Farshid Ketabchi

New Media on Ulitzer One of the great and unique things about Twitter is that it is a fairly simple and easy service to use. From an end-user perspective, setting up an account at twitter.com and starting to tweet is a couple of minutes of work. I can describe the concept of Twitter and its features to any internet-savvy person in 5 minutes. The basic functions on twitter.com can be summarized as follows: Create an account/profile Search or look up users Follow/un-follow a user Tweet — post an update Send a direct message to a follower Reply to a user or mention users I suppose Twitter will evolve and may become more sophisticated as more features are added. For example, Twitter recently added a couple of new features. One is Lists where you can define a global list (accessible by twitter.com//) and add to it anyone that you follow. For example,... (more)

Digital Footprint and Virtual Social Influence

I’ve been thinking about my presence on the internet from the early days, from my time at Argonne National Labs near Chicago in 1988-1989 and from my graduate school days at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1989-1992. That was even before the web browser days, which didn’t come out till 1993-94. Mosaic browser was first released in 1993. And I remember the excitement we had at work when we installed an early version of Netscape browser in 1994.Partial map of internet 2005,via Wikipedia There was internet of course even before the browser. In addition to the worldwide... (more)

Leveraging Your Host Systems with SOA Web Services

The promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA), increasing benefits of Web services, and continued business use of legacy systems have all coalesced to usher in a new era of flexible IT alignment for business needs. With only a fraction of legacy applications being Web-enabled and increasing enterprise investment in SOA, organizations need to know how they can use Web services to leverage their legacy systems. Web services can be used to leverage host systems and enable the transformation of legacy applications into Web-enabled composite applications. Such applications can b... (more)

Metadata and Tagging

Metadata or data about data has been an important topic in software and the web all along. In the old days we used metadata on a HTML page source to increase its searchability. That is by adding metadata or tags to a page we would tell the search engines what the page is about so that if someone searched for one of the tags, they would return the page in their search result. So a page on a given product or service (e.g. camera) could contain a list of relevant terms (e.g. photography). This is still relevant even in HTML 5 with the tag . (See: http://www.w3schools.com/tag... (more)

Enabling Social Bookmarking and Link Sharing for Your Web Content

In a previous post “Shall we bookmark?” I discussed social bookmarking and covered several of the social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Reddit, Diggit and StumbleUpon. In this post I briefly describe how you can easily add social bookmarking buttons to your web pages or blog posts so that a reader or visitor to your blog can use any of such sites to bookmark your blog post or page. There are several services that have made this very easy by packaging up access to numerous social bookmarking sites into a dialog or pop-up window configured as a single button that can easily b... (more)