This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we posted some tips about repairing a bad Linux upgrade.  In fact, it is rare but sometimes, unfortunately, it happens. I mean one or more error during an upgrade installation on Ubuntu. In my case the problem was caused by a blackout and a battery which did not worked properly. When I restarted the PC it worked only in text mode and it asked me the login and the password to enter into the Ubuntu root mode. Obviously, as usual, I typed the requested data and then, after reading how to solve similar problems on internet, I decided to go forward with sudo apt-get update. At this point Ubuntu advised me that something had been wrong during the last update and suggested to try with sudo dpkg –configure -a.  I followed the suggestions and I concluded the “repair session” with  sudo apt-get upgrade –fix-broken. Fifteen minutes later and after rebooting all the “bad upgrade” problems were solved. Recommended!

Here is  a program for your mobile phone (with camera) to decrypt the secret message …

This week, in our Freeware Page, we posted a brief review about Rocketdock, a terrific “Apple style” dock for Windows. We decided to test Rocketdock on a Windows XP and the results were positive and we did not find bugs. Rocketdock is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and the brand new Windows 7 using just 10MB of RAM. To add a new icon it is sufficient to drag and drop it into the bar and it will be automatically added. To cut off an icon you have to drag it from the dock to an empty space on the desktop and it is immediately removed. To conclude we suggest this freeware because it is really customizable and easy to add & tune to your existing desktop. Recommended!

This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish), we have added a brief post about allmyapps.com a useful website which allow you to easily install software on Ubuntu (8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10) and Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7).  After a simple registration you can choose the free software you prefere to install and in few clicks and some minutes you are ready to use your new programs. Allmyapps.com, automatically recognizes the OS you have installed on your PC. On allmyapps we found many useful softwares and every month more programs are submitted by readers and added to the website for the installation. For Windows we also positively tested another website ninite.com where we found many free softwares ready to be dowloaded and automatically installed.  Easy to use and useful!

Arctic Adventurer: We Feel Fine,
originally uploaded by ocean.flynn.

DRAFT
Photos of Iqaluit cemetery taken October 2002; Uploaded to Flickr, Trawled by wefeelfine, Linked to wordpress, wefeelfine.org

American artist, Jonathan Harris describes his work on his website:

“I make (mostly) online projects that reimagine how we relate to our machines and to each other. I use computer science, statistics, storytelling, and visual art as tools. I believe in technology, but I think we need to make it more human. I believe that the Internet is becoming a planetary meta-organism, but that it is up to us to guide its evolution, and to shape it into a space we actually want to inhabit—one that can understand and honor both the individual human and the human collective, just like real life does (Harris).”

“Sep Kamvar is a consulting professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. His research focuses on data mining and information retrieval in large-scale networks. He also is interested in using large amounts of data and accessible media in the study of human nature through art. [Among his other areas of interest he includes] probabilistic models for classification where there is little labeled data (Sep Kamvar’s blog profile).”

Glossary of Terms

Nonlinearity: “At the beginning of Chapter 5 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim finds himself in jail on the planet of Tralfamadore. Billys captors give him some Tralfamadorian books to pass the time, and while Billy can’t read Tralfamadorian, he does notice that the books are laid out in brief clumps of text, separated by stars. “Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — discribing a situation, a scene,” explained one of his captors. “We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any relationship between all the mssages, except that the author has chosen then carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” Harris and Kamvar aimed to write Almanac of Human Emotions in the telegraphic, schizophrenic manner of tales from Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers are.”

Open Platforms: “The power of open platforms in enabling the easy generation of consumable content has been demonstrated repeatedly on the internet, not only with the web itself, but also with sub-platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Google Gadgets, among others. I am interested in platforms that easily enable high-quality content creation for developers and provide a straightforward content consumption and navigation experience for users.”

Open Sub-platforms Open Sub-platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Google Gadgets, among others, facilitate the generation-creation of high-quality consumable content while providing easier access and consumption for users.

Timeline

Webliography and Bibliography

http://wp.me/p1TTs-j6

Recently there was a situation in one of the  project where in the existing legacy CORBA had to be replaced with some other technology .  One of the technologies which was considered was webservices though i thought like it might not be a right replacement , i always thought like th EJB would a perfect replacement. But again due to some unfortunate reasons , I understood that the requirements (not technical though it was of the management constraints…) even EJB or  any thing would fit the bill.

Web services is not a right replacement for corba because for the reasons such as webservices are not as fast as the CORBA which is understood due to the under neath parser which need to do the parsing. secondly the webservices are value based where as CORBA is of reference based. Thirdly the asynchronous messaging is not  some thing like what we get in CORBA(even though AXIS 2 has this asynchronous messaging ..).  I was pretty clear that WebServices is not a solution. So under this circumstances, we were kind of more than happy to explore the new technology called as the Apache ETCH , basically its developed by CISCO and has been submited to Apache . I was really excited to explore this new technology which says like its light weight and  its a perfect replacement to the bloated CORBA. Secondly Its very easy to use , Thirdly it really suits our requirement as its having an apache license.

Anyways i am in the process of  going through the ETCH code and i have decided to be an apache contributer to ETCH project. I am sure i will have loads to learn and  at the same time lots to share in this blog.

Gateway load balancing protocol performs similar function to HSRP and VRRP. In both HSRP and VRRP,  group of routers participating in first hop-redundancy has one Active and can have multiple Client routers. At one single time, traffic is being passed through Active router, leaving client routers with unused bandwidth. Client routers will only become active once Active router in a group fails. We can create multiple groups and create different active routers but it results in extra administrative burden.

GLBP on the other hand can provide load balancing over multiple routers (gateways) using a Single Virtual IP and multiple Virtual mac-addresses. The bandwidth/traffic load is shared between multiple routers participating in the group rather than being handled by a single active router.

Following are the important points conceptually for GLBP.

1. GLBP uses single Virtual IP and multiple mac-addresses to provide first-hop Gateway redundancy.
2. In GLBP, there can be four routers/gateways in a group
3. Hello messages are used to communicate with in the group destined to 224.0.0.102, udp port 3222 and they will be sent every 3 secs by default.
4. initially group members will elect one AVG ( Active Virtual Gateway) and other routers will act as backup AVG’s incase the active AVG fails
5. AVG will assign Virtual mac-addresses to other routers, they are known as AVF’s ( Active Virtual Forwarders)
6. Each AVF assumes responsibility for  forwarding  packets sent to Virtual Mac’s assigned by AVG.
7. AVG is responsible for answering ARP requests for Virtual IP’s

Configuring GLBP

R2(config-if)#glbp 1 load-balancing ?
  host-dependent  Load balance equally, source MAC determines forwarder choice
  round-robin     Load balance equally using each forwarder in turn
  weighted        Load balance in proportion to forwarder weighting

There are three different types of Load balancing algorithms in GLBP.

Host-Dependent

1. The Mac-address of the host is used to determine which AVF’s  mac is the host directed towards.
2. A given host is guaranteed to use the same Virtual Mac as long as number of VF’s in the GLBP group are constant
3. Host dependant GLBP is not recommended in situation where there are small number of hosts, for example, less than 20

Weighted

1. GLBP places a weight on each device to calculate the amount of load sharing that will occur through MAC assignment
2. Each GLBP router in a group will advertise its weight and AVG will act based on that value
3. For example  we have two routers, Router A and Router B. If router A has double the bandwidth capacity then router B. Router A will be configured with the double weighting value of router B

Round-Robin

1. With Round-robin VF mac-address is used sequentially in ARP replies for the virtual IP
2. This is the default type of GLBP algorithm
3. It is suitable for any number of hosts.

Steps for  configuring GLBP

1. enable GLBP with glbp 1 load-balancing
2. glbp 1 priority ( Higher is better, default is 100)
3. glbp 1 ip x.x.x.x
4. glbp 1 preempt < To enable preempt, by default its disabled>
5. glbp 1 authentication  ( Enabling authentication with in a group)

Verification

Show glbp

This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we have posted a new ebook (in EPUB format) reader for Ubuntu: Lucidor. This software is not a simple ebook reader but it also allows you to search ebooks through an embedded search engine which is able to scan Google Books, epubcatalog.org, Lexcycle, Feedbook and – of course- your personal local library. Unfortunately, the Lucidor search engine does not support the Project Gutenberg that, we believe, at the moment, is the most interesting free project for ebooks. Lucidor is complex, well structured and flexible. To conclude we would also suggest another reader FBReader that has not any search engine but it manage very well the EPUB ebooks and offers very readable texts. Something to try!

This week in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we posted a brief suggestion about a problem (better a bug) we found when you used Imagewriter. In fact we tried to write an image on a USB key but it stopped different times reporting in “Details”, as last information /dev/sdh successfully unmounted; where sdh was obviously our USB key. First of all, using (System – Administration) Synaptic Package Manager, we tried to reinstall Imagewriter but only after some time on internet we solve the mistery… For some reasons Imagewriter runs better if the .img file is as near as possible to the Home folder. In our case we copied the image file on the User folder after the Home and in the next test we made we successfully wrote the file on sdh (our USB device). We hope this simple tip could be useful for some of you!

I never liked the new Firefox 3.0

1) It crashes more frequently than the last 2.xx (which NEVER crashed)

2) It’s damn’ slow on my eeePC

3) My pictures loaded on flickr.com look almost completely DESATURATED with the new Firefox – not with Explorer, not with the old Firefox

Do I have to switch to Explorer? My flickr.com pictures look like if I left them on a sunny week in my car – only when I browse them with the new Firefox …

Any help?

After 1 month I used it both in Europe and USA, I can say:

- Call quality and voice quality is ALWAYS excellent
- Where many other mobile phones do not find the network, my Nokia 6700 ALWAYS does
- When I have now a plastic mobile phone in my hand, I really appreciate the metal shell of mine
- The GPS is quite slow to find satellites from time to time, but it brought me where I needed with the free maps you can download online
- The 5MP camera is ok, but i prefer my Canon EOS 450D
- I am positively surprised by the MP3 audio quality, but probably because my last phone was very old
- There are for sure longer lasting batteries than this one, but this one is still ok: I’ve to recharge approx. every 3 days.
- Very useful the possibility to recharge the phone via USB
- The keypad is not the best; it is true that the last line is quite small: this is the most annoying feature of this mobile phone. Nevertheless, you CAN write SMS with one hand only.

So, if you need a reliable and solid phone for excellent quality voice calls, this is it!

As some of you have already noticed, yesterday we decided to add a tweeter option to this blog. Please, feel free to enjoy it!

I upgrade to Windows 7 today, but I did with a clean install on a new disk that I added to my computer. This required me to reinstall my applications. I decided to only add those programs that I use regularly.  It turned out to be more programs than I thought.

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Google Chrome, which makes three browsers on the computer
• OpenOffice
• Picasa
• iTunes
• KeePass
• ProcessExplorer
• TeraCopy
• Filezilla
• Foxit PDF reader
• CutePDF writer
• Dropbox
• Evernote
• Launchy
• GIMP
• 7-Zip
• NeatWorks

This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish), we tried to find how to freely convert pdf to html files. Unfortunately we have not been able to discover a satisfying solution. In fact, first of all (1) we upload our complex pdf file (text, color drawing and pictures) on Gmail email and we sent it to ourself. When we opened the email we click on “view as html” option and we were able to read the text (unfortunately too tiny) without drawings and pictures. It was not bad but we were really far from what we were looking for. As second experiment (2) we tried to use Kword and we had (as html) text and pictures but there were many incongruences between the texts and the borders and we missed some phrases. In few words, we had a better look but a worse result. Then (3) we installed pdftohtml using Synaptic Package Manager but unfortunately we were not satisfied from the html file we obtained. At this point we concentrated our researches on a free online solution and in order we tried: “Online conversion tools for Adobe PDF documents“, “convertpdftohtml“, “pdftextonline“, and “pdf-search-engine” but the results were not good. Unfortunately, we dismissed and I confess we could not find a solution to solve the task but we think that the “Kword solution”, if improved, is not far from a good solution in converting the file from pdf to html.  Please, if you have suggestions about this topic, feel free to add a comment. Thank you.

Stupid seem to be a fair amount of our population: even a movie was made on them. I can trust this movie as I also meet stupid quite often on my blog. They usually write things like Mother Nature love us, God created this planet as perfect, we are the Chosen ones we have not to worry, the ones having a shitty life deserve it and so on.

If this link still works, watch the Age of stupid. Better, rent it. Fairly enough, this movie is not a catastrophic sci-fi: it is a documentary on past and present situations. Make this movie watched: maybe after it less people will care about their own square of sand while the tsunami approaches..

At Thurday’s 2009 Investor Leadership Forum hosted by the Argyle Executive Forum and Capital IQ Peter a speech by Thiel of Paypal and Clarium fame linked future economic growth to innovation and technology rather than government stimulus.

Peter started by noting the difference in the type of question asked today of emerging markets and the developed world. For emerging markets, the discussion is about how well they will do over the next 20 years. For the developed world, the concern is whether the entire system will collapse within the next six months. Thiel wants to take a different approach and think about the developed world in 20 years. He believes that the growth of science and technology will drive the developed world and will offset the economic headwinds that we are facing, including inflation. His overall thought is that science and technology are broken because there is not enough innovation. He contrasts three facts with the bullishness of VCs, startup companies and scientists

1. VCs made no money in 11 years. (We wonder whether this is really an issue because the nature of venture capital has changed so much in the 1990s. Venture capital is no longer pools of entrepreneurs who invest in other business with a profit motive but has become an asset class where financial products are structured to be sold to institutions with a goal of generating a management fee. If there is a 20% payday at the end, that’s great, but in the meantime the managers collect a cushy 2% management fee. We believe these incentives make venture capital today less of an indicator for innovation than in the past.)

2. There is a disconnect between the exponential technological growth and progress on one side and the stagnant median wage on the other. (he acknowledges that the question of progress of the median wage depends on whether you believe that the government over- or understates inflation)

3. The demographic development does not favor innovation

Thiel then steps back to the 1960s and how commentators then saw the year 2000. Back then, the year 2000 promised permanent bases on the moon as well as manned missions to Mars. Increased productivity would lead to seven hour workdays and 13 weeks of paid vacation. But none of these forecasts came true.

Thiel fast forwards to 2009 and claims that the credit crisis is primarily a technology crisis, or a crisis of innovation. Credit is a claim on the future, and if there is no progress, you will not get paid on your claims. The technology bubble was a sign of hope in the power of innovation. When that bubble burst in 2000 we added leverage to the system to offset the effects of the bursting. When still no growth materialized by 2008, markets collapsed.

Over the last 200 years growth has averaged 8% per year. This was driven primarily by innovation. If you look back at other time periods like the 1300s to 1500s there was no growth at all. Thiel wonders what would happen if we were suddenly to enter a long no-growth zone. This would have catastrophic effects. In order to meet retirement needs everyone would have to work to 80 and the savings rate would have to approach 40%.

To top off his bearish forecast, Thiel suggests that investments in large cap tech companies are actually bets against technological progress. Microsoft (MSFT) will do well if there is no disruption from technology. Therefore, investments are actually stacked against innovation.

During the Q&A session a Bloomberg reporter asked the inevitable question about Clarium’s YTD 10% loss. Thiel responds that he was mistaken to focus on the real economy and overweight equities. Clarium did not expect the financial economy to read the real economy in a bullish way. The decoupling occurred because volatility declined, mostly through the help of the government which took risk out of the system, and because the Chinese stimulus was big enough to actually have an effect which percolated to the rest of the world. For the near future, he sees little prospect for volatility to decline more and thinks that China will begin to reign in growth.

Disclosure: Thomas Kirchner manages the Pennsylvania Avenue Event-Driven Fund (PAEDX). He is the author of the book Merger Arbitrage: How to Profit from Event-Driven Arbitrage (Wiley Finance, 2009).

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

My eight years old DiamondMAX_Plus Maxtor 120Gb hard disk died last week. First I thought it was only a Windows problem, as the error message I got after crash was: “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM”. However, when I tried to access the command prompt through the Windows repair console, the new message was: “Disc unreadable” !!!

Via an ATAPI/USB adapter I connected the HD to another working PC, and again all what I got was just “Disc Unreadable” – and strange noises coming from the disc …

So, what about all the pictures, personal data, work files I had on that disc? I googled around and I found Data Doctor Recovery (I used the NTFS version). With the DEMO version I could see that most of my files were still on the disk. I paid 69$ via Paypal and got the full version.

I recovered ALL my pictures and some other important data. Just a few files got lost forever, because of physical (!) damage. So, indeed it seems my Maxtor left me after 8 years of duty.

I strongly recommend Datadoctor.org !

Congrats Holder guys!!

http://www.itprofessional.be/news.cfm?id=108886

Knowledge Notebook is a great tool specially designed for students which lets them to take notes in a quicker and a smarter way. Knowledge Notebook provides advanced editing options and search feature. Just enter the subject name, tag(which is optional) and the points and then save your notes.

Notes can be reviewed periodically based on subject and tag. Like other word processor you can highlight points, add bullets, colors to the font etc. It displays your notes in a easily viewable format. Clicking on the subject item will show the editing screen which lets you to edit the content and also to save it. The maximum length of a note is 6,000 characters.The saved data are stored locally. So you dont have to worry about data loss or any security issues.

Knowledge Notebook allows you to share your notes with your friends by following some instructions in the note editing screen after clicking the Send button. You can download the trial version for free.

This week, in our Freeware Page, we posted a brief review about Gmail Tips, a terrific pdf printable guide with tons of useful information to better manage your gmail account. You can decide to read online the document at www.gmail.com/tips or download the printable pdf version. As for martial arts the tips you receive are related to your skills and are progressively more difficult. At the “white belt” level, I am sure, you will find some feature you have been using for years but when you become a “black belt” or a “Gmail master” you are able to deeply enjoy all the Gmail’s most useful “secret” features. For example you learn how to remotely sign out your Gmail account when you forget it open at the office or in an internet cafe’. Moreover, properly using the Gmail  filters, you will able to send automatic responses reducing the  time wasted in routine replies. We are sure that everyone will find other useful tips depending on what he/she is looking for. Useful!

Online communities have been around for as long as the internet itself, but the path technology has travelled in the last decade means the options for what you can offer and what you can do with them today have exploded.

Despite this, they’re still viewed as a bolt-on or feature of a brand’s web presence. This has led to what’s been termed as the “iceberg effect of community management”.

Image courtsesy of Rita Willaert, Greenland, 10th September 2005 on Flickr

The full-spectrum of web and social media tools is now being vacuumed up into and integrated with communities: so beyond forums and chat, we now have blogs, RSS, aggregation, email, polls, Q&A, photos, video, audio, virtual worlds, groups, ratings, attachments, events, microblogging, profiles, focus groups, networking, widgets and wikis, to list only the most obvious…

These tools protrude the ocean’s surface, along with the reams of content created by community members. But that is only a small fraction of what is happening. As more brands and organisations come to recognise the potential value of facilitating their own communities – but still consider it as an “add-on” to their main website – what does this mean for the role of community manager? What do they need to know and what do they do all day?

Image courtesy of The Brain Toad on Flickr

This is my off-the-cuff list of community management under the bonnet. I prefer the engine metaphor because communities commonly have a goal – they’re supposed to get you somewhere. I’ve also included the pre-launch stages. Depending on your product and whatever way you slice it, there’s a lot to get stuck into!

1. Business Plan
Translating business objectives into a workable plan that is agreed with stakeholders across the business. Finding and agreeing a budget. If you’re already on board at this stage, you’ll need to be involved in this in order to understand the business needs, if you’re hoping to translate it into a successful product that is…

2. Technology Platform & CMS
Choosing a technology platform – low-cost off the shelf packages you can tailor to suit community interaction, eg. Ning, Squarespace, Joomla; bigger-budget customised developments based on for example Drupal (the system I’ve worked with in my last three roles); or maybe you go totally bespoke whether in-house or with an agency (potentially the priciest, and beware proprietary lock-ins that could come back to bite you).

3. Personas & User-Centred Planning
Personas are a useful heuristic for surfacing the needs of the different key groups who’ll be using your community. You think you have your audience all figured out, but have you thought about their activities and requirements in community terms? Explore this in workshops if you can.

4. Design & Build
If you’re around during this phase, you could be called upon to input from the following (and more) perspectives: web design and wireframing, information architecture, usability, accessibility, user experience, on site search, SEO, taxonomy and folksonomy, APIs, browser compatibility and web standards. Many brands are still lacking in some or all of these departments, so your broad knowledge and experience can help make or break the end product! In terms of collaboration and notation around refining design and navigation concepts with your devs and designers, I can’t recommend Conceptshare strongly enough. I used it for that purpose in Chinwag’s previous re-build and it is genius.

5. Registration & CRM Integration
The first experience of a community member is often to register; don’t make it painful and onerous, you’ll annoy and lose people from the get go. Communicate the importance of this to direct stakeholders, preferably with story boards and demos of best practice. The experience generally is so poor and under-thought that Joshua Porter’s writing a book about it. Get advance estimates for the costs of integrating community registration / login with your current CRM system (preferably when you’re in Business Planning stage). The figures – and actual effort – can be unexpected. Is there another solution?

6. Testing & Tweaking
When you have early “alpha” versions of the site to play with, plan for an extended period of UAT (user acceptance testing). Get people across the business involved. Allow for some less structured “guerilla” usability testing too, at different stages of the build. You can learn as much from this as from pre-scripted interactions. Make sure your community manager is involved for most if not all of it and has oversight on the final sign-off.

7. Guidelines
Social networks revolve around me and are a bit of a free-for-all, they’re social but generally selfish. Communities bring benefits to people by having a common purpose that may facilitate but also overrides pure self-interest. So community rules and a general etiquette are essential. These guidelines need to be agreed by your organisation, and include some legal considerations. You may also need specific guidelines: for your bloggers, for group managers, for staff members and for sponsors, depending on the scope of your endeavour.

8. FAQ / Help
The more multi-faceted your site, the more bases your FAQ will need to cover! Basic instructions on your different areas, tools and registration are essential, should be visibly linked to everywhere and also feature somewhere in the site-wide navigation. Keep them readable and concise. A good FAQ is not an afterthought, and harder to write than you’d imagine. Be community-minded and have a site help discussion forum too, where your input and peer support can mingle to the benefit of all concerned.

9. Seeding: pilot before launching
There’s nothing worse than being told of some cool new community or cutting edge network, and hoofing it over there only to find it bereft of visible life forms. Counter this by running a closed pilot, while you also beta test the site’s taxonomy and functionality. Invite a segment of your audience to participate in the pilot. Make sure they know they’re getting a special preview, listen to their feedback and iterate rapidly to solve key technology, content and user experience design issues during this period. Allow for a couple of months minimum, or at least until there is lively activity before opening up. Then when the world turns up, they won’t be confronted by a confusing environment of unusable tools and tumbleweed. [See also .17]

10. Moderation
Think about posting controls, editing permissions, alert systems, freezing tools, spam filters and of course, moderators! Which is better for your community: external agency moderation, user-mods, or moderation by the experts, contact centre staff and people who know the answers and issues themselves inside the business? As community manager for CIMAsphere I run staff training workshops, and oversee the moderation workflow and rolling schedule. A closed group on the community for geographically distributed moderators to discuss issues and share best practice is another plus. Relying solely on external mods can be un-feasible and also means the brand is not fully engaging.

11. Inboxes
Not everything happens *on* your website, so common community inboxes you may have to set up and manage include: info, help, feedback, and abuse; plus the community manager’s personal inbox of course. That’s a lot of email! Who else can help you mange these inboxes? Hunt down the most apposite or amenable folks and spread the inbox love to spare the pain!

12. Enhancements & bug fixing
Gotta love those bugs as a community manager! Living in perpetual beta with a modest budget, bugs follow you wherever you go. Users complain on the site, people email for help, some people struggle to even login if your registration process isn’t perfect (and whose is?). Bugs perkily await you in the morning, and they’re there when you go to sleep each night. The thing businesses need to consider is that bugs impact users much more directly and frequently in communities than in other websites. And who else can communicate these bugs’ intricacies and preferred fixes to developers apart from the community manager? Prioritise ruthlessly, and use a good bug-logging or collaborative project management tool. I recommend Trac,  Adminitrack, or even Basecamp (but not Bugzilla – it’s strictly for the engineer contingent). Realise you’ll never get them all fixed if your support budget is minimal. Communicate with your users about the bugs, and discuss with the business how they plan to support product development in the future.

13. Analytics
Unique users, dwell-time, page views, referring sites, search traffic, browser and device breakdown, exit pages, pages per visit, popular keywords and content, campaign tracking… this is just the beginning, but if you can’t report on the above, something’s wrong. Even if you use a paid analytics vendor like Neilsen, Omniture or Nedstat, it should be possible to also plug in the wonderfully free Google Analytics. But realise there’s more to GA than meets the eye – look into its deeper facilities.

14. Community & engagement metrics
Another beast from analytics entirely: clicks are not the bottom line! Value comes in many forms. Most active participants; most active groups / forums; total posts / interactions; average posts per user; ratio of posters to passives. These are some fundamentals, but don’t tell you much more than if you’re properly monitoring the community from a managerial perspective in the first place. But how many go onto recommend you, or redistribute your content elsewhere? How many buy? How many change their sentiment from negative to positive, and vice versa? How many act creatively? How many contribute valuable feedback and knowledge to other users and to your organisation? Only some of these metrics are directly monetary, others contribute to site and business objectives in the broader sense and longer term. Think about types of value, what you want to measure, and what you effectively *can*.

15. Bloggers
Internal or external, expert or enthusiasts, detractors or advocates? Okay, it might not be the most sensible move to hire detractors as bloggers, but critics will have a voice on your site nonetheless, and are part of the positive future of your organisation, catalysts for beneficial change. This is because they often speak loudly the frustrations and uncomfortable truths that the brand smoothes over. That’s because they’re passionate, so some could be bloggers eventually   Get a mix of bloggers on board, make sure a variety of business and community interests are represented, and within your guidelines allow for freedom. Give them ongoing feedback. Run training for internal bloggers and monitor their progress. Try out different things and don’t expect it to purr along like a dream. Expect it to be bumpy.

16. Groups
Groups are very powerful clusters: a key trait of people is to identify by similarity of experience, location or interest. According to the Ruder Finn Intent Index, 72% of people go online just to become part of a community. Groups in communities facilitate this clustering further. Do you have pre-defined or user suggested groups, or both? Devolving group control to community members is common practice. Group guidelines and moderation can ameliorate the risks involved, as well as reassure the group managers that you’re taking their group’s good health and sanity to heart.

17. Advocates, evangelists & early days participants
Prior to launching, identify and open a communications channel with brand or business advocates who can get motivated to sign-up and post when you launch, and help spread the word. These could be dynamic individuals already championing your brand elsewhere in the social mediaverse, or people who present themselves and have good ideas when you (for instance) do a mail out to your audience asking for ideas and involvement before the community goes live. In turn, your first active users should be carefully listened to and responded to. Those first weeks are critical. Having turned up first to the party and said hello, they deserve special attention!

18. Getting to know you
If you don’t “know” your community, you’re onto a loser. By know, I mean get familiar with them as participants. You don’t need to be the resident expert on the community’s focus (though input from experts is essential) but you do need to know who’s unhappy, who’s helpful, who’s critical, and who’s smart. Many community users will be a combination of these and other types. Some people can even be accidentally evil and destructive. Unless they’ve been heinously bad, don’t jump to cast judgement! We’re complicated creatures after all.

19. PR, content and attention planning
Do you know why you’re building your community? Then the PR and content planning should be seamless. Schedule in some eye-catching events and content around your launch; but remember it’s not about broadcasting “messages” or parading shiny baubles. Instead it’s about being interesting by providing value and being relevant and useful. If your event isn’t going to really matter to those early days and ideal users, then all the press coverage and email-outs in the world aren’t going to get people logging in and participating! It’s the same with content and event programming going forward. What might impress journalists and influential bloggers on the one hand and what tickles your community on the other don’t necessarily correlate.

20. Culture shift and cross-business input
The governance and ongoing development of the community shouldn’t be left to one person, or even one department. A cross-business steering group is one way of bringing a range of business eyes and knowledge to bear on the project and prevents it being siloed or becoming a political football for competing fiefdoms in the organisation. Communities languish and fail every day due to the latter scenarios. Breaking down those barriers is one of the great leaps forward that a community can begin to facilitate. People talk about operational efficiencies, but they’re rarely delivered in a meaningful or positive way. Well managed communities make this approach tangible, and eat away at the barriers and inertia both within businesses and between them and their customers.

21. Direct engagement and response
Follows from the above. If your community is a platform for CRM, R&D, product development, PR, marketing or customer insight, direct engagement must be baked in. As community manager you should liaise across the business to make sure the right people are aware, listening and acting upon feedback – whether that’s publicly, or off-line, or in specific community spaces. And the community needs to know you’re listening, even if you don’t respond publicly on every single occasion. Ignore them at your peril. Creating community areas and content that your users have suggested and asked for is one of the best outcomes of engaging with them. Hosting raw, unfiltered and real-time feedback is also a wake up call to complacent businesses; you can gain insight and improve your key business offerings based on monitoring conversations and analysing positive and negative comments.

22. Communications & Marketing
Communities do generate their own buzz, but those who can gain most from community often don’t have the time or aren’t in the right context to pick up on these vibrations. That said, neither does traditional marketing always reach the parts that other, more context-specific comms can. Marketing in and for communities often falls flat, or as one marketer has put it “there’s a hole in my funnel“. It’s got to be clear: what’s in it for them? Reaching out and partnering with other networks is likely to be more fruitful (see 23.). In turn, setting up group, discussion and blog alerts, and a community newsletter, can also spur new members and accelerate activity. Working with advocates in your community and elsewhere also has a grassroots halo effect.

23. Off-site community: partnering & networks
Linking with or extending to external communities can create a virtuous circle, with value for the brand and community flowing in multiple directions. Are there directly-related or relevant groups elsewhere? There were already 30+ CIMA student and member run groups on Facebook when I started at CIMA, which up until then had been ignored by the business. We decided to work with some of the livelier groups rather than starting our own, we recently set up a Facebook page and Twitter accounts, and we’re reviewing other networks. Think about the positive impact of reaching out, but beware duplicating your product and effort on a platform you don’t own. Be realistic about your workload but inform the business that your customers are out there – they’re organising themselves and being courted by others. So for how much longer will your brand be relevant, or will it soon be surplus to requirements?

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Think a lot of this is a job for other people? Web editors, web designers, CRM staff, digital marketing and PR folks, web producers, brand managers, product and business development, perchance even some community assistants? That’s as may be, but community management is an emerging profession and – in the main – little understood.

Online communities are viewed much like websites were 10 years ago – “oh, that new thing, let’s get one”. As time goes by, community management will become more specialised. But for now, it’s a whole lotta skillsets rolled into one…

So it follows that I’ve actually left out some things – 23 things is enough to be getting on with   What else do you think goes on under the bonnet of community management?

In line with this (if you’ll forgive me for mashing my metaphors) it’s also time to ask: what other new roles will emerge to power communities forward and keep the iceberg’s complex ecosystem intact?

… (just from now and then, not 24 hours/day):

- I appreciate my hotel supplied me with advanced tooth paste
- I got scared I have breast cancer, even if I am a man
- I believe cheerleaders are necessary for a rugby team to win
- I am sure David Letterman was caught into a trap
- Mr. T convinced me I absolutely need his Flavorwave cooking device (watch post’s movie)
- I feel extremely fat and I want to buy that amazing contour sculpting device system

Sadly, if I order it today, the delivery will take from 7 to 10 days. Please, help me finding it in Europe. I see already my six packs developing in just four weeks – as seen on tv.

Was this the most exciting summit I’ve ever been? Absolutely YES.

What about 3 days long debate on one of the hottest challenges human kind has to face? What about excellent panels made of the world best experts? What about know-how exchange among researchers, engineers, lawyers, water and farm managers, business planners, business coaches, energy, environmental and political top figures?

How stimulating can be watching such a young association with such positive visions making its first step in the real world? A lot more than what you think.

And last but not least, social networking requirements have been fully accomplished. I hope my suitcase will not be too heavy because of all the business cards I collected.

Now, the question is: what to do in the next two days of holiday under the sunny skies of the West Coast?

PS Advance white toothpaste works! I’ve now native-compatible teeth

There are many ideas being presented today.  I’ll try to highlight a few and also add some personal thoughts.

The youth of today are important.  It’s important to provide them the tools they need to express themselves, or else they’ll find other ways.  To kick off the show with some of today’s creative youth was awesome.

Content is no longer one sided.  One point hinted out early on is that content is no longer the domain of one group.  Today’s web users are just as excited to create content as they are to consume it.  You need to plan for that fact.

It’s important to not just build great websites or ads, but to also know how your customers think and behave.  I know that I would like sites to be smarter about me.  I’m tired having to re-explain myself to each website/company.

The next point is that full version Flash is coming everywhere: desktops, netbooks, smartphones and TVs.  The biggest problem was RAM usage.  It’s a true dilemma for Adobe and device manufactures.  I, as a techie, realize that devices and computers aren’t equal in power and ram.  However, my mom doesn’t understand that.  Most of the public just assume that a machine is a machine.

Touch, gestures, accelerometer, etc. are important to the future of User Interfaces.  This was obvious before the keynote.  Apple’s iPhone has proved that people love this new way to interact with devices. As an owner of an iPod touch, I have to admit that the first time I tried gestures, I fell in love.  My 3 year-old understands gestures with no training or explaining.  Using a mouse is not intuitive at all, so the sooner we can get rid of it, the better.

Enterprise applications are tired of being second rate apps.  Up until recently, enterprise applications have been boring as all heck.  The important thing was the numbers, more so than the experience.  As Web 2.0 interactivity has become part of people’s everyday lives, so has the need to duplicate this richness in the enterprise.  Employees in an enterprise are just people who cruise the web at home.  This is a long-overdue trend that I’m glad to see transpiring.  Rich is good and it’s about time we begin to leverage concepts from the real world into the enterprise.