Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

 

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The Future of the Web

The Web is expanding rapidly peaking now at 1.66 billion users worldwide and with a growth speed of 362.3% for the period of 2000-2009. No doubt the Web will continue to radically impact and transform our lives and behavior, the way we communicate and interact. In this article we collected some relevant prediction statements about the future of the Web as seen by the the industry leaders.

The Web Now

"56% of adult Americans have accessed the internet by wireless means (laptop, mobile device, game console, or MP3 player).
Rising levels of Americans using the internet on a mobile handset. 32% of Americans have used a cell phone or Smartphone to access the internet for emailing, instant-messaging, or information-seeking. On the typical day, about 19% of Americans use the internet on a mobile device, up from the 11% level recorded in December 2007." Wireless Internet Use, Pew Internet & American Life Project

"The Web is on the edge to make another large jump. We're more interconnected with broadband and 4 billion cell phone subscribers to access the mobile web." IBM Research

"The current generation of teenagers are very tech-savvy, with 89% owning a mobile phone with a camera and 61% having uploaded a video to the web." webuser.co.uk

The Future of the Web

"The future of the web is box computing, in which you can power up a netbook or mobile phone and immediately pull up a search box without opening a browser or waiting for your operating system to boot up", according to Baidu founder and CEO, Robin Li.

"It is not likely that this artificial Compuserve-like era of iPhone applications can be expected to dominate the mobile content landscape very long.
Let's face it, the mobile web is still a work in progress, making the more sophisticated displays of some mobile apps far more appealing than dealing with the almost-good mobile web functionality that is available on most platforms today." John Blossom

"The trend seems to be towards real-time. We should expect faster information, faster technology, and more filters to help us control it. How much real-time Web we can handle is another question entirely." Benn Parr

"As contextual marketing becomes the norm, a new group of thought leaders will emerge. They’ll drive a need for new technology that makes tracking and understanding online visitors even easier." John Squire

"The Web moves to a VM-based stateful clients with fast communication lines between the client and the server moving tons of strongly-typed data back and forth." Yakov Fain

"So the question becomes what role should government play when it comes to the ever-expanding and more powerful Internet and Web? These key questions will be answered in the years ahead, and the citizenry would be wise to think about them now and offer input to lawmakers - sooner rather than later." ICitizenForum.com

We are in front of a new wave of web innovation. It's fuelled by the simultaneous emergence of location-aware mobile devices (GPS on iPhones, etc) and real-time, one-to-many communication tools (Twitter, etc). The next Internet boom is coming; stay in front of it by staying focused on fundamentals. Mike Berkley

Conclusion
It is not totally clear what the Web will be in the next 5 to 10 years, but experts envision that it will be rather mobile, real-time and service oriented, providing solutions for the users' fundamental needs.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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How to motivate employees to adopt the new social media

The web is social now. Businesses adopt the social media, people build social networks, and everyone's looking to gain attention, which is not easy at all.

We were looking to find a way to improve Propeople's online presence and decided the best way for a company to adopt the new social media is to motivate its employees to spend more time online and to use the new social media extensively.

Motivation cannot be imposed, and we decided to do it in a fun way. It was the beginning of the summer and we thought it's a good idea to make our Propeople+Twitter t-shirt. We hoped everyone will want a free t-shirt and will submit their twitter user-names to appear on the t-shirt... but we got few responses.

The main problem was our employees did not see the benefit of being on Twitter. Then we published some articles and testimonies from people using Twitter in our monthly internal bulletin and repeated the call. More reactions followed, but we knew there can be more.

The last thing we did was to show employees the useful resources available on Twitter. Everyday, Propeople shares about 10-15 tweets containing extremely useful resources for designers and developers, and there are virtually endless resources shared everyday by other users. This time we had an enormous interest from employees to explore Twitter.

Motivating employees to adopt the new social media is challenging. The real motivation for people is to see the benefit of the new media in their personal and professional life.

The Propeople+Twitter t-shirt is ready and everyone with his name on t-shirt will have one. Follow us on @Propeople.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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DrupalCon Paris highlights

DrupalCon Paris was an awesome event, amazing speakers and presentations, outstanding participants, and super remarkable news.

Just before we get into all major news from DrupalCon Paris, note that videos and presentation materials will be available online by end of the week on DrupalCon Paris 2009. So here are the major news.

First, Drupal Gardens is "an easy on-ramp for people to experience the awesome power of Drupal without having to worry about installation, hosting and upgrading. Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning for Drupal. Think of it as "Drupal as a service". The goal is to make the base service free of charge, and to introduce Drupal to hundreds of thousands of users. Drupal Gardens could play a key role in promoting the viral adoption of Drupal, and the name Drupal Gardens is key to that." source

If you are interested in taking part in the alpha program, or if you'd like to get notified about the progress of the product, sign up at drupalgardens.com. For more information please read the Drupal Gardens article. Also, see a video sneak peak of Drupal Gardens at the Propeople live blogging from DrupalCon Paris.

Second, Acquia Hosting is now available. "Acquia's hosting offering differs from generic hosting in at least two ways. First, the infrastructure will be carefully tuned and optimized for Drupal and deployment tools will be streamlined for Drupal development. Second, Acquia provided technical support for your Drupal site, the Drupal application, and all of the underlying infrastructure. Currently, the infrastructure is provided by Amazon AWS. The web nodes are load-balanced with Nginx and all content is replicated to two database servers that are configured in master-master configuration. Files are stored in a highly-available network filesystem on top of EBS volumes with frequent off-site backups. The shared cluster hosting is optimized for Drupal sites and backed by support from Acquia." source

For more information, please read the Acquia Hosting article and on Propeople live blogging from DrupalCon Paris.

Third, Drupal 7 code freeze and final preparation for the release. All major work on Drupal 7 should be done before November 15, 2009. In his presentation at DrupalCon Paris, Dries did not mention any release date for Drupal 7, but was pretty sure Drupal 7 will be released by the end of this year. See the entire process described by Drues' in the Drupal 7 Code Freeze slides from DrupalCon Paris.

Finally, the next DrupalCon will be in San Francisco, on April 18-20, 2010. Visit http://drupalconsf2010.org for more details about the event.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Best Practice for getting started with Cloud Computing (EC2, Drupal & MySQL) - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

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Drupal ingredients - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

This is an interactive session that implies public participation.

How to choose good modules?
There are over 40000 modules on drupal.org
http://drupal.org/project/usage
http://groups.drupal.org/similar-module-review
http://drupaldashboard.com/node/43
issue queue - active, but not too active
maintainer - active for a long time
maintainers - more is better
ask personal friends
ask industry friends - http://groups.drupal.org/libraries
code style, use standard coding procedures - http://drupal.org/project/coder

Excellent modules you may need... find them here http://drupal.org/project/
Admin
Views
CCK
Webform
Wyslwyg + some external library/libraries
Token
Pathauto + Path Redirect + Global redirect
Panels
ImageField + ImageCache
Flag (or Nodequeue)
Views Bulk Operations (VBO)
Content Profile (profile.module performance?)
Profile module (Contenr Profile performance + future?)
monkey pants
...

Image Gallery
Views
ImageField (therefore CCK, Filefield)
ImageCache
Taxonomy (galleries)
configuration
Custom Breadcrumbs (therefore Token)

Social Networking Site
OG
Notifications
Flag + Flag Friend
Panels for user pages

Spam
Automated: Mollom, Spam, Akismet (no), Captcha + ReCaptcha
Manual/community: Flag + Flag Actions, VotingAPI + A slice of custom code, [either of those] + VBOwn your face with easy sauce!

E-commerce
Ubercart
Ubercart
Ubercart
Ubercart
Ubercart

Here is the session official presentation - http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcv55663_82d9m66bdz

Please submit your favourite/useful modules.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Drupal and Microsoft - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

PHP on Windows
around for a decade
most often used only as a development environment

What is needed? - 5 steps of enlightenment
streamline Windows Web Server Installation
improve PHP on Windows
ass Microsoft value to PHP
insert Microsoft values to existing PHP projects
web application installer

Microsoft started to deliver stuff to address issues
- MS Web Platform installer: free download, turn your PC into a virtual server
- application installer included

MS worked with the community do solve the issues
gain feedback from the community

PHP 5.3 is most significant update for Windows.
code is lighter and totally transparent for users
PHP on Windows was modified to run the Windows way, and not Linix

Future
Active Directory connectivity for PHP
Word & Excel reading and writing
more Windows Live services
Exchange connectivity
PDO Driver

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Reinventing Journalism with Drupal - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

Building a small city newspaper or online community from scratch.

2009 was not the best year for newspapers. Many publications printed their final edition in 2009.

Newspapers emerged as media empires back in 1930. It was one of the very few media means at that time.

Newspapers business model: news gathering -> printing -> distribution.

In 2009 everything is changed
news is ubiquitous, and it's free
anyoane can blog or upload video
news is generally free
there are many ways to advertise

Threats to newspaper
classified ads
blogs
microblogs

Where will revenues come from?
advertising
classified
grants
corporate underwriting

What would be an open source approach?
go hyperlocal: small geographycal location, town, neighbourhood
create a virtual community of geaographycaly close people
motivate people to comment and interact around your new

Views
site needs news
bend the content display to Views 2's capabilities
avoid costrly views tpl.php templates whenever possible

Location module
strong for making CCK fields location sensitive
works great with user profile

Advertising module
good to track clickthrough, pageviews and other metrics
integrates nice with Workflow module
can't track for HTML ad

Admin module
great user interface
conflicts with admin menu, not delivering CSS to IE

User profiles
the cornerstone of a community site
pictures all important

A great example of a hyperlocal news site - http://gableshomepage.com

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Mihai Moscovici

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Transforming "The Economist" - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

The Economist - authoritative weekly newspaper focusing on international politics and business news and opinion.

The Economist is moving to Drupal.

The vision is to build an online destination for analysts, drawing the intelligence of journalists, readers and guests.

The Economist is aiming to publish user-generated content as an important part of the content.

The Economist is looking to...
fast product development
innovation
responsive to change
delivering business value sooner

Change
Technology
Process
Culture
Organization

Why Drupal?
free software
strategic fit (community and content publishing)
offered robust development framework
PHP developemnt vs. Java
strength of Drupal community
potential for zero-time-to-market process

Drupal did not have a sales force... no one came with a .ppt presentation to defense Drupal.

Process: Drupal, what now?
hired a person to manage migration to Drupal - Rob Purdie
two options to approach the project: 1. redcesign/backend project to deliver a new site at the end; 2. incremental and iterative approach based on business value.
option 2 was choosen and used Scrum to manage the whole migration project.

Select a project top start with
Comments, high-value, highly-visible work

Next come up with speed
train the project tech team
train managers
hire experts to work as part of the team
train the team to work in Drupal
strategy to delivering Drupal while continuing using the old CMS

Incremental architecture through the Proxy approach: Drupal --JSON over HPTTP--> Existing Cold Fusion system --HTTP--> Public Internet.

Culture... change came with Drupal
x-functional, self-maintaining teams
tech in the business
delivery by  business-value
chaordic
team present work every coding sprint
20% for community and ideas

Migration
test-driven development
continuous integration

Drupal-o-meter for Economist.com
Content migration - March 2009
Continuous integration - May 2009
Single sign-on Drupal and legacy system
User data migration - Aug 2009
New LAMP infrastructure - Sep 2009
Channel pages - Oct 2009
Home-page - Dec 2009

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Social+Media: What we need next - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

by Chris Heuer

Social media is what we do with it, not what it is.
It's more art than science.

Brief history
Cave paintings
Written words
Guttenberg
Radio
TV
Web
Weblogging
Social Networking

The "democratization" of communication technology is advancing at an ever increasing rate.

Social Media is very challenging... especially for early adopters.

Dot com era: The three C's
Comntent
Commerce
Community

Social media: The Four C's
Context
Communication
Collaboration
Connections

Social media principles
be human
be aware
be honest
be respectful
be a participant
be open
be courageous

Everyone has a role to play, everyone has something to contribute!

Jeff Jarvis calls the modern era "the big restruction".

We're finally realizing all organizations are made of people, thus they are social.

All modern organizations are media companies!

Social media is changing tyhe way we relate to each other.
Truth is that we cannot longer set up the world as We vs. them.

Drupal is at the edge of "the big scary chasm" right now.

Drupal needs to find solutions to go over it and achieve success.

With success, we deal with...
with popularity, comes pain of change
new, clueless, self-proclaimed "experts" that hurt us
a diverse group of users that make it harder to be "user-centric"

Solutions
look at the WHOLE of the community
think HOLISTICALLY about user experience and needs
ask more powerful questions

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Basics of Drupal Mobile Websites - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

Mobile Trends
25 years ago: GSM phones of 11 kg
now: iPhone, PDA, etc.
59% users can complete their tasks on mobile websites.

Why go mobile?
everything goes mobile
people want to connect everywhere and all the time
Google believes mobile is the future of the web

Visit the DrupalCon mobile site built on Drupal - http://drupalcon.siruna.com

Complexity
Device fragmentation
Usability
Optimization of download size
Bring relevant content only

General
Multi-column design sites must become 1 collumn sites

Goal of mobile tools
bundle functionality
device detection
user notification
redirection
mobile permission

Create the mobile look
have your own theme: no floats, no fixed margins, no big fixed fonts, reduce usage of tables, etc.
use an adaptation service: multiplatform adaptation, fast prototyping, high quality

OSMOBI
A free service to instantly mobilize a Drupal site based on the transcoding engine.
Test the Alpha version of OSMOBI now - http://osmobi.siruna.com

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