Psych your mind at Oz-IA 2008

Update: This presentation now has audio!

Last weekend I deliverred my presentation ‘Psych your mind’ at Oz-IA, Australia’s premiere conference on information architecture. The subject was the psychology of social computing adoption and how to put together a strategy that ties an understanding of how people think and behave when it comes to fulfilling their social needs online, information architecture, and technology.

You can download the slides from my Slideshare page.

Admittedly, I was a little nervous about the presentation as I seemed to have made a good impresion last year and so wanted to be sure that I didn’t dissapoint. Fortunately, the response was very positive. Someone in the lunch break said that it was a great way to open the conference (even though I actually presented second) while James Breeze of Objective Digital suggesting that I should write a book on the subject.

I’ve yet to work though the audio so I can slidecast this presentation like I did with my ‘The Intranet Is Dead‘ presentation for the LG Web Network confeence a few months ago, but it will come soon for all of you who couldn’t make Oz-IA this year. For those of you who did see the presentation I’d encourage you to give me some feedback so that I can improve on the material.

M

Farewell to Vista and OSX. Chrome heralds hello to Cloud Computing

While the OS battle continues between Microsoft and Apple, it’s being suggested that Chrome, Google’s new browser, will take people a step closer no longer needing an operating system — at least as we know it today.

“I believe that is really Google’s intent,” said Sridhar Vembu, the chief executive of Zoho, a California-based softwaremaker.

It’s true that Chrome currently requires Microsoft’s operating system to work, but the browser’s code base and Google’s other online applications — including mail, document editors, spreadsheets and photo editing software — demonstrate that the age where practically everything you need will be stored online and not on your computer is just around the corner.

This is called “cloud computing” and it’s the way that many people like myself are already working. And there are big savings to be had for organisations if they move this way. It costs around $2000 for licences, computer maintenance, staffing, and the like, to have one person use Outlook an organisation’s standard operating environment, including the growing storage costs over a few years. Google’s Apps Premier subscriptions cost $50 USD per user per year with a 99.9% uptime service level agreement [1].

Taking advantage of the savings to be had in cloud-computing, 40,000 of the Arizona State University’s 65,000 students have switched to Google accounts. While previously, the university offered inbox quotas of 50 MB per student, Gmail offers 2 GB of storage. As a result of the move, the university has already been able to transition two of its four full-time engineers who had managed the 4 terabyte (TB) NetApp storage system to other more important functions. The savings offered by the switch to Gmail are $350,000 per year alone in storage, maintenance and personnel costs [2].

How much does maintaining your infrastructure cost? How much do you personally spend on software? Maybe you need to consider the move to cloud computing?

M

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[1] Ribeiro, J (2008) Google extends Apps Premier credit for Gmail outages. 28 August, 01:45 PM. Online at: <http://www.itworld.com/…/premier-credit-gmail-outages>, accessed on 7 Sept 2008

[2] Pariseau, B (2007) College slashes storage costs with Google Gmail. 01 March. Online at: <http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/…/245576,00.html>, accessed on 7 Sept 2008

Javascript, Headers and URLs

I was playing with the Topic Map Kid site a few days ago and wanted to use the HTTP Header information to write the site’s root. Unfortunately, after a bit of googling it seemed that no one could help with a javascript solution to access the header information. To cut strings, Javascript doesn’t have the same handy left() right() functions that ASP Classic has either.

So, the only option available to me was to slice and dice the window.location.href which I thought I would share with you all.

 function Left(str, n){
  if (n <= 0)
      return “”;
  else if (n > String(str).length)
      return str;
  else
      return String(str).substring(0,n);
 }

 function Right(str, n){
     if (n <= 0)
        return “”;
     else if (n > String(str).length)
        return str;
     else {
        var iLen = String(str).length;
        return String(str).substring(iLen, iLen – n);
     }
 }

 //find the current url of the site incl page
 var ajax_url = window.location.href;
 
 //cut out the http:// part … which equals 7 characters
 var ajax_url_len = ajax_url.length – 7;
 
 //now strip out the http:// part
 ajax_url = Right(ajax_url, ajax_url_len)
 
 // identify the first / which will be the .com/page.html part
 var where_is_slash=ajax_url.indexOf(‘/’);

 // now cut out the /path.html .. etc .. part so we’ve just left with the site’s URL
 ajax_url = Left(ajax_url,where_is_slash);