Future of Web Apps: Thursday morning summary
October 9, 2008
I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference today and tomorrow in London. Here are a few summary notes from this morning.
Note: this gets pretty technical in places.
The mornings’s theme seems to have been about operations and development isuses.
Digg Recommendations
Kevin Rose, from Digg, talked about Digg and the new Digg recommendations. I’ve done lots of work in this area with our Recommendation Ventures web services, so it was really interesting to hear Digg’s experiences. A few points:
- When Digg added recommendations, they saw a 4 times increase in the number of people ‘friending’ other people, and a 40% increase in diggs (votes on news stories). This goes along with the conventional wisdom regarding recommendations — they help keep visitors on your site longer and encourage interaction.
- Digg generates recommendations by clustering around keywords in their existing taxonomy. This generates better recommendations, by allowing a person to have differing interests, and generating and blending speciific recommendations for for those topic areas. I suspect the do the clustering/bucketting to make the calculations less expensive, too.
- Digg have built custome graph stuff in Python to generate recommendations. Nice to hear the Python namecheck there.
Web Applications
Edwin Aoki from AOL talked fairly generally about the Web Application Ecosystem.. A few points:
- Web apps have probably suffered from the release of a lot of device development kits this year: iPhone, Android, more Flash development. So, a step back into putting programs on devices rather than developing apps to run on all devices.
- Basically, end user consumers don’t care about open web standard and that. They just want ot do stuff in usable apps.
- Web Services are important for building the fundamental services for creating enduring value, rather than another website. (I think I got the point of that comment…)
Languages and Scaling and Operations
I guess every tech conference has to have a session to poke fun at programming languages. Jokes cast at Ruby, PHP, Python and Perl by Joe Stump (Digg) and Blaine Cook (ex-Twitter). But some important points as well:
- languages don’t scale. Scaling is something else, comes from actual systems architecture. (Therefore, who cares what language is used, keep developers happy)
- Web Apps need to be able to scale horizontally onto lots of small cheap boxes. Architect this in from the beginning to avoid pain later, but don’t sweat it too much.
- Capacity management matters.
- Use message queues. Defer tasks into the background if you can. This is essential when systems grow, and add lots of flexibility.
- Use caches such as memcache, but do it intelligently: cache invalidation is often a hard problem to solve. Easy to add to the cache, harder to keep it consistent.
- Look out for herd-effects on cache invalidation: All servers then go and re-fetch data at once. Stagger invalidation times across servers.
Message Queues
Matt Biddulph from Dopplr talked about using message queues. Interesting stuff. Basically, this is all about moving server processes into queues, so you can have one or more worker save servers to handle less-time-critical parts of the application in the background.
A few notes:
- Queues make life easy because:
- Easy to add and remove slaves, which means easy scaling
- Improve application performance by delaying things that don’t matter now to lower priority background processing
- Easy performance monitoring .. look at the queues
- “Enterprise Integration Patterns by Hohpe, Woolf et al.” is worth reading.
Monitor your media coverage & conversations – low cost
October 3, 2008
Back in my dark old days as a corporate PR consultant, we had a room full of poor sods somewhere in the bowels of the machine, cutting out column cms from dead-trees-pages. Why? So we could justify our exorbitant fees and monitor our clients reputations. It was also so we could respond to a debate or manage an “issue”.
In some ways, nothing’s really changed. That is still going on, but many people would say the real action is now happening online. And the best thing is, I don’t have to feel sorry for the Google search spiders having to crawl through the myriad pages to retrieve what I want. It’s what they love best!
Here’s a helpful piece from E-Consultancy about how to monitor opinions, articles, conversations relevant to you and your organisation – without paying a brass razoo (in most cases).
Before you get cracking (because you know it’s time) – here’s a quick Nodestone guide to getting sorted.
1. Know what your goals are
- Do you just want to know what being said about you online, or are you planning to enter the conversation (and if you are not sure, best you be reading up on the power of web 2.0, blogging and the social web. See our presentation here for a start.
- How far do you want to go and what resources do you have to manage your responses?
2. What key words are most relevant to you
- Various spellings and shortened versions of your company, major projects/products and names of key people
- Competitors
- Major stakeholders (eg. legislators, major customers/shareholders, funding partners).
- The sector that you are in
- Other key words, eg topics you would scan for when reading a newspaper
3. How are you planning to circulate and act on what you find?
- If there is a live debate on a blog or in a forum about your key topics, what will you do? Who will be ready and able to respond to misinformation or genuine criticism?
- If there is a chance to offer a positive follow-up story to an influential blogger or mainstream journalist, who and how will (you) act?
- If there is a positive story about your project/organisation – what will you do? Who will you share it with?
- If there is an interesting story written, how can you use it in your own communications?
- Will you carefully subscribe to certain blogs or newsfeeds and read them?
Welcome to the great conversation of “us”. In some ways it’s never been easier. If you do nothing more than have a play with Google Alerts – you will learn a lot.
If you want to discuss a proper strategy about media monitoring and reputation management, give me a tinkle. We’ld love to help you improve your communications. It might be as simple as a short chat and a sign post to send you off in the right direction.
Everyone’s Blogging
July 21, 2008
These slides from the training session for the Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce last week. Let me know if you want us to come to your event or run a bespoke event or Masterclass.
More details on our Social Media for Good course soon (looks like next date will be Oct 3 in Brighton).
Covers a bit of an introduction to social media and blogging, plus some questions to get you thinking about your own context, opportunities and challenges.
Some good thinking in the room and animated conversations. Quite a few organisations ready to get blogging and exploring integrated social media in more depth.
A few of you made pledges are you walked out the door about your goals and intentions, so let me know how you get on!
Thanks to all for your warm feedback and to those who helped make it a positive event, especially Lorraine Bell (BCP), Tania “Radiance” Fullerton (Brighton Steiner School) and Fay McDonald.
Email Marketing Masterclass
July 17, 2008
| 21 August, 2008 | ||
| 6:30 pm | to | 8:30 pm |
One of our special Nodestone colleagues Mr Jim Callender is running a session soon that can’t be missed. Well, except by us as we will be swanning around in France having a well earned break!
For those of you who will be around, do get along. Email is one of the most tried and true, low cost and high response online marketing / social media tools to use. Do it well, and it might even go viral.
Jim will be co-presenting with the now-famous pure360 – total email marketing solution people. Great resources available on their site.
Thursday 21st August, 18:30 – 20:30
Payment by donation to The Werks.
Full details and register here.
Mark “SCIP” Walker on Internet Fundraising
June 20, 2008
Mark Walker from SCIP has long been supporting local charities and communities with IT services. Not just through all the work SCIP does in information and computer technologies, but also via the very happening SCIP group email list, which brings people together all around the South Coast.
If that’s not enough, Mark is now researching how to help local charities raise funds via the internet, including a bunch of region specific resources. That’s all part of his role as ICT Champion for the south east of England.
Read his post on this and the rest of his blog here.
We like lots of the same stuff (To Kill a Mockingbird and Atonement for a start), so it’s great to have found you Mark. Don’t you just love social media for short cutting all that “getting to know you” stuff. I think you can tell a lot about a person by the music/books/films that inspire them.
Scholarships available for next course
June 19, 2008
| 30 June, 2008 | ||
| 5:00 pm |
Our Social Media for the Third Sector course is starting soon. Keep 11 July free for the group learning day, and make a commitment before early July so we can work with you on your learning needs analysis.
That’s if you want a taste of a truly educational, capacity building package, and not just a quicky training day.
We are looking for two motivated people / organisations to award 80% scholarships for Part One (and potentially, Part Two).
If you ‘get’ that social media is essential knowledge to:
- build stronger relationships with your stakeholders
- get attention online and in real life
- raise funds
- collaborate creatively and build innovative approaches to social and environmental challenges
.. then apply here.
Find out all about the way we give and support real learning here.
Any questions, just pick up the phone and talk to Libby on 07968 687 107.
As of today, there are still places available, and we won’t decide on the sponsored places until 30 June. But the earlier you apply, the better.
Word Play
June 19, 2008
Absolutely, totally, loving… wordle. (Try typing that without making it worlde). Tah Gra.
Click through for the big zappy version and make your own.
Give us a link in the comments so we can see what you make. So keen to see social media being more visual and creative.
As Claus Oldenberg put it so well..
“Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete of all communication.
Pros & cons of blogging – for social entrepreneurs
June 11, 2008
Some interesting analysis and discussion around this question at Social Edge – the Skoll Foundation online space for social enterpreneurs. Check it out, join in and subscribe to Social Edge is that’s your area.
See other Nodestone posts on blogging.
Social Media for the Third Sector
June 8, 2008
Learning Package: Social Media for the Third Sector
New dates coming soon…
Your chance to get > share > use radical knowledge for positive impact. More information…
Here Comes Everybody
June 2, 2008
He talks as well as he writes. Here’s Clay Shirky talking at the RSA about the concepts behind his book, Here Comes Everybody
The RSA don’t have (easily) embeddable videos, so click through to see the 20-odd minute presentation.
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