50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth

My wife and I just finished launching a new site for a client called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. It is the revised, updated edition of a book originally released in the 1990's and was New York Times bestseller.

We have been working hard for 3 months to design, develop and launch the site to support he book's release by Earth Day.

It is a significant site for us. It is our first major release on the Original Web Solutions Version 4.0 Architecture and if I must say is a really nice site.

We are really proud of the design and architecture. It uses the OWS Network build methodology deployed on the Mosso Hosting Cloud to support the amount of traffic. In the first 12 hours we have had 500 people.

Also this site is exciting because of its simple approach to enlightening the world about little things they can do to save the world!

Make sure and check it out. www.50simplethings.com.

Web 2.0 Apps Done Right

I have blogged several times about web 2.0 applications and what I look for in them. I have been evaluating a lot of applications lately and a good application really stands out.

I have been looking through Image and Photo sharing applications all day and comparing them against each other. Man there is a lot of crap.

One appliceation that I think truly reflects a quality Web 2.0 applications is the image sharing site 23. The have the key characteristics:

• Do one thing and do it well.
• They have an API.
• Simple, intuitive interface.
• Have a blog
• Have an about us page.
• Simple Search
• Simple Navigation
• Quick loading
  

They do it well, congrats guys.

GigaSpaces Infinitely-Scalable Application Platform

Was introduced to GigaSpaces today by a friend at the University of Oregon. What an amazing application platform. It truly an infinite scaling application that just doesn't handle the back-end tier, it tackles the business layer as well.

This is similar to the technology that Google and Amazon have built for themselves and their offerings.

They also have an GigaSpaces Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is publicly available, and there is a white paper available for the GigaSpaces EC2 Machine Image.

Gigaspaces support for Java, .Net (C#), and C++. They are also working on a presentation layer that works with the likes of Flash / Flex, AJAX, and Microsoft Silverlight.

They are reworking their pricing right now, however their target audience is the small business and startups so it should be affordable. They also have a community version available of Gigaspaces.

I am going to do a little more homework here.

Web-based Existence being a Developer

So in the last year I have completely move online. Everything I do is web-based. Most of my world exists underneath my Google Account.

However I use many other web services to get done what I do everyday. I can sit down at any computer pretty much and access my world online and get busy.

One area I am lacking is a web-based code editor to manage develop my sites and web applications. I utilize the OWS Architecture for managing a lot of the content on our sites and build out our dynamic web sites using a CMS system.

Though when it comes to building applications and writing code I really don't have many options. So recently I found a Edit Area a free web-based Javascript Editor.

The main features are:

• Easy to integrate, only one script include and one function call
• Tabulation support (allow to write well formated source code)
• Search and replace (with regexp)
• Customizable real-time syntax highlighting (currently: PHP, CSS, Javascript, Python, HTML, XML, VB, C, CPP, Pascal, Basic, Brainf*ck)
• Auto-indenting new lines
• Line numerotation
• Multilanguage support (currently: Croatian, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese)
• Possible PHP gzip compression (compress the 12 core files to one file of ~20Ko)
• Allow multiple instances
• Full screen mode
• Possible plugin integration
• Possible save and load callback functions
• Possible dynamic content management
• Can work in the same environment than "protype" and "mootools"'s like libraries.

So I am going to start integrating it into some of my work and servers. I will let you guys know how it goes. It will be nice to have this last piece of my world moved online.

Managing Service Relationships for Personal and Business

I was reading John Udell's post on Managing Service Relationships, talks about managing your service profiles and choosing to receive or not receive paper bills, renewing your accounts etc.

I have pondered this on several levels and thought about how nice it would be to have an application that would aggregate all your relationships under one interface.

So this is really an application that could be offered on 2 levels.

Personal Service Relationship Manager - Would allow me to track all my service relationships that I enter into. So this would go beyond managing my login information across networks like with OpenID. This would be a tool to manage the entire relationship and give me updates on when my relationships are expiring, keep track of SLA's, billing accounting, auditing, etc.

Business Service Relationship Manager - Now this would go with my rants on Small Business IT 2.0 as well as Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. The more 2.0 relationships you enter the more IT tracking you will need. Every API you use, every hosting account, domain you buy, DNS account, and every service relationship you enter as a business needs to be tracked and evaluated.

My wife and I were doing this during our Christmas holiday. We were figuring out what we needed to spend before the end of the year to balance out our taxes. So we were organizing what we have spent and part of this is going through every account we have and analyzing our service relationships. This took a while. Wouldn't it be nice if we just had one interface or report to do this like my American Express account?

So there you go, another application for you all to run with. I don't have the time. Make sure I get a mention.

Learning Objects and Web 2.0 Applications

I have been spending a great deal of time learning about "learning objects" from a site called Merlot.

Wikepedia defines a learning object as:

• "Any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training"
• "Any digital resource that can be reused to support learning"
• "Web-based interactive chunks of e-learning designed to explain a stand-alone learning objective"
• "A digitized entity which can be used, reused or referenced during technology supported learning"
• "A digital, self-contained, reusable entity with a clear learning aim that contains at least three internal changing and editable components: content, instructional activities (learning activities), and context elements. As a complement, the learning object should have an external component of information which helps its identification, storage, and recovery: the metadata."

I would like to see any web 2.0 application have a learning object defined for it just like we reference an RSS feed or other media link for a site today.

If it is a web application that is fairly complex or even simple it should have at least a basic set of learning objects for it that the average user can use to learn more about the application or a teacher can use to integrate into their classroom curriculum.

This is something I would like to work more on as part of the Social Media Squad and meeting its mission of Translating 2.0 to the Real World.

My Information Storage

When I am asked to save something on the internet when using an web application or desktop application I want to asked where?

I want to save it to a public location as part of my profile.

I want to save it to a privation location as part of my profile either in my online environment or in a local environment. A local logical drive.

This should be part of everything I do on the Internet, I should have to think too hard about it.

Should just flow and be where I put it.