Rob Boothby of Joyent interviewed more than a dozen technology experts to define what is cloud computing and why it matters to us in how we use the internet for our personal and business needs.

[Source: News.com ]

Share This

Listen to this podcast

Diagram courtesy of Mark’s Blog

As you can see from this diagram, Mr. Seall broke it down into three things that can influence the outcome of your website:

1. Things you can influence
2. Things you can’t influence
3. Relevant measures of your (blogging) website’s success

If we take this observations into account, we can ascertain that in today’s online marketing, all efforts put into SEO only makes up a small portion of our website promotion. Focus on what you can control, such as findable quality content, and see what a world of difference this can make to your website in bringing in traffic and readership to your website.

A business that only measures itself by its profits is unlikely to be successful in the long term. Profits are obviously important, but profit is only one measurement of success, and crucially, it is an outcome not a determiner.

To read more on this topic, please visit Mark’s Blog.

Tags: website, mark, seall, content, subscribers, statistics

Share This

Listen to this podcast

Dojinshi often feature copyrighted characters and material; amateur writers riff on established works, remixing the plots and characters, and creating new storylines.

Mr. Daniel H. Pink, journalist, discussed the nature of Dojinshi and how businesses can benefit from it. In his talk at South by Southwest (SXSW 2008), he pointed out the three key benefits of why we should re-think the way we view copyright law and intellectual property.

In essence, it’s a symbiotic relationship: by ceding some control of their material to dojinshi writers, media companies get:

1. customer care (doinjinshi drives sales of original material)
2. a talent market for new, emerging writers and
3. free market research (dojinshi sales are indicators of trends in original series).

The short version is: involving the fans and ceding control is actually GOOD for business.

Think about it?

Tags: swsx, 2008, manga, dojinshi, danielle, pink

Share This

Listen to this podcast

persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

We, as website owners, too often lose sight of the value of our content and quick to rely on tricking search engines to list our website in the top results page. There are numerous ways you can utilize the tools you already have on your website to your advantage:

• use your blogs
• provide adequate and detailed information to your products/services
• share your content with the world (i.e. RSS feeds, social networks)
• link back to your own content in your blog posts

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. I’m pretty sure you can think of some more!

Please use the comment box below. Cheers!

Tags: findability, content, architecture, social, seo

Share This

Listen to this podcast

If you are a client of ours who is in need of an FTP client but don’t necessarily want to go through the download and installation process, here’s a web-based FTP application for you!

AnyClient is a free platform independent file transfer application that supports all major file transfer protocols including FTP/S, SFTP and WebDAV/S. AnyClient is available both as a web based service requiring no software installation, and as a downloadable application that you can install locally.

You can use their applet or download the free program for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux at:

http://www.anyclient.com/

You can save a site profile information locally on your computer and quickly connect the next time you load AnyClient. Your site profiles cannot be seen by users other than yourself.

Please note that you will need to have the Java Platform installed on your computer to access AnyClient with your web browser. You can check out the site’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information on this service.

Tags: ftp, service, webapp

Share This

Listen to this podcast

Say hello to our new daughter, Grace Elizabeth Caibal, born on Sunday, January 13, 2008. She weighed in at 7 lbs 11 oz. More details and photos will be posted at Camoosta.com.

Tags: baby, grace, elizabeth, caibal, birth, camoosta

Share This

Listen to this podcast

Seasons Greetings from all of us at RCC Graphic Designs.

Tags: christmas,, greetings,, holidays

Share This

Listen to this podcast

Happy Holidays to everyone! RCC Graphic Designs will be shut down temporarily from November 28, 2007 to December 5, 2007 due to our relocation.

Voicemail and email will be checked regularly. Only emergency messages will be returned during this period.

We apologize in advance for any inconveniences this may cause.

Sincerely,

Rommel and Meghan Caibal

Tags: shutdown, relocation, moving

Share This

Listen to this podcast

####Background

[Open-source software](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software) is free software whose [source code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code) is also freely available for developers to modify and redistribute. Selling the software itself or derivatives thereof is usually restricted by a software license, but developers are mostly free to sell services and products that connect with or run on top of open-source products.

####Open Source and the Business World

Over the past several years, companies like Google, Yahoo, and IBM have come out strongly in support of open-source software, and even Microsoft has made some concessions to the open-source software movement. Given the time and effort that goes into software development, why would a company turn those efforts towards a freely-distributed software package? The answer lies in the changing landscape of software-based business models.

Historically, software has been largely treated as a tangible product akin to computer hardware. The problem with that point of view is that software is easily copied to CD or hard drive, and anti-piracy measures can be prohibitively-expensive and can inadvertently cause major problems for legitimate users. These problems needed to be solved, and while some software producers maintain the tangible-product metaphor, many developers are switching to service-based profit models.

An open-source business model puts a focus on providing service and support for a publicly-available software product, rather than focusing on supporting an in-house product. Generally, this reduces the cost of software development and allows businesses to avoid starting from scratch when creating their own software products.

Open source products also benefits business clients, as the products they are using have been tested by numerous groups of developers and are generally being constantly updated. Support generally tends to be better for open-source products, since support providers can spend more time and resources actually supporting the products rather than working on the product itself.

####Zend and PHP: An Example of the Open Source Business Model

From a web development standpoint, open-source software is essential to remaining competitive in a market with very tight margins. Most web developers couldn’t afford to stay in business if they constantly had to pay licensing fees for software they now get for free. One of the most important and essential tools in the web developer’s arsenal is the PHP programming language, and its development is a perfect example of a successful open-source business model.

The PHP language developed out of a Danish programmer’s desire to create dynamic web pages for his personal site without using the web languages of the day. Released as open-source software, the PHP language was picked up by two Israeli developers and was completely rewritten and again released as open source. These two developers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, took over development of the programming language and eventually formed Zend Technologies, a company which currently manages the development of PHP. According to [PHP.net](http://us.php.net/usage.php), PHP is now used on over 20,000,000 websites worldwide. It is by far the most popular web programming language (take a look at some of your favourite Internet sites, chances are that links within one of the sites have .php in the address bar somewhere).

While the PHP language itself remains an open-source project, Zend Technologies has managed to leverage its intimate experience with PHP into a lucrative business, creating products for developers and developing sites for clients. Zend remains the lead development team behind PHP, and their contribution help both their own business and other companies seeking to use PHP in web development.

####Recap

Open-source software is swiftly becoming widely-accepted in corporate circles as an alternative to the traditional software-as-product ideology. Open-source software provides benefits to both developers and users by keeping costs low, allowing developers to focus on expanding the already-existing open-source code base, and allowing businesses to redirect resources that would ordinarily go to development to provide support to end-users.

Tags: open-source, software, php

Share This

Listen to this podcast

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web — so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents “We Feel Fine,” a project that scours blogs to collect the planet’s emoti(c)ons, and the “Yahoo! Time Capsule,” which preserves images, quotes and thoughts snapped up in 2006. And he premieres “Universe,” which presents current events as constellations of words — a tag cloud of our collective consciousness.

Tags: ted, talks, web, technology, secret, stories

Share This

Listen to this podcast