The debate is often charged between MySQL proponents and those who are increasingly excited about NoSQL.

So, it's good to see a bit of levity enter the discussion. Every once in a while we need to sit back and not take ourselves too seriously. That seems to be the intention of this video that we found on High Scalability.

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Just be forewarned - this is NSFW. The video may be a bit harsh for some. The language is a tad off color. If that is an issue, we'd suggest you pass on this one. Still, the creator did a decent job of framing the debate between a software engineer and a Web programmer. The engineer has just finished a site that uses MySQL. The programmer asks why he did not use MongoDB.

(Video not displaying? Here's a link.)

The debate lives on in the blogopshere. We found a more reasoned look at the discussion on Rick Ho's blog. He gives a more balanced view:

"Most of the debate is centered around the transaction processing model itself. Basically RDBMS proponents thinks NOSQL camp hasn't spent enough time to understand the theoretical foundation of the transaction processing model. The new "eventual consistency" model is not well-defined and different implementations may differs significantly with each other. This means figuring out all these inconsistent behavior lands on the application developer's responsibilities and make their life much harder. Hard to reason about the DB's behavior can be very dangerous if the application made wrong assumption about the underlying data integrity guarantees."

Are you a MySQL diehard or a NoSQL fanboi? What's your take on the debate?

Discuss

YouTube has come to define the era of online video, so let's take a look at their most popular videos of all time. We first did this list in August 2007, at which point Evolution of Dance by comedian Judson Laipply was number 1 with nearly 56 million views. The next update was September 2008, when Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend pop music video was number 1 with 103 million page views (although commenters argued that it may have gamed the system). In January 2010, Charlie bit my finger - again ! was number 1, with 148 million views.

Our latest update shows that Justin Bieber is the first to break the 300 million views mark, after knocking Lady Gaga off the top spot last month. New to the top 10 this month is Shakira, with the theme song for the recent World Cup. Here is the top 10, as of September 2010:

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1. Justin Bieber - Baby ft. Ludacris; 310,348,009 views

2. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance; 272,359,281 views

3. Charlie bit my finger - again !; 225,711,262 views

4. Shakira - Waka Waka(This Time for Africa); 173,869,568 views

5. Miley Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A. - Official Music Video; 153,302,747 views

Embedding disabled by YouTube.

6. Evolution of Dance; 151,030,231 views

7. Pitbull - I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho); 140,894,705 views

8. Hahaha - Small daring boy; 135,572,931 views

9. Miley Cyrus - 7 Things - Official Music Video (HQ); 130,726,079 views

10. Lady Gaga - Just Dance ft. Colby O'Donis; 120,829,198 views

Editor's note: Thanks to Deane Rimerman for the monthly updates.

Discuss

If you're in the market for a tablet computer but the iPad just doesn't do it for you, then just wait for the Fall. A number of Android alternatives are ready to hit the market over the next several months and there's something for everyone.

A collaborative Google spreadsheet has been making the rounds on Reddit this morning and offers a list of nearly 20 Android tablets ranging from cheap to expensive, locked-down to hackable, and all gathered together for comparison.

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The tablet in the spotlight for several months now has been, of course, the Apple iPad, which starts at $499 and comes with a 9.7-inch screen, weighs 1.5 pounds and offers up to 10 hours of Wi-Fi Web surfing, video watching and music playing. While it seems that the iPad has certainly been a success, there are a number of features we've hoped to see from competitors. From more accessible pricing to a camera to something as simple as a USB port, the Android alternatives are quickly coming to market to fulfill our wishes.

(For a full view, go to Google Docs.)

According to the collaborative comparison of Android tablets, which is constantly evolving as thousands of users add to it, there are Android tablets ranging from as little as $99 to as much as $550, if not more. There are tablets with cameras, tablets that can provide up to 36 hours of video, and tablets with as much as 11.2 inches of screen real estate.

According to the document, the creators are considering anything with a screen larger than 5 inches that does not require a cellular contract a "tablet", although there seems to be some leeway, as evidenced by the presence of the Archos "palm-sized tablets", which looks like the Android equivalent of an iPod Touch.

If you're looking to keep up to date on Android alternatives to the Apple iPad, this collaborative effort may be a good place to keep an eye on. As we've watched along this morning, more than 2,000 people have been viewing the spreadsheet at once and, as many note in the comments, a number more Android tablets are expected to be introduced as time goes on.

Have you heard of any other tablets coming to market that aren't included on the list? What features are you looking for in a tablet that the iPad doesn't seem to have or does the iPad have all you need? Let us know.

Discuss

Reviews are starting to trickle out for Pansonic's LX3 successor, the DMC-LX5, and so far they all seem to echo similar sentiment. The form factor hearkens back to its Micro Four Thirds darling GF1, at least from the top, with "dinky buttons" (in CNET UK's words) on the back reminding you of its point-and-shoot bloodline. The pictures are solid if not characteristically warm -- and the ability to simultaneously produce RAW and JPEG files is a nice touch -- as is the choice of either Motion JPEG or AVCHD Lite video. The universal issue with this camera is the price; that £449.99 tag (the equivalent of $691 in US currency) doesn't quite seem to match the offerings, especially when it's about on par with entry-level DSLRs with interchangeable lenses (albeit without the slim look). As PhotographyBLOG puts it, Panny's gotta hard case to make for a camera "that looks, at first glance to be very similar to a £299 model." Hey, a hardware switch for changing the aspect ratio (just above lens barrel; 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, or 1:1) doesn't come cheap. Much more detail can be found in the reviews below.

Read - PhotographyBLOG
Read - CNET UK
Read - Pocket-lint

Lumix DMC-LX5 review roundup: great hardware for a not-so-great price originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh, sure -- a few people have called Google's Nexus One a "superphone," but suddenly, that nickname has taken on a whole new level of meaning. A team of talent from MIT has put its head down in order to concoct a new Android application that can come darn close to solving complex computational problems in just a fraction of the time that it'd take a bona fide supercomputer. The goal here is to let researchers and scientists convert to Google's mobile OS, but if you aren't falling for that one, it's also designed to "let engineers perform complicated calculations in the field, and to better control systems for vehicles or robotic systems." Of course, the models that are hosted on the phone do require a supercomputer to create, but once certain formulas are embedded, the app can then compute approximations in mere seconds rather than hours. Best of all, rbAPPmit is available for download as well speak in the source link below, but we'd probably wait for the (presumably thick) user guide to surface before diving in headfirst.

[Thanks, Alasdair]

MIT app turns your Android phone into a supercomputer... of sorts originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are few examples of good writing in video games. The medium tends to tackle the same issues and genres, and only rarely steps outside of that comfort zone. At the recent Fan Expo in Toronto, a group of veteran writers and producers, with credits ranging from Too Human to Splinter Cell Conviction, discussed what makes a good writer and a well-written game.

The majority of the discussion centered on why games aren't yet at the same level as film or television.

Read the comments on this post

Are you ready to get buzzed by Tweets? Twitter confirmed last week that it is experimenting with and will soon roll out push notifications through its official iPhone app.

What does that mean? It depends on how exactly the company lets users manage and receive their notifications, but it's not to early to start thinking about how push could change the Twitter experience. We asked a number of experts in the field of User Experience design what they thought about Twitter push notifications and several of them predicted it will be a game-changer for mainstream users.

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Charlene McBride, a self-described "cranky UX designer" from Boston, says first what we're all probably thinking: "I think it could be an interesting way for users to prioritize certain tweets, but I also wonder what keeps it from becoming yet another firehose of status updates."

Let's look past the risk of information overload for a moment, though, and assume that Twitter implements the feature well. What might that mean?

Right: screenshot captured by Nick Starr.

For me, getting replies and direct messages sent to me by push notification (I've been using Notifio) has been really nice. Twitter can be both synchronous (a real time exchange) and asynchronous (I'll see your posts when I get around to it) but the addition of push notifications brings the personal communication of replies and direct messages firmly into the synchronous experience, even when I'm not at my computer or looking at a mobile app. It really adds to the flow of using Twitter. The asynchronous part of Twitter is most suited to non-personal messages broadcast by the people I'm following; I'd like the messages intended for me personally right away, please.

Twitter can be both synchronous (a real time exchange) and asynchronous (I'll see your posts when I get around to it) but the addition of push notifications brings the personal communication of replies and direct messages firmly into the synchronous experience. It really adds to the flow of using Twitter.It makes sense for me to have that option with regard to those personal messages; probably more sense than Twitter's original option to receive every message posted by some or all users you followed delivered to you by SMS. That original model quickly fell apart once you followed more than just a few close friends and family. As the way people use Twitter has taken shape in a way different from what its creators originally envisioned, a new balance between synchronous and asynchronous messaging is needed.

That's my take on it, here's what some more UX pros have to say.

Push as SMS Replacement

Cindy Alvarez, author of the San Francisco-based blog The Experience is the Product, thinks push notifications could supplant SMS and win some new users to Twitter:
The non-Twitter-users I know say, 'If you want a reply, you text or email [a recipient]; if you don't need a reply you post to Facebook, what is Twitter good for?' Bringing a more SMS-like experience to the desktop (where you don't incur $0.05 per text charges) might win over a different audience.

Twitter and SMS coming together again, just like the product's creators originally envisioned? That could lead to some truly far-out use-cases, too.

"[Push notifications] really start to blur the lines between what we traditionally think of as a Twitter client and SMS," says Dwayne King, User Experience Strategist at Portland, Oregon design firm Pinpoint Logic.
"Not knowing for sure what options they'll open up for push, it could expand beyond the bounds of what something like SMS could do. Where SMS requires some sort of pre-existing relationship between the texters, Twitter and push via hash tags or geographic location opens up a new avenue for meet-ups, flash mobs and such."

Bringing Celeb-Tracking Mainstream Users Back to the Good Old Days of Twitter

The most compelling take on the User Experience implications of Twitter push notifications may come from Aviel Ginzburg, UX guy at Seattle-based Untitled Startup, makers of Twitter bulk-conversation analysis tool RowFeeder. Ginzburg thinks that the addition of push notification tools could help make mainstream users, who have been introduced to Twitter as a way to passively consume updates from celebrities, aware of the service's incredible potential as a communication tool.
"Those of us who have been using Twitter since the days that it was largely (entirely) text messaging driven perceive Twitter much differently than mainstream users.

"The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform..." -Aviel Ginzburg"Two days ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine, who has been on Twitter for a little over a year (tweets everyday, DMs, @replies people, and even owns an iphone w/Twitter for iPhone) and as my phone beeped over and over again, she asked me if something was wrong. I said no, I just get my DMs text messaged to my phone. Her response was, 'you can do that?!'

"She has been using Twitter like people use Facebook, as a way to consume (mainly) and share content in a 'on your own time' fashion. When she uses Twitter, she really uses it, but in controlled bursts when she is physically engaging.

"The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform that will one day replace text messaging, email, and even phone calls. Just look at the Twitter homepage... it's a text media consumption site.

"With the announcement of push notifications, they're bring the messaging platform core value proposition back to the forefront, and pushing the mainstream, who joined Twitter for entirely different reasons, to experience Twitter in the same way us early adopters do -- as a real-time communication channel that you never disconnect from. The concern of course is: have these users really signed-up for entering a service where the are expected to be available and engaged at all times?

"It may seem like a small and logical update (cut out the text messaging middle-man), but really, Twitter is going to be dramatically changing the way its mainstreams users experience and use Twitter."

What do you think the implications of push notifications in Twitter's own mobile applications will be? Are you looking forward to it? Do you think it's something only power-users are really interested in? Do you think it will change peoples' SMS habits?

Discuss

We're not quite sure what to make of this, as our first reaction is to label it a fan made render and move on. But it's a very detailed render, so let's hear this one out in between bites of freshly grilled burger (or whatever you do to celebrate Labor Day; we think more working is an appropriate course of action, but to each his or her own). So what you see surfaced on the Digital Photography Review forums is an apparent render of the Samsung NX100 and a diagram pictured after the break -- labeled by number but missing the complementary key. We still don't know much about the forum poster nor the images' origins, but later on he or she did provide supposed dimensions and some display specifications: 4.74 x 2.8 x 1.36 inches, 9.95 ounces, an external GPS receptor, an external EVF with 201K resolution, and a (non-articulating) display that's 921K AMOLED. We're intrigued to say the least, but nothing tangible at the moment.

Continue reading Alleged Samsung NX100 pics and specs surface

Alleged Samsung NX100 pics and specs surface originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Switch on a server and you've just doubled its cost. According to Gartner, between 2007 and 2012, most U.S. enterprise datacenters will spend as much on power and cooling as on the hardware itself.

Gartner predicts that energy costs for IT operations could also double by 2012 due to the volume of data that will flow through organizations and the expected increase in utilities.

The answer? Consolidate your servers and optimize them as best as possible.

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RWH Level: Beginner

When you are writing Web applications it is easy to be terse, obtuse or just plain devoid of reasonable text that conveys what a user is expected to do. Worse, a support page or even the humble README can leave fellow developers wondering what you were thinking or drinking. As with any problem, the solution involves more software!

With that in mind, it makes sense to take a look at some interesting approaches that will give you a leg up the next time you craft an epic INSTALL file.

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A Very Small Shell Script

One interesting collection of shell scripts from @mattmight seeks to mimize so-called weasel words. If you are into command line options you'll enjoy this collection as you prepare your own bodies of text.

For the more visually inclined, Yahoo Pipes provides methods to examine some of your favorite RSS feeds for words known to make you stop reading. In the following example, the regular RWW feed is drawn down in and filtered for some of those same weasel words.

The result is a shorter list of articles that might make you less prone to curse at your screen. In this case, only a subset of the articles in the RSS feed are returned due to the filtering on specific weasel words.

{"pipe_id":"ebf7bae50f6dde3130b9ffafc349e25a","_btype":"list"}

This is a simple example but you could easily expand this for your own needs. Harsh? Yes. Effective? You bet.

What are words and phrases that you'd consider weasel words? Are you using any scripts or techniques to avoid using them?

Let us know in the comments below!

Discuss

Hey, there little guy! That's the Toshiba AC100 -- an Android 2.1 smartbook with Toshiba's custom user interface -- on show in the UK, where you can now grab one up. The 10.1-inch, 1.9-pounder has yet to show its face anywhere near the US, but as for specs it's got a 1GHz Tegra 250 SoC, a 32GB SSD, 512MB of DDR2 memory, 802.11n WiFi, optional 3G, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and an HDMI port. While it's listed on Amazon you still can't actually order one of these bad boys stateside, but if you're in the UK, you can grab one up for £292.52 (almost $450) for the non-3G model. Video of the little guy in action back in June is below.

Continue reading Toshiba AC100 Android smartbook hits the United Kingdom

Toshiba AC100 Android smartbook hits the United Kingdom originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, it looks like the mystery of Nokia's Symbian^3 slider may soon be solved -- Reuters is reporting that the company will introduce its new "flagship" E7 smartphone at its Nokia World event in London next week, and it says that the device will pack both a "large" touchscreen and a full QWERTY keyboard. That's further backed up by the existence of an XML file on Nokia's own site, which seemingly confirms that the E7 does indeed run Symbian^3, and that it boasts a 640 x 360 display along with that QWERTY keyboard. Not much more than that at the moment, but those previous leaks suggest that we're basically looking at a slider version of the Nokia N8.

[Thanks, Wes]

Nokia said to be launching E7 smartphone next week originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are now some 250,000 mobile applications for Apple's iPhone and iPad, and over 70,000 for Android. How on earth do you find ones that are actually worth using? You could use a recommendation engine or website, an app that recommends apps or ask a friend.

But every now and then, we like to round up a few of our favorites and share them with you. This latest edition of our favorite mobile apps includes some newer ones for you to try along with us, as well as some which have received notable updates. This month, we're focusing on apps that make your life easier.

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iPhone Apps

LucyPhone: LucyPhone is free service designed to wait on hold for customer service and then call you back when the rep finally picks up. The iPhone app offers the same functionality as the Web service, allowing mobile users to search a company database or enter a toll-free number and monitor how long they've been on hold. Download from iTunes here.

ScanBizCards & CardMunch: ScanBizCards digitizes business cards using the iPhone's camera. The app can recognize the text on the card, including the person's name, email address and phone number. It then imports it directly into your contacts. When the contact is saved, you also have the option of sending a follow-up email. The cards can be flipped through cover-flow style and are clickable, too, allowing you to tap the contact to add them to your LinkedIn connections list, for example. (For more on this another other digital business card solutions, check out this article from July).

CardMunch does much of the same, but offers a free app download where ScanBizCards is $6.99. CardMunch uses credits (e.g. 40 credits = 40 cards, price= $10.00) and ScanBizCards offers in-app purchases for Web-based backup (1 year=$9.99).

imo.im: Imo.in is a multi-protocol, Web-based IM service that supports AIM, Facebook, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, MySpace, Skype, and Yahoo. The app lets you maintain concurrent sessions, allowing you to be logged into imo.im with multiple computers, iPhone apps and Chrome extensions. The new iPhone app keeps you signed in, even when the app is closed, for up to 72 hours, while still letting you receive push notifications. It also provides a searchable interface to your chat history for when you're on the go. Download from iTunes here.

Blancspot: Blancspot is another news reader application in the style of similar apps like Pulse and Flipboard that delivers the headlines along with visually compelling images and then allows you to share them with friends via Facebook and Twitter. The goal of the app is to boil down complex topics into easily digestible sections that maintain the essence of a story. It's great for browsing the latest headlines on the go, but with one fatal flaw: there's no "off" switch for the accompanying music. Download from iTunes here.

iHound: Parents will like iHound's new "geofencing" feature in its iPhone application. The app can now send push notifications when kids arrive or leave school and/or other after-school activities. It also allows you to broadcast your status to others, integrates with Foursquare for check-ins and can push other types of notifications to your phone, like reviews of local restaurants when you arrive at your vacation destination or a shopping list when you arrive at the store. Download from iTunes here.

iPhone/Android Apps

SpringPad: This Evernote competitor, already available as a Web service and iPhone app, recently arrived on the Android, allowing you to easily save info you need to remember. With SpringPad, you can save notes, tasks, lists, scan barcodes, take photos and geolocate nearby businesses. The app automatically organizes and enhances all this "saved stuff" for you and syncs it with the Web service springpadit.com, for access when you return to your computer. 

ProOnGo: This expense-tracking app lets you create expense reports by taking pictures of your receipts. Although not brand-new to iPhone, the Android version of the app was recently updated with a two-way sync feature between the servers and the device. Now Android users can email receipt images to ProOnGo's Receipt Reader, use custom categories for expenses and backup expenses when moving between devices. 

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We didn't get to hear them for ourselves at IFA 2010, and it sounds like we missed out -- a pair of publications are already showering Sleek Audio's nigh-bulletproof SA7 buds with praise. The tightly-woven carbon fiber casing may look stylish, but both SlashGear and TrustedReviews were even more impressed by the sound, calling the combination of dual-armature drivers and one-piece aluminum housing "more precise" and "stonkingly good" respectively. Both noted hugely powerful bass that sounded fantastic alongside the trebles and mids, rather than drowning them out, and high frequencies that remained comfortable to listen to even at higher volume -- a mark of excellence, to be sure. Of course, one typically expects quality audio when slapping four Benjamins down -- we'll have to hear how these stack up against other audiophile buds.

Sleek Audio's SA7 earphones briefly tested, dubbed 'stonkingly good' originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Palo Alto Research Center is releasing new semantic technology, based on Xerox PARC IP, in the form of an Outlook plugin called Meshin. At first glance, Meshin looks like the ugly stepsister to a similar Outlook tool called Xobni, as it also loads into an email sidebar window, displaying sections dedicated to recent conversations and a summary of attachments shared back and forth via email, among other things. But what makes Meshin different is the engine powering it underneath: a semantic technology that uses "natural language processing" to understand entities, how they connect and what they mean.

Invites available! Click through for link.

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The engineers freely admit that Meshin's user interface (UI) is currently the Achilles' Heel of the app. It's nowhere near as polished and put together as competitor Xobni's, for example. But they'll fix that, they promise. "We're hiring a UI designer," they tell us.

Focusing on the looks, though, is missing the big picture. Meshin is different from other email-based contact management systems including not only Xobni, but analysis engines like Gist, too. Where those companies hinge on the person - here's their title, where they work, their emails, attachments, their blog posts, their last Twitter update, etc. - Meshin actually analyzes the information found in the information streams it examines. It then extracts related conversations, related messages, related people and other semantically understood data. And it does so by looking beyond keywords. It knows what things mean. It knows if a word is referring to a person, place or thing. It can also surface related links and news from the Web for any given entity.

Read More about Xobni and Gist.

Already, the engine behind Meshin isn't limited to email messages alone. For example, if you subscribe to RSS feeds within Outlook, those are also understood as being a part of the relationship map with another person. If you subscribe to Twitter feeds within Outlook, again, those are analyzed, along with the other streams.

Meshin arose from a Xerox-funded project inside PARC whose goal is to commercialize older PARC IP for a broader audience. The project has been in development for only a year, with a small core team and support from PARC researchers. The long-term goal for Meshin is to extend itself beyond Outlook, in order to connect other types of information streams together. 

The researchers are contemplating where they should take the technology next - another email platform? An RSS reader? A standalone product? Should they open up Meshin APIs (application programming interfaces) for developers to use within their own applications and services? All these models are a possibility, but first the engineers wanted to just get the technology out there, in the hands of users.

We're helping them with that by distributing invites to the private beta. For access, click here.

Discuss

One big theme to emerge out of our conversation last week about the future of the workplace was remote working. I thought it would be beneficial to start this week off by thinking about the disadvantages of remote work and the technologies and policies that may be able to mitigate some of those problems.

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Productivity remains a concern for managers unwilling to give their employees a chance, but according to telecommute advocacy groups like Undress for Success and The American Telecommuting Association, research shows those concerns are mostly unwarranted. However, there are some other problems. Here are some of the issues I've witnessed in organizations of all sizes, and some ideas about what to do to fix these issues.

Please leave your own gripes and solutions in the comments, or e-mail klint@readwriteweb.com, and we'll highlight the best responses in a follow-up on Friday.

Missing Out On "Hallway Meetings"

Anti-meeting commentators, such as those from 37signals often point out how unproductive meetings are, and how little hallway conversations are usually where the most important conversations take place. This is probably true, but it creates a communication problem: those important conversations and decisions have to communicated to everyone who needs to know about them.

This can be hard enough when everyone works in the same space. But when employees aren't physically present, keeping everyone in the loop can be even more difficult.

Solution: This is what e-mail and intranets are for. Managers need to be dililgant about documenting and communicating decisions, and making sure that information is easily accessible to employees.

Lack of Responsiveness During Work Hours

One of the proposed advantages of teleworking is the ability to minimize interruptions from co-workers. However, sometimes co-workers have important needs and questions and not being able to get in touch with a remote working employee can damage everyone else's productivity.

This is exacerbated by flex time, especially when flex time overlaps with telecommuting.

Solution: Communicate virtual "office hours," and set standards for timeliness of responses. Instant messaing has proved to be a good medium for communication remote workers, but can be a distracting productivity killer. Setting "IM hours" could be a happy medium.

Being diligent about entering useful information into the organization's intranet will reduce the necessity to be contacted directly. Using Q&A sites like MindQuilt could also help employees find answers to questions.

Morale

Jealousy can impact the morale of workers who can't or aren't allowed to work from home. Also, while managers can track the productivity of employees who work from home, co-workers might be less privy to that information and harbor doubts about their remote co-workers accomplishments.

Solutions: Undress for Success recommends the following for dealing with telecommute-envy in the workplace:

• Employees need to understand why they were or were not chosen for telework.
• Employees should see telework as a benefit that is earned, not given.
• Standards of selection should be uniform.

Photo by Richard

Discuss

Running a site doesn't only require Web development skills. Any site where the users can add content and communicate with each other requires a great deal of care and attention if it's going to be a success.

Increasing user participation on your site is achievable if you aim for the old adage KISS, or keep it simple, stupid. Beyond that, there are a few things you can do to get more people to interact with your site. Here are seven tips to set you on that path.

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1. Enable Social Logins

I'd suggest losing registration altogether if you can. But if your site requires registration, best to make it as simple as possible. A quick click here, a quick click there, and hey presto - one registered user without the barrier of a signup form.

Check out our guide to JanRain Engage and you'll be setting up social logins in no time.

2. Clearly Signpost the Forums

Got a forum on your site? Good! Now make sure it's easy to find. Forums are not a great deal of use if nobody can find them. Put a link to the forums in the main navigation bar - don't bury it on a sub-page.

3. Show Avatars Everywhere

I've always found forum software to be rather plain and boring. Avatars are shown when you view a post, but on the topic listing, not so much.

Something like this seems much more appealing:

This is a layout I developed for a site with built-in forum functionality. Displaying avatars at this level helps when differentiating between the topics in the list.

4. Highlight Recent Activity

People are much more likely to participate in a site if they can quickly find what's new and updated across the site. Whether it's recent blog comments, replies in the forums, new members or site upgrades, some people will be interested to see what's going on. Let them find that information.

5. Talk To Them!

If you're building a site for someone else, there may be limits to what you can do in this area. But if it's your site, or you're contributing to a site where it's acceptable for the developers to get involved, do so. Being approachable is a very good character trait for a developer to possess - it shows you care.

6. Run Member Polls

If a lot of people have something to say, particularly about new or proposed features, it can be useful to distil this information into a member poll. Running a poll from time to time gives you a good insight into the general views of the community, while simultaneously sharing the same information with members.

7. Reward Top Contributors

Do you have a few people who stand out as being helpful, resourceful or good at keeping the peace? Depending on the goals of your site, giving out small tokens of appreciation can be a big help. Be careful not to alienate the less frequent contributors though.

Photo by JamieL.WilliamsPhotography

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Carl Zeiss keeps on making minor improvements to its Cinemizer head-mounted display, announced way back in 2008 and intended to be the most amazing way to watch stuff on your iPod. They didn't exactly catch on then, and two years later we're not entirely sure that the latest revision will either. The tiny screens that sit a fraction of an inch from your eyeballs have been upgraded to OLED, which should make them bright and lovely as they pummel your rods and cones, but sadly they're still stuck in VGA land -- 640 x 480 is not a lot of pixels these days. This version also pledges greater compatibility with non-Apple devices, a welcome change, and even more welcome is the new visual styling, which makes you look a little less walleyed than the last model. Despite this the price hasn't changed much, estimated to be around €400 ($515), but that's still a lot to pay just to have the coolest Frozone costume ever.

Carl Zeiss Cinemizer 3D Plus glasses get OLED infusion, still no attention originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Usually we'd advise you not to read too much into this -- we'd point out that this was a themed ad served up before the showing of Lawrence of Arabia at London's Secret Cinema event -- but what the hell: Microsoft says the revolution's coming. It's on now!

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 ad promises 'the revolution is coming' (video)

Windows Phone 7 ad promises 'the revolution is coming' (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Solar farms are swell and all, but they aren't exactly fit for laboratories or studio apartments. Thanks to new discoveries by gurus at the University of Birmingham, though, we could be on our way to a far more diminutive method of creating clean energy. As the story goes, we could soon be using microbes to transform wastes in metals into energy. The team managed to pinpoint Hydrogenase enzymes and BioPd in their research, which they believe can be used as catalysts for the treatment of persistent pollutants. The overriding goal, however, is to "develop a one-step technology that allows for the conversion of metallic wastes into high value catalysts for green chemistry and clean energy generation," but it's difficult to say at this point how close they are to realizing it. The best news? This is bound to start a new rash of Cash 4 Gold commercials.

Scientists using metallic wastes to generate clean energy originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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