Posts Tagged 'web 2.0'

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Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli – The Twitter Phenomena

Published February 27, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli is a known tech figure in the Israeli landscape, a columnist in several newspapers and Director of INFOSOC – Center for the Study of Information Society at the University of Haifa. In yesterday’s Calcalist, he wrote a column titled ‘The Twitter Phenomena‘, trying to understand why the micro-blogging social media service hasn’t won us (Israelies) over. Sheizaf also refers to the different add-ons (eco-system if you’d like) twitter has helped cultivate, such as twitpic, tweetdeck, tweetfollow, twitterfeed and others.

The phone was born to allow faster communication; Wikipedia offers free access to (open-source) knowledge; commenting (talk-backs) gave people the opportunity to vent. Twitter created a new form of communication, and an eco-system of add-on services.

Sheizaf’s column came in an excellent timing, with IBM Software Forum and Luis Suarez’s post. At IBM Software Forum Niv Calderon talked about monetizing social media, focusing on twitter – with public and corporate examples, such as Ford Motors, Comcast, JetBlue and Chris Brogan – showing how you can reach 1.5m impressions (people) with a single tweet. There’s definitely money in it. Niv recorded his lecture on video, which I’m sure he’ll post soon.
Mid-week I noticed Luis’s post, ‘Using twitter in the enterprise, by Ed Yourdon‘. Luis also focused on twitter as a corporate tool, linking to other posts talking about the business value of twitter, and of course, Ed Yourdon‘s presentation.

I view twitter as a sales and marketing tool. If you happen to follow me around, I’ve been known to tweet about the stuff I sell, people I meet, posts I read, events I speak at. Being interconnected to other social networks (like facebook), updated easily from a variely of end-user devices, focused and captured audience – it’s easy to understand why this micro-blogging tool has reached 6m users. Lotus Software has strengthened its brand name in Israel, and gained some ground against the local competition because of twitter.

As for twitter in Israel, Sheizaf predicts twitter will, eventually, catch on, and Israel will quicky adopt the micro-blogging tool, much like we did with facebook not too long ago…

Links:
Sheizaf Rafaeli – The Twitter Phenomena (Hebrew)
Luis Suarez – Using twitter in the enterprise, by Ed Yourdon
IBM Software Forum
Niv Calderon
Pew Study – Twitter users are mobile, urban and engaged online

Mixing it up with IBM Mashup Center

Published August 30, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
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There’s more to Web 2.0 than RSS, blogs and the 1,150,000,000 people connected to the internet. Web 2.0 is allowing us to bridge the gap between innovative (and social) technologies and business needs, in a simple (and code-less) way. I can take a map from Google, picture from flickr and a blog rss, incorporate them all into a single view – thus creating a new and unique service. It’s called a mashup:

In web development, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. [wikipedia]

IBM has been working for some time on develpoing a tool that would allow easy creation of mashups – IBM Mashup Center, that is now available free via IBM Lotus Greenhouse.CRN reviewed three mashup solutions: Google Mashup Editor Beta, IBM Mashup Center and Adobe LiveCycle. Here’s what they had to say about IBM Mashup Center:

IBM Mashup Center provides an easy-to-use, GUI-based method to combining maps, RSS feeds, and corporate data like customer lists into browser-based widgets. Creating a mashup here is as simple as dragging and dropping RSS feeds, mapping information, CSV files or other data sets onto a work board… IBM is targeting non-technologists—this is both less code-intensive and more business-friendly than Google Mashup Editor.

and closing with

The IBM Mashup Center provides a slightly more attractive alternative because of the platform’s flexibility and easy-to-deploy approach.

Mashups are definitely something that need to be in every CIO/CTO scope – the possibilities are endless, and those require little technical skills. Mixing up has never been so easy.
Stay tuned for my first mashup… coming soon.

Links:
IBM Mushup Center
Is Web 2.0 Ready for Business – CRN
IBM Mushup Center – demo (IBM)
The Business Case for Enterprise Mashups (IBM, pdf, 800KB)
Mashups – The new breed of web apps (IBM developerWorks)
IBM brings mashups closer to mainstream (Gartner, pdf, 160KB)

Analyzing blog traffic – FF vs IE and FB vs. Twitter

Published July 11, 2008 Uncategorized 5 Comments
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There are two things I like about using Blogger as a blogging platform:
  • Ability to add pretty much everything I see on the web, as a portlet or worst case – using HTML/JS
  • Analyzing traffic using Google Analytics.

I know wordpress and others allow for pretty much the same flexibility, and probably, someday, I will opt for WP in my own domain.

I’ve been incorporating some metrics into my blog, part of the openness and sharing I feel any blogger must adhere to. There’s no point sugarcoating things, not in the web 2.0 era.
Eventually, things come out. There are two interesting statistics I’d like to share, and your feedback and opinion are most welcome.

Firefox vs. IE
The first graph is analyzing traffic based on the user’s browser.
Apparently, people using the fox are spending double the time on my blog (65% to 32%), even thou the gap in number of visits (FF vs. IE) is only +200 pages, in favor of FF. I’m not the first to observe this, as FF is also the fav browser over at Luis Benitez. My guess is that FF users are more technology savvy – in a recent study, over 83% of FF users are running the most updated version. Also, I guess FF users are more custom to getting their daily fix by un-traditional medium – blogs, podcast, forums, twitter and such (in contrary to traditional sources as CNN, Fox, BBC, Ynet, Calcalist, etc). Then again, there could be no reason what so ever…

Twitter vs. Facebook
The second graph analyzes the top 10 referring sites to my blog, excluding direct traffic and search engines results. There are also columns for pages/visit and avg. time on site. I’ve highlighted in purple sites leading traffic to my blog, and in green the average time people spend.

In #1, way ahead of the rest, planetlotus.org, THE place to be heard, seen and read, at the Lotus community. The #2 site referring to my blog is Google Images. A surprising result I might say, but still, shows you the importance of image tagging and ‘alt name‘.

What I found more interesting is the 4th column, Avg. time on site. Apparently, people coming over from Blogger spend the most amount of time, over 5 min! In web 2.0 terms, that’s A LOT.

At #3 we can find traffic coming from facebook, which is also interesting. I tend to post stuff to my profile, from my blog and other sources. Good to know that although I don’t get that much traffic from facebook (only #8), my facebook buddies are spending 2min on my site!
Thanks friends. Conclusion: they like what they see, so I should keep posting.

There’s also the twitter angle. From time to time I tweet about the things I read. My followers are all early adopters, and technology savvy, so they will check the link out, but will ‘fast-read’ the page and move on. I guess tinyurl is also co-responsible for the traffic – you would click on http://tinyurl.com/63b28k and think twice on http://dvirreznik.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-bff-alan-lepofsky.html.
Hence why twitter is #4 on traffic referrals, but lower on time spent.

Links:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics Help Center

Embracing Social Computing at IBM

Published May 24, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
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BusinessWeek has put social media at the heart of its June 2nd issue, titled ‘Beyond Blogs – What Business Needs to Know‘. You can read most of the magazine online, along with videos and photo galleries of Top 100 IT Companies, Top 10 IT Companies in North America and Top 10 IT Companies in Asia.

Big Blue Embraces Social Media is one of the articles features in the magazine, and it provides an overview of how IBM got into social computing and how our customers can benefit from our experience.

Over the past two years, IBM has been busily launching in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits. “We’re trying to see how things that are hot elsewhere can be fit for business.” Irene Greif, IBM Fellow.

Why it’s important for IBM, and business at large, to adopt enterprise social computing solutions? Excellent question! There are many answers, but I’ll mentions the ones BW did:
First, in a global company people are too far away to communicate face-to-face.

These social tools, will provide a substitute for personal connections that flew away with globalization—and help to build and strengthen far-flung teams.

Second, it’s important for recruiting.

Hotshots coming out of universities are accustomed to working across these new networks—and are likely to look at a company that still relies on the standard ’90s fare of e-mail and the phone as slow and backward.

How do IBM employees communicate with one another? I use various methods, with email being one of the last. My first option is instant messaging (Lotus Sametime), followed by twitter (internal), post on beehive, e-mail with link to a file on my web space.

So far, IBM has Dogear, a community-tagging system based on Del.icio.us, Blue Twit, and a rendition of the microblogging sensation, Twitter. It also has a Web page called Many Eyes that permits anyone (including outsiders, at many-eyes.com) to upload any kind of data, visualize it, and then launch discussions about it on blogs and social networks. The biggest success is the nine-month-old social network, Beehive, which is based on the premise of Facebook. It has already attracted 30,000 users, including top executives.

Link: Big Blue Embraces Social Media – BusinessWeek

[pictured: my social network at IBM, as of 3 weeks ago]

Truthiness

Published May 8, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
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Web 2.0 true power lies behind our passion to share and participate, coupled with the increased availability of internet access, from multiple devices. If you and me didn’t posses that basic instinct to share and discuss ourselves (and comment on others), there wouldn’t be over 100 million blogs, YouTube would still be just another video sharing site and myspace and facebook would have half the number of users.

It starts with you.

That’s why I’m so pleased with Webby’s recent choice of Stephen Colbert for Man of The Year.
The Colbert Report is not well known in Israel (not broadcasted, and that’s a shame), but you can always follow the show online. Still, Stephen has showed us how easy it is to manipulate the web – if you have the will power, and access to the masses.

In July 2006 he asked viewers to change the entry of Elephants in Wikipedia and say the population of these animals has tripled in the last 6 months.

In April 2007 he was the top search result in Google for ‘greatest living american‘.

All that ‘noise’ started in 2005, the pilot for The Colbert Report, when Colbert coined the term ‘truthiness‘, which describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness was also selected Word of the Year 2006 by Merriam-Webster.

Not to mention his ‘1,000,000 strong for Stephen T Colbert‘ group in facebook.

Stephen Colbert – You are the Man !

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.