Globealive: The Next Big Thing ?

Via Doc Via Head Lemur.  Wow!  You don't often see comments like these about a startup:

Blogs and blogging software opened up the ability of a large number of folks to communicate ideas and information without knowing any of the underlying tags, protocols, and nuts and bolts of traditional website creation. I have spent 6 years building websites for a living and it is not an easy road to follow. This is their true power.

The conversations around blogs as journalism are semantic exercises of small import, promulgated by folks whose day jobs are under increasing pressure by folks who can do their own reporting on events and offer opinions unfiltered by marketing, editorial, or sales departments. The true crime here is that the anti-blogger journalism folks point out errors and fallacies, but offer no guidance on how reporting is done, nor share effective writing techniques. They still believe the emperor's new clothes are stunning.

Information without education is the old way of communication. Blind faith in the acceptance of news by organizations whose principles are being bent by ratings, marketshare, and advertising, are being examined and pointed out with increasing regularity by simple folks whose eyes are being opened to the potential of communication and discourse in near real time.

Doc's announcement of Allen's new enterprise, Globe Alive , points to the next stage in this revolution in communication. Globe Alive is the next big thing.

Real time communication with folks who have information to share, expertise to offer, and are willing to do so on a one to one basis is going to revolutionize the way folks can use information to improve their lives, their business, and their society. Globe Alive is the next big thing.

Wow.  That's high praise.  I just checked out GlobeAlive and even signed up (their IM software is now running on my machine).  Their blog is here.  No rss feed yet but I pointed them to rssify if they want to make one.

Good going guys!  Anything that gets high praise in this current excuse for an economy must be just plain cool.

And here's a Feedster search for Globealive.

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Feedster: Scott Duffy Gets It

What a nice comment to end* my day with:

This feedster thing is cool. Think about it. Through web logging, and now search engines for web logs, you can now search out other people's opinions at the click of a mouse. It's like instant polling. This might the first time in history that human opinion was cataloged so effectively. 

More...

Wow.  And its even from another guy named Scott -- a "Scott Duffy".  Thanks man.  Much appreciated.

*Actually my day isn't over yet.  Not even close but when you're blogging at 5:50 in the afternoon, it "feels" like the end of the day.

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One Down!  Or "Can I Never / Rarely Do PowerPoint Again?"

I've been holed up, somewhat ignoring my feedly duties, doing my php-con presentations and I just knocked out the slides for a 3 hour "Getting Started with PHP" class.  I started both sets of slides a while ago but got distracted, got sick and now Phew!  One Down!  Woo Hoo!  I took a little different approach, focusing on the things you really, really use rather than trying to touch everything.  Since its a small class, we'll probably go random right away so the slides may not matter that much anyway.  I'll post them post conference.  Thanks to Simon for letting me see his slides a few months back although I never did use them when I actually sat down this time.

I did the slides in PowerPoint since I'm taking a Mac and I don't have OpenOffice installed on my iBook -- nor even know if it works under OS-X.  And I have PowerPoint installed and working.  Although I've used PowerPoint for years, going back to it after a 6 month gap, i.e. the last PHP-CON, and I found it strangely difficult.  Yeah it looks good but the authoring process was pretty awful -- you turn off their IntelliFormat and it still capitalizes every line.  Which is a bad, bad, bad thing with code samples.  And don't even get me started about pasting into PowerPoint -- that's another blog entry in itself.

Question: Does it make conference organizers go "Ack!" when they realize that speakers aren't ready early?  Or is it just expected now a days that everyhing is last minute.

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Social Software Alliance

Very interesting.  Here are their guiding principles: 

Since there won't be just ONE kind or implementation of social software, by definition we need to facilitate the inter-connection of different 'systems' together. That's ONE thing social software standards can do. - Marc

More... (well a link at least that's really it)

I signed up.  Most of the folks I really respect are there and I'm using their standards so I should be a member.  Or that's what I think.  YMMV.

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Tim Bray: Geeky But Good

Via Six Apart.  If you're a code guy then this makes sense and is funny.  If you're not then just abend*:

Maybe I'm missing something, but four method dispatches to create a three-character string feels a little, well, stupid. More ...

*abend = Abort then End.  Old fashioned mainframe speak for batch processing jobs.

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Good Job ActiveWords!

Here's some nice comments on Active Words from Buzz Bruggeman by Bill Machrone at PC Magazine:

I almost always use my keyboard for launching applications and switching between apps. All the apps I frequently use are in my Start menu, and I've renamed them so I can start any one with a single keystroke: Windows-W for Word, Windows-V for my VPN, Windows-P for PhotoPaint, and so on.

That's a good start, but you can go considerably farther with ActiveWords, a new utility that watches what you type while you're in any Windows application. So while you're working on your e-mail or in your word processing app, you might suddenly decide that you want to visit eBay to see whether there are any new Righteous Brothers memorabilia available. You could name the search page rbm and access it by typing those letters and hitting the F8 key. The letters disappear from your application, and ActiveWords launches the appropriate browser window.

More ..

ActiveWords is a really nice product.  I don't use it a lot because I've been reluctant to tie myself too much to one machine and one OS (windows) but I really do like it.  It actually reminds me a lot of Inbox Buddy -- just an unobtrusive product which makes your day to day life better.

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All the Web Update

Interesting AlltheWeb has an update.  Andrei has the details (via Sterling).  Note that this (Andrei's) site seems to not display correctly in Internet Explorer 6.  If you don't see any text then drag the mouse over it and it'll appear.  Works fine in Mozilla though.

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MySQL Optimization Tip (and Opinion Requested)

I am by no means a MySQL optimization expert.  I leave that to those who have mastered the "Zen of MySQL" (Jeremy) who even just published an excellent presentation on it.  Now Feedster makes pretty extensive use of MySQL and as I am reviewing my table structure, something I'm noticing is that I'm using way too large fields all over the place.  Now if I read this MySQL man page correctly, I can use a TINYINT to store between -127 and 127.  Like a lot of people I suspect, I was just using an INT.  That's 4 bytes instead of 1.  Not a big savings but if you have this kind of wastage on a number of fields, it adds up.

So my MySQL optimization tip is:

1. Figure out your maximum values for each field in your database.
2. Make sure that your existing field type isn't significantly larger than needed. 

For a lot of databases this might not matter but when you have hundreds of thousands if not millions of rows, every bit helps.

Note: This might be covered in Jeremy's presentation but like most folks, I learn best by the school of hard knocks.

Note 2: If there is anything technically incorrect in the above, I'd really like to know it.

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