Firms are increasingly using networking software to share documents and collaborate in ideas, the research found.

And while more work-specific systems, such as LinkedIn or bespoke in-house software tended to be used for work matters, the likes of Facebook, Bebo and MySpace still had a place, said Peter Bradwell, a Demos researcher and the report’s author.

Demos says that when companies restrict access to social networks, it could have a long-term negative impact, because communication methods are limited. "They are part of the way in which people communicate which they find intuitive," says Bradwell. "Banning Facebook and the like goes against the grain of how people want to interact. Often people are friends with colleagues through these networks and it is how some develop their relationships."

Demos basically takes the position that employees who abuse their social network privileges should be under stricter watch. Productivity has of course been one of the biggest concerns regarding social media in the workplace, but according to Demos, it could actually have the opposite effect. Bradwell noted that it can build closer links with ex-employees and customers to boost productivity.

When it comes down to it, this is an issue that will continue to be debated, mostly because there’s no concrete way to measure the productivity (or lack thereof) against whether or not the time used would be better spent doing something else. There’s no doubt that there are plenty of potential benefits for businesses using social media, but bosses are going to have a hard time being convinced without seeing concrete results.

I guess Google has noticed that most people only use one thing, the search engine (Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, was quoted as saying that even its most die-hard fans can’t remember many of its major products).

Well, remember that Adobe Acrobat 8 video demo I put up last week? Turns out it had 50% more visits than our other podcasts last week. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed that, either. Over on Channel 9 our videos regularly got more visits than the Web site for the product or service we were discussing.

It’s a YouTube, er Google Video, world.

So, here’s a little test I did. I searched for:

Blogger Demo video. None found.

Google Calendar Demo video. None found.

Google Desktop Demo video. None found. Even worse is that there’s one of my videos there from Channel 9 showing off a competitive product.

Google Dodgeball Demo video. None found.

Google Earth Demo video. None found. Oh, there’s another one of my Channel 9 videos again.

Google Groups Demo video. None found. Another one of my Channel 9 videos are there.

Google Maps Demo video. None found. Another one of my Channel 9 videos are there.

Should I go on? I could – seems like almost none of the Google product teams has put a simple video demo of its products up online and if they have, they certainly didn’t make them findable. Seems to me that this would be a great thing to do for Google. I’m sure such videos would be linked into Wikipedia’s list almost instantly.

So, here’s my offer. I’ll come over and do an interviewwith each of your product teams and get a five-minute demo of your products. With my sooopppeeerrrr dddooooppppeeeerrrrr Sony HD camcorder. For free.

That’s what we did on Friday for Scrapblog and Jajah (I don’t charge for this, and am doing it for lots of little companies – we’ll even have a new show we’ll announce soon where it’ll be even easier to get your demo online, you won’t even need to convince me via email that I should come over).

Even better offer for Google? I’ll even put all the Google ones up on Google Video as well as put them on the ScobleShow.

Oh, how powerful is this? Well, do a Google search for “Adobe Acrobat 8 video demo” and what do you find? My video. And, yes, we’re getting visits from Google so I know someone is looking for video demos of products.

Anyway, want to do a demo? 425-205-1921. You won’t even need to pay $30,000 like you would if you were going to this week’s Demo conference (everyone who gets on the stage there pays for the privilege and everyone in the audience pays too).

Why do they pay? Because they know the power of demoing to an influential audience. Funny thing is that there’s a far cheaper (and more effective) way to do the same demo on my show. By the way, the number of people who’ve now seen the Adobe Acrobat 8 video I did is many times bigger than the attendance of the Demo conference this week.

It’s amazing to me that Google hasn’t done this on its own, actually.

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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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Hey, a two-word name! Kudos to the marketing department.

Why rename Monad? Well, replace the “M” with a “G” and you can see one theory of why the name had to be changed. I still like Monad, though.

Wikipedia entry on Monad.

I hear the new name will be announced officially tomorrow this morning and that the Monad blog will have more details then.

Don’t know what Monad is? Jeffrey Snover, in this Channel 9 video, explains and demos.

Update: the new PowerShell blog is now up.

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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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In the second part I will discuss the more advanced features of PHP:Form.

What is PHP:Form?

PHP:Form is a (new) web component, developed by TGP PHP Scripts (http://phpscripts.pallettgroup.com). It is designed to help you create forms with a lot less effort. When you’re creating a new PHP script, you will undoubtedly have to create forms to allow input to be entered. There is (almost) no PHP script without forms, and forms usually require solid validation to make sure there are no security leaks. It would be nice if those forms are accessible as well, but this often gets forgotten.

We’ve all had to create forms again and again. And every time we’ve had to write those validation functions. I’m sure you remember… if (empty($blah)) { echo ‘Invalid’; }, etc. After a while it becomes a really boring and mundane task, and most of the time we don’t do it properly either. One of the hardest things to do is to return error messages, indicating what is wrong, and allowing visitors to fix their mistakes, without having to re-do the complete form. I used to simply tell them to hit the back-button, after returning the errors, but this is obviously a not-so-good way of doing it.

Thankfully, that’s where PHP:Form steps in. It handles all the boring parts for you, and does it properly as well.

PHP:Form has support for inbuilt validators, which means you only have to use a simple HTML-like syntax to add new validation logic to a form. With these validators also comes automatic client-side validation. All the necessary JavaScript is created for you, and there’s nothing you need to do. Another remarkable feature of PHP:Form are so-called “formtypes”, which are basically form templates. These allow you define form templates, which can be re-used over and over again.

Let’s have a closer look at the validation part of PHP:Form; the validators.

Inbuilt Validators & Client-side Validation

Before we look at the validators, let’s first look at the basic PHP:Form syntax. It has a really simple syntax, because it’s basic HTML. To create a new form, use the tags, like so:

<php:form name="example">

</php:form>

That’s all that is really necessary. But you must also tell the form to display, using PHP, like so:

$_FORMS->display ('example');

Those two things are the only things absolutely necessary to create and display a new form. Of course, nothing will be displayed yet because you haven’t created any input fields. To see a simple form in action, have a look at demo 1 (http://www.phpit.net/demo/phpform%20series/demos/demo1.php)

Let’s move on to validators now. Validators are used to validate form fields, and just like the form tags, they are simple html, for example:

<validator for="[fieldname]">Your error message here</validator>

You can either place validators in between the form tags, or outside the form tags. If you place them outside the form tags you must specify the form name (using the ‘form’ attribute).

A simple form with a validator would look like this:

<?php

?>

View live demo (http://www.phpit.net/demo/phpform%20series/demos/demo2.php)

As you can see in the code we created a validator that has the required attribute set to “true”. That means that this validator just checks whether the value of the input field isn’t empty.

There are 5 different kinds of validators:

- Required: they are used to make sure an input field isn’t empty, like I just demonstrated.

<validator for="field" required="true">Please fill in something</validator>

- Numeric: they are used to make sure an input field only contains numbers, and nothing else.

<validator for="field" numeric="true">Please fill in something</validator>

- Regex: they can be used to specifiy a regular expression that an input field must match.

<validator for="field" regex="/test/i" >Please enter 'test' only.</validator>

- Callback: callback validators can take a callback function that is run on the server-side. That callback function is passed the value of the input field, and the function must return true or false. This is used for really advanced validation (and it’s likely you will hardly ever use the callback validator)

<validator for="field" callback="is_email">Not a valid e-mail address.validator>

- Name: name validator can be used to display a message or error only when you want to. They can only be shown when you manually show them using the trigger_error (‘form’, ‘errorname’) method.

<validator name="mymsg">This is my custom error!</validator>

Then in PHP:

<?php

?>

When using validators, you will probably want to check if a form validates or not. To do this, use the validate() method, as seen in demo 2:

If ($_FORMS->validate('example') == true) {

}

Client-Side Validation

PHP:Form also automatically generates client-side validation (JavaScript) when using validators. It natively supports the required, numeric and regex validators, but it doesn’t (fully) support the callback validator. This isn’t really possible either, because the callback validator points to a function on the server-side. But if you create a JavaScript function with the same name as the callback function, it will work, and it will run the JavaScript function you created. This gives you great power, and means you can even using advanced JavaScript functions and Ajax to validate data.

If you would like to see the client-side validation in action, have a look at demo 2 again, and make sure you have JavaScript enabled. You will probably notice how fast the errors are returned, and that no refresh happens at all. That’s the client-side validation.

Conclusion

In this first part of the PHP:Form series I have shown you what PHP:Form is: an extremely neat PHP form component, that is really useful for building web forms. I have been using it myself now for a few months, and I still can’t get over how great it is. It has really simplified things, and I can focus on the important stuff. If you’re still in doubt, have a look at the PHP:Form product page for more information and demo’s (http://phpscripts.pallettgroup.com/phpform/?ref=phpit).

I have also shown you exactly what validators are, and the different types. Validators are the most important part of PHP:Form, and you will probably use them in every form. You can some really interesting things with them, and when you combine a few validators it’s possible to create a extremely secure form.

In the next part I will have a look at “form types”, the form templates of PHP:Form. I will also have a look at setting default values, using the set_value() method of PHP:Form.

If you’re interested in purchasing PHP:Form, don’t forget to use the special PHPit coupon code: phpit

PHP:Form product page (http://phpscripts.pallettgroup.com/phpform/?ref=phpit)

Dennis Pallett is a young tech writer, with much experience in ASP, PHP and other web technologies. He enjoys writing, and has written several articles and tutorials. To find more of his work, look at his websites at http://www.phpit.net, http://www.aspit.net and http://www.webdev-articles.com

I first logged on at a bleary eyed 7am and thought I’d gone to the wrong page.

The log in page now is a quick view report which gives an overview of the day’s figures (both Adsense for content and Adsense for search on the same page – good move Google). These can be viewed as today, yesterday, last 7 days, this month and last month which can be changed via a drop down menu.

Users are then given the ability to narrow these figures down to show the top performing channels for the period selected at the click of a button.

Underneath these figures are the options for a variety of quick reports which allow publishers to check their figures in a variety of reports. Options include this month by day’, this month by channel and day’, last month by day’ and last month by channel and day’. Each of these allows you to download a CSV report next to them.

If you want a more detailed report (for example setting from one date to another) you can still do this by selecting the Advanced Reports’ options at the top of the page.

Page impressions on channels can now be viewed in the two ways that your overall stats have been able to be viewed previously.

Overall the changes seem to be reasonable. It will take a little while to get used to the new format but largely the changes are fairly cosmetic with no real changes to the actual system.

Terms and Conditions Changes – Also new today are some additions to the terms and conditions’ page. Jen at Jensense has a good summary of the changes so rather than rehashing them all here I suggest you take a look at what she has to say. Most of the changes seem minor – some seem to deal with RSS ads.

The one I’m most interested in is that you now have to seek Google’s permission to put two different publisher’s codes on the one page. ie if you want to run ads for two different people on the one page. This will impact the revenue share systems of some blog networks.

New Demos – Lastly they seem to have added some video Demos for beginner Adsense publishers to help them get going.

You can see all the changes to the report pages laid out at the Adsense what’s new’ page.

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Darren Rowse is the founder of ProBlogger.net, a blog about the many ways of adding an income stream to blogs.

Darren owns and writes a variety of blogs including Digital Photography Blog and Camera Phone
Zone. He is also a co-founder of the Breaking News Blog Collective.

Microsoft also announced updates to the award-winning Microsoft Office Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005. These include a service pack (SP) and public instant-messaging (IM) connectivity (PIC) that together deliver enterprise-grade connectivity from an LCS enterprise to the MSN, AOL and Yahoo! public IM networks. Microsoft executives demonstrated Communicator and LCS 2005 during a global Web conference event.

According to PC World,

“Gates said that in the next version of Microsoft Office, ‘a big theme will be taking real-time capabilities and building them into Office in a bigger way.’ He added: ‘We think of collaboration in a very broad way,’ ranging from an individual using the OneNote note-taking application on a tablet PC, to software for training and other group activities.

Mark Burnett, creator and executive producer of The Apprentice, who spoke from Santa Monica along with Microsoft Information Worker Group vice president Jeff Raikes, said he could benefit from the real-time communications features of the Microsoft products to track his various productions in several countries. He added that in the fourth season of The Apprentice, one of the tasks assigned to the competitors would involve Microsoft. Communicator and the Live Communications Server 2005 SP are slated to ship by midyear. Pricing will be announced at a later date. The 2005 upgrade for Live Meeting is due to become available to customers starting at the end of this week.”

“Communicator and Live Communications Server demonstrate how we are bringing integrated communications to life for our customers as rich presence and multimodal communications become an integrated part of the Microsoft Office System,” said Jeff Raikes, group vice president of the Information Worker Group at Microsoft. “Users now can view rich presence information for colleagues, partners and customers; select the most efficient mode of communication, whether it’s IM, a phone call, a Web conference or e-mail; and instantly share ideas and information.”

“With LCS and Communicator, organizations have a safe, easy way to IM and share presence information with colleagues, partners and customers,” said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of the Live Communications Team in the Real-Time Collaboration Group at Microsoft. “With the reach that PIC and enhanced federation provide, enterprise IM becomes a first-class business tool — as useful and ubiquitous as e-mail.”

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