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Filed under: Conversation, Thirdsector Systems, Web services
We have subscribed our Thirdsector Tech blog to the Odiogo service and added a translation widget to our display. See the column to the right.
Clicking a language for translation triggers Google machine code to render our blog pages in the target language. Odiogo is an advertising funded proprietry service, which allows you to listen to each post or subscribe to this blog with a variety of services.
You can now listen to our thoughts and information as an audio stream, subscribe to us an iTunes podcast, share our information on services such as Facebook and still load us into web readers such as My Yahoo and Netvibes and so on.
You will find our Odiogo streaming access page here.
Alternatively, use the Odiogo subscribe button at the top of the right hand column on this page.
In a recent entry we were thinking about access to information – Odiogo, reading the web to you. We are experimenting with widening access through the use of technology to compliment our community business clients.
Intel and Portugal in school deal
This post from the BBC News:Technology caught our eye. Intel has agreed to deliver 500,000 ClassMate mini-laptops to school children in Portugal.
Broadband penetration is low in the country, but we can see the sense of developing web access and its value for the next generation.
Technology overload or clear thinking?
Here at Thirdsectorweb we subscribe to a large number of blogs. They provide us with a vast range of information, from technical updates, information about new web services and streams of news and data that are relevant for our client web sites.
This Thirdsector Tech blog is itself available as an RSS feed, so our readers, service users and potential clients can see what we do as part of a wider practice.
RSS feeds our creativity and content. As a socially focused business we sit as a practice between the public and private sectors, generating content and systems for clients in a sector where open-ness and equality of access are important.
This starting point for our business offer is the reason we cleave so strongly to Open Source solutions. Often touted as ‘free’, which they certainly are at the point of delivery, the development of OS systems and software often has a high opportunity cost in terms of deployment and support.
For our practice this opportunity cost is offset by the nature and philosophy of Open Source – which provides a model of community organisation and cooperation in its growth and development that would be the envy of many of our community clients. That’s why, even if downloading a simple piece of OS software for personal use, registering it and providing feedback to the developer is such an important part of the process.
OS is ‘free’ but not without value.
These thoughts were prompted by a discussion we had in the office about an earlier Thirdsector post – is the web changing the way we think? The concensus here is yes…it has.
The blogosphere is full of comment recently about turning off email, unsubscribing from feeds and switching off from the web world. We believe that not only is Pandora out of the box – she should stay out.
After the ‘imagineering’ of HTML we think Really Simple Syndication is probably the second most important knowledge sharing invention this century, What do you think?
A contribution from Tim Smith
Tim is a partner in SmithMartin LLP and the technology lead for Thirdsectorweb.
Apprise – a new rss newsreader
Apprise is a news reader, utilising Adobe Air which will deliver all your usual news feeds but also has AIM and Twitter integration for you users of social networks, helping share the good news you come across.
You can organise your feeds in folders, with automatic categorisation of of incoming feeds by author and topic.
As an Adobe Air application Apprise works across all platforms and will let you see the entire feed web page from within the application display.
A useful addition to the rss feed family, particularly if you are new to rss feeds and want a comprehensive and intuitive interface to manage your information.
Our regular blog readers will know that here at Thirdsectorweb we are fans of the Flock browser for its beautifully integrated reader and facility to post blog entries directly from the browser.
Apprise could sway us to adopt it as our newsreader of choice…we liked it.
You can find Apprise here - as an Open Source application the source code is available on Google Code.
Cuil – a rival to Google?
A new search engine on the block.
Cuil (..pronounced COOL) has a simple black interface and provides rapid research results. It claims to have an index larger than that of Google, providing links to your search entries in a way that offers a slightly more expansive and visually appealing ‘content snippet’ than the Big G.
Cuil is the development of ex-software engineers at Google, so the expectation that its pedigree and functionallity will be top flight is high. You can select to have your information presented in multiple columns.
Our test searches, for SmithMartin projects and their links didn’t always tie relevant images with our published text. However the content filters and ability to search without Cuil capturing any personal information or history from our browsing activity (not that we mind anyway Goo….) means we will trial this as our search engine of choice for a while.
We’ll let you know how cool it is.
(Supplement to this post …20 minutes after posting the Cuil servers were overheating and the site was broadcasting a message that additional capacity for search was being created. Don’t think it was the SmithMartin team at their keyboards that were at fault....Tim).
We’ll keep trying because it looked an interesting entry into the search market.
The Thirdsectorweb team
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?
An interesting Blogrunner post that links to an article from the New York Times. Are young people and families really reading? As our partnership funds literacy events and delivers web expertise we found the analysis interesting.
Ten things that every charity needs to know about information technology
- Get connected
Deborah Elizabeth Finn has something very useful to tell on her blog about how charities or small community organisations can use technoiogy to the full.
Her experience is of America, but the principles of embracing new technology, allowing everyone in the organisation to access and influence tech utility and recognising that technology issues are organisational issues will strike a note with every voluntary sector reader of this blog.
Deborah’s list of ten things to think about, ostensibly directed at senior management, will chime with everyone around our partnership philosophy of utilising new technology to support social aims to the full. Read what Deborah has to say by using the view original article link below…
”…very little technical knowledge is required in order for nonprofit CEOs to participate actively in strategic IT planning. As long as you thoroughly understand your organization’s overall mission, strategy, and tactics and (are willing to learn a little bit about the technology), you can keep your information technology infrastructure on target…”
How big is the web?
Web connectiions with Thirdsectorweb
This post by Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj tells the story of how web page growth has happened since 2000. How big is a trillion? Will web based design and delivery businesses ever run out of potential clients? We are dizzy thinking about the potential of the web….read more in the following Google blog post…
We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all! 
Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a “new” page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what’s a useful page, and there is no exact answer.
We don’t index every one of those trillion pages — many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn’t very useful to searchers. But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world’s data.
To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google’s index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.
As you can see, our distributed infrastructure allows applications to efficiently traverse a link graph with many trillions of connections, or quickly sort petabytes of data, just to prepare to answer the most important question: your next Google search.
Blog design change…
We have been listening to our users and they tell us low legibility and too much ‘blackness’ made for a depressing read. So we have gone for a fresher style for our blog ‘face’.
We have chosen this 3-column theme by Brian Gardner, a Chicago designer and WordPress guru whose style we like a lot. It makes for a an easier read of our tech ramblings.
We are still working on better integration of our Tech newsfeed into the page – see right – to improve the clarity and display separation of news items.
Email us and let us know if you like the style…or if the content of our site news feeds are useful.
The Thirdsectorweb Team
Why a back-up policy is paramount…
At Thirdsectorweb we deploy a multi-layered disaster recovery policy. We stream our utilities and files away to a remote physical site, we keep a mirror image of our current activities on a non-web accessible mini-server, as well as backing up business and client critical files to a separate portable hard drive facility. If we lost access to the cloud, or to any remote server element of our business – your designs, data and web sites are protected.
The Web Worker Daily post…As I write this, Amazon’s S3 storage servers have been unreachable for 90 minutes. As was the case back in February the last time this happened, the outage is apparent by chunks of Web 2.0 dropping off: the most visible indication of trouble for many people was the sudden vanishing of pictures from Twitter. Poke around some, though, and you can find plenty of other services that are gasping for air right now. That’s not counting those of us who use S3 personally, for things like backups via Jungle Disk or the equivalent.
Amazon learned from the last outage that transparency is a must. If you visit the Service Health Dashboard, you can see that they know about the outage and are “pursuing corrective action” – though they have not yet announced an ETA for a fix. At least we know they’re working on it, though that’s cold comfort for startups who built their business around S3. Fortunately Amazon’s EC2 cloud is unaffected, so we’re not seeing swathes of servers vanish from the net.
Amazon does offer an SLA for the S3 service, guaranteeing 99.9% uptime or part of your money back. With .1% of a month being around 45 minutes, that means they owe people money. The requirements for claiming a refund, though, are onerous enough that no one except large users will bother (hey, Amazon, how about an automatic refund when you know your servers are down?).
With two relatively serious outages in the space of 6 months, some will be asking the question of why depend on S3? The answer is simple: the rates are hard to beat, especially for service that doesn’t require any sysadmin budget. The fact remains that no other giant has started offering commodity storage at similarly attractive prices, though it’s obvious that Google or even Microsoft could get into the game if they wanted to.
As long as Amazon has a virtual monopoly of cheap, distributed, fast, API-accessible storage, web startups will continue to depend on them. If you need to offer your customers better than 99.9% uptime for some reason, though, it’s clear that you need to have a backup plan for those times when the Amazon infrastructure is having issues. Fortunately, most of us can live without uptime over that level. 
Tags: amazonS3, cloud, thirdsectorweb services, security, remote back-up,
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About our business
Very mobile friendly
Tech news from CNN
- Google Instant feeds real-time addiction
Google this week released its Instant Search feature, which displays live search results as soon as you begin typing. - Video game piracy: Is it good for business?
Although as old as gaming itself, software piracy has been making headlines lately, seen by many as a growing danger to a business just coming to grips with the transition to digital.
- Google Instant feeds real-time addiction
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