7 Models for Online Product Delivery

An absolute brilliant and definitely must read from Dion Hintchcliffe: Building Modern Web Apps? Better Have A Deep Competency in Web 2.0, Open APIs, Widgets, Social Apps, and Much More (if the link doesn't work try the Google cache)

Dion presents 7 different models for delivering online applications:

1. Web sites: This the classic model for Web presence.
2. Syndication: Countless aggregation services now exist that make a site's information embedded in their services as well as a way to offer users a method for pulling information from a site and experienced in a means of their choosing, from Google Reader and Newsgator to the innovative Yahoo! Pipes.
3. Web 2.0 applications: in this context we're referring to the fact that Web 2.0 apps package up the 3rd major type of networked value: user participation.
4. Open APIs and Web services: This is one of the most important long-term decisions most online businesses can make.
5. Web widgets: Selecting parts of a Web site and it's data and packaging it up to make it run inside a portable, user distributable widget has been growing more and more popular over the last few years.
6. Social networking applications: This is an amazingly fast moving field as you can see from a recent post on the latest happenings on the OpenSocial blog, to the extent it's hard even for well-funded companies to keep up.
7. Semantic Web and Web 3.0: The Semantic Web, one of the original visions for the World Wide Web, has taken a while to arrive but it's beginning to look like it may hit critical mass in the next 12-24 months.

Dion goes on and explains why adopting the new distribution models is essential for new business.

[...] Unfortunately, the number of capable practitioners of these new distribution models remains relatively small compared to the large body of experts in traditional Web product development. Demand is also low for these new skills as most organizations have been painfully slow to appreciate how much online product development has changed.[...]

QS: Romania a $2bn Virtualization Market?

Looks like I'm staying on the quest for strategy topic and asking the following question:

Is Romania a $2bn virtualization market?

The question was raised after reading an article published on Wall-Street.ro:

The virtualization market is estimated at $2bn in 2008 according to studies quoted by Sebastian Pascu, Red Hat Certified Engineer/Romsym Data

While I doubt the correctness of the above number, I think there are a couple of interesting questions I'd like to get answered:

• Which are the largest data centers in Romania?
• How many servers are hosted by governmental institutions?
• What virtualization providers are present on the market?

If you have any answers to the above questions or you'd like to add some more please drop me a note.

Resources:

• Virtualization Continues to See Strong Growth in Second Quarter, According to IDC
• Virtual server market ramps up despite downturn
• Worldwide Server Market Contracts Sharply in Fourth Quarter as Market Revenues Decline to $53.3 Billion in 2008, According to IDC

QS: Why Asesoft and eMAG?

While I've been reading about it all over the internet, I still cannot find a good answer to why Asesoft has bought 51% of the online retailer eMAG. I am definitely unaware of the online retailing market so I'd really love to have an answer from the market experts to:

Why has Asesoft taken over 51% of eMAG online retailer?

The official announcement mentions that this is just a financial investment coming from Asesoft to help eMAG consolidate on the market, but I'd say that it doesn't make for a good take over justification. Not being an expert, I'd speculate that:

1. Asesoft is interested in the eMAG distribution chain and eMAG will become a strategic part of Asesoft Distribution (in favor of this hypothesis comes the fact that Asesoft has also acquired a division of Flamingo International specialized in distribution)
2. eMAG needed a lot of money that they couldn't get without giving up control

What's your opinion?

Lucky 7: We Want to See Blood

Disclaimer: This post is mainly dedicated to the Romanian audience and especially to those involved in the Romanian online business.

I have finally got the chance to participate to the Lucky 7 event organized by Cristi Manafu, a great initiative meant to help new comers promote their projects, learn and get feedback from those with experience in the Romanian online business.

Unfortunately, I have to say that the event has quickly transformed in a blood bath, some of the people invited to share their knowledge effectively trashing the projects. (nb on the other hand both Cristi and Costin have tried to offer some real advise).

Anyways, don't get me wrong. I still believe that those presenting should not be looking for a pat on their back and they need to hear real opinions. Still, I feel there is a long way between expressing your opinion (even if it is a blunt and direct one) and demolishing both the presenter and his idea. It is my belief that constructive and positive advise has a lot of value (via Vlad).

Even so, there is a lot to learn from this experience for those presenting and I think they should continue doing it while others staying in the shadow should try it:

• learn how the market players are thinking
• learn how important people on the market are behaving and how are they preparing to welcome you
• learn how to filter information
• last but not least: improve your presentation skills, connect and promote your business

We are still at the beginning and I hope in time we will become more opened, more friendly and, what I think is most important, more helpful.

In case you'd like to hear what I think about the projects that were presented at Lucky 7, drop me a note and I'll follow up with a post. Meanwhile you can read what Mircea wrote about the projects.

Coding Python with Style

Just a quick reference for coding Python with style:

>> import this

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.

Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.

Sparse is better than dense.

Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently.

Unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never.

Although never is often better than *right* now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.

If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

• PEP8 - Style Guide for Python Code
• PEP256 - Docstring Processing System Framework
• PEP257 - Docstring Conventions
• PEP258 - Docutils Design Specification
• PEP287 - reStructuredText Docstring Format

What other languages (except Java) are offering something similar?

Conditional GET and Time Precision

I've just got bitten by it, so here it is: if you are implementing conditional GET and use the If-Modified-Since to check your storage for newer 'records'/'content' make sure that the time precision is the same on both sides.

Now that I said it, let me add some details. According to the RFC2616:

The semantics of the GET method change to a "conditional GET" if the request message includes an If-Modified-Since, If-Unmodified-Since, If-Match, If-None-Match, or If-Range header field. A conditional GET method requests that the entity be transferred only under the circumstances described by the conditional header field(s). The conditional GET method is intended to reduce unnecessary network usage by allowing cached entities to be refreshed without requiring multiple requests or transferring data already held by the client.

I'll use a simple example to walk you through the problem: lets say you are serving an RSS feed of the latest published content. You want to make sure that you are not sending over the wire the same content over and over again if nothing new was actually published, so you decide to support conditional GET.

In order to do that you'll be setting a Last-Modified and ETag headers on the response and the well behaving aggregators/feed readers will send back these values in the form of If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match request headers.

The format of Last-Modified header specified in the RFC1123 is: Last-Modified: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:58:10 GMT (f.e. the Python strftime format is '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT')

As you can see this timestamp has second precision and that's exactly the thing you need to pay attention to. In case your storage is using a finer grained precision for storing timestamps (miliseconds/microseconds -- which is the case for most TIMESTAMP data types,) then using the If-Modified-Since timestamp to query for newer records/content may actually result in finding items that have been previously served (their timestamp is milliseconds bigger).

So, next time you are using Last-Modified make sure that the data storage time precision is the same.

Note: You can actually use the ETag value to disambiguate this corner case, but instead of reducing the workload on your server you'll just improve on the network transfer aspect.

Note: You might be tempted to set the Last-Modified to the actual time of serving the request. I don't think this is a good idea as changing the value for each query will not allow your database to cache the results.

Google Bot Does Not Respect the Moved Permanently 301

Just a note to other webmasters out there: the Google bot does not respect the moved permanently 301 HTTP response status and continues to request the resource.

I have noticed this in my Google App Engine logs when trying to remove the redirect after being in effect for at least 2 months. I know it may sound weird, but yes the Googlebot is still ignoring the 301 and requests the permanently moved resource every 30/40 minutes.

You can identify the Google Bot by checking the the User-Agent for the string Googlebot/x.y (current version is 2.1, so the User-Agent fragment is Googlebot/2.1).

I am wondering what will happen with the URIs returning 410 Gone. In fact I'll just try it out in the upcoming days.

Not far ago, I have written how Google Desktop is breaking privacy by trying to submit data even if I have set it up not to do so. I cannot stop wondering:

Why would I trust what Google is saying?

I've got the following answer from Matt Cutts on Twitter:

mattcutts: @al3xandru, we can trust the 301 redirect, but it still makes sense to periodically check the source page every so often.

I don't think this is the correct behavior though. I'd be expecting this behavior for 302 (Found) and 307 (Temporary Redirect) which both are used for marking temporary redirects, but not for 301 moved permanently.

Hot: Oracle acquires Sun for $7.4bn

Just figured an alternate title for the post: After years Oracle has finally found a way to put his hands on MySQL

After a couple of weeks of rumors about a possible acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM giant, today a totally surprising news came out: Oracle acquires Sun for approximately $7.4bn.

From the press release:

We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined (Safra Catz, Oracle)

From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun's SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we'll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace. (Jonathan Schwartz, Sun)

At the moment I must confess that I'm stunned and I don't know how to feel about it. And following Twitter coverage it looks like I'm not the only one:

piewords: @irsanw Didn't see this one coming...

synkdorbit: Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems? No kidding.. Last week IBM declined to buy them

NOWatkins: Woah... Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. That came out of nowhere.

Leaving aside big questions like: what will happen to MySQL?, how is IBM feeling now?, I'd really like to hear:

How do you feel about Oracle acquiring Sun?

Resources:

• Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun
• Oracle to buy Sun Micro
• Follow reactions on Twitter
• Why Oracle Won't Kill MySQL

Virtualization: Microsoft and VMWare Webinars

Microsoft getVIRTUALnow

Couple of weeks ago I've participated to two webinars about virtualization organized by Microsoft Romania part of their getVIRTUALnow initiative: Overview of Hyper-V Technology; Windows Server 2008 R2; HA and The management of virtual infrastructure.

I must say that at the end of the 2+ hours I have been slightly disappointed. The part I have appreciated the most was the slide decks. They were so great I'd really like to share them with you, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to do so. Unfortunately, the presentations were just vendor pitches and I cannot say I've really learned a lot. I got the feeling that instead of spending the time discussing about Microsoft solutions, their strengths (and weaknesses) and providing tons of details, the talks have most of the time slipped to simple comparisons with competitors' products. I would have also liked to see some more elaborated and consistent demos. All in all, I have to say that even if interesting from time to time, the 2 webinars were not the best use of my time.

VMWare Virtualization Webinars

In order to better understand Microsoft's virtualization and also see how competitors are positioning themselves, I've put together a list of webinars from VMWare, the name that came up quite often during the getVIRTUALnow webinars.

Just to make sure there is some common ground for all the materials I'd suggest to start with:

Intro to Virtualization: [...] who should use virtualization? Why should you use it? How does it work? What does it do? [...] This webcast provides a basic overview to virtualization solutions from VMware and explains the technology that enables virtualizations, as well as the features and benefits of VMware solutions.

View this webcast and learn how virtualization can help you:

• Save time, money and energy while achieving more with the computer resources you already own.
• Transform your IT infrastructure into a competitive advantage.

Desktop Virtualization

• Saving Time and Money with Desktop and Application Virtualization
• Choosing the Right Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Platform
• Comprehensive Virtual Desktop Deployment with VMware and NetApp

ESXi

ESXi is the free VMWare type 1 (native/bare metal) hypervisor.

• VMware ESXi Webstart
• Getting Started with VMware ESXi

Appliances

• An Overview of Virtual Appliances
• Virtual appliances: Strategy, Solutions and Programs

Application Virtualization

• Technical Track: Performance Tuning and Configuration of Resource-Intensive Applications and Databases
• Technical Track: Resource-Intensive Application and Database Performance on VMware Infrastructure

VMWare Advantage

• VMware Infrastructure: The Right Investment for a Tough Economy
• Best Practices for Deploying Your Virtual Infrastructure: VMware’s Own Path to Virtualization

The Cloud and Virtualization

Building the Internal Cloud: Transforming the Datacenter: This webcast will look at what cloud computing is and how you can begin to transform your own IT organization into a self-service, yet centrally controlled business unit.

Terms and Definitions

Hypervisor

also called virtual machine monitor (VMM), is a computer software/hardware platform virtualization software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently.

VDI

Virtual desktop infrastructure is a technology consisting of a couple components presented in the attached picture:

Last

Who won the getVIRTUALnow prizes?

About getVIRTUALnow

• getVIRTUALnow: Sa trecem la treaba! (2)
• getVIRTUALnow: ce stiti despre virtualizare?

URI, URL, and URN

Confused by the exact meaning of these terms? If you perform a Google search you'll notice you are not the only one.

So what's the difference?

As Tim Berners-Lee explains it in the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax (RFC3986)

A URI can be further classified as a locator, a name, or both. The term “Uniform Resource Locator” (URL) refers to the subset of URIs that, in addition to identifying a resource, provide a means of locating the resource by describing its primary access mechanism (e.g., its network “location”).

The term "Uniform Resource Name" (URN) has been used historically to refer to both URIs under the "urn" scheme [RFC2141], which are required to remain globally unique and persistent even when the resource ceases to exist or becomes unavailable, and to any other URI with the properties of a name.

To put it differently:

URL

is a URI that identifies a resource and also provides the means of locating the resource by describing the way to access it

a URL is a URI

a URI is not necessarily a URL

I'd say the only thing left to make it 100% clear would be to have an example of an URI that is not an URL. We can use the examples in the RFC3986:

• URL: ftp://ftp.is.co.za/rfc/rfc1808.txt
• URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt: URL
• URL: ldap://[2001:db8::7]/c=GB?objectClass?one: URL
• URL: mailto:John.Doe@example.com: URL
• URL: news:comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix: URL
• URL: telnet://192.0.2.16:80/: URL
• URN (not URL): urn:oasis:names:specification:docbook:dtd:xml:4.1.2:
• URN (not URL): tel:+1-816-555-1212 (?)

I'm not 100% sure about the last example though, but here is what I think: it is an URN because even if it identifies a resource it doesn't provide the means to locate it. Am I wrong?

Web FrontEnd Standards Validation Tests

A few weeks ago I have posted a couple of links to tools to help with testing web apps inside the browser and now I wanted to share another resource meant to help web developers tests their apps.

The project released by Neil Crosby and introduced as Frontend Test Suite is imo more about about validating the various aspects of the front end layer (HTML, CSS, JS) against the standards and not application testing. Anyways it can become part of your automated continuous test suite.

Below is the slide deck of Neil's Automated Frontend Testing:

While I have been validating from time to time some of my web apps, I must confess that such testing has never been part of any of the test suites. Have you used it in any of your projects?

Social Network Data Portability

Not sure we will really get there, but some are trying to figure out ways to open the gardened social networks and standardize the way (our) data can move from one place to another.

• Data Portability: It’s The New Walled Garden
• MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter
• Facebook Responds To MySpace With Facebook Connect
• Checkmate? MySpace, Bebo and SixApart To Join Google OpenSocial (confirmed)
• Google Confirms Friend Connect
• Google Friend Connect
• OAuth
• OpenID

The Perfect Workspace

How would you like such a workspace? Would you be more productive or would you just spend time admiring your setup?

Is it really looking better than mine?

See more great (or crazy) workspaces on Gizmodo

Different ways to react to outages in the cloud: Google vs Microsoft vs Amazon

Launched less than 48 hours ago, the Google App Engine cron support has already seen a long outage spanning around 9 hours:

The scheduled tasks service saw some down time last night from 11:30pm and 2:30am PST (GMT-8), and again from 6am to 12:00pm PST.

I must confess that I don't have a (big) problem with the fact that the service was down. Microsoft Azure has been down for 20+ hours sometimes in March and I've heard of quite a few Amazon AWS outages in the past. But this is not the subject of this post.

What I am actually interested in is to see how these teams are reacting when facing problems, so let's take a look at a couple of examples.

Google

Here is the fragment from the latest report from Google about the issue I've mentioned at the beginning of the post:

This issue has been identified and fixed.

And this is not the first time they are very short on providing any sort of explanation (I have quite a few more examples, but I'll keep it short)

Investigation Complete - Issue Resolved
March 10, 2009 at 1:46 am 2009-03-10T01:45:51Z 2009-03-10T01:45:51Z
Online
We have determined that this spike did not affect the performance or uptime of applications. If you feel we have incorrectly diagnosed this issue please inform us by posting in our developer forum.

Investigation Complete - Issue Resolved
March 9, 2009 at 12:47 am 2009-03-09T00:46:51Z 2009-03-09T00:46:51Z
Online
We have determined that this spike did not affect the performance or uptime of applications. If you feel we have incorrectly diagnosed this issue please inform us by posting in our developer forum.

Microsoft

Let's just compare the above reports with Microsoft's report about their Azure outage. The team has posted on their blog an explanation covering 3 aspects:

• What Happened?
• What Was Affected?
• How Will We Prevent This in the Future?

Leaving aside the fact that as a way to prevent further problems the Azure team has decided to provide by default a second instance that is not counted against the service quota:

For continued availability during upgrades, we recommend that application owners deploy their application with multiple instances of each role. We'll make two the default in our project templates and samples. We will not count the second instance against quota limits, so CTP participants can feel comfortable running two instances of each application role.

the report makes me feel confident in the team capability to deal with problems.

Amazon

Unfortunately I don't have any specific references here, but I clearly remember Amazon been very explicit in their explanations and the plans to address similar issues in the future.

My question now is: who would you trust?

I do feel that failing to provide any details about the problems and their resolution is not the best policy to convince your users about your capability to operate the system and its stability.

What we've got here is a failure to communicate.

Let Me Rephrase the Google App Engine Announcement

The most important aspect of this year's Google Campfire was, according to the official announcement, the addition of a new language to Google App Engine. I cannot say the new language was a surprise to me as I was writing about the reasons why Java will be the next language supported on Google App Engine a couple of weeks ago.

Anyways, while watching the live stream and discussing with other watchers it came to my mind that people are still not realizing that when speaking about Java there are usually two aspects to it: the programming language and the virtual machine. Even the official announcement misses this very important aspect.

Why is this so important?

The answer is basically extremely simple: within hours after the announcement I start getting confirmation that more and more languages are actually working on Google App Engine. To this moment I've heard of at least of 6 languages: BeanShell, Clojure, Groovy, JavaScript (Rhino), Ruby (JRuby), Scala. I have left aside Jython which is just another implementation of Python which was already supported on App Engine.

So, now let me rephrase this part of the announcement:

Google App Engine is supporting now the Java Virtual Machine and any languages that run on top of it.

Clojure on Google App Engine

Here is a list of links for running Clojure on Google App Engine

• Will Clojure work on AppEngine? Options
• Clojure on Google AppEngine Options
• Clojure on Google AppEngine
• Getting Cloudy: Clojure on Google App Engine

Groovy on Google App Engine

Guillaume Laforge have posted an article on the SpringSource blog on writing your Google App Engine applications in Groovy.

At the moment Grails doesn't work, but I'd say this is just a matter of days now.

JRuby on Google App Engine

Ola Bini has been the first to published a very detailed tutorial on how to run JRuby on Rails on Google App Engine.

You can further track the list of the supported languages on this page.

In case you want to watch the whole Google Campfire event I have embedded below the videos:

Get Google Chrome for Mac Now

Update: There are newer builds available for download. Check the Track Google Chrome for Mac section

It is still not the official release, but a developer built it from the real source code and runs natively on Mac OS (as opposed to another version that was coming with an emulator). So, if you think you've waited enough for an official build and want to try it out, you can download it from here (zip download) (nb the download file is hosted by the author of the build: Manu)

Included Features

• Basic Websites (Gmail works sometimes)
• Bookmark pages
• Most visited sites
• Open new tabs
• Back, Forward, Reload
• Full Screen Browsing
• Open link in new window
• Drag a tab to make a window
• Launch new tab
• Cut, Copy, Paste
• Keyboard shortcuts
• about:version, about:dns, about:crash, about:histograms

Missing Features

• Open link in new tab
• Plugins
• No Flash support
• History
• Omnibox
• Bookmarks Bar
• Find
• Print
• about:network, about:memory
• Web Inspector
• Input methods such as Kotoeri (Japanese)
• Preferences

Thanks Manu!

Tracking Google Chrome for Mac

There are 2 places to track Google Chrome for Mac

• Download updated native Google Chrome or Mac OS X (unofficial builds from the official source code)
• Mac Detailed Status

He Made Me Do It

It is the first time I'm posting a music video on my blog... but years ago I've been an Eminem fan and this new song really made me do it:

The song "We made you" is from Eminem upcoming album Relapse.

Digg: I Want My PageRank Back!

Update 1: I think there is a possible fix for the Digg new behavior. It involves the usage of a new HTML directive in the form:

  <link rel="canonical" href="ORIGINAL_URL" />

but I don't know how many search engines are using this information. For more details about rel='canonical' see the Resource section.

Update 2: There is already a PHP script for denying access to the page when it is referred from a short Digg link. You can find it here. The idea is simple: look for the Referer request header.

Update 3: Engadget is blocking DiggBar.

Update 4: Some are saying DiggBar is not evil.

You've been blogging for a while and with some blood, sweat and tears you've been able to build some PageRank , so your blog would sometimes really appear on the Google searches.

You've also tried to bring more traffic to your blog, so you've submitted your stories to Digg, Reddit, etc hoping that someday you'll reach the homepage and that will generate thousands of visits.

Anyways, by launching the DiggBar and introducing the new internal URLs for stories posted on Digg, Digg has decided that getting some traffic from Digg is enough reward for your posts and your PageRank is worth nothing. By loading your page in an IFRAME they made sure you'll get no PageRank at all and that all future search engine generated traffic will go to Digg.

I do understand that you need a way to feed your well overstuffed company, but I'd expect something else from a 'web legend' like Kevin Rose. Thanks for understanding the web Digg!

Digg-ing this post entry requires my prior consent.

By the way: I've already removed Digg from the initial bookmarks options for this blog.

Resources:

• About rel=canonical
• PHP script for blocking Digg

Rolinks: Microjobs by Cristi Manafu

I cannot say (at least not yet) that I like or dislike Microjobs.ro, but I definitely appreciate the way Cristi has initiated the project and market it so far. Something that most of us should learn from.

Here is the a short history of the project in links:

• Projects: Feedback pentru Microjobs.ro
• Events: In turneu cu Microjobs.ro
• Personal: Debut ca antreprenor
• Projects: Felia de business (must read)
• Projects: Noutati de la Microjobs.ro (part 1) (must read)

Update: There is a new post Projects: Noutati de la Microjobs.ro (part 2) providing more details about suggested ways to monetize the project.

Google Finally Sharing Details of Their Custom Server

Even if you are not a hardware specialist or fan you have to see the simplicity (but also extremely ingenious) of one of the best kept Google secrets: their custom server.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

For those with an appetite for hardware I'd recommend reading the CNET article.

Attention Profiling Mark-up Language

Attention Profiling: APML Beginner's Guide

Attention Profiling

When you browse the web and sign up for various social media services, information is being collected about your interests and tastes. [...]

And when you sign up for social networking websites such as MySpace or Facebook, the explicit information you give - your gender, age, favorite recording artists and so on - is gathered, in addition to the more implicit information about which profiles you visit, or Facebook applications you install.

For the companies involved this is big business - as there are marketing firms willing to pay a lot of money for this sort of information.

Attention Profiling by Michael Pick

APML is a proposed standard that gives you greater control over your own attention data, and in principle will allow you to selectively record your attention profile - the sites you visit, the search terms that interest you most, the content you most commonly link to - and share it with your favorite websites and services.

Attention Data - What It Is and Why It Matters

...consolidated, structured descriptions of people's interests and dislikes. The information about your interests and how much each means to you (ranking) is stored in a way so that computers and web-based services can easily read it, interpret it, process it and pass it on should you request and permit them to do so.

Marjolein Hoekstra

Of course you aren't alone, and whether you like it or not your search habits on Google, the applications you install on Facebook, and the content you write about in your blog are ripe for being "data mined" by those with a vested interest in compiling such information.

APML provides a means that you could personally take control of your information in a consolidated file, to use where you see fit to your own ends and benefit. And at the same time advertisers and content providers are given a much clearer picture of what might interest you, saving you the hassle of wading through irrelevant interruptive marketing, and being presented with information and offers that might very well be worth your taking a look at.

Basics

The profile has the form of an XML file. With each site your are visiting you are adding more information to your profile: not only in terms of interest, but also in terms of interest ranking. This way services may be able to serve you with relevant content.

Why Use APML?

The biggest reason you might want to use APML is the sheer amount of information bombarding you every day, and the ratio of signal to noise evident in that information. Because while you may have very specific needs and interests that you want served, it is not always a simple task to locate the information you're looking for.

Furthermore, as advertising is here to stay on the web, it would certainly be a lot better news if the ads you saw were tailor-made to your interests.

[...] Rather than having to go out looking for information in a hit-and-miss way, the information comes to you, and learns over time what interests you most through your acceptance and rejection of the offers served up.

So rather than a generic news website front page where I have to navigate to the sections that interest me, the news site could automatically display a custom set of headlines based on my interests and needs.

Resources

More documentation

• AMPL.org
• apml-library code
• APML specification
• APML - The Next Big Thing or The Next FOAF? - Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins (see other links here)
• Basics of Attention Profiling Through APML - Marjolein Hoekstra
• Explaining APML - What it is, Why You Want it - Elias Bizannes
• My Data Stream - Emily Chang

Applications

• Particls: receiving alerts about the news that interests you
• Engagd: creating your APML file through your personal selection of RSS feeds. It also allows you to filter your RSS feeds according to your evolving profile. See also this
• Cluztr: social network based on sharing your clickstream with friends; it an APML file based on your browsing habits, and uses it to automatically generate tags for other users to explore content through

Legal Music for Free

I've initially thought to post this as an April fool entry announcing that starting today all music will be available for free and that each music label will be required to have a website offering access to all their records.

In fact it's just two links for finding (legal) music online:

• Free Legal Music Sites
• 30+ Awesome Sites for Streaming Music

I sometimes use Deezer.com and YouTube.com, so I'd really appreciate if you can share your favorites!

By the way: here is how YouTube looked on April 1st. Nice joke!

The best joke of this April 1st is definitely the redesign of reddit.com to look like digg. Awesome!

Cloud Computing Unification Storm Calming Down

After what seemed to be the start of an interesting debate (with quite a few dramatic declarations), it looks like IBM and Microsoft sat at the same table and came up with a polite common position:

Representatives of CCIF, CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and the IEEE-ISTO met while attending the Cloud Computing Expo in New York. Other companies were invited but were unable to attend, generally due to the short notice.

The companies agreed on a shared goal to promote use and awareness of open and interoperable cloud computing. The group brainstormed several ideas including the possibility to build on the momentum created by CloudCamp.

Another topic was the ability to enable participants, from individuals and companies, both large and small, to be able to contribute to and use the results of broad community collaboration. Additionally, the possibility of a trade association or marketing association for cloud computing was discussed but no specific actions were agreed. The final topic was the need to have broader participation from the community in this discussion

But don't let this declaration trick you. The fight for leadership is far for being over! In fact it is just starting and what happened last week was just a rehearsal. Interesting times ahead!

In case you missed the events, here is a series of post summarizing the week:

• Microsoft to lead the cloud computing market
• Cloud computing Unification: Microsoft or Sun?
• Cloud Computing Unification Getting Ugly

Resources:

• IBM And Microsoft Bury The Hatchet On 'Open Cloud'... Sort Of