This article titled “Alternatives to Bloglines” was written by Jack Schofield, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 28th October 2010 18.37 Asia/Calcutta

As the Bloglines RSS aggregator is closing at the end of the month, could you recommended another web-based RSS reader? I don’t particularly want to use Google Reader if there is a suitable alternative.
David Dixon

In a blog post, Ask.com says it is closing Bloglines on 1 November, and that “being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.”

This is true, but it’s not the whole story. First, in 2005, Ask.com bought Bloglines and Google launched Reader, and at that point, Bloglines was much better. Since then, Google Reader has been redesigned twice and got much better, while Bloglines hasn’t – the new Bloglines Beta went nowhere. Second, people have many other ways to consume RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from websites. These range from powerful but complicated online services such as Netvibes (of which iGoogle is basically a knock-off) to simple email clients such as Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail (the desktop version).

The “line of least resistance” now leads from Bloglines to Google Reader, because most people already have a Google account. When you are logged into one Google service, Google Reader is just a pull-down menu option from the Google home page. And my warnings about putting too many eggs in the same basket – where you risk losing your data if your account is hacked or blocked – don’t apply to RSS feeds.

But although it looks as though the web-based reader market is closing down, leaving Google Reader with total market domination, there are still a few alternatives. If you like Bloglines’ relatively simplistic approach, for example, have a look at FastLadder, or possibly the beta version of FeedShow.

Nonetheless, the main market trends are to combine RSS webfeeds with feeds from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and to display the results in a more magazine-style format. If you fancy that kind of thing, try Activorus. (Feedly also takes that approach, but in a Firefox browser window.)

One of the benefits of reading RSS feeds is that they provide lightweight versions of stories without all the website’s furniture such as logos, widgets and navigation systems. Full RSS feeds mean you no longer have to go to the website and wait while your browser downloads JavaScript code, Flash and Java applets, large photos and other mostly-pointless rubbish. However, Feedlooks – which is still in beta – has now “reinvented” feed reading by letting you “read content in full visual glory without leaving the app”. Feedlooks looks like a basic feed reader (with a built-in Twitter client), but when you click on a link, it shows the original story from the web site. You can try it for an hour without creating an account.

Finally, for real geeks who think Bloglines was much too ponderous, there’s the open source Tiny Tiny RSS project. You can set it up on your own server (it requires PHP, MySQL, etc), which is the least transitory option. Unfortunately, the Tiny Tiny RSS demo site is no longer accepting new users, but you can hunt around for ones that people have set up on free servers.

As I’m sure you know, the key to trying different RSS readers is OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), an XML format for outlines originally developed by Dave Winer for Radio UserLand. Before Bloglines closes, all users should click on Feeds, then choose “Export Subscriptions” and save the resulting OPML file. Your alternative RSS reader should be able to import it.

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This article titled “Myspace goes cool, crisp and clean in a last bid to recapture lost friends” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Sunday 31st October 2010 04.37 Asia/Calcutta

There was a time, long ago, when Rupert Murdoch’s Myspace was biggest beast in the online jungle of social networking. Before Twitter was even conceived, while Facebook was a mere university project, the site was a pioneer in status updates, personal profiles and photo-sharing.

But it’s been downhill for the last four years. Long eclipsed by Facebook and with a distinctly uncool parent company, the website is reinventing itself with an extensive redesign and a shift towards “social entertainment” that, it hopes, will help reverse its declining audience and revenues – and which could dress the business up for a face-saving sale by News Corporation.

Rolled out to the US this week and the UK in mid-November, the revamp cleans up the notoriously ad-saturated, cluttered pages, introduces a real-time feed more than reminiscent of Facebook’s news feed and adds new sharing features, including cross-posting to Facebook and Twitter.

“This is way more than a redesign,” Myspace’s chief executive, Mike Jones, tells the Observer. “This is a new strategic focus for the business, a complete rebuild of the majority of technology that runs the Myspace platform and a long-term commitment [to] our strategy of social entertainment. News Corp made a big commitment in allowing us to go down this path and follow this strategy.”

These days, Facebook so dominates social networking that it is difficult to remember Myspace’s own time in the limelight. It claims now to have 130 million active monthly global users, while the internet metrics analyst comScore puts the figure at 90 million for September 2010, down 18% year-on-year. In the UK, traffic is down 35% in 12 months to 2.738 million users.

Rupert Murdoch astonished many in the media industry when News Corporation swooped on Myspace in a 0m (£332m) acquisition in July 2005. The deal was the result of an in-depth study by an internal team charged with making News Corp a serious presence on the web. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way: Murdoch did not count on Facebook’s exponential growth. ComScore puts Facebook at 620 million global users for September 2010, up 51% in 12 months. Gartner analyst Ray Valdes says this month’s redesign is essential to try to stop Myspace “sliding into oblivion”.

While more similar to Facebook in its crisper design, it also tries to differentiate itself by establishing Myspace as a more distinct, youth-focused brand. But even this might not be enough, Valdes warns: “The niche-oriented approach might be successful if Myspace were a spanking new startup that can control its first impression to the market, but Myspace has been around the block several times and the brand is unfortunately tinged with the aura of a has-been. The odds are against it.”

With its old-media parent and its messy, dated design reminiscent of moribund web pioneer GeoCities, Myspace had become an easy target for ridicule in the tech community. But it still commands a significant, if declining, audience. With a clearer strategy that finally puts bands and music – always its most compelling offering – at the centre of the site, it will aim to win back a core community that, in many cases, are moving on to other sites. Solo bass guitarist Steve Lawson was one of a number of musicians who signed up to “Quit Myspace” day last week, exasperated by what he describes as a site that has been playing catch-up with more innovative rivals since 2006 – but with a “paymaster that has no interest whatsoever in providing useful, accessible, community-based tools for musicians”.

“I didn’t delete my Myspace page as a protest,” he says. “I deleted it because it added confusion to my web presence. It was an ugly, clumsy, inaccessible version of information that was available in a much better form elsewhere.”

David Ham manages the UK band Marner Brown, who released their debut single last month. The band uses Myspace, as well as ReverbNation and SoundCloud, but now sees Facebook as the major networking channel for bands and artists. “Myspace has moved from being primarily a social tool to a noticeboard,” Ham says.

Short of a miraculous turnaround, will Myspace come to be regarded as one rare failure in the mighty News Corp empire? “News Corp underestimated just how fast the social media business could change,” says Simon Dyson, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. “They thought they could maintain their dominance in the same way they have for pay TV.”

If News Corp does try to sell, it is unlikely to get anywhere near the 0m it paid; Evercore Partners recently valued the site at half that. “If it had to sell it at a big loss, it doesn’t look good for a renowned company such as News Corp to have failed in such a big way.

“The problem now is that once a social media site loses popularity, it never seems to be able to get it back. No matter how much News Corp spends on it, it will still be seen as the social media site of yesterday.”

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This article titled “Microsoft to spend billions on Windows Phone 7: what chance of payback?” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 1st September 2010 11.20 Asia/Calcutta

While everyone has been focussing on Apple, RIM and Android phones, it’s been easy to overlook the company that has a lot at stake in the mobile market. (Chorus: Nokia!) No, not Nokia, which is still selling lots of phones (though we’ll come to quite what’s going on with Nokia in the near future).

No, we meant Microsoft. Remember them? And Windows Phone 7? It’s now moving towards the launch stage – which means advertising budgets, handset manufacturers, carriers, all having to be brought into line.

As the table (from Windows Phone 7 Central) shows [apologies for the overspill], the early players in this are the companies that have previously been Microsoft’s mobile BFFs. Though Dell has made very little impact in the smartphone market, HTC was (is?) the company which bought the most Windows Mobile licences, while Samsung and LG have been big WM licencees too. Notably absent from the list (so far) are HP, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba, who were among those mooted by Microsoft in February.)

But now let’s discuss the price. At Techcrunch Kim Cutler suggests the price of launching Windows Phone – in terms of marketing costs, payments to developers and handset makers – will be more than half a billion dollars. She quotes Jonathan Goldberg, a telecomms analyst at Deutsche Bank, who reckons Microsoft will spend 0m just on marketing the launch.

She has an interesting quote from him:

“This is make-or-break for them. They need to do whatever it takes to stay in the game,” says Goldberg. “It’s still wide open. They don’t have to take share from Android or Apple, so long as they can attract enough consumers switching from feature phones.”

The idea that in an expanding market it’s always OK just to take a niche is one that you’ll hear repeatedly from companies that are trying to catch up. (Of course Microsoft’s not saying this. But it’s the analysis being offered.) The reality though is that that is never the way to make sufficient impact on the market; it’s expensive and you’ll stay in a niche. Going back some time, I recall Ed Colligan, then chief executive of Handspring, saying it about the PDA market. Handspring couldn’t make any headway, though, and got bought by Palm.

Or it could be bigger:

“On a visit earlier this month to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Goldberg says company executives told him that Microsoft, along with its carrier and manufacturing partners, would likely spend “billions” of dollars in the first year for marketing and development. Another source familiar with Microsoft’s manufacturer and carrier agreements says the company will spend billion on the launch, half on marketing and half on other development costs.”

Eee-yikes. Billions of dollars so that you can catch up to get back to the place where you used to be, but aren’t because you competely took your eye off the mobile ball? For any company other than Microsoft, that would be scary. For Microsoft though, that’s just a cost of doing business, at least in the mobile market.

Mary Jo Foley meanwhile thinks that the cost is easily going to be north of a billion dollars:

“Think this through: Microsoft easily spent over a billion dollars over three years to develop and launch the now-defunct Kin phones, which were a tiny subset of its Windows Phone base. Microsoft spent an estimated 0 million to buy Danger; at least two to three years worth of salaries for the Pink team; however much it cost them to survey the tens of thousands of potential Kin customers/testers via “Project Muse”; and 0 million to write off the failed Kins.

“Windows Phone 7 is of far more importance to Microsoft than the Kin phones were. And Microsoft has been working on its Windows Mobile 6.x successor for two-plus years so far. We’ve heard from the Softies that they’ve reassigned many of their “best and brightest” to develop the Windows Phone 7 operating system, reference designs, user interface and developer ecosystem. So that’s two-plus years of salaries for thousands of Softies.”

She concludes:

“I’d say it’s safe to say we’re easily at or over billion at this point. Microsoft made .5 billion in fiscal 2010. One of the company’s biggest black eyes at this point is its lack of a credible and coherent answer to the iPhone and Android. A billion dollars would be a small price to pay to achieve this. Do you agree?”

Actually, I don’t agree that Microsoft “made” .5bn in fiscal 2010; those were its revenues. Its profits for FY2010 were bn. And it’s sitting on a cash pile of bn. So it’s really not going to notice the odd billion going missing, especially in the market that so many think is so important for mobiles – smartphones.

Yes, you could certainly argue that all the momentum is with Android at the moment, the mobile OS platform which is selling more phones than Apple, and might soon overtake RIM. You could argue that that’s because the Android code is open-source, and hence costs “nothing” to use in a mobile handset.

But over at Business Insider, there’s a Microsoftie who has emailed them (anonymously) to suggest that the cost of incorporating Android into handsets is actually much greater than “free”. As he puts it:

• Lawsuits over disputed Android IP have been costly for Android OEMs. (See Apple/HTC, as just one example.) Microsoft indemnifies OEMs who license Windows Phone 7 against IP issues with the product. That is, legal disputes over the IP in Windows Phone 7 directed at OEMs will be handled by Microsoft. This goes a long way toward controlling legal costs at the OEM level.

• Android’s laissez faire hardware landscape is a fragmented mess for device drivers. (For background, just like PCs, mobile devices need drivers for their various components—screen, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G radio, accelerometer, etc.) Android OEMs have to put engineering resources into developing these drivers to get their devices working. The Windows Phone 7 “chassis strategy” allows devices to be created faster, saving significant engineering cost. It’s essentially plug and play, with device drivers authored by Microsoft.

• [At Microsoft] We’ve seen the delays due to Android OEMs having to sink engineering resources into each and every Android update. Some Android OEMs skip updates or stop updating their less popular devices. Because of the unique update architecture, Windows Phone 7 OEMs don’t need to roll their own updates based on the stock build. Costs are reduced significantly.

• Android OEMs need to pay for licenses for many must-have features that are standard in Windows Phone 7. For example, software to edit Office documents, audio/video codecs (see some costs here), or improved location services (for this, Moto licenses from Skyhook, just as Apple once did). Of course, all of these license fees add up.

As Cutler points out, “Even at per device, 100 million Windows 7 phones will have to ship before it recoups billion in marketing and engineering subsidies, not counting revenues from search advertising or its cut of app sales).”

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This article titled “HTML5 facts and myths: a Javascript expert and Opera evangelist explain” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 24th September 2010 17.45 Asia/Calcutta

Does HTML5 seem like this to you? Photo by ianmyles on Flickr. Some rights reserved

For lunchtime reading (and cramming), Smashing Magazine has a very good introduction to HTML5 – specifically, as it puts it, the facts and the myths.

As the article says,

“Everyone’s talking about HTML5. it’s perhaps the most hyped technology since people started putting rounded corners on everything and using unnecessary gradients. In fact, a lot of what people call HTML5 is actually just old-fashioned DHTML or AJAX. Mixed in with all the information is a lot of misinformation, so here, JavaScript expert Remy Sharp and Opera’s Bruce Lawson look at some of the myths and sort the truth from the common misconceptions.”

The facts are useful (basically, a history of where HTML5 came from), and rather than shamefully ripping off their content we’ll just give you the bullet points from the section they call…

The Myths

• “I Can’t Use HTML5 Until 2012 (or 2022)”
(We’ve heard this one a few times in the comments around here. Ain’t so.)

• “My Browser Supports HTML5, but Yours Doesn’t”
(Willy-waving doesn’t make sense in the browser camp.)

• HTML5 Legalizes Tag Soup
(No, though it relaxes some things – no more searching for that missing />)

• “I Need to Convert My XHTML Website to HTML5″
(Nope, XHTML is a finished spec.)

• HTML5 Kills XML
(Not at all.)

• HTML5 Will Kill Flash and Plug-Ins
Actually, because this is perhaps one of the most contentious issues, we’ll quote what they say almost in full:

“Just as when CSS Web fonts weren’t widely supported and Flash was used in sIFR to fill the gaps, Flash also saves the day by making HTML5 video backwards-compatible. Because HTML5 is designed to be “fake-able” in older browsers, the mark-up between the video tags is ignored by browsers that understand HTML5 and is rendered by older browsers. Therefore, embedding fall-back video with Flash is possible using the old-school <object> or <embed> tags, as pioneered by Kroc Camen is his article “Video for Everybody!”.

“But not all of Flash’s use cases are usurped by HTML5. There is no way to do digital rights management in HTML5; browsers such as Opera, Firefox and Chrome allow visitors to save video to their machines with a click of the context menu. If you need to prevent video from being saved, you’ll need to use plug-ins.”

• HTML5 Is Bad for Accessibility
(It doesn’t have to be, though the <canvas> tag can be a problem; blame it on Apple.)

• “An HTML5 Guru Will Hold My Hand as I Do It the First Time”
(No, though there are already boilerplates that you can use. Just rejoice.)

Now you’ve got this far, you can go and read the article.

There’s also a video talk that Lawson gave at the 2009 OSCON conference on, yes, HTML5: the subject being “A pragmatic look at HTML 5 by experimenting with converting a real site to HTML 5 – how does it work? Where it useful and where is it annoying? How is support in current browsers?”

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A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors. A very similar presentation form is a tree map. The term is also used to mean its thematic application as a choropleth map.

Heat maps originated in 2D displays of the values in a data matrix. Larger values were represented by small dark gray or black squares (pixels) and smaller values by lighter squares. Sneath (1957) displayed the results of a cluster analysis by permuting the rows and the columns of
a matrix to place similar values near each other according to the clustering. Jacques Bertin used a similar representation to display data that conformed to a Guttman scale. The idea for joining cluster trees to the rows and columns of the data matrix originated with Robert Ling in 1973. Ling used overstruck printer characters to represent different shades of gray, one character-width per pixel. Leland Wilkinson developed the first computer program in 1994 (SYSTAT) to produce cluster heat maps with high-resolution color graphics. The Eisen et al. display shown in the figure is a replication of the earlier SYSTAT design.

There are several different kinds of heat map:

• Web heat maps have been used for displaying areas of a Web page most frequently scanned by visitors.
• Biology heat maps are typically used in molecular biology to represent the level of expression of many genes across a number of comparable samples (e.g. cells in different states, samples from different patients) as they are obtained from DNA microarrays.
• The tree map is a 2D hierarchical partitioning of data that visually resembles a heat map.
  A mosaic plot is a tiled heat map for representing a two-way or higher-way table of data. As with treemaps, the rectangular regions in a mosaic plot are hierarchically organized. The means that the regions are rectangles instead of squares. Friendly (1994) surveys the history and usage of this graph.

Ref.Wiki

So What’s a Heat Map and how it is useful for Web marketing?

Through years of research in web marketing, patterns have been seen in the ways that people not only navigate the web, but web sites and even web pages. All of this data was compiled by marketing firms and used to create a heat map.

Heat maps are charts that show us where most people look when they open a web site or page, by human instinct. The map displays regions colored yellow, orange and red – the darker the color, the more high-profile the spot is.

So if you are a web analyst/developer: simply look at a heat map before you design your next web site, plan to remodel your existing one, or are planning on remodeling your online advertising campaign, and make sure the ads are placed in the right “hot” areas!

Website Heat Maps

A heat map enables the website owner to determine what areas of a website the visitors find most interesting. It is best displayed visually.

Heat map image of Google

As you can see the more red the color, the greater the activity on that area of the website. Thus, for Google rankings the top 5 listings get a majority of the eye balls. You will also notice the red lines on the image, these represent the “fold,” the area above where you would have to scroll down to see more of the page.

Website Heat Maps with eye tracking

An eyetracking “heatmap” shows how much users looked at different parts of a Web page. Areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer fixations, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations.