Today, as I was browsing Google News, I stumbled across a heading/image pair that didn't quite seem to match well:
....I would really hate to encounter those "South Bay authorities" in a dark alley somewhere....
I'm starting another blog on the business/psychology/technology of the new social web over here. The purpose of it is to be less nuts and bolts and more study of the interplay between the business, technology and psychology of the Web 2.0 world. I'm going to analyize, break-down and study as much as I can about that world and hopefully open up some interesting dialog as the blog continues to grow.
...I have become more and more interested in that business/psychology/technology aspect of web world lately and have been wanting to study it more (and thus write about it). However, I didn't want to muddy up the point of this blog as a place for people to go to understand the under-the-hood pieces of Microsoft .NET technologies, so I just created a second one.
I invite you to come on over when you have a chance, I'll be posting regularly and - hopefully - have some interesting things to say.
I'm starting to note an interesting trend.
Okay, it's obvious that I'm a software developer and, in my opinion, a good one. I spend a great deal of time learning the details behind things and love understanding how the world works a bit under the covers. When I first went into developing software I figured that those who had made a fair amount of money on the internet were also good developers who spent their time doing very much the same thing - learning, exploring, understanding, etc. I'm actually experiencing a bit of a down-time right now as I recently recieved a nice position as a senior-level ASP.NET developer for a while with a startup company in my area (good opportunity, in my opinion); and so I'm taking some time to get more a grasp on my blog, on blog marketing, etc. Therefore, I decided I would read a few blogs, take a few notes on what I should do, and just try them out....what I found was interesting.
Probably the best site I found for advice is this one: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/01/11/how-to-market-your-blog-in-2007/. The guy was very logical and concise; and the advice he gives does make sense. One of the bits of advice he gave was to register yourself with various blog directories and social site networks (what these sites do is try to promote EVERYONEs blog by just signing up, and in the process gain traction themselves). However, a few of the sites he pointed me to were having serious problems (both in their esthetics and in their function); in fact, a few of the sites were downright crappy.
Top100bloggers.com immediately gave me this:
and blog-clicker.com threw up on me with this....
From my brief experience over at rentacoder.com I learned to pick out sites that were created by a business-weasel hiring out to some college freshman for one hundred fifty bucks. It's my guess that these sites were created in just this way. Something goes wrong with the site and the owner freaks out and tries to pull the XBOX 360 paddle out of the hands of the original programmer to fix the "issue" - and what you get is, well, what you see above.
My initial, gut-instinct here is that these sites were created in a rat-race fashion.
However, a few sites weren't bad and - in fact - were downright good. I thought BlogExplosion.com was interesting....the premise here is that you gain points by visiting other people's blogs for a period of time; apparently these points credit you for some standing in their system (I'm still new to this). Also, within a brief period of time I'm already noticing a slight number of hits coming from BlogFlux. B5Media.com looks really nice, but they appear to not be accepting new people at this moment (not sure why).
Oh well. My point behind this post is that I have to quietly chuckle to myself when a site just poops all over itself when someone is trying to join it and enhance it's community; it takes me back to a few people I use to work for/with who seemed gifted at putting themselves into the "putting out fires" department because careful, concise work seemed like a waste of time. I dunno', some of the sites might actually be good and, I'm sure, sites like MySpace.com started off similarly (in fact, when I had a MySpace.com account it seemed like the darn thing was breaking nearly every five minutes). I guess what do I know....
I'm playing around with FeedBurner (finally). I updated all of the RSS links to point to feedburner's, so if anyone has any trouble reading this blog from here on out (don't ask how you'd see this post if you were, but I'm doing my bit), please let me know. Thanks.
I'm going to go out on a limb here because I'm going to make it well known that I don't understand the craze behind the iPhone. I can appreciate the look and appeal of it to a degree, because I can understand that technology is cool and that Apple, with their interface, makes interacting with it different (therefore "cool" in the eyes of many); but what I cannot understand is the foaming-at-the-mouth for features that have already exist in other phones (like my iMate).
For example - PopCap recently announced that they're bringing out a version of Bejeweled just for the iPhone (you can read more about it here). To me this isn't news - this is almost sad that some find it even newsworthy. How long has that game been around and how long have I been able to play it on my smart phone? To make matters worse - you have to leverage Safari as the sole platform for developing applications for the iPhone. I just recently purchased Age of Empires for my phone so that I had something to play during my transatlantic flight to Italy - can that be done on the iPhone? Well, if it's all browser-based certainly it cannot (and can you imagine the minutes charged to my phone had I done it WHILE in Europe?). I'll admit I'm not sure of the physics behind how the iPhone plays the game, it's possible (quite possible) that it exists in some sort of cache on the phone, but - still - I would really like to see the implementation of something like Age of Empires in the Safari browser on the iPhone.
Plus, what's up with no flash?
Trust me, I definitely understand and appreciate the power of Web 2.0 and the new mindsight of moving tradiational, desktop applications over to the web (for quite a while that has been the point of many posts on this blog), but to me it seems like Jobs basically cut out of the iPhone a major feature and, through his legions, turned it around to something to marvel at.
If nothing else this reminds me of the time I got into a debate regarding PPC vs. Intel with a relative of mine. Months before Apple started the Intel transition he was tossing his hands about as to how great PPC was over Intel - a month after the transition started he was telling me how great Intel was. Seriously - I don't get it!
Lately I've started becoming more
and more interested in the business side of social networking - its effects on
business, marketing and the like; it's really quite a fascinating social
phenomenon. I think I’ve always had an
interest in a number of things in my life – obviously software development (the
under-the-hood, nuts and bolts, creative pursuit of developing a solution to a
problem) has always been a major interest, but so has business. Due to the fact that the world is starting to
catch up to the fact that computers are “cool” and, therefore, my investment in
them has become more marketable and social, my interest in business has grown
even further; now to the point where I think I might start blogging on not only
topics related to .NET development, but also the business applications of that
development in many areas.
Personally I think the next big “wave”
in the world of business is going to be in how it leverages the new social
medium to reach, interact with, and learn from customers (current or
potential). I think, in many ways, this has already started – companies like Microsoft,
Sun and even McDonalds are using RSS in some form or another to reach out to
their customers (their communities). It’s all just very fascinating and I think
that if we – as developers – can keep our eye on this new and interesting market,
we might be able to all profit from it highly. Remember that we have a power
that those who pay us do not; if we watch over their shoulders and keep our
focus one step ahead, we can be the ones cutting the paychecks.
Anyway –
if I write enough on this topic I might create a separate blog dedicated to
just that so that the focus here doesn’t drift too much. I guarantee I have
plenty to write out in the future in .NET development, but I also promise there’s
going to be a lot more on the practical applications of that development.
I'm not sure if this has been done before, but it might prove to be another way cross-site scripting is dangerous. Right now I'm trying to create a global index of all corporate blogs on my new site www.blogsbycompany.com. I'm waaay off the target now, but it's a pet project I'm playing with at the moment (don't bother going to it - yet). Regardless, I'm seeing that people put HTML into their RSS feeds; I'm noticing it all over the place (and it does make sense). My site aggregates company blogs (I have about 8 thousand blogs right now - but, I'm not advertising the site because it's way off of where I want it), but I'm noticing that sometimes I get encoded JavaScript in my blog descriptions (I'm making sure that people are properly encoding the script or else I encode it for them before displaying it in the results page on my search site). What this tells me is that if someone out there is poorly doing a web bot or a RSS aggregator site, they could potentially open their viewers up to someone running script in the browser or on the cilent through RSS feeds. Most people simply expect the RSS content to be nicely formatted, but if they foolishly try to decode script, they could really cause some damage to their readers.
I've heard this question several times in the past few months and the answer is - an astounding - not even close. In fact, I would say that ASP.NET AJAX is going to enjoy a long and fruitfull life as a development tool for ASP.NET developers over the next three to five years at least, probably even more (though it may morph into something else during that time). However, this question - as to whether all the new client-side visual tools like Silverlight - is the end of ASP.NET AJAX is a fairly decent one given that, still, not a whole lot of people fully understand the depth of ASP.NET AJAX. Let's take a brief look. First, ASP.NET AJAX is not only about AJAX; it's a full, complete, end-to-end framework for developers who wish to (or are forced to) dive into advanced client-side scripting. Quite literally thousands of controls are floating around in the world today that require the use of JavasScript - and millions upon millions of websites are leveraging it for reasons of client-side richness and control. What ASP.NET AJAX gives to the JavaScript (ECMA Script) developer is as close to an object-oriented, .NET'ish programming platform as you can get - so the need to write platform agnostic logic is either completely removed or mostly removed. For the millions of developers in the world right now who use JavaScript in their controls and web applications, development tools like Silverlight will not help. Second, Silverlight is - like Flash - more of a user-interface platform all in itself. Like Flash, it will require the download of necessary bits to the client machine, and once there, will require a compliant browser to operate within. You will be able to create compelling interfaces, no doubt, but it's focus is always going to be angled towards the designer; the guys who think in the world of "flash'yness" (pardon the expression). A highly effecient, intuitive intranet or CRM solution, on the other hand, will probably not be written, ever, in a development framework like Flash or Silverlight - the same goes for an eCommerce webstore or a highly dynamic news site. These more business-oriented solutions will benefit greatly from the nature and flexibility of markup within the browser; and therefore find great benefit in the asynchronous attributes offered through ASP.NET AJAX. It would certainly be interesting if all the web pages out there looked like a high-end Silverlight presentation, but realistically, that wouldn't be practical at all to developer or maintain. Third, ASP.NET AJAX is undergoing great advancements through the community - which shows a high focus on it as an important aspect of ASP.NET development. The open source community is contributing a great amount to the control toolkit, and this shows no sign of stopping or even slowing down. And finally, and most importantly, Silverlight, Flash or what-have-you is not (nor probably ever will be) a natural environment to build products and solutions in for the ASP.NET, data-driven website developer. We have been raised under the notion of markup and are trained with that in mind, our websites are built around it, and the end-user expects it; the idea of removing or lessening the effects of this trend would be insane. So, in summary, I see Silverlight being good for things like this: - Kiosks,
- Company main or "splash" pages,
- Games,
- Presentations
...the kinds of sites where a designer would be involved mostly. And I see ASP.NET AJAX coming into play with: - Intranets,
- Customer Portals,
- eCommerce sites
- Highly database backed or data-driven sites (like www.live.com)
...the kinds of things where a developer would be involved mostly. Basically, there is no way ASP.NET AJAX is dead or nearing death. End of story.
|