It looks obvious

This is the 100^th post, when starting with this blog I thought that nobody beside my family here in the US and back home in Israel will ever waste time to come visit it. One hundred posts later I can tell you that I was so wrong I couldn’t even imagine.

The first post in this blog was published at 11/11/05 8:54 PM. I started to collect statistic about the traffic at 11/13 when Google lunched the analytic service and since then the blog had:

1950 Visits

6200 Paged viewed

10 subscribers via e-mail

45 subscribers via RSS

Readers of these blog came from 49 countries

The post with the highest rating, not surprising, was “Allow me to Introduce Ronie ”

And the most important thing is that I found a new activity that giving me a lot of pleasure. I hope to see you here at the 1000^th post again.

Awhile ago I wrote about a TravBuddy and I argued (here and here ) that the main concept of having the users submitting content into TravBuddy database is fallacy. Today, however, I found a company that top Truvbuddy .   
Apparently MyTripJournal.com offers similar services with one huge difference. Not only they hope that the public will submit content to their site, instead of using blogs, the guys at MyTripJournal.com want us to pay (and it isn’t so cheap ) for things that we can get free somewhere else.

Cool isn’t it?

If for nothing else George W. Bush made it ok for future candidates for the highest office of the land to be proudly ignorant about major legislation….

Link: Latter-day President

“Asked if he disagrees with prospective rival John McCain’s proposal to ban "cruel, inhuman and degrading" interrogation of terrorists in U.S. custody, he demurs: "I’m not a senator; [I] haven’t looked at his act." When I persist, he says, "Would you like me to do an analysis of that for you?"–a rare flash of sarcasm, albeit delivered with a smile.”

My mother let me know the priorities very clear today. Your blog, she said, is very nice idea; I only wish you will write less and have more pictures of the girls…

So here I’ll “Talk” less and let my mother enjoy the pictures.

I read a very good column in eWeek claiming that Web 2.0 is in large a marketing term that failed to describe a real technological development or business model improvement. While many of the things written in the past this column put the finger on several key issues.   
When marking the web evolution and declaring the current step in the evolution as 2.o we need to check in what is it different from its predecessor. The problem is that the term Web 2.0 was conceived as rallying call for the recovery of Web business in the post-dot-com crash era and not as technological development. Moreover, as the column points out:

“Even O’Reilly concedes that the Web didn’t collapse with the dot-com market meltdown. The Web kept growing and evolving with hardly a blink as more people signed on every year.”
Moreover most of the “Flag” web 2.0 companies were:
“Successful Web companies such as such as Amazon.com, Yahoo, eBay, MapQuest, MSN and Google were prosperous concerns in 2001 and have only grown bigger since then. Many of the companies that have since emerged as market leaders, such as CRM (customer relationship management) companies Salesforce.com, NetSuite and RightNow Technologies, got their start well before the dot-com meltdown. “

But what is the problem then with the term? As I wrote previously it is because the labeling might lead for another bubble:

“But a rallying call to join Web 2.0 could also be an invitation to participate in Bubble 2.0. For every good idea in the market there may be two or three bad ideas that are dressed up to look like winners because they carry the approved Web 2.0 label.
Every business cycle has its winners and losers. This one will be no different. The lesson that we should have learned from the last Web shakeout was that there is no magic or special sauce when it comes to the Web.
The laws of economics are no different whether people are using a mouse to point and click to buy goods and services, or a pen to fill out an order from the old Sears catalog.”

He then concludes with simple observation:

“AJAX, Ruby on Rails, RSS, wikis or any other reputed Web 2.0 technology won’t make any business successful unless they are built into Web applications that work, are useful, make money and deliver value to customers.
Every venture, no matter what technology it uses, has to be judged on its own merits, not because it carries some catchy label.”

Absolutely worth the reading!

One good thing to say about IBM Service. As I reported my newly purchased laptop had its HD total lost . I called IBM at around 7 PM and the day after I got an overnight shipped new hard drive.

You need to give the credit where it’s due, and it is due in this case.

Finally Academia dealing with real life major problems … but seriously the mistake of this research is the assumption that there is an objective answer to the question of how well a women  rear look in specific clothing.
Many generations of man and crashed relationships thought us to avoid this question diplomatically. There is no right, or objective, answer to this question!!!

"This study will provide for the first time detailed and usable information that would enable designers to make the clothes that help women make the most of their natural assets."

 

(Linked through Israeli Blog )

Fled is ranting about the huge branding campaign planned by at&t . It is amazing how after all the discussions and planning done in these corporations they never come with a conclusion that in order to sale more they need to improve the product, not its image.

In contrast I’m considering to test basecamp to improve projects collaboration. I’m doing so because I read and heard from people that this application really work. I do not think that 37signals invested as much in branding, in fact I’m sure they didn’t.

Link:  The Deathstar Rises

“Apparently, they’ve spent lots of high powered marketing energy (and money, I expect) replacing the “Reach out and touch someone” slogan with “Your world, delivered.”  Excellent.  If I’d been on the “branding committee”, I would have recommended “We Suck Less.” 

Three weeks ago I bought a new laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T43) with all the nice things included. It was after long time of hesitation if to make the move to Apple or not.

For me, as for many of the heavy computer users, setting a new computer is a very long process. We customized the previous one so much that its really hard to remember every extension and every modification. How many of you remember without checking all your firefox extensions? What is the name of the theme you are using in each browser (of course more than one!) and all these beta application we have to try right away? So it took few days and the new laptop setting made me happy.

All of this is happening while at work we are at very close deadline for an important project, so the weekends and evening being spent working from home to complete these tasks in time. Friday,  my new laptop after reboot announce that explorer was crashed and I’m F*. ok, I was thinking, not a big problem –probably one of Microsoft’s update was not tested properly a simple rollback and we are back riding. Almost all that night I was uninstalling and checking but explorer was dead.

Finally Saturday morning I declare defeat, raised the white flag and reformatted my laptop and started the process again, while using my wife’s laptop and Citrix’s GoToMyPC to work with my Work Desktop. This time I’m going to be smarter I declare. And before any installation I marked restore point. This is not going to happen again I promised to myself.

So today, rebooting again I’m getting a new error massage: “your hard drive is not properly installed…” I picked up the phone and call IBM Tech support. After passing the necessary determination and I.Q. test called IVR I’m finally get to talk with human being.

Is it something serious I’m asking worried. Noting to complicated he said, please remove the battery then release the screw and have the hard drive out. When I’m finally done with these tasks he request to read him some numbers from the cover of the hard drive and announce: “I told you it’s not a big deal, in two business days you will get new hard drive”. Puzzled I asked “But what about the new one I just got?”, “this one is gone, it’s happened sometime, so sorry”.

Well, does someone know a very reliable online backup service?

The question is what is going to emerge from the current chaos in the Palestinian Authority. The fate of Palestinian self governing and independence is in the hands of the Palestinian themselves. They really need Palestinian Ben-Gurion and Palestinian Altalena

Link: Armed gunmen take over Gaza office, demanding jobs

 “The takeover was the latest sign of lawlessness in the Gaza Strip, where armed men have repeatedly taken over government buildings and kidnapped foreigners to pressure the leadership to give them jobs and incorporate them into the Palestinian Authority security forces.”