Condivisione di buoni prodotti della Rete.
Le nuove tribù promuovono nuove infrastrutture di accesso alla Rete. L'innovazione la promuovono i Cittadini; siamo noi quelli che stiamo aspettando.
This morning civilization almost ground to a halt as Twitter was hit with a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service Attack and went down for over two hours, with intermittent outages continuing even as they got the situation more under control. So what exactly is a DDoS attack?
The goal of any Denial of Service is to take out a specific online resource and make it unavailable to its users. Targets are typically hugely popular destinations with a lot to lose, and with Twitter’s explosive growth comes its emergence as a juicy target for hackers and miscellaneous enemies or pranksters.
DDoS attacks often involve sending a flood of external communication requests to the site that at first glance may appear just like legitimate traffic. The intent is to overwhelm the service’s resources to such a degree that it can’t respond to real requests for real users, effectively rendering the site unreachable or so slow to respond as to be impossible to use for some period of time.
Denial of Service: Nothing New
Denial of Service tactics are nothing new. Such malicious takedowns have a history stretching at least as far back as 2000 with DDoS attacks targeting some of the Internet’s most popular sites: Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and others experienced protracted outages over several days, with an estimated impact of as much as $1.7 billion in lost revenue and damages.
It’s also worth noting that these attacks are extremely difficult to protect against, and tough to handle even once they’re identified. Over time the methodologies have become sophisticated enough to make stemming the floodgates of incoming pings tricky even after a DDoS pattern is discovered. In other words, unlike during Twitter (
)’s earlier days when it was popular to complain about its downtime due to a difficulty scaling to meet demand, this time it’s hard to blame the site for being a victim of malicious attack.
It’s unclear when or even if we’ll find out who perpetrated today’s DDoS-related downtime, but we certainly hope those responsible are eventually brought to justice.
VeneziaCamp2009 - 23, 24 e 25 ottobre 2009 - Venezia, Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio.
http://veneziacamp2009.ning.com
Adobe Photoshop is probably one of the most popular graphic editing program used extensively. There is one simple reason for that. Photoshop is easy to learn and offer a variety of advanced tools to optimize and emphasize some impressive results.
In today’s post, you’ll find an assortment of new & high quality Photoshop tutorials that others have freely contributed to the design community for making your next photoshop effect.
How to Create a 3D Leaf from a Texture Photograph
In this beginners level tutorial, you will learn how to create a vibrant 3D leaf compilation from a single 2D photograph. You will be able to manipulate the object however you prefer.
Firefish Photoshop Tutorial
In this Photoshop Tutorial, you’ll learn how to design a mascot based on the Firefox logo, and mimic the fire effect using the pen tool and gradients.
Advanced Tutorial: Creating ‘Broken Link’
David Cousens explains how to create a stunningly professional work of art, in this advanced tutorial.
Fantastic Digital Painting Image in Photoshop and Corel Painter
Jill will show us how to create an amazing digital painting design using Photoshop and Corel Painter.
Creating an Abstract Watercolor Wallpaper
There are plenty of ways to create a Watercolor Effect in Photoshop. Some are very cheesy and you can easily tell that a simple filter has been used. In this tutorial, we will be using Layer Masking. It is one of the most fascinating and powerful Photoshop method, to use layer masks in your designs.
Create Smoke Effect on Grungy Wallpaper
This tutorial will teach you how to create simple smoke effect against a grungy background by using the Smudge and Warp tools.
Create a 3D Text Scene Using Photoshop
This tutorial will teach you how tocreate a realistic 3D text scene using Photoshop with a little help from Illustrator for the 3D text.
How to Create a Photo Manipulation of a Flooded City Scene
In this tutorial, we will learn how to manipulate a simple photo into a flooding torrent of a scene. You’ll use some relatively simple techniques to give this image a semi-realistic, stylized feel.
Colorful Spirograph Poster
In this great tutorial we will be learning how to create a Spirograph effect in Photoshop. Then we’ll learn how to use the effect to create a very stylish poster design with some smart typography and wait for it… rainbow gradients! So give it a try and I’m sure you’ll learn a bit.
80’s Style Design Using Photoshop
The 80’s have always had an iconic impact on Pop Culture. So, here’s a simple tutorial inspired by the 80’s.
Create a Furious Pink Panther Poster
How to create a poster of this new and improved pink panther using some great online resources, from Bittbox and the Go Media Arsenal.
Creating a Space-Helmeted Future Retro Illustration
I don’t know about you guys but I’m loving the work of Electrik Suicide and Sakke Soini at the moment. I’m going to call it Future Retro for the sake of this tutorial. I employed my take on the style in pitching a poster and overall look for a night at a local club. This tutorial goes over the meat and potatoes of it’s creation!
Create Smoke Text
A big thing that you see in graphic design at the moment is the use of smoke stphotography, these photos look really good but look a lot better when you mess about with them in Photoshop. Here we’ll be mixing type and a smoke image to create a really nice abstract wallpaper. This is just a quick tutorial but hopefully you’ll learn some new techniques so give it a go.
Horror Theme Text Effect
Design a Golden Flame Text Effect
In this tutorial, we will learn the process involved in creating this amazing golden flame text effect with soft smoke texture in Photoshop.
Create a Realistic Grunge Peeling Sticker
In this Photoshop tutorial, we will learn how to create a grunge peeling sticker effect in Photoshop. You will also be learning some basic to intermediate techniques which you can make use of in your future designs!
Create scorching Photoshop effects
Fake an image of a burning man in Photoshop with these flaming brilliant techniques from Fabio Sasso.
Design a Super Sleek Text Effect with Water Drop Texture
The steps in this tutorial to create a Super Sleek, eye-catching text effect with Water Drop Texture. This effect is simple but effective, and would be suitable for any water/rainy/ocean themed designs you’re creating.
Create A Retro Cosmic Design
This tutorial will teach you how to recreate the Retro Cosmic designs made popular by James White of Signalnoise. All you need is a copy of Photoshop and some time on your hands. In this particular example we’re going to create a retro cosmic rainbow but the techniques explained can be used in combination with any shape and colour.
How to Make a Dark, Post-Apocalyptic City Illustration
In this tutorial, we’ll change a full of sunshine, ordinary photograph into a gloomy image of the world after destruction of mankind. Using simple tools, we’ll turn lively streets into abandoned ruins overgrown with weeds. A number of stock images and a few little tricks will let us optimize our work and make this job more interesting and spectacular.
Letterpress Text Effect
A mini tutorial outlining how to create this effect in your own designs.
How To Create a Retro Apple Wallpaper
Follow these simple steps in Photoshop to create a homage to Apple, combining the retro striped Apple logo with a range of soft grungy textures to produce a detailed design with subtle touches of colour and tone.
The 6 Spheres of Social Media Marketing | Search Engine People |
YOU: "Beautiful, Brian. Looks complicated. What is it?"
ME: It shows the stages of internet marketing, including SEO, PPC, Email, and social media.
YOU: So why'd you call it the 6 spheres of SOCIAL media?
ME: This diagram integrates social media with all the other internet marketing. That's the new thing.
YOU: Oh, cool.
[Download a PDF of all the diagrams in this post.]
What's the Point of The 6 Spheres Diagram?
The point is for you to see how it's a process, with different actions and tactics depending on how close your prospect is to your ultimate goal.
The assumption is that you want prospects to buy something, or if you're a charity or non-profit, you might want them to donate or sign a petition.
(Yes, maybe now your goal is to get emails or build your twitter account or whatever- but those are ends that become means to the real end… if you're ultimately not making money, you're going to have to get another job.)
Surviving and thriving means keeping the end in mind, which is the small green sphere at the bottom.
[NOTE: for clever people, yes, they are circles, not spheres. but if your computer were in 3D, you'd see that they are actually spheres. No, no really.]
How Will This 6 Spheres Diagram Help Me?
My 5 steps of optimization teaches that in order to get where you want to go efficiently, you need:
1. A goal
2. A key metric
3. An understanding of where you're at
4. Strategy and tactics
5. The ability to change your route based on what works and what doesn't.The 6 spheres diagram gives you a map of how to get prospects to take action no matter where they're at, and no matter what internet marketing channel you use.
Let's break it down.
Playing the Music of the 6 Spheres… In Three Stages
1. The outermost sphere, your universe of all prospects, can only be reached by the strongest customer acquisition methods, the ones with the greatest reach: search engine optimization, pay per click, TweetROI (twitter pay per tweet), Twitterhawk (targeted twitter @replies), PR, and branding channels.
2. The second and third outermost spheres are considered relationship building.
3. The inner three spheres begin with your website and end in your most wanted response. Those last three include conversion optimization, email copywriting, and your offline sales process.
The 6 Spheres of Social Marketing and the 4 Phases of Social Marketing
In case you wonder how this relates to my blog post about the 4 phases of social media marketing, the 4 phases all happen outside of your website, so they apply only to the outer three spheres. Check out this diagram…
1. Strategy and brand planning should begin when you still have yet to establish your social media outposts (profiles).
2. Establishing social media presence makes it possible for people in the outermost sphere to become aware of you.
3. Engagement in the two outermost spheres creates a relationship and begins to create affinity for your brand.
4. ROI offers make sense once you have built relationships into the third sphere.Understanding Where Prospects Are At In The 6 Phases
1. The Universe: This is the universe of all your prospects. The size of that group depends on scope of your offerings and popularity of the niche. These people may not know about you but definitely are not members of your email or social media lists. You're working on the Attention aspect of the AIDA acronym.
2. Awareness/Initial Engagement: These people are aware enough about you to interact with you, but they aren't sold on you yet. Engagement happens on almost every level, but the difference is in the degree and strength of the relationship you've achieved. Now you're working on the Interest aspect of AIDA.
3. Social Media List: These people are interested enough to become a Facebook fan,a Twitter follower, or subscribe to your blog RSS. This is similar to your email list, but I regard an email list as a stronger connection and more responsive. We might debate that Gen Y's attitude toward email will change this in the future, but it's equally likely that as Gen Y gets deeper into the workforce they will accept and use email as Gen X and the Boomers do. NOTE: you may turn regular website visitors into SM list members, too. There are a lot of other possible directions. I'm really just examining the process of pulling new customers in via social media.
4. Your Website: People who get to this level have reached an area you have great control over. Everything your website does should help convert visitors to the next level of relationship. That might be to subscribe to your email list or become a lead. Or you might try to get them to buy now. This is the Desire aspect of AIDA.
5. Pre-Conversion: These people are on your email list or have submitted a lead to the sales force. The lead in many cases is closer to a sale than an email subscriber is, unless your lead collecting form is very general.
6. Converted: These people give you your most wanted result. For ecommerce, that means they bought something. For charities that's a donation. For a petition drive, it's a signature. The is the Action part of AIDA.
Examples of Companies Doing a Great Job In Each Sphere
1. Universe responses by topic: Frank @ComcastCares, Ben @OmnitureCare. Both of these companies are using Twitter to reach out and grab people when they talk about Comcast or Omniture respectively. That's both customer service and PR (in the form of reputation management).
2. Engagement with @replies: @coffeegroundz made history as perhaps the first to take a to-go order online from a customer.
3. Relationship building with SM lists: Both @ComcastCares and @OmnitureCare do this too. And you could argue that @coffeegroundz did this by being open minded enough to take an order on Twitter. But this is the nitty gritty tweeting that many companies are doing on a daily basis. Great examples include Christi Day @SouthwestAir, Morgan and Lindsey @JetBlue, Brad @Starbucks, Scott Monty @Ford, and Lucia @pandora_radio.
Just check out their stream and look for @replies they've written, especially if there are several to the same person. Everybody tweets and announces things and promotes stuff, but the twitter accounts that are having personal and helpful conversations with people are the ones to watch.
4. Direct ROI offers to SM lists: @DellOutlet brought in $1 million from offers tweeted in 2008. They're the pioneers. Looking forward to seeing more successes in this area from companies with less of a mega-brand. I'd love to hear from small businesses that have succeeded here.
Wow. What Now?
That's a lot to digest. I think you'll need to read this several times. It's a bit denser than my usual blog post.
This all provides you with a map for social media marketing. As you might guess, there's still a lot of work left:
- What's your brand planning and brand projection process for collaborative brainstorming with clients?
- What viral acceleration strategies fit the brand and goals?
- Will engagement be executed by client, agency, or both?
- What kind of ROI offers make sense?
[Download a PDF of all the diagrams in this post.]
IT'S a dirty job, but someone's got to do it: for innovation to thrive on the internet, we must break up the very social networks that the web has made possible.
Previous research has shown that certain patterns of social interaction make radical innovation more likely. Bold ideas are typically incompletely formed when first conceived and easily shot down by criticism. Hence, they emerge more readily in communities in which individuals work mostly in small and relatively isolated groups, giving their ideas time and space to mature.
The problem, says social scientist Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the National University of Singapore, is that today's software developers work in social networks in which everyone is closely linked to everyone else. "The over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold," he suggests.
The over-abundance of connections reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking holdTo restore the kind of aggressive innovation needed to build the next-generation internet will require re-engineering of the social networks of software developers themselves (Science, vol 325, p 396). This could be done, for example, if funding agencies ensured that research projects were carried out by many small, competing groups over longer periods. "To enable innovation it may be necessary to reduce the number of social ties between coders," says Mayer-Schönberger.
A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post.
I confess to feeling a bit triumphant. My article was ripe fodder for the blogosphere's thrash-and-bash attitude: a profile of a Washington-based "business coach," Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace. Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered.
But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?
* * *
The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.
I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.
Gawker's version of my story, headlined " 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job," begins by telling its readers to "Meet Anne Loehr" -- with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: "Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya." That's information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes.
The bulk of the posting consists of Loehr's own words, her thoughts on this generation's affinity for reality television and its supposed aversion to Nike products. (Still no mention of The Post.) For those little nuggets, I drove a half-hour to Fairfax County's Tower Club, and attended her two-hour "Get Wise with Gen Ys" session and recorded it.
Then the work got painstaking: It took about four hours to transcribe the session. (Are you playing mournful melodies on your violin yet?)
After the quotations from Loehr, the Gawker posting is a cut-and-paste of my own stuff, a description of why a financial adviser attended (so she can work better with clients who are "trust fund babies," she said). Still no attribution to The Post.
The eighth and last paragraph discusses and links to Loehr's "generational cheat sheet" on our Web site. Finally, beneath the last paragraph, the hyperlinked words "Washington Post" appear in red. Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn't have.
After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?
- Venezia città dell’innovazione
- Venezia WiFi
- Venezia... ombelico del mondo! :-)
Tre giorni nell'Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio; tre giorni per discutere, collaborare, crescere. Un appuntamento destinato a diventare il punto di riferimento più importante per tutti coloro che desiderano c… ContinuaCreata da Mauro Magnani 31 Lug 2009 at 23:47. Aggiornata l'ultima volta da Mauro Magnani 19 ore fa .