Brandon's Blog Feed

Web 2.0 and Business

For my business class I was tasked with creating a presentation that would mimic a proposal to the CEO of a major corporation advocating the use of Web 2.0 and 3.0 principles, concepts, and tools.

I'm still not quite sure that Web 3.0 is a legitimate term (web 2.0 barely is) and came to find that it is thought to be the use of user generated data in a meaningful and intuitive manner. The best example I could think of was Freebase, which aggregates content like Wikipedia but then allows for users to manipulate that data very easily. Unfortunately, Freebase isn't doing a wonderful job of that at the moment (microformats would help tremendously with such a task).

The majority (if not all) of the people in my class saw Web 2.0 as interactive content, social networks, and recommendation engines. Social networks and recommendations were by far the most suggested tool. No one really suggested the use of RSS and other open formats to disseminate information in a meaningful way to the consumer (one guy said music software should use RSS to notify users of new artist/music information, something which is currently done through email by iTunes anyway).
I think the class was somewhat shortside in their outlook on new technologies and were mostly concerned with how the user was going to get information and not how the company was going to improve by interacting with users (something which I heavily stressed). I saw the opportunity as a way to look at a somewhat flailing company (Comcast) and present a new way of doing things to the CEO.

My presentation is embedded below and you can peruse through it to see what I mentioned. I was clearly far too specific and didn't have enough research to really prove my point about why these technologies were useful and how the company would benefit from them (something I should have done had I had more time to work on the project). Clearly there are some notes which are needed to fully understand the presentation but I wanted to post it anyway.

The Importance of the Hawk vs. SFMOMA Incident

Let me first describe the issue at hand. Thomas Hawk has posted a story in which he describes events which transpired at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hawk says that he was photographing from an atrium when the Director of Visitor Relations tersely told him to leave. When Hawk tried to reason with the man and offered to show him the pictures, provide proof on the Museum's website that the Atrium was an approved location for photography, and tell the Director of his previous discussions with the Museum's Marketing and Communications Department, the Director would not listen.
First of all let me say that I disapprove of the way Thomas has handled this incident and I think he should have been more thoughtful about some of his comments and word choice in the blog. Despite that, Thomas is doing something necessary in fighting for photographer's rights. Despite the fact that this man may not understand the difference between a telephoto lens and a wide-angle lens (such as the one Thomas was using) and that he failed to have proper knowledge of the Museum's own rules, Thomas never should have been treated like this even if he was wrong in taking picture in the area.
I'm not going to blog about my opinion on this anymore but would like to elaborate on why this incident is important in understanding the implications of social media and blogging on the web.

Why This is Important

Although Thomas is likely skewing the facts at least somewhat and probably does not fully understand why he was kicked out, it is the company's responsibility to protect it's image. Normally this can be done through slander lawsuits and the like but it is very obvious that these kinds of arguments are foolish at best to bring upon everyday customers.
Companies are going to need to find a way to work with the internet and reach out to the customers with complaints or concerns. In fact, I hope that more and more companies will begin to hire entire teams of people who scour the internet looking for unfavorable reviews, blog posts, tweets, etc. to engage their community.

There is nothing better to restore a customers faith and trust in a company than helping them in a time of need when they have had a bad experience

Slander Lawsuits & P2P File Sharing

One of my favorite topics is P2P File Sharing which I believe is a great technology that will only help the music industry to grow. The problem is that modern labels do not understand the benefits and are too caught up in the past to research into alternatives for the future.
I believe that in both cases it would be far cheaper for labels to allow file sharing while countering it with their own, simplified, dead simple means of sale and for companies to reach out to the customer in crisis. Music distribution would become dirt cheap and PR would become far cheaper and more controllable.

I <3 Slicehost!

I've been using Slicehost for almost 4 months now and have completely loved it. My web hosting "journey" started out with Dreamhost. Dreamhost looked great at the time because of it's insanely low pricing. I soon began to have issues with Dreamhost. First, it began to become slow and I thought it might be my Wordpress installation but, in the end, decided a large problem was Dreamhost's sub-par drives (that's what you get when you pay $5 for hundreds of gigs + hosting). Towards the end of my stay at Dreamhost, I began to have major issues with access to the server. Basically, Dreamhost provided me with PHP and basic static serving but I wanted to try out Ruby on Rails. After quite a bit of searching, I found MediaTemple, whose Grid Hosting was taking the market by storm. I still keep a MediaTemple account for quick, easy setup. Like many shared hosts though, MediaTemple doesn't give you much control over the server. I needed root access to do a lot of things on Rails (mainly to install several gems). After searching around I came upon Slicehost probably from Benjamin Golub, the developer of RSSMeme and FFTogo (needless to say, one of the best Python/Django developers on the net). So far I have had nothing but good times with Slicehost. I have never had to ask for any support (MediaTemple has the best support for a major company that I've ever had) but I get the sense that the Slicehost staff would jump on my problem. The thing about Slicehost is that any problem is probably your own fault since the server is completely open and started pretty much from scratch. Slicehost is by far my favorite host and I think they can keep it that way for quite awhile. (At least until Google AppEngine is fully out :P)

Google IO Videos

Videos from Google's IO conference have been posted. These are a great way to get to know Google's development tools and to strengthen your knowledge of development in a vast number of areas.
http://sites.google.com/site/io/

Phoenix Mars Lander

I've got some pictures here that I'm collecting by watching Twitter. Check these out:

Official Phoenix Site
Space Flight Now

I've been watching:

NasaTV
John Culberson's Qik Feed

Webmonkey vs. Google Doctype

Shortly after the release of Google's doctype project for consolidating information on web design markup languages, Webmonkey is re-released by Wired. Webmonkey used to be a great resource for tutorials and quick how-tos for beginners and amateurs alike.

At them moment, it appears that Doctype has the clear advantage as far as content goes. The community around doctype seems more professional and "geeky". I foresee that the Webmonkey community will consist mostly of beginners and some amateurs coming to fill in the missing pieces, but overall, doctype will remain the more professional and advanced of the two.

Some Problems

As you may notice, there may be some problems with the RSS feeds at the moment. I'm taking care of it right now and, at the same time, wondering if my URL structure is going to be able to sustain much real use.

New Blog!

So this is my new blog! I haven't had one in a while (in fact, it's probably been over a year). I got sick of Wordpress about a year or two ago when it began to creep along and still not offer enough customization for me. With the advent of Google AppEngine, decided this would be the perfect opportunity for me to create my own blogging engine and control everything myself. So here we are! I am only saddened because I would kind of like to write posts in Google Docs but can't use the built in Blogging feature (although I could definitely whip up something from the API that would mimic the feature). I hope to post here on goings on in the community. You can find me all over the internet, at FriendFeed, Twitter, and many others (which can be found on FriendFeed). Some stuff to look for coming up soon:

FriendFeed feature
Some Google AppEngine write ups (some about how I did this and my growing love of python)
Maybe a new editing engine (I'll post about it if I find a suitable one)

Thanks for stopping by!!