Quoted: Code-Sucks.com is a resource for Web Designers and Web Developers giving away free css layouts, web templates and code snippets
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
My Dots for Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
My Dots for Monday, March 12, 2007
Quoted: The GORB's goal is to create a reliable, balanced and widely adopted rating system that measures our 'online' reputations. This measure is free for our members to give and free for our members to take. It helps us to find the great people around us.
[tags: rate]
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Social Networking : Participation and Abuse
A Social Networking system (i.e Digg, BlueDot) reaches it's optimal usefulness when system activity exceeds a minimal value and is below a maximal value. This probably sounds pretty obvious on the surface. But it has some very significant implications for how much income a system can hope to generate from traffic. Just to tease this out a bit.
Some systems are useful on their own. For example, the most useful place to store bookmarks (to my mind) is online. So Social Bookmarking tools are useful even if you don't want to be social.
But for the Social element of these systems to be useful they need to achieve critcal mass across a wide range of topics (tags). This critical mass is different for each system. But needs to take into account each individual users level of participation. Critical mass is the systems minimal level of activity. For web 2.0 systems to survive they need to achieve this crital mass as quickly as possible.
A systems potential for growth is limited by two factors. The first is how well the sytem is organised. Not all systems are equally scalable. I suspect that the more input users have within a system the less scalable it is. For example, Google's search engine is theoretically infinitely scalable. Because users have very limited influence within the system. Which brings me to the second limiting factor. A system is limited by how open it is to abuse. In recent months theres been quite a bit of traffic around abuse within Digg. The evidence suggesting that Digg's top contributors were in fact employed to promote specific items within the system. This sort of press must have an impact on a systems potential growth. Obviously these two limiting factors are interdependant. The better a system is organised the less open it is to abuse. The way it detects and manages abuse is a measure of the quality of it's organisation.
Some systems are useful on their own. For example, the most useful place to store bookmarks (to my mind) is online. So Social Bookmarking tools are useful even if you don't want to be social.
But for the Social element of these systems to be useful they need to achieve critcal mass across a wide range of topics (tags). This critical mass is different for each system. But needs to take into account each individual users level of participation. Critical mass is the systems minimal level of activity. For web 2.0 systems to survive they need to achieve this crital mass as quickly as possible.
A systems potential for growth is limited by two factors. The first is how well the sytem is organised. Not all systems are equally scalable. I suspect that the more input users have within a system the less scalable it is. For example, Google's search engine is theoretically infinitely scalable. Because users have very limited influence within the system. Which brings me to the second limiting factor. A system is limited by how open it is to abuse. In recent months theres been quite a bit of traffic around abuse within Digg. The evidence suggesting that Digg's top contributors were in fact employed to promote specific items within the system. This sort of press must have an impact on a systems potential growth. Obviously these two limiting factors are interdependant. The better a system is organised the less open it is to abuse. The way it detects and manages abuse is a measure of the quality of it's organisation.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Social Bookmarking : The Urge to Search
Regular readers will probably have noticed that I'm currently a bit obsessed with Social Bookmarking sites. In the recent past I've posted on del.icio.us, BlueDot and Ma.gnolia. Part of the reason for this obsession is that I want all my bookmarks in one place and to have a custom interface to them on geekglue.com (you can still see my old system in the links area). Which brings me to my problem. Working with the BlueDot API (the del.icio.us version) I realised that none of these services offer a bookmark based search facility. You can search by tags but not on the title or content of a bookmark. For example, I currently have 391 bookmarks, 41 tagged as actionscript. I can easily select a second tag to further filter my actionscript bookmarks. But there have been a number of recent occasions when I knew the bookmarks title but was a bit vague on it's tags (partly this is poor tag organisation; what can I say it is a work in progress). What would be great is to be able to search bookmarks rather than tags. For most people it's not really a problem because they maintain a relatively short collection of bookmarks. But as soon as your largest tag group starts to exceed 20 bookmarks (2 pages on BlueDot). Then you'll start looking for a bookmark search button. Being able to select the number of bookmarks displayed per page could help. But really thats just postponing the inevitable primordial urge : the urge to search.
As Mohit points out, see comments, a search method is available through the BlueDot SOAP API. My bad for not following through my research properly. It isn't entirely clear in the documentation but you can search purely using a keyword (i.e with tags = NULL; thanks Mohit for the clarification).
As Mohit points out, see comments, a search method is available through the BlueDot SOAP API. My bad for not following through my research properly. It isn't entirely clear in the documentation but you can search purely using a keyword (i.e with tags = NULL; thanks Mohit for the clarification).
Monday, March 05, 2007
Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide
There are posts all over the place about the Apollo Pocket Guide. But I want to offer my perspective now I've had a chance to read the sample chapter. The chapter looks at File operations using Apollo. Specifically it deals with the File and FileStream classes. The book is written in the clear and concise style we have come to expect from the O'Reilly pocket guides. They are straight to the point with clear examples to illustrate the application of the concepts discussed.
What was really exciting was to see some clear examples of how easy it will be to leverage Flex skills into Apollo development. The concepts for File operations were familiar from other languages (in my case PHP) and the methodology was familiar from Flex/AS3. This sample has really whetted my appetite for having a play with the Apollo alpha (which is apparently really close). Bring it on Adobe!
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