As we take on more and more interactive initiatives, it becomes increasingly vital that we keep abreast of the latest trends and technologies floating around the internet. Social Networking and Web 2.0 are 2 of the biggest trends going. As we explore the usefulness of these trends for our clients, it is important that we explore these trends on our own behalf. Hence the beginning of The Great SRG Social Networking Experiment. I am comparing Drupal, an open source CMS/Community platform that is free and fairly easy to setup. The other contender is Onesite a third party hosted, developed, and maintained platform that is free for personal use, and about 50,000/yr to execute on the enterprise level (ie 50,000 users). Both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. I intend to explore those more closely as I build out sites on both platforms.
Today was phase one of the experiment. I got the basic setup of a Drupal Community setup. With a little finagling and a little learning, I had the site setup in no time using our hosting solution provided Mosso. It is complete rough around the edges and in it's most basic infancy, but you can check out SRGinspired.net to watch as the site evolves.
7.18.2007
The Great SRG Social Networking Experiment
7.17.2007
Great Example of Viral Marketing - Create Your Own Simpsons Character
Here is a great example of a viral marketing tactic used to promote the new Simpson's Movie. Create your won Simpson's avatar. Just let the page load and click the "Create Your Avatar" at the top. The image to the left is my avatar sans beard. Matt Simpson. Check it out.
7.16.2007
Coolest iPhone App Yet!
The Google Code Project has released the coolest iPhone app I've seen yet. Telekinesis is a small app that runs on your mac desktop or laptop and lets you control your computer remotely from your iPhone. You can do just about everything. . .control itunes, view a webcam, launch apps, browse files. It is pretty incredible. Check out Telekinesis.
gTalk
It looks like in the next few months we will be rolling out an Instant Messaging client company wide. After evaluating several of the biggest clients, it looks like we are landing on gTalk. All the major players have similar sets of functionality. . .user to user calling, a web client, cross platform functionality. . .and then some. However none of gTalk's competitors are part of a broader productivity/messaging suite (ok, well M$ is the exception). One day in the future I'd really like to move the entire company away from M$ Outlook/Exchange and over to the Google Apps Suite. No more server, no more software upgrades, no more licensing hassles. . . and all the functionality a traditional desktop client provides. Moving to gTalk may just be the first step in this process. Check out gTalk here.
7.11.2007
Hosting, Virtual Hosting, Clustered Hosting. . .Oh My!
The hosting market has to be the most competitive technology market around. We've been on the lookout for a hosting partner for a while now. We need a place to host the client sites that we develop. This will allow us to guarantee uptime and site functionality.
I think there are a billion different hosting companies out there. The ones that captured my interest and seemed to apply best to our business model are the clustered hosting solutions. These are basically a large clusters of servers working together to provide a single hosting environment. One in particular, Mosso, had some really great features. The one feature that stood out was a truly cross platform hosting environment. For each domain we setup we can choose whether we want to develop in Linux or Windows, Apache or IIS, MySQL or M$SQL, the choices are endless. It is that flexibility that seems to fit our needs best.
Like I mentioned there are a glut of hosting providers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You have to kind of define your needs, weigh the options, make a choice and hope for the best. I'll post our ongoing experience with Mosso here on the infotech blog.
Open Source Phone
With all the hype about the iPhone I thought I'd give the competition a chance. The Open Moko is the first open source open hardware open everything phone that should be fairly popular in time. The ability to develop custom code for everything under the sun should make this phone a winner. Check it out.
