the webthinking blog

I have almost finished reading Ahead Of The Curve by Philip Broughton. Since “change” was an important buzzword in 2008, I want to capture an interesting definition mentioned in Broughton’s book:
Change = function (Dissatisfaction * New Model * Implementation Process) + Error

I have pulled out some interesting usage charts of the two main social networking tools - LinkedIn and Facebook.

Turns out most active day of the week among my LinkedIn connections is Monday. Makes sense for a business tool.

Everyone needs some fun and relaxation by Wednesday, which seems to be the most active day on Facebook.

Good. Folks, just don’t let Facebook take over your week-end. Or entire week. Please :)

If you have met me, you probably know by now - I am sold to LinkedIn and its benefits.

Here is something to think about: Goldman Sachs made the headlines quite often over the last few months. Have you ever wondered why Goldman Sachs does not have a list of job openings on their careers web site? Because they know talent does not hang out every day on their corporate web site.

Now, why do you think they have recently acquired a stake in LinkedIn? Aha. That’s why. They know they need to be present in this place, listening and watching for skilled prospects. And Goldman Sachs is not the only company.

When did you last update your profile?

Looks like Startbucks just entered Twitter land. Barista - a caramel macchiato and a tweet, please! Thanks!

I’ve been a Nokia junkie for years… Howdy to my friend, Lucian, over in Finland!

Michael Dell: Today there are about 1bn people attached to the Internet. Everyday, about 500,000 new ones come on the Internet for the very first time in their lives. So that means, the Internet population in 3-4 years is roughly gonna double. About 85% of the growth comes from emerging countries.

I’m close to finalizing reading the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Awesome book by the way! A good part of it touches upon outsourcing jobs to India, especially call centre jobs.

So, here’s my story: Bell Sympatico DSL users have been experiencing major service disruptions in the Toronto area over the past few days. This affects me as well, living in Richmond Hill, always hitting a Toronto server and an IP address that had a reverse name as “basXX-torontoXX.dsl.bell.ca”.

I pick up the phone to call Bell and ask them “How much longer?” An extremely polite Dominique answers my call. “Sir, before we go any further, just in case we get disconnected, is there a number I can call you back?”

Uh, ah, I thought I was talking to Bell - the phone company. Why should I get disconnected?? Because the ‘net is not working for me?

So my question to the Rep was “Do you mind if I ask where are you located?”

“No sir, in Southern part of India”. Ahaa, just as Friedman’s stories from the book I’ve mentioned above.

After convincing the person at the other end (of the world) that my modem was actually powered on - I get a new challenge.
“Sir, how can you possibly experience connectivity problems related to the Toronto area when you are living in Richmond?”

Hmm - I get it. Now I have to convince him that I live in Richmond Hill, ON and not Richmond, BC.

Two days later Bell has not fixed the problem yet. I’m posting this through my BlackBerry. Lovely!

To Bell: in addition to all screen captures of modem types in use posted on that intra/extranet, you should make available a at least a Google Maps lookup tool, as well. :)

If you are looking for a podcast hosting service, this might interest you… And you might be familiar with Libsyn.com just as well. BTW: if you are using it, you might pay more than you need to…

I have been evaluating and using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for couple of months now as a back-up hosting service for iSPINIT.com and I will definitely use this service for the upcoming iSPINIT.com Premium edition.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. That is applicable for large podcasting media files.

Let’s do the math first:

Libsyn’s highest package, Podcast Supreme, will set you back $30.00 per month for 800MB of space. Fair enough. This should cover the bandwidth costs as well.

Now this is what you would pay for Amazon S3:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using this calculator, you can get a price quote depending on you hosting needs. Let’s say you have about 1GB of data and 50GB (!!!) of files to ship out of the door every month: $10.36

Interested? This is what you need to get started with Amazon S3:

• an account with Amazon
• a neat Firefox plug-in - S3Fox (available on Mac and Windows)
• access to your domain DNS settings

Amazon S3 uses “buckets” as their terminology for “folders”. You can create your unique bucket - e.g. media.mydomain.com. After all, a domain name can be a folder name!

Next step: create a CNAME entry for media.mydomain.com to s3.amazonaws.com

Voila! Your cost effective hosting service is all set-up. The only thing left is uploading your data using the S3Fox plug-in in your browser. Firefox that is:

Enjoy paying only for what you use!