To non-net-natives such as me (that is, people who had an existence before cyberspace), apps (or as we might have called the ‘systems’) such as Foursquare naturally ring alarm bells. Indeed for me the very need to be announcing my whereabouts I confess just seems un-needed. As naturally as night follows day, people can be assumed to put this system to shady use. Enter ‘Girls Around Me’ (fnarrr), a Facebook/Foursquare app. Quoting from this article Foursquare’s Smart Move To Block A Creepy Stalking App Makes Facebook Look Really Bad:

“Girls Around me used Foursquare check-in data to show girls (or guys) nearby and then used Facebook’s API to let users see all of their pictures and personal profiles. It encouraged people who were “in the mood or looking for a one-night-stand” to stalk away on its site.”

Ok, so much harumphing as the ‘first known offender’ gets busted. But are we saying that Foursquare stalking is ended now? I rather think not, we’re seeing the birth of an industry be it underground or surface. Which brings me to another current meme set to change all our lives: Ye Google Glasses. Did I miss something? What else are Google Glasses other than a stalking device?

• Who lives in that building?
• Who is driving that car?
• Look this face up – snap -
• …does this person have a criminal record, bad credit rating, any other problem?
• …is this person vulnerable?
• …is this person a long way from home?
• …where did they park their car?

‘Don’t it always seem to be, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone’… Many moons ago I stopped over in Athens after having spend the summer in Crete, Greece. The planes being full I had a day or two to kill before starting a bus trip back to London. I still remember the fresh and buzzy feeling of strolling out of my hotel into central Athens thinking ‘absolutely no one knows what I’m doing now’. What I was doing was nothing extraordinary, walking up the Acropolis to the Parthenon with friendly exchanges with fellow tourists, but it was all in a beautiful spirit of freedom. Google Glasses ends all that. True there will no doubt be a flood of ‘AG-ware’ sold to preserve our anonymity in public that will probably work as well as Anti-Virus used to. There may be laws introduced, like the ones postulated to prevent neighbours surfing unprotected wifi. But they probably won’t work. Phrasebook standards such as ‘What is your name’ and ‘How old are you’ will start becoming reduntant as the information is beamed directly to the asker’s eyes before they’ve actually asked.

Is it right to pre-mourn the end of privacy?

*Definitely a pre-net-native song celebrated in the title ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ by UK band Slade. **From a similar epoch a line from Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.

What is a ‘responsive’ site?

A decision to be made in traditional ‘personal computer’ focused web design was whether to make the site ‘fixed-width’ or ‘fluid’. Fixed-width i.e. a fixed number of pixels width, say 800 or 1000 makes it possible to have a rock-steady, predictable layout, downsides being that when viewed from a wider monitor the site might look narrow and if viewed from a monitor with pixel-width lower than the width, not all the site is visible and the visitor needs to sroll horizontally to see it all. Fluid layout has the opposite issues, layout is potentially ‘sloppier’ but the visitors screen is full regardless and the site ‘scrunches up’ for narrower screens.

A ‘responsive’ site is basically a fluid site with some recently appearing techniques to enhance how it can appear across a range of monitor sizes, from large widescreens, down through the iPad format to smartphones – iPhone, Android etc. The main ‘new tool’ to faciliate the greater flexibility of responsive design is ‘media queries’. These are actually not that new having been added to the W3C standards primarily to allow different formatting for printing then called ‘media types’, but these have now been enhanced and expanded into ‘media queries. Media queries are CSS statements which in conjunction with the browser identify the type of device visiting the site and key aspects of that device e.g. the width in pixels, and specific CSS that follows ‘tailors’ the presentation to that device. The plot gets deeper when it comes to rearranging sidebars and other big areas of real estate – this is easy enough in the site was designed to be responsive from the outset but can get time-consuming when applied to a conventionally designed site.

You can see a responsive site in action by just looking at this one. If on a pc or mac or similar resizing the window to make it smaller will eventually make the sidebar flick under the main column and as the window gets narrower the menu will start to rearrange into rows. Narrower still and the font-size of the header will get smaller.

Who needs a responsive site?

Having lived with one for a while I’m tempted to say ‘everyone’, but that’s maybe the thrill of the new… Looking at typical website logs the number of accesses is still quite a small percentage. Some stats about smartphone usage are here at:For regular business-to-business sites most of the access will be from the office, but there are plenty of businesses – real-estate is an example – where many of the workers are travelling a lot and necessarily use smartphones to access sites. It’s now a pretty much a no-brainer for classic local businesses – shops, hairdressers, cafes, restaurants can get an edge with thumb-friendly sites while their competitors flounder in a pinch-n-zoom backwater!

Why make do with ‘three letter acronyms’ (TLAs) – in cloud computing they’ve largely been done away with in favor of four letter acronyms (FLAs), for example IaaS, SaaS (my main thing) and PaaS – let’s delve into these different FLAvors (oops) of CLOUDSOURCING…

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Examples:
• A dedicated physical server at a hosting center
• Regular ol’ Internet lines from an ISP (slightly debatable)
• A virtual server at a hoster
• ‘Bare iron’ type of contracted disaster recovery

This is the ‘lowest level’ cloudsourcing (that’s an IT style usage of ‘lowest level’ by the way, as in ‘nearest to the metal’ no value judgement included!). This is basically renting physical computing equipment at a remote location (i.e. outside of the organisation that is buying the cloud services). In the case of Internet lines then some of the kit is located at the client but most of it is external. Also, strictly speaking, when you use ‘virtual servers’ you’re buying something on top of a ‘VM’ platform e.g. VMWare but that’s discounted in this case because the VM platform is only there to enable you to run your favored platform, be it Linux or Windows etc.

So in a nutshell, IaaS is outsourced ‘kit’.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Examples:
• Amazon Services
• Microsoft Windows Azure

We jump up a layer from ‘kit’ to the dynamic duo of OS (operating system) and database. It’s open to debate why these are paired up as in effect the database software is just an app on top of the operating system – e.g. Windows/MSSql and Linux/Mysql, but hey we’ve got a tradition now. This is a more complex type of cloudsourcing – just ask one of the early adoptors of Azure but with that complexity come strengthening benefits – faster scaling on demand, improved global response and arguably lower overall cost compared to IaaS as suppliers can deliver benefits accrued from ‘timeslicing’ i.e. spreading the processing load of their clients so that it is spread more evenly across their huge sprawl of ‘bulk bought’ hardware, than can be acheived by businesses running on IaaS or their own hardware.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Examples:
• Big name SaaS providers – Salesforce CRM, Turbo-Tax, Google Apps
• ‘Niche’ providers for specific business needs – they’re so niche you won’t have heard of them!
• Web services

The classic SaaS is delivered via a website (normally with SSL type encrytption – i.e. to an https:// versiona of a website). The client company just needs a browser to access the site and is generally not restricted to a given platform with this type of SaaS. Larger SaaS’s may also provide platform specific apps for smartphones and tablets but in the author’s humble view that’s a weakness and should be avoided. The pure browser-only access version reaps most fully the prime benefits of SaaS provision which are:

• Minimum setup/maintenance of the client’s computers. No software installs, upgrades etc
• Flexibility of platform for the client – Windows, Mac, iPad etc (dependent on the specific SaaS’s requirments)
• Reduction/removal of backend IT workload for the client – less or no server maintenance, server software maintenance/upgrade, backups etc
• Faster response to changing requirements – easier for the provider to implement changes in the software than via the upgrade cycle for conventional software

Of course there are some potential downsides to SaaS provision:

• ‘All your data are belong to the SaaS’ – you need to keep an eagle eye on both the contracts and the actual technology to make sure you can get hold of your data in a form you can use when needed e.g. to interface with another system, and also check that the SaaS’s security systems meet your needs
• Oft vaunted ‘you need Internet access to use the system’ – yes, well it’s 2012 and let’s face it if you lose all Internet access for an extended period it’s time for the shotgun and dehydrated food reserves rather than checking your accounts receivable!

Hope you enjoyed this quick review of the different types of cloudsourcing – feel free to differ below!

Bloggers are often very down on spam, totally understandably but this needs to be met by appropriate measures and not overkill. I’ll go out on a limb here but in my view, with what is currently available, captchas are overkill especially for smaller volume blogging sites. Captchas usually take the form of those distorted figures which need to be read and entered and which apparently spambots are not very good at answering. A hard to crack capture might be the best thing to stop spam comments but it’s also quite good at putting commenters off their game – either stifling the first comment or drying up the conversation if repeated captchas (ok I admit that this is a subjective view but I think it’s broadly on the right track). So let’s look at the alternatives in WordPress, look also at registration/third-party logins, comment moderation, and see how things can be ‘luvved up’ with a couple of other add-ons.

An Ideal Blog Comment Setup?…

1. Relaxed Spam Control

   I’ve been using ‘Keypic’ – a WordPress plugin. Daily attention is needed as 2 to 3 spam comments get through each day, but daily attention is always needed on a blog isn’t it? I use it without moderation (see below) and without captchas and it doesn’t require the commenter to do anything at all. As a result the commenter is given a completely ‘natural’ and unfettered commenting experience. I think Akismet now has a free version (I need to check) and probably does a similar job.

2. The Heck with Logins

   I set up a system so that people could login via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and was a little surprised that no one used it. It turns out I’d underestimated how much those ‘authorize this app to access Facebook info’ etc. I certainly wasn’t getting any of that info but I didn’t want to go into what exactly the plugin coders were able to see so I just dropped it. It was of minimal value, and having no login or registration process needed to comment certainly assuages those fears and also encourages comments.

3. The Lord High Moderator

   ‘Your message is awaiting moderation’ is never really a turn-on, more so for a small scale blog. People can take that kind of message slightly personally and it also slows down the whole process… there’s something satisfying about seeing your comment online straightaway. And, as I’ve mentioned, using ‘relaxed spam control’ there’s a small risk of spam comments but you can delete those daily and in the time they’re up they’re not really doing any harm (long term having a lot of spam comments could hit your Google rankings but that wouldn’t be the case in the above example of blog maintenance). Moderation also makes more real-time type discussion less likely.

4. The ‘CommentLuv’ WordPress Plugin

   This plugin lets commenters choose which link to display with their comment post, from their last ten postings. It also makes it easy to check that you’re giving the posters value with ‘follow’ links. As such it is forming a kind of ‘in crowd’ of people who recognize the CommentLuv logo and are more likely to comment because they know the benefits. Recommended!

5. the ‘ReplyMe’ WordPress Plugin

   This plugin ensures that Worpress sends an email to the commenter each time you reply to a comment. Generally replies to comments can be overlooked by the commenter so it’s a great addition to your ‘commenting rig’

Anyway, that’s enough about comments… any comments? ;o)

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