Cool Limelight CDN pitch

Content Delivery Network (CDN) Primer

Have you ever wondered in this age of digital WebSphere with tons of online video, images being shared across the netizens of the globe, where increasingly news and publishing organizations delivering content to multiple channels (web and mobile) and more people are engaging in online commerce then ever; how does the enterprises ensure a smooth and efficient delivery of both static and dynamic content to the end users? A part of that answer is Content Delivery Networks or more commonly CDNs which are now days the most common ways to delivery digital content to end users.

Now what exactly is a CDN? CDN or Content Delivery Network is a huge mesh or web of strategically places edge server which tries to localize the content based on the location of end users requesting for content there by reducing the latency and increasing the throughput of the content delivery. Akamai which is a leader in CDN space has their servers located all over the globe which tries to cache the content of the providers (which utilizes Akamai's network) and then based on some intelligent algorithm Akamai chooses the geographically closer server which will serve a particular content object to the end user.

Check out the following diagram of an Akamai CDN network

Another interesting diagram of a CDN layout

Some other major CDN vendors are listed here

Some of the major corporates also build and own their own private CDNs in addition to subscribing to a pure CDN vendor. Based on the nature of the content (entitled and public) they can choose to use either of them.

Open Text Vignette VCM 8.0 sneak preview

Lot has been said and criticized about how user unfriendly VCM (Vignette Content Management) application from erstwhile Vignette (now a part of Open Text family) is. This unyielding and complex application interface has made the business users (ultimate content creators) adaptation of VCM an uphill task. Well lot of those issues apparently have been addressed in the new version of VCM which they are calling as VCM 8.0.

Here is a sneak preview to that.... Let's hope some of the usability improvement claims are true in spirit...!!

Cloud Computing simplified....

Ever wondered where your emails, images and documents gets stored when you save them in gmail, flickr or facebook or any other popular applications? Well John D. Sutter from CNN has come up with a nice bit of article which tries to explain the whole mist around Cloud Computing in layman's terms. Check for the article here

It also comes with a video trying to explain the concept of cloud computing to technologically most illiterate individuals. Check it out..!!!!!

How to moderate Social Networking pages of your brand or organizations?

These days every major brand or organization seems to be having their own dedicated pages and applications in social networks like Facebook to cash in on the viral marketing, collective feedback and intelligence buzz. Take a look at the following brand's or organization's facebook pages

Pepsi

Coke

Whitehouse

Now lets not get into the pros and cons of online social presence of these brands.. as it is perhaps well accepted that increasingly brands and organizations are going to have more intense and open ended free-flowing interactions with its constituents which for companies are the consumers and for organizations/institutions like Whitehouse, the citizens of USA. What I am interested in is the moderation of these pages !! As we know there are no shortages of people who will spare no effort while trying to deface one of these pages either posting derogatory or obscene messages there by completely hijacking the whole purposes of having these pages. There can also be spammers who would try to flood these pages with their own messages. Bottom-line is organizations need round the clock moderation of these pages in order to protect them from aforementioned challenges. Now let us see whether there is any in-built out of box feature of the application (ex: Facebook) itself in place which can provide some automated rule and dictionary based moderation engine to the organizations?
To start with I started exploring the options that you get when you start setting up a fan page or brand facebook page

• When you start setting up a new Facebook page you get the following set-up page where you need to select the type of page you want to set up (Artist, Band or Brand or Company etc.)
  

• Once you set up the page you are the default page admin and have your own dedicate page view including a small portlet on the left side of the page

• if you click further on the "Insights" portlet you are going to be presented with an analytic dashboard page giving you a holistic picture of the overall page activities

• So far all we have seen is how to set up your page and then getting a feedback on the activities on the page. However the only moderation example that you have is the "Delete Post" option given to the page owner for any flame message on the thread as shown below and the "Fan Permission Settings" that you can control
  

Obviously the moderation facility given in the facebook is rather crude and manual in nature requiring 24 hours moderation of the user generated content which by no means an easy task for popular brands and important institutions. You can always set up "Policies and guidelines" page where you can unequivocally express what is permissible and what is not in-terms of user generated content however there will always be people with intent to ignore them hence we need solutions which can be automated and rule based to carry out moderation activities in social network pages. Keeping this in mind I searched around a little bit and stumbled across quite a few COTS products which claim to do exactly that. Make your opinion about these products and worth of their claims by visiting their sites.

Two of them are

• iCUC moderation services
• Context Optional

Nevertheless as we are increasingly focusing on getting more interactive with our constituent user base, more options are likely to be provided by the social platforms to address the moderation challenges in the social networks to make them more automated and less resource intensive at the same time preserving the vibrant, dynamic and democratic flavor of social networks and their advantages.

notable articles on the same topic

• Article 1
• Article 2
  

Social Media/Tools classification chart by Brain Solis

These days every now and then you are coming across some kind of web2.0 or social media applications or sites trying to grab the last piece of niche offerings be it micro-blogging or follow-up applications based on an already popular application (example). Ever felt completely overwhelmed by this vast choices of social media tool in a crowded social media application space? The chart created here by Brian Solis gives you a comprehensive landscape based on platform and offering categorization

Brian runs a popular blog on social media and public relations here

Branding an individual online -How your professional identity or brand can be reflected online

In an increasingly crowded digital landscape with hordes of social networking sites, blogs and other web2.0 applications, creating your online brand as an individual is more important than ever as employers are increasingly snooping into your online identity and carrying out first cut employability study...

This is a nice article published on CNN which discussed more on this topic

Me 2.0: Branding yourself online

A quick look on SEO basic

WCM (Web Content Management) explained

A nice video on marriage of Enterprise Content Magagement and Web 2.0

content management system - Scalability at the cost of simplicity

Typically most of the large enterprise grade content management systems are complex to work with and not very intuitive for the business users. A part of this observation is influenced by one of the product from a major vendor in which I have invested a lot of my professional time. The Vendor is Vignette which had seen its better days but eventually got bought over by Open Text a very recently has a solid web content management suite which they call VCM (Vignette Content Management). However using the product to product content in a website or portal is an extremely tedious job which scares away the typical business and functional users. Though one of the most prominent selling pitch for any content management system is enablement of business users in the whole content creation effort typical that does not happen in enterprise grade CMS packages. Buried in the layers of object relationships, child-parent dependencies and taxonomy considerations it is very difficult for business users to visualize the content management model and create content which is ready to serve without the intervention of technical stuff. As a result organizations ending up spending millions in implementing these packages still have to rely on an army of content authors who are trained on these packages just to enter content which otherwise have been captured in a different tool. It is understood that prime reason for this complexity in the CMS packages of enterprise grade is the goal to achieve better scalability, reusability and findability. Couple with it if your organization is highly regulated (Healthcare or Finance) you will be burdened with a validation rigor which will make the overall content lifecycle that much more complex and hard to visualize for typical functional users (marketing folks or finance guys) for whom content production is just a part of their overall role description. The organizations are therefore pleading for a CMS package which is simple on the interface and implementation but at the same time provide better scalability, findability and reusability.

E-Discovery in developing world...

Lately I have developed an acute interest in e-discovery and associated business challenges and technologies to overcome those. Obviously it is still in its infancy and came to the content world spotlight primarily because of the FRCP rule 26 which came into effect on December, 2006. There is not doubt in anyone's mind that organizations are facing huge challenge to keep a tab on its content (Physical or Electronic) which is ever growing in exponential rate thanks to lowering entry barrier helped by technology in creating digital content. Now as far as the law goes in United States the relevance and discover ability of any content is driven by FRCP and in coming days I am sure more digital content type will come under its purview e.g. Online Audio or Video files posted by employees or organizations in social networking sites may be). My curiosity is more to do with the status of e-Discovery initiatives in developing countries like India. Being not so well known for its efficiency in speedy and transparent justice system can countries like India help support implement E-Discovery initiatives across the legal landscape? What do we need for that? We need a whole new bunch of lawyers who are technologicall savvy and understands various nuances of Digital Content and its discoverability, we also need a complete overhauling of our legal rule book and define new laws with regard to discovery rules (whats come in and whats not) and we also need a very powerful local industry (KPOs ) which caters to the domesctice industry in e-Discovery efforts. Our organizations also need to spend billions in updating their existing IT infrastructure to make them compliance with any potential e-Discovery rule change. It is also important from a globalization aspirations as companies which do business overseas especially in US come under US FRCP purview.