BBC News - Buy into it: The technology of online shopping

BBC News - Buy into it: The technology of online shopping:

"Shopping online is now easier — and more popular — than ever, whether for physical goods like books or groceries, or music and movie downloads.

The web made its name as a home for bargains, since internet retailers could undercut shop prices by avoiding overheads such as rent.

But using the web to lower prices is not the only hi-tech trick that internet retailers have up their sleeves."

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Microsoft explains Windows phone 7 'phantom data'

BBC News - Microsoft explains Windows phone 7 'phantom data': "Microsoft has confirmed that some handsets running its Windows Phone 7 software are sending and receiving 'phantom data'."

What I find telling about this story is how long it took this issue to emerge and how little I have heard about it. When the iPhone 4 came out I think we knew every little bug and major problems in a few weeks.

Get your binary files out of my database! Making the case for remove blog storage in SharePoint

First let me say that remote blog storage didn't start with SQL Server 2008 and SharPoint 2010. 3rd Party products have provided these feature to SQL for some time. So remote blog storage (RBS) is something you should be thinking about with almost any SharePoint solution.

In fact looking back at things there are a few times that RBS could have saved some serious problem I had concerning migration.

Rob D'Oria has written an excellent post laying out the case from RBS here. I think probably you should read Rob's article over my own. The only thing I would want to ad is a very high level view of why SharePoint kind of forces RBS.

Rob D'Oria noticed what I notice, SharePoint has a unique and deeply disturbing problem of taking the content documents you upload to document libraries and storing them in the database. When a document like Word is stored in a database as a long string of binary data it is called a BLOB. Blog is an ugly name because BLOBs are simply put: ugly. You get no real benefit by putting the data in the database and you end up paying a fortune for storage.

Every ECM I have worked with (Open Text. EMC, and FileNet) takes the documents and stores them as just files on a file store. Open Text has some wonderful products for moving to cheaper and cheaper storage, right down to something called WORM, Write Once Read Many.

The important point is that BLOB storage is neither normal for ECM nor cheap. SharePoint has implement a normal data storage model which is both expensive and strange. And it gets worse.

Most ECM system use database to simply track metadata and some other overhead. So with something like Open Text you can store all your files in a massive single location with TBs of data, and the database is fairly small, all the major storage is on the local drive. If there is a database failure you can restore the small database very quickly. And the database does not grow very much as you add new files. And perhaps most importantly the size of the files does not directly drive up the size of the database.

SharePoint is fundamentally flawed in placing all unstructured data in the SQL database, meaning you get very large databases by the user loading up large documents. Since databases can not index BLOB storage this always felt like a radical fault to SharePoint, and it was one reason to front it with something like Open Text.

But BLOB storage is a SQL issue, and you can use a 3rd party product to support RBS with any supported SQL Server. So if you are using SharePoint and you find you have these massive SQL Server Databases that have grown over the years, and you can see no easy way to reduce them, or you have a requirement to build a site with a massive SQL Server database, I would point you to Rob D'Oria article and say GO REMOTE BLOB STORAGE.

Jimmy Wales admits Wikipedia too complicated, cat meows, and the Pope is Catholic: Reflections upon the obvious.

Image from Marketing & Innovation Blog

"Wikipedia is too complicated for many people to modify despite billing itself as 'the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit', its founder has said."

BBC News - Jimmy Wales says Wikipedia too complicated for many

This is probably something of an understatement. Wikipedia is surely an amazing collaboration project and can only be judged as a major success.

BUT, editing the tool requires a fairly skilled computer user. And negotiating the streams of admin and conventions is maddening.

I find the admins have learned, or been selected, to be more positive and helpful, but the tool probably does need a major update. An update that continues to insure quality while opening it up to the Long Tail of knowledge out there.

A site like Quora shows the potential for user collaboration knowledge. Also Wikipedia is a bit isolated from the knowledge creation ecosystem. It's facebook page seems only interested in asking for money. It would be interested to see a new initiative that tries to extend the quality information in Wikipedia to cover every street in the world, every prominent person who ever lived, ever book ever written, ever newspaper article ever published, every item ever put up for sale.

The thing is that I trust Wikipedia. Sure I don't fully trust the crowd, but I trust the crowd more than I trust companies of any kind.

Microsoft Lync formerly Office Communications Server 14

Office Communication Server was one of the most revolutionary products to come out Microsoft in the past 10 years. Not sure why the change to name Lync, but the product should be part of any collaboration solution.

Microsoft Office 365

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Write code in SharePoint 2010: CMS Wire covers both sides

3 Reasons You Could Write Custom Code for SharePoint 2010

3 Reasons to Not Write Custom Code for SharePoint 2010

There is probably only one really good reason to write code in SharePoint: and that is if you come along a limitation of SharePoint that requires code.

Sadly far to many SharePoint people are infrastructure experts who don't fully understand just how tricky code is, especially SharePoint code

History of the Internet

Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive By Jodi Dean

Setting Up a SharePoint Developer Virtual Machine | SharePoint Sideshow | Channel 9

It's easy to get started with SharePoint 2010 development using the Information Worker Virtual Machine (VM). In this episode, you will learn all of the tips and tricks to get the VM up and running.

The Information Worker virtual machine is a Hyper-V based VHD file that has everything you need to build SharePoint solutions already installed. The VM includes Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visual Studio 2010, Exchange 2010, and more. In fact, this is the VM that we use for all of the SharePoint and Office training and Hands-On Labs on Channel 9.

Setting Up a SharePoint Developer Virtual Machine | SharePoint Sideshow | Channel 9

How to aggregate data from many SharePoint sites to one view using Quest Web Parts for SharePoint

If you are not familiar with Quest Web Parts for SharePoint you certainly should become. After doing some work with them I am starting to wonder if it makes sense to deploy SharePoint without them. Aggregating multiple content sources is just one of their many useful features. As you can see above you can aggregate a large number of different sites and sow them in a folder view. This allows a single users to have view of many site collections in a single folder structure. This even allows bringing in site collections in other web servers!



The hierarchy tool is collapsible and easily expandable. The UI is very nice and I have found the fool fairly easy to learn and it solves lots of SharePoints problems. This shows the use of only one web part, qListView, the package comes with many others.

Who is going to write all this content, things to keep in mind when moving to user generated content

(3) What activities make up the (web-based) social pyramid? - Quora

Notice that the numbers don't add up to 100%. That is because someone can be one of several roles. In fact s Spectator is likely to be a Joiner and a Creator.

The key point to take away from this is that the 20/80 rule essentially holds up. 80% of the population is reading, collecting content, commenting on content or stating their opinion on content which is created by about 24% of the total population.

When ever planning a collaboration system remember that only 20% of your users will ever engage in Creation behavior, and most them them at a very low level. If you have a small department of say 30 people there is a chance that you will not have enough people willing to produce content with enough time to produce content.