Posts tagged Time
When Is the Super Bowl Start Time? The NFL Finally Gets It Right
Feb 5th
Super Bowl 46 kicks off on February 5, 2012 at 6:30pm EST on NBC. Amazingly enough, I found this information by searching on Google and clicking on the second result: nfl.com. Amazing because every year, football fans flock to search engines searching for the start time, and until now,…
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Super Bowl Stat Time: Wolfram|Alpha Offers Stats Guide for Football Junkies
Feb 4th
If you want Super Bowl stats, the self-described computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha is the place to break down all the key Super Bowl 46 numbers before the New England Patriots and New York Giants game kicks off tomorrow night.
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It’s Time to Ditch StumbleUpon for Pinterest
Feb 3rd
StumbleUpon is one of those sites we’ve had on our radar for quite sometime. We covered the company’s redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.
The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user’s direct stumbling experience.
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“As part of redesign that spawns user experience that you write about, we look a lot at how users are using our service,” said StumbleUpon’s VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz. “We have some things in mind to address this concern.”
StumbleUpon’s response is that, well, they were “just trying to improve the user experience.” And besides, they told us, two-thirds of users use the Web bar.
“Signed-in users, when they’re encountering the Web bar it is about their stumbling,” Leibowitz said. “Visitors can easily close the Web bar.”
In other words, if you do want to see direct links, just don’t sign in.
What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user’s taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.
Leibowitz cited accidental clicks on the “X” button of the Web bar as StumbleUpon’s main reason for getting rid of the Web bar entirely.
“People would accidentally click the button – they don’t have an extension such as Chrome or Firefox extensions, so they can’t go back to their Stumbling unless they go directly to StumbleUpon.com.”
This sounds like a complicated solution for a pretty easy problem. It would it have been pretty easy for StumbleUpon to just add a box that pops up when the user clicks “X.” It could say something simple like: “Are you sure you want to close this page and leave StumbleUpon?” Instead, StumbleUpon says, it is thinking only of the users – not the people who receive tons of referral traffic from the StumbleUpon discovery engine.
“The trade off is that we have to make some concessions around the way we show the URL,” Leibowitz tells us. “There’s no way we can change the way the URL is displayed in the address bar, but there are some ways we can make it easier to copy and paste the source code.”
For StumbleUpon users who are still looking for a way to see the direct URL, try using a StumbleUpon Firefox add-on or Chrome extension.
What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic?
Unfortunately for sites who depend on StumbleUpon for referral traffic, there aren’t too many alternatives.
“My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon,” writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. “After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further…especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview.”
Pinterest is now Davis’ number two referrer.
This is only one isolated case, but it’s telling. Perhaps it’s time for marketers to start shifting their strategy from StumbleUpon to Pinterest. Because it doesn’t look like StumbleUpon will be backpedaling on its latest decision anytime soon.
Has referral traffic to your site suffered since the StumbleUpon redesign? Tell us about it in the comments.
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Limited Time Discounts Announced by SEO Corporation, #1 SEO Company India – PR Web (press release)
Jan 30th
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Limited Time Discounts Announced by SEO Corporation, #1 SEO Company India
PR Web (press release) Outsourcing to SEO Company India can help save one more than 70% on In-house SEO. As for an example if a person from US, UK or Australia hires a dedicated SEO Expert in his own country it can cost him a minimum of $5000 but one can hire experienced SEO … |
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Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
Jan 27th
Two weeks ago, Google launched Search Plus Your World. Since then, Google has faced strong criticisms that SPYW is making its search relevancy worse and favoring its Google+ social network too much. Not so, says Google search chief Amit Singhal. Most Google users are happy, Singhal said. Of course,…
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When’s the Best Time to Blog & Share?
Jan 27th
Anyone who spends their day on the Internet inevitably wonders this question. Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning, to catch commuters while they’re on the way to work? Or is everything completely random, driven by the off-chance that a post will end up on StumbleUpon and enjoy a slightly longer tail? Social sharing widget Sharaholic looked at its 2011 data, breaking it down to the top 100 days and times for sharing. See the results in Eastern Standard Time.
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Sharaholic looked at two metrics: social shares and traffic. For some, getting the highest number of shares is the goal; for others, increased traffic is where it’s at. Please remember that this data all comes from Sharaholic, so it’s specific to those users, though it’s possible to infer more from the results.
Thursday beats every other day. Why? People are probably bored at work, trolling about on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (and Orkut?), sharing to their hearts’ desire. Sharaholic’s data shows that 31%, or more than a third of the top 100 social share days, were Thursdays. The best day for pageviews, however, is not Thursday. In fact, it’s Monday. According to Sharaholic’s data, Monday captures 43% of the top 100 pageview days in 2011.
As most blogs know, the best time of day for social shares is between 8am and 12pm ET. Sharaholic’s data confirms this, showing that the most shares occur at 9am ET, moments before East coasters step into their offices to start the workday. Traffic declines throughout the day, spiking back up again around 9pm, and then slowly tapering off. Evidently, the best time of day to blog for pageviews is also 9am ET.
Image via UrbanHomesPDX.com.
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Rise of Mobile Web Apps Will Give webOS A Time to Shine
Jan 27th
Hewlett-Packard yesterday announced the open source roadmap for its beleaguered mobile platform webOS. This is HP’s last-ditch attempt to actually turn webOS into a viable product after it acquired Palm in April 2010. It looks like the rebuilt source code for webOS will not be ready until September as HP takes the long view of the platform. Yet, when webOS is ready for prime time again, it may be just in time to take advantage of some of the deep current flowing through the mobile ecosystem.
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IDC analyst Al Hilwa likes where HP’s webOS roadmap is going:
“Great to see this outlined in some level of detail. I am not surprised that it will take till September to open this code. There is normally a significant amount of scrutiny and code grooming to ensure that any sizeable chunk of code would stand scrutiny form an IP perspective. This is standard operating procedure. I think putting WebOS in the Apache 2.0 license is a bold move likely to maximize chances of adoption by OEMs because Apache 2.0 is both familiar and permissive. The Enyo JavaScript framework is likely to have a life of its own separate from WebOS because of the difficulty of building good JavaScript frameworks with support for sensors and device hardware. All in all this is a good first step to what might shape up to be an important contribution to the community with many valuable components, but we will have to wait and see if there are any actual takers. Feature maturity compared to Android may be a challenge for WebOS, but the elegance of the user interface and a more participatory governance model should attract some players in the embedded development space.”
The beauty of webOS is that it is the one mobile platform that takes a Web-first approach to application building. If you take a look at its application framework Enyo, it is clear that that webOS does not adhere to the principles of “native” platforms like Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone or iOS.
One of the reasons that webOS was crippled in the era of the native platform is because it did not have a robust application ecosystem outside of its reliance on Web technologies. Palm built webOS to be of the mobile Web. In this way, Palm was ahead of its time back in the mid-2000s. Even when the iPhone first came out in 2007, it was designed to be a device to access the mobile Web. That all changed when Apple released the App Store in 2008 and the native model of application development and delivery was born.
It should come as no surprise that there were major similarities to Apple’s early approach to (what became) iOS and Palm’s webOS. A significant portion of Apple’s team at the time has spent time working on both platforms, including Andy Grignon, VP of webOS software and applications at HP (Grignon has some patents on a few of the prototype iPhones that Steve Jobs rejected).
Palm’s problem was that the mobile Web was not ready for devices. We are just now starting to see the problems facing mobile Web apps being addressed through the HTML5 spec such as CSS and rendering along with caching and device access to elements like the camera and accelerometer. The native platforms have had that advantage since the beginning.
This is where webOS has a chance. It straddles the line between Web and native in a very fundamental way. Mobile Web applications will continue to evolve in 2012 as progress is made on HTML5 and the spec and ecosystem mature. The webOS open source project should be designed to take specific advantage of those mobile Web apps. Upcoming releases of Enyo will include distribution of WebKit as along with Flash and Silverlight as plug-ins. The kernel will be based on the Linux Foundation’s standard kernel.
While HP has been criticized for how it has handled webOS, this new direction is exciting. Other mobile open source projects, such as Tizen, do not have the type of history and funcationality that webOS can offer. The biggest problem facing webOS when it is ready will be whether or not any of the major original equipment manufacturers will pick it up and run with it. Samsung would be a logical choice if it is starting to hedge its bets on Android reliance but HTC could make a dent in the ecosystem by differentiating itself through webOS.
What it may boil down to is this: Palm may have been ahead of its time with webOS, but it fell behind the times when the native app environment exploded. With the coming wave of HTML5 mobile Web apps, the time for webOS to shine may come again.
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Running Out of Time for Monki Gras Tickets
Jan 25th
The RedMonk folks are getting ready to close the door on signups for The Monki Gras. The conference is scheduled for February 1st and 2nd in London, and features a delightful pairing of industry experts and beer. If you want to attend, you need to speak up today – the organizers are closing ticket sales on January 25th.
The Monki Gras is a follow-on conference to Monktoberfest, which took place last October in Portland, Maine. (As some would have it, "the Real Portland.")
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What’s It About?
The Monktoberfest conference was the first time RedMonk went about organizing a conference. As RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady likes to note, the conference started as a joke. What if they threw a conference that focused on beer as well as an agenda for developers?
Here’s what happens: People show up. Also? They have a pretty good time while also learning quite a bit and sharing with other conference attendees. The "hallway track" is often the best track of any technical conference, and Monktoberfest put the hallway track front and center by arranging fantastic food and beer for the breaks and dinners. Oh, and the talks were quite good too.
One More Round
Monktoberfest was a resounding success, so they said that they’d do it again. This time, they’re doing it in London a few days before another (slightly larger) developer-oriented conference: the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM).
Once again, the focus is on tech and craft beer. This time, the beer focus is on the UK’s "burgeoning craft beer startup scene" and one or two Belgian beers, perhaps. The talk focus has been expanded a bit, though. Many of the folks at Monktoberfest complained that the event was great, but there wasn’t enough of it. This time around, the RedMonk crew is adding a half-day of talks on day two starting at 10 a.m. (not too early).
Some of the speakers you don’t want to miss: Bit.ly’s Matt LeMay will be doing the "Kitteh vs Chikin" talk again, Kohsuke Kawaguchi from CloudBees will be talking about Jenkins and building an OSS community. Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse will be discussing open source foundations, and Laura Merling of Alcatel-Lucent will speak on "how telcos got API religion and what comes next."
The Monki Gras will also feature folks from Lanyrd, Zendesk, Adobe PhoneGap, Joyent and others. I’ll also be doing a talk on day two on how developers can "bootstrap" coverage for their projects.
Tickets for the event are £140.00 and registration closes tomorrow. See you in London!
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Just in Time for “Anonymous” Attacks, U.S. NIST Drafts a New Readiness Plan
Jan 23rd
Two years ago, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security firmly decided (again) that a policy of responding to vulnerabilities in the nation’s cybersecurity when they happen, is insufficient. The National Institute of Standards and Technology set about on a plan to model a 21st century perpetual vulnerability mitigation scheme – a continuous monitoring (CM) framework that attempts to model security procedures not in terms of crisis and response, but instead as a perpetual cycle of monitoring and engagement that stays basically the same whether or not there’s a crisis.
In other words, if you “keep doing this all the time,” then whatever happens won’t destroy the network. Late last week, NIST produced its first series of drafts for how government information services could look, perhaps later this decade. It’s so radically different from anything seen thus far, that NIST acknowledges that no one in the commercial sector has even come up with the language to describe it.
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The January draft of NIST’s interface specifications (PDF available here) shows five layers of what are periodically described as subsystems. Think of these functional components as comprised of devices, software, and people. Acknowledging that not every CM process can or should be automated, NIST’s architects have created these five classes of subsystem to represent the divisions of workflow for both people and technology who work with any data domain. In other words, regardless of what data you’re working with, as a government IT worker, you and your programs will fall someplace within this model.
So do software vendors start digesting this system now and try to build products based on it? Right now, NIST acknowledges that might not be possible.
“Each subsystem specification provides product development requirements applicable to specific product types. It is not expected, or desired, that any specific product adopt all of the subsystem specifications. Some of the subsystem specifications describe requirements that already exist within many Information Technology (IT) products. Thus, incorporation of these specifications should require only gentle instrumentation for those existing products. In other cases, the subsystems represent new functionality and product types (e.g., multi-product sensor orchestration and tasking and policy content repositories) that do not currently exist on the market. If vendors choose to adopt these specifications, they will likely need to develop new products. To catalyze vendor involvement we are looking into providing functioning prototypes of these capabilities.”
In a situation that will remind some folks of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, NIST comes clean in saying that in order to understand how this solution may eventually work, everyone needs to learn along the way just how the problem works. One of the elements absent from the NIST drafts so far is remediation, for instance. Right now, it’s worked out a structural framework for a query system that triggers workflow between the elements of the subsystems shown in the diagram. But the query language itself has not been invented yet.
So are we years away from a working implementation? Perhaps not very many. The CM concept has only been devised in the past few years, and one of the documents that led to the forging of these latest drafts was only produced last September. At that time, the CM concept was being referred to by its broader abbreviation, Information Systems Continuous Monitoring (ISCM).
“The output of a strategically designed and well-managed organization-wide ISCM program can be used to maintain a system’s authorization to operate and keep required system information and data… up to date on an ongoing basis,” the September document explains. “Security management and reporting tools may provide functionality to automate updates to key evidence needed for ongoing authorization decisions. ISCM also facilitates risk-based decision making regarding the ongoing authorization to operate information systems and security authorization for common controls by providing evolving threat activity or vulnerability information on demand. A security control assessment and risk determination process, otherwise static between authorizations, is thus transformed into a dynamic process that supports timely risk response actions and cost-effective, ongoing authorizations. Continuous monitoring of threats, vulnerabilities, and security control effectiveness provides situational awareness for risk-based support of ongoing authorization decisions. An appropriately designed ISCM strategy and program supports ongoing authorization of type authorizations, as well as single, joint, and leveraged authorizations.”
The hope is that, once security vulnerabilities are identified by researchers, either in the public or private sectors, the standardization of their reporting will enable them to be entered into the system like marbles in a pachinko machine. The system will essentially digest them, feeding on them and integrating their lessons into everyday processes. It is a completely different way to think about work and workflow, but desperate times demand it.
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It’s time to stop PROTECT IP
Jan 18th
A couple months ago, I wrote this about SOPA:
SOPA galvanized the tech community, from start-ups to venture capitalists to the largest web companies. SOPA was an unexpected shock and a wake-up call. Well, guess what? Now the internet is awake. And I don’t think it’s going back to sleep any time soon. We might need to rally again in the near future, but we can do that. The internet learns fast.
Now it’s time to rally and get loud. It’s time to call your Senators. Heck, it’s time to ask your parents to call their Senators. If you think the internet is something different, something special, then take a few minutes to protect it. Groups that support SOPA have contributed nine times more money in Washington D.C. than our side. We need to drown out that money with the sound of our voices. I’d like to flood every Senator’s phone, email, and office with messages right up until January 24th.
If you need a quick refresher about why the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are horrible ideas, Google did a blog post talking about how SOPA and PIPA will censor the web and won’t stop actual pirates. Or read about how capricious takedowns can cause serious collateral damage. Find out how real, legitimate companies can be run out of business.
What you can do?
It’s time for action. Call your Senator right now. Spread the word to your friends and family. Promise not to vote for politicians who support SOPA. Print out some PDFs and post them at work or on your campus. There’s also protests and meetups happening today in New York, the Bay Area of California, and Seattle. Don’t live in the United States? You can still petition the State Department at americancensorship.org.
This is it. You want to look back months from now and know that you did everything you could to protect the internet. Call your Senators, educate your friends and family, and please spread the word about PROTECT IP and SOPA as widely as you can.
But if you can only spare five or six minutes, please call both of your senators below:
Thank you!
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