Has the Cloud failed before prime-time?
I was thinking about this, is the premise of ‘the cloud’ as an infrastructure failed even before it got well out of the gate?
I am referring to the slew of outages the last day’s and weeks of some high profile infrastructures like Amazon S3 and Google. I always thought Googles infrastructure was untouchable. But it seemed that I had woken up to a different world last week. When I saw tweets and messages going around with ‘Gmail is down’
It raises the valid question. Can you , start-up or otherwise (Enterprise) bank on the Cloud as a valid infrastructure option?
I’d say yes- of-course- it is my business to be evangelistic to the point of being annoying about these kind of things. But something I read made more sense… P2P.
No (well, yes) not downing Indiana Jones and the Chrystal Skull though torrents. I mean P2P Search (Faroo) Calls (Skype) and storage (Wuala)
And when I switch on my PS3. In it’s idle time it will do some Protein Folding on his own. He together with a couple of hundred-thousand other PS3. So P2P App Engine is not far around the corner, it is probably at least in the same city already.
The same things that give Cloud based infrastructure it’s credit, cheap scalability, more then usual high availability, size and ease of implementation is also what keeps start-ups from entering- since all that -cheap and -fast and easy and scalable stuff comes at a cost…Amazons and Google’s (and recently IBM) server park runs in the tens of thousands machines. It is incredibly expensive to run an operation like that, let alone build one from scratch..
You need $ gazillions to be a Cloud Computing Platform. Those server farms cost a lot. Skimping, or misjudging demand, leads to outages, slow response and other confidence-killers. This is a game for the big boys
However it is incredible cheap and relatively easy for a group of smart people to come up with a P2P solution to the same problem…
Take for instance Skype. It has about 10 million people at any one time supporting the infrastructure. Those are 10 million machines all doing their (albeit little) part.
Now imagine somehow, someway that something like that could be implemented for hosting or computing, we have things like SETI and FOLDING @ home. But those things are really hard to enter into as a business or entrepreneur.
P2P Cloud computing in general will be the future of infrastructure
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Aching to know where that little pain in your back comes from? Hakia’s got your back.
Image via WikipediaYou know what I am talking about right? Little red spot on your arm, wheezing sounds in your ear, you don’t want to- but you do it anyway- you look it up online, and are probably worst of because you did….Well, you have got one illness alright- it even has a scary sounding name hypochondria or the more suited Cyberchondria.
So now there is a more credible source for all your self diagnosis pleasures. Ever since they have added 10 million PubMed articles and developed their “Credible online health search” program Hakia could be your final destination.
Seriously though. True hypocho’s already know where to look- Healia provides search into Pubmed for a while now. But Hakia is adding a good solid natural language interface into the mix.
Which means you can ask it questions like “why do my ears bleed?” and it gives you good credible results- so you don’t have to waste your time in a crowded emergency room and you don’t miss tonight’s episode of House.
Having a natural language type of search engine specially for self-diagnosing pleasures could be the ultimate physician. I can’t wait for it to respond to things like: “I have this ringing sound in my ear- and it starts around the time that my kids come home from school”
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Sensebot. Automated summaries of search results.
Ran into Sensebot yesterday-first impression was ‘fantastic’ and ‘creepy’
What sensebot does is it gives you summarized results from your search query. The search is performed by all or any of the major search engines. Sensebot takes those top results and after analysis returns summaries. So if your in a hurry- need quick rundowns of concise information about a certain topic then Sensebot is for you.
The summary serves as a digest on the topic of your query, blending together the most significant and relevant aspects of the search results.
Doing an ego query on Kotrotsos even got some creepy results. It’s like- things you have written but presented as quotes, which is great- but some quotes are presented out of context. Other then that it is an fantastic service that I will be sure to use more to quickly become acquainted with certain topic.
“SenseBot is a semantic search engine, meaning that it attempts to understand what the result pages are about. It uses text mining to parse Web pages and identify their key semantic concepts. It then performs multidocument summarization of content to produce a coherent summary. You can read more about the approach in our interview to Search Engine Journal.”
Web 3.0 is only partly about semantics
There is nothing more frustrating than a gaggle of geeks sitting in your boardroom talking about simple concepts in an unnecessarily obfuscatory manner because their revenues are tied to your inability to understand what they’re saying or the bills you’re paying.
Gender and the semantic web.
Image by charlton_b via FlickrRead Write Web writes about if the Semantic Web will have a gender. One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.
As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? “Objective” descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships.
Tagaroo
When writing blog posts- and in other experiments in semantic search I use services that analysis text for me and returns additional content. Services like Zemanta and Open Calais. Both services offer about the same features. Zemanta has got more markup and article features then Open Calais though. Both have auto tagging and images. So when writing your blogpost you don’ t have to hunt down the Internet for images to add- Open Calais (Tagaroo) and Zemanta do that for you.
Now, I reviewed Zemanta before. I am reviewing Tagaroo now. And although I got my hopes up for a souped up version of Zemanta it was abit of a let down. Do not get me wrong, the open calais platform is awesome- but for blogging Tagaroo does not really cut it.
How to fix Social media’s Data Portability issues.
Image via WikipediaMichelle Greer felt that the issue of data portability was important enough to step up and lead a discussion at SocialMedia Camp.
The semantic web can fix the issue of data portability in social media. How? By using associations to group different profiles together. It also allows people to own their data instead of being at the mercy of every social network.
Check out the video here. (by the way, eating cookies over someone elses macbook? Are you serious?)
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interview with the New York Times about The Semantic Web
An interesting interview with Michael Zimbalist, head of R&D at the New York Times.
He talks about mobile content , rich annotation of NYT content, the Semantic web and ambiguous computing in particular.
I think it is very refreshing to hear ‘old’ media talk this way about the possibilities of semantic web. I believe the New York Times will be on the forefront of this new media revolution. Having mainstream media richly annotated means a tremendous benefit to everyone.
Online Dating Goes Web 3.0 with MyLove2be.com
Online dating has long been held out as the classic example of web 2.0 for its user interactions and community creation. This is now all changing as the transformation of web 2.0 services are consolidated into all inclusive community enterprise solutions.
Case in point www.myLove2be.com has just announced the beta release of what is nothing short of a leap forward in online dating. By creating an online dating environment where image, video, and MP3 galleries are paired with Second Life Styled Virtual Reality Chat, Video Cam Chat, Text Chat, Blogs, Forums, Chat Rooms and Community Advertising Space you now have what is best described as a “Total Online Lifestyle Solution”.
Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center
This shift to Web-based applications has generated two powerful waves so far. Now, we are seeing a third wave—one that we are calling Web 3.0—and it may prove to be the most significant and disruptive yet to the traditional software industry.
Marc Benioff, chairmain and CEO of salesforce.com talks about the next wave of innovations which are part of web 3.0, platform as a service. While this only covers one aspect of Web 3.0 the way Marc explains it is right on.
10 semantic companies to follow
Image by checoo via FlickrThe article has a bit of age to it, it’s from november 2007- however it is still very valid.
What happened in the mean time from november until now? Powerset has gotten aquired by Microsoft, Freebase had a huge round of new funding as did Twine as did the rest. It is as clear as glass- Web 3 and Semantic web technology is catching fire fast…
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Struct3.com, chronicals of the Next Web.
I have been starting to write a huge intro into web3 and semantic web and Next Gen Web stuff as an intro for this blog.
But I scrapped it <silent cry>
I think we all can find out what these things are for ourselves right? For instance on web 1.0 sites where you can look it up and browse through. Or search for it on the largest community edited dictionary in the world. Or use the new semantic version of the same concept. And you can even fire of that exact question on one of the new Natural Language driven search engines.
Or I’ll just quote the exact Wikipedia article myself here, I am allowed to and it will probably save you some time. And that is exactly what this is all about right?
Zemanta, making blogging fun again.
Image via WikipediaWould it be great if somehow my attention profile would provide me with inspirational pieces or feedback?. Like it would know what I most likely would find interesting even before I would? That would now be totally possible.
I started using Zemanta and I can see the possibilities with this type of system. A large part of writing blog posts is about collecting assets to go with it. Those assets in turn could provide inspiration as well.
Because I am working in a team that is researching semantic web consumer products I have found Zemanta to be quite interesting. It does work as advertised but still needs alot of information to ‘get going’ which is only to be expected…Look at the image on the right, Zemanta suggested this one. Zemanta also suggested Betty Boop…
But in all it’s a fantastic product that I will be using all the time from now on. And to get me to use something for over a week is actually doing something right.
For people that know me and read my personal blog- this might sound familiar.
Now, this is not a re-post or copy of the same article. I wanted to see if it would give me the same results. And it did. This is actually good and bad. For one it is proving to be a solid technology- it also means that well, i still get Betty Boop. I would love to know the reason as to this particular goof.
So, in a particularly small nutshell. Zemanta is a service that suggest content to you while you are -in this case blogging. So, while I am typing this I get suggestions in a sidebar automagically.
I get suggestions for pictures, articles, tags and links (that is where all the in-line links in this article come from). I can add either one of these by just clicking on it or by pressing ‘apply all’ for even more ease of use.
I am planning to use Zemanta for most of my writings here. But I wont be using it exclusivly though. Will be testing a couple of them.
For now, my list of Betty Boop entries keep growing, but it just gives me an idea of a new article to post in the future. Isn’t that just a great side effect of a fantastic tool?
