blogging

What is Blog Action Day? A chance to help fight global poverty.

Blog Action Day is, according to its founders, “an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day.”

In 2007, the issue was the environment. In 2008, the theme is poverty.

By coordinating the efforts of many bloggers (more than 10,000 different sites, as of this morning), the organizers hope to galvanize improvement in the lots of the world’s poor. As measured by the World Bank, substantial improvements have been made since the 1980s.

Even so, one quarter of the world continues to subsist on less than $1.25/day.

Here’s what you can do to help:

• Participate in the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC). Just head over to laptopgiving.org.
• Tune in to BlogTalkRadio’s 12-hour Blog Action Day talkathon to discover how dozens of prominent bloggers and technologists will be helping in the effort.
• Support microlending efforts at Kiva.org. Learn more about microcredit, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank in this Business Week article, “Can Technology Eliminate Poverty?
• Read WebTeacher’s post describing a social business to find out how this form of concerned commerce works.
• Donate to or participate in the development of the technologies described at PracticalAction.org. These include micro-hydro plants, small-scale wind generators, affordable solar lanterns and biogas plants.
• Learn more in online poverty resources listed on BlogActionDay.org.

Spread the word!

Chrome: A shiny Web browser from Google may just be the next global platform for running Web applications

Techies and geeks returned from one last weekend of sun, sand and summer to find news of a disruptive change sweeping the online business world. Meet Chrome, Google’s new Web browser.

News of the announcement was leaked yesterday when Philipp Lenssen, an avid blogger of all-things-Google, received the comic book Google put together for the release and posted it, along with his first impressions. My director, ahead of the curve as usual , picked up on it right away and added it to WhatIs.com’s Buzzword Alert.

Google has since put up a high resolution of the Google Chrome comic book. I highly recommend going over and reading through the comic. Google put considerable time into clearly explaining the challenges faced by the designers of modern Web browsers with respect to memory bloat, rendering engines, Javascript threading errors and much more.

Since Lenssen broke the news, the tech blogosphere has of course been awash with reviews, opinions and speculation about what, exactly, Chrome will mean. Walt Mossberg posted a comprehensive review of Chrome in the Wall Street Journal, including speed and feature comparisons with Safari, IE 8 and Firefox. Rafe Needleman liveblogged the press conference introducing Chrome over at Webware. John Furrier colorfully blogged that the search wars just turned into the operating system wars. That’s true — except (as he notes) that Chrome goes far beyond search. SEO/SEM hounds and search engine watchers, however, will find Danny Sullivan’s thorough evaluation of Chrome’s search functionality quite useful.

Following below is own my two cents, both with respect to the browser itself and the significance of its introduction. First, however, I’ll let the video embedded below provide a quick introduction:

Obviously, Chrome has a lean, clean interface. This is Google, after all. Menus, dropdowns, extra bars and dialogs are largely stripped away. So what’s left?

The Web pages themselves. What a concept! I downloaded and installed the browser this afternoon without a hitch, imported my bookmarks and search history from Firefox and was off to the races. Chrome is quite speedy.

The address bar has been merged with the search field you’d see on the right in IE or FF. Firefox 3 includes a predictive search in this field already, so this isn’t ground breaking, but it is a clear recognitiion that search has become the default navigation method for most Web users. Enter your desired search terms and away you go.

Google is calling the new address field the “Omnibox,” a nod to its ability to incorporate “everything” you might need to explore. The Omnibox’s utility is another sample of Google’s secret sauce, in this case combining a record of your search and browsing history with Google’s own PageRank for given terms. The Omnibox is eerily good. With only a little use, it could predict precisely which page I was looking for after only a few characters were entered.

Chrome also features tabbed browsing, a key improvement introduced by iBrowse in ‘99 and then popularized by Opera in 2000. Once Mozilla included it in Firefox, the feature took off and is now a default feature in Internet Explorer and Safari. Chrome expands the tabbed interface in a number of innovative ways, including grouping related tabs and designing each tab so that it acts as an independent browser. Bookmarks, the Omnibox, menubar icons and menus are all inside of the browser, which again frees up more space for displaying rendering Web pages.

The pop-up blocker and phishing or malware alerts also included in Chrome may not be innovative at this point but they’re certainly effective and useful. The private browsing mode, aptly called “Incognito.” (This clever feature name was perhaps made in hopes that it will avoid the “Porn Mode” moniker that has dogged a similar feature of IE 8, InPrivate.)

There’s another key development: Chrome may not be the fastest Web browser currently available but Google hopes that it will be the most stable for pages loaded with Javascript. In a Web 2.0 world ruled by AJAX, that’s no small thing. And anyone that’s used one of Google’s many online applications knows that a stable, reliable environment for this kind of scripting is crucial.

This hints at perhaps the most important detail of all, and one that I tipped my hat to in the title of this post. Microsoft made an early bid for Internet dominance in the infamous browser wars of the 1990s by including Internet Explorer in each copy of Windows. Despite the Justice Department’s successful antitrust suit, IE continues to have upwards of 75% of the world’s browser share. Firefox has made inroads on this market share, to be sure, and the most recent version of Mozilla’s browser has been the best option around for speed, privacy, safety and usability since its introduction this summer, following close upon the success of Firefox 2.

Now it’s Google’s turn.

Google’s introduction of its own browser has the potential to upset the market in a way that no other company can, simply because of Google’s ability to promote the download and use through its various Web properties. As Google’s various Web applications and cloud computing architecture continue to mature, the Web itself can develop into an operating system. If this sounds familiar, that’s because Sun’s vision of network computing in the 90s using Java popularized such a concept long ago. Vastly improved broadband connectivity, viable Web-based apps and an Internet technology giant flush with revenue from the world’s best advertising platform change the dynamic a bit, of course. Google built its own Javascript engine to improve performance and, crucially, integrated Google Gears with Chrome to allow true offline access to its various Web applications. That adds up to something that distinctly resembles a fully-fledged desktop operating system and productivity suite.

While it’s true that consumer and enterprises haven’t been making a run on thin clients running on Linux quite yet, the potential to further erode Microsoft’s dominance of the operating and desktop productivity software markets is embedded within Chrome. I’m far from the only writer prognosticating on this count, of course. Michael Arrington thinks Chrome is Google’s Windows Killer. As Michael points out, this clears the way for “millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs.” Given that both the enterprise and consumer markets haven’t exactly been hot about Vista, I suspect Microsoft may be somewhat concerned about this development. Henry Blodgett over at the Silicon Valley Insider sees the development from precisely this angle, blogging that Google has launched a cloud operating system and called it a ‘browser.’

Who else should be concerned? Maybe Mozilla, though judging by this interview with its CEO, they’re putting a good face on the development for the moment. What’s next? Harry McCracken asked 10 questions about Google Chrome over at Technologizer that address Mozilla’s future relationship (and relevance). Jeremiah Owyang has added a few more questions in thinking about what Chrome could mean long term. Both ask for response and speculation in their comment sections, so have at ‘em.

Microsoft hasn’t been standing still, of course. They’ve been chasing search revenue for years, as evidenced by the failed Yahoo! acquisition. As the folks over at the Google Subnet blog at NetworkWorld point out, IE 8’s InPrivate mode thwarts Google’s targeted advertising. Unless the world upgrades to IE 8 and begins to browse InPrivate en masse, however, I’m guessing that GOOG’s 3+ billion of revenue per quarter is gonna be safe for the moment.

That’s especially true when you consider another critical element of Chrome: its future relevance to mobile search. Google’s Eric Schmidt has been quite bullish in this area, estimating that mobile search revenue will likely surpass desktop search in the not-so-distant future. The iPhone has shown what a data connection and full Web browser can do to mobile search (Try 50 times as many searches originating from iPhones vs. a normal cellphone). Here’s a prediction you can take to the bank: Just as the iPhone features a stripped down version of Safari, Google’s Android OS will have a similarly light version of Chrome optimized for a mobile device and poised to fully take advantage of the possibilities for geotargeted advertising based upon a user’s demographics, Web history and location.

Louis Gray is dead-on when he points out that Web browsers are now about the hooks. Apple’s Safari will be increasingly optimized for the iPhone and working with the private cloud that is MobileMe. Microsoft has built IE to be integrated with Windows and Office, though because of the bundling issues presented by antitrust has always had to walk a fine line. Flock, the social media-optimized version of Firefox, carves out a niche because of its tie-ins with the various networks and services. Chrome is no different, as I pointed out above. If you are already a power user of Gmail, gDocs, gTalk, gReader or g-Anything, Chrome may make more sense. Chrome is, I should note, only available for Windows Vista or XP at the moment. Guess they figure Safari will do the trick for a Webkit-based browser for Mac users and that the Linux crowd will be satisfied with Firefox and Opera for the moment.

To poorly paraphrase Lando Calrissian, Google’s Chrome is likely to allow all mobile users to truly surf with them amongst the clouds.

Bizzwords: Business lingo describes the state and style of the information age

Isn’t it amazing how the business lingo of the times reflects the technologies, anxieties and energies of a period? My local NPR station, WBUR, featured a terrific episode of On Point this past June, hosted by one Tom Ashbrook, that was all precisely this topic, discussing and poking gentle fun at business lingo. You can listen to it on Odeo or head over to the New Business Lingo at OnPointRadio.org.

[Image Credit: Despotes]

There are some wonderful “bizzwords” in the show, along with some historical perspective. As the show description notes:

Every walk of life has its lingo. Its buzzwords and catchphrases. American business has its own colorful menagerie of slang, and always has — from bulls and bears, to bootstraps, and 800-pound gorillas, and fish in a barrel.

But buzzwords and catchphrases change. They turn over and make way for newcomers.

And when they do, in American business, they may tell us something about where we and our economy are headed.

If you lived through the business world of the 80s, you no doubt encountered a consultant or executive who talked about “re-engineering business processes” or finding “synergies” between different products.

Cube farmers could be depended upon to be seen “prairie dogging” when something happened around the office. Networking at cocktail parties was hot.  Blamestormers might be Dilberted. Seagull managers might fly in to observe their microserfs, make a lot of noise, poop over everything and then leave.

If you worked in technology, you probably had a PC. As a hacker, you might have laughed about clueless users needed treeware. Everyone worried about career-limiting moves (CLMs) that might result from a bad click or command, propagating in an ohnosecond.

And of course, like, ya know, everything was, like, totally rad, dude.

In the 90s, couch potatoes turned to mouse potatoes as office workers all jumped on the Information Superhighway. Wired happily documented it all in its Jargon Watch column. By the end of the decade, i-everything and e-anything created one of the great tech bubbles.

Everyone wanted to go IPO. A few years later so one of the great crashes. Dotcommers became dotgoners and dotbombers. The 80/20 rule defined actionable moments after careful cost-benefit analyses. If something could be outsourced, it was. Viral marketing zipped off into email distribution lists, moving through word of mouse.

In the late ’00s (naughts), the Web 2.0 bubble has replaced the Internet bubble, as social networkers expand their social graphs, exposed to infotisements and advertorials as they blog, edit wikis and surf the blogosphere with RSS readers on iPhones. Online marketers are accountable for the ROI of every campaign. We’ve crowdsourced many actions and processes, whereever feasible, bending to the wisdom of the crowd and selling to the long tail.

Google is both a verb and a noun, along with nearly every conceivable form in between. Despite the company’s best efforts, google has even escaped proper noun status in many communities. The President calls it “the Google.”  The senior senator from Arizona talks about “a google.” The junior senator  from Illinois (and his search committee) Googled potential vice-presidential candidates. As billions of revenue from search adverstising each quarter streaming in to the Internet giant, it’s clear we’re a culture of Googlers googling each other, egosurfing away.

We’re also frazzing, dangerously close to overload by switching from email to cell phone to IM to text messages to meetings to Twitter and the Web.

Steeped in media from satellite and cable news networks, DVRs, DVD-players, on-demand programming and Web video, there’s even a danger of what sociologist Emile Durkheim might have identified as a kind of digital anomie, colorfully described as “Dorito Syndrome” — a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness, regardless of consumption.

No matter how much screensucking you do, there’s always more. Lisa Belkin wrote about a number of these in the New York Times in 2006 in Overly Wired.

Widgets are everywhere now, of course, and may be anything from a small gadget to an embeddable module in an iGoogle page to a downloadable desktop application or even (gasp) an esoteric mechanical device. (Guinness drinkers have their own version, of course.)

The green computing wave spurred by skyrocketing energy costs from power-hungry data centers has spawned many biologically-themed terms.

Greenwashing, astroturfing and blacksurfing have all entered the lexicon. Every product seems to live in its own ecosystem.

Freemium business models now may promote coopetition between fierce competitors, perhaps using telepresence rooms that are far too expensive for standard percussive maintenance.

Under such conditions, “matadors” (people skilled at dodging assignments or responsibility) have little chance of scraping by, as the presence technologies, pervasive computing and “status message culture” adopted by the millenials puts “slacking” firmly into the lexicon of decades-past.

And, of course, we’re all increasingly computing in the cloud now.

As we near the end of this decade, the buzzwords of the ’10s have yet to be coined and collectively sampled, savored and entered into the lexicons maintained by Merriam-Webster, the Oxford Englsh Dictionary and, of course, the best online IT encyclopedia online. (Shameless plug).

Some will end up as sniglets, humorous oddities of cultures past. Other words will always remind the culture at large of a certain time and place.

Here’s hoping we can improve on vlog, blook and webinar.

If you have an idea of what lingo might define the next decade of business, let me know at ahoward@techtarget.com or leave a comment.

Jive Software’s Clearspace upgrades enterprise social software

As is the case with many astute creators of enterprise social software makers,  Jive Software’s user interface designers have clearly been paying attention to the allure of the clean style, tabbed layouts and easy collaboration capabilities of Facebook.

The newest version of Clearspace, Jive’s enterprise social software platform, allows organizations to collaborate across intranets and extranets, along with extensions into the public Internet. Companies like Intel (Community), Nike (Community), VMware (Community) and Electronic Arts (Community) have all used Clearspace to provide collaborative forums for customers, end users, clients, product groups, online gamers and event-goers.

Clearspace also includes integration with Salesforce.com:

Watch a demonstration of the capabilities of Clearspace 2.5 over on Vimeo.

Google helps you keep up with the Olympics

These days, Google isn’t just a search engine, though of course google.com is the starting point for most online searches. As Dylan Casey points out on the Official Google Blog, Google has now made it easier than ever for users to keep up with the Olympics online. In my most recent post, I linked to the various places where you can watch the Olympics online. Casey extends your options — and then some.

The 2008 Summer Games on Google, available in 66 countries and 31 languages, features event schedules and updates on results. You can even track medal counts with an iGoogle gadget. The Summer Games Google Maps is a nifty mashup that allows you to “view medal and event information based on your favorite regions and sports.”

There’s even  a 3D video of the different venues you can tour, embedded below:

The Google Mobile Team also has a post up that explains how to follow the Olympics on your phone.

Just head over to http://www.google.com/m/summergames and enjoy.

Thanks, Google!

Video: Jimmy Wales on Google’s Knol

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, talked to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer about Google Knol, a new competitor to the world’s largest online encyclopedia.

Bit.ly: A better URL shortener for developers, data geeks and microbloggers

The old adage about not reinventing the wheel doesn’t quite extend to Web applications. URL shorteners may have been around for years but there is plenty of room for improvement. This list of 68 URL shorteners from Honkiat.com show both the competition in the space and the need for innovation. There’s certainly plenty of demand: TinyURL.com, for instance, which has been around since 2002, purports to receive over 1.5 billion hits a month. While that seems a little high, the emergence of character-limited microblogging platforms like Twitter and long, forgettable Web addresses spit out by content management systems has resulted in a need for effective ways to simply Web addresses.

Enter bit.ly. Bit.ly was created by Betaworks, the NY-based software concern that created Summize. Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, if you’re not following the rapidly evolving Web.20 startup space.

Dave Winer used a post announcing the launch of bit.ly on scripting.net to explain why bit.ly fills a number of other needs:

“They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from. They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here’s the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.”You can use your own keywords to the URL, organizing your links like tags.

Winer also notes that he’s a minority investor in the service, so while you can take his words with a grain of salt, try the service out and weigh its merits for yourself.

 I will say,  however, that bit.ly is easily the best URL shortener I’ve used to date.  It accomplishes its core mission quickly and easily, converting long URLs to short ones on the bit.ly homepage or using a bookmarklet you can drag to your Web browser’s toolbar. (It’s even kinda cute; note the blowfish mascots on the right.)

If you’re a Web developer or simply a data geek, the ability to pull all of the data about a given shortened URL through a XML or JSON interface will be quite helpful for analyzing your traffic and audience behavior.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of bit.ly’s other nifty features:

• display your 15 most recent shortened URLs below the entry field
• tracking of both clicks on shortened URLS and referring pages
• an API for creating shortened URLs from web applications, which is quite useful is you’re a Web developer
• automatic creation of thumbnail images that can be displayed on a webpage next to shortened URL

If my excitement about bit.ly doesn’t move you, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a glowing review of bit.ly at ReadWriteWeb that thoroughly explains why bit.ly is worth a try, along with an endorsement of bit.ly’s advanced URL tracking capabilities by Lifehacker.

If you like bit.ly, please recommend it to others. The larger the bit.ly community grows, the more effective and useful this nascent index of the Semantic Web will become. That’s because bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters. All the data gathered is available in public RSS feeds. bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of the database of submitted links.

What is spaceo.us?

Tony Clement (CEO) , Rob James (CTO) and Gary Lang (President) at Aegeon Software sat down with me to talk about spaceo.us at the Enterprise 2.0 Show in Boston last week.