SUN TZU “THE ART OF WAR” & Bruce F. Webster “THE ART OF ‘WARE 2.0″

I came across a great blog with an updated version of “The Art of ‘Ware” by Bruce F. Webster written in the early 90s. The Art of ‘Ware is basically a rewritten version (to relate to software) of Sun Tzu “The Art of War” a book written for elite chinese army members over 2000 years ago.

The Art of ‘Ware 2.0
http://and-still-i-persist.com/?page_id=236

The Art of War
http://www.sonshi.com/learn.html

My Shiny New Blog

Hello future readers,

This rather egocentrically named blog “LeonardAustin.com” will become the online location for thoughts and ramblings of me, Leonard Austin. If you want to check that i’m the Leonard Austin you’re looking for then check out my about me page.

And for those of you who are a Leonard Austin and came through to this site because you Googled your name, congratulations on the awesome name.

For more frequent updates you can follow me on twitter:

www.twitter.com/leonardaustin

reCAPTCHA

I would like to share a new great service that I’ve stumbled across, reCAPTCHA. Most people will know what CAPTCHA is, a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms.

Recaptcha is a clever way to get humans to read and input scanned text that computers (OCR) program struggle with. Basically instead of just one word that the user will type there are two; the first being a CAPTCHA image and the second an imaged which has been scanned in which is unreadable by OCR. The assumption is that if the first word is typed in correctly than the second word will probably correct.

reCAPTCHA reckon that “About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day”.

Registration and use of the service is free of charge and you receive an API key for each domain you want to use it on.

Personally I think this is an absolutely great idea and as soon as i can i’ll be incorporating it into my ext project.

Feedburner Acquired for $100 Million by Google – Maybe

There has been rumours going round for the last couple of weeks that Goolge have been in talks with feedburner to acquire them for $100 Million. The main source of these rumours: Sam Sethi

http://www.vecosys.com/2007/05/18/rumour-google-to-buy-feedburner/

For those of you who don’t know feedburner is a Feed Management Tool, whereby your feed can be converted into html, add footers to each post, reduce to only summaries and probably the most useful tool tracking.

So why would Google want to add this type of service to their portfolio, well the majority of clued up people now use Feed management reader (like Google Reader) to read new blog entries and articles, bypassing the site completely and therefore any of the ads on the site. I put forth the idea (and a lot of people agree) that if Feedburner where to become “Google Feedburner” then we would see a system that integrated Google Adwords in your blog feeds and Google Analytics to view the stats.

Again if you really think about it, Google is all about gathering information, whether found on webpages, visitor stats (Google Analytics), user interaction in the web (advanced features on Google Toolbar) and now with all personal information. Only today did I come across The Independent (A UK national broadsheet newspaper – A bit preachy) splashed across the whole of their front page “Google is watching you“. Google are ” setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, one with the ability to tell people how to run their lives.” – but a completely separate matter.

So if this rumour is at all true I think that Google acquisition of Feedburner primarily to be able to gather more information and track trends more efficiently; will they integrate this additional information into Analytics, who knows? Obviously the additional advertsing review will also come in handy.

Wouldn’t everyone be surprised is Yahoo! or MSN came along a snatched it up quickly?

Wow – Google Reader

I’ve never really been into feeds in a big way, i know the benefits of them it’s just I’ve never had the time to really set things up to make my life easier. In total I’ve got over 1200 bookmarks, the majority of which I don’t visit regally but a lot of the sites I wish I could, if only I could be arsed.

So Google Reader, i’ve known about this service for ages but last time i tried it I was very disappointed; I found it hard to navigated and not very intuitive. For those of you who don’t know, Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds. It was released by Google on October 7, 2005 through Google Labs (source wikipedia). Basically Google wanted to design a system very much like you email inbox for new content from your favourite feeds. Personally i think the first version was a bit of a mess although they did try and incorporate a few new gimiks in my eyes they whole system didn’t work.

However (apparently, according to wikipedia) in September 2006 they released a completely new version, and it is brilliant. I spent about 4/5 hours planning around with Google reader on Sunday afternoon, adding all my bookmark feeds, favourite websites and most visited websites. Instantly I could pretty much see all the articles published on each site in one place, and yes the interface is much more like a email inbox.

Features include:

1. An inbox type approach to new content to your favourite sites
2. Choice between list view or expanded view
3. As you would expect an ajax approach to reading the contents
4. A star system allowing me to save my favourite articles, just like gmail.
5. Once selected a read it will disappear from your inbox.
6. Multiply folders for each feed, i.e. tags.
7. Share feeds (haven’t tested this out yet)
8. A huge amount of keyboard short cuts
9. and so on.

Basically Google reader has allowed me to view all my favourite sites in one place, it has ensured that I will never miss an article on a website I wanted to read because I haven’t visited it in a couple of week and most importantly it has saved me about 30mins a day. The only downside I can find is that you can’t rename folders once you’ve created them, unless im wrong but please let me know. Also why the hell don’t websites that publish feeds, publish at least the summary of the article not just the title.

In conclusion, if you are not using a feed aggregator, like Google Reader, start now it will make your life easier. I know that there are other aggregators out there, like the one built into firefox, but I just don’t have the time to try them and I’ve committed a whole Sunday afternoon to the Google Reader, but if you use another aggregator which you think is much better please let me know and i might just try it out.