social

King is dead, long live the King!

The trademark of the Web: "Content is king" is dying away. In the end, Web is business and business needs to make money. With the emergence of so many, high-quality, free-content resources, few people want to pay for content on the Net; even if they do - it's for niche and limited content. By large, the money on the Net is in advertising, exclusively. To get any advertising money you obviously need users and the size of the audience you can reach directly resonates with the ad revenue.

It is not about content, anymore!

The mind-bobbling success of online services with limited original content such as micro-blogging (Twitter) and social rating (Digg) prove that it's not about content. Content is not #1 even on Facebook - it's the interaction that brings people to Facebook, not some magic content they are looking for. Let's face it: most of the content on Facebook is pretty goofy.

Speaking in grossly generalized terms, successful sites on the Web become popular for two main reasons: either they are very useful and fill some need, or there're way too many people on the site to avoid it. Large user base creates a social power: just because there are so many people on the website, and somebody can contact them (either textually or through applications as in case of Facebook) - it instantly becomes a marketplace.

One, less explored characteristic of the Social Web is that - once you have a large user-base, it becomes less important what brought these users together. You need to open proper channels between them and the crowd can mold itself into many interesting things, some of which may have little to do with the original idea.

Nice and funny "analysis" of the Internet community on CreateDebate

Web these days is full of spam-bots, malicious crawlers and other "e-pests" that post junk-advertising all over the Net. These parasites give the most headache to blogs and social sites, where moderators want to free-up comments to general audience ("Two-Way Communication", eh?), but have no desire to promote illegal Viagra sales.

Captcha, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, is one of the most effective tools to fight evil machines with. Unfortunately, not all Captcha is equal. Many Captcha systems are vulnerable and have been hacked, rendered useless against all but the most primitive spamming.

reCAPTCHA is a service from Carnegie Mellon University. This service is a prime example of blending pleasant with useful in a very Web 2.0-ish way. reCAPTCHA provides a free, high-quality protection and at the same time helps digitize old books. Every time you use reCaptcha, you help digitize one word of a book that was written before the digital age. How much cooler can it get? Well, reCaptcha also provides enhanced accessibility through audio-Captchas. That one is not easy to "code" yourself, and I don't know of any other free service that offers it.

Great job, guys!

I am a huge fan of Linux. On most counts: code quality, cultural/social, stability, performance and security, I think it is superb. There is no other operating system that I would like to see on my servers. However, there is a huge issue with Linux as a desktop operating system. And it has little to do with programmers, to be honest and fair.

The issue is the look-and-feel of Linux and other free software that come with it. The dreadful graphics a-la Windows 3.0 from two decades ago is not just a minor nuisance but effectively daunts and depresses to the extent of making user less productive. Especially when you have the polished perfection of OS-X interface to compare with. Even Mac's inferior copycat - Windows looks much better than most of the Linux software. If they can't create, in Redmond, at least they try to copy.