2007 February Archive at Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Monthly Archive for February, 2007

Google Apps Premier Edition

Published

Tom Raftery

on 22/2/2007

in office 2.0

. 1 Comment

InformationWeek are reporting that Google have released a business class version of their Google Apps.

The new suite of apps will be called Google Apps Premier Edition and, according to the article:

Google Apps Premier Edition features application programming interfaces that businesses can use to integrate it with their own applications. Ten Gigabytes (10GB) of storage for ad-free Gmail is offered standard, meaning workers can spend more time working and less time cleaning out their in-boxes. And Google is offering service level agreements that promise 99.9% uptime and 24×7 tech support.

But possibly the most compelling aspect of Google Apps — at least from the standpoint of potential customers considering a switch from Microsoft products — is the price. Google is offering the whole package for just $50 per user, per year.

The SLA and the 24×7 phone support make this a compelling offering, particularly when you consider there is no software to roll out and/or maintain.

The biggest shortcomings in Google’s apps, right now is the lack of a presentation tool and contacts management but look to Google to address these soon. And obviously, because it is Software as a Service, the new functionality will just appear one day! No messy upgrading or downloading.

This really puts it up to Microsoft.

Here is the feature comparison across the free and premium versions of Google Apps:

More here.

Post number 1,000!

Published

Tom Raftery

on 22/2/2007

in Blogging

. 4 Comments

I just took this screenshot in my WordPress dashboard and it shows 999 posts published on this blog!

That means this is post number 1,000. Wow!

Thanks to everyone who has come to this blog, particularly those who go to the trouble of leaving a comment. The comments are a fabulous resource and I am constantly learning new things from readers.

Here’s to the next 1,000 posts.

WordPress 2.1 updated to 2.1.1

Published

Tom Raftery

on 22/2/2007

in WordPress

. 0 Comments

WordPress 2.1 has be updated to 2.1.1

The update is a low to medium priority update and:

includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code.

This is a list of the files changed from 2.1 to 2.1.1:
* wp-includes/post-template.php
* wp-includes/cache.php
* wp-includes/formatting.php
* wp-includes/category.php
* wp-includes/post.php
* wp-includes/version.php
* wp-includes/js/scriptaculous/wp-scriptaculous.js
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-mce-help.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_gzip.php
* wp-includes/capabilities.php
* wp-includes/cron.php
* wp-includes/functions.php
* wp-includes/bookmark-template.php
* xmlrpc.php
* wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
* wp-admin/admin-functions.php
* wp-admin/custom-header.php
* wp-admin/options-general.php
* wp-admin/edit.php
* wp-admin/index-extra.php
* wp-admin/options-reading.php

It would be irresponsible of me to recommend that you simply update those files. Instead I’ll recommend that you read the upgrade instructions.

An inconvenient truth

Published

Tom Raftery

on 22/2/2007

in climate change

. 5 Comments

I watched Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth last night and, I must say, it was very good. Hopefully it will serve as a wake up call to those who dismiss climate change as a myth. Unfortunately though, I think those who watch it will do so because they have an interest in this area and those who don’t believe in climate change will never watch it.

Some interesting facts which came out of the movie - for instance Al debunks the notion that scientists disagree about climate change. He pointed out that in a study of over 900 scientific papers on global warming (a randomised selection of 10% of all scientific papers published in the area in the last 10 years) not one scientific paper came out against global warming.

Whereas the same study looked at over 600 newspaper reports on global warming and 53% of them came out against climate change.

In the same way that the tobacco industry tried to tell us that smoking is not bad for our health, it looks like the petroleum industry is now trying to debunk global warming and right now, it is winning the PR war.

Joost updates, Viacom and social networking

Published

Tom Raftery

on 21/2/2007

in video

. 1 Comment

I posted the other day about Joost having released a client for Mac. Joost have since released an updated Mac client app which addresses a couple of issues with the first one. I have tried it out and find that the video is still quite jumpy - stopping and starting frequently which is something people won’t tolerate from TV programs.

Joost is still in beta though so I’m sure that will improve.

The big Joost story of the last couple of days was Joost’s deal with Viacom whereby Joost will be able to show some of Viacom’s content on launch.

From news.com’s report of the story:

The deal, announced Tuesday, is designed to bring television and theatrical content from Viacom’s brands–which include MTV Networks’ Comedy Central, as well as Black Entertainment Television and Paramount Pictures–to the Joost software upon its full launch.

The deal is limited, at least at first: many of Viacom’s most popular programs, such as Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report and South Park, will not be available initially. Some of the featured offerings, however, will be MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, Comedy Central’s Freak Show, BET’s American Gangster, as well as feature films from Paramount and its related brands.

No financial terms of the agreement were provided.

All well and good until I read Bernie’s take this morning - I think he was spot on when he said:

Joost lacks the social networking side of YouTube, where user views and user favourites count. The world needs a YouTube social network and the content makers need to have some revenue flow for their video productions.

James Corbett, disagrees though. James contends that:

there are also reports that Joost is in talks with British broadcasters ITV and Channel 4. Considering I can’t get Channel 4 here that would be a big win from my point of view. Which is why I disagree with Bernie Goldbach regarding the need for a social networking side.

See now James - that’s precisely why I think recommendation engines and other social tools would help Joost enormously. The more content Joost has, the harder it will be to find good shows and the more useful recommendations from people with similar taste will become.

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition on a Mac!

Published

Tom Raftery

on 21/2/2007

in Mac

. 13 Comments

Having read Rob’s post about the release of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition sp2 (could they not have come up with a snappier name - think mySQL, for example!), I decided to go ahead and see if it would install and run on my Mac!

The install was uneventful and I documented it as a series of screenshots on Flickr.

Having installed SQL Server 2005 Express Edition on my Mac, I fired it up and created a database and a table using the SQL Server Management Studio Express (again, snappy name?) which ships with it. The process was very straightforward, as you would expect.