News portal

One of my colleagues in the office told me about a website statistics service named Woopra (he knows I love quantitative data). I had not heard about it prior, so I went a did a little research around the Internet about it. Apparently, it launched on/around May 30 2008, as it’s relatively new, but had a nice little writeup on TechCrunch. I did some Tweet tracking and saw that a healthy early adapter audience was using it.

What is Woopra you ask? Very simply: MyBlogLog meets Google Analytics and has a baby, and then morphs into a Bloomberg Terminal of the next century. Very, very interesting, at least to me it is. I’ve taken some screenshots of my Woopra Terminal and put them below for you to see:

What I like about Woopra is that it gives me information in near real-time and tells me where my audience is going and where they have been on my website. Generally, all of the data exists on server logs, but I like the advanced graphical representation of my data. In the screenshots above, you can see the ticker on the bottom of the page that scrolls with data from the server.

Woopra is going to run into some issues when large publishers start signing up. They are in beta right now which is very smart and limiting their service to publishers who are less than 10,000 page views. I’m speculating that the reason for this is because the amount of resources it takes to crunch all of the data is fairly intensive and that they want to work out all of the kinks before they start charing. I’m interested to learn how their infrastructure is built - are they using Amazon’s EC2?

What I’d like to see is Woopra share network data information.  Meaning, if I track a view on my site and rename them, I’d like to see that “renamed” person across the entire Woopra network.  There is a lot of information in the larger “network” - lets see if Woopra pools that data.

I also give them credit for the slick interface.

Darren Herman is a digital media enthusiast and serial entrepreneur. Herman writes about technology, entrepreneurship and digital media at his blog, http://www.darrenherman.com.

Partner Links
– Manage your finances online with Geezeo
– Web Jobs
– CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group
– CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page
– Check out SmugMug for a free trial

The list of the top software books based on number of Amazon reviews, average Amazon rating, number of Google hits, and Jolt awards.

Startups, unable to bear the brunt of online criminal activity, could start looking to cloud computing — the providers of which have the capacity and infrastructure to survive an attack — for salvation. The clouds, however, are going to have to step up their game.

Why did I choose the napkin to promote as a canvas for software architectural drawings? To be honest, except for my general belief in the virtues of simplicity it´s also somewhat a hommage to a book I recently read: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

Dan Roam impressed me with his creativity and his ability to depict the essence of all sorts of stuff in clear and simple pictures - all fitting on the back of a napkin. Before I´ve read his book I either did not give size of architectural images much thought or I complained about the limited size of displays compared to the huge blueprint tables for building architects.

I always envied them for their large sheets of paper filled with all those symbols describing a whole world to be built and lived in. The overview such blueprints provide seemed important to me. In comparison to that, looking at an UML diagram on a 1280×800 screen felt awkward.

That has changed, though, thanks to Dan Roam! I no longer feel hindered in my creativity and expression by a small display. Right to the contrary! I think limited display size or a consciously chosen small canvas help architecting software. Why? Because a small canvas naturally limits the number of “things” you can depict at the same time. A small canvas thus constrains the complexity of the design you can draw. And that´s a good thing!

Traditional building architecture might not need such constraints, since it´s dealing with static objects. But software is a different beast. It´s not static at all, it´s highly volatile, constantly evolving, never finished. That´s why I recommend, to keep depictions of it small.

You probably think drawings like this

source: http://openalchemy.org/index.php/OpenAlchemy_Wizard_Tour

or this

source: http://www.roxsoftware.com/ug/

are the norm and why should it be different. But from the point of view of someone trying to understand (!) what they show they are, well, hard to grasp. Whoever draws a diagram does not have much of a problem with its size. He understands the content perfectly well - otherwise he wouldn´t be drawing it. But once you switch sides and need to understand such depictions, the situation changes. Hours upon hours of valuable time are invested into understanding such drawings - whereas much effort could have been saved, if the drawings were kept smaller and simpler.

If you´re an expert in fuel injection pumps the drawing on the right might be easy to read. But there are always less experts than novices, people who first need to learn about a technical system. They are easily (and unnecessarily) overwhelmed by such images.

That´s why I´m saying: Don´t try to impress anybody by putting everything you know about a software system into just one big picture. Try to walk in the shoes of the many (occaissonal) viewers of it who don´t have much time make sense of a ton of boxes and arrows.

Of course the capacity of the human visual system is mind boggling. We can spot a familiar face in a crowd and scan thousands of images in a folder or on a light table. But that´s “simple” pattern recognition.

Understanding (!) a software architecture on any level of abstraction is different. There might be patterns to recognize, but before that the meaning of the structural elements and their relationships needs to be clarified. And that´s what costs so much time. And that´s what benefits from consciously limiting the size of software architectural drawings.

At times larger drawings for overview might be ok. But mostly you should think “small is beautiful” Focus yourself on whatever fits on the back of a napkin. You can use more than one. Help yourself…

I woke up this morning and checked TechMeme to see what was happening in the tech world. Three stories jumped out at me. Amazon was down due to a Denial of Service attack. Twitter has been down many times over the past few weeks. Dave Winer says he needs a Plan B for Twitter. Disqus, the blog commenting service, has also been down several times recently.

Starting now, Mattel (MAT) is offering a premium subscription option to its phenomenally popular Barbie Girls web-based virtual world. Since beta launch April 2007, it’s amassed a record-breaking 13 million registered users, with over 2.3 million of those monthly active users.
At $5.99 a month, the new “Barbie Girls V.I.P” account gives girls a […]

Check out my cousin, Wendy Newcomer - listed as “Best New Country” by AOL Music!  The link there seems (as of 6/9/2008) to be bogus, but here is the corrected link to Wendy’s feature on AOL’s “The Boot”.

Listen to Wendy at Amazon:

Wendy Newcomer

First of all, this post is about 2 things that rock. One is Fuzed, the new Erlang web glue that runs Rails on the Erlang-based Yaws web server, put together by Tom Preston Warner and Dave Fayram of Powerset. The other is Amazon EC2, which is a big, sneakily expensive nerd playland. I became interested in Fuzed at the talk I heard on it at RailsConf by Tom and Dave.

The Talk Market believes eBay is so yesterday with its text and picture auctions. The Talk Market is a video marketplace. Think of it as short infomercials for the products listed on the service. The ordering process utilizes Amazon Web Services Flexible Payment Service and that’s a good thing. Today Amazon has announced an investment in The Talk Market.

The company notes that their "patent-pending user-generated TV shopping channel platform enhances sellers’ video presentations with dynamic graphic overlays, custom motion graphics and soundtracks." After viewing their jewelry videos, I can say that this might actually have potential to be a success. When buying an expensive piece of jewelry, it’s good to see what it looks like "in-person" rather than just a few photos and some text. The jewelry is modeled and you can see what it looks like on a person. Naturally this isn’t needed for a category like electronics.

The amount of the investment was not disclosed and the transaction closed last month. Sadly there’s no embed option on the videos so you will need to check out their site to view the product videos.

While Powerset unquestionably has some interesting and valuable semantic search technology, there are other semantic search engines that produce equally meaningful and relevant results.
In this post, we compare Powerset results with those of a demo implementation from one such search engine, Cognition Technologies. And we compare them both with the current gold standard in web search, Google.