A Blog About Accessibility, Digital, Marketing, and AI
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A very nice article just posted by J. Mark Bertrand that gives five excellent steps every serious writer should consider to improve their craft. My favorite:
Start reading books the way an architect looks at buildings
Read full article: The Master's Artist
Industry pundits are pondering the scalability limits of enterprise applications delivered on-demand.
Case in point is Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com has had great success in small to medium sized business (93 percent of Salesforce.com customers had fewer than 500 users). But can they scale to 10,000?
... in a May report based on data from 29 Salesforce.com customers, Nucleus Research raised questions about whether the vendor could support enterprises with more than 2,000 users. Noting that many large companies are Salesforce.com reference customers, the report found that most use the vendor "on a divisional or regional basis and did not have more than 1,000 users.
Cisco plans to scale to 10,000 Salesforce.com seats, but currently only has about 1,000 user live on the CRM.
Technology at that scale is one limiting factor:
Wettemann says it remains to be seen whether on-demand software is scalable enough for large customers. One issue, she says, is bandwidth, a concern when you have "lots of users hitting a remote database somewhere."
Perhaps even more challenging than the technical scalability challenges are the end user conversion issues. Change comes hard to many people. In Cisco's case:
...many sales people are simply reverting to their legacy nonhosted CRM applications, to which they still have access...
Read full article at C|Net: On-demand applications face growing pains
MySQL makes some commercial inroads this week:
At the LinuxWorld conference this week in San Francisco, MySQL signed partners Novell and Dell to resell the upstart company's database and support service, making the product easier to procure. MySQL is also readying a release of its namesake database with features including stored procedures and distributed transactions, which large corporations often use.
Read more: Database start-ups bet on open source
Saying “No!” can be hard. Ramona Creel at OnlineOrganizing.com published a list of 20 different ways you can say no. A couple of favorites:
Read the complete list at onlineorganizing.com
Online ad sales to double in the next five years!
Another sign that e-commerce has come of age appeared yesterday as JupiterResearch predicted online advertising would reach US$18.9 billion by 2010 -- almost double last year's gross of $9.6 billion.
Much of that revenue growth will be stoked by search engine advertising, which garnered 40 percent of online ad sales in 2004...
Read full article at the eCommerce Times.
This great article from Information Week gives an overview of the benefits of using Wiki technology to enable collaboration within the enterprise: How To Use Wikis For Business.
But they fail to mention what I consider the best all-around Wiki software -- Dokuwiki.
Here is how the author of DokuWiki describes the software:
DokuWiki is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required.
DokuWiki is PHP based. It lets you include other PHP code or HTML pages on the fly, meaning you can embed an external web report in an intranet web page that you create on the fly. Very powerful!
I've long been a fan of gel pens and felt tip pens. A lot of my writing is annotation and markup, so I need a smooth writing but bold ink that stands out on a page. Since writing is such a big part of my life, I finally decided to search for the perfect pen. I bought a dozen or so of the best pens I could find and tried each out over several weeks. I finally settled on the Uniball Jetstream as my choice for the 'perfect pen.'
It writes smooth like a gel pen. Unlike most gel pens, it has a hybrid ink so it dries fast and doesn't smear. Unlike most rollerballs, it doesn't have a dried speck of ink that must slough off to start the ink flow. Even the much touted space pens have that disadvantage. But not the Jetstream.
Another bonus is that it's cap takes a bit of a tug to get off. Unlike the click-top gel pens, with this pen you can be assured that the cap if firmly on or off. No more sticking a pen in your pocket only to find you've gotten ink on your pants or in your hand.
You can buy it at almost any office supply store, or purchase online here.
Anyone who manages web projects -- freelance or otherwise -- can find a nice list of resources in this article by Garrett Dimon. A basic list of references from how to execute low budget projects to the best web resources for web designers.
I've used BillingOrchard for some time now to create and manage invoices online. Now there is a competing service called Blinksale offering many of the same features.
Which do you like best? I have to say BlinkSale has the edge in look and feel.
BlinkSale.com's Service