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.

The reason you revisit a website is normally because it has updated, there is new data, you have found a purpose to return and all of this is intended to generates a rich user experience that makes you want to return. There are however ways of getting ahead of the crowd and making that user experiences better.

10 years ago you might have been tempted to use animated graphics on a page with some fancy DHTML coding to make you think ‘wow, that’s cool’, however technology has advanced and so should your website. Today a site will use AJAX, PHP, .NET, HTML 5 to create a richer experience for the user. These standards allows a developer to load content that refreshes automatically, embed videos, images, upload data, etc.

The next level up is creating a Rich Internet Application. Now you might be thinking application in the sense of a program you find under the menu in your computer but I’m talking about a Rich Internet Application that uses Adobe Flash, Java or Microsoft Silverlight (the three biggest players in the area). Before you can actually view something in Flash, Java or Silverlight you will need to download and install the plug-in. However once installed you will be able to download a small application on the website and run it in your browser. There are however downfalls in going this way. Silverlight doesn’t work in Linux, Flash doesn’t work on most mobile devices, Java can be problematic on some PC’s, etc which need to be taken into consideration.

So lets move on to some examples! There are plenty out there so I’ve just decided to to pick an example site from Adobe Flash, Java and Microsoft Silverlight:

Adobe Flash – Donnie Darko (the movie)

This one I might be a little Biased to as I really enjoyed the movie and when I discovered the website I was impressed. The website is based on flash and is a great example of a RIA (Rich Internet Application). It combines, text, video, audio and takes the user on a journey through the website. In fact it is a challenge the whole way through as information is provided through to you in short bursts, mouse clicks are hidden at times and you are prompted to put in passwords to open the next section (should you be clever enough to work it out from the information provided).

Java – Yahoo! Games

Yahoo! Games are based on Java. I’ll rephrase that. Most of Yahoo!’s games that you play online use Java. They have a wide range from poker, scrabble, pool to Bejeweled. This has created an incredible series of RIA which gives the user a Rich User Experience that keeps them coming back! I would suggest to give it a try, but I warn you that you may become addicted.

Microsoft Silverlight  - Silverlight.net Showcase

Silverlight is the newest of the three, however this doesn’t mean it hasn’t got any attention. In fact Stat Owl, has showed that Silverlight is slowly growing in market share. The showcase site itself is in in Silverlight, but it provides many examples (over 900) of websites that are using Silverlight. These range from MMORPG, public transport, geospatial imagery to dynamic bar graphs.

Let me know if you have any stand-out examples of Rich Internet Applications!

Upon getting the beta invite in an e-mail because I joined up with the pre-registration (by the way, not everyone who pre-registered has received an invite), I logged in and got presented with the Welcome screen. It very sleek and gets right to the point.

Login Screen for Guvera Beta

From this point you have 3 main options presented to you:

Random: If you don’t know what your looking for, click on Random. It will ‘randomly’ take you to a channel where you can see what songs are being offered.

Browse: If you want to look by artist, or by channel. (Browsing by artist isn’t enabled at this stage).

Search: If you know what you want, just type it in – (I think everyone knows how a search box works). One nice thing about the search is that it brings up a small photo of the album, song title, artist and gives you the ability to preview the song.

Channels is where it all happens!

Yep, That is right it is all about finding a channel where you can see a list of songs. So far on all the channels I’ve seen you can preview a song for 30 seconds, stream the whole song or what most people I think want – download the full song for free.

So how does it work? Well each channel is sponsored. For example a company or business can set up their own channel that has there branding on it. Additional links and information that is targeted towards the user. Each channel has had a different look, but have the sleek look which Guvera has going from the welcome page.

Your File: A module that shows you the album cover, artist, song, duration, size of the song. (At the moment this doesn’t dynamically update to the song you have previewed or clicked on to stream and not all of the fields are populated like duration and size).

Your Credits: Shows you how many credits you have and how to get more. (At the start you might not have that much but once you re-fill in all the details you did when you pre-registered this increases)

Playlist: A standard set of media controls to play music.

Music: The list of music being offered in a nice grid view (Love grid views). Title, Artist, Duration with button to Preview, Stream and Download. This is essential the main window where you do all you need to do.

Links: Sponsored links such as information, promotion or competitions you can entered provided by the channel sponsor.

Do you really get songs for Free?

Yes, you do. You get credit allocated to you and you can use this up. For example I had 1.60 worth of credit after I updated my profile on each one of the channels I visited. Once I downloaded a song at one channel I had .6 credit remaining. However on the other channels I still have 1.6 credits.

I downloaded a song and got the full length .mp3. Here are some more of the interesting details for those of you who are interested:

Size: 5.5 MB
Bit Rate: 256 kbps
Sample Rate: 44.100 kHz
Format: MPEG-1, Layer 3
Encoded with: LAME3.98

Negatives / Bugs / Feedback

As it is a ‘BETA’ you are to expect bugs, and problems to occur. The idea is to give a small group a test at the system and to address issues found before it goes main stream. Often a users first impression lasts and it could taint them from using it in future. If you are a BETA tester you should keep this in mind, that what you are seeing isn’t the full product. So here is my feedback:

No ability to give feedback: Ironically, I couldn’t find a submit bug/forums/e-mail button anywhere to submit any problems I was having. This is the main reason I’m doing a blog post. I’m hoping this gets back to them and so they can make some improvements.

No ID3 Tags on MP3′s: This would have to be the number 1 problem I have. The mp3 I downloaded (at around 220 Kb/s) had a massive file name that doesn’t describe the song or the artist. I also made the assumption there would have to be ID3 Tags that would handle this instead. This is not the case. There is pretty much no way to identify the song you have downloaded (not unless you manually edit the file name or insert ID3 tags yourself).

Updating Profile / Favourites: There is a fair amount of questions and I had to refill in all this after I had done this to pre-register. It seems like double handling and I don’t like it. Also when it comes to your date of birthday details it actually doesn’t save this correctly. For example my date of birthday is 1 day out, as after I save it and return to the details screen it has entered in the previous day I was born.

Your Song Box: This doesn’t dynamically update to the song you are playing or have selected on the channel.

Multiple Windows: You really can’t go opening multiple windows. You can’t for example up 3 different channels and save those channels to your favourites. It will only do it for the last one you opened and you will soon see that the 3 pages you have loaded up are all the same instead of 3 different channels. You basically have a ‘single click, one window only mentality’.

Address Verification: Not sure how this is meant to happen and there is no information on this. This needs to be expanded and explained further. There also needs to be a ‘why do we need to do this’, ‘why do you need this information’ thing going through my head.

Forums / Chat Room: I would like to see a forum \ chat room made available. I might not use these features myself but I was looking for a way to communicate with other users. Imagine if a channel had its own chatroom available or a forum? It may be a way to engage the audience and create a community where people will come back (not just to download songs). This would provide greater exposure for the sponsors and Guvera and a reason for the user to stay connected. With the targeted information (such as location), it could be easy for a Brisbane radio station to get people in the Brisbane area talking to each other…. – I’m sure this idea can be expanded more and thought out more if it hasn’t already.

Credits: Credits look strangle similar to dollars. I feel like I want to call the dollars or money. I also don’t know how much a song will cost me (money term there). Perhaps this could get looked at. EG: I have 1.5 credits meaning I have 1.5 songs. I have no idea how I get half a song, or how my credits will increase now that I’ve updated my profile. I bit more explanation here guys would be great. That grid view of songs would be good to see how much credits a song costs. I’m assuming all songs cost the same, but maybe they dont?  If this gets a bit more of a look, that would be great.

Conclusion:

Guvera, does what it set out to achieve. I was able to download a song legally as an mp3. It was easy to navigate around and find the song I wanted, however once I got the song on my computer I expected more (ID3 Tags). This has actually led me to deleting the song I download so it won’t ruin my music collection rather than re-naming it myself. There are a few bugs with the site and things that need to get looked at, but see potential.

The music being offered isn’t ancient, but it also isn’t the latest stuff out there. Guvera is working on extending this further, and I look forward to it. I’m keen to see how things pan out and I would like to encourage people to pre-register but at this stage I wouldn’t recommend it to other people in this BETA stage.

Oh and ‘hi’ to the guys working there at Guvera, I believe your office is just down the road in Robina, QLD. I would like to see this work out for you guys, as support local talent is always nice.

Update 14/1/2010:

I’ve received some nice Feedback from Guvera via twitter which I would like to say thanks for taking my thoughts on board. I’ve noticed a ‘report a bug’ button. Once there are more changes, I’ll be willing to go through it all again.

The original Napster was a hugely successful online music sharing service, which was shut down by court order. However it paved the way for many other P2P file-sharing programs. The question of whether these sites are ethical is still a controversial issue.

So what can the music industry do to solve this dilemma? There has been an interesting site discussed on several blogging networks that may just have a solution.

Guvera, a new website has stated that they have found a way to make downloading music legal! “The biggest change to media in history. Music, film and TV for free”. As stated on their Myspace page, Guvera is set to give people access to free music, built around a very unique business model that still pays the artists.

There is a still a lot of mystery surrounding the site, however you can pre-register at www.guvera.com. The site asks its users a number of questions, such as their interests in music, food, films, countries and much more.

For more information, click on the following link:

http://www.promoney.com.au/pdf/client_resources/Guvera_Investor_Presentation_August09___1_20.pdf

http://www.promoney.com.au/pdf/client_resources/pdf2/Guvera_Investor_Presentation_August09___2_20.pdf

It appears as although advertisers will be paying for the free content themselves. This concept definitely sounds like a new and exciting way to gain access to television, film and music content. I think it could represents a new Internet phenomenon.

What are your thoughts on the matter, would you be more tempted to download content if it is free and legal? Or would relying on advertisers to provide this service deter you? I for one cannot wait to see what Guvera presents.

Information on the internet suggests that the planned launch of mid this year has had some unexpected delays but it can’t be too long now.

• http://twitter.com/Guvera – Guvera’s Twitter Account
• http://www.myspace.com/guveradotcom – Guvera’s My Space Account
• http://www.linkedin.com/companies/guvera – Guvera’s LinkedIn Account

Twitter is a micro blogging web 2.0, social networking, latest trend, etc…. site….. that allows you to post short messages (think sms), videos, links, photos ‘Out There’ (the Internet/twitter sphere). If you are more of a video person, the guys at http://www.commoncraft.com have put together a great video which you can watch here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o

Or just click play – below:

So in short, it is a way read and share messages from people you know to see what they are up to and also a way to see what the rest of the world is up to. Of course not everyone is doing that, or believes there is a point in doing that. If you have the time, take a look at this interview that David Letterman had with Kevin Spacey: Letterman on Twitter: “A Waste of Time”

It is a great video and well worth the watch. But it does raise the question. Is Twitter a waste of time? Before I answer, I would like to point to another video by Common Craft which can be watched here – http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter-search

or just watch the video below:

So if you had to ask yourself as a business is Twitter as waste of time? I would strongly advise you to rephrase that and put forward the question ‘Can we ignore twitter?’.

I would like to focus on Dell. They have embraced the web, and have been a great example how distribution/warehouse costs can be managed effectively to create a ‘just on time’ business model with its partners. Until this year, they only sold their products online. Now they have changed that and have Dick Smith Electronics, and Officeworks where you can walk into a store and buy a PC.

So what have Dell done with twitter? Embraced it! Here are a few of the Dell twitter accounts (there were at least 20 different accounts I found I could follow depending on my needs):

• http://twitter.com/Direct
• http://twitter.com/DellHomeSalesAU
• http://twitter.com/Direct2Dell
• http://twitter.com/DellYourBlog

Dell has been tracking the amount of people who have clicked through their links and it has raked in a cool $3 million (Mentioned on ViralBlog). With results like that it puts Dell up there in the top 100 most mentioned brands on twitter. For a full list of sites you can check out www.revolutionmagazine.com where you can see the likes of Starbucks taking up first position.

The contents in of the e-mail displays Abbey’s opinion that the client is a ‘complete dick’ and is asking how to deal with him. Shortly after Craig received the e-mail he has forwarded it on to his contacts. From there, they have forwarded it on, and so forth until it has landed in my inbox (Brisbane, Queensland). After forwarding this e-mail on again a co-worker started a search on the web with her name.

Straight away he was able to find her name in the search results and it appears that Abbey has sky rocketed on search results, but hit rock bottom in creating a positive web presence. Not only has these made it on twitter, digg and blogs. Newspapers and the media have posted this on their own sites (and most likely printed it in their paper) across the world. I’ve copied some of the search results are below:

Abbey Sherwell

Abusive email accidentally sent to client goes viral

Leaked Entertainment Books email trail

Account manager sacked after accidentally abusing client by email

Fans defend Geelong worker sacked over email

Geelong women sacked for sending obscene email to client

How not to do business: a lesson by Abbey Sherwell

Do Your Own Search – http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=Abbey+Sherwell

If you want to read the e-mail yourself, there are plenty of links above. Two links I didn’t include are the facebook groups which have now been created. The are a ‘Save Abbey Sherwell’ and ‘Don’t Save Abbey Sherwell’, which at time of writing has a 173 members vs 86 members respectfully. These numbers for me represent an example of a basic poll on how people feel about what has happened. How do you feel?

This is a great example of how powerful and viral the web is becoming and it doesn’t look like it is going to slow down. It also means that a creating a positive web presence is becoming an essential thing in our everyday world. Future employers don’t just look at resumes any more, they do a search for you on the net to see what is out there. They want to know who you are and what you do.

For me reading this article made me feel a bit sorry for Abbey, but as a gentle reminder that keeping professional practice in the workplace (both internally and externally) is essential as you never know what could happen. If you have other examples or can share your own story be sure to leave a comment.

How would Abbey Sherwell combat this?

Has it made you think differently how you act in the workplace?

Do you think what has happened is fair?

Have you been forwarded the e-mail yourself already?

• Blogs
• Blogging
• Blogshphere
• Web 2.0
• Social networking
• Online Interactions
• Enterprise 2.0
• Tweets

Is what it is all about these days. Interactions between platforms, instant communication and feedback. Suddenly a target audience of a few because an audience of many.

I’ve just bought myself an iPhone and have found it incredibly easy not online get online and use, but through the app store. Download a wordpress app to post this article, download a twitter app to see what is going on (I created a twitter account last night) and post (photos included).

With a little bit of work I was able to integrate the two together on my site automatically. So I thought I would share a quick story about how I first used twitter, before creating an account.

A co-worker and I were having lunch outside, enjoying a burger at the the local fish and chips shop (Fish Kitchen) and we started seeing smoke in the air. We all had guesses of what it was and with our bad sense of direction we didn’t get close. On the way back to work we started seeing the news choppers flying over head, we knew this had to be big news and with a tip from a passer by, it sounded like a pub had caught fire.

So we made a competition to see who could find out what was happening first back in the office. I did a few searches on google news. It didn’t turn up any results, so I thought I would try twitter for the first time. With a few searches of ‘pub fire’ I soon found out that it was the Norman Hotel that had caught on fire. A few more tweets and I found out the #hashtag which had been created and I started getting photos of what was happening in real time. I had clearly won the competition and it at least 15 minutes before the mainstream media posted anything. Around 5 minutes later before mainstream media had ant photos. Another 5 – 10 minutes before they posted video from the choppers.

The craziest thing was that it was twitters that had posted links to the news articles as they were been posted, not the media themselves. In a competition to get the news out. Social networking sites like Twitter were miles ahead and it really gave a sense that the power is with the people. I even found that I was really well informed and there were photos the media just didn’t have (A guy working opposite took a photo as he was clearing the area, another one with fire trucks, etc).

Now that I’m on twitter, have an iPhone in my pocket. I’m ready to bring you “the news first”, “as it happens”, because why write it down on paper for just myself?