET 3.5 also now includes richer support for UpdatePanels integrating with WebParts, ASP.NET AJAX integration with controls like <asp:menu> and <asp:treeview>, WCF support for JSON, and many other AJAX improvements.

VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 also now have great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications. You can learn more about this from my blog posts here:

• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense
• VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging
• VS 2008 ASP.NET AJAX Control Extender Support
• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight

You can watch some videos that discuss ASP.NET AJAX and Visual Studio 2008 support for it here.

I also highly recommend the excellent ASP.NET AJAX in Action book to learn more about ASP.NET AJAX (both client-side and server-side).

VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support

VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express includes a significantly improved HTML web designer (the same one that ships with Expression Web). This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration. Below are some articles I've written that discuss this more:

• VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support
• VS 2008 Nested Master Page Support
• VS 2008 Vertical Split View Support
• VS 2008 Support to Treat CSS and JavaScript Validation Issues as Warnings instead of Errors

ASP.NET 3.5 also has a new <asp:ListView> control that provides the ability to perform rich data scenarios with total control over the markup. It works nicely with the new CSS support in VS 2008. You can learn more about it from my article here:

• ASP.NET 3.5 ListView Control

You can watch some videos that discuss the new Visual Studio 2008 web designer features and the new ListView/DataPager controls here.

Language Improvements and LINQ

The new VB and C# compilers in VS 2008 deliver significant improvements to the languages. Both add functional programming concepts that enable you to write cleaner, terser, and more expressive code. These features also enable a new programming model we call LINQ (language integrated query) that makes querying and working with data a first-class programming concept with .NET.

Below are some of the articles I've written that explore these new language features using C#:

• Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Lambda Expressions
• Query Syntax
• Anonymous Types

Here are a few additional blog posts I've written that show off some of the new VS 2008 code editing support and some cool ways to use these new language features:

• VS 2008 Code Editing Features
• Tip/Trick: Building a ToJson() Extension Method using .NET 3.5
• The C# ?? null coalescing operator (and using it with LINQ)
• Using LINQ to XML (and how to build a custom RSS Feed Reader with it)

The Visual Basic team has also created some great free videos that cover LINQ. You can watch them here.

Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL

LINQ to SQL is a built-in OR/M (object relational mapper) in .NET 3.5. It enables you to model relational databases using a .NET object model. You can then query the database using LINQ, as well as update/insert/delete data from it. LINQ to SQL fully supports transactions, views, and stored procedures. It also provides an easy way to integrate business logic and validation rules into your data model. Below are some of the articles I've written that explore how to use it:

• Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL
• Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes
• Part 3: Querying our Database
• Part 4: Updating our Database
• Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control
• Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures
• Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures
• Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions
• Part 9: Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the <asp:LinqDataSource> control

I think you'll find that LINQ and LINQ to SQL makes it much easier to build much cleaner data models, and write much cleaner data code. I'll be adding more posts to my LINQ to SQL series in the weeks and months ahead (sorry for the delay in finishing them earlier - so much to-do and so little time to-do it all!).

Scott Stanfield is also working on creating some great LINQ to SQL videos for the www.asp.net site based on my article series above (all videos are in both VB and C#). You can watch the first 4 videos in this series here.

Browsing the .NET Framework Library Source using Visual Studio

As I blogged a few weeks ago, we will be releasing a reference version of the .NET Framework library source code as part of this release. Visual Studio 2008 has built-in debugger support to automatically step-into and debug this code on demand (VS 2008 can pull down the source for the appropriate .NET Framework library file automatically for you).

We are deploying the source servers to enable this right now, and will be publishing the steps to turn this feature on in the next few weeks.

Lots of other improvements

The list above is only a small set of the improvements coming. For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support. ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox. WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data.

Office development is much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon, and with Outlook. Visual Studio Tools for Office support is also now built-into Visual Studio (you no longer need to buy a separate product).

New WCF and Workflow projects and designers are now included in VS 2008. Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional (and no longer just VSTS). Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS. AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU. And there is much, much more...

Installation Suggestions

People often ask me for suggestions on how best to upgrade from previous betas of Visual Studio 2008. In general I'd recommend uninstalling the Beta2 bits explicitly. As part of this you should uninstall Visual Studio 2008 Beta2, .NET Framework Beta2, as well as the Visual Studio Web Authoring Component (these are all separate installs and need to be uninstalled separately). I then usually recommend rebooting the machine after uninstalling just to make sure everything is clean before you kick off the new install. You can then install the final release of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 on the machine.

Once installed, I usually recommend explicitly running the Tools->Import and Export Settings menu option, choosing the "Reset Settings" option, and then re-pick your preferred profile. This helps ensure that older settings from the Beta2 release are no longer around (and sometimes seems to help with performance).

Note that VS 2008 runs side-by-side with VS 2005 - so it is totally fine to have both on the same machine (you will not have any problems with them on the same box).

Silverlight Tools and VS Web Deployment Project Add-Ins

Two popular add-ins to Visual Studio are not yet available to download for the final VS 2008 release. These are the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio and the Web Deployment Project add-in for Visual Studio. Our hope is to post updates to both of them to work with the final VS 2008 release in the next two weeks. If you are doing Silverlight 1.1 development using VS 2008 Beta2 you'll want to stick with with VS 2008 Beta2 until this updated Silverlight Tools Add-In is available.

Hope this helps,

Scott

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