Author Archive for Tom Raftery

Enterprise wikis reviewed update

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/4/2008
in wiki
. 3 Comments

Things move fast in the Web 2.0 world! Only a couple of weeks back I wrote a review of Enterprise Wiki software in which I mentioned PBWiki and Socialtext amongst others.

I like Socialtext and would have recommended it had PBWiki not just shipped its new interface. The PBWiki interface is friendlier and easier to get around for non-techies so I went for that.

Now today I see two posts mentioning that a new version of SocialText is en route which will make SocialText a much more compelling enterprise app.

Socialtext is adding Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People. From Michael Arrington’s post:

SocialText Dashboard, pictured above, is a Netvibes-like customizable home page. Users can add SocialText widgets that show information from the company’s wiki - total edits, a list of workspaces, change summaries, etc. Other widgets are for productivity, like a calendar, or just for fun, like a YouTube widget.

All Dashboard widgets are Google Widget compatible, which means that, subject to security settings, they can also be added to sites like iGoogle. But more importantly, all iGoogle widgets can also be added to the Dashboard page. So you can, for example, pull Gmail directly into your SocialText Dashboard.

While in Socialtext People, users can create profiles and add “friends” within the organization. You can monitor the activity stream of mutual friends as well, which includes outside services such as Twitter. And as Rafe Needleman points out in his post:

You can tag yourself “M&A” if you’re in business development. Others can tag you, too. Then, if you’re looking for someone with a particular skill or hobby, you just search on tags. Tags are easier to update, and because of that you’re more likely to see good information in individuals’ tag clouds, compared to a bunch of form fields that no one wants to bother with. Of course, tag clouds and folksonomies are also less rigorous than straight data fields, but you know what they say: They make it up in volume.

So, if you haven’t rushed out after my last post and dived into PBWiki, you might want to think again about SocialText. It just keeps getting better and better.

Friendfeed now on Twhirl

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/4/2008
in Technology
. 2 Comments

Friendfeed is a very cool site which aggregates all your rss feeds onto one page. This is cool because I contribute to 6 blogs and numerous other sites (Ma.gnolia, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) often automatically without ever visiting the sites in question! Now I have one place to go to see everything I have published.

Better yet, others can see this page and better again, I can see all my friends updates to their sites on a single page (and leave comments on them!).

This is all very useful but suffers from the same problem that the Twitter page suffers from. You need to constantly refresh to see the latest updates.

To get over this there are several Twitter client applications for the desktop (and for mobiles, Blackberry’s, iPhones/iPods, etc.). The one I use is called Twhirl and it is very cool because as well as auto-refreshing, it gives audio and visual notification of replies and direct messages.

So earlier today when I read Mike Arrington’s post about how Friendfeed is now available through Twhirl I immediately downloaded the latest version of Twhirl (0.7.9) and set it up.

Friendfeed on Twhirl

Even better, through the Twhirl Friendfeed interface you can also comment on and favourite others posts.

I love it. Now I’ll have to watch who I add to my Friendfeed friends list very carefully as this could overwhelm me very quickly!

Psst! You wanna buy a data center?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/4/2008
in cix
. 9 Comments

Well, ok not an entire data center but my share of the CIX data center.

As I have mentioned before, I am moving to Spain in July. When I move, I will no longer be able to make a meaningful contribution to the further development of CIX and in that scenario it would not be helpful of me to hold onto my shareholding.

This is an opportunity for someone with a passion for data centers/hosting to purchase an interest in Ireland’s newest and Greenest data center at a very early stage in its business life. The buy in price now will be cheap compared to how much the shares should be worth in a couple of years.

Because of its strong focus on energy efficiency from the outset, and the open approach we took in the build, CIX has received a lot of very positive publicity. This has obviously translated into goodwill, business enquiries and servers in racks.

Whoever buys the shares will need to be able to commit serious time to further growing CIX’s business (and therefore their investment).

For the right candidate with the correct technical skills my business partners would be willing to be very innovative around how the funding is set up so don’t think big money to buy into this.

If you are interested in this opportunity, drop me a mail or give me a call to discuss.

Can Zemanta help you write better blog posts?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/4/2008
in semantic web
. 9 Comments

Zemanta is a really cool Firefox plugin which scans the content of your blog post as you are writing it and suggests related content!

I first heard about Zemanta when I met Jure ÄŒuhalev, Zemanta’s Community Manager, at the BlogTalk 2008 conference here in Cork earlier this year. When Jure explained it to me I was intrigued and interested to try it out.

Subsequently I met AleÅ¡ Å petič, Zemanta’s Managing Director, at the Plugg conference. Having heard a lot about the plugin, I downloaded it to try it out and I have to say I am impressed, especially since the recent release of version 0.2.1.

The changelog for this release is:

- introduced WordPress 2.5 and new Wordpress.com support
- introduced FireFox 3 Beta 5 support
- increased the number of suggestions to non-wikipedia sources
- tripled our index of related articles
- we also started adding our users to the articles index

In the screenshot below you can see that for the post about Microsoft’s Live Earth Zemanta suggested images including Microsoft logos and Virtual Earth screenshots. It found articles and blog posts about the new release of Live Earth and it suggested related Tags and Links (along the bottom). Zemanta also pays close attention to copyright, making sure that suggested content is licensed as Creative Commons or approved by stock providers, so you won’t get into trouble by using Zemanta’s service

Zemanta Firefox plugin

The fact that Zemanta is a Firefox plugin, as opposed to a WordPress plugin is quite clever as it means that it only needs to be installed once and it works across the multiple blog sites I write on. It works on WordPress, WordPress.com, Typepad and Blogger.

I know Zemanta is using some Semantic web technologies so I asked how the plugin works and received the following reply:

Following concepts come handy when trying to understand the engine: disambiguation, entity extraction, hierarchical classification, information retrieval, machine learning, cross-domain background knowledge.

That didn’t help me much but maybe it will be helpful for some!

The Zemanta plugin still needs a bit of work. When writing this post, for example, I had to save the post as a draft and open it again before Zemanta started suggesting content. However, it is very useful when you are writing a blog post to be able to see other sources of related material so I predict a bright future for Zemanta.

Heading to EnergyCamp and Interop

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 4/4/2008
in Conference and Green
. 7 Comments

EnergyCamp and Interop and on in Las Vegas at the end of the month.

Via James Governor, David Berlind very generously extended an invitation to me to come along to these conferences.

EnergyCamp should be very interesting as it will be the first unconference around Green IT issues as far as I am aware.

Interop also has a Green IT track which has a session on Green data centres. Given the work we have done on this in CIX, I’m really looking forward to this.

PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 14): 550 Email blocked by ORDB

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 4/4/2008
in Technology
. 3 Comments

My incoming email was unusually quiet yesterday morning. Great, I thought, I’ll get some work done!

However, later in the morning I realised that anyone tryint to send me email was receiving the following error:

PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 14): 550 Email blocked by ORDB - to unblock see http://www.example.com/

A quick chat with a few people, including Ross of Rozmic (providers of EmailCLoud - my upstream anti-spam solution) and some Googling told me that my mailserver was mis-configured.

ORDB were one of a number of free blacklists of email spammers. Mailservers could query incoming email against their blacklist and accept or reject email based on the response. However ORDB shut down in 2006.

My mailserver was setup in 2007 but still had a configuration whereby it checked all incoming mail against ORDB (or tried).

Recently, it seems, the blacklist servers were reconfigured to list every ip address as spammers. This was probably to get mailserver admins to once and for-all remove references to ORDB from their config!

When I realised this was where the problem was I went to my mailserver configuration file (Exim.conf), found the following lines:

# deny using ordb
  deny message = Email blocked by ORDB - to unblock see http://www.example.com/
       # only for domains that do want to be tested against RBLs
       domains = +use_rbl_domains
       dnslists = relays.ordb.org

and deleted them.

Sure enough the mail started flowing once more. If you tried to email me in the last couple of days and couldn’t get through, apologies - please do try again.

Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!