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September 07, 2004
How I'm Using Del.icio.us
I'm really starting to like Del.icio.us which advertises itself as a social bookmarking site. The idea is simple, you click on a bookmarklet anytime you want to bookmark a page, up pops a Web page with the page's title and description. You can edit those field and enter an extended description or comment and free-form keywords. Each of those keywords becomes its own bookmark list, complete with RSS feed.
I've been using it exclusively instead of traditional bookmarks because I like its flexibility. I can store something easily and in more than one place. I can create custom bookmark lists for other people to read. For example, I've started a bookmark list for my class and they can follow it in their feedreader. The fact that I can add my own comments also makes it usable as a linkblog of sorts and its more flexible and easier to use than most blogging software for that purpose.
Another think I'm doing with Del.icio.us is just using it to hold stuff I want to read later or know I'll want to find. Because I can put things in multiple categories, I can easily create my own categorization scheme.
Del.icio.us lets you look at other people's bookmark lists too and even aggregate them. For example, I've classified some pages as having to do with messaging. I can also messaging for all users and see what other's have classified under that tag. I haven't found that to be as compelling, but I think with a little coordination, you could get a group of people sharing keywords and build some powerful bookmark lists.
09:05 PM | Recommend This | Print This
eBay's Infrastructure
eWeek has an interesting article on eBay's infrastructure that gives some tantalizing clues as to how they solve some of the most immense scaling problems on the Internet. Like most articles in this space, the article focuses on physical architecture issues with a few logical architecture tidbits thrown in (and not necessarily well identified as such). They've taken an interesting route with respect to geographic redundancy:
We've taken a unique approach with respect to our infrastructure. In a typical disaster recovery scenario, you have to have 200 percent of your capacity÷100 percent in one location, 100 percent in another location÷which is cost-ineffective. We have three centers, each with 50 percent of the traffic, actually 55 percent, adding in some bursts.From eBay: Sold on Grid
Referenced Tue Sep 07 2004 14:37:22 GMT-0600
The effect is that they have more overhead in terms of running machines at three locations instead of two, but they cut their potential infrastructure bill by 25%. Throw in the TCO for running those additional servers and they've probably saved quite a bit. You need to be big enough to absorb the overhead before the 3 redundant sites idea makes sense. That is, I suspect that there's a breakeven point for 2 data centers at 100% capacity each and 3 at 55% each. I wonder where it is?
02:43 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Spam and Open Source Software
Yakov Shafranovich has a two part article (part 1, part 2) at CircleID on the collision between Microsoft's proposals regarding Spam, intellectual property concerns, and open source software. The point of the article is that Microsoft is asserting IP rights regarding some proposals on Spam and trying to make everyone feel better by freely licensing it. That's not really going to cut it for most people. I don't blame Microsoft for looking for IP, that's what many companies do, but it seems that this is an unusual place to do so.
02:34 PM | Recommend This | Print This
RSS for Blackboard
Dan Olsen extolls the virtues of RSS in his latest entry comparing Blogs with Blackboard (a course management system). There's a subtle point in what Dan says. If I were working for Blackboard and read Dan's comments, my first reaction might be to say "let's create a customizable student dashboard that shows all the course information at one shot." Not a bad idea, but its still proprietary and leaves out other solutions. If Blackboard merely added RSS, their product would integrate nicely in a feedreader along with RSS information from other sources as well. The browser showed us the power of moving away from closed applications suites. That's where I believe the future is headed.