links for 2008-06-09
June 9, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
-
Yum!
-
Some good things to keep in mind if nothing else.
-
Interesting Idea.
Mollom - Spam Control and More
April 24, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
I came across this service a little earlier in the week and can’t wait to give it a try! It is quite possibly the first real competitor to Akismet for community spam filtering and control. The Drupal community is all up in arms with praise for the beta-service.
Sometime next week I think I’ll toss it onto one of my Drupal sites and see how it does for a while. While I’ve been pretty happy with Akismet (which I use on this site), competition is always a good thing and everyone likes to detect and delete spam.
What appears to be the claim to fame with Mollom is that learns from it’s mistakes and your content. Apparently one of the features in the pipe is content filtering, like nuking inappropriate language from community sites. While the community sites that I’ve managed haven’t had much of a language problem, those things do happen and varying defense levels certainly help to quell managerial fear.
If you’ve used http://mollom.com/javascript:mctmp(0); let me know your thoughts.
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-04-10
April 10, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Looking over some NAB materials and hounding on my development team to get Contributr back online in time for the conference season #
- Trying to figure out what the heck my Contributr developers have been doing for the last several weeks, not being micromanaged, nor working. #
- Wow that last Tweet was a Twoosh! (The sentence was 140 characters by complete accident) #
- @rosshill Nice find! reTweeting: Restaurant that uses Tumbler as their web site: http://blackbirdbuvette.com/ #
- @rosshill I like all of the Twitter interface changes I’ve found so far today, let’s hope it doesn’t get ‘cluttered’ #
- Why didn’t anyone tell me Flickr released video today? I must be out of the loop this week. #
- It’s not as exciting as you might think but here’s a tag-cloud generated from my Tweets http://tinyurl.com/6o63pw #
- @coreygreenberg You’re using AMP? I don’t run into people who have tried, much less use Adobe Media Player. #
- @CreativeSage Are you campaigning against RickRolling?
# - @efortiz Yeah, it’s a decent enough app, I talked to some of the original devs from AMP last year and it’s "heart" isn’t in the right place. #
- @CreativeSage oic, I haven’t watched the episode yet, it’s on the list though. #
- Retweeting: ijustine: Wanting to hit all the btchr’s complaining about flickr video: http://tinyurl.com/6xbelc #
- @acafourek what hardware do you have again? I don’t think my old PowerBook could handle all that #
- @acafourek that’s a nice setup, I’m looking at MBP’s pretty seriously right now, I get this thing maxed out all the time #
- @britter @chrisbrogan I’m going to have to have my parents Tivo it or something for next time I visit them. I keep hearing good things a … #
- @gerik do you love your Flip video? I got one a couple weeks ago, but NAB next week will be my first big test of it #
- I got my new business cards in today-they match my online branding, Convergence Journalism and New Media Specialist, including my twitter@ #
- Good morning Twitterville, it’s raining really hard this morning #
- @thewebcoach, have direct mail campaigns for social networking sites been effective for you? #
- @conniereece I’m still making up my mind on Everyone being w/ other tabs but I think it’s more Usable now, I see myself clicking on it more. #
- Contributr.net is back online, sans our beautiful new design, the design is done, the coding for it is not #
- Anyone out there who follows me or not from Vermont? @ or DM me please! #
- @awest FlipVideo has a lot of amazing potential to be used lots of ways, it one of my favorite gadgets right now. #
- @digitalmlewis The people behind Kickapps are very good people, I’ve met with them, and it’s a great product #
- I’m meeting with the startup incubator interested in Contributr here in a couple hours, wish me luck! #
- @misslacey123 ugh? #
- @singlegalDC Thanks! Been a while since we’ve talked, everything going well? #
- @leeodden Congrats on 1,000 after 1,400. That’s a much higher conversion rate than I have with my 316/3370 ratio. UR a good value!
# - Headed home from my meeting with the startup people, I’ve got some "next steps" to get started on, first thing, my patents and ownership … #
A Contributr Update
April 8, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
The Contributr team has been taking a little break recently, and that’s not a good thing. We’re trying frantically to make up time but other commitments got in the way.
Colby Palmer has been working on a complete redesign of the web application and the AIR desktop application and is doing a great job. He’s a great designer and a great guy and we’re glad to have him on our side! The difficult part now is pulling together all of the little bits and pieces before NAB next week.
I’ll be there presenting Contributr to the industry and friends and I’m really hoping we have the new design implemented enough to use it for our demos. It is a HUGE improvement over our first user interface and I’m very proud of it.
Thursday I’ll meet with the Missouri Innovation Center again to look at some of the business possibilities behind Contributr and its market viability as an early-stage startup. I hope that I’m able to take Contributr with me into my next job and continue working and enhancing it for the news media, and the public.
It would be a disservice not to give Contributr a shot and continue development.
So wish us luck as we try to get version 1.1 of Contributr out the door and ready for more widespread testing.
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 2008-04-03
April 3, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Good Morning Twitterville! #
- Do you know of a REALLY good email program for the Mac? Apple Mail has been misbehaving lately #
- @gregbd, Adobe Connect can be finicky but I do love the service. What’d it do? #
- Just setup my next meeting with the startup incubator who’s going to assist with Contributr #
- Taking a look at Scalr, the open source Amazon EC2 management initiative #
- @smalljones DM or email me more info you have any please #
- @newmediajim I’ve heard good things about the Sony line #
- Following up on job leads and making appointments with people #
- Just ordered a pizza for delivery via txt message, crazy isn’t it? #
- @melissaha I REALLY doubt it! #
- @danielpunkass you must have caught them on a good day, good catch #
- @benstein ah dang, to yourself? #
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-03-12
March 12, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Quick, see my featured article on Adobe.com: http://tinyurl.com/32xy4d #
- I’m also mentioned in the rotating feature on the University of Missouri homepage: http://tinyurl.com/2ng8lh #
- Morning Twitterville! It’s a beautiful day today #
- wow this election site that I’m working on has a 400kb homepage… designers aren’t optimizing images I take it! #
- Do you have a blog? Want a guest speaker? I’d be happy to contribute some ideas. DM me #
- Writing emails, it’s such a double edged sword because when I write someone, they write back, and the loop continues! #
- @webby2001 @chrisbrogan Twitter’s multi-format abilities make it far superior to txting, you can twitter anywhere/anytime/any platform #
- @respinos I know it, it’s unfortunate that I won’t be able to develop for iPhone using the SDK very easily #
- Just stopped by the grocery store, I think I have ingredients for about 2-weeks worth of meals now. yay! #
- I’m meeting with a startup incubator in a couple hours, hopefully I can get Contributr accepted and we can get rolling #
- I think I’ll go for a run this evening its so nice outside. #
How To Make A Million Before You Turn 20 - Forbes.com
February 26, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
How To Make A Million Before You Turn 20 - Forbes.com
(Via Forbes.)
This fascinating article talks briefly about 5 people 20 years old or younger who’ve already made their Million+. This is just amazing and it goes to show the kind of intelligent and entrepreneurial people we have in this world. It’s truly amazing.
Now I like to think of myself as pretty entrepreneurial, I’ve started more ‘companies’ than I care to remember. The remnants of a few are located on this site through the various old sites and publications I have posted in my portfolio.
This drive to achieve and create something though speaks to a higher calling and a higher level of thinking. Lots of people have ideas, but these kids actually went out and achieved.
No amount of technology can ensure that you actually achieve, that takes something special.
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.
–
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 - 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.–
-
OtherProfiles
