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First, if you have any questions for the Windows Phone 7 Series team, I'd be more than happy to ask on your behalf (as I do live around the corner from Redmond's campus and will be meeting with the team again at some point in the future). Post a comment and/or video response.

I was invited to a behind the scenes look at elements of the Windows Phone 7 Series developer platform. At Mobile World Congress (covered earlier in this channel), Microsoft provided a first look at Windows Phone 7 Series and I'm pleased to offer you the opportunity to see a live demonstration up close.

Yes, I got to play with the phone, too. It works as advertised even as a prototype. Unfortunately, we could not adjust the brightness settings in this particular device. The Metro interface is a bucket of win in my book.

Charlie Kindel partner group program manager, Windows Phone App Platform & Developer Experience was hosting an intimate reception this evening in San Francisco. I wasn't able to make it, but Microsoft arranged a somewhat more private meeting with Greg Sullivan from the Windows Phone team a little closer to home.

I met Greg a few years ago through the Longhorn Labs project (back when Microsoft Windows team leads worked actively with their most vocal community supporters). I'm not sure if I can reveal any more device details at this point, but suffice it to say

I want one.

• <a rel='nofollow' href='http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000HCVR5S/lockergnome Word 2007 Version Upgrade</a></li></ul></p><p>Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or <a href="http://blip.tv/file/get/L0ckergn0me-MicrosoftWindowsPhone7ScreenshotsAndLiveDemoVideoWalkth188.mp4">download the video</a>:</p><p><textarea style="width: 460px; height:60px;"><object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/j9F4QJK1wFs"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/j9F4QJK1wFs" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a></textarea></p><ul class="related_post"><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/helping-ponzi-with-her-macbook-pro/" title="Helping Ponzi with her MacBook Pro">Helping Ponzi with her MacBook Pro</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/img0823131736375jpg/" title="IMG0823131736375">IMG0823131736375</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/fixing-computers-for-a-living/" title="Fixing Computers for a Living">Fixing Computers for a Living</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/pay-off-student-loans/" title="Pay Off Student Loans">Pay Off Student Loans</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/hidden-microsoft-security-gem/" title="Hidden Microsoft Security Gem">Hidden Microsoft Security Gem</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/newspaper-industry-problems/" title="Newspaper Industry Problems">Newspaper Industry Problems</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-take-live-skype-calls/" title="How to Take Live Skype Calls">How to Take Live Skype Calls</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/texas-redbud/" title="Texas Redbud">Texas Redbud</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/lids-com-coupons/" title="Lids.com Coupons">Lids.com Coupons</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/geotag-your-photos-with-freeware/" title="Geotag Your Photos with Freeware">Geotag Your Photos with Freeware</a></li></ul> <p><iframe src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/lpj2a0s0b83fm727ahojoknhc4/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fchris.pirillo.com%2Fwindows-phone-7%2F" width="100%" height="280" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"></iframe></p>

Bits:
You, Too, Can Soon Be Like Tom Cruise in Minority Report' Hollywood imitates life. And sometimes life imitates Hollywood. John Underkoffler, who led the team that came up with the interface that Tom Cruise's character used in the 2002 movie Minority Report, co-founded a company

Designing a rich Internet application (RIA) can test even an experienced design team. The hardest challenge is to blend Web and desktop paradigms to create a responsive and intuitive experience.

read more

In December 2008, Six Apart acquired Pownce, a microblogging service that never managed to attract a large following. Pownce was shuttered after the acquisition, but its two-person team joined Six Apart to help integrate the technology into Six Apart's blogging services. Today Pownce founder Leah Culver has written on her blog that she's leaving Six Apart, where she spent the last year working on its TypePad and TypePad Motion products. Culver writes that her next project is developing an iPhone application for Plancast.

Despite reports to the contrary, Culver isn't joining Plancast full time (at least not yet). Plancast founder (and TechCrunch alum) Mark Hendrickson says that she's joining on a contract basis to build the iPhone app, but that the long-term future is uncertain. Culver's blog notes that she might continue working on Leafy Chat, a web based IRC client that's in private beta.

One thing worth pointing out: Culver and Mike Malone were Pownce's only engineers, and they were absorbed into the Six Apart team as part of the acquisition. Malone left Six Apart just over a year after the acquisition to join SimpleGeo, and now Culver has left just a few months later. It looks like they had a one-year post acquisition cliff, and given their departures soon thereafter, it's possible the integration of Pownce's technology didn't work out as they might have hoped.

Image by hyku

We Americans like to think of ourselves as trendsetters for the rest of the globe, but when it comes to cell phones, we're still playing catch-up with countries such as Japan and Korea.

In general, Asians use their cell phones in more robust ways than the typical U.S. resident as TVs, wallets, GPS devices, and music players. Japanese cell phones can double as a house key, a credit card, and an ID. Users can even use their cell phones to send their vital signs straight to their doctors.

In recent years, U.S. companies have made baby steps toward incorporating more advanced cell phone features, particularly in the areas of mobile banking and video broadcast. Meantime, the Asian cell phone market continues to be a good predictor of features that could soon be included in American cell phones. For example, Japan had cameraenabled cell phones two years before Americans ever went gaga for them.

Curtis Schenck, a manager of corporate relations at NTT DoCoMo USA, gave TechNewsDaily the scoop on the hottest features in the Japanese market right now. Try not to be too jealous.

1. Personal Butler

Customers don't have to Google for information, since i-Concierge acts as their butlers or personal assistants and caters to their every need. Users can input their food preferences, neighborhoods they like, and entertainments that they enjoy. When new information is downloaded into the system, they get push notifications that are based on their preferences. For example, if they like Thai food and a new Thai restaurant that is opening nearby, their cell phones will notify them.

2. Investigative Visits

This takes the Verizon commercials to a whole new level. If a users' five-bar reception signal drops to three bars or if they have a dropped call, they can call customer service and a team will be sent out to investigate the problem.

3. Barcode Reader

Japanese phones can read QR marks, which are sophisticated barcodes for businesses. If an Asian cell phone user is walking down a Tokyo street and walks past a restaurant that isn't open, they can point their camera to the QR mark and their phone's browser will automatically be routed to the restaurant's Web site.

4. Free TV on the Phone

Subscribers can surf 13 free TV channels on their phones. DoCoMo has also launched their own channel called BTV to air programs that are filmed specifically for the mobile phone.

5. Phones as Payment Systems

Osaifu Keitai, also known as the mobile phone wallet, lets users load up credit card information onto their phones. If stores have a reader, users can swipe their phones over it to pay for their purchases. Cell phones can also be used to pay for subway and train tickets.

6. Send Money to Other Subscribers

Some Asian countries allow users to send money using their cell phones. Users simply input another person's phone number and the amount they owe them and like magic, the money is transferred.

7. Internal Wi-Fi Spot

Japanese cell phone users can download a movie onto their mobile phones and show it on their TVs. This is another way to get entertainment on demand. A femtocell base transceiver station (BTS) in the home hooks up mobile phones to the DoCoMo network through a broadband line such as an optical fiber. The femtocell BTS lets a person with a cell phone download videos and music files. Through femtocell BTS, a person can set up a private wireless network for their home appliances, entertainment systems, and other devices.

8. Home Security Service

Japanese cell phone users can lock their doors and manage their home security systems remotely using their mobile devices. They can also adjust appliances and set environmental controls, so their lights and heat can be switched on before they get home.

9. Environmental Awareness

DoCoMo has deployed environmental sensors throughout Japan and people are now able to monitor air quality, temperature, and UV rays around them using their cell phones.

10. Reads Vital Signs

In the same way that we might plug headphones into our iPhones, Japanese cell phone users can plug in equipment such as a blood pressure monitor to their phones and send vital signs directly to their doctors. This helps save some people a trip to the doctor.

• Mobile Phone Use Soars
• 10 Profound Innovations Ahead
• Americans Are Info-Junkies

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana, a play on "mail analysis" since he was initially focused on email social graph analysis.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

The big project fails, the company begins to struggle and before you know it, the board of directors replaces the management team. Sound familiar? But crisis doesn't have to spell the end of the company itself.

Most companies and teams in turnaround situations focus on the obvious and important factors of balance sheet, cash flow and net income health. Teams also usually get to work quickly on market analysis that ultimately results in new product and business strategies. These actions are almost always necessary, just not always sufficient. Here are four often overlooked tactics that, if successfully employed, are critical to rapidly and successfully turning around a struggling enterprise:

1. Facilitate Closure - When a team has been through an extended period of hardship, it needs a sense of closure before it can start moving forward again, and closure is often best facilitated through a cathartic event that symbolizes the end of the perilous and painful journey. But while closure commonly necessitates letting a person or team go, don't rush to find a fall guy. Be very precise about identifying what was holding the company back it could just as easily have come in the form of an ineffective process or out-of-date strategy. Approach its removal the way you would a tumor: Excise carefully, and be wary of damaging any healthy surrounding tissue.

2. Set a Vision - According to intentional change theory, there are five steps to achieving sustained desired change. The first is to identify the ideal self, which for an organization is usually embodied in a collective vision consisting of its members' dreams (to be recognized as the best in the industry? world domination?), their desired future (market penetration? profitability?), and their strengths or values (high quality? extraordinary customer care?) Identify these in order to establish a shared vision that resonates with each team member on a deep, even emotional, level.

3. Find an Enemy - The easiest way to solidify an us is to identify a them. As Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory makes clear, people need to be part of a group, but in a company the result is often conflict between groups. The conflict that most often occurs in a crisis is affective and role-based and therefore often negative and value-destroying. There is no better way to rally the troops than to embody the fight with an external nemesis. Identify for your team an enemy outside the company and focus on beating or staying ahead of it, using everything from its press releases to its product launches to spur the team into action.

4. Tend the Garden - In our recently published book, The Art of Scalability, we talk at length about how leadership is like gardening. Leaders must hire or seed the team with the right people and mentor its members just as gardeners feed their plants. And when team members aren't working out, they need to be weeded out.

The time period between Microsoft's release of its XP desktop operating system and Vista marked the longest in the company's history between product launches. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's co-president, admitted in a Wall Street Journal interview to telling Bill Gates at one point that It's not going to work, describing the development as crashing to the ground due to haphazard methods of feature integration.

To recover from this, Microsoft enlisted the help of senior executive Amitabh Srivastava, who rooted out the process that was holding the project back. He then had a team of architects establish a development process that enforced high levels of code quality and reduced interdependencies. Once the new process was in place, the vision was set for what was ultimately a successful product launch, at least in terms of getting the product out the door and meeting the expected sales volumes.

There are entire books and domains of research dedicated to turning around failed projects and distressed teams. This list is in no way all-encompassing but if you are ever faced with the daunting task of turning around a team, these four tasks will be critical to its success.

If the acquisition of Touchco wasn't enough of an indication that Amazon is preparing for a skirmish with the Apple iPad, this should make it perfectly clear. Mike Nash, a man who has quite a history of accomplishments at Microsoft for the past two decades, is leaving the company to work on the Kindle business for Amazon.

Before leaving Microsoft, Mike was the Corporate Vice President of Windows Platform Strategy and was responsible for pieces of Windows business strategy, ecosystem engagement, consumer security, Internet Explorer, and emerging markets, according to his bio on Microsoft's Web site.

In addition to his most recent role, Nash has had a string of historic positions at Big M including a role as the first product manager on the original Windows NT marketing team; the Corporate Vice President of the Security Technology Unit; and a driver of a number of Microsoft acquisitions in the security space.

There's been no official announcement yet from Amazon so we're unsure of Nash's focus within the Amazon team.

[Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet] [Amazon Kindle]

Disclosure of Material Connection: http://dsclszr.us/5

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• Amazon acquires Touchco and a Microsoft exec (macworld.com)
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Amazon Hires Mike Nash from Microsoft to Work on Kindle is a post from: Magical Tablet

News hit this Monday that Powered has acquired three social media agencies: crayon, Drillteam and StepChange. I just had a skype video conversation with Aaron Strout and Joseph Jaffe to learn more, here's my take. You can read crayon founder Joseph's take and Aaron Strout the CMO of Powered and a quick mention in NYT.

A Solution Set of Services Bolsters a Marketing Platform
I've heard of crayon, and have many conversations and even podcasts with founder Joseph Jaffe, I've also spent time with the Powered executive team last year. Stepchange is a 13 person team out of Portland focused on Facebook Apps and mobile, and Drillteam, from NY, has been around for 10 years and focuses on experitntial and advocacy marketing, such as connecting events to online like street teams, guerrilla, and ambassador programs. Powered isn't just a community platform, I learned they have other marketing features that really intent to provide a suite of offerings.

Natural Evolution Of A Growing Market:

• Consolidation happens in downturned markets. As the recession starts to show signs of it lifting, now's a great time for companies to come together and create a greater value. We saw this type of acquisition behavior from agencies during the first boom, and we should expect similar patterns here.
• Acquisition provides key services software platforms can't fill. It makes sense for Powered platform to partner up with a service(s) teams that have already been successful for some time, this improves the time to market to deployment. In addition to coming with a book of business, they can quickly deploy the Powered platform, expanding the software footprint. Joseph Jaffe has strong thought leadership, an existing marketing brand, and reach needed to the group.
• Yet, brings risk for Powered and new partners. First of all, there are some big names coming together, the real stress will be can these cultures, and their strong willed leaders, be able to jive together. Secondly, it'll be interseting to see if Crayon and services teams forces stragies on their clients that involve the Powered platform. I asked if there are any layoffs coming from consolidation, they haven't made any plans, but when you have 4 companies coming together expect redundancy.

Impacts To Customers, Partners and Competitors:

• Social Agencies should rekindle and bolster relationships. This impacts other social agencies like Stage Two Consulting, Social Media Group, AdHoc, Ant's Eye View, ForumOne, Community Roundtable, Shift Communications, Dachis, FutureWorks, New Marketing Labs, who may be at medium and small tier, they should quickly partner up with other firms to increase their value.
• Customers of crayon, Drillteam, and Stepchange should request agnostic recommendations. Any client of these three agencies should make sure that the strategy they are being offered includes other vendors and platforms not just the Powered platform and Facebook platform. Remember, first find out where your customers are online before choosing the tools to use.
• This is competition for larger agencies yet savvy agencies will partner. This is a threat to large agencies like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, and Edelman. Yet the smart agencies won't get defensive, they should partner with this team, and figure out what offerings they can offer that they don't have in their portfolio.

Congrats to the Powered, crayon, Drilldteam and Stepchange team for this merger, I'm excited to see the industry emerge from small disparate startups to a larger entity going forward.

Gallery: The Apple iPad

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Continue reading The Apple iPad: starting at $499

The Apple iPad: starting at $499 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Gallery: The Apple iPad

Continue reading The Apple iPad

The Apple iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Baumgartner will join United States Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger as the only man to jump from near space altitude. Kittinger jumped on August 16, 1960, from the Excelsior III balloon, which at the time was flying at 102,800 feetthat's 19.47 miles or 31 kilometers up in the sky. Compared to Baumgartner, however, Kittinger's suit looks miserable:

In fact, his right glove failed in the descent, and his hand dilated to twice its size. Absolutely crazy.

Hopefully, Baumgartner won't have any of Kittinger's problems. He will jump sometime in 2010, after a few test jumps at lower altitudes, as part of Red Bull's Stratus mission. Kittinger will be assisting Baumgartner from the ground control, while the mission team monitors his position and body state as he plummets down to Earth, surpassing the speed of sound.

I love these nutty people.

The Tech Podcast Network team, about 7 of them, canvased CES 2010 shooting video from open to close every day.

The video below is a highlight that they shot on Saturday with Ted from RED.

If you would like to see more information about it and hear straight from Ted about the Scarlet this is the video for you.

There was a ton of video shot at CES this year from all the press and attendees. To sift through all of it would be impossible. I chose to share this from the Tech Podcast Network team because of their dogged dedication to sharing as much of the show as possible.

Sharing a coffee with them in them in the blogger lounge (which was much more comfortable and less packed than the press room) was an opportunity to pick their brains for the next booths to hit up.

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Tech Podcast Network from CES is a post from: TechStartups.com

It can be difficult to guess judicial decisions based on the judge's oral questioning of the lawyers, but it's certainly possible to see where judges are having trouble with an argument. In today's case, judges repeatedly went after the FCC's contention that it was acting legally in the Comcast case. Because Comcast's behavior ran afoul of an "Internet Policy Statement" rather than an official rule, the company claims that the FCC had no grounds for action until it made the Policy Statement into actual policy (which FCC Chair Julius Genachowski is trying to do right now).

Judges questioning the FCC's legal team said that the Policy Statement was "aspirational, not operational," that the FCC had not identified a "specific statute" Comcast violated, and that the FCC "can't get an unbridled, roving commission to go about doing good."

What difference would a pro-Comcast ruling make, given that the company has already changed its traffic management practices? It would "free us of this black mark on our record," said a Comcast attorney, according to the Wall Street Journal. That attorney, Helgi Walker, comes from the high-powered Wiley Rein law firm in DC. Ironically, former FCC Chair Kevin Martin, the Republican appointee who sided with the two Democrats on the FCC in the Comcast ruling, was himself a former Wiley Rein lawyer.

In a statement after today's hearing, current FCC Chair Genachowski said, "This case underscores the importance of the FCC's ongoing rulemaking to preserve the free and open Internet. I remain confident the Commission possesses the legal authority it needs and look forward to reviewing the court's decision when it issues."

That decision should come in the next several months.

Linking words together online is an hobby. Creating context from those words is an art. Making them work in harmony is a gift. The team at Thomson Reuters have done this for some time with their Calais project and the first consumer product from it OpenCalais.

OpenCalais is a monster database filled with linked data that can be accessed by anyone via a special API. Currently it works on an individual application level and as plugins with other popular CMS and blogging platforms. In tandem they create a more powerful experience for the publishers of new content by allowing the integration of linked data for linking, tagging and finding optional third-party resources for inspiration.

Word on the street and from a trusted source is that the Calais team has something new on the horizon their own CMS. A release of a CMS that has semantic technologies built right into is a powerful addition to the marketplace. Many blogging platforms and CMS products available today have stagnated under the weight of their own popularity.

It is hard to innovate when you are leading the pack or trying to figure out how to make money from your product that is free. Time and resources become devoted to maintaining the status quo, patching holes and community relations and support. Not to mention that many of these tools have crept out from the minds of developers and not publishers.

The same can't be said for Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative. With a business model built in from the inception of the project they have the ability to create value from the wealth of content that is entering their system. It is treated to some natural language processing, machine learning and prepared to link with other content. As the initiative currently exists it is the side car to better publishing as there is no status quo or hole patching. They realized this.

Throwing a CMS on top of this type of foundation is a logical move for OpenCalais to extend development and create publisher relations. There has been so little innovation in core CMS offerings that most rely on third-party developers to create additional functionality or implement API's like OpenCalais, Zemanta and other discovery products.

An OpenCalais CMS, blogging platform or whatever comes from this group is going to be a welcome addition to the choices that publishers have available today. The closest opportunity today to creating a true semantic experience in a publishing platform that is readily available would be to install the Zemanta plugin in WordPress. It transforms the writing experience. An offering from Calais could transform the writing and CMS experience.

Update: Krista Thomas (@kristathomas) from OpenCalais got in touch to say that there is a fully integrated CMS based on Drupal called OpenPublish available now.

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

CMS Innovations from Thomson Reuters? is a post from: TechStartups.com

Thanks to a soft launch from an iPhone app, thingd, is now open to the public. You can begin to add your things!

The app arrived earlier this week and I've been playing with it for a couple of days. I wanted to give it, the site and the overall model of thingd a longer review, but time is of the essence. I'll stick with the iPhone app for now.

This way if you install it and start using it you'll be able to provide feedback to the thingd team. Wouldn't it be cool if your idea makes it into production?

And wouldn't be especially timely so that you can add your new Black Friday goodies!

What is thingd?

It is a massive collection of things that are linked together first by you, then by the data known about them and then by your thingd network. Thingd facilitates commerce, commenting and sentiment about particular things. It is also a discovery tool for new things.

How can I use the iPhone app?

First you need to get a thingd account. Once you have acquired that you'll need to begin by taking photos of things, preferably, those in your own possession. If the item is popular it will be tagged by thingd and as you to verify the right information. If the item isn't so popular or old you can add a model number and your own specs.

Once the photo of the thing leaves your phone it will head to the thingd website for inclusion into the data pool and be added to your My Things' list. It is here where the multiple levels of metadata can be added to a thing. Think of it as a semantic engine for things that is equally machine and human powered.

What do I do with thingd iPhone app?

The first step is add your things. The second is to look to it for creating structure around your items. Most likely the items you photograph first will be the ones that you like the most. Think of thingd as the expanding catalog of things and the iPhone app as the best way to make additions to the catalog.

For now, you can push your photos and things to thingd and test the out the site. At this early stage give the site and the iPhone app a thoughtful review and pass on those thoughts to the team that developed it.

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thingd iPhone App Is Here is a post from: TechStartups.com

What I am about to say is because I have been a long time member of the eBay affiliate program, now called eBay Partner Network. It is also of value to anyone that is starting or currently responsible for managing an affiliate program for a company.

My affinity for their brand is the result of being a partner for over three years, my wife being a seller on eBay for nearly ten years, API ease of use and the ability to earn revenue consistently for three years as part of the partner network.

But try as they might, eBay has not driven me away from the partner network . . . yet. They transitioned the program from Commission Junction to an internal program two years ago. The metrics and other monitoring tools suffered as eBay had to get their affiliate legs underneath them. No longer could an affiliate view the extensive reports for click monitoring, referrals, purchases, week to week comps, etc.

Then eBay transformed the program most recently from their CPA (where a partner was paid if their link resulted in a sale) program to a CPC program. This isn't your average CPC program with prices set per click it is based on an algorithm that calculates the quality of the clicks from a given link on a 24 hour basis and assigns them a monetary value.

With this most recent transition to CPC and a program controlled by an algorithm (see: bot) eBay developed a Transparency Team. This team has the task of reaching out to partners that have links that aren't performing in a manner that matches the eBay partner agreement (see: fraudulent).

This is a great idea in theory. However, this team wouldn't need to exist if the eBay partner network returned to the same type of reports that Commission Junction used. Instead, when reinventing the wheel, eBay eliminated any useful monitoring for partners. Thus making participating in their program as opaque as it can be. Metrics that provide a payout, ranking or trip the algorithm to send an automated email stating that a partner is somehow engaged in fraudulent activity are nonexistent.

Ebay has removed any substantive accounting for themselves in the process of monitoring or payouts, the crux of a developer or user becoming an affiliate. Hiding reports from users that are accustomed to them as part of other vendor programs.

The problem is a that is a basic customer service issue that has not been addressed by eBay. Reporting, prompt replies and useful feedback data would allow partners to build better programs that meet eBay's standards and can be crafted to drive more quality traffic to eBay.

This example says it all:

Two months ago I was contacted by the eBay Partner Network Transparency Team (see: bot generated email) stating that in their quest to be transparent I should do the same and that I was failing as a large percentage of my links weren't sending referrer data. Meaning that they don't have a record from these links of the website where the link was displayed and clicked on.

Fair enough to ask me about the links. Not fair or right, accusing someone of not being transparent when all of the click data is hidden away. Not fair is waiting two months to reply back with meaningless data stating that eBay is right. See below:

Ebay sure is right that I have a high non-referrer rate and that bots are removed. I guess I should stop questioning their authority . . . sure. I'd do that if I knew what the criteria were or what bots are being removed. Because for nearly two years they didn't remove a single bot from click data.

I've requested more data from the Transparency Team like IP addresses and user-agents of those clicks. Since I can't track the click that is actually going to eBay without breaking the user-agreement with eBay I will be at their mercy to figure out if the clicks are coming from mobile devices or and some proxy bot that has a lust for finding its way to eBay auctions. Maybe the bot master was blocked by eBay for not being transparent enough when scraping their auctions.

Ebay, this isn't how to be transparent or run a valued affiliate program. If my experience hadn't begun with your program on Commission Junction I wouldn't have such high hopes for how the current partner network could operate. As an affiliate, I want to make money, but I also want eBay to succeed.

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Ebay Partner Network and Transparency is a post from: TechStartups.com

Startups are increasingly responsible for how we view the interent. Both visually with design and user interface tools and with behind the scenes technology that shapes our world view. Simply put when you find information online it is increasingly chosen for you by technology, not a human. That technology in a broad stroke is a bot.

A bot is a group of computer language, code, that a programmer of team of programmers have written to perform a function. It serves as an automated way performing the mundane or an interesting task that might take a person 10 days to complete if done by hand.

Daniel Suarez has tackled bots in a way that is enlightening and both fear inducing. He's done this through his book Daemon, which made its way into my life thanks to a bot named Klau . . . I mean human filter named Rick Klau. Suarez writes about a programmer that upon his death and the subsequent posting of his obituary online that would put into motion a series of bots that cause great public harm.

The enlightening part of this is that it is something that maybe we wouldn't have thought of. The fear inducing part of this is that much of this could really happen. But that is not what I want to talk about. I want to use it as a baseline for understanding that what shapes our lives is information. And that information is ever increasingly generated for us by bots.

There are fewer humans in that information gathering, processing and filtering stew than ever before. Blind trust is put into these bots that they are in essence an oracle. That the decisions they make are a definitive guide to the way that we process the world around us. Below is a video a video from a presentation that Suarez gave last year (If you can't see the video click here):

The bot-mediated reality that he speaks of is now. Currently it is ubiquitous in simply forms like search engines, and as he calls it, narrow artificial intelligence. Something internet users interact with multiple times a day. And according to the Suarez they operate in the mortgage, insurance and medical industries. This is our reality.

Tech Startups find themselves having a major role in the development of bots. Often they are pushed in this direction simply as a part of innovation. Innovation is something that is based on efficiency and new ways of interacting with information. All of this in order to create a better world through experience. What Suarez has explored is a world in peril due to this innovation.

This story of bots is being written now by startups and coders around the globe. In this bot-mediated reality there it is important to put on your anthropologist hat and review the impact that developing technology has on a culture, a community. It isn't just the insidious that we should be on the lookout for, but working to ensure that the best effort is being made to create a human-like experience.

BTW, the video of the entire presentation is the only one that I have on my iPod. I watch it often to keep myself inspired about the technologies we are developing.

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Stewards Of A Bot-Mediated Reality is a post from: TechStartups.com

As the in-house SEO coordinator for CNN.com and the rest of Turner's news properties (including CNN Money, CNN International and iReport), he has overseen a 17 percent increase in traffic from search year to year and oversaw one of the single largest search traffic days in the site's history with the 2008 presidential election.

Editor's Note: We asked Topher to write this for Tech Startups because his work is impressive. SEO's of all types can benefit from his experience.

Now that the new CNN.com has been live for a while, I can sit back and say, yes, the SEO effort worked!

With that in my pocket, I wanted to walk you all through the path that I took to have as SEO-friendly a site as possible when it went live October 24.

Got involved with the process as soon as I could

They brought me in, and I inserted myself as much as I could during the wireframe stage. This was great, and I was able to ask a lot of questions about what items were on the page and what they would show the user.

After the wireframes, the next thing in front of me was the series of mockups that evolved into the final comps for the site. This was even better than the wireframes because I was given a real idea of the modules and items on the page, and then I could ask some tough questions about the technologies we would be using to build it out. I was able to have some really great conversations with them about the use of Flash and Ajax and the up / down side of using them in each case.

Finally, I was looking at the HTML reviews and was able to see the real world the code we were using and catch the little things that might be forgotten.

Do not forget about the little things

This was huge for me to be able to see the real-world code in HTML review and also final templates before launch.

This is the time I found all the little things that I might have overlooked or that were removed from the code in the final stages. I was not able to get it all in there at this point, but if it was just a mistake, this was the place to catch it.

Win the war, not the battle

Yes, things that I wrote about in the SEO requirements did not make it to the live version of the site. Yes, I wish they would have, but in the end, it is all about winning the overall war, so don't fret. Keep your eye on the big picture.

The ends justify the means

In the end, the big picture is to get more traffic to your site from search, and that is my goal at CNN. I wanted to have the new site give the editorial team and me a good chance to optimize it to get as much search traffic as possible.

This is not the end of the road

Now that the site is live, I cannot give up. I need to keep on with the things that did not get in by launch day. Remember also that SEO is not a stand-still kind of world, so there is always something new to try to get done on the site.

In-house SEO Tips From A Master is a post from: TechStartups.com

In an offer to tie it all together and bring a close to the day, I present to you Mockingbird. A bird named application that is about as simple as it can get.

It is self-billed (can't help it) as wireframes on the fly. And as far as desktop software in the browser goes, this is a model to follow.

Mockingbird is a welcome entry to an already crowded field of online wireframing applications. What sets Mockingbird apart is that the interface isn't built in Flash. It has been built in the open source framework Cappuccino.

What also sets this application apart from the field is the intuitive user experience that they deliver. The moment I hit their site I clicked on Try it now' to get knee deep in what I expected to be a cluttered interface. I honestly expected it to be complex and operate like mind mapping software a favorite for wireframe developers to emulate.

I was pleasantly surprised with a couple of things. Once the interface loaded without asking me to install any plug-ins. Not a common feature for interactive applications that aren't native Flash. Cappuccino is to thank for this with its integrated Objective-J language. The second surprise was that it ran amazingly smoothly. It was as responsive as a desktop application with no lag time. Maybe I shouldn't say surprised by the smoothness and call it what it is . . . amazing.

Beyond the features to create mockups and link between pages, users have the ability to share their work. The current offerings are by link and iframe embed code. I would look to this in the future to allow users to send emails right from this portion of the interface.

The team behind this application have kept it simple. I imagine that the backend of Mockingbird is about as complex as applications come, and they have managed to distill down to the ideal combination of features and usability.

Mockingbird knocked my socks off in another way too they are blogging with posterous. Which, of course, bills itself as the dead simple place to post everything. I guess birds of a feather do flock together.

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Start Mocking with Mockingbird is a post from: TechStartups.com

Startups are often in a position of being bootstrapped or strapped for cash when it comes to what is considered outside the core product roadmap.

Often in that category is the marketing of the product site online. The crew at Sitening as an ever maturing offering with Raven SEO Tools that won't hurt a startup budget and could prove a big return on a $79 monthly investment.

Raven SEO Tools is an internet marketing tool set. Designed to be a powerful tool for those in the know and accessible to newbies to manage site marketing, research SEO, monitor linking campaigns, reporting and integration with the Google Analytics API.

If there is one thing that Raven could do to improve upon this application it would be spin off components of the functionality into separate interfaces or other product offerings. Raven doesn't suffer from bloat, but it does put a lot of options for monitoring and reporting in front of a user.

Raven's interface is like opening a tool box to find the shiniest most sophisticated wrenches when you would settle for a rusty vice grip. After some time you can get to the rusty vice grip but you have to know where to find it.

The team at Sitening has begun to address with the addition of a Wizard for entering in a new site for monitoring and some social components. The social monitoring is a must for today's market in monitoring tools and a welcome addition for a startup to gauge the pulse of concerned users.

Beyond the Wizard integration there is something very interesting that Raven has that no other monitoring application I've reviewed has a content manager. Raven has a built in mini-CMS consisting of the essentials, title, keywords and body with a TinyMCE WYSIWYG wrapper that currently will connect with a WordPress blog.

The ability to blog from within a robust set of tools when a users mind is full of ideas, keywords, strategy and tactics is a powerful addition. It turns Raven into a hybrid monitoring SaaS that has the ability to help make your startup budget go further.

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Make Your Site Fly With Raven SEO Tools is a post from: TechStartups.com

About the author: Matt is a software developer and author living in Chicago. He is the author of five programming books, most recently Drupal 6 Javascript and jQuery and an Open Source project called QueryPath for PHP that allows developers to easily build applications from XML data with jQuery like functionality.

Matt's personal blog is at TechnoSophos.com

I saw into the future. At 10:00 AM PDT on October 25th, in a conference room seating 16 people at the Googleplex in Santa Clara, I saw into the future of the web. And it was good.

What I saw was the demise of Web 2.0, a technology grown to capacity. And it is not Web 3.0 (whatever that is) that will take its place. No, tomorrow's web is about user interfaces.

The weekend of October 24th was the annual Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Mentor Summit at Google's headquarters. Ostensibly, this is the opportunity for all of the Open Source organizations who participated in GSOC to get together and perform a collective postmortem on the summer's successes and failures. But anytime such a menagerie of geeks is assembled under one roof, much more is bound to happen.

Unsurprisingly, many of the unconference's sessions were focused on the GSOC program itself. But a healthy dose of technology centered sessions made their way onto the schedule as well, and the hallway may very well have seen more code than the conference rooms.

Beyond the physical conference space, much was happening in the virtual sphere as well. As a gesture of thanks to the GSOC participants and mentors for a summer of work, Google gave everyone Wave accounts.

Wave's utility lies in numbers. Signing in without a friend is like throwing a party but inviting nobody. Bring a friend or two into the Wave, and it feels like hosting tea in a room with too much furniture. But once the numbers start to rise, Wave's strengths surface. It is a cocktail party that comes complete with a birds-eye view of all of the chit-chat. Conversations swirl around, splintering into smaller threads of conversation only to merge back into the main discussion later. Images, maps, polls, and an API for building extensions make Wave a promising tool except for one thing.

The user interface stinks.

Yes, Wave's merits surface only when many people are in a discussion. Unfortunately, that's also where the big shortcomings surface. As one conversation forks into many smaller discussions, the wave quickly becomes visually unmanageable. The Quickest Scrollwheel in the West will still have a hard time traversing the continuously growing vertical pane that wraps the conversation. The entire advantage gained by the birds eye view of the conversation is lost to clumsy scrolling.

But this failing is indicative of something greater. Once again, Google has achieved an engineering masterpiece. And for all technical purposes, Wave is a marvel. It certainly pushes AJAX and asynchronous web interaction to its very limits, and I have no doubt that the source code for the server component would make my head swim. But the user interface, for all its visual business, simply doesn't work. Wave is an attempt to cram the internals of a Hummer into the body of a circa 1996 Honda Civic.

This is where the Mentor Summit offered a revelation.

On the second day of the summit, the PyMT team hosted an hour-long session on multi-touch input. PyMT is a set of Python application bindings for various multi-touch libraries. Linux, Windows, and OS X all support multi-touch input technologies. Last week, Apple's new Magic Mouse made its debut featuring a multi-touch surface atop a traditional laser-based mouse. Dell offers a laptop with a multi-touch screen. Wacom offers a multi-touch tablet. Microsoft's Surface technology boasts table-sized multi-touch surfaces.

Multi-touch is arriving in a big way. But what's the hubub about? What's the big feature that suddenly makes these technologies attractive? It is the extension of point and click to touch, tap, pinch, swipe, expand, drag, rotate, throw. The simple mouse model that has driven graphical interaction for decades is mid-way through an extreme makeover. And with deflection- and pressure-sensing surfaces rapidly advancing, mice and fingers are just the tip of the input iceberg.

The PyMT team took an hour-long trip to Google's hands-on room and came back with an impressive demonstration. Beginning with some Lego pieces, a flat sheet of metal, and a PlayStation 3 camera, the pair of programmers from PyMT built a gaming surface and a couple of paddles. The camera tracked the motion of the paddles on the surface, transforming the physical paddles into virtual ones in a game of Pong projected onto the wall. In an hour!

When we can build new input devices with an Open Source library and $35 worth of corner-drug-store toys, a whole new universe of possibilities appears.

And that's where Wave returns to mind. As I walked out of the room with UX Design guru Steve Fisher, he turned to me an remarked, When I watch a demo like this, it makes me wonder What is the Web going to look like in a few years. Yeah, it makes me wonder, too.

Wave is a fantastic architecture. But the architectural gems are obscured behind yesterday's user interface limitations. In that way, Wave is a milestone that marks the death of Web 2.0. And it is more than that. It's a fingerpost pointing not to the technologies touted as Web 3.0, but toward a new mode of human-computer interaction. What is going to make tomorrow's web compelling? Not metadata. Not cleaner layout. Not even native support for videos. Better user interfaces. Interfaces tuned to convey information more effectively. Reactive interfaces. That's where tomorrow's success stories are waiting.

HTML 5 and RDFa are good and all, but the real sea-change is coming from your fingertips. All ten of them.

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The Demise of Web 2.0 is a post from: TechStartups.com

Can't make it to SoHo anytime soon or in this lifetime? Then you should head over to StyleCaster to get a sense of what ambitious, smart fashion is walking the streets of NYC South of Houston. New York is teeming with this apparel and footwear clacking away to catch a cab.

StyleCaster is most definitely a Big Apple property, which is only to its benefit as they grow their site. The city is a fashion and media capital.

With the new boom of startup activity on the East Coast they find themselves in a great position to gain users, make partnerships (both tech savvy and with traditional media) and to be in the epicenter of the next fashion trends. Think what Portfolio.com used to be, but for fashion.

Fashion sites often suffer from a lack of depth, see content, or lack of tech to make them accessible. They often rely heavily on motion graphics in Flash and a business model based on revenue from affiliate sales. Not StyleCaster. They have mixed all the ingredients and a some other special sauce to create a complete user experience.

It would be hard to write this review if I didn't break their site down from the beginning. StyleCaster is three distinct properties that have been plied together with one smaller cousin: Fashion Recommendations, Social Network, News/Blog and Shopping (the smaller cousin).

Fashion Recommendations

This is the core value proposition for StyleCaster. They deliver a tailored interface for weather and season with 360 degree model views.

Earlier this summer they took this concept and created an iPhone app that was just as robust as their site. The experience that they are able to deliver with their Daily Looks section should make retailers jealous. They have merged seamless cross-selling with the common sense that your friend might recommend and item to you.

Social Network

Everyone wants on this bandwagon for many reasons and the number one being to get funded. I'm not sure if this is what got StyleCaster $4 million but this is how it is done right, in case you were wondering.

They first look to a larger network, in this case Facebook, and integrate with their API through Connect. Second, they take this data and create an onsite profile each registrant. Third, and final in this process of hooking user into their community, they make it drop dead simple to engage with other users based on contributor types, cities, at random and a 15 minutes of fame section. A simple horizontal navigation that tracks users onsite fashionista moves.

News/Blog

Fashion Recommendations might be the awesome wow factor that you need to attract the fashion forward and a Social Network to get users connected and spending time on your site but the most impressive feature of this site isn't really a feature. The Newsroom and Blog sections of StyleCaster are destinations for an insiders perspective on fashion. This is where the magic of this site is made.

This is content that matches the ambition and smarts of the fashion they follow . . . delivers and then some. My only gripe is that the IA and taxonomy is lacking lacking and it can be difficult to find much of the great content that is buried in the site.

StyleCaster's headlines can be seen on other fashion/celeb sites around the net but smart money would probably say that there are more partnerships in the works to deliver full content. I'm not smart money, so I can't say for sure.

Shopping

Well, what would a fashion site be without shopping? I called this the one smaller cousin' and I mean it. Simply put, the focus of this site is obviously to build a company and a brand based on high quality content, technology and a great user experience. It wasn't built with shopping at its core. And that is awesome! There is a solid enough foundation in place that if StyleCaster went down this road they would find success but not as much as they will find by having all of other components in place.

I've gushed quite a bit here over what is just another startup. They are just another startup that needs to prove itself in the marketplace. I believe they will. And even if they don't, this business, with any one of the three aforementioned sections would make any entrepreneur very happy with the traffic they could bring. Kudos to the team that are making this happen. They're getting done the right way.

It wouldn't be right to do a post about a fashion startup without some snark, now would it?

If you have ever wanted to release that inner hater, head to The Daily Looks section and spin them tall skinny models round and round until your petty little heart is content. Not that I did or would want to do this.

Tip if you do: Play house music to make it a party. Remember, you can't do this in SoHo!

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StyleCaster Is Your SoHo Connection is a post from: TechStartups.com

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Let's start by saying that we all have been reading and participating in the most recent meme that 'seo is evil', but this isn't the time to get in the gutter.

Now that this is out of the way I wanted to point you in the direction of a new tool in Google Labs called Fetch as Googlebot. It allows you to run any URL from sites in your Google Webmaster account as the Googlebot. This can be of huge value when you are trying to discern just what the bot sees when it is sent out to fetch content from your sites.

To use it login to your Webmaster Tools account, click on the site you would like to fetch, choose Labs from the top left menu, click Fetch as Googlebot, enter the URL you want to review and wait a few seconds for it to load. That's it. The analysis is up to you.

Real value

It becomes particularly handy when you are using AJAX, hidden div layers or image based linking. You can ensure that when your content is fetched by the Googlebot that your content is making its way into the index as you intended. Whether it is a static page, dynamic one or an RSS feed you will be able to view fetched content as Google sees it. And it sees them very differently.

Below is an example of what the Googlebot sees:

Highly structured data (RSS feed)

Unstructured data (dynamic HTML)

If you were a developer on the Google team, which one would you rather index and run algorithms against?

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You can only neglect your users for so long before they leave you. The same goes for lovers. And I, was in love with Google Reader once.

Then one day I realized Google Reader wasn't loving me as much as I loved her. So I walked out. We see each other, maybe once a month or so, for short periods of time while we trade feeds.

Reasons

At first she didn't accept my privacy when I wanted to put authenticated feeds in the system. Then she wouldn't allow me to have my shared items back when I asked for them. I wanted all of them . . . but she only gave me 20 at a time. What about the thousands of items I had shared with her? Enough. I couldn't take it any longer. I had to do something about it.

Solution

Two years ago I began caching my Google Reader shared feed so I could access to all the items. Back then Reader hadn't added any features around sharing like search. But I had it once I was storing the items. What I had created then was a strange knowledge base that I could now query to find content that I found of value and had filtered for myself.

Value

Quickly, I added about 10 more shared feeds from friends and other people that I respected online. After about two weeks I had forgotten about Google Reader and found myself hanging out with my new friends . . . well, hanging with their knowledge bases. Here I was capturing tacit knowledge from some of the people I respected the most for their minds.

Filtering

What was now stored for my querying pleasure was content from the best publishers on the planet filtered by the sharpest people I could find. I began to build other tools around the data like grouping by publisher, sharer, keywords and gobs of new feeds.

I built tracking around it to see how robots traversed the feeds since the actual data was locked in a password protected site. Which turned out not to be that big of a deal since the title links were directed back to the publishers.

By adding new user controlled filtering mechanisms on top of pre-filtered data that was pouring into the system, it became much easier to produce pages and feeds for topics that interested me.

Here are a couple of feeds to demonstrate what I am talking about:

Keyword: http://www.filome.com/key/1/micropayments.rss
Group: http://www.filome.com/group/ksmith/1/Taminania_Brain_Science.rss
Sharer: http://www.filome.com/1/robdiana.rss
Likes: http://www.filome.com/likes/1/08100556675301148205.rss

What Reader is Doing Now

Since we broke up, she's been adding features but they are all at the feed level and not down to the individual publisher post level. The Bundles that she allows you to create are feed based. Instead of receiving 1 or 2 items of an interesting topic from a few publishers you get all the items in those feeds . . . many more than 2. It's like being in a forest and finding a twig that you want and your date cuts down 10 trees and hands them to you saying, Look, I got your twig. Happy now?

Where Reader is Going

For fear that they are going to be crushed by Facebook and Twitter, Google appears to have put some emphasis on the Reader team and either given the resources or freedom to improve the system. I would even venture to say that members of the Blogger team might be instrumental in some of these improvements. She should look to her friends for support during difficult times.

Where Reader Should Be

I'm gonna break it down nice and easy.

1. Grouping content at the individual post level
2. Feeds for everything
3. Portability of all shared/liked items from the day a user signs up
4. Content shopping cart
5. New UI 85% of web users don't read feeds. Get pretty.
6. Open up as a hub for syndication
7. Give publishers real metrics about subscribers, sharers and likers
8. Allow publishers to create community around these users (within Google)

I am still in love, but I have better things to do

My favorite part of her is still the shared feeds. Like perfume they remain long after she has left the room. They add value to the ecosystem and to the lives of those that have access to them. And since Google Reader is sitting on this massive mountain of filtered and expertly curated data, they should use it as their greatest asset in the coming walk-off with Facebook and Twitter.

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The semantic web is well on its way and one of the startups that has taken an early lead is Zemanta. They have taken a unique approach to linked data and the science that powers their ability to create structured content from it. They aimed their service at publishers, not the IT crowd.

Typically, semantic technology companies rely heavily on their colleagues with computer science degrees not the actual publisher. They will deliver products as API's or server side solutions with a hefty price tag. Zemanta has created the right relationships with CMS and blogging platform owners to integrate their tools within administration sections.

They offer AJAX'ed out components in these platforms that reads from the main content box as a publisher types a post and updates linked content like photos, links and tags that are appropriate for the post. By doing this it allows the publisher to focus on their post and actual release content faster.

The core of their service is to intelligently eliminate the need for the publisher to start research from ground zero. They offer points of direction inside the administration interface to guide the publisher to resources quickly. I am most impressed with the way that Zemanta handles tags and the relationships between them.

Zemanta does offer an API, I have used it in the past. The API returns data quickly and an even more robust set than the plugin style for CMS's. A sample request returns maps, categories, links, excerpts and more. The only problem that I encountered was one that all semantic companies have right now, context and sentiment for breaking news.

Semantic services rely on hefty algorithms that need sample data to create the links between data and develop sentiment. As a result of this issue, it makes it very hard to implement solutions that work with real-time data and syndication of that content. Most times, once something has hit a feed or been released to a partner site it cannot be updated with linked data. I've been told it is something that the Zemanta team is working on.

Zemanta makes it easy to Zemify your content in WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type among others and possibly Blogger in the future.

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• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

I dance the Macarena whenever I come across an article that argues against healthy living. I cautioned you against too much positive thinking a few days ago. I laughed while reading research about dark chocolate firing up the happy brain. And I high fived the doctors who warn folks against too much sunscreen because it blocks the vitamin D that all of us need. I hate that stuff and was looking long and hard for an excuse not to look like a clown this summer. Thank you!

I've even performed the opposite of an intervention with one of my friends last week who was foolishly trying to give up alcohol and nicotine at the same time.

No, no, no, I told her. You can't do both of these together and expect to keep friends. Now I suggest you go pour yourself a glass of Merlot or light up the lung rocket pronto, and do us all a favor.

Alas, I bring you one more doctor you will like: Dr. Erika Schwartz, Medical Director of Cinergy Health. She's here to tell us not to get too carried away with our healthy habits. Thanks, Erika!

As a society, we are constantly striving to lead healthier, happier lives. But with these efforts, we sometimes run the risk of going too far. As a rule of thumb, any extreme is unhealthy, but rarely are we made aware of the cons of healthy habits, instead led to think any good thing is better if done as often as possible. Not so fast

Here are some examples of healthy habits that can backfire when done in excess:

1. Over-Exercising: Your body and mind do not need more than 3-4 days a week of 30-45 minutes of cardio activity. Cardio/aerobic exercises should be done every other day alternating with Yoga, Pilates, walking, and weight training on the off days. Hiking, swimming, tennis, golf, team sports and a simple variation in exercise over the course of the week, month and season is the best way to stay lean, toned and energized.

2. Staying Out of the Sun: Our bodies need Vitamin D to stay strong by making healthy bones and ward off illness by boosting our immune system. The only way to get Vitamin D into our system is via sun exposure. Don't make yourself overly neurotic about sunscreen. If you are going to the pool or beach or participating in outdoor sports that involve more than 20 minutes of sun exposure, slather on the SPF 30, but if you are simply doing your daily errands outdoors, enjoy the feeling the sun on your skin. The only part of your body that should always be protected is the face.

3. Antibacterial Soaps and Gels: Antibacterial soaps and gels are good to carry in your purse or car but becoming obsessed with the sanitization they promise could weaken your body's ability to fight off good bacteria. Using them is okay, but use regular soap as well.

4. Sleeping: The average person needs 8 full hours of undisturbed sleep at night. If you are regularly getting fewer or more than nine hours sleep, you are not doing yourself much good. Human beings are not built to think, process or function optimally on more or less than 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night. Not to mention too little or too much sleep is bad for our skin and causes bloating, overeating, confusion and depression.

5. Air Conditioning: While air conditioning feels great on a hot, humid summer day, don't sit and breathe in cold recycled air all day and night long. The air may contain bacteria and germs and certainly all kinds of particles of dust. Every few hours, turn the air off, open the windows, go for a walk outside and breathe in the fresh air don't forget to wash your air conditioning filters with warm water and soap and let them air-dry every month you're using them. And if you work in an office building where windows never open, bring a sweater to keep your core temperature warm and get out of the office at least for lunch and a mid-afternoon break

6. Organic Food: While organic foods - such as fruits, vegetables and packaged goods - tend to be expensive, the real problem is that unless you eat them directly from the farm, they to can contain pesticides or be processed. Make sure to read the labels of the food you are purchasing carefully even if you are buying them from the health food store. Foods don't need to be organic to be healthy. Stick with labels that have simple and few ingredients, and a low amount of natural sugars (like honey, turbinado sugar, cane sugar), sodium and processed carbohydrates.

Database normalization is a technique for designing relational database schemas that ensures that the data is optimal for ad-hoc querying and that modifications such as deletion or insertion of data does not lead to data inconsistency. Database denormalization is the process of optimizing your database for reads by creating redundant data. A consequence of denormalization is that insertions or deletions could cause data inconsistency if not uniformly applied to all redundant copies of the data within the database.

Why Denormalize Your Database?

Today, lots of Web applications have "social" features. A consequence of this is that whenever I look at content or a user in that service, there is always additional content from other users that also needs to be pulled in to page. When you visit the typical profile on a social network like Facebook or MySpace, data for all the people that are friends with that user needs to be pulled in. Or when you visit a shared bookmark on del.icio.us you need data for all the users who have tagged and bookmarked that URL as well. Performing a query across the entire user base for "all the users who are friends with Robert Scoble" or "all the users who have bookmarked this blog link" is expensive even with caching. It is orders of magnitude faster to return the data if it is precalculated and all written to the same place.

This is optimizes your reads at the cost of incurring more writes to the system. It also means that you'll end up with redundant data because there will be multiple copies of some amount of user data as we try to ensure the locality of data.

A good example of a Web application deciding to make this trade off is the recent post on the Digg Blog entitled Looking to the Future with Cassandra which contains the following excerpt

The Problem

In both models, we're computing the intersection of two sets:

1. Users who dugg an item.
2. Users that have befriended the digger.

The Relational Model

The schema for this information in MySQL is:

CREATE TABLE `Diggs` ( `id` INT(11), `itemid` INT(11), `userid` INT(11),
`digdate` DATETIME, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `user` (`userid`), KEY `item` (`itemid`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;   CREATE TABLE `Friends` ( `id` INT(10)
AUTO_INCREMENT, `userid` INT(10), `username` VARCHAR(15), `friendid` INT(10), `friendname`
VARCHAR(15), `mutual` TINYINT(1), `date_created` DATETIME, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), UNIQUE
KEY `Friend_unique` (`userid`,`friendid`), KEY `Friend_friend` (`friendid`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB
DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

The Friends table contains many million rows, while Diggs holds hundreds of millions. Computing the intersection with a JOIN is much too slow in MySQL, so we have to do it in PHP. The steps are:

1. Query Friends for all my friends. With a cold cache, this takes around 1.5 seconds to complete.
2. Query Diggs for any diggs of a specific item by a user in the set of friend user IDs. This query is enormous, and looks something like:

   SELECT
   `digdate`, `id` FROM `Diggs` WHERE `userid` IN (59, 9006, 15989, 16045, 29183, 30220,
   62511, 75212, 79006) AND itemid = 13084479 ORDER BY `digdate` DESC, `id` DESC LIMIT
   4;

   The real query is actually much worse than this, since the IN clause contains every friend of the user, and this can balloon to hundreds of user IDs. A full query can actually clock in at 1.5kb, which is many times larger than the actual data we want. With a cold cache, this query can take 14 seconds to execute.

Of course, both queries are cached, but due to the user-specific nature of this data, it doesn't help much.

The solution the Digg development team went with was to denormalize the data. They also went an additional step and decided that since the data was no longer being kept in a relational manner there was no point in using a traditional relational database (i.e. MySQL) and instead they migrated to a non-RDBMS technology to solve this problem.

How Denormalization Changes Your Application

There are a number of things to keep in mind once you choose to denormalize your data including

1. Denormalization means data redundancy which translates to significantly increased storage costs. The fully denormalized data set from the Digg exampled ended up being 3 terabytes of information. It is typical for developers to underestimate the data bloat that occurs once data is denormalized.

2. Fixing data inconsistency is now the job of the application. Let's say each user has a list of the user names of all of their friends. What happens when one of these users changes their user name? In a normalized database that is a simple UPDATE query to change a single piece of data and then it will be current everywhere it is shown on the site. In a denormalized database, there now has to be a mechanism for fixing up this name in all of the dozens, hundreds or thousands of places it appears. Most services that create denormalized databases have "fixup" jobs that are constantly running on the database to fix such inconsistencies.

The No-SQL Movement vs. Abusing Relational Databases for Fun & Profit

If you're a web developer interested in building large scale applications, it doesn't take long in reading the various best practices on getting Web applications to scale such as practicing database sharding or eschewing transactions before it begins to sound like all the advice you are getting is about ignoring or abusing the key features that define a modern relational database system. Taken to its logical extreme all you really need is a key<->value or tuple store that supports some level of query functionality and has decent persistence semantics. Thus the NoSQL movement was borne.

The No-SQL movement is a used to describe the increasing usage of non-relational databases among Web developers. This approach has initially pioneered by large scale Web companies like Facebook (Cassandra), Amazon (Dynamo) & Google (BigTable) but now is finding its way down to smaller sites like Digg. Unlike relational databases, there is a yet to be a solid technical definition of what it means for a product to be a "NoSQL" database aside from the fact that it isn't a relational database. Commonalities include lack of fixed schemas {TODO}. Below is a list of some of the more popular NoSQL databases that you can try today along with a brief description of their key qualities

1. CouchDB: A document-oriented database where documents can be thought of as JSON/JavaScript objects. Creation, retrieval, update and deletion (CRUD) operations are performed via a RESTful API and support ACID properties. Rich querying is handled by creating Javascript functions called "Views" which can operate on the documents in the database via Map/Reduce style queries. Usage: Although popular among the geek set most users seem to be dabblers as opposed to large scale web companies.

2. Cassandra: A key-value store where each key-value pair comes with a timestamp and can be grouped together into a column family (i.e. a table). There is also a notion of super columns which are columns that contain whose values are a list of other key-value pairs. Cassandra is optimized to be always writable and uses eventual consistency to deal with the conflicts that inevitably occur when a distributed system aims to be always writable yet node failure is a fact of life. Querying is available via the Cassandra Thrift API and supports fairly basic data retrieval operations based on key values and column names. Usage: Originally developed and still used at Facebook today. Digg and Rackspace are the most recent big name adopters.

3. Voldemort: Very similar to Cassandra which is unsurprising since they are both inspired by Amazon's Dynamo. Voldemort is a key-value store where each key value pair comes with a timestamp and eventual consistency is used to address write anomalies. Values can contain a list of further key value pairs. Data access involves creation, retrieval and deletion of serialized objects whose format can be one of JSON, strings, binary BLOBs, serialized Java objects and Google Protocol Buffers. Rich querying is non-existent, simple get and put operations are all that exist. Usage: Originally developed and still used at LinkedIn.

There are a number of other interesting NoSQL databases such as HBase, MongoDB and Dynomite but the three above seem to be the most mature from my initial analysis. In general, most of them seem to be a clone of BigTable, Dynamo or some amalgam of ideas from both papers. The most original so far has been CouchDB.

An alternative to betting on a speculative database technologies at varying levels of maturity is to misuse an existing mature relational database product. As mentioned earlier, many large scale sites use relational databases but eschew relational features such as transactions and joins to achieve scalability. Some developers have even taken that practice to an extreme and built schema-less data models on top of traditional relational database. A great example of this How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data which is a blog post excerpted below

Lots of projects exist designed to tackle the problem storing data with flexible schemas and building new indexes on the fly (e.g., CouchDB). However, none of them seemed widely-used enough by large sites to inspire confidence. In the tests we read about and ran ourselves, none of the projects were stable or battle-tested enough for our needs (see this somewhat outdated article on CouchDB, for example). MySQL works. It doesn't corrupt data. Replication works. We understand its limitations already. We like MySQL for storage, just not RDBMS usage patterns.

After some deliberation, we decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system.

Our datastore stores schema-less bags of properties (e.g., JSON objects or Python dictionaries). The only required property of stored entities is id, a 16-byte UUID. The rest of the entity is opaque as far as the datastore is concerned. We can change the "schema" simply by storing new properties.

In MySQL, our entities are stored in a table that looks like this:

CREATE TABLE entities ( added_id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY
KEY, id BINARY(16) NOT NULL, updated TIMESTAMP NOT NULL, body MEDIUMBLOB, UNIQUE KEY
(id), KEY (updated) ) ENGINE=InnoDB; 

The added_id column is present because InnoDB stores data rows physically in primary key order. The AUTO_INCREMENT primary key ensures new entities are written sequentially on disk after old entities, which helps for both read and write locality (new entities tend to be read more frequently than old entities since FriendFeed pages are ordered reverse-chronologically). Entity bodies are stored as zlib-compressed, pickled Python dictionaries.

Now that the FriendFeed team works at Facebook I suspect they'll end up deciding that a NoSQL database that has solved a good story around replication and fault tolerance is more amenable to solving the problem of building a schema-less database than storing key<->value pairs in a SQL database where the value is a serialized Python object.

As a Web developer it's always a good idea to know what the current practices are in the industry even if they seem a bit too crazy to adoptyet.

Further Reading

• How FriendFeed Uses MySQL to Store Schema-less Data by Bret Taylor
• Looking to the future with Cassandra Digg Blog

Now Playing: Jay-Z - Run This Town (feat. Rihanna & Kanye West)

The current separation between the way we implement our application and the way we manage it leads to many of this ridicules situations. Cloud makes those things even worse.

In this post i suggest an alternative approach. Why don't we run our application the way we run our business? I refer to this approach as the "interactive cloud" where our application behaves just like our project team and the operations just like our managers. As with our business our application would need to take more responsibility to the way it runs and take corrective actions such as balancing it own resources, re-assign tasks to the available resources in case of failure etc. It will need to involve its manager only when it runs out of resource. It will need to provide reports in a way that makes sense to our managers.

In the first part of this post describes the general concept behind this model and the second part provides technical background which include code snippet based on our experience in GigaSpaces.

Steve Gillmor is going to love this, of course, since he proclaimed that RSS was dead and Twitter was the new messaging protocol bus, or something to that effect. Rest In Peace, RSS, he wrote, saying It's time to get completely off RSS and switch to TwitterAll my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don't go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don't go there, I don't use RSS anymore.

Santosh Jayaram, Twitter's existing head of operations (and also from Google), will presumably remain with the company and report to Costolo.

Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor, is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn't launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime. In fact, Twitter's inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that.

Twitter is actively hiring more senior people, we've heard. In July they hired Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Much of Jammie Thomas-Rasset's legal arguments following this summer's $1.92 million Recording Industry Association of America file sharing jury verdict against her don't have much weight or precedent.

Clearly, that a jury in June ordered her to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 music tracks she infringed on Kazaa is outrageous and shocks the conscience and there's no rational relationship between the amount of harm suffered by the recording industry and the award granted.

Thomas-Rasset wass the nation's first sharing defendant to go before a jury. The RIAA has filed more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting individuals, and most have settled out of court.

That said, in their latest court papers, (.pdf) Thomas-Rasset's legal team again is sticking to the argument that the whopping jury award is a due process violation all in a bid perhaps to secure a third trial. (The first ended in a $222,000 judgment against the Minnesota woman, but a mistrial was declared after the judge conceded he gave faulty jury instructions)

Still, it is true that the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts have repeatedly reduced lofty jury awards based on so-called due process breached. But those were punitive damages awards, not statutory damages awards.

Those punitive damage reductions, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, do not apply to Thomas-Rasset's case although Thomas-Rasset's defense team suggests there's always a first.

Punitive damages are the amount a jury awards to punish conduct of an offender. Up until recently, there generally has been no limit. But the Supreme Court has suggested that punitive damages should be limited to about no more than 10 times the amount of actual damages a jury awards.

Higher ratios, the courts have said, are due process breaches because defendants have no notice ahead of time about the lofty financial consequences of their actions.

But the law is crystal clear when it comes to the Copyright Act, the law under which the RIAA sued Thomas-Rasset. Juries can award up to $150,000 per violation. Punitive damages do not fall under the Copyright Act.

One of the only point