Background

IP Address and Domain Names

In the very early stage of web technologies the IP address of the web server was used to look up for a web page. That mechanism was not so user friendly and difficult to promote a specific brand name online. As a Solution for that the domain name service came in to action where users can type domain name and there is a middle man to map that name in to an IP address. This was user-friendly and businesses could use their brand name online very easily.

Search Engines

Even with domain name there was no way to find a specific content in the web using keyword and search engines solved that problem. Even though you don’t know a domain name you can go to a search engine and type a keyword and find a specific content as you want. In order to provide those facilities search engines are using robots or spiders to index entire World Wide Web. In addition to identify the important pages there are various ‘voting’ mechanism like Google page rank which based on back links.

Stumble-Upon

What will happen in the case you don’t know enough about the subject to type a keyword and search content? But still you know the outline of the subject area which you want to read about. That’s where Stumble-Upon comes to action. It keeps an index of user submitted pages and their information. Users can stumble across the web using stumble-upon tool bar based on given interests and stumble-upon will deliver pages randomly according to your interest. Same as in search engines Stumble-upon also using voting mechanism but its directly getting the vote from users. Due to that the accuracy of the vote considered to be higher than ‘back links’. The number of votes will be a factor to decide the visibility of a specific page to other users.

Getting Started

Register Account

The first step to use stumble-upon is creating an account. However you can stumble by just clicking stumble button in the main page, but in that case you won’t be able to use most of the advance features. Due to that it’s recommended to register before starts stumbling. You can access the registration page by clicking the link in hear of main page. It takes you to a simple registration form, you have to fill it and click sign up. You can prove that you are a human using captcha or facebook login. Then it will take you to a window where you can enter your interests. Tick then as you want and hit stumble. Then it will display a toolbar at the top of browser window and some web page according to your interest. By clicking the stumble button in the toolbar you can go to next web page.

Install Stumble-Upon Toolbar

The toolbar mentioned above is not yet installed in your browser, so there can be some malfunctioning. In order to avoid those you can install it locally as a plug in for your browser. When you go to main page of Stumble-upon it will display a link to get the add-on according to your browser.  If you are a Firefox user you will be able to get complete set of tool in your toolbar as a Firefox plug-in. Even for other browsers there are add-ons which can be downloaded and installed. However the Firefox plug-in provides most wide and accurate set of features. As long as you have the toolbar you can always click on the Stumble button there and start stumbling, submit the current page to stumble, vote for current page and share it with your friends. In addition it can give access to your saved interest, change them and stumble only in one interest too.

Web Interface

As long as you have a registered account in Stumble-upon you can control it using the web interface. Once you login you can see a settings button in the header. By clicking that you can access preferences including profile information, theme, Manage interests and profile picture. It provides facility to import your Facebook profile image to stumble-upon. Finally it creates a public profile URL for you like http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/YourUserName/. Your profile page displays your favorites and your friend’s network. You can invite your friends to Stumble-Upon or you can subscribe other stumbles too.

Start Stumbling

Now you have fully configured stumble-upon account. Click the stumble button in toolbar and stumble across the web pages according to your interests, Submit interesting pages to stumble-upon and vote of interesting pages saying ‘I like it’ using toolbar or may be writing a review. Optimize the list of topics to have a better stumbling experience. In the case you need to shout out about a page use sharing options in toolbar including Twitter and Facebook. Furthermore you can keep a track of your likes and stumbles through the web interface. If you see an interesting user you can subscribe to him and get updates. If you have your own web page, submit it to Stumble-upon saying ‘I like it’ in toolbar, so you will be able to present the page to many other stumblers. To improve that you can add a stumble-upon button in to your web page too.

Profile Authority

When you are stumbling it delivers the pages according to an algorithm. The basic factor is ‘Likes’ to increase the visibility of the page. However each like won’t be treated as same, but there will be a weight for the vote according to the profile authority of voted stumblers. It will be decided according to the below facts.

• Discoveries you have made and their popularity
• Subscribers you have and their popularity.
• Vote you have given to other pages and their popularity.
• Number of reviews you have written.

If you are a high authority Stumbler your vote will be having a high value than others and voted pages will be having an improved visibility to other Stumblers. However stumble-upon having a paid advertising program as well. Using that you can promote your page to stmblers as a Sponsored page.

User Experience

Stumble-upon is totally different experience to surfers. You can simple stumble across the web according to your personal interest without giving any specific goal. This can be really addictive as long as it identifies your likeness and deliver pages accordingly. Most importantly it identifies the values of the page based on users’ direct vote which is highly accurate. Due to that it can deliver highly target high quality content to the users. You can use stumble-upon as a new way of learning and getting news randomly. When you become a good stumbler and have many likes it will deliver even precise content for you. Join stumble-upon now and feel this new experience.

Content Management Systems

A content management system is a tool that can be used to separate the content from presentation. In general, a Content Management System follows three steps. There are designing the end user template, adding the content as text or html to the database and displaying the results to the end user. Increased functionality, being easy to do large-scale changes in a very easy manner and no need of HTML knowledge are the some of the advantages of Content Management Systems. It will be a great option to use a CMS for large, often updating, multiple contributors required and dynamic content included websites.

History Overview

The name Joomla came from the Arabic word jumla which means all together. This was a legalization of the early Content Management System which was known as Mambo. It was trademarked by Miro International Private Limited. Joomla has a very short span of history as a Content Management System. It was first released in the August 2005. Thereafter, day by day it has improved its functionalities and become stronger than the other once.

How It Works

The content is the key in a Content Management System. Therefore the content is displayed with three types. A section is the basic among them which groups a group of content. A set of sections are categorized as a category. Articles hold content like images, text and other content. There is a Media Manager to manage the images like things. Contact is a place to store forms. The user can change colors and the graphics using the website template. In addition, the users are able to use plug-in that will add automated content to the user’s content. The site owner has the full permission to the content and the owner can check them by just adding ‘/Administrator’ to the homepage URL. It contains many more other features like User Manager, Language Manager, Banner Manager, Polls, Search, Web link Management, Syndication and Newsfeed Management, Menu Manager, Template Manager, Integrated help system and web services to provide a top class output to the Joomla consumers.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Joomla

It is said that Joomla is the most recommended Content Management System for a website that contains large content. It can be described as a fully fledged CMS. The deep levels of navigation make the content well managed and improve the efficiency of the website. The main advantage of Joomla is the free and open source availability.

There are so many disadvantages as well. It has a bigger learning curve when it is compared to other CMS like WordPress. Joomla is not the best option for small sites. It is not at all good with Search Engine Optimization. JavaScript and CSS can get bulky due to the slow loading time and the layout changing is also not that easy when compared to other famous CMSs. Some costly plug-ins for Joomla comes freely with the Content Management Systems like WordPress.

Competitors

There are number of Content Management Systems available in the today’s world. Durphal and WordPress are the most famous ones among them. WordPress is much lighter than the Joomla and it can be a good option for the websites with small content. Durphal is much powerful and flexible when compared to the Joomla. But the numbers of Joomla users are greater than Durphal. The main reason is that it is the easiest CMS to handle websites with large content. In a nutshell, WordPress is the best for the end users, Durphal is the best option for the web developers and Joomla will be the best web designing CMS.

How To Make Joomla More Efficient

One of the major concerns over the other Content Management Systems with Joomla is that the high complexity of operating for the end user. It will be a better implementation if it is possible to reduce the complexity for certain extend. Blogs are the world’s fastest growing type of web pages. Among the Content Management Systems, WordPress is the most popular for blogging. The reason is that it can be updated frequently in an easy manner. It can be great if it is possible to provide two editions of the Joomla CMS. One will be for the high end users and the other one will be for the normal users. The reason is that the normal users can be provided some easy and lightweight tools with them. Most of the good software has several editions. Microsoft products have become that much popular due to the user availability in their own choice. This edition based development is not that often seen in the Open source products. Providing it can do much better for everyone. Another major issue in Joomla is the weaknesses that it has. There are so many security threats and vulnerabilities in it.  Therefore the content can be damaged or hacked during the processes of developing.

Consumer Response

There is a rapid growth in the Joomla community since it was released. The latest builtwith statistics shows that it has achieved the third place from the Content Management Systems. In addition, it has had a +0.18% movement from the 4.6% total CMS used websites. Another factor provided to prove the consumer response is that the number of comments and posts appear on the walls of the social networks. With the Video component and the Joomla web services the users and the new trend has attracted to this community.

References

• CMS Usage Statistics. (2010, 05 18). Retrieved 05 27, 2010, from CMS Usage Statistics: http://trends.builtwith.com/cms
• Joomla-Advantages and Disadvantages. (2009, 09 28). Retrieved 05 27, 2010, from slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/tradocaj/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-joomla

OpenID identity is actually not a username and password system. Technically, they are URLs. Something likes this,

• http://claimid.com/username
• http://username.myopenid.com
• http://me.yahoo.com/username

You have to give your credentials to the OpenID provider website, and the provider is responsible to notify the other sites that you are who you claim to be. After you have claimed the authentication and authorization, you can use the website as a registered logged in user. Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect are some examples of OpenID. The main difference in the OpenID is a single company does not control it. There are number of companies you can choose to obtain an OpenID.

To use the OpenID credentials, the website should have the OpenID login feature, and if you can find the OpenID logo somewhere on the webpage, you can use your OpenID to login. This form then connects with the OpenID client library.

Behind The Scene

There are two parties involved in an OpenID transaction, Consumer and Provider. A Consumer (also called a Relying Party) is an OpenID enabled web site. A Provider plays the role as a registrar. It allows users to create and manage OpenID URLs and accounts, and authenticates the user to Consumers. This is an open source framwork service, and anyone can be a Consumer or a Provider without any cost of licensing fees. You can find a large number of web applications allow users to log in using the OpenID credentials and number of sites have become the service Providers all over the web.

When a user tries to log into a Consumer site using OpenID, the Consumer site contacts the Provider to verify the user’s credentials. The user may be redirected to the Provider and asked to sign in using Provider password. When its done successfully, the user will automatically redirected to the Consumer site with granted access as a registered user.

Getting Started With OpenID

To use OpenID, you should have an OpenID account with one of the many providers on the web. If you have an account with Google, Yahoo, AOL, LiveJernal, Blogger, Flickr, MySpace or any other common big name OpenID  providers, then you already have an OpenID. If you want, you can have an OpenID account with some dedicated OpenID providers, such as MyOpenID or ClaimID. This is called as ‘home base’. Even if you choose any of the services, you’ll get a unique URL that you can use around the web.

Getting Used To OpenID

The main confusion of using OpenID is, it is not a normal username and password but it is usually a URL something looks like this: http://username.providername.com.

To log into an OpenID enabled Consumer site

• Find the OpenID logo somewhere on the web page
• Paste your OpenID URL in the provided text field and press Enter
• You’ll be asked to sign into you account back at your ‘home base’. You have to provide the username and the password to the ‘home base’ account.
• At last, you will have to provide some of your basic details like your name and profile picture.

That is all. No need to register, no need to confirm.

Benefit Of OpenID For Different Level Of Internet Users

General Internet User

• Convenient online experience: Do not have to memorize a number of username and password for different sites
• Security: If you could find a secure OpenID provider, the phishing attack surface is reduced.

E-Commerce And OpenID Consumers.

• Being an OpenID consumer, they can give a simple user registration to the users. This will give a major attractiveness for website.
• With the user’s approval, the OpenID let know more about the visitors to the consumers to target their market
• Can be prevent from identity theft, as the login information can be retrieved from OpenID

OpenID is not a perfect solution for a normal user, until he’s getting used to it, and to prevent the security problem, the user must choose a secured OpenID provider.

References

• (2010). Retrieved on 2010, April from wired.com: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Use_OpenID
• (2010). Retrieved on 2010, April from zdnet.com: http://blogs.zdnet.com/digitalID/?p=78
• (2010). Retrieved on 2010, April from penn-olson.com: http://www.penn-olson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/openid.gif

Getting Started

Add to Gmail

To add Google buzz in to your Gmail account you can follow this link. And there may be an introduction page for Google Buzz when you open G mail. By clicking “Try Buzz in G mail” you can activate Buzz. Once you finish that step there will be a new section in your G mail account named Buzz. There you can see the status updates of your Friends and you can update your status as well.

Configuration

Once you click on the Buzz section in your G mail it will open Buzz main interface. At the top there is a Text box to enter your Status update and publish it. Next to that there is a link to update your Google Profile which is tightly coupled with your Buzz account. Then next link there is very important, using that you can import your status in other applications. Once you click on that it will give you some suggestions where you update your status including twitter, G talk, YouTube, Picasa, Flicker and all the other sites you follow using Google Friend Connect. You can add sites to buzz and the status you update in those sites will be added to Buzz time line. Next link will display the list of your followers. If you wish to follow or un-follow people, there are text links to do those in front of each contact. Just below the text editor, there are link to following people and find people. Using find people link you can include more people in your buzz time line. In each buzz there is a link to comment on it, mark it as “like” and Email the one who buzzed.

Functionalities

Same as Twitter you can update your contacts by a status message using Buzz. But in Buzz you can share hypermedia. Once you share a link with some images or Videos, Buzz will identify them automatically and add them below the Buzz Text. And you can do the same with RSS feed as well. Simply buzz is a combination of Status updates, photos, videos and RSS feeds. And it uses your Gmail friend list, so you don’t have to worry about creating new contacts for Buzz. The facility of connecting other sites to Buzz makes it easier to follow them right inside of your Gmail box. Especially in Twitter we may miss our friend’s Tweets, because there are mixed with so many other Tweets. In here you can clearly indentify that there are new updates.

The best and unique feature here is you can comment on Status. Here buzz is one step ahead from Twitter. And once someone posts a comment on your Buzz, it will generate an Email, so you won’t miss any of the comment. In the case you need to send an Email explicitly to someone about your comment you can use very popular @ and the desired ones Email address.

Buzz works with your Smart phone and in there you can connect it with Google Latitude. Using that you can see your friend shared location through Buzz and update yours automatically.

What’s Next

Google are dominating all the Cyberspace in an exponential rate. Practically according to the current situation there can’t be a cyberspace without Google. But the main Internet concept they couldn’t dominate is Social networking. The most popular Social network is Facebook and twitter is also competing with its new concept which is micro blogging. Through Google Buzz and many of their products like Google Friend connect, they are trying to dominate Social networking concept.

But so far Google didn’t show decent result in this subject. Even with the Buzz I cannot indentify a strong hook to get the market away from the Facebook and Twitter to Google Buzz. It’s true that there are some interesting features like commenting and Location sharing. But still it doesn’t giving the classic feeling like in Facebook with so many Hypermedia and total online life sharing. And Google Buzz is not giving the awesomely simple user experience like in twitter.

The main point is, behind the screen Google is weaving a web to launch massive social networking product though they are still behind compared to other products in market. Google buzz may be an introductory and experimental product. I feel like there are so many things yet to come. All we can do is waiting and watch what the Google going to do.

References

• Google Buzz: Gmail status update and content sharing has us bam-Buzz-elled. (2010, February). Retrieved February 2010, from Cnet: http://www.cnet.co.uk/i/c/blg/cat/software/google/buzz.jpg

Access

To locate Google Book Search you can go to main navigation bar in Google home page. After you get a search result you can change it to a book search too. After all you can Google for Book search too.

Layout

Bookshelf

This is a newly added feature in to Google Book Search. In there you can bookmark and organize the books you reading. For that there is a link named “My Library” at the top right corner of the main page. There you can categorize books in to various category including Favorites, Reading now, To read, Have read and, Reviewed. There is a button to create a new book shelf as well. Using that you can have multiple book shelves and it help you to organize your books in a better way.

Browse Subjects

This section located at the left column of the page. This helps users to narrow down their search in to a specific category.

My Library

This is a Graphical representation of your book shelves. You can locate this at the top of main content are of the home page.

Categories

There are various categories in the main content are and this will help user to optimize and get the exact result of the book search. You can click on the arrows displayed at the sides to view more books in each category.

Usage

You can enter a Key word in a search box and hit Search Books button to initiate a book search. The search result will contain Book which having the key word in its content. You can control the view of the search result in the left column option. In there you can choose the way you want to see books and what kind of previews you looking for.

Once you click on a specific book it will take you to the page which contains all the details about the book. In there you will be able to see a preview of the book if it’s allowed. In addition to that you can see rating and reviews about the book. At the left columns there will be a links to online book stores to buy a hard copy of this book.

Right below the thumbnail image of the book there will be a drop down menu to add this to your book shelf. Once you add the book will be displayed in your Book shelf view at the main page.

Advantages

In the case someone need to find about a specific content in a Book, he has to dig in to the book and read everything to find it. Sometimes index may helps, but still it will take lots of time to find the right book. With Google book search you can find the exact book and the exact page which having your desired content. Sometimes you may be able to read the book online or may be a part of it. If you really want to have a hard copy you can buy it too. In normal situation we cannot find a given word or content inside a paper book without reading everything. Google book search will make the life easier for research student, professors and many more.

Technology

The technology behind the Google book search is very simple, yet smart. As the first step the developers should scan the books and store them as a text format most probably PDF. For that they may use Optical character recognition. After that they can search a given keyword inside the PDF file. In the web page using JAVAScrip it highlights the area of the search content to make it easier for the user. According to the preview access user will be able to read the book online as well.

Google Book Search API

You can add your own Book search in your web site. For that Google Code provides all the instruction and technology. Click Here to read more about Google Book search API. Using this you can embed a book preview to your web site or add a custom search.

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Newyorker.com: http://www.newyorker.com/images/2007/02/05/p465/070205_r15903_p465.jpg

Getting Started

Access

You can access Google calendar at the main navigation bar at the top of Google home page. This may be located under the more links in there. To operate you will require a Google account. If you are already a Gmail user you can use the same account. If you are totally new to Google services when you try to access Google calendar you will be prompted to create a new account.

Layout

Once you access Google calendar at the left had side you can see few link and month view of a calendar. In addition to that there will be a form to switch between calendars of you have many. In the main body of the web page there will be time slots. You can select different time slots using the tabs displayed at the top right. At the upper top right corner you can locate the link to access Settings.

Configure

Before you use the Google calendar you should configure it according to your requirement. For that you should go to settings page. You can access setting using the link at the top right corner of the web page.

General

In here you can control the general behavior of the calendar. It’s important to select the country and the time zone correctly. In addition to that you control select time format, date format and many more parameters.

Calendars

In here you can create many instances of Google calendar. This will be useful when you sharing calendars with many different groups.

Mobile Setup

This is the most interesting and important feature in the Google Calendar. In here you can configure your mobile phone with Google Calendar. After that you can receive SMS notification for the events you are going add. Once you add your mobile phone number in here it will send a verification SMS with a code. There is a text field to enter verification code. Once you enter that you are ready to receive SMS notification for free.

Labs

In the labs section there are many components and add-ons develop my 3^rd parties to improve the service of Google calendar. These components may contain bugs, so use with due care.

Start using Google Calendar

Create Event

There are many ways to create event in Google calendar. The easiest way is click on a specific time slot. In the pop-up a window you can add further details and add event. Or you can click on the “Create event” link at the left top corner of the page. There is another interesting way to add event which is “Quick add”. Once you click the quick add link at the left top corner of the page you can simple type the details of event in simple English. It will automatically add the event to your calendar.

Reminder

When you create an event there is a option panel. There you can add a reminder to the event. Te reminder can be E mail, pop up or SMS. The option of SMS would only appear only if you have configured your phone with this.

Guests

There is another option panel to add guest to the event you are going to create. When you add a guest you can select the privileges given to him. You can add guests from your Gmail contact list too.

More About Google Calendar

Google calendar is a real live example to prove the power of rich internet applications. Previously we used calendar comes with mail client applications to manage our events or may be some other installed event management software. With this powerful web application we can do all the above work by simply looking up a URL in the web browser. The main problem with this kind of rich internet applications is you cannot do anything when there is no internet connection. But Google developers have come up with a smart solution for this with Google Gear. If you have installed Google Gear on your PC you can click on the Offline link at the top right corner. Then it will store important data locally on your PC to run Google Calendar even when there is no internet connection. You can Sync your data periodically. In addition to that Google calendar supports variety of mobile devices including iPhone and Nokia S60.

Next possible development in Google calendar will be integration with G mail. Normally we use calendar software with our mail client. But so far I didn’t notice such a feature with Google calendar. Furthermore Google developers can integrate this will Google Docs as well.

This web application will help you to manage your all the events in your busy life.

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Onewebhosting.com: http://onewebhosting.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/google_calendar.gif

To access Google Trends you can use the main navigation bar in the Google home page. There click the more link and then click even more. It will open a page with many other Google services. There you can find a link to Google Trends. If not, simply you can Google for Google trends. Once you open Google trends, there will be a Search box almost same as Google search engine. You can enter your keyword and hit the Search trends button.

We will use the keyword “Barak Obama“.

Once you hit the button, in the browser screen it will display a chart at the top. And in the special points of the chart will be labeled and explanation will be there in the right side. Look at the peak labeled as C. The explanation for that is “CME Group Congratulates President-elect Barak Obama”. At the bottom of the page it display search volume index for regions and for different languages. Finally you can save all the above data in your local computer as a CSV file from the link at the bottom of the page. In addition to this you can narrow down your research for a given regions or time frame.

In addition to that there is a separate section for web traffic monitoring which you can access in top navigation bar. In there you can see a chart of unique visitors for a given web site. By the way Alexa.com is giving better service if you need to monitor web sites traffic.

In the main page of Google trends, there is a space for Hot Trends. It shows current hot trends in Google which can be really important. By clicking more trends you can access the full list of hot trends. Furthermore you can subscribe to RSS feeds about hot trends or add it as an iGoogle gadget. So you can be updated about them real time. This is really an important tool for internet marketers to identify Google search trends which is a large part of the whole internet searches. According to that they can take strategic decisions and plan their future business promotion procedure.