Kathryn Barrett is dedicated to the cause of promoting O'Reilly's books and authors to the world at large, while also indulging in her personal crusade of making the task of those who have to read press releases less arduous and more entertaining. Part PR mastermind, part closet nerd, she really enjoys writing about things like bash, Knoppix, ASP.NET--you name it. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, writing, and backpacking in the wilderness areas of Northern California.
That’s not a question you’ll hear a lot of people ask. In addition to being an internationally recognized authority on Silicon Valley business models and innovation economics, an award-winning strategy researcher, and a professor of high-tech entrepreneurship, strategy, and venture finance at some of the most impressive schools you can name, Amy Shuen is also the author of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide. At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in SF, we couldn’t keep enough copies of her book in stock; you would think it was required reading.
If you missed seeing Amy at the Expo, you can catch her in this fun video blog caught on the fly at the Expo by Robert Scoble. Amy’s own blog is an entertaining and educational read, too.
The winner of the free copy of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
Two weeks ago, I offered to award a free copy of Amy’s book to someone who posted a comment about Web 2.0 to this blog. As always, the comments were excellent. In my totally arbitrary fashion, I have selected Scott Hodson as the winner (and I’ll notify him soon). He wrote:
I love Web 2.0 and the ability to mash other apps together! Over a year ago I created a WiFi maps site (http://802.11maps.com) using Google maps API and find the site very useful, and so do many others. I look forward to adding features to allow others to add value to our site through APIs and developer tools as well. Perhaps one of my greatest challenges is learning how to share and feel OK with it. It’s hard sharing or giving something away, something you created and worked on so much, but the hope is that in return for sharing the overall whole value of the effort will be much greater through the contributions of others.” Scott Hodson | April 29, 2008 01:35 PM
Thanks for posting, Scott. And thank you to everyone else who posted a comment! Keep posting. I’ll have another book giveaway soon, and the odds of winning are excellent.
If you missed Steve Souders‘ live webcast on Even Faster Web Sites—or if you’d just like to see it one more time—you can download the movie now and watch it at your leisure.
One caveat: the file is rather large. It’s an 87 MB, .mov file that runs approximately one hour. If you click on the movie link, the movie will load into QuickTime in your browser window and begin to play. With a good Internet connection, this can take up to ten minutes. As an alternative, you can right-click on the movie link to download the file to your desktop. This may be preferable if you have a slower Internet connection or don’t plan to watch the entire movie in one sitting.
You may prefer to get a taste of what the webcast was like with the ten-minute YouTube trailer below. Keep in mind that it’s lower resolution than the full movie.
You can also catch Steve in person as he co-chairs the upcoming Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference which takes place on June 23-24, 2008 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California.
A couple weeks ago, Jonathan Zdziarski presented a fascinating webcast on iPhone Forensics. He geared the presentation towards law enforcement professionals—specifically, forensic investigators—but even I, with no background even remotely in law enforcement, found the presentation rivetting. And now I know that if you’re a criminal, you’ll want to keep your iPhone close to you: it can reveal a lot more than you imagine.
But for the non-criminals among us—and those who go after the bad guys—Jonathan has done some amazing work, including the creation of a toolkit and detailed iPhone forensics manual that he provides free of charge to law enforcement pros. He tells how to get it in his webcast.
If you missed the webcast, you can download the recording now and watch it on your computer. It’s a 200 MB .mov file, which means it takes a long time to download. If you click on the link, it will load into QuickTime in your browser window and take about 10 minutes before it begins to play with a good Internet connection. You can also right-click on the link to download the file to your computer and then watch it at your leisure.
iPhone Forensics Demonstration by Jonathan Zdziarski
The YouTube version only contains the first 10 minutes of the webcast. It’ll give you a taste of what it’s like, if you’re not sure you want to download and watch the whole thing.
Web 2.0 is one of those terms that average people find very slippery; that is, even when they’ve had it explained to them clearly, they find it difficult to turn around and explain to someone else. Of course, Tim O’Reilly gets it and can put it in easy-to-understand terms. And now Amy Shuen has written a guide for business people—any executive, manager, developer, entrepreneur, or investor who wants to thrive and survive in a hyper-networked Web 2.0 economy. It’s Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, and it’s available now.
“You’re already an integral part of the Web 2.0 business economy,” says Amy. “Every time you click on Google, Wikipedia, eBay, or Amazon, you are sparking ‘network effects.’ If you use a Flickr-enabled cell phone or tune in to iTunes podcasts or check Yahoo! Finance for stock quotes, you are creating monetizable value for businesses—even if you don’t actually buy anything.”
For those who want to be a Web 2.0 success, Amy offers her 5 Steps to Web 2.0:
1) Build on Collective User Value
2) Activate Network Effects
3) Work through Social Networks
4) Dynamically Syndicate Competencies
5) Recombine Innovations
If these steps sound a little cryptic, each one is covered in Chapter 6 of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide.
A chance to win a free copy of the book
Want to get your hands on a copy of the book? Post a comment to this blog to 1) share your biggest Web 2.0 challenge, 2) tell us about your greatest Web 2.0 success, or 3) take a stab at defining Web 2.0 in your own words.
Post before the end of the day on Tuesday, April 29th. I’ll select a winner (in a totally arbitrary fashion) and send that person a free copy of Amy’s book.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about Scott Berkun’s new book, Making Things Happen, and I asked people to post their ideas about what makes a good project manager. I said I’d arbitrarily select one winner from among those who posted and give away a free copy of Scott’s book.
Once again (it’s happened before) there were so many insightful posts that I’m having difficulty selecting a winner, even arbitrarily. So this time, I used a handy random number generator and selected ten winners from the bunch. I know I’m probably overlooking some brilliant and inspired responses, but there’s no way around it.
Here are the winning posts—oddly enough, they were all quite short! And I thank everyone who posted a comment. It was a fun discussion.
This week’s webcast is presented by Steve Souders, co-chair of Velocity and author of High Performance Web Sites. Steve will explain the Performance Golden Rule, review his performance best practices, and use YSlow to analyze the top web sites in the world. Introducing Steve will be Andy Oram, author, blogger, and senior editor for O’Reilly Media.
The webcast is live, free, and short enough to fit into your day without interrupting your busy schedule (approximately 45 minutes). Join us Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 10 am PT (17:00 GMT). Register today!
With the iPhone quickly becoming the market leader in mobile devices, the need for law enforcement personnel to perform forensic analysis of these devices is beginning to surface. Join us on April 17th at 10 am Pacific Time, as Jonathan Zdziarski demonstrates how to install his custom forensics toolkit on any existing model iPhone and send a raw disk image to a desktop machine. He will also show you how to recover files specific to the iPhone including deleted keyboard caches, photos, web objects, and much more. Jonathan’s custom forensics toolkit and his accompanying forensic manual will be available free to forensic investigators in law enforcement. This live webcast is free. Register now and we’ll send you a reminder as the date draws near.
The web is full of opportunities for companies both large and small, but smaller companies face a difficult problem: infrastructure. Industrial-strength infrastructure can be costly to buy and maintain, so smaller companies often do without. “Yet in today’s world of web publicity flash storms caused by sites such as Slashdot and Digg, the difference between a web application serving a few dozen users and serving thousands may be no more than a glowing article and a few hours’ time,” notes author James Murty. “Although this kind of attention may be exactly what you hope for, unless you have invested heavily in infrastructure, your application may not survive the onslaught.”
A possible answer, according to James, comes in the form of Amazon’s infrastructure web services and his new book Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB explains how you can use Amazon’s massive computing infrastructure to build your own applications. AWS lets businesses and individuals “rent” computing power, data storage, and bandwidth on this vast network, and, best of all, you only pay for what you use.
Now you’re probably wondering, what kind of advice does James Murty have for people like me who might want to use AWS?. That’s a good question. Here’s what James has to say:
Jonathan Zdziarski’s live webcast last week was truly fascinating. He explained the process in detail from how to “jailbreak” your iPhone all the way through creating and installing an application on it, and he answered some thought-provoking questions along the way. You can download the movie and watch it if you missed out. It will take awhile to download as it is a one-hour long, 211 MB .mov file. With a good Internet connection, you should allow up to 10 minutes for downloading, but it’s definitely worth your time.
You can also view the ten-minute YouTube trailer if you want to get a sense of what the presentation is like. YouTube movies, of course, lack the resolution you need to see what’s on Jonathan’s screen. If you’re really interested in the topic, just go for the whole thing.
There may be something drier than the phrase “project management,” but usually it’s shaken and served with an olive. And while the latter is often greeted with some sense of anticipation, this is seldom the case with the former. In fact, the mention of project management all too often evokes a sense of weariness, unremitting work, frustration, even failure—feelings that are completely inconsistent with the fact that all successful projects depend on effective project management.
Scott Berkun is quick to tell you that it doesn’t need to be that way, and his latest book, Making Things Happen (formerly titled The Art of Project Management) will show you just what he means. Scott is a noted public speaker and teacher on management, creative thinking, and design. When I asked him what motivated him to write on project management, he said:
If you had to miss Derrick Story’s live webcast in late March—Five Ways to Make Your Photos Look Better—you’re still in luck. The video, complete with Derrick’s stunning photography and expert tips, is now available for downloading. Watch the YouTube trailer to see what it’s all about, or download the .mov file and view the entire presentation at leisure. The entire movie is one hour long, 196 MB. Be prepared for a long download time (7 minutes on my computer with a great connection) but it’s entirely worth the wait.
If you missed out on the Carla Schroder’s recent presentation, Control a World of Computers from Your Linux PC, you’re in luck. You can download and watch the webinar video (approx. 30 minutes, .mov file, 125 MB) here.
Kathryn Barrett is dedicated to the cause of promoting O'Reilly's books and authors to the world at large, while also indulging in her personal crusade of making the task of those who have to read press releases less arduous and more entertaining. Part PR mastermind, part closet nerd, she really enjoys writing about things like bash, Knoppix, ASP.NET--you name it. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, writing, and backpacking in the wilderness areas of Northern California.
If you missed out on the Carla Schroder’s recent presentation, 
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