Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Monday, August 03, 2009
Social Networks
Use the right social network for the purpose. The landscape as I personally see it may not be the same for others. If you have a different agenda with these web brands, I would greatly appreciate a comment below!
Twitter: useful for getting links to your works published, to an almost random audience, with the potential of turning interest streams into tsunami - somewhere - most of the time. A democratic engine if there ever was one.
Facebook: What starts to appear to be "keeping up" with old friends may provide opportunities to reconnect with them. Discrete communication that leaves an edible trail. Publishing too much of your inner idiot, or too much profound professorial-ness - both maybe traps to avoid.
Warning: Watch their content copyright terms. Not the place for original works of art.
myspace: a place to exhibit and advertise your art, interact with others, make new connections that do not necessarily result in anything. There appears to be a sort of "museum" culture, people do not remove things (they should!), and very little is actually "for sale" - links to individual sites are far more common. Some write their lives, other use it as an opportunity to opportunity to make connection with like minds.
Warning: Anything owned by Rupert Murdoch may suddenly "change direction".
trademe.co.nz: this is exactly like ebay only this is brilliantly designed. ebay has that utilitarian kind of look, is far far more successful of course - whereas trademe is the brainchild of one person that was sold to the local news media giant Fairfax for 750 million NZ$ (about US$600 million, at the time). It is a very successful social network embracing the huge second hand market and quite a lot of retail traders as well.
Warning: don't cheat the tax dept here - its all public record.
Linked in: professional relationships.
Warning: If you start socialising here -
Orkut: Important if travelling to South America. If you speak Spanish or Portugese there are lots of conversations to be had. Growing in other markets as well as it is Google's own early acquisition and now is extremely web 2.0'd and possibly useful.
Ning.com: a cloud (rather than "server based") system that can of course keep growing forever (as long as humans are interested in your subject - i.e. you domain name). But this is the Luxury model - fully featured and firing on many cylinders. Annoying things are some of its imposed limitations. But it works - it grows members if you have a good idea and can drive it with an appropriate dynamic.
Use the right social network for the purpose. The landscape as I personally see it may not be the same for others. If you have a different agenda with these web brands, I would greatly appreciate a comment below!
Twitter: useful for getting links to your works published, to an almost random audience, with the potential of turning interest streams into tsunami - somewhere - most of the time. A democratic engine if there ever was one.
Facebook: What starts to appear to be "keeping up" with old friends may provide opportunities to reconnect with them. Discrete communication that leaves an edible trail. Publishing too much of your inner idiot, or too much profound professorial-ness - both maybe traps to avoid.
Warning: Watch their content copyright terms. Not the place for original works of art.
myspace: a place to exhibit and advertise your art, interact with others, make new connections that do not necessarily result in anything. There appears to be a sort of "museum" culture, people do not remove things (they should!), and very little is actually "for sale" - links to individual sites are far more common. Some write their lives, other use it as an opportunity to opportunity to make connection with like minds.
Warning: Anything owned by Rupert Murdoch may suddenly "change direction".
trademe.co.nz: this is exactly like ebay only this is brilliantly designed. ebay has that utilitarian kind of look, is far far more successful of course - whereas trademe is the brainchild of one person that was sold to the local news media giant Fairfax for 750 million NZ$ (about US$600 million, at the time). It is a very successful social network embracing the huge second hand market and quite a lot of retail traders as well.
Warning: don't cheat the tax dept here - its all public record.
Linked in: professional relationships.
Warning: If you start socialising here -
Orkut: Important if travelling to South America. If you speak Spanish or Portugese there are lots of conversations to be had. Growing in other markets as well as it is Google's own early acquisition and now is extremely web 2.0'd and possibly useful.
Ning.com: a cloud (rather than "server based") system that can of course keep growing forever (as long as humans are interested in your subject - i.e. you domain name). But this is the Luxury model - fully featured and firing on many cylinders. Annoying things are some of its imposed limitations. But it works - it grows members if you have a good idea and can drive it with an appropriate dynamic.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Hunch.com
A new type of search engine pretends to be able to advise you when you need to make a choice and do not know what you want to do, in fact fairly aggressively surveys your inner opinions more randomly and coercively than a call centre on amphetamines.
Or it is an incredibly useful conversational thinking tool that helps you identify products that align with what they can sell you according to what you say about yourself.
Our inner need for gratification, recognition and interaction ensures that many people will have a lot of time doing patchwork marketing surveys. As a Web 2.0 application, it goes beyond the expectations of that medium - perhaps it is an early Web 3.0 application.
A new type of search engine pretends to be able to advise you when you need to make a choice and do not know what you want to do, in fact fairly aggressively surveys your inner opinions more randomly and coercively than a call centre on amphetamines.
Or it is an incredibly useful conversational thinking tool that helps you identify products that align with what they can sell you according to what you say about yourself.
Our inner need for gratification, recognition and interaction ensures that many people will have a lot of time doing patchwork marketing surveys. As a Web 2.0 application, it goes beyond the expectations of that medium - perhaps it is an early Web 3.0 application.
Social Media Safety
A recent media article points out the inherent danger in using social media sites explaining "what am I doing" as it may tell burglars when you are away from home, if they are tech saavy enough to monitor you, and stupid enough to want to burgle you. Tech saavy burglars are also aware that the forces of detection - although maybe a little behind their own level of criminal genius are right behind them, potentially tracking disturbing web activity.
The other side of this nonsense is not that social media sites necessary want to know where you are unless you are stupid enough to have your location publically tracked by owning a mobile phone and switching it on. No, when the media attacks social networking it is due to a fundamental mistake when it comes to social media. It is partly about getting invited to parties and it is partly about leading people along links to material online that you feel are important. A twitter feed that tells me a housewife in Ontario is cooking an omlette is simply not that fascinating or useful to me. But one who posts a link to the best omlette recipe on her twitter feed is doing me a service and at the same time building a following for her intellectual point of view, even if they are not all there all the time as some may think.
It is the combination of mobile phones and social media that invite people to say what they are "doing" and revealing location. But it is the phone that does that, rather than the social media concept - that is a marketing wet dream come true.
NZ Herald article
Monday, May 18, 2009
Questions to focus on what is important for a customer website.
1. publishing articles or notices
2. publishing surveys/polls and presenting results
3. making and publishing video
4. online face to face consultation via webcam
5. encrypted email services, mailing list
6. cutting edge design
7. social networking
8. guaranteed complete privacy
9. technical cutting edge advancement
10. market exposure
11. minimal fuss
12. income making
1. publishing articles or notices
2. publishing surveys/polls and presenting results
3. making and publishing video
4. online face to face consultation via webcam
5. encrypted email services, mailing list
6. cutting edge design
7. social networking
8. guaranteed complete privacy
9. technical cutting edge advancement
10. market exposure
11. minimal fuss
12. income making
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Microsoft Internet Explorer Users Exposed to Flaw
It's official. Do not use Microsoft Internet Explorer as your machine can be "taken over" by people who certainly do not have your interests at heart.
It's official. Do not use Microsoft Internet Explorer as your machine can be "taken over" by people who certainly do not have your interests at heart.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Basics of Computers - The elements of decision
Computers, at their very essential, are machines that have to make a decision. A choice between one logical path, item or object and another. Or none. If you have invented ways to store values and even letters of the alphabet, there has to be a way to access it, a system of repeatable addresses. Addresses must be based on a number system and when you start to see addresses at the machine level you will see things like this d50e:1b45 - now is that a number of something quite unpronouncible?
It is neither, and both. It is representative of a number, but using a number system that may seem unfamiliar, at first.
We think in Base 10, or Decimal. Why? When you consider the relative advantages of number systems, the old folk had it better with dozens, pence to the shilling, and most things came in dozens, e.g. eggs.
Base 12 has stronger mathematical advantages as it has more factors. 3 times 4, 2 times 6 and 1 times 12 all make 12. In other words: (1,2,3,4,6,12) is a list of the factors of 12. (1,2,5,10) is the same thing for 10. What about 16? (1,2,4,8,16] are the factors. What can you see with the factors of 16? They keep doubling. It is the only regular progression of factors until we hit, you guessed it, a multiple of 16, that all too familiar computer number 256. What about 256 ^ 2? Or 256 ^ 16?
All are rich with factors, but 16 is high enough for addressing memory. And that is what this number set is - hexadecimal: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F representing the base 16 values equivalent to Base 10: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15, respectively.
A number like ab5e is: (10 x 16^3) + (11 x 16^2) + (5 x 16^1) + (15 * 16^0)
It's decimal equivalent is derived in the same way that eleven millions, two hundred thousand is derived from: 11,200,000, or: (1 x 10^7) + (1 x 10^6) + (2 x 10^5)
The decimal equivalent of 0b5e is: ( 11 x 256 ) + ( 5 x 16 ) + ( 15 )
or, 40960 + 2816 + 80 + 15 = 43,870
As you may gather a memory address like d600e500 is a very large number. Hexadecimal is useful for expressing very large numbers in a compact form.
Consider the hex word like 0xffff. It's a nice and compact way of saying what 65535 says in decimal. The 0x means what follows is hexadecimal, usually called "hex".
0xffff = (15 * 16^3) + (15 * 16^2) + (15 * 16) + (15) = 65535.
So what is ffffffff?
And what is "binary"? What possible use is base two, consider the hex: 0xfefd - in binary it looks like this - (each 4 bit group is called a nibble) looks like this:
1111 1110 1111 1100
Put that into a binary stream, and you can see how hard it is to work with it.
1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100
If you lose sync in this stream, you have no idea what the value is. Remember - the space between the bit groups do not exist.
If we however condense the binary bits into bytes (8 bit chunks) we can shorten this down to:
0xfefd 0xfefd 0xfefd 0xfefd 0xfefd
0x followed by 4 hex characters is representative of two bytes, it may represent a value or simple address simply by loading it with its binary value.
Binary is simple - on or off. The only two states that electricity knows. Represents zero or one. 0 or 1.
What a computer's bare bones has to work with, a choice. The decision is going to be based on values (switches) in the programme. The programme will swap values (bytes) in memory via the CPU's registers, it will know what location in memory these bytes are to be written into by the values in its address bus.
Some devices on the address bus are PCI devices and some are IDE. Memory is made available to these devices via the address bus. The CPU sees them as objects in the computer's memory.
Computers, at their very essential, are machines that have to make a decision. A choice between one logical path, item or object and another. Or none. If you have invented ways to store values and even letters of the alphabet, there has to be a way to access it, a system of repeatable addresses. Addresses must be based on a number system and when you start to see addresses at the machine level you will see things like this d50e:1b45 - now is that a number of something quite unpronouncible?
It is neither, and both. It is representative of a number, but using a number system that may seem unfamiliar, at first.
We think in Base 10, or Decimal. Why? When you consider the relative advantages of number systems, the old folk had it better with dozens, pence to the shilling, and most things came in dozens, e.g. eggs.
Base 12 has stronger mathematical advantages as it has more factors. 3 times 4, 2 times 6 and 1 times 12 all make 12. In other words: (1,2,3,4,6,12) is a list of the factors of 12. (1,2,5,10) is the same thing for 10. What about 16? (1,2,4,8,16] are the factors. What can you see with the factors of 16? They keep doubling. It is the only regular progression of factors until we hit, you guessed it, a multiple of 16, that all too familiar computer number 256. What about 256 ^ 2? Or 256 ^ 16?
All are rich with factors, but 16 is high enough for addressing memory. And that is what this number set is - hexadecimal: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F representing the base 16 values equivalent to Base 10: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15, respectively.
A number like ab5e is: (10 x 16^3) + (11 x 16^2) + (5 x 16^1) + (15 * 16^0)
It's decimal equivalent is derived in the same way that eleven millions, two hundred thousand is derived from: 11,200,000, or: (1 x 10^7) + (1 x 10^6) + (2 x 10^5)
The decimal equivalent of 0b5e is: ( 11 x 256 ) + ( 5 x 16 ) + ( 15 )
or, 40960 + 2816 + 80 + 15 = 43,870
As you may gather a memory address like d600e500 is a very large number. Hexadecimal is useful for expressing very large numbers in a compact form.
Consider the hex word like 0xffff. It's a nice and compact way of saying what 65535 says in decimal. The 0x means what follows is hexadecimal, usually called "hex".
0xffff = (15 * 16^3) + (15 * 16^2) + (15 * 16) + (15) = 65535.
So what is ffffffff?
And what is "binary"? What possible use is base two, consider the hex: 0xfefd - in binary it looks like this - (each 4 bit group is called a nibble) looks like this:
1111 1110 1111 1100
Put that into a binary stream, and you can see how hard it is to work with it.
1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100 1111 1100 1111 1110 1111 1100
If you lose sync in this stream, you have no idea what the value is. Remember - the space between the bit groups do not exist.
If we however condense the binary bits into bytes (8 bit chunks) we can shorten this down to:
0xfefd 0xfefd 0xfefd 0xfefd 0xfefd
0x followed by 4 hex characters is representative of two bytes, it may represent a value or simple address simply by loading it with its binary value.
Binary is simple - on or off. The only two states that electricity knows. Represents zero or one. 0 or 1.
What a computer's bare bones has to work with, a choice. The decision is going to be based on values (switches) in the programme. The programme will swap values (bytes) in memory via the CPU's registers, it will know what location in memory these bytes are to be written into by the values in its address bus.
Some devices on the address bus are PCI devices and some are IDE. Memory is made available to these devices via the address bus. The CPU sees them as objects in the computer's memory.
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