Author: Mark

Amazon Kindle and Electronic Books

image One of the gifts I was given for Christmas was an Amazon Kindle, which finally arrived yesterday. I’m not 100% sold yet on reading books on a device – I already have enough things that I have to plug in at night 🙂

But my first impression is that this is a pretty nice device.

The good (so far)

  • Easily Portable – I travel a lot and I also read a lot. When I went to Spain for Tech-Ed Europe I brought 5 books with me on the trip (and yes I finished all five). I have books that I read about business related topics and books that I just read for fun. Carrying that many books, and I would carry more if possible, is not easy. The Kindle is tiny and weighs practically nothing. I love the idea that I could take as many books as I want when I travel.
  • Lots of books available – I’ve lost count but Amazon has an amazing number of books in the eBook format as well as several magazines and newspapers. Side note, one of the books I’m reading now: Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged isn’t available on the Kindle (disappointing).
  • No Computer Required – Amazon cut a deal with Sprint for built-in EVDO service so there is no monthly cost for the Kindle’s WAN support. You can browse the web and (of course) browse and purchase books from the Amazon store. Buying books is a breeze too. Last night I bought Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds and from the time I hit the order button to the time it was delivered to the device was about ~5 seconds. I hope we see more devices in the future that take this same approach.
  • Readability – Wow! I really didn’t think there would be anyway that I would compare reading on a screen to reading paper. The Kindle’s screen uses a display technology called electronic paper and I can honestly say it’s the most readable electronic screen I’ve used. There is no back light for the screen, there is also no anti-aliasing – the text is clear and looks just like ink.

The not so good

There is a lot to like about the Kindle, but here is what I don’t like:

  • Cost of books – Buying a book is easy. The problem is the books cost the same as a paperback! I would have expected the books to be a lot less considering that a lot of the COGS is removed: printing, shipping, inventory, etc. I am sure the margin’s for each book sold is through the roof. Hopefully the price of books will come down over time.
  • DRM – I’m not a DRM fan. When I purchase something (music, video, books) it becomes content that I have rights to use and I want to be able to use it anywhere I want. Amazon’s books use their own DRM to ensure that their eBooks can only be used on the device that purchased it. So sharing books with friends is essentially broken.
  • Airplane – I have to find something new to do when traveling and hear the ominous “turn off all electronic devices until we’re in the air/on the ground“. That’s prime reading time, but not with an eBook. Ugh.

I don’t think the Kindle is ready to replace traditional books just yet. There are some kinks that need to be worked out still in how the market works for eBooks. However, I’m going to start using it as my primary way to read books and most definitely for any business book. For example, even though I already own a hardcover of Good to Great I’ll probably buy it for the Kindle too (when it is available) — just because I can search and annotate it any time.

Tips & Hacks

Below are some tips & hacks that I’ve found already — my first Google search this morning was “Hacking the Kindle” 🙂

Telligent Reporting Server, Beta 1

It’s been a busy couple of weeks at Telligent. A few weeks ago we announced Graffiti Beta 1 (and we’ve gotten some awesome feedback – thanks!)

Tonight we’re happy to announce that Beta 1 of our new Telligent Reporting Server product is now available:

Download Telligent Reporting Server, Beta 1

We’re committed to providing Community Server customers with great business intelligence and reporting is a big theme for us in 2008. This beta provides a good insight into some of the tools that we’ll offer to help customers get a much better understanding of what is happening in their community. Below are some screen shots and additional details:

Look for trends in your community

Look for trends such as user logins over time. All the reports are interactive so you can click-and-drag to zoom into a particular date range:

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Quickly identify key contributors

Want to know what users are contributing most to your community? Break it down by time, by views, and a number of other criteria. Charts allow you to click into a graph to get detailed sub-reports.

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Export data for deeper analysis

All data can quickly and easily be exported to Microsoft Excel or other data analysis tools. We make it simple to extract your important information so you can slice and dice it to your hearts content.

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That is just a small sampling of some of the capabilities of Reporting Server. We’ve built over 60 different reports to help you understand how your community is being used. Reporting Server also has reports for tracking answer/unanswered status for your forums, detailed analysis of forum threads, rating analysis of blogs, break-down of users by domain and much more.

In addition to working well with Community Server you can also build your own reports. In fact we fully expect to see Reporting Server become its own stand-alone tool that can be used to enable simple and easy reporting for any data.

Enjoy!

Microsoft Access or SQL Server Express

We’ve had a couple of people ask us why Graffiti uses Microsoft Access instead of SQL Express. I wanted to explain the decision and also point out that Graffiti will run just fine on SQL Express as well as SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005. With our commercial edition you’ll actually be able to choose between Access or SQL Server.

We decided to use Microsoft Access instead of SQL Express because we know that the majority of customers that would deploy Graffiti would do so on servers that were hosting hundreds, if not thousands, of other sites.

As Scott Guthrie states, “SQL Express is is good for dedicated hosting scenarios, and for scenarios where you have a small number (4-10) customers on a box (where each can get their own instance of SQL Express)” he continues “When you have 100-1000 customers on a box (massive shared hosting), having a separate instance of SQL Express for each customer doesn’t scale. That is where/why you’d want to use SQL Server — and carve up a separate database for each customer.”

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/10/15/427581.aspx#428941

A lot of people in the Microsoft developer community have been really disappointed that SQL Express didn’t live up to its expectations: a realistic replacement for scenarios where a simple light-weight copy-and-deploy database was required. Believe me, we’d much rather use SQL Server!

The other challenge is that many hosting companies still charge a premium for SQL Server storage. From our perspective it was more important to keep the following barriers to entry as low as possible:

  1. Hosting costs at as low a cost as possible. Hosting companies typically don’t charge for use of Access databases.
  2. Install and setup as simple as possible. Access allows the install process to literally be as simple as getting the files on the server.

Hope that helps!

The WordPress as a content management system (cms) alternative

We kept hearing customers ask for a super simple content management system and had a number of customers say, “Something as simple as WordPress but with more modern content management features.” We listened and we built on a much more robust platform: Microsoft .NET.

The result: Graffiti CMS.

We just released beta 1. But we’re already pretty confident that we got it right. Here is why:

Install and setup is easier

WordPress is known for having an install that takes 5 minutes or less. Graffiti’s install takes less than 2 minutes. Why? We don’t expect you to setup or configure a database.

WordPress has 5 installation steps, below is Graffiti’s. I actually copied WordPress’s and crossed out the irrelevant stuff (about half of it):

  1. Make sure your host meets the requirements (IIS and .NET). Also, have a database ready with proper username and password.
  2. Unzip the package you downloaded.
  3. Open up wp-config-sample.php and fill in your database details. Save and rename the file to wp-config.php.
  4. Upload all the files to your webhost
  5. Run the installation file. Relative to where you uploaded the files, it’ll be in wp-admin/install.php.

You don’t need to know PHP or ASP.NET

Both PHP and ASP.NET are tools for programmers. Graffiti is built for people. You don’t have to know how how to program your DVR to use it. Why should you be required to write code to use a CMS?

Now we did realize that designers would want to customize how Graffiti looks. So we decided to introduce a neutral programming concept we call Chalk. Chalk is a simple templating language that gives both designers and developers the ability to customize how content is shown without requiring them to read a 500 lb. book on programming.

Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform and better tools. So for developers familiar with ASP.NET its full power and capability are available to you.

Just enough workflow

Graffiti enables just enough workflow. By just enough we mean that workflow is available if you want to use it but workflow isn’t required. The workflow concepts in Graffiti revolve around content creators, content managers, and site managers. Content creators create the content, content managers publish the content, and site managers control how content is presented.

Simple.

Best of all workflow is something that you can choose to use. You’re never forced into anything.

Simple content management tools

Graffiti keeps track of all changes in your content and who made the changes. Want to see what has changed or roll back to a previous version. No problem.

We’ve tried to skim the top of traditional content management and blogging and blend them together.

Search Engine Optimized for Google and everyone else

We put a lot of effort into ensuring that Graffiti is optimized for search engines. Whether it’s search engine friendly URLs, smart redirects, or properly structured content you’ll find that Graffiti was built to help people find your content.

Built by Telligent

Graffiti CMS is built by Telligent the same folks behind Community Server. Community Server was one of the first robust multi-user blogging/community platforms available. We’ve got an 80+ person team that does nothing but eat, live, and breath communities and social software and more importantly help customers build and grow successful communities.

Of course there are a number of other reasons why you should evaluate Graffiti. But why don’t you see for yourself. Try Graffiti Beta 1 and if you have questions just drop me an email: rhoward@telligent.com