Cloud Computing Conundrum: Platform as a Service vs. Utility Computing

Money Quote: As it stands today  platform as a service offerings currently do not satisfy the needs of people who have existing apps that want to “port them to the cloud”. Instead this looks like it will remain the domain of utility computing services which just give you a VM and the ability to run any software you damn well please on the your operating system of choice.

However for brand new product development the restrictions of platform as a service offerings seem attractive given the ability to “scale infinitely” without having to get your hands dirty. Developers on platform as a service offerings don’t have to worry about database management and the ensuing complexitiies like sharding, replication and database tuning.

CBS Best Inauguration Video Quality, Hulu, C-SPAN The Worst, Others Not Loading | The Business Of Online Video

Money Quote: I’ve now watched over a dozen live feeds of the inauguration from most of the major news portals and hands down, CBS has the best quality and most reliable stream.

Me: Guess what technology did CBS (as well as the official PIC site) use to do it’s video streaming? Hint – It isn’t Flash.

Think Megan Fox is Sexy? I’ll Sell You 1 Share of “Synthetic Ownership Interest” for $10 : The Drama 2.0 Show

Me: Just read the article. It’s not what you think. And yes, I wouldn’t mind a share of ownership interest in Megan Fox – synthetic or otherwise…

How Not to be a Key Online Influencer | David Henderson – author, journalist

Me: Hilarious!

Angels and Demons of Our Social Media Souls

Me: Are you more Angel or Demon?

How to Create a Blogging Plan and Actually Reach Your Goals This Year

Me: Good Article from ProBlogger which talks about creating a blogging plan if you choose to blog to make money. Personally, I just blog to vent.

Obama’s Inauguration & Future Of Technology

Me: Another glowing review of CNN’s use of Microsoft Photosynth during Obama’s inauguration event.

Photosynth Comes of Age in CNN’s Inauguration Coverage

Money Quote: Today’s feature on CNN is certainly an awesome showcase for Photosynth, a technology that Microsoft first debuted back in 2006.

Social network Friendster refocuses business on Asian users

Me: Is that a first for a Silicon Valley startup? To have its full time CEO operating from Asia while the global headquarters still remains in the valley?

Google Web Drive and “Cosmo” Discussed in Deleted Document

Me: I don’t understand all of the hype and excitement recently over Google’s mythical GDrive service that may or may not happen. Personally, I’m more than happy with my Windows SkyDrive account with free 25GB storage and drag-and-drop integration with my desktop.

Tim Sneath : The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets

Me: Anyone want to guess why the default wallpaper for Windows 7 Beta is the picture of Siamese fighting fish blowing bubbles?

Study: Rich Men Give Women More Orgasms

Me: Instead of conducting this study solely as a survey, will they be scientifically proving it through experimentation?

Online file storage from … Dilbert? – TechFlash: Seattle’s Technology News Source

Me: I think the service will seem cool for the first week or so, then everyone will realize how lame it is that your company is using a file storage service from Dilbert.

Are Record Labels the New Realtors?

Money Quote: The first R.I.A.A. lawsuits were filed in September 2003, against individuals allegedly caught sharing music illegally online. By the time R.I.A.A. halted its legal campaign this past fall, they’d managed to issue 35,000 suits, win none of them, spend more money on legal fees than they recovered in settlements, and plunge the industry into a public relations quagmire — all the while failing to stop either music piracy or the continuing decline of CD sales.

What Men And Google Have In Common | Plushies in Action

Me: The answer may not be what you think…

Will Windows 7 stymie Mac OS X’s growth? | The Digital Home – CNET News

Money Quote: As a person who performs almost every computing task on a Mac and tells anyone who will listen that at this point, the average consumer should be using a Mac instead of a Windows machine because of security and usability, I’m starting to prep myself for the single moment that I thought would never come: I’ll be using a Windows 7 machine as my main computer and telling anyone who will listen that, believe it or not, using the latest Microsoft operating system really is worth it.

The Dangers of Telling a User Switching to Linux That “Linux Is Just like Windows” | CodingExperiments.com

Me: The reality is that Linux is not like Windows. There are still way too many things you can do in Windows which comparable and familiar alternatives are just not available in Linux. Which is why despite seeing Apple’s OS X gaining ground on Windows over the past few years, Linux desktops are still running to a standstill during the same time frame.

Other ways of getting my links in real time: Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious or FriendFeed.

I may leave out certain links from my feed if I feel the stories have already been covered ad nauseam this week.

There are some plugins that practically all WordPress blog owners have installed: Akismet, WP Super Cache, some Google Analytics plugin (pick your favorite from a dozen different implementations), and so forth. Everyone knows about these plugins, so I’m not going to talk about them today.

What I would like to share with you instead are 5 WordPress plugins that may not be as well known, but I have personally found them to be quite useful for my own blog.

All of these plugins work on WordPress 2.8.2, the latest version of WordPress at this time.

In alphabetical order…

AZIndex

The AZIndex configuration UI gives you many options to customize your index page

All blogs with a lot of content need an easy way for readers to find the content they need. The two basic ways to do it is through search or some sort of article index. Even for a small blog like mine, I have found that having an index can be pretty useful, even if only for me to find the article that I need quickly.

Click on my Taxonomy link above to see the index page that I have created for my blog. It would be difficult for me to manage and update the index manually, but with the AZIndex plugin, you can create and manage a highly-configurable blog index with rich navigation options very easily.

The plugin is chock full of features, and the UI for creating and managing the index is straightforward and functional.

And once you have created your index, you can activate it by using the WordPress short code in your page text, such as:

It doesn’t get any simpler than that!

BTW, for those of you interested in the rotating tag cloud on top of my index page – that was not created by AZIndex, but a different plugin, WP-Cumulus, instead. WP-Cumulus is a pretty nice plugin in its own right, but it’s basically just eye candy.

Update: You may have noticed that my Taxonomy page does not exist anymore. I decided to remove it for a site redesign. However, I still wholeheartedly recommend the AZIndex plugin!

BackType Connect

Check out this post I wrote last week. If you scroll through the 235 comments there, notice that I was able to pull in comments from social media services like Reddit and Twitter into my comment stream?

Well, you can use the BackType Connect plugin to do that.

BackType is a relatively new social media service which aims to index and catalog millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments.

By installing the plugin, you will be able to leverage the BackType service and display comments from other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit and Hacker News which are talking about your blog post. These comments behave just like any other comments, and your users can reply to them and so forth.

Note that you will need a BackType API key (and thus need to register an account with BackType) in order to use the BackType Connect plugin. Update: The API key will automatically be generated for you when you install the plugin. You don’t need a BackType account!

Relevanssi

Better WordPress search results with Relevanssi

Like I mentioned above, besides creating indexes, search is the other way which can help your readers find the content that they are looking for on your blog.

Unfortunately, the default search functionality in WordPress sucks.

I tried other options before, like Google Custom Search. The search results were alright, but somehow it had problems indexing the correct pages and posts on my blog.

So after I read this excellent article by Joost de Valk, I decided to take matters into my own hands and use plugins and hacks to make WordPress search suck less.

Joost recommended using the Search Reloaded plugin. Unfortunately, it wasn’t free. Someone in the comments suggested wpSearch (a Lucene-based search engine), but unfortunately it had annoying problems with indexing after articles were updated. Finally, I came across the wonderful Relevanssi search plugin created by Mikko Saari. It basically does everything that wpSearch was supposed to do, minus the indexing problems.

Armed with Relevanssi, Joost’s instructions, some minor supplementary plugins (Search Excerpt and Search Suggest), and a few hours, I was able to create a WordPress search experience that I’m finally happy with.

Relevant. Neat. User-friendly. Useful.

If Mikko is reading this – my last request to you: Would you be able to make Relevanssi index blog comments as well as the blog contents? Update: Relevanssi indexes blog comments now. Awesome!

Shutter Reloaded

All modern blogs need some kind of lightbox plugin.

(If you are not sure what a lightbox script does, basically it allows you to view images on the blog page without leaving the page. For example, click on any of the images above and see what I mean.)

In the WordPress plugin directory, there are literally dozens of different lightbox plugins that you can choose from. I personally tried at least five or six different kinds.

Bottom line – Shutter Reloaded is the best of the bunch in my opinion. Fastest performance, rich functionality, clean JavaScript code, and minimum incompatibility problems.

I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Widget Logic

This widget will only be displayed if the current page is the 'about' page

If you look at my blog’s home page, About page, search results page and any of my blog posts, you will realize that depending on which page you are viewing, the widgets on the right sidebar will vary.

For example, on my search results page, the widget for tags and most recent posts don’t appear. On my home page, I have a huge widget (“Who is the Armchair Theorist?”) that does not appear anywhere else. And likewise, on my About page, it shows a whole bunch of other widgets that can only be found on my About page.

How can I do that? The answer is the uber-versatile Widget Logic plugin.

In a nutshell, Widget Logic allows you to set a conditional expression for each widget which will determine whether the widget will be rendered or not. This is very powerful stuff, since you can use any of the WordPress Conditional Tags or even generic PHP code as part of your conditional expression!

How cool is that?

Keep that in mind as you sit down, relax, and listen as I tell you a story…

Boycott Novell: “This is not a hate site”

I had a pretty interesting experience this past week.

Last week, while I was browsing around the Internet, I chanced upon this article on a website called Boycott Novell (BN) which talked about Bing.

To my surprise, with all of the good buzz that Bing has been getting since its launch, this article was a poorly-organized mess of incredible negativity and aggressiveness, even going as far as accusing Microsoft of bribery and vandalism (I’m not kidding – read the article). Naturally, it doesn’t mention anything positive about Bing whatsoever, despite the undeniable fact that literally thousands have expressed positive sentiments for Bing on both the blogosphere and on Twitter.

This was strange to me, since BN proclaims that:

This is not a hate site. This is neither a crusade nor any type of propaganda front. We have our mind set on a single goal: finding out the truth.

[...]

If you are new to this site or just happen to lurk, we encourage you to take part in the discussion. We perceive comments as discussions, not just placements for feedback and correction. We are very responsive to comments.

So naturally, in the spirit of open social media discussion, I left a comment, expressing my opinion that I felt the article was a collection of cherry-picked articles against Microsoft.

My debate with the author went on for a few rounds, and finally to my surprise, the author accuses me of being a paid astroturfer and a Microsoft shill for failing to disclose that I work for Microsoft in my comments.

Now, I have a few problems with this accusation:

1. First of all, it is simply not practical to disclose who you work for or represent in every single blog comment you leave. Hardly anyone does that. Scoble doesn’t do it. Matt Cutts doesn’t do it.
2. What most people do however (including myself), is to leave a URL link to their website or blog so interested people can find out more about who you are. I never comment anonymously, and I didn’t do so in this case.
3. I never tried to obfuscate the fact that I worked for Microsoft. In fact, on my About page, I prominently state in the first few lines that I am a a technology evangelist working for the biggest software company in the world. If that’s not enough, on the front page of my blog is a prominent link to my public LinkedIn profile, which clearly shows that I work for Microsoft.
4. The worse thing is, comments have been disabled on the post which accuses me of being an astroturfer. So much for a site which claims to “encourage you to take part in the discussion” and is “very responsive to comments”.

I can say with 100% certainty that every other blog I’ve visited and commented on before (even the slightly more fanatical blogs like TheAppleBlog), people will argue and debate with you about the points you bring up til no end, but they will never attack your character or who you work for.

That is social media. That is open discussion.

Alas, not on BN. If you read the entire comment thread, you will realize that the author (as well as some in the BN community) rather attack you for who you are, instead of debating you on your arguments. Boden Larsen, a neutral commentator, sums it up best:

Yes, [Roy Schestowitz, the site author] resorts to an ad hominem attack and then goes on to defend this strategy. In my opinion you can never win once things turn in this direction, so don’t sweat it. I’m sure that many readers here see what’s happening even if they remain silent.

Obsession and Paranoia?

The initial encounter with BN piqued my interest in the website, not so much because of the content or their accusations, but because I found it both amusing and surprising at how paranoid and obsessed the BN community really was with everything Microsoft.

Here’s a sampling of articles published after my “encounter” with them:

• I subscribed to the BN news feed. Out comes this article: Boycott Novell Has New Subscriber
• BN actually filed a complaint to the FTC! Looking forward to see what comes out of this: Microsoft Reported to the FTC for AstroTurf Marketing
• BN also published a list of all known evangelists working for Microsoft. What’s hilarious to me, is that Brian Gorbett (Microsoft Evangelist) actually commented to have his particulars updated!
• BN has no choice but to change their commenting policy, claiming themselves to be the victim from abuse and intimidation from trolls.
• David “Lefty” Schlesinger, who is a member of the Linux community and has been falsely accused by BN before, defended me on many of the comments I made on BN. Naturally, BN (remember, they are the victim) has no qualms about smearing him.

And as expected, all of the accusatory posts above have commenting disabled.

Penguin Pete is the typical type of individual that you will find hanging out at BN. Check out these two articles that he wrote (one of which was quoted as a “source” on BN). Check out these gems which I took as direct quotes from his articles (all emphasis is his):

You know who Linux’s enemy is? Oh, nobody much. Just the most powerful corporation in the known universe, founded by the richest human being in the universe.

[...]

Well, that’s what’s going on in Linux and the FOSS community. Pardon us, but we’re fighting for our freaking LIVES! And everybody else’s freedom too, even if they don’t care about it themselves much.

[...]

Who else is on their side? Because, as a highly proud member of the Technology Freedom Movement, I’ll tell you this today: You’re with us or against us.

I know, that sounds really Republican-going-to-Iraq, doesn’t it? It isn’t often that life provides us such a black-and-white situation. But that’s what makes this day so special. This thing is snowballing out of control, picking up more people from both sides every day. Watch the comments, watch the blogs, mine, yours, everybody’s. Through it all, we will have a very clear view of what color shirt everybody is wearing.

You’re with us or against us. You’re with us or against us. You’re with us or against us.

To further show his classiness, he takes an otherwise inspirational story about the principal developer for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and twists it around to show the superiority of FOSS developers:

Since one of the commenters below launched into the typical spiel about how professional coders at proprietary software companies produce superior output compared to the hobbyists of open source who are all wearing sandals, etc., blah, blah, blah…I found this amusing, assuming it isn’t a parody site (crossing fingers). Here is the principle developer for Microsoft Internet Explorer. He’s a dropout, self-educated, and has prior job experience at at McDonalds, coffee shops, and a hotdog stand – and that’s not even the most embarrassing thing he says about himself.

What was that superior difference between FOSS and proprietary software again?

Anyway, let’s go back to BN:

I asked the BN community recently what they thought about Microsoft releasing 20,000 lines of source code to Linux. Surely as advocates of Linux and open source software, they would be happy right? I mean, even Greg Kroah-Hartman, the current Linux kernel maintainer and the lead of the Linux Driver Project, thinks it’s a great move.

By now though, you can probably guess that BN folks are less than thrilled:

As we know from inerrant Microsoft, Linux is a cancer that infects everything it touches. Microsoft just touched Linux. Is Microsoft a cancer now?

[...]

Microsoft’s “contribution” was made for one reason only, and that’s to promote their virtualisation stack. Ultimately, this only benefits those who run Windows.

Are we supposed to jump up and down for joy because of this?

Hardly.

Finally, if you are still not convinced that BN is an anti-Microsoft hate site sans a single thread of objectivity, well… listen to what the site author, Roy Schestowitz has to say:

This site is as much “anti-Microsoft” as the United States is “anti-Madoff” and the British are “anti-Mugabe”.

Those who do the crimes deserve no favouritism.

Folks, you decide for yourself whether BN and its community are obsessed and paranoid.

Social Media FAIL?

The question I ask myself is this – If I were in Roy’s shoes and I have a personal vendetta against Microsoft, is running BN in this manner the best possible way I can execute a plan to change public perception and win sympathizers?

I think for those who have been around social media a lot, you know that social media is all about credibility. And by consistently misinterpreting facts, using untrue but sensational headlines, censoring comments, using an immature, aggressive and condescending tone, and generally being poorly-researched, I can guess that Boycott Novell doesn’t have much (if any) credibility with anyone important in technology.

But then again, it could be that the facts are not on BN’s side, which means Roy has no choice but to make a lot of noise and hope to appeal to others’ emotions instead of debating using sound arguments and facts.

In any case, as much as BN claims otherwise, it is certainly not an open community, much less one that encourages open discussion and alternate interpretations/opinions.

What does the Linux/Open Source community think?

The last thing I was really curious about was whether BN represented the views of the open source community in general, or are they just a self-contained bunch of anti-Microsoft fanatics.

To get that answer, I did a simple search on Google (I didn’t use Bing, lest others accuse Bing of censoring results ).

Here is a post from the Linux community Linsux.org:

Update: It has been brought to my attention that Linsux.org is not a Linux community (in fact, far from it). So please take the comments below for what it’s worth. My bad.

Wow. I can’t say anything else but the so over used: BoycottNovell is the cancer that’s destroying Linux community.

Damn I never thought they were so “cunning”. That’s so real planing and “FUD” from their end. This Shit-what’s-his-name-itz is one psychotic megalomaniac planner. He know exactly hot to pull the strings.
Thank god he never became a politician, or things could be totally different.

I prefer that Shit-what’s-his-name-itz remains in BN rather then try to get some other more influential place in society.

What about the Ubuntu community, what do they think? [1, 2]

I think that boycott novell is pure garbage.

Do anyone even relies on it’s information? since it only spreads FUD and Conspiracy theory’s IMHO. I wonder myself how some articles are sometimes the most digged (on Digg).

Also this site gives bad name to the Linux comunity, giving an image that our comunity are a bunch of radicals and software “terrorists” who want to plant a Bomb on Redmond.

It’s obvious if you read the comments on the boycottnovell article regarding the codec issue, that these guys think they are better than everyone else – anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their views is, in their mind, unwelcome in Linux.

These guys are whack-jobs.

When BN tries to cross post their articles on the comp.os.linux.advocacy newsgroup, this is what the community thinks:

Roy Schestowitz is a classic narcissist and *yes* he *does* believe that he is above everyone else and that people won’t bother to check his sources and “facts”. He really does.

He has comments turned off on that story BTW. I guess even Schestowitz knows when he has screwed up really bad.

[...]

‘Boycott Novell’ is a sham laughingstock joke of a website.  It’s not taken seriously by anyone except a handful of like-minded Linux dweebs. When’s the last time Novell contacted you to discuss anything?  That’s what I thought.

You actually accept money to run Microsoft ads on the site – what kind of pathetic fraud does that?

There really is a whole lot more out there to read, if you are interested.

I think we can conclude the story here with a personal email I received just today from a prominent member of the Linux development community who I shall not name.

Hello,

Just wanted to point out that the conspiracy theorists at BoycottNovell do not represent the “community”. Just like the Unabomber did not represent “America”.

[...]

As long as you do not believe we are all wackos like those idiots, I felt it was worth pointing that out.

Update: Wow. I never expected my article to get close to 2000 page views in the few days since it was published (I know it’s not a big deal to many blogs, but for my humble blog, it is).

Anyway, here are some other reactions to my article (and to BN) from elsewhere that I found. I won’t extract any quotes here, but please feel free to see what others in the community have to say.

There is a discussion page for this article on Linux news website Lxer. The OpenSUSE forum discussion thread is here. And how can we possibly have an article about Boycott Novell without including any reactions from the Novell community?

I only started blogging last year (April 2008), and just like any other thing you do for the first time, you make mistakes and figure things out along the way. This new Armchair Theorist (v2.0 if you will) incorporates some of my personal best practices which I learned from the past year.

I started thinking in earnest about revamping my blog since early November 2008, but the whole process took a couple months and really only got done this week. I guess the advantage of blogging for fun and personal fulfillment instead of money is that you can relax and take your time to make things happen.

So here are the five steps which I did to revamp my blog:

Step 1 – Choose a new theme

I used the wonderful and customizable K2 theme last year, but I decided to go in a new direction this year.

For my fans out there (all 3 of you) who have visited my landing page in the past couple months may have seen me try out the brilliant WP-iStalker theme (created by the equally brilliant Avice De’véreux). However, at the end I decided that WP-iStalker, while full of integrated features, was just a tad too advanced and intimidating for me. A theme gives your readers a very important first impression, and what I really wanted was something bold, yet simple and easy for readers to navigate and use.

In the end, I found the perfect theme in Vigilance, which was featured in Mashable’s list of 10 best WordPress 2.7 themes.

Step 2 – Streamline my blog and page design

Inspired by advice from folks such as Chris Brogan and ProBlogger, here were some of the things which I did to streamline my blog and page design:

• Break down longer pages into separate pages to ease navigation – i.e. my contact information is now separated from my main “About” page and each of my projects now has its own page instead of lumping everything together under a single “Projects” page.
• Remove all of the unnecessary blog widgets that didn’t value add to the readers.
• Remove underused functionality and plugins such as Similar Posts, WP-Print, and Joost de Valk’s CrunchBase widget. They may resurface again later on, but not for now.
• Create a text widget (which only shows up on the front page) that provides readers a teaser as to who I am, as well as point readers to the five most important links which define my online presence:
  • My blog’s About page
  • LinkedIn profile – Just because my entire business network is there
  • Facebook profile – Just because everyone else is there
  • Twitter – Just because that’s where I generate all my day-to-day content
  • My tumblelog on Posterous (NEW) – I’ll talk about this later

Step 3 – Adopt a consistent policy for capitalizing post titles

Prior to the revamp, the way I wrote my blog post titles were a mess.

Moving forward, my post title policy is simple:

• First letter of first word is capitalized.
• First letter of subsequent words are capitalized if they play the role of either a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb in the post title.
• All other words are not capitalized.

Inconsequential, some may say. Regardless, it still had to be done.

Step 4 – Reorganize my blog content

Moving forward with the new Armchair Theorist, I plan to focus on only two kinds of blog posts: articles and link dumps. Frivolous content such as my regular Wordless Wednesday feature, I have decided to migrate it off of my blog into a tumblelog.

So here is what I did:

• Created a brand new tumblelog with Posterous. I was originally debating between using Tumblr or Posterous, but at the end, the simplicity and feature set of the Posterous service won me over.
• I migrated all of my old Wordless Wednesday photos and posts onto Posterous. Using email, this was a reasonably easy task that took no more than 15 minutes. Once they were migrated, I deleted the posts from WordPress.
• I consolidated all of my WordPress categories into just two: Articles and Links.
• What about all of the broken permalinks and missing category links? No problem. Using Urban Giraffe’s awesome Redirection plugin, I was able to configure all of the old (and missing URLs) to redirect to either my Posterous tumblelog or my new category URLs.

Step 5 – Reorganize my blog taxonomy

If you ever need a reason to be skeptical of so-called “expert advice” on the Internet, you don’t have to look further than here.

Eight months ago, I wrote an article about the best practices of tagging. Although most of those rules still apply for me today, I’ll be breaking at least 50% of those rules for my blog moving forward.

My views on tagging has changed a fair bit since I penned that masterpiece, and the bottom line is that in my opinion, categories and tags do not work very well for blogs. The main reason is of course the challenge of consistency in both the granularity of the tags and the tags itself, as well as the challenge of keeping the number of tags to a manageable number that doesn’t spiral out of control. Not to mention, based on Google Analytics data, tag and category links don’t get clicked a lot (less than 5%), relative to the overall traffic. I believe readers today rather use a blog search tool to discover relevant content on a blog instead of using tags and categories.

Therefore, this is what I did:

• As mentioned above, eliminate all categories except for Articles and Links – essentially de-emphasizing the use of categories.
• Integrate Google Custom Search into my blog and prominently displaying it at the top of every page to emphasize the use of search for navigation.
• Tags will continue to be used. However, here are a few important changes to my tagging best practices last time:
  • Use a singular base instead of a plural base – I struggled greatly over this during the past few months. At the end, I just feel a singular base works better.
  • Strict cap of no more than five tags per article – This forces me to only tag main ideas, and not to over-tag everything under the sun. What I had been doing previously was that if an article mentions Google, I will tag it as such. That’s creating an index, not a taxonomy. If the readers need an index, they are better off using the search function instead.

Conclusion

Like most other things in life, my blog will perpetually be a work in progress. What you see today is just an accumulation of my best practices and philosophies on personal information architecture as manifested through blogging and maintaining my social media presence.

That, and the fact that I’m a tinkerer, and feel the urge to tinker with things from time to time.

Anyway, I hope you like how my blog looks after the revamp.

And please feel free to adopt any of these best practices for your own blog. That is, if you still trust this self-proclaimed Internet expert idiot.

Before we begin our ride, let’s first look through the official trackback specifications and review how trackbacks really work. Got it? Good.

According to the official specifications, all I need to do to do a trackback is to send a HTTP POST to the trackback URL, with a mandatory url parameter, and a few other optional parameters (blog_name, excerpt and title). Something like this, if I want to trackback to my last blog entry:

Easy right? Luckily this is so easy to test with a tool like cURL. So say I try the following command:

And hey, it works! What I get back this:

So WordPress handles it like a champ. How about Windows Live Spaces? Let’s try my friend Guppy’s latest blog entry:

This is what I get back:

Unknown Error… well that’s not very helpful. OK, maybe Guppy forgot to change the Windows Live Spaces setting to Allow trackbacks from any public website to my blog? But it’s 3am in the morning, I don’t want to wake him up for my silly little experiment…

Fine, I’ll register my own Windows Live Spaces blog.

So after leaving all settings as default and making sure I changed the trackback setting above, I tried the following command again:

Crap. I don’t believe this. Again, the response shows an error:

OK fine, at least Windows Live Spaces blogs should be able to trackback the other direction to WordPress right? After fiddling for an hour… no such luck either. Neither direction works as far as trackbacks are concerned.

Unless I’m missing something (and do leave me a comment to let me know if I did), trackbacks just don’t work in Windows Live Spaces blogs. Period.

That’s too bad, because this is an example where Microsoft has committed to supporting a certain standard specification, but they actually fail to do so, due to poor implementation or other factors.

Is anyone really surprised though? Remember Visual J++, or something more recent, like OOXML?

Like any resourceful latecomer to the blogging game, I googled for other people’s tagging best practices. Perhaps because tagging is such a nebulous and subjective art, there was not a lot of information I can find besides a couple useful articles by Ian Beck and Nick Santilli. The most common advice is to be consistent, which I totally agree. Second most common advice is to find something that works for you. Umm… OK, I’ll try.

With tagging so prevalent in anything web 2.0 today, my goal is to find a tagging system or best practices which not only can be applied to blogs, but other things as well, from personal file organization to social bookmarking.

With that, here are my Top 10 Tagging Best Practices for Anything Web 2.0:

1. Be consistent. This rule is so important that it needs to be repeated here again. Whatever happens, pick a system and stick to it.
2. Always use lower case letters. No exceptions. And spaces and hyphens are the only punctuation that I will use to separate different words in a phrase.
3. Use nouns whenever possible. I always prefer “stupidity” to “stupid”, and “developer” or “development” (depending on the context) over “develop”.
4. Try to limit the use of abbreviations. Although the goal is to make the tags as succinct as possible, I will still expand out abbreviations unless they are universally recognized either as a brand (like IBM or HP), or an industry buzzword (SOA or GTD). Ambiguous abbreviations such as KM or PR I will expand them out as “knowledge management” and “public relations” respectively. The only exception is for extremely long abbreviations like “tokyo international anime fair”, in which case I will use the shortened form “taf”, since the abbreviation is used frequently to market the event as well.
5. Tag important company and brand names. If my blog entry (or article I’m submitting to a social bookmarking site) talks about any companies, I will include them as tags. The only exception (based on my discretion) is if the company was only mentioned in passing as an example and is not central to the main idea of the article.
6. Tag important product names. I will tag product names that appear in the blog entry, but I will strip out the vendor name in the tag and apply that as a separate tag. For example, if my article talks about IBM Lotus Notes, I will tag the article separately with the “lotus”, “ibm” and “notes” tags instead of “ibm” and “lotus notes” or even worse, just “ibm lotus notes”.
7. Tag ideas, concepts, locations, and events. Any main ideas, concepts (however nebulous or concrete), locations or events must be tagged and captured. If the article has three sections each with a different idea, try to extract a tag from each section. Examples: “productivity”, “social graph”, “enterprise”, “singapore”, “blogs”, “security”. If I am tagging an event, I will always put the year of the event if it’s an annual event (like using “taf 2008″ instead of just “taf”).
8. Don’t tag individuals. I will never tag a blog entry with another person’s name, even if I talk about them or link to their blogs. This is simply a matter of personal choice. I feel that linkbacks are more than sufficient to give them credit if I do refer to their work. The only exception is if the person is a central idea for my blog. E.g. if my blog was a blog on Microsoft, Bill Gates will be a central idea, and thus I wouldn’t mind using the tag “bill gates” when talking about him.
9. Use a plural base. I will always choose “blogs” over “blog” or “blogging”. There has been some debate on whether to use a singular base or a plural base as a default, but to me, a plural base just sounds more natural, especially when tags are mostly being used as categories in the Web 2.0 world.
10. Don’t use more than 10-12 tags per entry. This can be an entirely arbitrary number up to you. For me, if I need so many tags to accurately provide the metadata for a blog entry, then it may be a sign for me to break up the article into smaller, manageable parts.
11. Bonus Rule: Remember that tags are metadata that helps other people find your content using search engines. So think from the point of view of the user – If I am to type in search terms using a search engine to find this content, what search terms will I likely use? Those can also be considered as tags.

So these are my tagging best practices. How about yours? Please leave me a comment if you have your own set of tagging best practices that you want to share.

Last note on when to use Categories and when to use Tags in WordPress. In general, I subscribe to Lorelle’s school of thought: Treat Categories as your blog’s table of contents, and Tags as your blog’s index. Categories help you organize your posts into manageable sections in your blog, and Tags help your readers do a search to locate the specific information that they are looking for.

Update: About eight months after I wrote this article, I have changed my opinion on some of the best practices above, specifically the plural base (#9 above) and number of tags to use (#10). Anyway, at the end of the day, it is what works for you.

Ahh, the echo chamber

“We are talking to ourselves. Mike. This is the real danger.” — Robert Scoble

Paid Blogging Is A Lose-Lose Situation

Adam Singer discusses why paid blogging is almost always a lose-lose-lose situation for all parties involved.

Bush sneaks through host of laws to undermine Obama | World news | The Observer

I can’t believe this is even legal…

The Official Microsoft Silverlight Site

Good white paper on how to leverage SEO techniques for Silverlight applications.

Microsoft Dips Its Toe Into The iPhone With Seadragon Mobile

Microsoft apparently isn’t going to ignore the iPhone completely. They released a Seadragon application for the iPhone today that lets users “infinitely zoom” on high quality images with near zero transition times.

WordPress could face serious competition – from Microsoft

Now before you begin laughing your asses off at me take a deep breath and get your WordPress love back where it belongs. Calmed down? Good, now let’s get on with the info shall we.

College Grad Thinks It’s Pretty Ridiculous You Haven’t Hired Her Yet

So what should young people eager to join the tech industry do? Go to graduate school. Or! Pretend you’re an aspiring actor and get a job a restaurant — preferably at a chain where they let you wear blue shirts and khakis (for practice).

Business Technology : Are Netflix Layoffs Microsoft’s Fault?

Netflix said it is cutting 50 technical specialists early next year. But not for the reason you’d expect.

yax-962 Muddy Singapore swallows China workers

Judge for yourself – Is there justice in Singapore?

The Bailout Tab

Cool graphic from the New York Times on how the $700 billion bailout plan is geographically located in the US.

An explanation about your Windows Live “Network”

A very nice explanation on the differences between Spaces friends, Messenger buddies, and Hotmail contacts.

Highest Paid Presidents / PM’s around the World

Politicians in Singapore are amongst the most highly paid government officials in the world. Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore earns five times more than the American President. Lee Hsien Loong takes an annual salary of $2.46 million.

Tim Anderson’s ITWriting – Tech writing blog Sun’s JavaFX is launched: another go at applets

It’s early days. I’d like to hear from Designers whether JavaFX does what they need. JavaFX will improve, and it does have obvious value for Java developers who want to code rich internet applications. Sun’s commitment to open source may make JavaFX interesting to those who find Flash and Silverlight too tightly locked to single vendors.

Google Was Three Hours Away From Being Charged As A Monopolist

When it came down to the wire, Google blinked. It was the right move. But Google is on notice that the DOJ considers it a near-monopoly, and will treat it as such if need be. At least until the Obama Administration takes over. Then Google CEO Eric Schmidt can remind them how hard he campaigned for them to win.

Live TV On The iPhone – Courtesy Of Microsoft

But the irony to all this is that in 2006 Microsoft and Skinkers signed a technology for equity deal in 2006, a first for Microsoft in Europe at the time. So Microsoft will have a stake in bringing live TV to the iPhone. Nice.

Google Gears Down for Tougher Times – WSJ.com

Google is ratcheting back spending and cutting new projects and employee perks as revenue growth has slowed dramatically over the past year.

Will uTorrent Really Kill the Internet?

An inflammatory article published by Richard Bennett in The Register makes the claim ‘BitTorrent will kill the Internet’, or at least VoIP and games. However, are Bennett’s claims based in reality, or is it just another round in the FUD war that envelops the Internet?

Prayer vs Hard Work

“I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” — Frederick Douglass

Facebook Connect: Does Issuing Passports Make Facebook A Country?

The other challenge that Facebook Connect will face is how to prevent it from tarred with the same “centralized identity service” brush that Microsoft’s Passport got tarred with at the turn of the century.

Japan workers told to go home and procreate | World news | guardian.co.uk

The aim is to allow working mothers and fathers to spend more time with their children and find the time and energy to have more sex.

Other ways of getting my links in real time: Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious or FriendFeed.

I may leave out certain links from my feed if I feel the stories have already been covered ad nauseam this week.

This past week was my last week working at IBM.

And since Monday, I have started a new and exciting role with Microsoft as part of their Developer and Platform Evangelism Team in Singapore.

Yes, I’m moving from one empire to another empire.

I am moving from the company commonly known as “Big Blue” to the company Wall Street investors lovingly nicknamed “Mister Softee“.

Let’s start with the old…

The two things that I will miss most about IBM:

It goes without saying – #1 is definitely the people there; the wonderful colleagues and friends which I’ve had the pleasure to work with and know at a personal level over the past three years.

#2 is perhaps surprising to some – I will greatly miss the plethora of tools that IBM made available to us which enabled each and every one of its employees to be as productive as they could be.

Now, IBM gets a lot of flack for being a dinosaur; a company that is stuck in the past making boring and old-fashioned software. However, most people do not realize that IBM is one of the most progressive and innovative companies in the industry today as far as leveraging Web 2.0 and social computing software in order to make its employees work together better and more efficiently.

IBM has “enterprise” versions of practically all of the social media tools that are available today on the consumer web.

You like Facebook? IBM has Fringe and BeeHive – a social network-enabled employee directory on steroids which allows everyone to post photos and other content, as well as use tags to describe each others’ job functions.

You want delicious? IBM has Dogear – an intelligent social bookmarking tool which doubles as an excellent complement to IBM’s search engine when trying to navigate through the vast library of resources residing within IBM’s Intranet.

What if you fancy Basecamp? Well, IBM has a tool called Activities – an innovative way for employees to quickly assemble together and organize actionable information for short-term ad-hoc projects.

And some IBM tools like Cattail are an absolute time saver. Cattail is essentially a social network around web-based file sharing, which allows employees to easily discover and leverage relevant documents and assets (such as presentations) which other IBM employees have created.

And of course things like blogs, wikis, communities and forums are a given.

Most of these tools are developed internally from IBM Research – the same guys who brought the Internet the amazing Wordle application. And for tools that have overwhelmingly proven themselves, they are productized into customer offerings like IBM’s Lotus Connections social software suite.

A few months ago, Robin Fray Carey from Social Media Today wrote an interesting whitepaper on how IBM leverages social media tools from mashups to virtual words in order to do make its employees more productive. Check it out – it’s a very good read.

I will definitely miss these tools.

…and onto the new!

I can’t comment much yet on work life at Microsoft, since I barely just started.

However, I will say that I love the fact that everyone at Microsoft has so much unbridled passion towards the company and the technology that it is absolutely contagious. Everyone here is a believer.

Microsoft is no slouch in research and innovation either. And Microsoft is also the only company that has the unique market position of being able to cover the entire computing spectrum, from consumer to enterprise, from online to offline, from desktops to electronics. This versatility and breadth is the single most attractive thing to me about the company.

I am definitely looking forward to working here at Microsoft. I am a believer too.

I had the opportunity to attend the press conference for Anime Festival Asia 2009 a couple weeks ago (photos here).

Now, I’m not normally the type of blogger that attends (or gets invited to) media briefings for consumer events like AFA, but I was pretty stokked to attend this one since I am a huge anime fan. The press conference was more or less as I expected, and frankly, I’m pretty excited about AFA this year.

But I’m not here today to write about how AFA09 will have double the number of musical artistes compared to last year, with Yoshiki Fukuyama and Shoko Nakagawa joining AFA incumbents May’n and Ichirou Mizuki in concert.

Nor am I interested in writing about how the AFA09 venue will include a maid cafe featuring a group of seven “maids” that were handpicked through a closed-door audition process and which seems to be marketed more as an all-Japanese idol group but in reality the group consists of all Singaporean girls.

Lastly, I’m also not going to write about the pleasant yet not-so-surprising development that the powers that be are positioning Singapore as the next anime marketing and creativity hub – and as a first step in the right direction – are holding a one-day business conference (Animation Asia Conference 2009) together with AFA09.

Instead, and three run-on sentences later, I would like to highlight something I realized recently:

Nowadays you will hardly find any announcements or build-up for big events without some kind of social media component to it.

This is actually a good thing, particularly if the social media piece is executed well. And executing it well does not mean only coming up with an event #hashtag or liberally creating multiple Twitter accounts.

In AFA’s case, I believe that they integrated the social media aspect into their event build-up very nicely, and one way to understand it is to compare AFA09 with AFA08.

AFA08 was held on Nov 22/23 of 2008. According to DarkMirage’s blog post, the press conference was held on Sep 3, 2008, or two months before the event. Before then, not many people (if any at all) knew about the event – especially not casual anime fans like myself who were not tuned into the local online anime community. In fact, I didn’t even know about AFA08 until someone told me near the end of October, or only one month prior to the event. And many of my colleagues and friends didn’t know about AFA until I told them basically the week before.

Information flow for AFA08 was also pretty one-directional. Besides an email address listed on the AFA08 website for general inquiries and the option for users to befriend the AFA mascot (AFA-kun) on Facebook, I believe there really wasn’t much interaction between the fans and the event organizers.

AFA09 will also be held on Nov 22/23 of this year. This time around, the Facebook page and Twitter account for AFA09 was created as early as May 29, or a good six months before the event when the event build-up started (1st thing I like). Furthermore, if you scan through the Facebook and Twitter content streams, you will realize that it’s not a one-directional flow of information, but actual conversations are going on between the event organizers and the fans (2nd thing I like).

And what’s more – oftentimes the original content that is being posted has nothing to do with the event itself, but are anime-related news or tidbits that fans will enjoy (3rd thing I like). That helps position AFA’s social media channels to be not only a temporary thing just for this year, but actually an useful resource with a community that will come back and survive post-event. And of course, that could be very useful when you want to talk about AFA10, or market other products and services to the community.

(Interestingly, the AFA09 Facebook page has close to 10x more Fans than the AFA09 Twitter account has followers. Yet another validation that teens don’t really use Twitter?)

The thing is – as the handful of people reading this would probably know – nothing I described above is rocket science. However, as easy as it is to create a Facebook page, start a WordPress blog or register for a new Twitter account, sustaining and running these social media channels well is an entirely different ballgame.

I think some social media blogger once said (it could be Ben; I don’t remember) – that it’s his hope that one day there will be no need for social media specialists anymore, but instead social media becomes an invaluable tool that all PR, marketing, and event professionals will know how to leverage.

And companies agree with this view as well. Based on this IPR report (PDF), close to 80% of companies today think that social media skill sets are important for new PR and marketing hires.

Anyway, successful social media case studies like AFA and Resorts World make me hopeful that the day that we don’t need a separate social media specialist anymore may actually come a lot sooner than we think.

This is a simple Windows batch file which uses cURL to manually send a pingback.

Usage:

The Source URL is the absolute URI of the post on the source page containing the link to the target site.

The Target URL is the absolute URI of the target of the link, as given on the source page.

The Pingback URL is the absolute URI of the pingback XML-RPC server.

For example:

The tool will then output the XML-RPC response as per specified in the Pingback specifications so you will know whether your pingback attempt was successful or not.

Download the Simple Pingback Tool here.

This package includes the Windows version of cURL 7.18.0 with SSL support.