"web2.0" entries
Announcing: Spike Night at Velocity
Guest blogger Scott Ruthfield is a Program Committee member of the O’Reilly Velocity: Web Performance & Operations Conference. Web Operations is not for the casual observer: it’s for a particular kind of adrenaline junkie that’s motivated by graphs and servers spinning out of control. Jumping in, on-your-feet analysis, and experience-based-experimentation are all part of solving new problems caused by unexpected user and machine behavior,…
Ignite! comes to San Jose June 22nd – Submit your talks now!
Ignite! is coming to San Jose on Monday June 22, 2009 at 8:00 pm, attached to the Velocity Conference. Admission is free, open to all, and there will be a cash bar. The deadline for talks is May 11th, so submit your talks now! As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15…
CrisisCamp is June 12-14th in Washington, DC
CrisisCamp is an unconference to bring together domain experts, hackers, makers, developers, and first responders to improve technology and practice for humanitarian crisis management and disaster relief. This is the first event in what I hope will become a movement, and it's happening on June 12 – 14, 2009 in Washington, DC. Across the world, everyday people can find…
Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals
More and more people from the private sector are interested in playing a role in government, thanks in no small part to the excitement surrounding the Obama election and inauguration, in which social media technologies and information sharing were showcased at their best – massive fundraising from many small donors, empowering people to self-organize locally, and direct public relations that circumvented a mainstream media lens. Now, people enamoured with emergent social technologies want to know how they themselves can revolutionize not only politics, but also governance.
Velocity Preview – The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number at Microsoft
The psychology of engineering user experiences on the web can be difficult. How much rich content can you place up on a page before the load time drives away your visitors? Get the answer wrong, and you can end up with a ghost town; get it right and you’re a star. Eric Schurman knows this well, since he is responsible for just those kind of trade-off decisions on some of Microsoft’s highest traffic pages. He’ll be speaking at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference in June, and he recently talked with us about how Microsoft tests different user experiences on small groups of visitors.
Velocity 2009 – Big Ideas (early registration deadline)
(tag cloud created from Velocity session & speaker information using wordle.net) My favorite interview question to ask candidates is: “What happens when you type www.(amazon|google|yahoo).com in your browser and press return?” While the actual process of serving and rendering a page takes seconds to complete, describing it in real detail can take an hour. A good answer spans every part…
Velocity Preview – Keeping Twitter Tweeting
If there’s a site that exemplifies explosive growth, it has to be Twitter. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is Tweeting, or talking about Tweeting, or Tweeting about Tweeting. Keeping the site responsive under that type of increase is no easy job, but it’s one that John Adams has to deal with every day, working in Twitter Operations. He’ll be talking about that work at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference, in a session entitled Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World’s Most Popular Micro-blogging Site, and he spent some time with us to talk about what is involved in keeping the site alive.
AT&T Fiber cuts remind us: Location is a Basket too!
The fiber cuts affecting much of the San Francisco Bay Area this week are similar to the outages in the Middle East last year (radar post), although far more limited in scope and impact. What I said last year still holds true and is repeated below: From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why…
It's Really Just a Series of Tubes
Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you’re someone that, like me, has a [somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure](http://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity), you must watch this talk.
Google App Engine Lets Your Web App Grow Up
Google released App Engine less than a year ago. It was the first chance for external developers to use the power of Google's servers. The powerful platform supported Python and was free (within limits). It now supports 45,000 apps and those apps get over 100 million page views per day. Those pageviews were all free, but they had limits. That's going to change. After today developers can pay to have more storage, more bandwidth, more CPU time and send more email.