Jason Thibeault's Blog: From My Pen, page 76

An Interesting Take on the Dashboard

I recently came across www.wdyl.com, google’s new Dashboard-like environment for a lot of their services.

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I definitely believe that with the explosive growth of web applications in recent years that it’s becoming harder to keep track of everything. I visit one website for my email. I visit another for maps. I visit another for search. I visit another for calendar. In a sense, it’s become almost unmanageable. Google’s attempt here is admirable. I can see a number of places where they can improv...

Nature in Slo-Mo

Slow-motion photography (6,000 frames per second) can create some fascinating displays of nature that may be impossible to really appreciate at their natural speed. Case in point? The frog below snacking on a tasty cricket.

How-To: The Joy of Seeing Your Words in Print

Self-publishing has been around for decades. I remember as a graduate student at California State University, Northridge, the humble beginnings of XLibris and other digital printers promising to bring your words to print. I played around with some of them although, at the time, the Vanity presses were still in full-swing, giving budding authors like myself the opportunity to publish when mainstream houses were swamped with submissions. And I especially remember seeing my first book in print....

Solving the Problems of Big Data

Just when you thought you had the problem nailed down with data, that it’s all about being able to analyze it, new problems creep up: like the network being able to handle massively scalable architectures that are needed to analyze big data sets.

Oops.

Of course, that is the story of technology: the real issues don’t surface until solutions begin to appear that address the immediate, visible problem (in this case, how to analyze the data). Thankfully, the brilliant minds out there recognized th...

Want People to Watch Your Video? Make it Searchable.

A recent study in GigaOm Pro (warning: subscription required) suggests that the video paradigm has evolved considerably:

In the beginning, content was king. If a broadcaster had good TV content, viewers would seek it out. Then distribution was king, because without it no one would be able to watch that content. But what happens in the future, when there’s an infinite amount of content on a multitude of platforms? Power will no longer lie in the quality of content or in the strength of its dist...

The Social Media of Machines

Why can’t machines be social? Why can’t they share status updates? Why can’t they post information about how they are feeling and what’s happening to their drives, memory, and CPUs? That’s exactly what the company Nodeable asked when they applied a Twitter-like messaging platform to system monitoring:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/nodeable-gets-2m-to-be-twitter-for-cloud-monitoring/

What’s most interesting about this company’s approach is the application of social media to something not typically bra...

Photo: The Hidden World of Animals

Look at the expression of the dog in this beautiful, candid shot. Makes you wonder just how much of the animal world (or our canine friends) we really know…

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/blue-heeler-mexico/

Can Computer Programs Be Philosophical?

The Cornell CreativeMachines lab (creativemachines.cornell.edu) is one of many higher institution “labs” working on how to bridge the gap between man and machine. In essence the “humanization” of computers. From their website:

At the Creative Machines Lab we are interested in robots thatcreateandare creative. We explore novel autonomous systems that can design and make other machines – automatically. Our work is inspired from biology, as we seek new biological concepts for engineering and new...

Convergence

I’ve talked about aggregation as a coming trend (really a game-changing trend as data and content grow exponentially) but I also need to address convergence.

When I started my product development company, Q2 Labs, in 2005, my partner and I had a clear idea of what convergence was: broadband, wireless, and data/content syndication. And we spent a lot of time and money generating IP around that (which eventually provided the potential for GoWare).

Distancing myself from the immediate intellectual...

How-To: Writing Search Engine Optimized (SEO) Article Headlines

Simple, clear, concise, relevant. Those are some of the things to keep in mind when developing article headlines that are optimized for search engine pickup and placement. Lisa Mason, a freelance writer, has put together a good list of tips for writing SEO-optimized headlines:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Headline-Writing:-How-to-Write-Web-Headlines-That-Get-Search-Engine-Results

From the article:

Clear and concise-You’ve heard it before and it sounds obvious but it is still commonly mistaken on th...