Sunday, April 11, 2004

Overview - Service-Oriented Architecture: Developing the Enterprise Roadmap. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) design practices allow businesses to leverage their investments in platforms and applications through service reuse and standards-based interoperability. In this Application Platform Strategies overview, Burton Group Senior Analyst James Kobielus defines SOA design principles and best practices in depth. Kobielus explains how service-oriented design supports the virtual enterprise network (VEN) paradigm and leverages the network application platform (NAP) and Web Services framework (WSF). [Burton Group - Application Platform Strategies] 3:06:37 PM    comment []

TeleBriefing - Teleconference - Application Platform Strategies Service Upgrade: Reference Architecture. Join us for this special teleconference, which will highlight a new valuable decision-support tool for IT technologists, strategists, and planners who subscribe to Burton Group's APS research service. Effective 2/12/04, Reference Architecture is available to all APS clients as part of, and integrated into, their existing research and advisory service. One of three Reference Architectures offered by Burton Group, ''Reference Architecture for APS'' is tailored to the topics covered in the APS research service. The teleconference will highlight components of the inaugural Reference Architecture for APS: Application Integration - depicting the relationships between platforms and frameworks (such as J2EE, Java, .NET, and LAMP), and integration via Web services standards like XML, SOAP, WSDL, and Web services processing engines and methods Application Platform Foundations - covering the building blocks: application frameworks, languages, operating systems, and application topologies Web Services Integration - providing the standards, specifications, and decision matrix for building interoperable applications and service-oriented architectures Reference Architecture for APS is a web-based, practical, decision-support tool that offers an enterprise-wide view of applications infrastructure. Reference Architecture facilitates infrastructure-planning objectives over a 2-3 year period and helps define your future-state network. By providing strong, actionable recommendations that are based on specific business and technology principles, Burton Group clients can now make architecture decisions about applications infrastructure that are particularly suited for their company. [Burton Group - Application Platform Strategies] 3:06:29 PM    comment []

small business.......and Google. Ruminating about small business and the Net: Of course, the customer set is incredibly diverse, but you can divide them into three broad categories not by size or industry, but into sellers of · Goods that can be described in a catalogue and shipped to someone. Products is the best-known and has benefited hugely from the example of Amazon and the platform provided by eBay. More recently, Overture and Google AdWOrds have enabled these companies and also online service firms - to reach a huge market that was previously unreachable. (GoogleÂ’s AdSense - allowing small businesses to sell ads on their own sites - has also enabled a host of online content providers to cover their costs or even make a profit.) And FedEX and UPS have enabled them to ship and manage inventories. · Online services that can be both described and delivered online. This is the fastest-growing and the newest category, and it covers everything from call centers to outsourcing and ironically, is a growing supplier to other small businesses. · Local, physical services. The laggards are local service firms, doing everything from health clubs to restaurants, nursing to pizza deliveries, cleaning teeth or cleaning houses. Yes, these local service firms tend not to be very computerized, but thatÂ’s really not the issue. This broad, fragmented market needs one discrete thing to get it moving: effective local search. What [Yahoo!] Geocities or Tribe want to offer, Google could provide  in a minute if it could figure out how to constrain its results by geography. Imagine being able to type in “dry cleaner” and get the 20 nearest to you. Of course every large city has 10 or 15 such services..Â…which is exactly the problem. Google has the market share globally, but the much smaller local markets are still too fragmented. Even as media seem to be consolidating across the country, the Internet has allowed them to proliferate and fragment globally. As we watch Google, we canÂ’t help but wonder when it will add good, solid location-based search. Of course, the challenge is not just on GoogleÂ’s side; there needs to be better address data on the WebsitesÂ’ side. If you look at GoogleÂ’s Autofill, it is pitiful. ItÂ’s pretty easy for humans to figure out what needs to be filled out in a form; why canÂ’t Google? The difficulties there are akin to those of deriving an address. But now look at what has happened recently: GoogleÂ’s Gmail: what is it (presumably) other than a way of encouraging people to put metadata on their content sender, recipient, subject and derived fields such as number of ccs, date/time and store it in a Google database? Imagine if Google started doing the same for public events/calendars, store addresses, and yes, even blowout sales with amazing, never-to-be-repeated price cuts! There is such an initiative, SMB meta; I'm checking on what has happened to it.... [[This title "..and Google" reminds me of an old misogynist  joke, where everything was titled "X...and the woman question." The idea was that these pesky women inserted themselves and their position into every discussion..... fast-forward a century, and it was Microsoft. Now it's Google.]]   [EDventure] 3:06:08 PM    comment []

Overview - New Portal Standards and Future Developments. The portal software market is maturing and consolidating. New standards, such as Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), promise greater reuse and interoperability among portals and their content. In this overview, Senior Analyst Gary Hein examines the new portal standards JSR 168 and WSRP and their impact on portability and content reuse; he also explores portal market forces and their effect on enterprises and portal vendors. [Burton Group - Application Platform Strategies] 3:05:42 PM    comment []

uncensored, unprivate thoughts on Gmail - free advice. Note of course that it's always easier to speculate than to deal with cold hard facts... here are some thoughts about Google's new Gmail. [no more pictures for a while, until I or Blogware get better at it, and learn how to do thumbnails!) First off, yes, the privacy concerns are real: If you have anything really secret, you probably  shouldn't write about it in Gmail... or any other public, unencrypted e-mail service. On the other hand, you *certainly* shouldn't write anything secret on your well-protected corporate service. Much as I love my new employers at CNET, entering the corporate world makes me realize how handy it could be to have my own private e-mail account somewhere else. For starters, the CNET folk would not want the liability of responsibility for what I might be up to on my own... and for my part I know that they would take a more personal interest in my affairs than would some sysop at Google. Yes, I trust Google...but do I trust everyone who works there, forever? of course not! The difference between Gmail and all the other privacy flaps lately is that Google is upfront about what they are doing - and you can sign up or not. It's not as if they were tracking you around with cookies that you don't know about or capturing your mistyped URLs to sell your traffic to the highest bidder... so, with that out of the way (though for sure it merits and will get further discussion), just think about some of the possibilities... first, with ads you'll never have to pay - as long as there's competition; I fervently hope so! second, what's intriguing is using people's *own* words rather than the words they "consume" as indicators of their interests. As I understand it, though, right now it's the *incoming* mail that gets selected, or perhaps entire conversation threads. Consider this service-placement: In the sequel to Something's gotta give, Diane Keaton has left sleazy old Jack Nicholson and is back with the cute young doctor, but things are dragging: "Julian's mail used to have ads for flowers and expensive restaurants, but now it's all discount hardware and bagel shops." "Yeah," responds her just-married, new-mother friend Alice, "with Juan it used to be vacations in Greece and Manolo shoes, but now it's baby monitors and kitchen sets." Coming soon: overpriced private schools and family vacations in Orlando.... And speaking of movies, imagine some customization - "For my conversations with , I want to see ads for - where the topics could be movies, vacations, office supplies, whatever, depending on the person and the relationship. You could categorize your friends in terms of the movies that seem to turn up around their mail: 21 grams? downer! You've got mail? a little too cute. Chainsaw massacre? don't meet this guy alone at night! NOw, picking up technology from another ad-oriented company called Revenue Science  - yes, more privacy issues, but none of this is personally identifiable, consider more possibilities. Revenue Science has this intriguing notion of audience-based targeting [as opposed to media-location targeting]: it's kinda collaborative filtering without the individuals: In short, it creates N-dimensional vector spaces in which people cluster according to their behavior online - neither the people nor the pages they visit are explicitly identified, but they do tend to cluster. For advertisers, the interest is not individuals but what clusters show a propensity to click on what ads... So imagine taking this technology and applying it to individuals' mail - with express permission, of course - and to Orkut profiles.... "Want to meet other people in your N-dimensional neighborhood? click here!" You'll never know exactly what it is they said, but you'll know they match you and your interests somehow. In the far-distant future, imagine airline seat-selection according to such metrics. (Personally, I'd rather sit far away so I can get work done...and please keep me away from people who are going to talk to each other about banalities through the whole flight! Yes, put *that* in my profile, please!) Or you could apply the same to a holiday cruise. Slightly closer to reality, I hope Gmail also has the following less-edgy tools (Eudora is the gold standard to beat as far as I'm concerned): filters that color your mail different colors according to topic (up to 7 in Eudora), and the ability to create default and alternate sigfiles. (plus an alert that warns you if you forget to include a subject line) [EDventure] 9:39:37 AM    comment []

Tablet PC contest entry deadline coming closer. Reminder: time is running out to enter your app to win $100,000 in the Tablet PC contest. And, with that, I'm outta here for the weekend. See ya Sunday night. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 9:36:58 AM    comment []

IntelliTXT: Your Advertising Peanut Butter Is In My Editorial Chocolate..... Back in 1998, February to be exact, I shared a stage at the TED conference with Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab. Richard Saul Wurman, TED's founder and impressario, introduced us both. I went first. I gave a short overview of my new magazine to a polite and curious reception. Gross then got up and in ritalin-starved fashion began a manic pitch. Imagine, he told the incredulous audience of tech and entertainment influencers, an entirely new search engine model, one driven not by editorial results, but by the raw metrics of the market itself - a pay-for-placement search engine, where the highest bidder wins top spot. Afterwards a number of folks gathered around to congratulate me, and at the same time to ridicule Gross's vision. After... [John Battelle's Searchblog] 9:33:51 AM    comment []