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Week four of Can You Guess What It Is? with Fuelmyblog continues. Sylvie posted another photo today.
If you think you know what it is, you can guess via a fuel to us here. The winner will be announced during a live draw (from all of those with the correct guesses) at 3:30 p.m. EST on Sunday. Good luck!
Each week's winner can choose from a Blog2Print book or another SharedBook product.
Last week I learned once again how powerful and strong my team can be.
We had just upgraded the latest improvements, truly revolutionizing our architecture and the way things work (faster, much faster), when suddenly we started experiencing some strange phenomena.
When you have a production system up and running, and such things happen it can be scary, very scary. As all good software engineers are, we can also be a little bit of “control freaks.” Therefore strange phenomena make us feel nervous, out of control, somewhat unconfident. And this is where the amazing power of a good team comes to play.
A standard practice we have when we face these situations, is to immediately setup a task force, and get into action. We have frequent brain storming sessions, analyze all symptoms, identify leads, list action items, and assign them among team members. Every one or two hours we get together again, identify our situation, the progress we’ve made, insights we’ve gained, and go on to continue the battle.
And it never fails. Get a good team together, and the magic is bound to happen. Slowly the picture starts to get clearer. Strange phenomena are not that strange anymore. Things start making sense. And out of this blurriness comes the spark. Someone raises an idea, an ingenious theory that solves it all. This time it was Ze’ev (big kudos Ze’ev!) who came up with it, that final piece of information that solved the mystery. As a result, we found the bug of two 3rd party products colliding with one another and affecting the server in a delicate scenario.
Two positive outcomes emerged from last week’s happenings: first, we solved the problem. Second: we gained more confidence as a team. Every such event, every such experience helps us gain more confidence in our power as a group, and hence makes us a better team!
I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of the members of this amazing task force: Saffi, Ze’ev, Dario, Rami, Alex, Roy, Nir, Alik and Rona. Great job guys!
If you haven't seen it already, Stephen Baker and Heather Green have updated their 2005 "Blogs Will Change Your Business" BusinessWeek story to "Social Media Will Change Your Business." The article is full of updated statistics and observations and I think it could be helpful to anyone interested in raising their online presence.
We have another winner! Congratulations to mommy bytes, the winner of the third week's live draw in the Can You Guess What It Is? contest with Fuelmyblog. Angela guessed last week's photo correctly as a corkscrew or wine bottle opener.
The next photo has already been posted on Fuelmyblog's site here. What do you think it is? You'll have all week to submit your guesses. You can do so by leaving a Fuel for us here and putting your guess in the comments. Good luck!
The winner each week receives their choice of a Blog2Print book or another SharedBook product.
If you've tried to check out Blog2Print this week, you may have received a server message. We've been performing some upgrades to the widget and they're complete now. Thank you to everyone for their patience!
Stay tuned to Fuelmyblog for an update on this week's contest. And have a great weekend. This is what it looks like around here (courtesy of Jane Kratochvil, the AP and CNN.com):
When it comes to advertising on the Web, it seems that everyone is fighting for space on the homepage. The idea being that there is no better place to advertise - since the homepage is commonly the most accessed page in any Web site and it appears early in an interaction, when anything is possible.
But there are many arguments to make that a simple placement on a homepage is not a good long-term strategy.
First off, there is the issue of context. On a homepage the user has not yet established their intent and thus an out of context ad might not pay off. There is no better example of this than Google. They took this concept to its most extreme - a single text entry form homepage devoid of any other advertising. But Google more than makes up for this after the user has disclosed their context. Once a keyword or phrase is entered - let the advertising begin!
Secondly, there is the issue of timing. In the early days of the Web, there was a concept that users visit Web sites for the fun of it. So a simple homepage advertisement could be the very thing to entice the user. But these days most Web site visitors come with an intent. The homepage is scanned to find the intended target and, once it is found, the user clicks off the homepage. Once they are gone, the homepage advantage is gone with it.
My preference would be to become more ingrained in the navigation of a site. Take, for example, All Recipes. Our Create-a-Cookbook appears in the global navigation of their site AND there is a button placed at the top of each members' Recipe Box. Both the context and timing are right.
Don't get me wrong - given the option to advertise a product on someone's homepage, I'll jump at the chance. But if it becomes the only placement in a Web site, I'd ask for a recount! Especially when considering a product like SharedBook - which is at its best when it is incorporated into our clients' sites.
Week Three of Can You Guess What It Is? with Fuelmyblog is underway with a few changes. The photos will be posted on Mondays moving forward and the live draw conducted Sundays at 3:30 p.m. EST.
This week's photo appears below and here (along with some additional details). When you think you know the answer, you can post your guess through a fuel to us (SharedBook), writing your answer in the "leave a message" option.
Stay tuned ... Sylvie has promised a slightly less blurred image midweek as well.
![[can-you-guess-what-it-is-.jpg]](http://bp1.blogger.com/_PPYYzjJiFuk/R7iZSw-QPeI/AAAAAAAAAhs/heXSCp7uiU0/s1600/can-you-guess-what-it-is-.jpg)
This is the second week for the Can You Guess What It Is? contest with Fuelmyblog and we've posted a timely photo in keeping with today's Valentine's Day theme. First clue: Be our Valentine.
Here's what else we can tell you. The picture is of something soft and the cost varies, depending on the variety. Take a look here.
Here's what else you need to know:
-You can ask as many questions as you wish here or on Fuelmyblog's Blog.
-Once you are ready to submit your answer you must leave it through a Fuel to Blog2Print
-The people with the correct guesses will go into a "Live" draw on Friday at around 2:30 p.m. EST - the correct answer will be announced during the Live show here. The deadline for all guesses is 2 p.m. EST. UPDATE: Congratulations to this week's winner: Princess Ecossaise! This week's picture was a rose.
The second O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference ends today. And it is remarkable to see how much more vibrant this conference was compared to the first last summer. Yes, the first was in CA – close to the tech world that is supplying many of the "tools" but not to the greatest number in the publishing community, for whom these tools are meant. But I also believe that the publishing world has started to embrace the digital era more energetically, recognizing that it will transform the industry in untold ways, and attention needs to be paid.
The fear I have is that, in looking for ready solutions to the unknown, the industry is glomming on to buzzwords like "social networking" in the belief that cracking the social networking aspects for publishing will provide the easy solution. There is no question that social networking is one of the most important phenomena to emerge from the Web world in the last few years. The latest statistics from Technorati suggest that 1.4 blogs are started every second and it’s hard to have a successful site without a strong user-generated component. At SharedBook, we see this phenomenon in the number of stories and photos that are shared among our registrants and the active use of our collaborative functions.
But finding a way to integrate social networking into publishing models is not the panacea that some might be looking for. Its relevance will vary according to the need of the users.
Reading will always be primarily a solitary pursuit. How much one wants to network around content will be stronger for some than others.
At SharedBook, we believe that customization and personalization is as important a path as social networking, if not more so. If the Web has shown anything, it is that consumers want their content when they want it, in the way that they want to consume it.
Maybe it’s on a device, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s chunked from various places and books and re-bound into a new volume. Maybe it has a digital flyleaf and other personalization; maybe this doesn’t matter. One thing we do know is that the traditional way of accessing and consuming reading material will be one choice among many and that the market will become more fragmented. But if it takes the path of filmed entertainment, it will ultimately be larger in aggregate than where it started.
In this modern age of ours faster is better. If you want to win the market, you have to be faster. Users drop off your Web site if your site is too slow. If you want to win a bike race, you have to go faster. You’ll drop off the peloton (principal group of cyclists in a bike race, riders in a group save energy by riding close) and lose the race for sure if you are not fast enough.
Once again I discovered to my surprise that the same principles apply to both cycling and software. Find the weakest link, and fix it.
In SharedBook where we use software to create books with rich content and photos, our weakest link was the photos. Fetching photos from different sites can take a lot of time. Processing those photos within the server is a time consuming task (not to mention CPU and memory). How do you improve that?
Well, Saffi, the head of our architecture team, came up with a simple and effective concept: caching. Once we fetch the photo for the first time, we cache it and use it again and again. We even cache the different versions of the processed photo internally, thus saving ourselves more processing time. How do you introduce this into an existing system? You’ve probably guessed it: very carefully, with lots of patience. Refactor your codebase, one step at a time, and move to the next step.
In cycling, my weakest link was making turns. Especially those S shaped turns. How do you improve that? You’ve probably guessed it again: very carefully, and with lots of patience. Practice turns again and again, one step at a time, and move to the next step (sharper turns, faster turns).
In SharedBook the caching saves us a lot of time, making our book creation process much faster.
In cycling, better cornering saves me a lot of time, allowing me to stick with the peloton and go much faster.
And what’s the next step? Going even faster of course!
