How I Exercise My Mind
April 23, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Because I’m constantly connected to real people as well as the Internet it can be difficult sometimes to keep your mind sharp and on focus. I’m not perfect in that regard, that’s for sure. But I do try to keep a fairly clean calendar with important events and conversations.
In addition to my email and calendar practices I also do some other things to try to stay ahead of my mind. For instance, I regularly check my RSS reader to stay current on news and information in topic areas that I’m interested in.
But staying sharp isn’t just staying organized, I also try to get out and walk or run several times a week. I’m not always successful but I do certainly feel a lot better about my workload, stress, and well being after being physically active.
My Nintendo DS also helps to keep me on top of my game, I enjoy taking a quick break now and again to play some Brain Age, or Big Brain Academy. The DS is the first video game system that I’ve purchased in quite a while (although the Wii is awful fun to play if someone else has the equipment).
Ok so this post actually ended up being shorter than you might think, what things to do you do in order to stay sharp and focused?
Introducing Google AppEngine
April 7, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
It’s Google’s first foray into application stack support and infrastructure and I for one am very excited to give it a try. I was planning to go to bed early tonight and get an early start to tomorrow but now I feel the need to wait until 9 PST to signup and be one of the first 10,000 to signup for the developer’s beta program.
Do I know Python? Nope, but I’m certainly going to learn it now. Python is very popular among modern web applications and is one of the 4 or 5 primary (and exclusive) languages and Google uses and approves of in-house.
What’s amazing is that when you think of the end-result for Google by releasing an application stack of infrastructure like they are. If every developer in the world has a chance to develop web applications using the same base as Google does, well what can’t Google do?
Frankly one of the neatest aspects I see is this, if you develop on Google AppEngine, and Google likes your idea, they could buy your company or your app from you and launch it immediately. There wouldn’t be any more of this 1-year plus delay from purchase to beta re-launch under Google like JotSpot and GrandCentral who wait patiently to be integrated into the GoogleMachine. Your app already uses their system and works within their constraints, so what’s holding it back?
I’ll update this post with more as I encounter more news and information about the program in the coming hours and days. Stay tuned!
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-03-18
March 18, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Good Morning Twitterville, it’s still raining here and it’s kinda depressing. #
- I really like the new Safari "Develop" menu for quick switching between user-agents, etc. #
- I am now Twittering using Ping.fm! #
- Hello World! This is my first post from Ping.fm, I’m testing out their service this morning. #
- Time for my post-lunch laptop battery recharge period… it’s also nice to turn up the screen brightness to high #
- @HighTechDad I like it, and I tend to think of "grid" as being a much better term than "cloud". Although I find myself using both. #
- Ping.fm is pretty neat, but can it beat "Moodlbast" which I’ve used for quite some time, watch for a blog post later
# - @HighTechDad Just a little, launched a couple servers, logged in, haven’t done any configuring or file loading yet. #
- Top News Headline of the day: "Ambulance Hits Heard Of Dear" - grammar errors theirs, I LOLd 4real on when it hit my feed reader. #
- Using the Reynold’s Institute’s money to register for NAB in Las Vegas in April, and I’ve got an interview setup in Las Vegas that same week #
- Just finished dinner, I’ve got some server migrations/upgrades/ordering to do tonight for Contributr #
Why Your Business Needs To Focus On Relationships More and On Money Less - Dawud Miracle @ dmiracle.com -
March 4, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
(Via dmiracle.)
I’ve blogged many times before about the lack of effective monetization for news organizations on the web. It’s not just news orgs that need better ads and monetization strategies, believe me, I’ve been there.
Many of the web sites I built and sold have been ad revenue based, and none of it was easy. Some of the sites that i’ve built over the years didn’t even make much money, but they sold for more than the sites that were making twice or more. Know what the difference was? Heart, the ones that sold high I had put more time into them and they had ‘meaning’.
The web isn’t just about making money and taking names, it’s about building relationships and networks now. This is what web 2.0 is really about. It’s about the people. People make the mashable web go round.
The blog post I’m highlighting here talks about relationships and conversations being worth more than than the revenue your site is supposed to generate as it relates to businesses.
Now I understand that The Man wants to make his or her money from web ventures, but relationships and conversations can, and do, bring much more to the table. By gaining respect and ‘friends’ in the social web you’re able to use those connections and real people to your advantage.
There’s nothing quite like getting real, honest feedback from people who actually visit your site and have something to say about it.
So as you’re launching the next big web venture remember that, money is important, but the relationships are just as important, and often more important than the revenue.
Recent Facebook Application Launches
February 28, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
I recently launched several Facebook applications and thought I’d share them with you. All of them are essentially the same application with different content, they parse RSS feeds from blogs and newsrooms that I work with.
While these aren’t examples of huge viral applications, they have been gaining viewers and interactions day by day. (I might also add that these are in a sort of perpetual beta until further notice )
- KOMU News Headlines
- KBIA News Headlines
- Columbia Missourian Headlines
- Jonathan Coffman Blog Headlines
- The Convergency Room Recent Posts
Have a look and let me know what you think!
Pie In The Sky - Comparing Current Offerings
February 21, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Comparing Current Offerings
Amazon:
- Very Inexpensive (+1)
- Very powerful (+1)
- Recently had its first major downtime event (-1)
- Very flexible in terms of OS, applications, etc (+1)
- S3 storage service provides a good platform for archive storage (+1)
- Bring your own Machine Image is a good thing, use what you’re familiar with (+1)
- You cannot upload and download files using FTP/SFTP as with standard web hosts (-1)
- You’re probably going to need an outside management firm unless you’ve got a very smart admin on staff already. (-1)
Score: B, the biggest loss here is the usability factor, it’s not usable for your everyday web hosting needs. If there were a control-panel and management provided by Amazon this would be an A.
Mosso’s Hosting Cloud:
- Higher starting price point (-1)
- Very fair overage fees (+1)
- Multiple smallish downtime incidents have been reported (-1)
- Being a startup, they’ve got heart (+1)
- Usability is high with their easy to use control panel (+1)
- They haven’t been able to truly solve RoR scaleability (null)
- Reseller friendly, if you have an account you can sublease your resources to friends and clients very easily, including billing (+1)
Score: A-, Mosso has gotten closer than anyone else to being what I would consider a true cloud computing provider. The get bonus point for being usable and for being around more than a year or two. I hope they can implement a plan with a lower starting price point, and someone has to figure out RoR, hopefully it’ll be these guys.
MediaTemple:
- Low starting price point (+1)
- High overage fees (-1)
- Recent significant downtime, both scheduled and unscheduled (-1)
- “Container” technology and usage is effective, and usually efficient (+1)
- Beta (cs) Cluster Server is in the works that promises to ‘fix’ many of the problems with the current (gs) Grid Server (+1).
Score: B, MediaTemple is attacking the lower end of the clustered server hosting arena and are doing a good job of it too. Much of their early success is attributed to being featured on the popular TechCrunch site right after launch. MediaTemple is where my own sites are currently hosted and I’m very happy with them.
Others:
There are other cloud and utility computing providers out there, see Monday’s post for more information but I do not have direct contact or experience with them like I do the above providers. I encourage you to take a look at the others in the field, which are mostly on the enterprise (higher) level than any of my current projects.
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Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
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Pie In The Sky - Where Mosso Has it Right and Wrong
February 20, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Where Mosso’s The Hosting Cloud Wins and Looses
Mosso’s The Hosting Cloud promises to offer all of the stability, uptime, and processing power of competing grid/cluster products without the management headache.
This is in distinct contrast to Amazon’s cloud computing services, they provide the machines and that’s about it. It’s up to the user to provide the OS, applications, support, and management of the servers.
Mosso has it right, and if cloud and utility computing is going to catch on, it needs to appeal to the masses. Appealing to the masses at this point on the Internet largely means usability. If it’s not highly usable to the target demographic you might as well wait to launch.
From what I’ve seen of the Mosso Hosting Cloud control panel, they’ve taken great care to make sure it’s easily used and implemented by anyone who’s used shared web hosting previously.
Some of the key problems of utility computing remain however and it’s a testament not just to how far we are from truly ubiquitous cloud computing. Web platforms weren’t designed from the ground-up to be highly scaleable. Which is unfortunate, but changing.
One of the biggest problems I see in the near-term is Ruby and Rails, while it will scale gracefully (look at Twitter for instance), it took a lot of work and dedicated resources to make it do so.
Mosso has decided to continue using LightSpeed as the service to handle RoR on their cloud, which being a commercial product is largely proprietary and not the end all of solutions.
The only other area that I would have liked to have seen additional improvement is the higher cost of entry into Mosso’s system. At $99 it stands toward top of list in terms of shared hosting, granted this is much better than any shared host you’ll find anywhere, but the fact still stands that at $99 you’ve got a whole new set of competitors than at MediaTemple’s $20 entry point.
For $99 in the hosting industry you can get a pretty powerful VPS, a very low-end dedicated server, or multiple shared hosting accounts. Of course the argument Mosso has is that for that $99 you’re in theory getting multiple (potentially dozens+) VPS style systems for your dollar.
Scaling up from that $99 is where Mosso is at an even greater advantage, their ‘overage’ charges are on the lower end of the line than other grid/cluster hosting platforms.
So while Mosso’s Hosting Cloud is a big step in the right direction, there are numerous additional problems that need to be solved before my dream of utility/cloud computing really comes true.
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Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
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Pie In The Sky - Mosso’s Hosting Cloud Launches
February 19, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about what I thought “The Cloud” should look like, well my dream may just be coming true! A couple days after the post I was contacted by Mosso, which is the grid hosting component of RackSpace.
Mosso is releasing a new service that promises to have the stability and security of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud service, with the ease of use and support of a managed hosting environment.
I spoke with Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce last week about the possibilities and the plans and what follows is what he had to say.
Basically, Mosso has worked over the last few months to shore up issues and enhance the features available to their customers. The ‘Hosting Cloud’ as they are now calling it is the end-result of that work, with a new emphasis on billing for actual usage.
Mosso currently supports over 37,000 web applications on their cluster, so they’ve got some experience in enterprise scaling. Right now cloud computing is dominated by Amazon’s services, but what Mosso has done is take the power of the cloud and simplified its use, allowing customers to use standard web development tools and transports to build and update their web sites and applications.
One area that Amazon has taken a hit is their lack of control panel and controls in general, there are a couple companies who having created business around providing management for EC2/S3 controls, but Mosso has wrapped up everything you need into a familiar looking dashboard control panel environment.
In just a few clicks, and in 5 minutes you can setup a new web application on their grid selecting from Windows/Linux, PHP, MySQL and other technologies. Your application is then created on the SAN and virtualized to several servers to begin with. It’s then ready to be virtualized onto additional servers on the fly as demand and load increases.
Mosso has always been setup with the reseller in mind, and their new focus on The Cloud doesn’t change that, customers are still allowed an unlimited number of applications and databases and 3rd party billing support.
The pricing and marketing is where The Hosting Cloud really changes the business, they’re keeping the current $99 per month hosting fee, but dropping the overage charges to much more reasonable levels.
For your $99 a month you get 3 million requests, in and out. If you go over that, there’s where the power of the cloud kicks in, addition requests are only 3 cents per thousand (a very reasonable amount).
In addition to processing power, SAN storage space and bandwidth are also included in the base fee with low overage fees (25 cents per GB over your allocation of bandwidth, and 50 cents per GB of SAN space).
I’ll be back tomorrow with more thoughts on Mosso’s announcement and I’ll share some links to other posts about the launch from the blogosphere.
–Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.–
Pie In the Sky - A Blog Series Examining the Future of Web Hosting
February 17, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
This week marks a major series of blog posts. All week I’ll be posting about my vision for the future of web hosting and the Internet itself. The series couldn’t come at a better time, web startups are everywhere again, personal computing and communication has been revolutionized, and creating connections between people, machines, and the world has never been easier.
Stay with me all week to get resources, tips, advice, vision, and more as I take a look at the Pie In The Sky, the future of web hosting.
The future is literally today as social networks and pervasive computing continue to dominate the online landscape just as we as a country continue to march toward an election season rife with technology issues that need to be taken care of.
Here’s a quick preview of some of the topics you’ll see throughout the week:
- Monday: Where we are now, the state of the Internet
- Tuesday: Major product launch and commentary
- Wednesday: Launch recap and review
- Thursday: Comparing cloud computing platforms
- Friday: Where the future of web hosting and the Internet lies
- Saturday: How Journalism, new-media, and social-media can take advantage of the future - Today.
In between major posts I’ll also be posting links and resources in micro-blog format to provide additional context, information, and commentary.
If you haven’t already, please subscribe to my RSS feed to always have the latest content. Alternatively, you can also subscribe to my blog via email using the form in the far right column.
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Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
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Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-02-12
February 12, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Just upgraded my site to fix the WP security hole, 5 minutes down isn’t too bad is it? #
- I can’t get my iTunes to purchase a ringtone I want
# - The interwebs are broken again #
- The Interwebs are still down, talk about a productivity killer! #
- I’m on a blogging roll, at least two posts launching today folks. #
- Think I got bumped from the newspaper side of the Gannett job fair tomorrow, Jschool folk don’t understand that newspaper/TV doesn’t matter. #
- @avionne how do you do that? running Windows? #
- bah, half my Tweets are being eaten with the broken Interwebs monster #
- @acafourek your workplace is Twitter friendly? #
- I need to revamp my RSS reading workflow, giving NetNewsWire another try #
- If you had to pay for Twitter would you? #
- If I shared more links via Twitter would you prefer that, or should I just post to Delicious? #
- Just off the phone with Adobe Marketing, I’ll be featured on Adobe.com in March! #
- @acafourek thanks! It’s pretty exciting, now to write my article… and find a job! #
- @deanpence let us know, it’s pretty exciting, I can just about justify an AppleTV now. #
- @acomputerpro, I’ve encountered that and realized that it’s lazy coding, since it ‘could’ be interfering with their DB coding/variables. #
- @computerpro @deanpence Dean beat me to it. #
- @dsilverman the only times I’ve used Pownce was when Twitter was down for extended time periods. #
- Reading My ongoing challenge with Firefox jacking my CPU to near 100% at http://tinyurl.com/3yev82 #
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