Jan 26
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The Truth about Piracy is that no one is getting hurt. That’s it. Current stats via IDC posit that 70 percent of software in East Africa is pirated. This is then computed into millions of dollars worth of losses. I disagree. Piracy has greater advantages than losses. Why? 1. MINDSHARE. Particularly in the mass market [...]
Image via Wikipedia
Viral trends are the daily social flares that rise up as if out of nowhere, and then flares out as if it was not there, usually tied to specific events or ideology in a day in time.
What is a Meme?
| Noun: |
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“Natural selection occurs whenever the following conditions exist (Dennet 1990):
- Variation: a continuing abundance of different elements.
- Heredity or replication: the elements have the capacity of creating copies or replicas of themselves.
- Differential “fitness”: the number of copies of an element that are created in a given time varies, depending on the interaction between the features of that element (whatever it is that makes it different from other elements) and features of the environment in which it persists.”
The Yo Dawg image is a Meme that erupted from Xzibit‘s show, Pimp My Ride, which featured Xzibit making superflous surprise upgrades to someone’s car, mostly in tandem to someone’s hobbies.
This concept is extended to anything that any person does that is an exaggeration of a basic idea. For example, if someone is overdressed, a simple ”Yo Dawg….” would do.
The explosive popularity of microblogging service Twitter has reached celebrities, Xzibit included.
In one of his first tweets he decries his embodiment as a meme: View Tweet
…which led to the creation of this image macro:
Several days later, he rescinded his criticism, saying “i’m not mad @ you”: View Tweet
In the final stage of celeb-o-meme — “acceptance” — Xzibit embraces the yo dawg, attempting to his own: View Tweet
I heard about !Blether from Mashable, a new way to have private group chats on twitter.
The twitter Aouth works smoothly.
Creating groups is the next task and its supposed to be a simple three steps.
Enter user names created by passwords.
Give User group a name.
Click Blether to create the group…
and Voil…..
Nothing.
The Blether button does not work!
this is when accessed through the Blether Page, http://www.blether.co
However creation directly on twitter works,
But I still have not been able to chat.
I must confess that I am a Slideshare user.
I have, over a span of time, posted and shared various slides there and have not been disappointed in terms of impressions, reach, functionality across various platforms.
I then remembered that I had once tried a service called Scribd.
Scribd is no longer merely a place for presentations.
When I went back to the site, It had morphed into something else!
Scribd has become the epicenter of academic document storage and sharing.
The first thing I noticed is they had socialized the platform with Facebook Aouth, which really transformed how the service permeates ones social network.
I immediately saw several of my Facebook friends with articles they had penned, were reading, or wished to share with others.
The idea for Scribd was originally inspired when Trip Adler was at Harvard and had a conversation with his father, John R. Adler about the difficulties of publishing academic papers.
Although their main competitors are listed on Wikipedia and Crunchbase as Docstoc, edocr,WePapers, and Issuu, in my circles one uses either Scribd or Slideshare.
UPPERS
DOWNERS
This is how they tell their story:
SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. 45 million people use SlideShare every month for research, sharing ideas, connecting with others, and generating business leads.
SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, and professional videos. Get an account.
You can upload your PowerPoint, OpenOffice and Keynote presentations, and your Word, Open Office documents. You can share them on your blog or website, or send a URL to friends by email. What’s more, the transcripts of your files will be indexed by Internet search engines and enhance the search engine ranking of your presentations & documents. You can also share on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
SlideShare is also a great place to find presentations and documents on almost any topic. You can search on the site, or find them through tags. Or you can find them through the related list next to every document / presentation.
For advanced features and analytics, one needs to have a PRO account.
The website was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it has since expanded to also become a host of a large number of slides for business and fun.
Although the website is primarily a slide hosting service, it also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. Think of it as a YouTube for documents.
SlideShare also provides users the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content.
SlideShare’s biggest competitors include Scribd.com, Issuu and Docstoc.
UPPERS
DOWNERS
CONCLUSION
If you have bulky documents to either archive or share, use Scribd. However if you have presentations that you would like to be viewed Slideshare is the place to go.
Image by michperu via Flickr
One of the aspects we have heard them asking for the most is local replication on regional servers so that uptime is maintained regardless of downtime in the international link. This is one of the factors some schools are opting to go on Google Apps for Education, as they offer a level of replication through the Google cache servers in the regional ISP’s.
The ILM 2007 is not being offered by some regional Microsoft Distributors, as the solution being preferred is Forefront, for Identity Management, which is not compatible with the Live @ Edu environment. In an environment that has not upgraded to 2010, this becomes a bit tricky. Also, the 32 bit 64 bit differences in management tools could be daunting to an organization that is not strong on Active Directory and management tools. Google on the other hand handle Identity management online and through API’s. The depth of Identity Management offered on the MS front is incomparable, however the level of complexity is also greater. Perhaps for Microsoft, the product offered should only be the express version, as most tasks can be managed on browser and on PowerShell scripting.
A heavy presence in local technology initiatives, public government policy making, event sponsorship and capacity building amongst ICT Mavens enable Google solutions to be easily prescribed, by building strong links of trust in the technology fraternity. On the flip side, the perspectives and perceptions on MS is a delinked and un-participative closed network which does not strongly interact with other technologists. Quite like the Equity bank revolution where we saw the bank take to the streets and hawk to customers, Google has one of its best engineers located at the I-Hub and providing direction to anyone interested in technology and in Google as a whole! This is definitely very different from the Microsoft approach.
In most instances, a partner has provided licensing and as such is the partner on record. They may however see no value in ensuring the school utilizes the Live @ Edu component of their school agreement which, while Microsoft drives the shift to cloud, is an integral component of the global strategy.
Since Microsoft has a stronger and more distributed partnership structure which should be a strength, one would presume that, being on the same side, licensing partners would work closely together with implementation partners. The implementation partner/partners would have pipeline access through the licensing partners on closed leads or leads in progress, so that the solution is provided as a unified front as Microsoft.
Google on their part have invested heavily in a team driving education and have a purposed manpower that is driving their cause. This team has done well thus far, but they are also attempting a roll out on a partnership structure.
Some institutions are viewing Live @ Edu as an option to phase out their on premise exchange both for staff and students, and as such partners deploying exchange to institutions are not too keen to push it as a solution. Thus what is happening instead is the entity phases out their exchange environment with Google Apps for education. Would you rather not your client phase out one product for another, rather than going to the competitor?
Live@ Edu offers seamless integration with popular education tools such as Moodle and KOHA library systems. Most education communities utilize these as they are free and plug in to a large community of schools from which they pool resources.
However a gap in Live @ Edu and in the mailing integration as a whole is Video and audio conferencing in Gtalk, seamlessly interlaced in the mail ad not as a third party application, the ease of use in creation of wikis and webpages using Google Sites (Remember, Microsoft had Windows Live Spaces which they shut down favour of WordPress blogs, without providing an automated authentication linkage within Live@edu into WordPress, particularly for new users. The new plan in 365 for education is Sharepoint) provision of SMS messaging integration, particularly for calendaring and notifications.
This is a specific offering the Google has put together, by acquiring regional PRSP providers and thus seamlessly integrating regional SMS provision to their regional services. Google has heavily localized its service offering and provided region specific content aggregation and distribution channels across Africa. With aggregated YouTube channels, android applications,search localization, they provide more than a single platform but give a whole environment.
Microsoft would have to do a lot to tackle this threat, as they have more or less been kicked out of the web.
Currently the partners offering this integration in the region have not been as proactive as competitors offering SMS integration services. For schools for example, a synergy of the IT Academy Program driven together with Live @ Edu would sell the value of both offering Microsoft education and utilizing Microsoft’s cloud offering.
