Microsoft shareholders to get ‘say on pay‘

Microsoft’s board says it will hold a non-binding, advisory shareholder vote on the salaries of the company’s executives every three years, starting with …

Microsoft OKs Shareholder Advisory ‘Say On Pay‘ Wall Street Journal

Microsoft’s Board Enacts Say-On-Pay Advisory Vote Bloomberg

Microsoft approves ‘say on pay‘ shareholder vote Seattle Post Intelligencer

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Microsoft Board Authorizes “Say-on-Pay” Advisory Vote on Executive …

Amazon is one of the companies that deploys simple business ideas and are probably a step behind the early adopters. Their user reviews and comparison purchases model was peer-production and user generated content (UGC) before they became buzzwords. Now this. Their efforts in cloud computing also brand them as a player in the post W2 world.

The Net
aka: The Internet (http, nntp, ftp, email), International Information Infrastructure
Era: 1980s-1990s
Realisation:

It isn’t the cables, it is the computers which are interesting

The Web
aka: World Wide Web
Era: 1990s-2000s
Realisation:

It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting

The Social Graph
aka: Web 2.0, semantic web, now
Era: 2000s -
Realisation:

It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important” or “its not about the social networking sites, its about the social network itself

Tim has put things nicely into perspective. I especially agree with the last point: I don’t care about Facebook, but I like what Facebook has taught us thus far and wrote a little ditty about it.

He goes on to say “The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.”

“As more Web 2.0-style applications, which include lots of content contributed by end users, come online, companies will need to have better tools to handle them”, said Dennis Quan, chief technology officer of high performance on demand solutions at IBM.

“What’s at the heart of this is the realization that this technology is not restricted to universities or academic institutions. There’s a broad applicability for this technology,” Quan said.

Cloud computer primer
Cloud computing is essentially the harnessing of computer power to scale to a massive size, which allows for the following:

• replicating the size of the internet or a part thereof
• testing application viability (esp Web 2.0 apps) by simulating user adoption across the internet
• crunching numbers on a massive, scientific scale. Think the Genome Project, SETi@Home, scanning pictures of Space or the desert. Apparently, in the 50s-80s academics used to book time on a computer to perform data analysis (like calculating pi) and they can now buy time on Blue Cloud or EC2/S3.

Taken from McManus’ article:

Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft – it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s term for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).

The aim of the partnerships is to add more “social computing platform” capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an “enterprise productivity platform”. In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator.

Update: definitive article from Susan Scrupski.

No sirree, Jaiku is the effort of some Finns, the most always-on culture on the planet (this is an abysmal sentence…). Threading and an element of moderating allow it to be used in serious apps.

My interest in microblogging is across various theatres (of war), but especially for the enterprise. Real time status updates,  always-accessible team members (phone, email, site, IM) and a bit of sharing on the side.

You know which microblogging service is really underrated? Tumblr. Its more microblog than the others. The others should really be termed something like Gadget-Bridge or PresenceBlogs.

A recent analysis by Bear Stearns (BS) recommends that Yahoo! adopt a social networking (hmm, sound familiar in the local context?) by buying Facebook. One of my favourite Web 2.0 characteristics is that comment to a feature is regularly more illuminating than the feature itself, and in this case its true again; roll the good comments please:

• BS has questionable statistics, showing that the 35-54 age demographic as being the biggest social networkers. This is intuitively inaccurate ( ever seen the over 30s groups on FB?).
• Yahoo! Has all the social networking tools it will ever need. It had them in the 90s already. They cant see the wood for the trees, and good suggestions include merging them all into one powerful app, not 20 different ones (cf FB).
• Yahoo! Should not buy FB, unless it will do so only to remove a competitor. It should rather go back to its roots, or rummage around its dev shed and bring all its toys out and reengineer them for Web 2.0.

Yahoo!, WTF? You were the web for many years, synonomous with search, free mail and free hosting. I was hooked from 1999. Sure, I got mad when Yahoo! shut down my account after 6 months of inactivity and when my girlfriend dropped me via Yahoo! mail, but you were like the rock band one grows up with at 13 who can never do wrong.

PS: I’ve registered for another account and am giving Yahoo! another chance. They have the brains, for one. Its surreal writing about Yahoo!s fortunes as I did the same for my dissertation in 1999 when Yahoo! stood for everything the web could be.

AideRSS came up with PostRank (not only similiar in name to Google’s killer PageRank, but also in methodology). It takes all your feeds, monitors the trackbacks and you can view popularity of posts at a glance.

I’m still a fan of email newsletters in some cases. Why? I probably would never have found this story be glancing over popular RSS feeds as its still early days.

• structure (html)
• design (css, images)
• layout (css, html)
• business logic (php, asp, visual n++)?

You know, death of the <font> tag parties and no more bgcolor, tables tables tables etc. Well, HTML is being revived as version 5 by the w3c. I’ve read some of the debates, but I haven’t got the exec summary, please share. Will love to know what will happen to web standards now <sigh></font></blink>

Update August 9:

First view of the new tags: Slashdot IBM

All my mates in online media, heed,

http://idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/