Blog post on Drupal load balancing, which is nontrivial. [Link]

It is not always easy to scale Drupal — not because Drupal sucks, but simply because scaling the LAMP stack (including Drupal) takes no small amount of skill. You need to buy the right hardware, install load balancers, setup MySQL servers in master-slave mode, setup static file servers, setup web servers, get PHP working with an opcode cacher, tie in a distributed memory object caching system like memcached, integrate with a content delivery network, watch security advisories for every component in your system and configure and tune the hell out of everything.

Joel Spolsky’s long, entertaining, entirely geeky take on web standards as “Martian Headsets” is definitely worth reading. He explains why the evolution of the web has included variations on and departures from standard ways of doing things, and cascading fault-tolerance has created a complex environment with billions of web pages, many filled with errors if your compare them to a supposed standard, though what’s “standard” is hard to pin down. The various browsers interpret the code for web pages differently, and this problem grows worse as the ecology grows more complex. It’s increasingly difficult, even writing straightforward html code, to create a page that displays correctly for all browsers. There’s also quite a bit in this article about the evolution of the Windows operating system and why Vista appears so broken. Then there’s IE8, currently in beta, subject to a struggle between standards idealists and pragmatists. Should IE be backward compatible if that means fault tolerant? Or should it adhere strictly to standards?

The precise problem here is that you’re pretending that there’s one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it’s not a real standard: it’s a platonic ideal and a set of misinterpretations, and therefore the standard is not serving the desired goal of reducing the test matrix in a MANY-MANY market.

It’s gonna be a long, long year.

Mashable posted this brief (less than two minute) video with a simplified explanation of data portability.

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

The site also has a link to a longer written explanation from October about apml (attention profiling markup language) by Mark Hopkins, who says

The concept of APML is that it allows you to share your “attention profile” data with other users, organisations or programs in the same way you might share your OPML file with someone. The most compelling reason I can gather why the internet world as a whole needs to line up behind the concept of APML because companies are already gathering so much data that used to be considered private and sacred, so we all need to get out in front of it now and define the process of gathering that information, and attempt – as users – to control a bit of that.

I don’t agree with the Mashable contention that this is “a detailed (and a bit technical) explanation” of data portability. APML is just one aspect of data portability, and (in my opinion) less important than portable identity and social graph. Hopkins is writing about the use of APML for personalization, and I agree with some of the issues he raises.

I’d like to see a better explanation of data portability than I’ve seen so far… maybe I’ll write one, myself.

Rohit Bhargava, author of the original “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization,” has published some notes about his new centralized social media bio. He’s talking about aggregating “all of my personal information into what I would consider a complete professional portrait. ” This aligns well with Polycot’s strategic recommendation that business entities should create a core identity and message. Bhargava identifies ten key categories of information about him that are included in his social media bio. Here’s a version of his list:

• His Bio - Background on his work experience, including bios of different lengths that can be used for cutting and pasting into blog posts, event descriptions or anywhere else where others would want to include some bio information for him.
• His Profiles - Sites where he has created personal or professional profiles that describe his background and experience.
• His Appearances – A list of conferences, seminars and events that he has spoken at over the last two years (he left off anything older than that).
• His Interviews – Links to interviews he has done for audio or video podcasts, as well as links to guest blog posts he has done on other blogs.
• His Publications - This is a list of white papers, presentations, published articles or any other thought leadership that have been published (outside of blog posts).
• His Favorites - Sites where he’s published a list of favorite websites, blogs or anything else.
• His Bookmarks - Similar to the favorites section, but at the moment dedicated to republishing my common tags he uses in his del.icio.us account, his primary tool for bookmarking.
• His Rankings & Honors - Widgets that show ranking numbers and stats for his blog, as well as a list of honors or awards over the past year.
• His Syndication – A list of sites that syndicate content from his blog and republish on their own networks with permission. Unauthorized syndications of content are obviously not included here.
• His Tags – Tags that he recommends using to define the content on his blog and index the content on directory or search sites.

Your list would vary depending on experience and goals, however the exercise of reviewing and cataloging online data about your and/or your business is extremely useful in helping you focus your web presence. At Polycot, and especially at my soon-to-launch new consultancy, Social Web Strategies, we would suggest a next step, creating a coherent story or message, as a crucial aspect of your web presence development. When we say “web presence,” we don’t mean your web site, though it’s a critical aspect of your presence. However, a web site is generally insufficient on today’s web. You have to consider all the other online places (communities, social networks, social bookmarking sites, presence applications, etc.) that have strategic relevance to your business.

At Worldchanging I recently posted a couple of columns wherein I mentioned a lack of complete data portability. In one of those pieces, I said “what I’d really like to see, and haven’t yet, is a good Open Source approach to the social graph, and standards to make identity and social graph portable.”

The DataPortability Workgroup is just what I was looking for:

• Philosophy As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.
• Mission To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

The workgroup just surged forward with the addition of members from Plaxo (Joseph Smarr), Google (Brad Fitzpatrick), and Facebook (Benjamin Ling).

The Workgroup is working on a “Data Portability Reference Design” that will describe best practices for integrating existing standards and protocols. The goal is for all that data we store at whatever social sites we join to be accessible from every site. I’ll report more about specifics as I follow the Workgroup’s progress.

Clay Shirky explains the meganiche. [Link]

I define a meganiche as a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless represents roughly a million users. The meganiche is something new, and it will have a lasting impact on online business and culture.

For most of the past decade, the basic strategy for building a successful Web site was encapsulated in the phrase “Get big, get niche, or get out.” You could appeal to a broad constituency, with all the blandness and generality that implies (think Yahoo), or you could target a tightly focused group that was far smaller but easier to reach and more loyal than a mass audience (think Slashdot). Getting big would yield high volume and low margins, while getting niche would bring the inverse. Getting out was what you were forced to do if you ended up stuck somewhere between the other two approaches.

That was when 36 million people were online. Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1 percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Back then, reaching a million users required a decidedly mainstream offering (Amazon.com and MSN come to mind). Now, getting niche can be the path to getting big; one-tenth of 1 percent of today’s Web audience is a million people. Forget Bridgewater – the Net is chockablock with special-interest sites and services you’ve never heard of but whose user base exceeds the print circulation of The Washington Post.

Is this what you should be thinking about? Feed back…

In 2002 Dave Winer bet that, in 2007, a Google search on keywords for the top five news stories of the year would show weblogs ranking higher than the New York Times. Winer wins: blogs ranked higher for three out of the five top stories. Even more interesting: the real winner, had it been included in the bet, was Wikipedia, which ranked higher than blogs or NYT in four out of five stories. [Link]

Adweek has a very interesting list of 2007 business/marketing trends. The list includes convergent web “spinoffs” from/to television; “all us, all the time” – a world where everybody publishes and everybody’s a celebrity for fifteen microseconds; moving from PC to mobile – the phone as Internet device (though I’m skeptical that anyone’s thinking of leaving the PC behind); authenticity in marketing; the death of privacy in a world where all data about everybody is (potentially) everywhere; green capitalism, where oil company cadets don green uniforms and everybody “gets” the environment, even those who don’t; gaming gets social as more people move, if not permanently, into virtual worlds; BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are becoming significant economic centers (and, though they don’t mention it, economies become increasingly global-not-local)… and the two other trends I want to quote in full. These two are the most relevant to Polycot’s clients and friends:

DATA IS KING “Content” is no longer the be-all, end-all in the digital age. The growing number of social networks and marketers interested in targeted, relevant messages has given rise to a new proclamation: data rules. Google built its business on this premise, and Facebook’s $15 billion valuation was due to the plethora of information it has on its 58 million users. On the media-buying side, we’ve moved from mass media to precision media. Marketers now equate consumer knowledge with “insights” that can help hawk their wares and justify the huge bucks they’re shelling out for media time. The Nielsen Television Index more than doubled its data output to clients this year (with the addition of average-commercial-minute ratings for live audiences, among other numbers), and companies including TiVo and TNS introduced services that measure audiences for commercials and programs down to the second. Number crunchers, your day has come.

OPEN BEATS CLOSED When it comes to digital media, the new prevailing wisdom is open networks beat closed systems. The most successful companies of the age—think Google, Facebook and MySpace—are platforms that allow others to build on them. Facebook in late May opened its site to outside developers, letting them not only build applications on the site, but also make money from them without giving a cut to Facebook. What’s in it for the site? An army of developers dreaming up ideas it never would on its own. Thanks in part to a flood of apps that let users do everything from throw virtual sheep at each other to share movie and book recommendations, Facebook’s user base has grown by 50 percent since it opened up, according to Nielsen Online. Now the Internet open-beats-closed ethos is moving into new areas like telecom. Within days of iPhone’s introduction, it had been hacked by users to allow them to add features they wanted and the service provider of their choosing. After Google announced plans for an open mobile operating system, Verizon said it would begin to open up to outside developers. That’s good news for consumers, but it will challenge incumbents whose business models are based on exerting tight control.

Scholars are using Facebook as a social laboratory.

it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science — that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.

[Link]

Facebook screwed up with Beacon, and, intitially, they didn’t handle the screwup very well. Mark Zuckerberg published a very necessary apology today, but his apology can’t address the larger problem: it’s hard to run a community system for big profit. Attempts to monetize community systems are too readily seen as exploitation by community members. Zuckerberg and his colleagues were insensitive to this concern, which crops up from time to time. In the nineties, when I was part of Howard Rheingold’s startup community system, Electric Minds, we heard concerns about “commoditization of community.”

Who owns Facebook, Zuckerberg and his investors? Or the community of users without which Facebook would be little more than a vaporous cloud? If the former, what rights to they have with regard to their users’ data?