Posted by Al on Nov 24, 2009 in
Dotnet |
View Original Article If you got lost on the title, you are not the only one, I did as well, I shall add a subtitle.
Who are those experts in Twitter and Facebook?
Easier now? Easier for me to wrap my head around it. All around the blogs and twitter are self proclaim people as “Social Media Experts” Who are those and what can they do for you? Well we all, I hope I am not alone in this one, that Twitter and Facebook were a lot of fun as well as provided the information that you wanted by filtering the whole noise.
So many conversations with other developers trying to figure it how this companies are going to be able to turn a profit. Is not like Facebook can keep taking spammers to court to get their money. Developers everywhere started creating applications out there for social interaction in the web. Yet found them self late on that missed the most important detail, what about a business plan? Well we are developers, we see something cool and we want to write the app. Also is not like Twitter had a business plan when they started or they have one now as much as they get money from investors. Many other developers might had the same idea, build it and they’ll come.
Many developers I know would love to create an startup, of course, this is what is all about. When you think about startups, you think about writing the new killer app in a open space office full of Xboxes and big screen TVs. Will weird geek toys purchased online from ThinkGeek.com. But we all know that only happens when an inverter gives you all that money ;-) Now I can see a new bread of startups, with cool logos and no developers around, just a very, very complicated business logic to turn a profit on the social media. It just doesn’t end up for me, they may be the future, I just don’t see it. Makes me think they only looking for inverters. If its too obvious it must be it.
Now I’m getting on those “Social Media Experts” the people that studied the phenomena for the few years that is being out there and came out with very long power point presentations stating the obvious again and giving you a general idea of how to use Social Media to your advantage. Are they self proclaimed social media experts or proclaimed by the followers they have?
I don’t blame people for trying to understand and try to monetize a very popular technology that brings so many free customers to. If I could find a myself a way to make money in that technology,I’ll be spending my nights writing an app just for that purpose.
There is also the other side, the experts that are not trying to make a profit, yet they people that are trying to advertize or promote their product on the Social Media, being able to reach so many people that are already interested in what you are talking about is a great marketing schema that never needed an expert in social media to tell the marketing department to get on board. At least it cuts on broadcast emails that feel like spam anyway. Now the spam that you received on the social media is ‘cos you wanted to follow that fellow. He will tell you everything of what he is selling. The good thing here is you are already interested or a customer, so feels like you are getting the updates.
With all this in mind, I have been expecting companies to get a better understanding of what people is interested on by using their timelines and what are they disclosing on the Twitter. So if you are thinking in purchasing an iMac, you may tweet about the idea to get feedback from people in that model you are thinking of buying, so Apple should be searching and understanding what people wants as well as approaching those with deals or just support in making that decision, just by doing that they may get a new customer. No even big purchase should be like that, I know that if a tweet came with a coupon for diapers I would take it as many of my followers know I have young kids, so targeting people like me should be their business. So please beer companies, here I am looking for a good deal.
There is so much information on the social media that indexing and filtering is a difficult task, Google and Bing already started that task to index the stream of messages, so now searching and getting a profile of users looking for those products should be a little easier, still targeting them can be difficult and might be the new spam if not careful.
So are those new Experts in Social Media looking at those? Or they’re consulting your company how to get into Twitter? If so, please let me help out with that! Seriously maybe is a little more complicated than that for companies that would like to bring all that social media syndications in house to find out what their users are asking for, that information is without any doubt priceless to any enterprise. Some companies are still ignoring it or avoiding it for some reason like the way it happened when blogs came out. Hopefully with time adoption will happen, and those experts will multiply once again. I really hope that people don’t need experts to understand that you need to bring all that information to your company and respond fast and any complain or problem that you may see by your users.
The question here is what are those Social Media Experts and what do they bring to the table? Are they experts to tell you how to make money from the web or they are experts to explain how social media should be observe and interact with as a company? Or they are all of above? Is the Social Media thing still too difficult for marketing departments to understand? Is there more that I’m missing in this picture? Did I came to the twitter world too late? In any case, all these questions have been hunting me, I see more and more people talking about these subject as much as they were talking a few years back about the Web 2.0.
This one shall pass as well?
Cheers
Al
Follow me in twitter | bookmark me | Subscribe to my feed | Add stats to your blog
Tags: Blog
Posted by 4GuysFromRolla.com Headlines on Nov 24, 2009 in
Dotnet |
View Original Article XML is an increasingly popular way to encode documents, data, and electronic messages. There are a number of ways to programmatically
create, modify, and search XML files. Since its inception, the .NET Framework's System.Xml
namespace has included classes for programmatically working with XML documents. For instance, the XmlReader
and XmlWriter classes offer developers a means to read from or write to
XML files in a fast, forward-only manner, while the XmlDocument class
allows developers to work with an XML document as an in-memory tree representation.
LINQ to XML is a new set of XML-related classes in the .NET Framework (found in the
System.Xml.Linq namespace), which enable developers to work with XML documents using
LINQ's features, syntax, and semantics. Compared to .NET's existing XML APIs, LINQ to XML is a simpler, easier to use API. For a given task, LINQ to XML code is typically shorter
and more readable than code that uses the XmlDocument or XmlReader/XmlWriter classes. And perhaps most importantly, LINQ to XML allows
you to leverage your existing knowledge and familiarity with LINQ's standard query operators and query syntax.
This article is the first in a series of articles that examines LINQ to XML. This installment introduces the LINQ to XML API, examines some of the more pertinent classes
in the System.Xml.Linq namespace, and shows how to perform a number of common XML tasks using the API. Read on to learn more!
Read More >
Posted by vitaly on Nov 24, 2009 in
CSS,
Design & Graphics |
View Original Article 
Over the last decade web designers managed to come up with a plethora of useful techniques and design solutions that make today’s web development process much more straightforward and simple. Some techniques were simply applied to the Web, while others were developed from scratch, helping developers to use off-the-shelf-solutions to problems quicker and in a more elegant way. However, finding little slick tricks to fix your site takes a tremendous amount of time, and that’s not counting the time to implement them. We have put together a list of resources for developers and designers, to save you time so you can have enough time to have some fun too.
Here we present 45 very useful development tools such as grids, image solutions, typography, iPhone tools, HTML 5 helpers, testing resources, WordPress tools and helpers, CSS code tools and other further useful tools, time savers and resources. Enjoy this web development goodies bag!
Also consider our previous articles:
Fresh Web Development Goodies Bag with 30 useful development tools to inspire you and make your life easier.
Typeface and Terminology
eXtreme Type Terminology
eXtreme Type Terminology is a five-part article that covers most anything you might have wanted to know about the evolution of type terminology.
CSS Web-Typography Matrix and code generator
CSS Web Typography Matrix and code generator is a matrix for calculation of font sizes and line spacing in em and px. It’s a very handy tool to utilize!
Differential Presentation of 40 Onscreen Typefaces
This article presents results from a study investigating the personality of typefaces. 40 typefaces (from serif, sans serif, display, and handwriting classes) were rated, using semantic differential scales. Responses are shown by typeface class and individual typeface using scaled scores. These results are helpful to practitioners when deciding which typeface to use for online text.
iPhone tools
jQTouch
jQTouch is a jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.
iphonedebug
iPhonedebug is the iPhone Debug Console meant to give greater visibility and interactivity on your iPhone/iPod Touch while doing development. This was created after the frustration of having to go through the “include console.log statement then reload” method of debugging. It is similar to Firebug’s fantastic console and debugger.
iUI: iPhone User Interface Framework
iUI: Framework for Safari development on iPhone iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing iPhone webapps. It makes WebApps look and feel like iPhone native Apps.
Pipho -PHP iPhone Optimized Image Gallery
Pipho reads photos from any directory, creates resized thumbnail and slide images, and combines it with the Jaipho javascript. It also supports text files as descriptions for both gallery and slides. Pipho requires PHP5 and is written in the Zend Framework, but does not requires any Zend class. All PHP classes are stored in library folder.
iPhone 3G Stencil
iPhone 3G Stencil includes the standard interface components for the iPhone 3G: buttons, fields, map elements, keyboards, icons. All components are on a transparent background and should re-size nicely.
Grids
GridFox – The Grid Layout Firefox Extension
GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.
Layout grids for Axure and Pencil
These layout grids are designed for use with Axure RP Pro 5 and the Pencil extension for Firefox. For Axure, this resource will help you layout prototype web pages using the 960-grid system, having grids for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12 and 16-column layouts as well as a thirds (and a reverse-thirds) grid. The Pencil grids are for 12 and 16-column layouts.
960 Gridder
960 Gridder is an excellent tool for any web developer/ designer that wants to easily align, match and/or lay out websites. Essentially, it is a bookmarklet that can be used to put an overlay on a given website.
Grid System Generator
This tool generates grid systems on the fly: supported are the frameworks 960.gs, Golden Grid, 1kb grid and a plain simple grid system. You can select the width of the layout, a number of columns as well as horizontal margins.
Blueprint Cheatsheet (PDF)
Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing. This cheat sheet refers to the recently released version 0.8 of the Blueprint CSS framework.
Easy Image Solutions
ImageOptim
ImageOptim is a front-end (GUI) for set of tools for optimization of PNG/JPEG images and GIF animations. Optimization makes files smaller by finding optimal compression parameters and by removing unnecessary information, like file comments, EXIF tags and color profiles. It’s excellent for publishing images on the web and also useful for making Mac and iPhone applications smaller.
Content Aware Image Resizing
This technique resizes images depending on the current browser window size, making the content more adaptive for various screen resolutions. It is implemented with JavaScript: Drag the right border of the top image or use left (and right) arrow keys. Then use the form to change settings. This demo requires Firefox 3.5 at least.
CSS Sprite Generator
CSS Sprite Generator allows you to choose and upload the image files you want to use in your CSS Sprite and click “Create CSS Sprite.” The application will join all your image files into a single file and will generate the corresponding CSS and HTML code along with the rollover effect if any chosen.
Horinaja
Horinaja is a ready-to-use slide-show implementation, utilizing either scriptaculous/prototype or jQuery. When the mouse is outside of the slide-show area, it scrolls. When hovering over the slide-show, the scrolling pauses. It can automatically create slide indices (pagination), if required. To manually scroll, either click on the slide index links (pagination) or use your mouse wheel.
SpriteMe
Background images make pages look good, but also make them slower. Each background image is an extra HTTP request. There’s a fix: combine background images into a CSS sprite. But creating sprites is hard, requiring arcane knowledge and lots of trial and error. SpriteMe removes the hassles with the click of a button.
HTML 5 Helpers
Google Chrome Frame
GoogleChrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can: Start using open web technologies – like the HTML 5 canvas tag – right away, even technologies that aren’t yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8. Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.
Modernizr
Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies.
Testing Resources
The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing
As web professionals, we all know that the concept of the page fold being an impenetrable barrier for users is a myth. Over the last 6 years and over 800 user testing sessions later, only 3 occasions did the page fold act as a barrier to users getting to the content they want. This article breaks down the page fold myth and give some tips to ensure content below the fold gets seen.
Browsera
Browsera offers automated browser compatibility testing. It can automatically detects cross-browser layout problems and scripting errors on your website. Discover layout problems, test pages behind login, test dynamic pages, locate JavaScript errors, test your entire site.
ABtests
ABtests is setup to let you test your websites/applications and share that knowledge with others, making everyone smarter in the process. Here are some things you can do at ABtests: View and learn from other people’s test results;Upload your own test results and share with colleagues or clients; Follow ABtests on Twitter to get a firehose of A/B and multi-variate testing related information.
Browserscope
Browserscope is a community-driven project for profiling web browsers. The goals are to foster innovation by tracking browser functionality and to be a resource for web developers. Gathering test results from users “in the wild” is the most important and useful feature of Browserscope – and you can participate! Try it and find out how your browser compares.
Effective A/B Testing
Say you’ve created a new design which you feel is more effective but you’d like to know for sure. A/B testing is a simple idea. Create two versions of something and put people through the different versions. Track what they do afterwards and figure out which version causes more people to do what you want. Go with the better version. This slideshow will be both very informative as to why and how to effectively A/B test. Even the S5 used for the slideshow is available for free download.
WordPress Tools & Helpers
WordPress Debug Theme
Sometimes you need to see what’s wrong with a WordPress install, and you need to see it fast. This shows you the important URL’s, editor, and memory settings, etc. On subpages it will show you something else: the page type, all the query vars that are set and the SQL query for that page. When just doing a print_r or var_dump of $wp_query is hard to read, but this theme tries to be a bit smarter about that. This theme also works in the preview, so that might be enough in a lot of cases.
Web Design Wordpress Template Tag Reference Guide
Do you need a WordPress Reference Guide? This content was reformatted for quick reference from the Template Tag section of the WordPress.org Codex, a relative encyclopedia to WordPress theming, and great reference for your WordPress questions.
List of all WordPress hooks
This is precisely what it claims to be, a list of all WordPress hooks. That’s right, currently a list of 989 WordPress hooks. You can click a column name to sort, view a specific hook’s version history and file locations, or find out the deprecated hooks so you do not use them.
Launching Freebie Images WordPress Plugin
Spice up your blog with professional, high quality, free stock photos and images. With an amazingly simple Drag and Drop interface, blogging has never been this easy. The Freebie Images Plugin gives you a micro format search interface inside your WordPress Admin where you can search for and add images to your blog post – free of charge. The images are perfectly sized for blogs – between 300px and 400px width.
CSS and Code Tools
CSS-JS-Booster
CSS-JS-Booster is a PHP-script that tries to automate as many performance optimizing steps related to CSS and JS embedding as possible. This is an easy to use PHP-Library that combines, optimizes, dataURI-fies, re-splits, compresses and caches your CSS and JS for quicker loading times.
xCSS
xCSS bases on CSS and empowers a straightforward and object-oriented workflow when developing complex style cascades. Using xCSS means a dramatic cut down to your development time by: having a intuitive overview of the overall CSS structure, using variables, re-using existing style cascades and many other handy features. But most frameworks are bulky and inflexible, aren’t they? Not xCSS! It’s lightweight and seamlessly integrates into any existing workflow. Aside from that, the CSS overhead is getting reduced while your (X)HTML attributes remain semantic.
DBG
DBG is a a full-featured PHP debugger, an interactive tool that helps you debug PHP scripts. It works on a production and/or development web server and allows you to debug your scripts locally or remotely, from an IDE or console.
CSS Browser Selector
CSS Browser Selector is a very small javascript with just one line which empower CSS selectors. It gives you the ability to write specific CSS code for each operating system and each browser.
Detecting unused CSS selectors
Many selectors and classes come and go while developing and testing. After a while, you will easily see style files that become untouchable: you don’t know which classes or selectors are being used or not. The same uncertainty creeps in when you maintain someone else’s site. There are several solutions out there about detecting unused classes and selectors, but here you can find the most popular.
Textmate: Re-Usable Command Basics
With Textmate, there are a whole host of available commands and bundles, but what if you need to extend existing ones or create your own? This covers some of the basics like using filter through command, re-using commands, adding simple UI elements which will help you get started.
Further Useful Tools, Time Savers & Resources
Quick Tip: Dynamically add an icon for external links
A common feature on Web 2.0 sites and wikis is the “external link” icon: external link. This is a great candidate for using progressive enhancement. By using just a little jQuery, you can easily add the images. So, that’s it. Short and sweet, a quick tip, how-to and code to help you accomplish it fast.
XRAY
XRAY is the easiest way to look beneath the skin. XRAY is a bookmarklet for Internet Explorer 6+, and Webkit and Mozilla based browsers (including Safari, Firefox, Camino or Mozilla). Use it to see the box model for any element on any web page.
An AJAX Based Shopping Cart with PHP, CSS & jQuery
In this tutorial, you will learn to create a functional AJAX driven shopping cart. You are free to download the code and modify it any way you wish. You can build upon it and even turn it into a full-fledged online shop.
jsHub
jsHub simplifies connecting software services to websites. Websites typically connect to many different software services – web analytics, audience measurement, optimization, and many more. Each connection is made with a small piece of code called a ‘tag’. Some sites have 10 or more tags on a page, and each one adds to the time it takes for the page to load. Each tag needs similar information to be written into the page, but in a slightly different format, and this can cause awkward inconsistencies. jsHub is a suite of tools and a set of standards, that help you to make better websites. Tagging doesn’t have to be painful.
Kotatsu – a simple HTML table generator
When you need to create a table, here is a tool to help create a table and row in column classes quickly. It’s called Kotatsu.
iWebSkel
iWebSkel is the ultimate ready to use kit for website design. It features only the latest version essential components to start developing quickly using XHTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Patterns for the Color Blind
About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites. The patterns and examples on this site help you create websites the color blind can use without problems.
Ident Engine.
Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We’ve filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints.
Beautiful Email Newsletters
Here you will find page after page of aesthetically pleasing newsletters.
Tags: design, Tools, typography, work
A new report from three institutional investment companies - Henderson Global Investors, Insight Investment, and the Universities Superannuation Scheme – maintains that companies and their investors are not properly accounting for the impact of climate change on their investment decisions.
The report, which also had input from Acclimatise, a specialist risk management consultancy, is entitled ‘Managing the Unavoidable: investment implications of a changing climate” and is published alongside four sector specific reports covering oil and gas, UK commercial property, UK energy generation and the UK water sector. The reports can be downloaded from here.
The report points out that concern is primarily directed towards extreme weather, such as storms or floods, rather than on incremental changes, such as temperature, which can impact facilities management and energy efficiency. Seb Beloe, Head of SRI Research at Henderson Global Investors, commented; “The research underpinning this report suggests that we as investors need to pay much greater attention to how climate change/weather affects our investment decisions. This will require paying attention to how climate change adaptation will affect company-specific business models, value drivers, strategy, governance, cash flows and assets”.
Among the Key findings of the report:
-
Companies are putting more effort into how to address specific one-off climate events than in adapting for long-term change.
-
Risk assessment processes are weak, particularly in respect of incremental changes and indirect impacts.
-
Companies are more concerned about risks than opportunities. The emphasis is on the fact that those who are prepared have a potential business opportunity over those who are not.
-
Public policy inconsistencies are an obstacle. Examples cited are the differences in time horizons in looking ahead and also on-going issues around UK planning regulations.
The report makes several recommendations for investors, primarily around building climate change into decisions and ensuring companies are giving it due weight. It also advocates investors getting more involved in public policy debates around adaptation.
The report is based on an examination of specific industry sectors but is applicable across most of the commercial world. To some extent it reflects research from The Green IT Report a year or so ago which reached similar conclusions. Not so much about adaptation, but that the impact of climate change will not just be through one-off, large-scale, dramatic events directly hitting business facilities. There are potentially a variety of impacts and knock-on effects from climate change events far and wide. Examples included power shortages and blackouts, telecoms failures, medical epidemics leading to resource shortages, inability to get to work or travel on business, and the impact these would have on suppliers, distributors and resellers. It may not just be from one event, but from a combination of events up and down the supply chain.
Whichever way you look at it, businesses are currently ill-prepared for climate change, probably waiting until it’s too late before taking truly effective action. But clearly there are opportunities for ICT companies to help by creating more resilient supply chain systems, flexible transport/logistics solutions, etc and also providing the monitoring systems to allow companies to adapt when things start going wrong. It’s an area of green IT that will become increasingly important.
Tags: Application Packaging, Virtualization
