Nei giorni scorsi sono stati annunciati alcuni problemi di sicurezza che riguardano estensioni di Joomla. photo credit: underbiteman Tali estensioni non sono molto diffuse, anzi qualcuna è sconosciuta, ma può darsi che qualcuno di voi le utilizzi (Mad4Joomla Mailforms è la più probabile). Ignite Gallery 0.8.3: SQL injection (galleria immagini fatta in Flash) Mad4Joomla Mailforms: SQL…
Pubblicato da Html.it un nuovo articolo che ho scritto: parla di come creare, pubblicare e gestire un form usando il componente Chronoforms. Clicca qui per leggerlo. Random PostsIl grande giorno di FirefoxNuove estensioni per Joomla!, solo per voi! (non è vero)Rilasciato Drupal 6.2Come usare i breadcrumbs di Joomla 1.5 con JPathwayWordpress Related Items con Ultimate Tag Warrior [...]
Il 24 e 25 ottobre 2008 a Milano, presso il palazzo Affari ai Giureconsulti (P.za Duomo), si svolgerà la 2a edizione di MiOpen, evento sull’open source promosso ed organizzato dalla CNA per far conoscere programmi e soluzioni tecnologiche basate sul software libero da royalty.
A questo appuntamento parteciperà anche Alessandro Pasotti per una presentazione di Joomla! con il suo intervento
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a web host. Usually the first things we look at are price, storage, and bandwidth, but I would argue that storage and bandwidth are mostly irrelevant as criteria for choosing a host. Buying a hosting service because it offers a huge amount of storage and bandwidth is like buying a car because it has tires. Every web host offers tons of…
Una funzionalità molto apprezzata ed utile in ogni sito è la presenza di informazioni di orientamento, ovvero segnali che consentono all’utente di capire dove si trova all’interno del sito, e come è arrivato a quella pagina. Joomla permette di realizzare questa funzione attraverso la funzione pathway ed il modulo Breadcrumbs, fornito in ogni installazione. Joomla [...]
It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the product side this week, Google said it would provide RSS feeds of search results, Yahoo updated its calendar app using Zimbra, Mozilla released Geode, Microsoft integrated its Live search into Facebook, and more. On the trends side, we looked at Google stats from recent political debates, investigated the trend of social shopping, and explored the latest in the Mobile Web world - including a RWW Live podcast on the topic, plus an in-depth look at mobile social networks. We also brought you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.
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Google Has Changed Political Debate Forever
When Sarah Palin and Joe Biden debated in front of one of the largest TV audiences in US election history recently, the two candidates might not have been Googling for facts during the debate, but millions of people watching the debate were. This week Google released some information about what kinds of things viewers were searching for as that debate unfolded, minute by minute. It is amazing both that viewers were able to do such a thing, in real time, and that we’re able to watch what people are searching for. The internet in general, and Google in particular, has substantially augmented this important part of public life.
Social Media and Shopping: A Growing Trend
Social media is evolving. What began as a way to “hang out” with friends online has morphed into an entirely new platform for communication, information sharing, and marketing. Businesses are quickly discovering that if they want to reach the youngest demographic, Generation Y (born after 1979), they had best get online. But maintaining a web presence alone isn’t enough anymore. According to new research from August 2008, web retailers are now actually trying to engage that demographic segment using social media.
And The Top Mobile Social Networks Are…
MySpace and Facebook, as it turns out. Despite the land grab by numerous startups looking to become the number one social network for mobile devices, it’s becoming apparent that mobile social networking isn’t necessarily going to be the new frontier that everyone thought it would be. Instead, as consumers surf the “real internet” on their mobile devices, they’re also interacting with “real” social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Could it be that consumers don’t want new and separate social networks just for the mobile phone?
RWW Live: Mobile Web Development
This week’s episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of Mobile Web Development. We had special guests from Microsoft, Pandora and DevelopmentNow. The show covered the state of the mobile application development market, focusing on Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone, and more. Here is the audio:
Download MP3
Will Google Use Chrome to Index Password Protected Web?
It’s now over a month since Google released its open source web browser, Chrome. An interesting theory we heard recently is that Google will use Chrome to index the password protected Web - a.k.a. the ‘dark web’. Right now the Chrome Terms of Service (TOS) prevents Google from indexing private data. But when you consider that Chrome was initially presented as a browser for applications, instead of just web pages, this theory begins to make more sense.
5 Great Books to Build Your Character
Tough economic times and
startups have at least one
thing in common - you need character and determination to survive.
Character is what it takes to win,
to believe and to persuade others. It’s a mix of passion, determination,
sleepless hours,
hard work.
Character is about crossing the finish line, about achieving dreams and
goals. In this post, we look at five very different books that share a
common theme - remarkable people.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!
Microsoft Stake in Facebook Begins to Bear Fruit
Almost exactly one year ago, Facebook and Microsoft were in the headlines when the Redmond, Washington-based software giant outlasted Google in a bidding war to garner a $240 million stake in Facebook. It was that investment that pegged Facebook’s valuation at a whopping $15 billion. In July of this year—following a generous amount of speculation on how the two companies would collaborate—Microsoft revealed plans for an integrated search and advertising deal that would incorporate Microsoft Live Search and advertising into the Facebook platform by fall. This week, we saw the first step in that integration with the release of Microsoft Live Search on Facebook.
Finally! Google to Offer RSS Feeds for Web Search Results
A rumor that’s been floating around the web lately is that Google will offer RSS feeds for new results in basic web search. This week Search Engine Land confirmed that Google will “soon” offer this functionality. Why is this big news? Because there’s no better way to keep track of new mentions of a company, person or concept online than through RSS. Google is the only major web search engine to not offer feeds for basic web search, as they do in blog search and news. We’d previously recommended Live.com for web search feeds, but who really cares about Live.com search results? They’re terrible. Google feeds are good news.
Yahoo Announces Major Update to Yahoo Calendar: Leverages Zimbra Technology
Yahoo this week announced a closed beta of a major update to its online calendaring application, which will feature a tighter integration with Yahoo Mail and other Yahoo properties. The new calendar is based on the Zimbra platform, which Yahoo acquired in 2007, and will support both the iCalendar and CalDAV standards for exchanging information with other calendaring services. Among the new features are the ability to enhance your calendar with photos from Flickr, a built-in to-do list, and support for drag and drop. Yahoo Calendar can now also send out reminders for important events by email, IM, or SMS.
Does Your Browser Know Where You Are? With Mozilla Geode, It Might
Today, the old real estate adage ‘location, location, location’ could just as easily be applied to the Web, where it seems that “where you are” is becoming as important as the information you’re seeking. Nowhere is that more apparent than with GPS-enabled mobile platforms that use location-specific information to simplify the way people access and share content on a daily basis. This week Mozilla released Geode, a Firefox geolocation add-on which will enable localized content.
Mufin: Better Music Recommendations through Algorithms?
Music discovery is clearly a hot topic these days, with large companies like Apple and Microsoft competing with smaller services like imeem, Pandora, and Last.fm. With the exception of Pandora, these services typically rely on the listening habits and recommendations of other users. Mufin.com, however, which launched this week, uses a fully automated system that only takes the actual sounds of a song into consideration. In our tests, Mufin often returned good results, but the fact that it doesn’t take genres or the quality of a song into account can make for a frustrating experience at times.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Why Some Traditional Enterprise IT Vendors Are Scared of SaaS
Some traditional enterprise IT vendors are selling the line that SaaS is a passing phase, that it is “old wine in new bottles”. They are telling their market that SaaS is really no different from the discredited Web 1.0 Application Service Provider (ASP) model or even that it is simply the ghost of the ancient mainframe Service Bureau come back to haunt us all. This post shows why their analysis is wrong. It also shows why some traditional enterprise IT vendors feel so threatened by SaaS and why the economic downturn just made this a major issue.
Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.
SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
Thank you to our sponsors, for supporting our mission to provide in-depth coverage of Web apps and trends. To enquire about sponsor slots on ReadWriteWeb, email us for a Media Kit.
NEW: we now include RSS advertising as part of our main Sponsor package.
Why sponsor ReadWriteWeb? It is one of the most popular blogs in the world, according to Technorati, and reaches an influential audience. Our site is read by tech and media professionals, early adopters, developers, designers, analysts, CIO’s, VC’s, media execs, leading thinkers. Email us now for more details. Here are our current sponsors…
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Strands has created a social recommender engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.
Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application.
The Defrag conference is focused on the tools and technologies that accelerate the “aha” moment. It is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado.
The Web 3.0 Conference is for the builders of the next
generation Web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs,
marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists. It’s on October 16 - 17, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Direct Media Exchange is a simple solution for managing ad networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites.
FreshBooks offers professional online invoicing. Save time, get paid faster and look more professional by streamlining your invoicing with FreshBooks.
SocialText provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.
WildApricot enables clubs, associations and communities to automate and streamline administrative tasks, using their online membership management software.
E.Factor stands for “The Entrepreneur Factor” and represents a vibrant online community and virtual marketplace designed for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs.
Quintura is a visual-based search engine, which we are now using to power ReadWriteWeb’s main search. Check it out here.
Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on RWW, a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice (in our case web tech).
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW and SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.
ChunkIt is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that wants to help you speed up your online research. To do so, ChunkIt preloads and searches through all the links on a given page and displays the search results in a large sidebar on the left side of your browser window.
The idea behind ChunkIt is that this will help you get to relevant search results faster, as you get to see your search terms within their context and not just in a short excerpt on a search engine.
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ChunkIt installs a toolbar in your browser, which allows you to ‘chunk’ searches in your favorite search engine (ChunkIt supports Google, Live, Yahoo, AOL, and ASK), as well as the links on the currently visible tab. You can also use ChunkIt to search the currently active page itself.
In our tests, ChunkIt usually turned out to be the most useful when using a search engine. Having ChunkIt display all the instances of a keyword in their context does indeed safe you from having to click through to all the top search results. Often, if you are just looking for a specific fact, the ‘chunks’ in the sidebar will already give you all the information you need without having to visit any other site.
Being able to search through the links from a given page is also quite useful. You could, for example, go to a newspaper homepage or a Wikipedia article and find all the links from this page that contain a certain keyword. This feature is also very useful when search academic databases. Of course, ChunkIt would be even more useful for a lot of academic and business users if it could also search PDF files, though that would probably slow the extension to a crawl.
We did notice, however, that ChunkIt often ran into trouble with sites that featured a very large number of links and often just refused to work on these pages.
If you are doing a lot of research on the web, ChunkIt is definitely an extension that’s worth trying.
If you want to see ChunkIt in action without installing the extension, here is a short video introducing the service:
Upcoming.org founder Andy Baio and Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter have released a project called Memeorandum Colors. It’s an easy-to-install Greasemonkey plug-in that shows the political bias of past linking behavior on blogs aggregated by Memeorandum, the political sister-site of tech aggregator Techmeme.
In this heated election season, Memeorandum is a huge asset for following politics online, but it’s hard for the casual observer to get the most out of the conversation by merely visiting the site. Memeorandum Colors adds a whole new layer of clarity and sophistication to the site by color-coding algorithmically categorized liberal and conservative blogs.
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Memeorandum, like Techmeme, tracks hot conversations in the blogosphere by seeing who is linking to whom. Every 5 minutes these sites check to see what the break out topics are and then organize them by link-hub and conversation links. See the screenshot I took a few minutes ago.
Memeorandum Colors takes the history of what 50,000 blogs indexed by Memeorandum have linked to and analyzes them for patterns. Schachter and Baio found that there were two clear groups of blogs that tended to link together. Presumably they looked at them and determined that one group was conservative and the other, liberal. Interestingly, the two ran the same algorithm on the blogs in Techmeme and found that the blogs there are split into two groups as well - business vs. technology.
The Greasemonkey script then color codes each blog in shades of red or blue, depending on how consistently they’ve linked with the conservative or liberal pack in the past. The end result is that when you load the Memeorandum site, you can see which kinds of blogs are clustering around a common node, which story nodes are of such general interest that they cross party lines and which brave conservative blogs step out of the norm and link to liberal sources and vice versa. This author was just complaining yesterday about how hard it is to find out what liberal blogs have to say about conservative conversations on Memeorandum without a lot of knowledge about who the leading blogs are in each camp. Problem solved!
This is an awesome example of the kinds of magic services that can be created by analyzing aggregate data around user generated content. We love this kind of stuff.
If you’ve never used Greasemonkey before, we assure you - it’s much easier than it sounds! Just download the official Firefox plug-in and then click on any Greasemonkey script link to install it. Honestly, two or three mouse clicks and you’re cooking with gas. If it helps you can watch our screencast How to Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes.
For an in depth technical discussion of how Memorandum Colors was created and to grab the Memeorandum Colors script, see Baio’s fabulous blog Waxy.org. I’m off to see what moderate conservative blogs have to say about reports of extreme hostility at Republican political rallies!
In downturns there is a “flight to safety”. Typically you would put Venture Capital (VC) at the risky end, with something like a Money Market Fund at the safe end. Well today even the safest stuff is looking scary, thanks to the games that the financial engineers have been playing. So maybe investing in a real business that disrupts the old order with a fundamentally new value proposition is actually the safest thing to do. That is “Real Venture Capital (RVC)”. But RVC is very, very different from “Momentum Venture Capital” (MVC). MVC is under a significant threat.
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Real Venture Capital (RVC) is anything that takes a risk and works hard to create something fundamentally new. Many classic VC funds fall into this category. So do many angels. But I would also put entrepreneurs who bootstrap their ventures into this category. I would also even put Private Equity and Hedge Funds that do turnarounds and transformations.
This is very different from Momentum Venture Capital (MVC). The old asset class categories make less sense in this context. You get all kinds of MVC that would traditionally be called VC, Angel, Entrepreneur, Private Equity or Hedge Fund. But they are fundamentally different from Real VC. MVC jump on trends and amplify them. If they are lucky and smart, they get out in time. They are the bubble inflators. Their core competency is timing trends. They ride momentum.
In a downturn such as this, MVC get crushed. MVC that timed it well and got to cash are sitting pretty, playing golf ready to jump in a gain when the cycle turns. But MVC left “holding the bag” at a time like this get crushed.
RVC is contrarian. They invest when most people are scared and sell when everybody is bullish. MVC is the opposite. Smart MVC invest when the trends are obvious and get out quick, the classic “flip artist”. Dumb MVC invest when the trends are obvious and don’t get out in time. But both smart and dumb MVC are primarily trend spotters.
Warren Buffet ignores Mr. Market and buys companies that generate lots of free cash flow. RVC build the kind of companies that Mr. Buffet would want to buy (which mean that anybody would want to buy and that you don’t need to sell until the right buyer comes along).
No asset class looks safe now. Remember that the objective is some cash after inflation, and inflation has certainly reared its ugly head again. Here are some of the usual assets that people turn to in difficult times. (In brackets are the classic “Chicken Little” fear mongering questions that you hear today).
1. Cash (in what Bank? After Inflation? In what currency?)
2. Money Markets (frozen assets in panic, no inflation protection)
3. Muni Bonds (what did Schawzenegger say about California needing emergency funds?)
4. Property, “safe as houses, right?” (’nuff said).
5. Oil (will drop if global economy slows)
I could go on and on. The point is that when nothing is safe the risk/reward of investing in a new business that you really understand, with people you trust, suddenly looks less out there on the risk curve.
This is what we wrote about yesterday related to SaaS and traditional IT vendors.
That maybe part of a bigger historical shift of power from BigCo to SmallCo, reversing what happened in the last 50 years when the share of US GDP controlled by Fortune 500 went from 1/3 to 2/3. Coase’s Law and the reduction in transaction friction created by the Internet are the theoretical underpinning of this shift.
This historic shift makes it safer to build disruptive innovation from scratch than defend an incumbent position. To put it more simply, today it is better to be a Barbarian than a Roman.
In short, it is time for Real VC to be bold. Some will be bold. Some won’t. Enough will be bold for this to work out just fine.
Image credit: Thomas Hawk
