This week’s ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup is chock-full of stories this week, so lets not waste any time recapping the top posts of the last week of February. We’ve got tips for keeping out the trolls, some advice for naming your startup, best methods for weeding out programming applicants, and an example of how Google Buzz can be used by startups to engage users. Also, our Never Mind the Valley series is back in full swing this week with profiles of Washington D.C. and Chicago.

Sponsor

Keeping Out the Trolls: Relevancy in User-Generated Content

In the summer of 2008, J.R. Johnson sold Virtual Tourist to Expedia for $85 million dollars. While Johnson seems like the type of laid back Los Angeles entrepreneur that would take some vacation time, his quest for relevancy had him launching a new community the following March. Lunch.com is Johnson’s attempt to cut through the noise that has proliferated since he first started in the user-generated-review space in 1999.

What’s In A Name? For Startups, It’s Crucial

If you’ve been following our Weekend Reading series on Fridays for the last few weeks, you’ve noticed that we’ve been discussing the importance of personal branding for entrepreneurs. But branding is not only an important facet for individuals; for startups, branding is an essential step toward building a successful business. Mint founder Aaron Patzer, who speaks Tuesday at the Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami, Florida, recently discussed with CNET’s Caroline McCarthy how he believes Mint’s branding helped it become a breakout success.

Hiring Programmers: Screening Out Liars and Duds

Every entrepreneur will tell you that recruiting the right candidate is important. While startups are constantly trying to find programmers that mesh well with their culture, team and work-style, one article suggests that companies still struggle finding candidates that know how to program at all. Jeff Atwood published a post this morning entitled, The Non-Programming Programmer with a stunning look at how many interviewees misrepresent their abilities.

Startups: Don’t Don’t Be Be Redundant Redundant On On Buzz Buzz

Tuesday night, ReadWriteWeb announced that we would be taking a new approach to how we use social media to communicate with our readers. Instead of blasting out automated content on Google Buzz as we do with our Twitter and Facebook accounts, we will be using Buzz to interact on a new level by discussing anything and everything in Buzz’s forum-esque threads. I described it last night in a Buzz comment as “a better version of forums meets a less frantic chat room,” and many positive comments seem to be welcoming this new form of engagement. This also got me thinking about how startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs can take advantage of Buzz.

Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Washington DC

The words “fat cats in Washington” have been uttered in every corner of the nation from Texas to the Bay, yet DC’s tech scene is anything but sluggish. Companies like AOL, Nextel, MCI and Uunet found early success in the region and since then, a slew of young entrepreneurs have emerged to follow suit. Some of the companies include LivingSocial, Clearspring, CareerBuilder, OPower and iPhone app development service PointAbout. ReadWriteWeb caught up with some of the industry’s movers and shakers to find out what the DC scene has to offer for entrepreneur

Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Chicago

Holding down the proverbial fort for the mid-west, Chicago, the Windy City, is the third largest city in the U.S. and the most populous city that doesn’t sit on an ocean coast. The city, which does, however, rest on the shore of Lake Michigan, is home to a unique culture of nearly 3 million people and countless numbers of Fortune 500 companies condensed into its 234 square miles of city. Though the city is often passed over for Silicon Valley and New York in terms of startup cultures, Chicago has a expanding repertoire of companies, entrepreneurs, investors and organizations helping put the city on the startup map.

Discuss

You know those time-lapse videos that compress days, weeks or years into minutes? The ones with flowers budding, blooming and then withering in seconds? Or late-1990s Silicon Valley startups getting venture capital, blowing it on espresso bathtubs and Dr. Pepper fountains, and vanishing into receivership?

I think Twitter may be the same thing, except for language. In spoken English, it can take decades - even centuries - for new words to emerge, become part of common parlance, and then fade into disuse.

Sponsor

But on Twitter, hashtags can live that entire lifecycle in the course of a day or two. A news story breaks, and competing hashtags vie for dominance. Then a few influential folks adopt the same one. Suddenly the conversation coalesces around it, the term trends, the spammers start using it, and then the conversation peters out as we move on to the next topic.

Is that the pattern? And how closely does it map onto the ways that words and phrases earworm their way into spoken language?

Maybe some up-and-coming linguistics student is already mapping the ways hashtags rise and decay, and getting ready to publish a dissertation… in 140-character increments.

Meanwhile, people, seriously - “snowicane”?

More Noise to Signal.

Discuss

Our readers know ReadWriteWeb as the blog that’s ahead of the technology curve. Our sponsors know us as that, too. Once a week we introduce our sponsors to our readers and let them know a little more about who they are and what they do. You can say thanks to the companies that make ReadWriteWeb happen by tweeting them (see the link below each sponsor) or following them using our Twitter list.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? Our readers are smart, tech-savvy decision makers; 40% have a graduate degree or PhD, and over 45% play a key role in information technology purchasing decisions. More than 1 million people on Twitter follow us to stay abreast of the latest Web technology trends from around the globe. To find out more about our sponsor packages, visit our advertising page or email our COO.

Sponsor

Skip to info about:
Tableau : Data visualization |
Crowd Science: Demographic data |
Medill School of Journalism: Digital journalism programs |
Mashery: API management services |
Rackspace: Cloud computing experts |
Global Delight: Mac and iPhone Producs |
Sproutbox: Start-up investors |
OptionsHouse : Online Brokerage |
Aplus.net: Web hosting |
Search Engine Strategies New York: Conference in New York |
Conduit: Customized components |
MyDomain.com: Domain registrar |
Toopia: Our iPhone app developer

Tableau

Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web in interesting and compelling graphs. Download Tableau Public and in minutes, you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes. Anyone can do it. You don’t need to be a programmer or hire one - no language to learn, no plug-ins, no API. Your blog or website will stand out with colorful, interactive data visualizations. Bloggers using Tableau Public are averaging 3 times more reader comments.

And, once on the web, anyone can interact with your graph and the data. They can re-embed your work, download the data, or create their own visualizations. Check out our gallery to see some of the cool graphs bloggers have created. Or learn how in our 5 minute video.

Thank Tableau on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we’ve struggled to get in the past. It’s important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science.

Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Medill School of Journalism

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University offers programs that combine the enduring skills and values of journalism with new techniques and knowledge that are essential to thrive in a digital world. You might have a passion for creating finely crafted prose, or for telling stories using visual tools. Maybe you are invigorated by the possibilities of interactive publishing, or by videography for the small screen. Maybe you are an experienced professional looking to renew and retool your multimedia skills. You can find your niche in Medill’s graduate journalism program.

Thank the Medill School of Journalism on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery’s expertise. At the “Business of APIs” conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper “Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services” to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world’s largest hosting providers, but it’s also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Explore Rackspace’s hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Global Delight

Global Delight is a dedicated team of developers passionate about everything Mac, iPhone and iPad. Global Delight has churned out some of the widely recognized applications for Mac and iPhone. Voila, nominated as the Best Consumer Software in the Macworld Awards 2009, is a powerful screen capturing, image editing, organizing and sharing tool on the Mac platform. Voila enables users to quickly capture and annotate anything and everything on their screen, turning their manuals, documents, courseware and more into a visual delight. Camera Plus Pro, currently nominated as The Best App Ever 2009 under the Photography section, is a power-packed camera app for the iPhone, thrilling users worldwide with its amazing capturing, editing, managing and sharing options. It is the only iPhone camera app that offers geo-tagging, full-resolution photo editing, and multiple and simultaneous photo uploading to various sites.

Thank Global Delight on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Sproutbox

SproutBox is an elite team of product developers, creatives, and business experts that invest their talent full-time in start-ups. SproutBox’s new approach to venture capital has helped launch several successful companies including: CheddarGetter, a subscription billing and analytics tool; ScheduleThing, an online scheduling and reservations app; and Squad, a web-based collaborative code editor.

To apply for start-up funding or find out more information visit sproutbox.com.

Thank Sproutbox on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

OptionsHouse

href="http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=185300__zoneid=0__cb=a1c9bfa640__r_id=__r_ts=__oadest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.optionshouse.com%2F%3Fpartner%3Dreadwrtewb%26utm_source%3Dreadwrtewb%26utm_medium%3Dpaid-banner-ads%26utm_campaign%3DThank-You-Post%26utm_content%3Dhome-thank-you-post"
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> src="http://i.xx.openx.com/cb77b02f40ee1316c06ccb4ddcf4ce91.jpg"
width="200" height="100" align="right" /> href="http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=185300__zoneid=0__cb=a1c9bfa640__r_id=__r_ts=__oadest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.optionshouse.com%2F%3Fpartner%3Dreadwrtewb%26utm_source%3Dreadwrtewb%26utm_medium%3Dpaid-banner-ads%26utm_campaign%3DThank-You-Post%26utm_content%3Dhome-thank-you-post"
target="_blank" rel="nofollow">OptionsHouse is an online broker, serving self-directed investors interested in options, stocks, and IRAs. We offer a streamlined, professional-grade trading platform and some of the lowest, most competitive rates available in the industry.

Thank OptionsHouse on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Search Engine Strategies New York

Taking control of your business’s online destiny at Search Engine Strategies New York: From Social Media to Mobile, Video and Local Search, Search Engine Strategies New York will guide you through the complexities of search marketing and take you beyond the everyday fundamentals. Discover how this seemingly innocuous art touches and affects every aspect of your business’ online existence, and how mastering it will transform both your brand and your profit margins.

Register now through Jan 15 and save $600. Enter RWW15 to save an additional 15%.

Thank Search Engine Strategies New York on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Conduit

Conduit enables Web publishers to distribute their offerings both directly and through its global network of 220,000 publishers and their 100 million users. The Conduit platform is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to offer the best of your site through a custom App or Community Toolbar, send desktop alerts to your users, and much more.

The Conduit platform opens a new world of content sharing. Your site visitors can add your content right to their browser by clicking on a branded 2go button that you place on your site. You can also share your content in the Conduit Marketplace, where all the publishers and users in the Conduit network can grab it.

The platform has been adopted by major brands such as Fox News, iWin, Major League Baseball, TechCrunch, and Travelocity, as well as thousands of small and medium organizations in 120 countries.

If you would like to Conduit your website, go to www.conduit.com.

Thank Conduit on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

MyDomain.com

MyDomain is a leading ICANN-accredited provider of domain name registration and online business solutions. For over 10 years, MyDomain has offered low-cost domain names and free domain services including complete DNS management. Today, sub-$10 domains without the constant upsells you’ll find at some competitors are the norm at MyDomain. MyDomain’s complete range of solutions include Web hosting and VPS hosting, email, SSL Certificates and more.

Toopia

Nicolas Koenig is the developer who made our beautiful iPhone app a reality. He runs an iPhone development shop from the Netherlands called Toopia. Toopia also created the Thermometer iPhone app, which enables your iPhone or iPod touch to get the current temperature based on your location. The RWW app lets you read us on the go, follow us on Twitter, share stories on Facebook and Twitter, and browse at your leasure using Read it Later and Instapaper. Download the ReadWriteWeb iPhone application here.

Thank Toopia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you’ll stop by their sites and see what they’ve got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb’s? Drop us a line and let’s talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

Discuss

Every one of us suffers from lapses in self confidence and they may be moments or turn into real threats to our success. It’s even more threatening if an organization’s culture lacks self esteem and confidence too.

I found this posting helpful to read.

Do You Make These 3 Common Mistakes When Trying to Improve Your Self Confidence?
by Henrik Edberg.

1. You sit around and hope that you can solve it in your mind somehow.
2. You focus on the wrong things.
3. You don’t prepare.

Fear of failure.

“Fear of failure can hold you back. But failure isn’t all that bad really. It can be very helpful if you choose to see it that way. The thing is to reframe failure from being something that makes your legs shake to something useful and important for the growth of your self confidence and your overall growth as a human being. Here are four ways that failure can help you out:

You learn.
You gain experiences you could not get any other way.
You become stronger.
Your chances of succeeding increases.

Worth the quick read. More worth internalizing.

And, yes, I have self-confidence lapses regularly!

Stephen

• Philpapers Breaks New Ground for Discipline Based Repositories http://icio.us/nl1wfu #
• Jewel in the Open Content Crown Needs Help http://icio.us/mjxpa1 #
• OASPA: act now or lose credibility forever http://icio.us/a3w2cr #
• 50+ CSS Techniques Designers Should Know http://icio.us/xzl4h3 #
• Epub reader plugin for Firefox http://icio.us/0quiwr #
• January 2010 Profile: Michael Healy [Executive Director, Google Book Rights Registry] http://icio.us/tgooxz #
• E-Books and ISBNs: a position paper and action points from the International ISBN Agency http://icio.us/uygmsb #
• Europe 'will not accept' three strikes in Acta treaty http://icio.us/b5cffd #
• New Mexico State Must Cut Materials Budget by 27% http://icio.us/i2qnrq #
• 500,000 journal articles listed on RePE http://icio.us/nprlmy #
• Three-strikes petition gets attention of 10 Downing Street http://icio.us/lty5j0 #
• Next Generation Connectivity: A Review of Broadband Internet Transitions and Policy from Around the World http://bit.ly/az3fHe #
• RSA System Administrator/Manager at Alliance Library System http://bit.ly/aULzUz #
• 2010 Publication Schedule for the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography http://bit.ly/bSjT26 #
• Systems Librarian at Florida Institute of Technology http://bit.ly/devcGr #
• Modelling Scholarly Communication Options: Costs and Benefits for Universities http://bit.ly/b2rXwj #
• When using open source makes you an enemy of the state http://icio.us/stzzzn #
• European Commission Gets Tough Treatment From Parliament Over ACTA http://icio.us/mj4vps #
• How efficient is our licensing system? http://icio.us/mwudov #
• The Big Brother of Europe?: France Moves Closer to Unprecedented Internet Regulation http://icio.us/lfih1b #
• RIAA ’statutory damages’ argument trashed? http://icio.us/aozzu1 #
• Third RIAA trial for Jammie Thomas-Rasset http://icio.us/xrkoek #
• Riggio: Barnes & Noble to Become E-Commerce Retailer http://icio.us/e244xk #
• White House "IP Czar" demands good data from rightsholders http://icio.us/11giqk #
• JISC Digital Repository infoKit http://bit.ly/d517ea #
• Technology/Instruction Librarian at Southwest Minnesota State University http://bit.ly/aVS9Nn #
• "Capture and Release": Digital Cameras in the Reading Room http://bit.ly/bUwTbj #
• Associate Librarian for Information Systems/Collection Access at SUNY New Paltz http://bit.ly/9Tvv4z #
• A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation http://bit.ly/d0q1nQ #
• Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (2/24/10) http://bit.ly/9fdEiS #
• Repository & the Cloud event http://icio.us/n1vwas #
• A Win For Publishers http://icio.us/jkt52q #
• Cloud storage in a post-SQL world http://icio.us/1u4ljn #
• New Zealand Introduces File-Sharing Amendment Bill http://icio.us/1v0bjs #
• Google Books Settlement: An End Run Around Authors' Contracts and Copyright http://icio.us/qlovuw #
• "DSpace Manakin UI: Case Study of Value and Costs" http://bit.ly/9RnG0r #
• Digital Projects Librarian at Plymouth State University http://bit.ly/bkl1oT #
• Reed Elsevier 2009 Financial Results http://bit.ly/bnwPvk #
• Senior Web Specialist for Library Services & Scholarly Applications at Villanova University http://bit.ly/bYLU6P #
• Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries http://bit.ly/aBsd6p #
• The Commons welcomes the University of Washington Libraries! http://icio.us/tzv1iz #
• Interview with Dorothea Salo http://icio.us/bb5man #
• Case closed: why most of USA lacks 100Mbps 'Net connections http://icio.us/sgagv5 #
• UKCoRR Meeting Leicester http://icio.us/s5r2cv #
• TOC Report: I see the new Alex ereader – it’s fantastic http://icio.us/ooo00h #
• Open Access Publishing: How Will We Pay for It? http://icio.us/1kp1mn #
• Open University online research repository gets one million visitors http://icio.us/sywsr1 #
• Thousands of authors opt out of Google book settlement http://icio.us/zercrw #
• Platform Wars Come to the Book Business http://icio.us/kxbinr #
• Shameless Self-Promotion http://icio.us/qwnjks #
• EU Data Protection Supervisor Warns Against ACTA, Calls 3 Strikes Disproportionate http://icio.us/j1ulqs #
• UK Government: Disconnections? No. Suspensions? Yes. http://icio.us/3qptxf #
• E-Book Sales Jump 176% in Flat Trade Year http://icio.us/4mcspo #
• University of Houston Proposes to Cut Staff Costs by over $15 Million in 2010-11 Biennium http://bit.ly/c6XHqT #
• Technology Librarian at Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy http://bit.ly/aRX305 #
• Google Book Search Settlement Hearing Transcript http://bit.ly/biOe7b #
• "A Survey of the Scholarly Journals Using Open Journal Systems" http://bit.ly/bqxTJ5 #
• Emerging Technologies Librarian at John Marshall Law School http://bit.ly/cN52Yg #
• Digital Nation: 21st Century America's Progress Towards Universal Broadband Internet Access http://bit.ly/dgw94d #
• Format War Heats Up Among Publishers of Electronic Textbooks http://icio.us/mwgyqq #
• Sourcing and scaling http://icio.us/sihhyr #
• Macmillan’s DynamicBooks Lets Professors Rewrite E-Textbooks http://icio.us/jymf3l #
• U. releases Kindle pilot data http://icio.us/ej5qf3 #
• Leaked ACTA draft reveals plans for internet clampdown http://icio.us/v0q5in #
• Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition Now $25 or $9.99 (Kindle) http://bit.ly/brVDij #
• "Academic Author Objections to the Google Book Search Settlement" http://bit.ly/ccvdcK #
• Digital Curation Librarian at Michigan State University http://bit.ly/bA7qG4 #
• EFF: "Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers" http://bit.ly/d9R41b #
• Database Analyst and Web Services Developer at Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library http://bit.ly/cPfgIJ #
• The Future of the Internet IV http://bit.ly/ao2Pk3 #
• Open Repositories 2010 Call for Papers Deadline 1/3/10 http://icio.us/qshapt #
• Nook users feeling hooked by escalating e-book prices http://icio.us/mw2hku #
• Trust and the Settlement http://icio.us/yhe3qt #
• The Library Exception Under the Indian Copyright Act 1957 http://icio.us/mlzhx1 #
• Last Week's DigitalKoans Tweets 2010-02-21 http://bit.ly/9okDNj #

Related Posts

1. Last Week’s DigitalKoans Tweets 2010-02-21

	Shared “We have six months to save Evanston’s libraries.…”.
	@webosinternals I have preware .9.12 w/updated feeds but it’s not showing an update available for .9.28. how can I get the new version? [shifted]
	Posted klibrary: RT @johntspencer Why are we shutting down “failing” schools and propping up failing banks? (via @mtechman) agreed! Why is that?.
	Shared Earthquake Data, Feb 27th.
	Posted ColonelTribune: Here is live TV coverage from Hawaii in advance of the coming tsunami: http://bit.ly/bwSx5f This will be weird. Live disaster coverage..
	RT @timoreilly: Amazing map showing how the Chilean earthquake’s energy is expected to spread through the ocean http://bit.ly/cPFj7D [shifted]
	Posted yalescilib: RT @TEDNews @TEDchris Cosmologist Sean Carroll on understanding time. Absolutely, utterly awesome http://on.ted.com/8ANC.
	Posted TWCi: IMPORTANT! If NOT in Hawaii, please DON’T look at evac maps from Pac. Tsunami Warning Ctr. Servers jammed. Leave for those who NEED it!.
	Posted keyinfluencer: Here is a list of Chileans and others close to the earthquake reporting from the ground http://om.ly/fhCZ.
	Posted Revkin: The plate that shifted http://j.mp/ChilPlate & great piece explaining Earth’s deadly — & lifegiving — dynamics: http://j.mp/dynEarth #quake.
	Posted BreakingNews: #Tsunami at Marquesas Island smaller than forecast; Hawaii impact could be less than initial expectations — National Weather Service.
	Posted KnockDownCrazy: The Chile coast may have shifted as much as 10 feet. At 3:44 in video: http://bit.ly/dauOPL That is just huge. #earthquake.
	RT @acarvin: Watching @ineenz live-streaming from a car in Oahu: http://bit.ly/ajRogJ [shifted]
	Posted oodja: RT @BoingBoing: Chile quake, Pacific tsunami watch: open thread http://bit.ly/b3gMqK.
	Posted JasonOkuma: 1 hour 3 minutes away from first #Tsunami waves to hit #Hawaii. Get LOCAL #Hawaii LIVE News VIDEO here http://www.hitsunami.info.
	Posted fanultra: live streaming at http://tinyurl.com/yflqcr7 #Hawaii #tsunami #hitsunami.
	Posted digicmb: Twitter 360 App Augmented Reality for the iPhone 3GS http://bit.ly/aHQjmX twitter apps augmentedreality geotagging RT @iknrr.
	Posted nytimes: Tsunami Twitter list: Real-time updates from ordinary people and media orgs. in Hawaii — http://bit.ly/a62wIQ.
	Posted jpmccluskey: nearly 81,000 people watching the Ustream broadcast of the Hilo/Hawaii tsunami #hitsunami.
	RT @aarontay: [New Post] QR codes for libraries — some thoughts http://goo.gl/fb/HBJn [shifted]

Share:

No tags for this post.

Ithaca, NY Have ever wondered what it was like to travel in the Middle East long ago? Rice University’s TIMEA (http://timea.rice.edu/) digital archive offers visitors unique views of Western interactions with the Middle East during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The TIMEA archive includes electronic texts such as travel guides, museum catalogs, and travel narratives, photographic and hand-drawn imagesof Egypt, historical maps, and interactive GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps of Egypt and Cyprus.

TIMEA provides researchers with a common user interface to digital objects in three repositories. Texts, historical maps and images reside in DSpace. Educational research modules are presented within Connexions, an open-content commons and publishing platform for educational materials.

After a lifetime as a PC user, today I bought a MacBook!  I am both excited and nervous, as literally the last time I used a Mac was in the junior high school newspaper club (oh yeah, you remember those little Apple computers!).  Needless to say, I’ve had enough experience with PCs, troubleshooting, software, tweaking, security-proofing, and speed enhancing that I could probably guide anyone else making the jump from Apple to PCs.  But I am in need of help myself right now!

I will note that I am still the proud owner of an Android phone, and do still support the open development platform in general.  And I’m super peeved that most of our library’s audio books are now inaccessible to me.  Feh.  But…I had it up to here with Windows 7, with HP, and with skeevy Microsoft screwing around with substandard product releases.  So, here I am

If you are a Mac person, please either comment below or email/IM/text/whatever me with any tips you have for a newbie Mac owner, particularly one who is used to running literally everything in a PC platform.

Ithaca, NY  Developer Happiness Days 2010 (http://wiki.2010.dev8d.org/w/Main_Page) came to an end today in London. The DEV8D blog (http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/) features interviews with event participants who discuss projects, innovation and new ideas around how to get scientists and developers together. Ian Mulvaney, the product manager of Nature journal said, “We’re very keen to work with people who have good ideas about how to improve the process of scientific communication.”

A round-up of additional tagged DEV8D content–tweets, posts, and photographs is available here: http://www.netvibes.com/amcgregor#dev8D.

Cloud computing means many things, but almost all definitions include some key value propositions: scalable on-demand resources, a metered pay-per-use model, access over the Internet, and infrastructure management and optimization that is better than most data centers.

At a more conceptual level, cloud computing abstracts away all the undifferentiated IT tasks. Most businesses don’t add any value to their customers or create any competitive advantage for themselves when they buy, build, configure, and manage servers and storage. This is doubly true for disaster recovery equipment and data centers.

Sponsor

Conversely, poor performance in these tasks can cost value and competitive advantage. There is no benefit in doing these tasks well, but there is cost to doing them badly. This is like the opposite of a financial call option - lots of downside risk, but no upside.

For companies planning their first disaster recovery data center, with the associated selection, build, and maintenance tasks for servers, storage, and networking, cloud computing seems like an obvious fit. They can trade the capital expense that buys them no new value, for a no-commitment operating expense that probably buys better operating practices than they could achieve themselves.

Solutions are beginning to grow up around this idea of cloud recovery. The name is a little optimistic because most offerings today are traditional backup solutions, with little or no ability to actually recover in the cloud. Although a lot of vendors in the backup industry are making cloud announcements, they are mostly just letting users store backups in the cloud. In order to really deserve the cloud recovery title a solution should have the following features.

1. The ability to recover workloads in the cloud: The cloud can offer more than just a place to dump your backup files. It can provide the computing systems to run your recovered systems, and after a production system fails, the ability to quickly restart a complete replacement with data, applications, and complete configuration in the cloud.

2. Effectively unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning: A few vendors can offer rapid, off-site recovery, but they don’t really qualify for the cloud title unless they provide lots of stand-by capacity with no up-front reservations or configuration. While this seems like a lot to ask, this is the promise of cloud computing.

3. Pay-per-use billing model: A defining characteristic of cloud computing is that we only pay for the things we use. Use a little this week and pay a little; if we use a lot next week then we pay more, but only for that specific week.

4. Infrastructure that is more secure and more reliable than the one you would build yourself: When we decide to outsource any part of our operation, we worry about the security and reliability of our vendor. The best cloud providers have not only large scale equipment, but also large scale expertise. This means that they can be much better at security and reliability than any of their customers, and their data center is better than one we might build for ourselves.

5. Complete protection and automated recovery: Non-expert users should be able to recover everything they need by default - the current crop of solutions is shockingly bad at this. This is the cherry on top because it makes everything so easy. No one wants to go through a “run book” full of recovery procedures and bring in experts for each system to assist with getting recovered systems back online. Depending on the type of disaster, experts may be scarce, and the run book is probably out of date. Why not make the run book part of the automated system? Instead, simply push a button that says “recover now”, wait for the files to copy, and then log in to the perfectly configured system, running right in the cloud.

In summary, the trouble with traditional backup solutions is that they are really focused on dumping the data onto tape or disk (and now onto cloud storage), and maybe restoring it back onto the original hardware. If you must recover to different hardware or a different virtualization platform, they don’t generally do much to help with the inevitable incompatibilities. And for equipment failures, you really have to have some hardware standing by.

So while cloud computing means many things, it is fair to say that any cloud recovery customer who doesn’t get all five of these features will be disappointed.

Photo credit: Suresh
Discuss