They’re expected to reach 230 million at the end of 2007 (this includes multiple memberships by one person).The money is good and growing.

For example, my friend’s Facebook App that took two weeks to build recently sold for $25k. And marketers who are savvy are getting a lot of press for their social networking presence. There is a lot of money and creativity being exchanged. “Revenues from social-networking services should reach $965 million, growing to $2.4 billion by 2012, writes MarketingCharts.”

In Datamonitor’s report called, The Future of Social Networking: understanding market strategic and technological developments they say that the most participation this year is happening in Asia Pacific, then Europe, the Middle East and Africa. North America is third on the list.

MySpace dominates in the US by a long shot. According to this data MySpace has over half of the social media memberships in the United States, followed by:

• Facebook: 18.2 percent
• Google’s YouTube and Orkut: a combined 7.6 percent
• Flickr 7.1 percent

Remember the data is in terms of memberships not traffic. Still, it’s surprising to see just how far behind Facebook is in this measurement.

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Which brings me to the title of this post. After reading feeds for the past few hours and doing my link blog I’ve come back to an observation I’ve made a few times over the past few months: great content is now a commodity.

We have too much great content. Heck, I’ve been slowing down my feed reading and blogging and I’m still awash in great content.

In just the past hour I’ve put up about 24 really good blog posts and I’m not even close to being through my feeds.

And much of what gets onto my link blog never shows up on TechMeme, Digg, Google News, Slashdot, or any of the other places that one can find aggregations of tech news and such.

So, now that we’re awash in great blogs and other news, what does that all mean?

Well, it’s getting harder to get noticed. I have seen this problem in companies. Where it used to be just fine to get one blogger to talk about you (remember how CoComment launched? I was the only blogger to do that and they got tens of thousands of people to sign up for their beta in the first day. Today, to get onto Techmeme you need to have dozens of bloggers writing about you. TechCrunch MIGHT get you that coverage, but you can’t count on that, so you need a group of blogs to write about you, all at one time.

What does it mean for bloggers themselves? Getting noticed is tougher. Which is why I am seeing more growth lately in Twitter. People want to be heard and what’s the most likely way that you’ll get heard? Join Twitter, where thousands of people are hanging out all day long? Or write a blog where you aren’t sure anyone even sees it? I see the answer, even though Twitter is causing its own commodification to happen.

One way I dealt with competing with commodity thinking? My link blog. I figure if everyone is going to write great content once in a while I might as well create a publication of my own. Turns out that has pretty good value. FastCompany is using it. It’s being reprinted over on Twitter, and on Facebook, and I’m finding some other venues to make even more value out of it.

Another way? Do a video interview every day. On Friday I put up a video with the CEO of MyQuire.com who was getting ready for Demo when he came over to Half Moon Bay for a conversation about his project-management tool. It’s amazing the people I’ve met in a year and had conversations with.

I wonder who’ll come into my life this week?

Anyway, that’s just a long way to tell Steven that if you’re getting bored with all the noise then get out there and find some way to separate out the wheat from the chaff and/or find a way to bring more smart people into my life (and, hence, yours).

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“Europeans Go Online 24 Hours Per Month”

The average European accessed the Internet 16.5 days in the month and spent a total of 24 hours viewing 2,662 Web pages. That’s less than the U.S. April averages of 21.9 days, 31.4 hours and 2,826 pages.

The Netherlands and Scandinavian countries have the largest percentage of their populations using the Internet, ranging from 68 percent to 83 percent. Germany has biggest online population consisting of 32.6 million people age 15 or older. The U.K. has the most active online population with the average number of daily users at 21.8 million, 21 days per month and spending 34.4 hours online.

Countries that have usage days below the European average are Russia (11.4 average usage days), Austria (12.0), Italy (12.9), Ireland (13.0), Portugal (13.4), Norway (14.7), Denmark (14.7), Switzerland (15.1), Belgium (15.5) and Finland (16.4).

The average Swedish user views 4,019 pages per month, which is more than any other country and 51 percent above the European average of 2,662 pages per month.

"This marks the first time we have released this detailed of a portrait of Internet usage across the 16 countries, making these comparisons truly revealing," commented Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe. "Such comparisons are only possible due to the consistency of our panel-based methodology country-to-country."

The study also found that Google is the most popular property in 13 of 16 countries, followed by Microsoft. Yahoo was the third most popular online property but only made the top 3 lists in Ireland, Italy and Spain.

Excerpt from my post, “And let me point out, that there will not be a 3.0 or any other rev numbers, unless there is another tremendous evolution, fusion, or breakthrough in the practice, science, and art of communications.”

The flagship publication that has made a business out of documenting “what is” versus “what is…changing” without necessarily helping their readers understand the evolution, decided to place a stake in the ground and call attention to their forward-looking vision, or as some would say, ignorance.

I guess they missed the whole fact that the industry was still coming to terms with how the Web swept the rug from underneath it, thus changing the game forever, and threatening the eradication of generations of less-than-web-savvy PR professionals.

And what’s even worse, is that in this age of Social Media, I couldn’t even comment on the article. I was given a link to editor@prweek.com.

According to Julia Hood, EIC of PR Week, “PR has gone through other incarnations in the past, but what is happening now is so fundamental, it can only be described as the next iteration of the industry – or PR 3.0, as we have designated it.”

Stating that the industry is entering the age of PR 3.0 is absurd, premature, and irresponsible. If anything, this article could have validated PR 2.0, but instead they chose to leapfrog it.

Here’s her argument for PR 3.0 has they “have designated it:”

“Staffing has been on the increase”

“… increasing revenue per employee…”

“…an average of 17% growth among firms that reported the previous year.”

“Edelman’s astounding 26% growth…”

“…Schwartz Communications pulled in 22% growth, Qorvis increased by 31%, Taylor (formerly Alan Taylor Communications) was up by 36%, and Integrated Corporate Relations showed a 48% rise…”

PRWeek’s rationale for evolving into PR 3.0 is driven by revenue? Are you kidding me? Some of our other friends tracking the economy might call this growth, or an upward trend. But to call it an entirely new era of PR is laughable, sensationalist, and so off the mark that it demonstrates why PR and spin go hand in hand.

Oh yes, we’re living in a time where PR has evolved more in the last 10 years than it has in the last 100. The press release is finally evolving, the Web is now interactive, citizens are now more than journalists – they’re influencers, and Internet marketing is driving new PR campaigns. Social media has, and will only increase, in its influence for redefining not just PR, but all media in general.

Honestly, I’m still defending, justifying, and defining the ideas and principles behind PR 2.0 and social media and how it all integrates into traditional PR. This is where the discussions need to focus in order to improve the industry, and, it can only be done through art and practice, not through revenue.

I’m talking about PR for the PR – forcing the discussion outside of the likes of PRWeek and into global forums where people can exchange real world information in order to share and learn from each other in the face of the new web and Social Media.

The idea and the mantra behind the PR 2.0 movement is to reach PR people outside of the echo chamber to help them evolve, improve their game, learn the technology that’s driving social media, and most importantly, participate in the conversations taking place without them (not initially as a PR, but as a regular person genuinely engaged in conversations to participate and learn.)

Social media and (PR 2.0) is about respect, passion, conversation, and insight. It so much more than blogger relations, wikis, social networks, Second Life, blogs, tags, podcasts, etc. Those are merely the tools used to engage in the conversation. But PR is all about, or should be about, knowledge, understanding of the markets, and the channels used to reach them with the most compelling and meaningful messages.

New PR, PR 2.0, whatever you want to call it, is more about being “smart” enough to participate at an entirely new and more valuable level of engagement. It’s about reading the publications, blogs, networks, where you want to participate. It’s about living and breathing the product/service we represent.

It’s the difference between spin and evangelism.

It’s also the difference between storytelling and influence.

It all eventually merges back into PR – with a long trail of communications professionals that will be forced to jump ship for the betterment of the PR industry as a whole.

With Web 2.0 attracting mainstream attention, PR 2.0 (and everything 2.0) has PR and marketing professionals drooling while seeing dollar signs – rejoicing that their ship has come in. Yes, unfortunately, it shows in the numbers. But I’d like to think that this is an opportunity for PR professionals to put the “pro” back in their title.

PR 2.0 is not because of Web 2.0. It is because of the Web – or the Live Web as Doc Searls calls it. The evolution of the Web has forced communications professionals to step out from behind the “great wall of PR” to interact with the people formerly known as the audience and the “people” aka influencers aka experts that also reach them.

The interactivity of the web, combined with the ability to transform readers into content producers, is forcing PR’s evolution along with it – regardless of 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0.

The idea is to fuse the best of PR, technology, marketing, and the Web. No BS. No hype.

PR should understand markets, the needs of people, and how to reach them at the street level – without insulting everyone along the way.

PR 3.0, as defined by PRWeek, is a slap in the face to all of the new media pioneers who have tirelessly worked to help bring PR into the conversation – and in doing so – improve the business of PR and the skills of those who practice it.

For those who haven’t read my series of what PR 2.0 is and isn’t, here’s a quick recap:

I started discussing the concept of PR 2.0 during Web 1.0 as a way of analyzing how the Web and multimedia was redefining PR and marketing communications, while also building the toolkit to reinvent how companies communicate with influencers and directly with people.

PR 2.0 is an opportunity to not only work with traditional journalists, but also engage directly with a new set of accidental influencers, and, it was also our ability to talk with customers directly.

PR 2.0 is not because of, or limited to, Web 2.0. It is, however, influenced by it.

PR 2.0 isn’t Social Media. And Social Media isn’t Web 2.0. These are also distinct movements that can complement and inspire each other.

PR 2.0 incorporates the tools that enable the socialization of media, providing smart folks with the ability to reach folks directly.

Social Media is important because it represents the democratization of news and information.

Social Media frames “media” in a socialized context, but it doesn’t invite PR (as it exists today) to market through (or to) it. However, worthy individuals can participate in conversations as long as they participate as a person and not a marketer.

PR 2.0, in principle, is the ONLY method for conducting PR in the long tail.

UPDATE #1: Keith O’Brien of PRWeek blogs some of the initial industry response to its Agency Business Report – "Mike Manuel says yes. Brian Solis gives a definitive no."

UPDATE #2: I responded, "Just to be clear, my post wasn’t in direct response to the Agency Business Report, it was specific to PRWeek’s claim that the industry was moving towards a new age – PR 3.0 as designated by the staff.

By aligning PR 3.0 with revenue and business growth, PRWeek is misleading and confusing the already bewildered masses of PR practitioners and company marketing executives who are still trying to figure out the new world of Social Media.

Our discussions about PR (insert number here) should first focus on helping these people “get it,” instead of trying to coin a movement that hasn’t yet amalgamated."

UPDATE #3: Keith O’Brien’s response, "...what we (the Royal We, at least from my perspective) wanted to get across was that social media was not tremendously impacting the bottom line (yet) and that execs were agreeing with your statement – that everyone needs to get it. Perhaps when everyone gets it, we will be at 3.0. Or 2.3. (insert number here)."

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Trust in the advertising system has to remain at a high level. Yahoo doesn’t need more class action lawsuits cropping up over accusations of click fraud. They made a couple of announcements that indicate Yahoo will be more proactive about the problem.

A Reuters report noted Yahoo’s appointment of one of its associate general counsels, Reggie Davis, to the position of vice president of marketplace quality. Davis has been involved with defending Yahoo from click fraud lawsuits like the Checkmate action.

The other big news came as Yahoo formally put a number on the illicit clicks it sees: between 12 and 15 percent. These are clicks that Yahoo tosses out before they hit the accounts of their advertisers.

Clearing up the definition of an invalid click will be important. "We need to take some of the inconsistency out of this issue," Davis said in the report.

Yahoo’s moves received approval from Click Forensics head Tom Cuthbert. Calling him a close observer of search industry click fraud efforts might be understatement; he has been openly critical of the lack of transparency into click fraud fighting.

Cuthbert continued to call for independent third-party auditing of click activity, to ensure advertisers fully understand the issues surrounding illicit clicks, namely in how well Yahoo and others keep them from hitting client accounts.

As InternetNews.com reported a couple of individuals had been fingered by YouTube and another video sharing site called Live Digital for performing the offending uploads of ’24′ as well as ‘The Simpsons.’

Fox undoubtedly wants heads severed and delivered on a silver platter. Or at least fined, maybe jailed:

According to copies of the subpoena applications, Fox found this season’s first four episodes of “24″ on LiveDigital and YouTube on Jan. 8, a full week before they were to air for the first time in the U.S.

Seeing the episodes early means being able to do other things with one’s time during the slots those ’24′ episodes would air. That means an impact on Fox’s ability to charge for ad time if viewership drops for those shows.

TechCrunch pinch-hitter Marshall Kirkpatrick considered the impact of the information handover on other YouTube users:

I wonder how YouTube users will feel about the company

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/youtube-rolls-over-on-24-poster-2007-02/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/developing-a-profitable-web-project-in-hours-2006-10 http://www.webpronews.com/developing-a-profitable-web-project-in-hours-2006-10#comments Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:23:33 +0000 Paul Fisher http://www.webpronews.com/?p=32435 It took seven months to get the One Million Masterpiece charity project online. The site is complex and needed the development time, but in the last few days I’ve had a yearning to see if I can still turn around a project in 24 hours.

Back in the early days of the Internet boom I’d sit in my bedroom and knock out html websites all night long, but almost ten years on, can it still be done in a time where profitability and interactivity are the key measures?

So, it’s 7am and I’ve got a plan. The new pressures I face in life (work responsibilities, family etc) have been dealt with and I have a clear 24 hours ahead of me. An idea for a site has been kicking round in my head ever since I sold a site last year. This site was a very specialist software comparison site that generated referral commissions and Adsense income. It was an excellent earner and I’ve wanted to recreate that success, but on a larger scale.

So last year I bought the domain http://www.shoutdown.net with the intention of building a software comparison style project. I want the site to be in the informal blog style, where the posts are product summaries (written by me), and the comments would be reviews submitted by other people. I’d also throw in a rating system, and way of attaching news releases or other relevant pages to each product post, plus link related posts (for example different versions of the same software).

So the idea is there, it’s 7:30am and my first job is to select some mp3′s to get me through to lunch. Here goes…

08.00
By the time I’ve chosen my music, switched off my Google desktop bar and responded to essential email it’s already 8am – crap. So, first job is drawing out a schematic of the database that will power my site. What information do I want to keep and how will I organise it? I’m having five database tables. For ease I’m calling them level1, level2, level3 etc because I see them as levels of information about each software product – the top being category information and the bottom being the reviews and ratings.

09:15
Took me quite a while to get the structure clear, but now I’m sketching out the homepage on paper. I’ve looked at a few blogs that I like and have basically copied their layout for ease. I’ve also worked out the sizing of my main columns and rows and know the positions of the adverts, main blog posts and navigation. I still like to work on paper at this stage – I’m an artist at heart!

09:55
OK let’s get on the computer. I’ve fired up Paint Shop Pro and my first job is to work out a colour pallet. I want three colours, so I blob different combinations on a blank white image until I get the right combination – orange, purple and grey. I then make a note of the hex codes for each colour on a post-it – this will save LOADS of time later. While I’m in PSP I’m going to mock up a logo as I already know the size of image I need from my plan. Actually I really like the logo so it will probably be permanent.

10:21
Time to start on the site. I’m using a single html page at the moment with a linked css file. Using some basic tables and css I’ve laid out the top bar, the post area and two columns (one for ads and one for navigation). I’m sticking to a tried and tested blog layout.

I always use Dreamweaver, but always hand code. Why use Dreamweaver then? Well, I find the preview quite accurate, but other than that I have no idea – just habit.

11:38
I’ve just finished the main site layout, including place holding text that will eventually be dynamic. I’ve left space for some ads on the site, so I’ve justed logged in to Adsense to generate the code. All I need to do is use the colours on my post-it to get them fitting in nicely. I’ll also take a look round for some other nice banners in my affiliate accounts.

12:43
That took longer than planned, time for lunch

13:17
OK time to fill up my database with some data, then I can start writing the php that will populate the pages. I’m going to sign up for a few software affiliate accounts and write some sample reviews on the software. At the moment I haven’t got time to write really good reviews, but in time I intend to fully try each title and write some good stuff (positive and negative). For now I’ll be brief.

15:20
Right, let’s get back to the site. I’m going to sort out the navigation side bars first, and then I’ll split my single page up.

16:45
This isn’t working. I’ve got a very limited knowledge of php so I’m having trouble dynamically generating category headings and software lists dynamically. It’s taking too long to sort out so for now I’m going to simply print a list of all software titles in the database. I’ll make up for it by also providing a list of software categories, plus a list of the most reviewed software.

16:58
I’m going to split up my single html page now into a header, body, nav and footer, and use a php include to pull the pages together. In total I will only need three main template pages for the content of this site – the homepage, a category page and a product page.

18:24
I’ve finished the layout of the three pages, including all the code that pulls info from the database. Everything’s working pretty well and I’m please with the simplicity. My next job is to create an rss feed of the posts and reviews, but first I need some DINNER!

20:04
After some pasta and tv I’m ready for this rss feed. It’s pretty easy to create a php page that will pull the necessary code and place it in the rss 2.0 layout. Once I’m done I’ll just save the php file as xml and ensure that my .htaccess file remembers to parse xml files for php code.

21:36
I checked that the rss feed was valid using a standard validator. It took a little time to sort out the date formatting to be honest.

21:57
I’ve been developing using Firefox to test the layout, but I just checked the site in IE and noticed the background colour was dodgy. It was a css error – fixed.

22:15
OK back to content. The reviews at the moment are boring so I’m going to add some images and expand them a little. I’m also going to add some reviews that I’ve been collecting over the last few months. The good thing about buying the domain and posting up a test website for six months is that the search engines have already crawled the site, and hopefully will help me avoid the Google sandbox.

02:30
I’m absolutely knackered. I’ve just spent the last few hours trying to get the navigation system working but with no luck. The problem is that I’m trying to dynamically generate an information tree (apparently that’s what it’s called after much research) but I just can’t get it working. I’m giving up.

04:49
OK, I’ve just created a rating system which will only accept one software vote per IP address. Seems a bit buggy but I really really tired and can’t be bothered to go through it again now.

So what’s left to do? I need to create forms to input reviews, news and bookmarks but I’m just too tired to continue. So much for 24 hours, but actually I’m really pleased with the result. On the surface the site looks like any other blog, and you might question why I decided to hand code the entire thing. Well, I have some ideas for some advanced functions, but I’ll only be able to implement them if I know the site inside out. Plus I just like the challenge.

I wont have time to work on the site all week, but I’m already planning my next 24 hour session – marketing. I’ll be sure to keep you updated on that, and how the site is doing generally!

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Paul Fisher is a professional in online search. He is also editor of http://www.shoutdown.net and is the founder of the global arts project http://www.theonemillionmasterpiece.com

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/developing-a-profitable-web-project-in-hours-2006-10/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/tailrank-diggtech-techmeme-and-google-reader-2006-10 http://www.webpronews.com/tailrank-diggtech-techmeme-and-google-reader-2006-10#comments Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:59:11 +0000 Robert Scoble http://www.webpronews.com/?p=32140 Kevin Burton released a new TailRank. Last week I asked the audience at ConvergeSouth how many people even knew about TechMeme. Very few hands went up. ]]> Kevin Burton released a new TailRank. Last week I asked the audience at ConvergeSouth how many people even knew about TechMeme. Very few hands went up.

That totally shocked me. So, thought it was time to look at the memetrackers again since so few people in the world know about them.

These are sites where you go to learn the latest news in the tech world.

First, there are two approaches to reading tech blogs: one, you can read a bunch of feeds like I do with Google Reader. That takes a couple of hours even if you’re really fast like I am at hitting “J” “J” “J” (the “J” key moves to the next post).

But, since I just read my 200 tech feeds and posted a bunch of stuff that had been posted in the past 24 hours I thought it’d be interesting to see how that compared to the new TailRank and TechMeme.

I probably should have included Slashdot and GoogleNews/Tech in this post too, but I got more than 500 emails waiting for me to answer and tons of videos to encode.

Here’s my non-scientific observations (you should do your own homework and decide which site is best for you on your own):

HEADLINE DENSITY

Let’s start with my favorite TechMeme. I loaded all three at the same time on my brand new Apple MacPro and 30 inch screen – this lets me get all three pages side-by-side for comparisons. TechMeme has 32 headlines (17 of which are top level) and three paid advertising headlines.

TailRank only gets 10 top-level headlines (to get more you gotta click “next” which we’ve learned through eye track research that most users will never do, but what I’m really looking at here is information density, and on that point TechMeme wins by a long shot).

Digg/Tech has 15 top-level headlines.

TechMeme wins this one.

UPDATE: I went back and looked at TailRank again. I totally missed the headlines over on the right side of the page. Those looked like ads to me, or a blogroll. Shows how deep my avoidance of traditional advertising is. Anyway, even after noticing them, they aren’t as useful cause there’s no descriptive text. For instance here’s one headline “When it Doubt, Blame CREW.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? Am I really supposed to click on that to learn more? Sorry, I won’t. TechMeme’s headlines at the bottom of the page, though, are almost as useless but they have a little more info which makes them easier to deal with (I can see who is linking to them, which I can use to judge if a headline is really going to be interesting to me). Either way, though, TechMeme wins this one, even after considering the other headlines on the page.

NEWSWORTHINESS OF TOP HEADLINES

This one will be subjective. I’m biased toward more big-paper news. Things like Google buying YouTube. So, let’s look.

TechMeme: has headlines from Richard Edelman (only bloggers really care about ethics of other bloggers, so this is a minus for TechMeme). A report from the New York Times on a reporter who is covering Second Life (snore, is this really news?) A TechCrunch article on Sequoia investing $5 million in Sugar Publishing (news!!) An article in BusinessWeek about YouTube vs. MySpace (lots of people are talking about this, people talked to me about this at every stop so far today). A Read/Write Web post about Moveable Type Enterprise launching (news!!) A Daily Mall article on home entertainment (mushy). A Wired article about a MySpace predator getting caught (news!!) A New York Times article about social software (mushy). AT&T making network neutrality concessions (news!!)

Anyway, to shorten this up, let’s count the news headlines: 17 interest me, out of 32 headlines. Pretty good.

Let’s look at TailRank. MySpace predator story. That’s not the most important thing today, methinks. But it counts. The mushy NYT article on social software. Walmart/Edelman thing, but not as authoritative as TechMeme, that linked to the latest Richard Edelman post. Red iPod story (mushy and old, was yesterday’s news); Another post about Walmart/Edelman thing, albeit older; A personal blog post about Macs sucking (interesting, and I’ll count that as news, although TechMeme has the same kind of post, but lower which is where I think it belongs). Moveable Type enterprise story. Cool. An NYT story about Chinese version of Wikipedia. News. TechMeme had that too, but lower. YouTube vs. MySpace. Yeah, news. Om’s story about Google making $2 billion in increased stock valuation. Yeah, news.

The percentage of articles is higher on TailRank, but unfortunately the quantity wins out, I see TechMeme the winner here too.

How about Digg? Digg is a completely different animal. Every headline is pretty interesting, but has much more niche-oriented news (top link right now, for instance is “useful error pages for Firefox”).

Comparing Digg with TechMeme is pretty difficult cause they do very different things. I couldn’t live without either of them, which brings me to the next section.

SMALL STORIES/COMPLETENESS OF PICTURE

Now, here, obviously, is where reading your own feeds every night will definitely win. In the past two hours I’ve posted about 48 items. Each hand picked from hundreds of items that crossed my screen. A good cross-section of items, including Google Ajax Video Bar, and other fun weird small things (and big things too). To be fair, the front page of my feed only shows nine, though. You gotta click the link at the bottom of the page to see more. Just as tedious as it was on TailRank, but both experiences are better if you subscribe.

Digg, however, wins this game. Digg gets the weirdest newest stuff onto the page. The downside of the Digg page is that much of it is noise to me, cause I don’t care about a lot of the items that get on Digg. For instance, there right now is a 1992 video of Steve Jobs showing off NeXTSTEP. Please, that’s noise for someone who is busy and just wants to know the top headlines of the day. But, to my son, who is a Steve Jobs love child, that’s probably going to be his favorite headline.

CONCLUSION

I’m sticking with TechMeme for my first “must read” page in the morning. Then I’ll go to Digg. Then to my feeds. Then to TailRank.

How about you? Which one do you like the most and why?

POSTSCRIPT: Now that I’ve trashed TailRank, I want to praise it. The memetracker feature is cool and TailRank has a broader range of news than TechMeme. Either way, it’s good to see the competition between these sites.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/tailrank-diggtech-techmeme-and-google-reader-2006-10/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/jboss-portal-opens-for-developers-2006-08 http://www.webpronews.com/jboss-portal-opens-for-developers-2006-08#comments Wed, 30 Aug 2006 14:34:29 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=31200 Red Hat’s JBoss division announced the availability of a new version of their portal software, with full clustered content management system capabilities and Web Service for Remote Portlet (WSRP) support.

The general release of JBoss Portal 2.4 became available with those significant additions. WSRP benefited from the development of several new features:

•  Ability to easily consume portlets from remote producers

•  Seamless integration of WSRP portlets in portal

•  Support for simple registration schemes

•  Simple caching of markup and metadata

•  Support for WSRP Base level (support for service description and markup interfaces)

•  Local portlets can easily be exposed remotely to WSRP consumers

•  Includes a local WSRP producer to easily test WSRP in Portal (‘self’ portlet provider)

JBoss Portal is a standards-based development platform. Through the use of modular applications, called portlets, web developers can deploy JSR-168-compliant features with web framework or collaboration functions on their portals.

For scalability, the JBoss team added render-view caching for improved performance, a clustered portal state, and fully clustered CMS. Administrators on the JBoss Portal can manage users and roles so those who require access can have it at the level they require.

Users of previous versions of JBoss will find a migration application in place starting with version 2.4. That provides an automated walk-through for those upgrading from 2.2.x to 2.4.x, according to the JBoss release notes.

Developers can also view the JBoss Portal 2.4 TestSuite to view results of the nightly test of the codebase.

TestSuite shows the build results, and metrics on broken versus successful builds, and uses CruiseControl for this usage.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/jboss-portal-opens-for-developers-2006-08/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/localbrit-search-built-in-hours-2006-07 http://www.webpronews.com/localbrit-search-built-in-hours-2006-07#comments Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:35:16 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=30527 Rome may not have been built in a day, to quote an obvious saying, but the search engine at LocalBrit.co.uk moved from scratch to launch in that time.

Marathon coding sessions have been a time-honored tradition in the world of programming. Jolt Cola, pepperoni pizza, and a burning desire have been enough to push a determined hacker to create something from scratch.

Developer Ahmed Farooq of iBegin had an available datasource, and the motivation to build LocalBrit, a United Kingdom local search engine. He hit the ground running at 8 am local time, and except for the stemming technology he already had, created the site in a day.

He provided a running timeline of his work beginning after getting his dog to shut up and starting work. These are a few excerpts from his work:

8:10 am – wrote data importer. Takes data in text format and throws it into split mysql databases.
8:20 am – first peak of frontpage design. Happy. Need inner page done, and then cut.
8:27 am – received spam email. Good to know the world is still spinning
10:01 am – first ‘set’ of data is being synchronized. Blazing fast. Goody
10:02 am – Dammit. Artifacts in the db – duplicate db. Have to restart process.
2:43 pm – Still hunting Geocoding. This is a problemo.
12:56 am – Back. Daily Show and Colbert Report are most hilarious.
2:10 am – Bah. Some error in my processing, invalid SQL queries

And so on. Farooq did take some time off for sleep, from 2:58 am to 7:24 am. After returning from his little break, he addressed a couple of issues with the database and the query. When 8:01 am rolled around, Farooq declared himself winner.

LocalBrit offers a very straightforward interface. Find [blank] in [blank] and hit enter. The results return on the right side of the page, while a Google map appears next to that. Business information comes from a database that Farooq said fell into his lap “about a week ago, by what can only be described as a freak series of coincidences.”

Now it is up and running. It isn’t perfect, but it can find pubs in Brighton and umbrellas in Sheffield. The question now is what will Farooq do for an encore?

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