July 23rd, 2008

Two weeks ago a great thing happened to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Google decided to include actual number of people searching for each keyword combination in the search engine.

The keyword tool is used to find combination of words that can be used for advertising on the Google search engine or in the Google Ad network. Companies that pay for these keyword combinations get to display their text-ads next to the search results, and have to pay Google for people who click their ads.

Getting real search numbers is a relief and boon to all internet marketing people who struggle to understand what people are searching for. My first thought was “Great, now let’s see what people are interested in and where my program fits in!”. And for a few days it was fascinating to type in different keywords, find combinations with lots of competition, and even much more used combinations without any competition.

Then I started wondering, why did they do this?

The first answer is simple. They believe they will make more money by doing so. Maybe because new keyword combinations will become more interesting, or because of the news factor where people flock to the keyword tool and spend more money on marketing with keyword campaigns. But then again, why not do this years ago?

Another posibility is that interest in keyword advertising is falling (or not rising as fast as it used to), people are clicking less on advertisements or a combination of the two. So in a sense they could be getting desperate.

And then Google’s quarterly results were released, without Wall Street being too happy. Google hiring just 448 new employees the last quarter was the final confirmation.

I belive Google is worried, and if they are, so am I.

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July 20th, 2008

One of the main focuses while creating PeerAware has always been to create a system that supports creating a knowledge sharing network. With the latest release a few such networks have emerged and every day I am getting more feedback from these. Among the requests I have received is the possibility to create question-answer-documents based on topics discussed in a workspace chat. I have a few ideas for how to implement such a system, and expect one of the next beta releases to include this.

The intention then is to make sure that topics discussed in a workspace chat can be converted to a document that can be found through a normal PeerAware search. Watch this space, there is a lot more to come!

Tags: knowledge management, knowledge sharing
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June 28th, 2008

With Beta 11 of PeerAware the shared whiteboard became much more visually pleasing, and with the latest theming and icon upgrades the usability of PeerAware is improving rapidly. Focus for the next couple of weeks will be to add support for linking objects together in the whiteboard, to enable drawing diagrams with smart connections. This has been a weak spot in the current implementation. Also expect to see more export functionality, something quite a few people have requested so far.

The problem as always is time of course, so now it is back to coding instead of writing on the blog.

Tags: whiteboard
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June 26th, 2008

A lot of effort has gone into upgrading the user interface of PeerAware, and among the improvements a new set of smilies and user icons have been created. The user icons are based on work by Juliane Krug, and the smilies are based on Nicolas Gaglianis work. All of the svgs are taken from the openclipart library where the base drawings have been put into the public domain.

I use Inkscape for all my graphics needs both in PeerAware and on the web-site. It is a great editor for drawing, and for each new version it has improved both usability and feature-set.

The new user interface of PeerAware is both simpler and more esthetically pleasing. Still a lot can be improved for even better usability, and I will just continue updating both the UI and functionality. I hope you will enjoy what will come over the next months.

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May 4th, 2008

Traditionally it has only been possible to create web-pages with the client-server model. This model is based upon the web browser connecting to a web server, requesting a web page and displaying the result. The last 3-4 years Ajax and web 2.0 has been all the rage, and has greatly improved how a web page can interact with the web server. With Ajax a web page can do async requests to a web server, and this makes it possible to construct programs out of a web page. A great example of this is Google Maps.

Using PeerAware it is now possible to create peer-to-peer web pages, or even combine the best from a client-server architecture with p2p. With PeerAware you run your own private p2p workspace, and all communication goes between connected members. The user-interface to the workspace is a web page with chat functionality, where all chat commands are sent across the p2p network to all connected members. It is the same communication path that can be used by customized web-pages. The owner of a PeerAware workspace decides what web-page should be loaded for members who connect to his workspace, and this web-page has a set of javascript functions available that can be used for communication between instances of the page.

To illustrate the concept a tutorial is available for those who want to use or make their own p2p javascript programs. I hope you enjoy this, it can be a lot of fun! If you have PeerAware installed you can also connect directly to the tutorial workspace.

Another example of this concept is the shared whiteboard that is part of the default workspace. This is a lot more advanced than the tutorial workspace, but if you are interested, the code is located in the html folder in the PeerAware program installation. This defaults to C:\Program Files\PeerAware in english language installations.

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April 16th, 2008

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black” Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography.

PeerAware is much the same from this release on. Finally PeerAware runs on all Windows desktop operating systems from Windows 2000 to the latest versions of Vista. Of course it runs better on the later versions, basically due to support for service discovery. If you do run it on windows 2000 you will have to update internet explorer to version 6, but once you do it will work just fine.

For strange reasons SSDP and UPnP Host Device services are disabled on windows server operating systems, but PeerAware will work without problems even so. But if you do enable these services, computers running PeerAware on nearby computers will discover workspaces running on the servers and display these in the local network list.

In general it is recommended to run PeerAware on Windows server if you regularly have more than a few hundred people working in the same workspace, as network connections are not limited on these versions of windows, and performance is better. Also, in general you will want a workspace to be on all the time so it makes more sense to run it on a server. Both Windows server 2003 and 2008 work perfectly with PeerAware, just install and configure like you would on a desktop machine.

You can get beta 10 from the download page.

Tags: Beta release, operating system
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April 2nd, 2008

Tomorrow I will participate in search summit Norway 08. It is Norway’s largest conference on search technology and business. Hopefully I will learn a lot of new things related to search technologies, and most likely this will find it’s way into PeerAware in one form or another. In parallel there is a conference on topic maps which could have been interesting in combination with the shared whiteboard, but at present I believe I have enough to do with getting to a 1.0 release to justify another integration project.

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January 14th, 2008

Today Beta 8 of PeerAware is available for download. This release is an important milestone, as it marks the first time a collaborative component is ready for testing. PeerAware now allows a group of people to draw together in real-time and work on the same whiteboard. Basically this is like a simplified version of Visio, but the interesting part is that multiple users can work on the same diagram, working each on their own part, or just observing changes made by another person.

The types of diagrams that can be created are:
Basic diagrams with arrows, rectangles, circles and other shapes.
Flow charts with notes, processes, decisions, junctions, delays, or, merge, extract and more.
Network shapes with servers, firewalls, routers, bridges, laptops etc.
Mac and Windows UI controls for doing layout of program UI.
Workflow diagrams with human resources, legal, QA, accounting, inventorying, shipping and sales.

I guess more diagrams types would be obvious, like gardens or interior designs, but that will depend entirely on what requests I get. In reality I have no plans to make this into a full ArchiCad, AutoCad or Visio replacement, rather it should be a good alternative for prototyping, especially when you need to prototype something in a group spread across multiple locations.

And I guess we really need to get support in place for saving and loading drawings, but meanwhile I hope you have fun playing with it.

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January 13th, 2008

PeerAware is my way of relaxing, but in the right environment this gets even better. First of all, a nice view from the window is nice, along with some good music.

While working on PeerAware I often find myself listening to the following albums:
4 Non Blondes - Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
Frank Sinatra - My Way
Nazareth - The Ballads Album
Pearl Jam - Ten
Pink Floyd - Echoes
Rolling Stones - Hot Rocks

For some reason most of these are quite old, maybe it is time to get some new music. What would you recommend?

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January 5th, 2008

As hinted earlier the next version of PeerAware will contain a collaborative shared whiteboard that allows all connected users to draw on the same whiteboard in real-time. For a preview take a look at this screenshot. All workspace scripts will go open source under the mozilla public license (MPL) version 1.1. For users and developers that means that anyone can edit existing scripts or create new ones, all based on open standards, html and javascript.

Tags: online whiteboard, shared whiteboard, virtual whiteboard
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