Wikipedia

Amazon Is Building a Better Browser for Kindle —

Browsing the web on one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers is like taking a step backwards in time. It’s clunky and has only limited support for web standards and bare-bones JavaScript capabilities.

But now Amazon may be looking to add browser engineers to the Kindle team, according to the job listings on the company’s website.

A job posting for a browser engineer at Lab126, the division of Amazon that develops the Kindle, indicates the company is looking for somebody to develop “an innovative embedded web browser” for a consumer product.

The role at Lab126 includes designing new features for a new browser while supporting the existing code. Job requirements include familiarity with current web standards and web rendering engines, as well as experience with Java and embedded Linux, both of which the Kindle runs.

The Kindle’s current browsing experience is notably sub-par. It’s good enough to check your e-mail, post to Twitter or read Wikipedia, but it doesn’t handle images or more complex web apps particularly well. It certainly doesn’t live up to the same vision of the mobile web being outlined by the iPhone, or Android phones like the Droid or Nexus One. And with the coming of the Apple iPad and other threats to Amazon’s dominant e-reader, which should behave on the web about as well as (if not better than) the iPhone, the Kindle had better improve its browser if the device is going to continue to compete with these more capable devices.

Amazon recently launched a beta program for third-party app developers who want to build software for the Kindle.

Apparently, the job listing has been up for a month, but I only became aware of it once CNet’s Stephen Shankland tweeted about it.

Calls to Lab126 and Amazon on Monday morning went unreturned. I’ll update this post if and when I get more information from Amazon or anyone else.

Meanwhile, if you have any advice about improving the Kindle’s browsing mojo, leave it in the comments.

Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com

TEDTalks: Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide —

At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the Web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He leads the World Wide Web Consortium, overseeing the Web's standards and development.

In the 1980s, scientists at CERN were asking themselves how massive, complex, collaborative projects -- like the fledgling LHC -- could be orchestrated and tracked. Tim Berners-Lee, then a contractor, answered by inventing the World Wide Web. This global system of hypertext documents, linked through the Internet, brought about a massive cultural shift ushered in by the new tech and content it made possible: AOL, eBay, Wikipedia, TED.com...

Berners-Lee is now director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which maintains standards for the Web and continues to refine its design. Recently he has envisioned a "Semantic Web" -- an evolved version of the same system that recognizes the meaning of the information it carries. He is also a senior researcher at MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab.

News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News: What I Will Say at SXSW is where and how Jay Rosen lays out his current thinking on new agendas for whatever journalism will become after we’re done with the current transition.

He has long been concerned with how explanation is “under-emphasized in the modern newsroom” and offers excellent examples of how explaining should work, as well as ideas about how to institutionalize it. For example, “The goal is to surface the hidden demand for explanation and create a kind of user-driven assignment desk for the explainer genre, which is itself under-developed in pro journalism”. He adds, “Are there other ways to surface this kind of demand?”

I’d call attention to the imperatives of stories, and the role that might be played by new sets of well-explained facts that can help frame or re-frame a story.

See, stories are what assignment editors want. They’re also what readers want. And stories are different to some degree from the current vogue-word narrative. They do overlap, but they are different.

A few months back I visited the subject of story in What’s right with Wikipedia? — a piece I wrote in response to a What’s Wrong With Wikipedia story that had run in the Wall Steet Journal. I don’t know if that story was part of the WSJ’s GOP-aligned “What’s Wrong With Everything Liberals Do” narrative, but in any case I felt the matter needed explaining. Some Wikipedians did a good job of showing how there wasn’t much of a story there (read the piece to see how). For my part, I felt the need to explain what stories are actually about, which is problems, or struggles. Said I,

Three elements make stories interesting: 1) a protagonist we know, or is at least interesting; 2) a struggle of some kind; and 3) movement (or possible movement) toward a resolution. Struggle is at the heart of a story. There has to be a problem (what to do with Afghanistan), a conflict (a game between good teams, going to the final seconds), a mystery (wtf was Tiger Woods’ accident all about?), a wealth of complications (Brad and Angelina), a crazy success (the iPhone), failings of the mighty (Nixon and Watergate). The Journal’s Wikipedia story is of the Mighty Falling variety.

In his piece Jay mentions what a good Job the Giant Pool of Money episode of This American Life did of bringing sense to the country’s financial crisis. This gave rise to the PlanetMoney podcast, which is also terrific at explaining things. PlanetMoney feeds some of its best stuff to NPR’s news flow as well. One good example is Accidents of History Created U.S. Health System, which made it clear how we got to our wacky employer-supported health insurance system. Go listen to it and see if you don’t have a much better grasp on the challenge, if not of the solutions, currently on the table.

My point here, or one of them, is that the real story isn’t Obama vs. Intransigent Republicans (the Dems’ narrative) or Sensible Americans against Government Takeover (the Reps narrartive), but that we’ve got a health care system that burdens employers almost exclusively, rather than individuals, government (save for VA, Medicare and Medicaid), or other institutions. It’s an open quetion whether or not that’s screwed up, but at least it’s a question that ought to be at the center of the table, or the “debate” that been both boring and appalling.

This is consistent with what Matt Thompson says in The three key parts of news stories you usually don’t get, # 2 of which is WHAT WE MISS (1): The longstanding facts. But we also miss seeing the role that longstanding overlooked facts might play amongst the three story elements: protagonist, problem and movement. Take the problem of employer responsibility as a structural premise for health care. By itself, the problem just sits there. We need a protagonist and a sense that the story has movement. In the absence of either, we look for other defaults. Thus we cast Obama and his opponents as the protagonists, or to get into characterization as the issue if the topic gets logjammed, which it has been for awhile. So we hear about problems with the president’s charactrer. He’s not leading. Or … whatever. You can fill in the blanks

Meanwhile, we live in a world where employers are almost nothing like they were when the current health care system solidified at the end of World War II. In many towns (Santa Barbara, for example) the (or at least a) leading employer is “self”. Tried to get insurance for your self-employed butt lately? How about if you’re older than a child and have a medical history that’s other than perfect? Scary shit. Does the Obama plan make things better for you? According to this story in CNN, “Health insurance exchanges would be created to make it easier for small businesses, the self-employed and unemployed to pool resources and purchase less expensive coverage.” Hmm. “Easier” doesn’t sound like much relief. But doing nothing doesn’t sound good either.

So the easy thing is to go back to covering the compromise bill’s chances in Congress, and the politics surrounding it. That at least makes some kind of sense. We have all our story elements in place. It’s all politics from here on. Bring in the sports and war metaphors and let automated processes carry the rest. Don’t dig, just dine. The sausage-machine rocks on.

As Matt says, “… rarely do we acknowledge what we’re pursuing. When our questions make it into the coverage at all, they have to appear in the mouths of our sources, resulting in paltry, contorted pieces like this one, from the AP. Or they’re attributed to no one, weaseled into a headline that says only, ‘[Such-and-such] raises questions.’ Whose questions? Not ours, certainly.”

I also wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree (or down the wrong hole) when we obsess about “curation” of news — a favorite topic of mainstream media preservationists. Maybe what we need is to see explainers as advocates of our curiosity about the deep questions, or deep facts, such that they might become unavoidable in news coverage.

This, of course, begs the creation of whole new institutions. Which is the job that Jay has taken up here. Let’s help him out with it.

Carriers Are Playing the Field When It Comes to Search —

Carriers are swapping mobile search partners in an effort to better monetize users looking for content on the wireless web. The latest round of deals could help knock Google, which currently dominates mobile search, off its perch.

T-Mobile USA recently bumped Yahoo in favor of Google as the default search engine on its handsets, ending a year-old agreement that saw Yahoo power search on the carrier’s Web2Go service. (Yahoo said that it will continue to deliver content for Web2Go.) The move came just days after AT&T said it had tapped Yahoo for search on its new Motorola Backflip, marking the first time Google’s search offering was replaced on an Android handset. And it follows Verizon Wireless’s decision last fall to make Bing the default search provider on BlackBerry handsets, replacing options including Google and Wikipedia.

The recent round of partner-swapping among carriers and mobile search providers may seem trivial in light of all the recent attention focused on downloadable search applications, but the tie-ups could significantly impact the space over the next few years. While smartphone users always have the option of typing in a URL or firing up a search app, casual users will typically settle for the default engine on a mobile browser. That doesn’t bode well for Google, which could see its search engine get bumped from its own Android platform if other carriers follow AT&T’s lead. Google continues to dominate mobile search, accounting for more than 9 percent of all page views on the mobile web in January, according to the admittedly small sample of Opera Software users, and comScore reported last August that more than half of all mobile search users said they used Google. But that dominance will be threatened as carriers opt for other partners to direct users on the mobile web.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Why Mobile Search Is Still Anybody’s Game

Image courtesy Flickr user g.orginals.

I should say upfront that I'm a big fan of Lawrence Lessig's causes and his presentation techniques. My favorite might be his 2007 tour de force at TED about John Philips Sousa, Jesus singing "I Will Survive," and the joys and dangers of remix culture. A few days back he spoke at TEDxNYED about what conservatives can teach the free culture movement. I may be getting into trouble recommend a talk about conservatives here -- some of the email I received last week suggests that a good percentage of the readers here might find a Kucinich-Sanders ticket to be hopelessly middle of the road -- but this talk is classic Lessig, from its "I Was a Teenage Republican" opening to his real-time Wikipedia fix, to a reminder that Republican Walt Disney (the guy, not the company) was something of a remixer. There's plenty to argue about here and he presents in black and white some issues that are full of grays, but chances are you won't spend 20 minutes today with a smarter person. It's worth watching and thinking about even if you agree with only a part of it.

Introdução ao NoSQL parte I —

Os bancos de dados conhecidos como NoSQL (Not only SQL)  surgiram da necessidade de escalar bancos de dados para o resolver os problemas das aplicações web que operam em larga escala. Segundo a definição da wikipedia :

“NoSQL é um um termo genérico para uma classe definida de banco de dados não-relacionais que rompe uma longa história (ou império) de banco de dados relacionais com propriedades ACID. ”

Não podemos dizer que o NoSQL rompe o “império” dos bancos de dados relacionais. Os bancos de dados NoSQL servem para uma gama de problemas que nem sempre são os mesmos dos bancos de dados relacionais.

Muito tem se dito sobre as vantagens em termos de escala dos bancos de dados NoSQL em comparação aos bancos relacionais. Não é verdade que os RDBMS (relational database management system) não escalam. O fato é que eles não escalam facilmente. Vejamos um esquema básico de aplicação web  moderna:

A medida que este sistema passa a receber um número maior de usuários começam a surgir nossos primeiros problemas de escalabilidade.  Temos então duas opções :

1) Aumentar o poder do nosso servidor, aumentando sua memória, processador e armazenamento. Este tipo de solução é chamada de Escalabilidade Vertical (scale up).

2) Aumentar o número de máquinas de servidores web.  Isto é chamado de Escalabilidade Horizontal (scale out). Como mostrado no esquema abaixo :

Suponhamos que nossa aplicação continue crescendo bastante. Neste esquema acabaríamos chegando a um momento onde o banco seria o nosso maior gargalo uma vez que ele não conseguiria atender a todas as requisições em tempo hábil. Neste momento poderíamos apelar para a Escalabilidade Vertical e fazer um upgrade na máquina que está rodando nosso banco de dados. Mas esta abordagem é limitada pelo fato de que chegaríamos a um limite de capacidade com uma unica máquina ou chegariamos a um limite de orçamento para conseguir uma maquina extremamente poderosa. Assim nosso próximo passo mais lógico seria tentar escalar horizontalmente nosso banco, ou seja, colocar mais máquinas rodando o nosso banco:

Agora que temos a missão de escalar nosso banco de dados através de múltiplas vamos perceber que é bem mais complicado do que com os nossos servidores web.  Na maioria dos casos não podemos simplesmente ligar mais uma máquina rodando o banco e esperar que tudo funcione. Vamos precisar de uma série de configurações e alterações nas nossas aplicações para fazer tudo funcionar na nova arquitetura distribuída.

Os bancos de dados NoSQL vem para tornar este processo que muitas vezes é trabalhoso e complicado em um processo mais simples e robusto. Permitindo assim que os desenvolvedores se preocupem mais com suas aplicações e menos com manutenção. Esta facilidade de escala proporcionada por estas soluções tem sido um dos maiores motivos pelos quais os bancos NoSQL se espalharam rapidamente pelas  maiores aplicações web em funcionamento na atualidade.

Assim podemos dizer que tanto os bancos de dados relacionais quanto os não relacionais podem coexistir. Eles atendem em sua maioria a casos de usos diferentes como ilustrado na figura abaixo:

No próximo post vamos estudar as principais características que diferenciam os múltiplos bancos de dados NoSQL e vamos agrupar as soluções existentes de acordo com estas características.

E você, acha que o NoSQL pode conviver com os bancos de dados relacionais ? Conte suas experiências escalando RDBMs !

Posts Relacionados:

1. Emprego para profissionais NoSQL

A geek anti-manifesto —

The other day my colleague Scott Hanselman wrote a useful essay called 10 Guerilla Airline Travel Tips for the Geek-Minded Person. It’s a mixture of technical and social strategies. The tech strategies include marshaling data with the help of services like Tripit, FlightStats, and SMS alerts. The social strategies include being nice to service reps, and using the information you’ve marshaled in order to make precise requests that they’re most likely to be able to satisfy.

Scott writes:

I’m a geek, I like tools and I solve problems in my own niche way.

That statement, along with the essay’s tagline — …Tips for the Geek-Minded Person — has been bothering me ever since I read it. Why is it geeky to marshal the best available data? Why is it geeky to use that data to improve your interaction with people and processes?

My Wikipedia page includes this sentence:

Udell has said, “I’m often described as a leading-edge alpha geek, and that’s fair”. ¹

I did say that, it’s true. But I’ve come to regret that I did. For a while I thought that was because geek was once defined primarily as a carnival freak. That’s changed, of course. Nowadays the primary senses of the word are obsessive technical enthusiasm and social awkwardness. Which is better than being somebody who bites the heads off chickens. But it’s still not how I want to identify myself. Much more importantly, it’s not how I want the world to identify the highest and best principles of geek identity and culture.

Fluency with digital tools and techniques shouldn’t be a badge of membership in a separate tribe. In conversations with Jeannette Wing and Joan Peckham I’ve explored the idea that what they and others call computational thinking is a form of literacy that needs to become a fourth ‘R’ along with Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

The term computational thinking is itself, of course, a problem. In comments here, several folks suggested systems thinking which seems better.

Here’s a nice example of that kind of thinking, from Scott’s essay:

#3 Make their job easy

Speak their language and tell them what they can do to get you out of their hair. Refer to flights by number when calling reservations, it saves huge amounts of time. For example, today I called United and I said:

“Hi, I’m on delayed United 686 to LGA from Chicago. Can you get me on standby on United 680?”

Simple and sweet. I noted that UA680 was the FIRST of the 6 flights delayed and the next one to leave. I made a simple, clear request that was easy to grant. I told them where I was, what happened, and what I needed all in one breath. You want to ask questions where the easiest answer is “Sure!”

I see two related kinds of systems thinking at work here. One engages with an information system in order to marshal data. Another engages with a business process — and with the people who implement that process — in a way that leverages the data, reduces process friction, and also reduces interpersonal friction.

These are basic life skills that everyone should want to master. If we taught them broadly, and if everyone learned them, then this sort of mastery wouldn’t attract the geek label. But we don’t teach these skills broadly, most people don’t learn them, and the language we use isn’t our friend. If systems thinking is geeky then only geeks will be systems thinkers. We can’t afford for that to be true. We need everyone to be a systems thinker.

---

¹ Actually I’d say that Scott Hanselman is a leading-edge alpha geek. I am, at best, a trailing-edge beta or gamma geek. But if someone were to remove the word entirely from my Wikipedia page, I’d be fine with that. I no longer want to be labeled as any kind of geek.

The Dell Adamo XPS has been discontinued along with our hopes and dreams —

So long, Adamo XPS. It was wonderful knowing you while we did. We can’t help feeling like you had too short of a life though. You were only available for sale since December and Dell probably spent an untold fortune developing your 9.9mm thin body. It’s kind of weird, actually.

The Adamo XPS launched with much fanfare last October. People were amazed that Dell could produce such an amazing piece of computing goods, complete with a robotic keyboard as John Biggs calls it. It took a couple of months to get the notebook to the retail market, but then in December Dell started to sell it. Best Buy picked it up a few weeks later. But that doesn’t matter anymore. The Adamo XPS is now just a footnote on Dell’s Wikipedia page. It’s no longer listed with the other Adamo models on Dell.com and according to a Dell Chat Rep, it has been discontinued.

Hopefully Dell isn’t done with the line and we’ll see version 2.0 shortly. Maybe at SXSW. That’s where Dell showed off the Adamo line for the first time one year ago next week.

My friend, Chris Hall, has told me about Batten Disease, an illness that strikes down children, most often in the 4-10 year-old age range. Chris’s son, Matthew, passed away from the disease a short while ago. They’ve set up a Facebook group about their son, and about Batten Disease, to raise awareness.

Chris told me, “Our first aim is to significantly increase numbers (for awareness). Once we have done this we’re going to look at creating a charity to help stop this terrible condition and also help children who get it.”

So, the only ask at this time from Chris and his family, is that you consider joining the group.

My ask, to add to this is that you look at the symptoms (according to Wikipedia) and consider requesting a screening if this raises a flag:

“Early symptoms of the disorder usually appear around ages 4-10, with gradual onset of vision problems, or seizures. Early signs may be subtle personality and behavior changes, slow learning or regression, repetitive speech or echolalia, clumsiness, or stumbling. There may be slowing head growth in the infantile form, poor circulation in lower extremities (legs and feet), decreased body fat and muscle mass, curvature of the spine, hyperventilation and/or breath-holding spells, teeth grinding, and constipation.” – source, Wikipedia.

Peace to you, Chris and Mel, and I’m sorry I never got to meet Matthew in person.

Wikipedia has a whole page dedicated to criticism of Google.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Criticism of Google at Wikipedia | Comments]

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Attempting To Open Source Data Center Design —

Being an unabashed proponent of Open Source, I can avoid the news about a new industry group trying to start an initiative to open source data center design. The Open Source Data Center Initiative, announced last week, will act as a repository of technologies associated with the design of datacenters. This initiative aims to rope in smaller industry players and researchers from academia.

The complete freedom afforded by open source licenses allows for large scale innovation. We have seen the disruptive potential of open source in the traditional software world as well as in the cloud based world. In a way, open source encapsulates the freedom available in the academia and, therefore, has the potential to disrupt wide ranging fields. It is no surprise that the folks behind this new initiative thought of Open Source approach as the right model to foster innovation in the data center design.

Compared to other fields of IT, the innovation on the data center front is relatively slow because the industry as a whole is slow to change. With cloud computing capturing the imagination of enterprises and public, It is important to innovate rapidly on the data center side. There are many industry groups that are pushing for change in the data center industry suggesting many different best practices for innovation. The Open Source Data Center Initiative tries to take a different approach from the other efforts by tapping into open source philosophy to promote innovative ideas from the participants. It is a partnership between Greentech Research Foundation, Inc and University of Missouri to establish an engineering framework for datacenter design and technologies. The complete text of the agreement can be found here.

This effort is joined by one of the veterans in the data center industry, Mike Manos who is now building a cloud infrastructure for Nokia. In his blog post, he clearly highlights the role of this initiative

To be clear, this Open Source Data Center Initiative is focused around execution.   Its focused around putting together an open and free engineering framework upon which data center designs, technologies, and the like can be quickly put together and more-over standardize the approaches that both end-users and engineering firms approach the data center industry. 

Imagine if you will a base framework upon which engineering firms, or even individual engineers can propose technologies and designs, specific solution vendors could pitch technologies for inclusion and highlight their effectiveness, more over than all of that it will remove much mystery behind the work that happens in designing facilities and normalize conversations.

In my opinion, it is a pretty solid move to foster innovation. With the impending need for smart and green data centers, such an open source approach is the right way to go.

Around the web —

• The free software problem – Devin Reams
• Answers and Questions – Blog Archive – Firefox, Safe From Plugin Crashes – Very cool.
• WordPress — Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook – WordPress Plugins – One of the first times I’ve found a generally well-built plugin to do something I want. Thanks Keyvan, glad I didn’t have to write it (just modded it a bit)!
• Eating their own dog food: Palm Developer Relations team builds the new Facebook app | PreCentral.net – very cool.
• Bookmarklet to Quickly Access WordPress Admin Menu – Weblog Tools Collection – this is pretty cool, but I also want a better way of setting the site I want.
• I Just Retweeted @Ferrisbueller
• NATO phonetic alphabet – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – I think I’ve got this down now.
• del.icio.us, Thank You : Pinboard, Welcome – I know some folks that love pinboard, I’m still on Delicious for now. All I really care about are the APIs and tools built to support the service.
• 10 Essential Chrome Extensions for Web Developers – I need to learn how to run Chromium with multiple profiles like I do with Firefox.

Why Wikipedia Articles Vary So Much In Quality — Hugh Pickens writes "A new study shows that the patterns of collaboration among Wikipedia contributors directly affect the quality of an article. 'These collaboration patterns either help increase quality or are detrimental to data quality,' says Sudha Ram at the University of Arizona. Wikipedia has an internal quality rating system for entries, with featured articles at the top, followed by A, B, and C-level entries. Ram and graduate student Jun Liu randomly collected 400 articles at each quality level. 'We used data mining techniques and identified various patterns of collaboration based on the provenance or, more specifically, who does what to Wikipedia articles,' says Ram. The researchers identified seven specific roles that Wikipedia contributors play (PDF starting on page 175): Casual Contributor, Starter, Cleaner, Copy Editor, Content Justifier, Watchdog, and All-round Editor. Starters, for example, create sentences but seldom engage in other actions. Content justifiers create sentences and justify them with resources and links. The all-round contributors perform many different functions. 'We then clustered the articles based on these roles and examined the collaboration patterns within each cluster to see what kind of quality resulted,' says Ram. 'We found that all-round contributors dominated the best-quality entries. In the entries with the lowest quality, starters and casual contributors dominated.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Movie Notes: Revolutionary Road —

= 4 stars

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates
Directed by Sam Mendes

Synopsis

Set in 1955, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) tire of their safe, suburban life in Connecticut and plan a move to Paris.

The Good

• Questions the entire “settling down” routine, where for the sake of raising a family, parents defer their own dreams. Our elaborate societal constructs of cubicles, jobs, and houses can become a glass prison, but an unusually sadistic one, where fellow inmates unconsciously prevent anyone from leaving, ensuring mutual unhappiness.
• Solid performances by DiCaprio and Winslet, particularly DiCaprio who swings from charm to unhinged anger and heart-breaking sadness. Most of the film’s best moments contain the pair playing off each other, with moments of heated conversation seeming painfully familiar to anyone in a relationship where compromises are inevitably made.
• Some great directorial moments: one perfect cut indicates attraction, the drop-out of a soundtrack a seduction, and a crazy guest falls out of focus in the background, with Winslet in the foreground, cigarette smoldering, visually depicting her attempt to ignore his words.
• Plot-wise, an awareness of what is better left out: Frank and April’s early romance isn’t shown, and periods where nothing much happens are omitted.

The Bad

• Predictable – you know this can’t end well from the opening moments where Frank sleeps with a secretary.
• The nostalgic and suburbia ennui elements sometimes come off as Mad Men lite, notably the office guys, a bored housewife (Betty Draper is still tops), and the introduction of the children.
• The whole “suburbia-is-hell” routine has been done before.

Conclusion

Despite a predictable plot, performances by DiCaprio and Winslet are worth seeing. Recommended.

IMDB: Revolutionary Road
Wikipedia: Revolutionary Road
Rotten Tomatoes: Revolutionary Road 69%

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What Niches are and Where Do You Get Them? —

According to Wikipedia, a niche is “a special place within the scheme of things.” Niche marketing is defined as “the process of discovering and serving small but essentially lucrative market sectors and creating custom made products or providers for them.” It’s all to do with discovering your special interest and also the items and services that match.

To begin with, you should realize that your objective in obtaining a specialized niche, is to concentrate your direction and ideas to the most appropriate, concise, and concentrated concept feasible. Your potential audience is everybody on the planet with internet access and an interest for your site’s subject. Your possible information resources, are everything recognized as referring to that topic. Which means you want to be certain to possess sufficient info to, at some point, fill hundreds of pages. Also you will want to tighten your focus enough that, you will be recognized as an expert, as “THE Expert” for information, items for purchase, and/or services pertaining to your particular niche topic.

Concentrate…
Let’s say you’re interested in gardening. You can refine your focus by choosing an gardening style, period in history, particular gardener, subject within the niche (flowers, landscaping, tools, indoor, front yard, garden furniture, and so on.), and/or the life and motivation of famous gardeners through history. Your goal ought to be to select as numerous of these focal points as you can, so that the end result is a very concise subject matter.

Following this, you will definitely want to discover how regularly people are looking for this information, what words they are keying in the search engines like google, and just how numerous the available websites are, with that information. Eventually you will put your concept together and your key phrases, then you can choose your domain name and create meta tags pertaining to your web site.

Keywords have been named as such for a purpose…
Each web page on your web-site should have its own key-words or phrases. They are the words and phrases that individuals will type into a search-engine and discover your site. Perhaps your gardening interest has been narrowed down towards the history of English garden architecture, and represented by the pictures of some particularly famous garden architect. You must discover the best keywords, see what other websites are presently popular, maybe alter your focus until you discover precisely the right level among what’s popular, what’s available, and what’s wide open or missing, for you to personally concentrate on.

Performing in-depth research to begin with, is essential for your success. This is the “hard work” part, but as soon as you have done it, you’ve got the bones or the basis, of everything else you will be creating for your chosen niche. You will have a listing of websites to relate back to for research, article content, backlinks, and so on.

I hope this article has given you an insight into what niches are and where to get them.

It's Back! Layar's Mobile AR Browser Relaunches On iPhone —

In December of last year, augmented reality (AR) browser makers Layar chose to pull its iPhone app from the App Store due to frequent crashes reported by users. They thought it was better for their brand to remove the application than to promote a faulty product. As we've mentioned in the past, Layar had hinted that a revamped iPhone app would be out near the end of February, and earlier this week they released just that.

Sponsor

With the relaunch of their iPhone app, Layar rejoins acrossair, Wikitude and others now vying for elbow room in the mobile AR space. Layar boasts one of the largest collections of points-of-interest (POI) data sets and now that library is available again on the iPhone. The usual suspects can be found on Layar, such as Flickr photos, Google search, YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles, but one of the more unique layers on the app is Foursquare integration.

Users can use the Layar AR viewfinder to find nearby Foursquare locations and by linking the app to their account can check in without leaving Layar. There is also a feature in each layer to view entries on a map, or in list view. The map is especially handy for Foursquare integration because Foursquare's own app disappointingly doesn't support a map view. An equally interesting layer to investigate is the Recovery.org layer which shows you which U.S. organizations in your area received funding (and the amount they received) from the Recovery Act.

"The new Layar Reality Browser has a re-engineered engine under the hood. This new engine makes the application light, stable and very quick," the company said on its blog. "It is ready to handle all the current layers and it is a good base to realize all of our exciting future plans."

Layar's return to the iPhone platform comes just in time for the company's new layer marketplace which will allow developers to charge users for their content; in other words, an App Store for mobile AR. If Subway wants to create a layer with all of their locations and charge $.99 for it's use, they or any other company will easily be able to do that. One could assume that Layar will make use of Apple's in-app purchase functionality on the iPhone, but it would be sad to see Layar lose a percentage of their cut on the purchases to Apple. If anything, that could raise prices on the layers themselves, but that's a whole other argument.

This could be a huge step forward for the mobile AR space. As these applications become more useful, more refined and more popular, companies will be excited to participate in providing branded content in an AR experience. Expect an announcement from Layar in the next few weeks about the launch of this exciting new platform, but in the meantime, iPhone users (3GS only) can go snag Layar's free app (iTunes link) in the App Store.

Discuss

CeBIT Remainders: 8 Reasons We Didn't Go [Remainders] —

Every year, Hanover, Germany hosts hordes of tech journalists, analysts, and PR people for CeBIT. It's like CES, sort of, except further away, and more boring. We decided not to go this year; it ends tomorrow. Here's what we missed!

To be clear, these were some of the bigger stories of the conference, at least for American audiences. We've written a few other CeBIT stories up as well, which you can find here, but by and large, the event just sort of came and went. So, this is what was happening over in Hanover this week, while the rest of the tech world was going about their business.

Pierre Cardin Tablet: Wikipedia tells me that Pierre Cardin is a "Italian-born French fashion designer" who is famous for his "space age" clothing designs. He's paired up with a small Taiwanese OEM to make a tablet—the old foldy kind, not the slate-like new kind. It's pink, and it will cost $450, if it ever hits stores in the US.

ASUS EeeTop ET2010PNT and ET2010AGT On the exterior, ASUS EeeTops are basically a budget take on the AIO concept you're familiar with from the likes of the iMac and HP's Touchsmarts. On the interior, as with most ASUS products, they're incomprehensible parts soup.

Shuttle I-Power External GPU: Breaking news, for people who would like to buy a box that's nearly the size of a netbook and which can help boost their notebook's graphics capabilities! (But only certain notebooks, because you need a special adapter!) The Shuttle I-Power External GPU is ready to accommodate your fantasies.

1Cross B'ook ereader: Entourage eDGe on a budget: The first step here is to try to remember what the Entourage eDGe is. Now that you've done that, the second step is to figure out why you care about this cheaper, gaudier, and somehow less practical take on the same concept.

Intel Atom for Storage Devices: Intel's Atom processors, traditionally meant for netbooks and cheap laptops, are about as unglamorous as tech products get. I'd even hold that this was true five minutes ago, which was before I'd even heard about the Intel Atom for storage devices, which is a special version of the platform for household and small business network storage devices.

New Intel Classmate: Intel's ultra-budget Classmate convertible tablet PCs are evolving! (Slightly!) Here is the reference design for the newest one, which is quite similar to earlier reference designs on the outside, but adjusted slightly for cost and performance reason on the inside.

LG 12x Blu-ray drives: Did LG not have 12x Blu-ray writers before? Are these just new versions of their old Blu-ray devices? Such are the mysteries of CeBIT, which could easily be solved, if anyone cared enough to Google for backlinks.

ASUS O!Play USB 3.0: We're big fans of the ASUS O!Play set-top boxes around here and we're not very slightly more enamored with the concept, now that it supports USB 3.0.

iPad SDK Settings: Tethering, Voice Mail, MMS, Wikipedia Search —

9to5Mac is yet again delving deep into the iPhone 3.2 SDK for iPad and this time they’ve turned up settings for internet tethering, voice mail, and MMS settings, as well as a search option for Wikipedia.

Again, whether or not this is legacy code from the iPad’s iPhone heritage, or potential future features we have no way of knowing. Being able to tether to the iPad would be good (at least for international users, since AT&T doesn’t even support iPhone tethering yet…) Being able to tether from the iPhone to the iPad would be even better, but we’re not holding our breath… Likewise voice mail and MMS are interesting to see on a data-only device.

Wikipedia, however, is a natural extension of the built-in, currently Google-centric search and on the popover-enabled iPad Safari would be especially handy. Can we have that for iPhone as well?

Still no sign of Bing, however, though the current Yahoo! option will soon be powered by Microsoft’s search engine anyway…

Video after the break!

YouTube link

iPad SDK Settings: Tethering, Voice Mail, MMS, Wikipedia Search is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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