Image Search

I’m pretty sure that most of your friends have used Google Images search. Easy way to access it is do a normal search and change it to image search from top bar or side bar. Once you go to image search it will display thumbnails of images indexed from many web pages, which makes Google image search world’s largest image hug. Using the side bar you can narrow down your result by image size and time.

The main problem in many other search engines is that they don’t actually recognize the content of the image. They just read the ‘title’ and ‘alt’ tags and list the image. This is where Google image search makes a difference. It actually looks in to the image and identify some content of the image for indexing. Therefore you can search image for color.

Ex: You search for “BMW 320i” and then select “Red” color from the sidebar. See the result, it will give what exactly you are looking for.

Then you can narrow down your search by image type. Here again Google image search look in to image and identify the content, whether it’s a face, photo, clip art or line drawing. Try to narrow down the search with type “face” and take a look. You will be amazed by the accuracy of the filtering algorithm.

So far we were using keywords to find images. But Google Image search works the other way around too. You can upload an image, and then it will look for it in the web. To proceed with that you have to go to Google Image home page and click on the camera icon in the search box. It will ask you to upload the image, then it will show you the places where the uploaded image appears on the web. Furthermore it looks in to the image content and present you the visually similar images as well. Same as in the previous case, the image recognition and indexing algorithm works perfectly. To make it easier to use Google image search you can add a description to image as well.

There is a mobile application which allows you to take a photograph using your mobile smart phone and upload it to image search easily, named Google Goggles. You can find more information about the application here. It’s again using the same algorithm to identify the image content and do the search based on that.

Video Search

Google Video search is also commonly used as same as Google Image search, yet its fine features are rarely used by general users. Easiest way to access the video search is do a general keyword search and change the result in to videos using top bar or side bar or Google Video home page.

Any Google search support Voice Search and you can use the same to image or video search. All you have to do is click on the microphone icon in the search box and speak what you need to search to the attached microphone. It will convert that to text and do the search for you.

If you don’t like matured content in your image or video search result you can switch on the “Safe Search” using the drop down menu at the top right side of search result. You can make the safe search strict or moderate according to your requirements.

Google video search doesn’t recognize the content in the videos like image search. Yet, it gives you the facility to narrow down your search result using upload time, duration of the video, quality and source website.

By clicking on the thumbnail of the video you can directly go to source website and enjoy the video.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a very special type of search engine which index Academic papers submitted by scholars all around the world. This might not be a quite useful tool to general users, but valuable for academic students. This is the world’s largest hub of academic articles. Right next to search button in Google Scholar Home Page, you can find two links for Preferences and Advanced search. They allow you to fine tune your search result by giving your default preferences and narrow down search result by giving specific searching criteria. In the search result it shows the academic paper or the book section related to search keyword. Further it shows the other articles which already cited the subject article along with related articles which will help you to enrich your forthcoming academic paper.

Sometimes there are articles in databases where you need paid membership to read. In such cases Google will list only the introduction page. To proceed you have to get the membership. If you are an academic student, in most of the cases your university will give you the relevant access to paid article databases.

Google Public Data Explorer

This is again very uncommon type of search engine and hardly ever used by general Google users. If you take a good look in to Google Public Data Explorer, you will be able to find useful information and statistics about your country, or the globe. This is maintaining various different data sets collected by different organization. By accessing a dataset you can see statistical data in graphical format including charts.

Ex: Dataset: World Bank, World Development Indicators -> Gross Domestic Product

Here you can see the total GDP in world and using the side bar you can select a specific county. Further, you can select more than one country to compare the values. Upon your selection, the chart will change real time. You can change the chart type in top left corner.

Google Finance

Google Finance is a specialized search engine which gives you latest market quotes and news from financial world. It collects trading data from many stock indexes and presents it in graphical format. The best part is numbers are changing real time when market opens. So you can get most up to date idea about stock prices along with the latest news.

This is a good place for an investor to do a historical analysis of price patterns and collect valuable information for a strategic investment.

In the search box you can enter a company name or short code in relevant stock index.

Ex: If you want to search for Apple Inc, you can enter “Apple” or “AAPL”

This will take you to the stock prices of Apple Inc along with the chart. Chart provides you a range of options to see historical price patterns and trade volumes. By going to ‘setting’ just under the chart you can change the chart style and intervals. If you are an experienced investor, you will probably change the chart style to “Candlestick” and set the chart interval according to your trading system. By visiting Technicals you can include indicators which helps you to do technical analysis such as Moving Average Convergence and Divergence (MACD) or Bollinger Bands. In here you can include more than one indicator to make this platform an advanced technical analysis tool.

This is a slight insight to uncommon Google products, their fine features and strengths. This makes us realize how far Google has come in information technology market and how it dominates the whole world. Within a short period of time it has changed the global life style and made our lives easier. The important thing here is, no matter how big they are, no matter what kind of monopoly they hold, most of their valuable services come free and they earn money with advertising. Hats off for this smart business model!

Joomla provide all the above general functions to the users and many more including SEO friendliness and uncountable number of extensions/templates. So it always used to stand tall among CMS’. And It comes totally free and having very active development community and user community online. Therefore it was developing rapidly and users always get answers for their issue quickly.  With all those pluses, Joomla was moving ahead, evolving to be the CMS in internet.

Recently Joomla community introduced Joomla 1.6 which attracted web developers as well as web content writers including website owners. If you take a deeper look you will figure out that, Joomla 1.6 is not just an ‘Upgrade’ like previous version evolution. It’s more than that!

Server Requirement

The most significant thing in Joomla 1.6 is it doesn’t work with old school web hosts. The minimum requirement of host Joomla is,

• PHP 5.2 +
• MY SQL 5.0 +

I see this as a really good step and minimum requirement would be satisfied by any decent web hosting service provider. In the development side, Joomla community will be able to use new technological advancement and provide smooth and nice product experience to users. If you are in an Old school web host, and planning to use Joomla 1.6 CMS, I guess time is ripe to move to a new decent web host.

What’s New?

More Control

The coolest feature in Joomla 1.6 which will attract the most is its controllability. It has taken the user permission to the next level. You can create user groups and assign permission to each group. Give privileges will be cascade to entire member of the group. This comes handy because most of the commercial web pages contents are uploaded my many people probably paid staff. And site admin need to give access to each section only for specific set of writers. With this each user will be able to see only his part of the web site to edit or may be view. Same would happen with administrative back and. Therefore this will be jump ahead in Joomla CMS and definitely this will contribute a lot to its future popularity and success.

URL Redirect Manager

This is another new feature in Joomla 1.6 and this URL redirect manager allows you to develop advanced routing between different site URLs. These redirecting may be static or may be depending on HTTP header details. If you need to direct entire traffic of URL ‘A’ to URL ‘B’ that will be a static redirection and you could modify the HTTP header after the redirection. Using this module you will be able to direct all your 404 errors to a nice page without letting user know something went wrong.

More impressively this provides built in tiny URL system. Hence you won’t have to use third party services to get your URL shorten. URL redirect manger will do it for you right inside your web application. In this case you might have to come up with creative sub domain configuration to make it better looking. The most important thing here will be you don’t have to depend on some other third party service and you will have the total control.

Multi Language Support

As always new Joomla also equipped with Multilingual support. You will be able to give a drop down menu to your user to change the language instantly by him. However to get this done you might have to create separate content for each language to get the optimum result why automated translators doesn’t always do a great job for all languages.

Most importantly new multi language support feature will allow you to create separate specific segments for each language. If you have some part of the web site that would be visible if language is selected to ‘French’ and that is irrelevant to ‘English’ , such kind of thing would be able to control using this new feature.

Components and Extensions

This could be a bad news as well as good news for both users and developers. Old Joomla extensions won’t work with Joomla 1.6 as long as it comes with totally different architecture. This will be a bad news for general non technical users because they will have to look for new version of extensions which are compatible with Joomla 1.6 and it will be good news for developers since they will get a room to come up with better creative extensions with new architecture.

However, I believe that this is a good move. In most of community development, developers are thinking about the old version of applications and its existence. But it only stagnate the evolution of the product and won’t let the developers to move on with advance tech. So, If you planning to move to (not upgrade) Joomla 1.6, account this fact as well.

Unlimited Nested Categories

This is a Joomla community request for a long and finally it’s been delivered by development community. Now you don’t have hard coded depth for your category hierarchy. You could create a nested category inside another category till infinity. This is really cool and expands the usability scope of Joomla. Most importantly this will be helpful for non technical users to manage their complex content without aid of a developer with much more flexibility.

Menu Structure

Joomla 1.6 comes to advance menu system management. It allows you to assign a page or even a module to a menu item. Further the management of menu hierarchy is made so easy for any one. The one of most important thing, Meta data management of menu item is been optimized and make it much more flexible. Top most important this is accessibility and visibility of menu item have taken to a unquestionable perfection level. Hence any level of user will be able to come up with user friendly as well as SEO friendly navigation structure for his web site.

Move to Joomla 1.6

As you could see from the above facts take your existing website to Joomla 1.6 is not just a simple upgrade. You will have to move entire web content to the new system to feel the power of Joomla 1.6. However, if you are starting a new web site, you can simply getting start with latest version of Joomla.

In the website migration process you will have to think about the web host first, whether it meet the minimum requirement of Joomla 1.6. In here you don’t have to worry about the capability of server computer hardware, it just software you have to taken in to account. Yet, with the increasing traffic you will have to look for better hardware and it won’t affect your Joomla website anyway. If your web host meets the requirement you will have to think about the extensions as well. You have to look for whether they have Joomla 1.6 compatible versions. If all set you are good to move!

Competition

Though Joomla is taking its shape to a perfect CMS with its version 1.6, it’s having tough completion in the CMS world. Drupal would be its main competitor. Most of the people say that Drupal is easy to understand and get on rather than Joomla. I personally don’t agree with it, yet I can’t deny the fact since many people made the same complain. So it will be good advantage for Drupal against Joomla.

Then comes the most popular blogging CMS, WordPress. It’s specialized for Blogging yet, it won’t stop you using it as a website CMS. It’s having entire features to develop a decent website including templates, plug-ins and other features almost same as Joomla. And installation is just few clicks and any non technical person would be able to move on with it. Learning curve of the CMS is also lesser. So there is a possibility that WordPress come out of its frame and give a significant challenge to Joomla.

SimpleCMS is another product out there which could give a solid head on challenge to Joomla. It give a very user-friendly interface to add and modify content. All you have to do is just click on the content after logging as authorized user. It will simply take you to edit mode and after saving things goes live. Same as Its name its ‘Simple’! And installation process is also very less complicate. Hence it was gaining raid popularity among web site administrators.

Further Evolution

Joomla will continue to evolve with its active development community. Probably they will look in to make it more users friendly to make it even easier for non technical users. Especially the installation script will come with less complicated mechanism. Content editing, page structure editing and navigation are already at the top as I can see. With all these Joomla will be able to solve the common complain ‘Significant learning curve’

Plug in and template availability is always a plus point for Joomla and it will continue with Joomla 1.6 as well. There might be some compatibility issues, but they will be solved soon. And there will be more extensions and more templates with this continuous evolution of Joomla. With all these Its taking its shape to be THE best web CMS.

What is the next step of evolution of social networking? As it seems it’s going to be ‘Mobile Social Networking’ or maybe it already is. There are strong signals out there to support this trend with the increased usage of wireless devices including smart phones and tablets. Most of the popular social networks also have taken steps to support this trend from their side using various technological advancements.

Twitter

According to my research Twitter is the most active social network in mobile world. It gave facility for its users to update tweets using SMS which is very convenient. Folks don’t have to connect to internet, but just have to send a SMS to given number which is very user friendly way to express them and it could be used by anyone with any technical competency. Most of the countries allow the Twitter to use a toll free number which is a serious contributing factor for this trend. With the improvement of wireless mobile devices twitter was having increasing number of mobile internet users as well. Hence they came up with simplified mobile interface which could be easily rendered in small resolution mobile displays. The simple functionality of twitter helped this trend to continue exponentially. Additionally twitter introduced a mobile client which could gather more information from the device automatically including location details and attach them to tweet easily. This mobile client is very popular among iPhone and Android phone users. The result was nearly half of the tweets updated came from mobile devices in past year and twitter leads the trend.

Facebook

It should be somewhat difficult for Facebook to go mobile due to complex functionality and rich media transferring. However they have done a great job with the simplified mobile version of Facebook which is m.facebook.com. It provides only the most wanted functionalities like status update, photo sharing, commenting and profiles. It is light weight and optimized to use bandwidth efficiently. However it couldn’t rock the market like twitter did till the Facebook mobile client comes to the picture. It gained increasing popularity with the iPhone and Android boom. The application could be installed in the smart phone or tablet locally and it is using Facebook API calls to fetch data and populate the interface. With this now Facebook also in the big picture with twitter side by side. Additionally they introduced SMS status update and notification like features as well. It contributed to current success of mobile version of Facebook.

LinkedIn

As everyone knows Linkedin is special kind of social network which took the concept of ‘Exclusivity’ to its next step. It allows you take your professional social experience online. You can add your real life professional contact in there to your friend list. This highly exclusive social network is also going mobile with its mobile friendly version which is m.LinkedIn.com same as Facebook. It also provides most wanted features in a special web interface which is optimized for mobile devices. Further, same as Facebook LinkedIn also have mobile client, yet according to my experience it’s not popular as Facebook or Twitter. The reason may be LinkedIn is a professional exclusive social network and folks just won’t come to hang around in there. As the final result LinkedIn also successfully moving on with mobile social networking trend and having increasing number of mobile users in past few years.

MySpace

MySpace is one of the oldest social networks out there in internet. Before the time of Facebook and Twitter it was rocking the show. However, with the success of Facebook and twitter its popularity seems reducing. It tried to introduce new set of game with Zynga having the objective of attract more users. However, so far none gave good result. When it comes to mobile social networking they also have introduced mobile version of web interface and mobile client as well same as Facebook and Twitter. But according to statistical data same as in standard internet, even in mobile world its popularity is going down. It having continuously dropping number of users and seems losing the competition.

Google Latitude

Google latitude is very special kind of social network which is specially designed to work with mobile devices which are having GPS receiver. It has provided mobile client and it could update your location data online. So your friends will be able to see where you are now. Further, out of your friend’s network you will be able to identify gatherings and meet ups using their location data. This could be very appealing paradigm in social networking. Previously latitude was having a online interface to update location manually and so many people were doing it. But with the improvement of hardware in mobile devices they extend the concept to automate the location data updating which helped them to step ahead in mobile social networking trend.

Why Social Network Goes Mobile?

Increased Internet Speed for Mobile Devices

The main contributing factor for this exponential trend of mobile social networking is increased speed of wireless internet. Sometimes back the speed of mobile internet was 28.8 Kbps which was no good enough speed to do anything other than check mails in text format. But with the generation of mobile evolution keep increasing the connection speed. Today there are mobile internet connections having speeded more than 10 Mbps which is sometimes faster than fixed line broadband internet connection. Hence, mobile devices also could access internet same as PC. This helped people to use social networking sites on the go.

In addition to connection speed, the hardware of mobile devices also was upgraded significantly. Sometimes ago processing power of mobile devices were less than 50 Mhz. But today it’s exceeding 1GHz and that processing power is good enough to use high speed internet connections and render advanced graphics. When it comes to touch screen displays, their response time is significantly improved and they became more usable, especially for internet browsing. These improvements also contributed to the ‘Mobile social networking’ trend.

Mobile Optimization of Social Networks

As you could see in above paragraphs, most of the popular social networking sites have came up with light weight mobile web interfaces having the objective of make it easier to render in a mobile screen and optimize bandwidth usage. For that they have designed basically text based light weight versions with very lesser images. Further, they have optimized the screen width to fit to any mobile device. Most of the advanced features are been removed and frequently used features are organized in the interface in a very streamlined manner. So many mobile internet users are attracted to use social networks in mobile internet browser using wireless connectivity.

Additionally, you could see that most of the social networks are came up with mobile clients for popular mobile device platforms having the objective of improve the performance and optimize the bandwidth usage further. They are using provided web services to communicate with core application functions using very light weight protocols including JSON and SOAP. I could see that most of the iPhone users and Android users are attracted to Facebook and Twitter client give a signal of success of above effort. These technological advancement and development effort of social networks also have contributed to growth of ‘Mobile social networking’ trend.

Social Impact

The social impact of mobile social networking is in front of our eyes today. If you take a look at Facebook status update and tweets, there are so many updates you can tell that they came from mobile devices. They would sound like ‘At Lecture’ or ‘On the way to big apple’. And if you take a look at Facebook photo upload stream, there are so many mobile uploads. These showing that people have become more open to social networks when they are with a mobile device rather than with a PC. And most importantly they have updated location data, sometimes as text or may be automatically with Geo tagging techniques. And when you update a status, the response time of your friends have became very short since most of them are connected to social networks with their smart phones and tables. These are living proof that mobile social networking has taken the real human social experience online way better than previous PC based access. However, I have noted sometimes people don’t care about their privacy when they update status and photos online which might lead to serious problems. Finally, its user’s responsibility to update details wisely.

Future Possibilities

The main reason for the popularity of mobile social networking is very fast access and response time since you have your wireless mobile device most of the time with you. With the future technological development the mobile social network will extend beyond wireless mobile devices. Instead of mobile device, there can be a device you can wear all the time or may be permanently implanted to your body. It could update you biological data to social network. So your friends or relations could see them online as long as they are in your network you also would be able to do the same. So future status update might looks like this.

‘My blood pressure is 100-140’

After seen this, a friend might comment.

‘Dude, why is your blood pressure so high. Are you OK?’

Possibilities are limitless in this kind of social network and real life social experience will be totally represented online and may be more. The above mentioned kind of social network could be used by a hospital to track the patient’s data more effectively and attend to issues in a timely manner.

As long as people are so open in social networks due to mobile trend, leaders could use that as a tool to identify people’s mentality. Once an employee updates a status, it could be a valuable piece of information for a manager or employer. This kind of data might be used to take strategic decision in human resource management. If you think further, collection large amount of social network update could be used to Government strategic decision making procedures. If you could enter those data in to appropriate machine learning algorithm, the government would be able to predict the mental state of civilians with a statistical probability and that will be valuable information to decide the momentum of country’s future growth.

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.