If you remember correctly not long ago I created a weblog post where I talked about (And shared some more pictures) Little Venice, that is, Puerto de Mogán, one of those lovely fishermen’s villages that you can find on the South West coast of Gran Canaria. So I thought I would share a couple of other pictures I took recently but at the same time I also thought about showing you a couple of other pictures I took from another breathtaking location on the South of the island: Monte Leon.

Monte Leon is one of those places with some fantastic views that clearly remind you that Gran Canaria is a whole lot more than just sandy beaches and a lovely weather. Just about 20 minute drive inland from the South coast you will be able to see some of the most beautiful scenes around in the island that you can think of and which will clearly remind you of some other stunning places from all over the world. Thus I will leave you to figure it out and see what you think. For the time being here you have got four of my favourite pictures of the week that I have been sharing over the last couple of days over at my Flickr account.

Puerto de Mogan

Puerto de Mogan

Monte Leon

Monte Leon

Enjoy them !

Technorati Tags : Gran+Canaria, Monte+Leon, Puerto+De+Mogan, Little+Venice

Here we go again, folks. Google creating some more havoc out there on the Internet. And this time around forgetting the Beta flag of, yet again, another product release. That is how Google Analytics has been born. Indeed, you may have read about it all over the place on the Web, but just to get you started here you have got /.’s, Digg’s and Arstechnica’s articles on the announcement.

I must say that when I read through the different news web sites about the new Google release I was a bit skeptic about it, specially when it has been a few months now since it bought Urchin, an offering for which you would have to pay a good amount of money to get the service going. But now Google managed to surprise us all and make that product release free of charge ! Goodness ! How much trouble can that create ? Indeed, quite a lot, folks, quite a lot. So I decided to give it a try and sign up; take it for a ride and see how it would go.

And that is where all my excitement just died out because for the last couple of hours I have been trying to sign up with my GMail account and to no avail. Rather the system is not responding or I am getting time out errors. I guess that once again Google is suffering from the typical launch crash they tend to go through when releasing a new product. Either way, I am surely going to wait for this one to be up and running, as I have been looking forward to get this kind of functionality for my weblog elsua and now, instead of having to pay for that kind of offering, we have got the opportunity of making good use of a free release and see how it would perform. See if it would meet our needs and our requirements.

So far I have been using Miarroba to get some further web analysis and statistics from my weblog and I have been quite content with the experience and the results, thus I guess I will have a very good way of comparing both services whenever Google Analytics comes up live again and see which one would be the winner. And now, at least, I am glad to hear that I am not the only one who is having a similar problem to the one I have detailed above. Anyway, time to wait for the service to be back up and give it a try. Then once I have checked it out for a few days I will let you all know how it went, if I ever get a chance, that is.

Technorati Tags : Google+Analytics, Google

I have been out on the Internet since, more or less, beginning of 1997 (Yes, I know, quite some time already), and back then and for a number of different years I started to use different Instant Messaging tools in order to get in touch with my colleagues, friends and family. That is why in the end I ended up getting multiple userid accounts: AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, etc. You name it, and I have an account for it, I am sure. But over the last few months now I have noticed a change in the different tools I use for some real-time collaboration.

Indeed, over the last few months I have noticed how I am switching away, little by little, from the traditional Instant Messaging tools into VoIP / IM Tools. I mean, I cannot remember any longer when it was the last time that I fired up ICQ or MSN. Instead, I am finding out that every single morning when I come to work I start loading tools like Skype, Damaka, and, lately, with some of my colleagues, Google Talk. And I seem to be quite content with that because by now I have convinced most of my contacts to make the switch. And it certainly has been worth while the effort.

I am not sure if you have noticed it or not but from the perspective of knowledge sharing, collaborating and engaging much more actively with a group of people VoIP tools seem to be much more powerful than traditional IM tools. Why?, you may be wondering. Well, I am not really too sure about it but I am finding out that I get to establish a conversation via voice with folks a lot easier than with IM. In some cases people do not seem, nor want, to be fast typists, so collaborating closely with someone feeling that way becomes a bit difficult and slow sometimes. However, engaging with them using voice tools certainly does help. A lot.

Plus the fact that for most of the VoIP tools out there we can find different options to record the conversations and revisit them back whenever we would need to, which will help a whole lot more whenever we would need to try to capture meeting minutes, action items, ideas, thoughts, etc. etc. And finally, more and more of those VoIP tools are also putting together video conferencing capabilities, which will make it even easier to relate to people and get to know them by allowing us to put a face behind the voice, a key item to help boost your trust levels with your peers and therefore get much more meaningful exchange of knowledge and information.

That is why I was quite content to see that Festoon now provides video conferencing support not only to Skype, but also with Google Talk, all under the same executable. I am just wondering when Damaka would be added to the list. I mean, with over 1 million downloads you would expect that such a fantastic VoIP tool would be beyond the mark of having reached a significant enough critical mass. So as these tools get better and better and make collaboration a whole lot easier I am finding out that I get to use traditional IM tools less and less. And best part of it is that most of my colleagues and friends feel the same way, so converting them hasn’t been too difficult. So how about you ? Have you moved away already from Instant Messaging tools or are you still too afraid to jump into the VoIP bandwagon? What do you think ? Will you ever make the switch?

Technorati Tags : Instant+Messaging, VoIP, Damaka, Skype, Google+Talk

Not long ago a couple of elsua’s readers asked me via e-mail if I could provide them with some more information details about what IBM was doing around the area of Knowledge Management, Collaboration and knowledge sharing on a corporate level, and while back then I referred them back to the Alphaworks Collaboration web site where you can get a very good overview of what is actually happening, just recently I thought that this other particular news article in InfoWorld would be very enlightening for those who may want to have a look into some details further.

The article itself is titled IBM trying to promote internal cycle of growth and amongst other things you will get to read over there what IBM is doing with the IBM On Demand WorkPlace, specially from an internal perspective, as one of the most powerful options to share information with one another, search for experts using the Enterprise Directory called  BluePages and having quick access to ThinkPlace, one of the very last features coming onboard and that IBMers are currently using to continue boosting innovation from a collaboration perspective.

And also apart from getting to hear about some of the capabilities out there for IBMers you will also get to read about what some other work IBM  has been doing and for which we shall see some results coming out very shortly. Like, Green Pages, for instance. So as you can see things are still thriving around the collaboration and innovation areas inside of IBM. And one thing I am also planning to do with elsua is to give you a little bit more background on the happenings as we go along. Thus stay tuned for some further updates as they may come along.

Technorati Tags : IBM, IBM+Collaboration, IBM+ThinkPlace, IBM+On+Demand+WorkPlace

If you remember, a couple of days ago I created a weblog post around the subject Who Is Afraid of the Big, Bad Weblog and over there I indicated how for the last few months, if not years already, it has become evident that no matter how large or how small your company may be you cannot longer ignore the different conversations taking place in the Blogosphere, amongst other means of sharing knowledge and information out there in the Internet.

Well, the next question now is what can be done in order to track those weblogs that talk about your company, your products, your services and so forth, amongst the millions and millions of weblog posts that are already available? And if on top of that you take into account the different conversations taking place in Wikis, forums, newsgroups, etc. etc. then it will certainly become a rather cumbersome task and all of that for the sake of keeping up to date with them. Is it worth while ?, you may be wondering. I would think so. I would very much think so, indeed. But what can we do to scan through all of that information resources available to us?

I am not sure how it is all going to come out but this just looks like perfect timing. Check out Blog-Spotting With IBM over at Internetnews where you can read how very shortly IBM will be providing such service using Public Image Monitoring Solution, based on WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition. Yes, indeed, keeping track of what people out there say about your company and your products is just about to take a new approach and make things easier. A whole lot easier, I must say. And I will surely be glad to follow up on it and see how it will all work out in the end. Because the sooner we get a better grasp of the different conversations, the better. Wouldn’t you think so ?

Additional Reading: /. IBM Announces “Blog-Spotting” Software

Technorati Tags : IBM, IBM+Weblogs

I am sure that by now, one way or another, every single weblogger out there may have been affected by splogs. And if they haven’t that means that they still haven’t been exposed to them but will shortly be doing so. Who isn’t affected by spam at some point or another? We have seen it in e-mails, IMs, web sites, newsgroups, you name it. Now, the latest trend in spamming is splogging.

Just recently there has been lots of commentary about how this new kind of spam is getting really strong out there in the Blogosphere. Check out, for instance, the discussions held over at /. or the CNET news article on the subject: Tempted by blogs, spam becomes splog. I think it wouldn’t come to nobody as a surprise that this was about to happen. I mean, right now Technorati is indicating it is tracking 20.9 million weblogs and I very much doubt that all of them would be authentic weblogs. There are lots of chunk out there and somehow I feel that we all know this was something that we should have prevented but never bothered doing it. And now we are starting to pay the price.

How many great weblogs and their corresponding weblog posts are passing by unnoticed just because we haven’t been able to stop splogging? How long will it take before something gets done? I mean, it has happened in e-mails, IMs, and so forth and in most cases it is sort of manageable now. But why not with splogs? What are we waiting for, folks? I am not sure if people would realise about this or not but this is a phenomenon that apart from being very annoying it could also create a lot more harm than helping out spreading the word about weblogs. If not check out in the CNET article how many search engines are already thinking about restricting the number of weblog services they would crawl (Blogger being one paying the big price so far).

There must be a better way to handle this issue. We all know how crucial it is to have a working search engine to find stuff stored in weblogs, so what are we, webloggers, going to do to find the content we need if search engines are no longer going to crawl the weblogs we want? How sustainable that can be? How long before people give up and start moving elsewhere? Indeed, there must be a better way for weblogging services to stop this new trend. Otherwise, the consequences would be much higher than what may have looked like so far.

The key question remains though: are weblogging services like Blogger, and whatever else, ready to kill this new trend? Once and for all? I am sure there is a way of doing it. I mean, I refuse to think the splogging can take down such weblogging services just like that. So why is it not happening any way faster? Are we witnessing the beginning of a new era where weblogs will get hammered with an increasing amount of spam that in the end would make them unmanageable? I hope this might never happen, but so far I see very little that these weblogging services are doing to avoid this problem. So what needs to happen to take some further steps to stop it? That a whole system goes down and becomes unusable? Will we be able to afford it ? I am sure we will not, which is why I am hoping that we may still be on time to fix it, otherwise it is going to be some interesting times for us, webloggers.

Will we be ready for the fight ? You bet we will ! We just need to find that better way of handling the creation of new weblogs, and I am not sure about what you think, but I wouldn’t think it would be too complicated to change the way setting up a weblog works now and make it much more interactive for the hands of the new weblogger. After all, what is it like to follow a couple of extra steps knowing that it would eventually get you there? As I said, I am sure there is a way, we just need to find it and implement it. And the sooner, the better.

Technorati Tags : Metablogging, Splogs