Cost-Effective Scalability, Oh-my!

Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability, Oh-my!

Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability, Oh-my!

It might seem like a quest to have the best of everything but Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability isn’t that mythical. You don’t have to battle the the wicked witches, but that doesn’t say it is a simple path to take either.

So lets talk about an example that exists out there already:

Wikipedia – www.wikipedia.org

We all know what Wikipedia is but in case you missed it (perhaps your just starting to use a computer?), Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia that is based on an openly=editable model. It allows users to add articles/pages and also edit existing ones in a self organising way.

So lets take a look at some stats and see how large Wikipedia is, bear in mind this is only the English side of Wikipedia and doesn’t count for other languages.

I’ve also put together a more visual representation taken from the wiki stats page, Click to enlarge the view!

So there is no doubt that Wikipedia is large, and they have use an Open Source, Scalable solution across multiple servers, multiple countries, etc. All with less than 30 staff members dedicated staff members. Of course you don’t have to be as large as wikipedia to use the software and there are in fact many smaller sites that use the same software. You might not have the large economies of scale either, and that doesn’t matter because there are effective solutions out there.

Enter LAMP, a solution stack of open source software that is ready to take on your needs. LAMP is actually an acronym (not a light stand) that represents the key open source software packages.

Linux – An operating system
Apache – A HTTP web server
MySQL – Database software
PHP – A language in which you can code web pages

LAMP allows you set up and host your own site with ease, it is scalable and as for the cost effect side – it is Open Source. I’ve heard lots of rumours but I haven’t been able to find any ‘hard facts’, but major sites like Facebook and Flicr are based on LAMP, or at least were at some stage. I could say my site is based on a LAMP distro to also make a point (but it isn’t), however there is nothing stopping you from starting your own site and doing so.

The next biggest craze though is cloud-computing and business creating their sites of API’s, and renting CPU power from Google, while hosting data on Amazon S3, etc. The reason I avoided this is because it is very much on the hype cycle and I don’t feel comfortable not having that much control. This might be changing (and it looks so), but it is hard to recommend outsourcing a solution when you can get started yourself easily with LAMP!

The long tail describes a wider range of products that are more specific getting sold less often, rather than the ‘head’ being more common/generic products being sold more often. A great image create by leftclick can be seen below:

Effectively the dinosaur represents a curve on the graph, where there more generic or common a product, the increase of the results. On the other end the more specific the term, the less results occur. Following the example by leftclick, how would you leverage the long tail in web 2.0?

If you were in the hotel business and you had a resort you could describe yourself as a ‘hotel’ or perhaps even the location your hotel was. This would be a very generic term, and really ‘the head’. If you were more specific, you could use key works such as ‘accommodation’, ‘Queenstown’, ‘backpacker’, ‘wheelchair access’, ‘pets allowed’ and the results would be fairly narrow. Putting this keywords into Google may give you the results of a few million (the head), to a few hundred or less (the tail).

The more specific your key words, the more specific your audience – leveraging the long tail can yield lower costs in advertising while also increasing your conversion rate.

By doing the following you can target advertisements on the long tail in the example above. This also means you will have lower costs (because there is less competition) and have higher conversion rates (because the target audience is looking for services similar to what you offer).

Another great tip is from leftclick is focused pages, targeted at these specialised search terms. What this basically means is, don’t rely on your advertisements bringing in visitors, create pages or content so the search engines results will list the page (in in turn bring them to your site). In the above example creating an online guest book, or encouraging user reviews (even better if they blog about it and link to your site) are a few good ways to create content.

So what if your a site like Amazon? Similar approach works but there is a few more tips which you can use. If you have a large product range, once the visitor is on your site you might want to direct them towards more generic items you have for sale. The products are more popular and as a first time vistior you might be more interested.

Perhaps you’ve become a member of a site like Amazon and bought a few items. Soon you wont to direct your members towards a little more ‘specific’ material. This will have the opposite effect in that existing members who have seen the common/generic stuff can get pushed towards the more specific terms. By doing this you are encouraging existing users to branch out more.

• Blackboard @ QUT
• Facebook Community
• Book a consultation slot with Jason
• Lecture Audio / Podcast Feed (you can subscribe to the podcast stream or right click and save individual files)
• Blog index for INB Undergraduate students
• Blog index for INN Postgraduate students
• Aggregated / Blog Feed? *need to find or create one from all blogs*

So lets have a look at what Enterprise 1.0 is and compare it with Enterprise 2.0:

Taken from http://www.e2conf.com/about/what-is-enterprise2.0.php

If you compare the two tables you will see the differences between the two. Business can also transition from a Enterprise 1.0 driven organisation to an Enterprise 2.0 driven organisation over time. There are strong benefits in that Enterprise 2.0 allows the knowledge of many accessible to many. Information is no longer constrained to help files, e-mails, books and traditional methods. Most importantly, Enterprise 2.0 is happening now (with or without you).

Professor Andrew McAfee, formally introduced the concept of Enterprise 2.0 in 2007. One of the easiest ways of describing the technology the enables Enterprise 2.0 (without showing or describing the technology itself) is by SLATES (or S.L.A.T.E.S.).

S – Search
L – Links
A – Authorship
T – Tags
E – Extensions
S – Signals

These concepts were quickly identified as an Enterprise 2.0 checklist. This concept has been developed further in recent times (FLATNESSES) but the 6 key concepts are still there. We can identify Enterprise 2.0 technologies using SLATES or more recently FLATNESSES, so lets move on to Enterprise 2.0 platforms.

Chances are that you are using these or have at least seen them. In fact I can guarantee it (your on my Blog – that you can search, view links, read articles I’ve written and allowed you to provide feedback, views tags I’ve used on content, seen extensions like my twitter updates and one of the ways I’ve signalled this is by using RSS feeds).

Wikis

Blogs

Mashups

Online Communities

Social Bookmarking

Social Networking

Differences between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0 – check
Ability to identify technology that uses Enterprise 2.0 – check
Available platforms which helps oraganisations use Enterprise 2.0 technology? – check

So, do we know what Enterprise 2.0 is?

It seems that a few people are interested in organisations and sites that are actively using it. I’ll try gather a few sites together and share some examples in the near future.