Tech News

By Jimmy Rogers
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Want to track the swine flu outbreaks on your desktop?  A chap named “niman” has created a nifty Google Map of all the swine flu activity…ON EARTH!

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Key:

• Pink markers are suspect
• Purple markers are confirmed
• Deaths lack a dot in marker
• Yellow markers are negative

If you go to the full map page (link below) it gives an itemized list of those who have come down with the disease.  We can’t make any claims to the validity of this information, but it looks like the person updating it has been digesting headlines, so it’s probably as accurate as something like this needs to be.

[Google Maps via Gizmodo]

General Electric has revealed that it’s created a 500GB optical disk. That’s 10 times the capacity of a Blu-ray disc, and enough room for the content from almost 60 movie DVDs.

Right now, the technology is simply at the stage where it can be proven to work in a lab setting. It’s likely to be at least two to three years before it can be refined to be produced at a commercially viable price.

Whereas Blu-ray is simply a more efficient use of the same technique used in DVDs (a series of dimples in the disk surface read by a laser), the General Electric system uses holograms, effectively turning the data storage area into three dimensions. The firm says it has found a way to make smaller holograms almost 200 times more reflective, thus increasing the number which can fit on a usable disc.

The big problem with such a huge disk is that it appears to be a case of producing something just because you can, rather than because there is any need.

At the moment there only seem three possible mass-market uses for a disk with such a large capacity, all with notable drawbacks:

Firms could use them to produce movie disks with massively increased resolutions and sound quality. The problem there is that these improvements would likely be far past the point where much appreciable benefit could be noticed on existing audio-visual equipment.

They could be used for selling movie disks with much more content on. While this could have some uses – such as putting a full season of an HD television series on a single disk – most customers aren’t likely to pay the price studios would want to charge for so much content in a single purchase.

They could also be used as a home recording system, allowing users to store hundreds of hours of video, or even thousands upon thousands of music files. That might be a useful space saver for people with large collections, but anyone who’s ever had a CD get scratched or a recordable DVD fail will likely be very wary of having the potential to lose so much content in a single swoop.

Instead GE will initially concentrate on specialist uses such as hospitals which need to store extremely detailed brain scan data, or movie studios which want to minimize archive space.

Apart from making you look like a total freak (unless you plan to wear these at a D&D convention), we still think these “Digigrade leg extensions” look pretty amazing. If you’re interested in getting a pair for yourself, you can do so right here.

[Via Gizmodo]

Attention spans have never been shorter it seems.

But what can you do? In order for people to value your content, they’ve got to extract the value that’s there in the first place.

The problem is, no one’s going to wait around for you to explain at length. You’ve got to get the point across as quickly as possible.

Luckily, there’s a solution. All you have to do is say more with fewer words.

Here are two communication strategies that allow you to present an entire idea in 10 words or less.

Tapping Into the Mental Schema

A mental schema is a concept firmly rooted in the brains of your target audience. You can use these schemas to pack an entire story into a few words.

Let me explain.

Remember the movie Speed? Back when the Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock action flick was being pitched to producers, it was described as Die Hard on a bus. You instantly get the premise if you’ve seen Die Hard.

When YouTube launched, people called it “Flickr for video.” Since Flickr was a free service that allowed people to upload and share photos, YouTube must be all of that… for videos. Common sense, right?

But here is a question many of you may be thinking. Do you always need to use a popular movie or a brand name as a schema? Absolutely not.

What comes to mind when I say “library?” You think about books, lots of them. You think this because “library” is a schema too.

Now what if I were to say Wine Library? You would think about lots of wines and maybe Gary Vaynerchuk’s business. And, you would be right. Gary does have a ton of wine, and you get that instantly.

Just remember that a schema takes advantage of what your audience already knows to tell a complete story in fewer words. You use analogies, archtypes, established worldviews, and popular culture to create instant understanding.

As you might have guessed, these schematic comparisons are great in persuasive writing. Just take a look at 10 persuasive writing methods for practical examples you can use today.

Word Association

Legendary direct marketer Joseph Sugarman said “Every word has an emotion attached to it.” Beyond emotional trigger words, this means that even ordinary, everyday words carry an emotional association for the recipient. And as with mental schema, choosing correctly from among these simple words helps you quickly create a complete story.

For example, let’s take a look at the word “subscribe.” By definition, subscribe implies sending or receiving payments. Similarly, here are some emotions associated with this word:

• You subscribe to communication mediums (phone, internet)
• You subscribe to media (magazines, video games, newspapers)

What’s the association? A commitment to pay recurring fees.

So, when you use the word “subscribe,” you tell a story about a product that requires you to continuously pay for continuous service or use. Now let’s look at another word.

Think of the word “get.”

What pops into your mind? Getting money, getting links, and getting traffic. Or in other words, getting something you want.

But there’s also another association. When you “get” something, you often keep it — without continuous payment (unlike subscribe). This is a subtle difference and here are two examples:

• You get a phone. You subscribe to phone service.
• You get a newspaper. You subscribe to newspaper updates.

You see how that works? Well, Willy Franzen understood this subtle difference when he increased his subscriber count by 254%.

He simply changed his call to action from “Subscribe by RSS” to “Get Updates via RSS” and his subscriptions went way up. This worked because he altered the association from “continuously pay” to “get for free.”

So now you see how even everyday words have emotions attached to them. And when you want to write short, informative messages, you can carefully build a story around each word in your message.

What about you? Do you know of any other ways to communicate more information in fewer words?

About the Author: Derek Halpern discusses new media communication at his blog Prevential.

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Social media is about starting conversations that lead to building relationships. To successfully start building those conversations, you actually have to know where to find your core audience. ...

SEO tools won't solve your problems if you have poor content. But they will help identify problem areas you should address. ...

By Jimmy Rogers
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Have you been watching the news at all recently?  If so, you’ve probably heard the term “Swine Flu” bouncing around a lot.  While most people come down with the normal human flu at some point, it’s not really a danger to anyone but the very young and the very old.  Why is this flu different and what does it have to do with pigs?

Essentially, influenza (aka, “The Flu”) is a viral infection that attacks our population in a yearly cycle.  Fortunately, the human immune system is there to recognize and neutralize the effects of the virus.  Each year, the virus mutates just slightly and most of the population is once again susceptible to the disease.  This is why a new vaccine must be created regularly to reflect the most recent influenza mutants out in the environment.  Under normal circumstances, this is all you need to know about the flu (aside from how to avoid infection and take care of yourself if you do come down with it).

Recently, some changes in the status quo have raised alarm bells at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).  There have been reports of “swine flu” in Mexico and several other countries whose citizens regularly visit Mexico, including the United States.  Since this is a general information article and not a “minute by minute” report, refer to major news outlets for more accurate information regarding confirmed cases.  As of this moment, though, it looks like over 80 deaths in Mexico are the result of contact with swine flu and there have been confirmed cases of the new pathogen in New York, Ohio, Kansas, California, and possibly other states.

Putting the news figures aside for a moment, let me explain exactly what swine flu is.  The influenza virus has a number of components, but the most variable parts of the virus are the spines found around its exterior.  These are proteins called “peplomers” and there are two major kinds.  The HA (hemagglutinin) peplomer is responsible for binding the virus to host cells and the NA (neuraminidase) peplomer allows the virus to break its bonds to the host cell once it is ready to move on.  When you hear about the H1N1 virus or the H3N2 virus, the viruses are being referred to and classified by their external receptors.  This is a bit of a simplification, but knowing the chemical nature of the peplomers isn’t crucial to understanding their function.

The peplomers are a double edged sword.  They allow the viral particles access to the machinery of the cell (this is how viruses replicate themselves), but they also allow the immune system to recognize and target the virus.  When the human flu virus mutates its external proteins, the body’s defenses still recognize them and eventually mount a response (the period of sickness occurs while the body is developing that response).  If this failed to happen, you would eventually succumb to the virus and die.

The virus didn’t originate in humans, though.  Birds, pigs, and even horses have their own versions of influenza.  Remember the “bird flu” or “avian flu” scare a while ago?  Scientists feared the influenza common in birds had “jumped the species barrier” and begun infecting humans.  This is called a “zoonotic” disease - a disease that moves from animals to people.  Now, the same worries have arisen about swine flu.  Why does this matter?  Won’t our immune system just deal with the new influenza virus the same way it has always done with the seasonal one?

Unfortunately the answer is a weak “maybe.”  While your immune system might not immediately stop a new human influenza infection, it DOES recognize that new mutant and begin building a response.  Avian and swine peplomers, on the other hand, are not easily recognized by the human system because our evolution did not include pressure from those particular viruses.  As humans have come into close contact with the animals that carry these viruses, the animal influenza has been able to mutate enough to cross the species bridge and infect humans as well.  In the past this would not have been a global problem.  An infected village might just die out in isolation.  Things are different now: a traveler can become infected in one region and fly thousands of miles to another, long before they experience symptoms.

So what’s the take away message from all of this?  Can we do anything about this?  Well as individuals it’s wise to go through the same sanitary practices as we might during flu season.  Also, traveling to places which have reported cases probably isn’t a great idea.  Governments and regulatory bodies like the CDC and the WHO are in an “all hands on deck” kind of status right now.  As the outbreaks continue (they are expected to grow for at least the time being), these groups will be tracking  any reported cases and trying to treat those infected.

As a young microbiologist, I’d say that for the moment we shouldn’t worry too much.  There are people who have spent their whole lives preparing for just these kinds of events and they’re currently working very hard to provide the public with the best information and advice.  Hopefully you now have a better understanding of the science behind influenza and zoonotic diseases.  I’ve put some links at the bottom of this posting for further reading.  Also, feel free to post a comment or @me on Twitter should you have any more questions.

Additional Resources:

• Track the Swine Flu Outbreaks on Google Maps
• 10 Things You Should Know about Swine Flu - MicrobiologyBytes
• The CDC’s Page on the Flu
• The WHO’s Factsheet on Influenza

[First Image of Influenza Virus from El_Enigma on Flicker with CC | Second Image of Influenza Virus from AJC1 on Flicker with CC | CDC Logo from the FDA website, Geeks Are Sexy does not represent the CDC or any other government agency]

TV advertisers are finally discovering that YouTube + viral imagination = free media.

The good news for you is that money is not a barrier, which means that marketers of any size can play. But the rules are different, as they always are online.

Because media is free but attention is not (this is flipped from TV world) you need to make a different sort of ad for a different sort of audience.

1. Assume that the viewer has the attention span of an espresso-crazed fruitfly. That means slapstick, quick cuts and velocity.

2. Find a word or phrase that you can own in Google, that fits in an email, and that comes up in discussion at the cafeteria table or in the playground.

Castrol gets both rules right in this inane commercial.

3. Length doesn't matter. 10 seconds is fine and so is five minutes. Media is free, remember?

4. Challenge the status quo, be provocative, touch a social nerve or create some other sort of interesting conversation. In other words, a commercial worth watching.

Dove does both in this now-famous commercial.

Because of the power of free media, I expect to see a whole host of commercials that would never be deemed effective enough to spend big media money on, but that generate huge views online. Look for plenty of irrelevant slogans and catch phrases and off strategy content... anything for an eyeball.

Also, understand that this is out of your control. Once launched, what happens, happens. One commercial I know of caught fire and ended up with millions of views. The client then called the producer, screaming in anger. He wanted to be able to turn it off, to decide how it got used, who talked about it, etc. You can't. Once it spreads, it belongs to the community, not to you.

The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there's very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we'll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.

-Apple found guilty of willful patent infringement
Apple has been found guilty of willfully infringing on a “predictive snooping” patent awarded to Opti Inc. in 2002. The company has been ordered to pay just over $19 million in compensation, despite its attempts to have the patent thrown out.

-Top 10 Ubuntu Downloads
The reviews are in, and the just-released Ubuntu 9.04, i.e. “Jaunty Jackalope,” rates as a slick, fully-formed Linux desktop. Looking to get started or upgrade your system? We’re recommending 10 downloads for everyone to try.

-Millions of ’90s Geeks Get Nostalgic over GeoCities
My Twitter feed was abuzz this afternoon with geeks mourning the news that Yahoo! is closing GeoCities, the company that revolutionized web-hosting and design in the ’90s.

-How To Make Microsoft Office 2007 Look Like Office 2003
UBitMenu is a small plugin for Microsoft Office 2007 (Excel, Word, and PowerPoint) that makes Office 2007 look like Ofice 2003.

-The World’s 10 Most Iconic Green Office Buildings
Despite tough economic conditions, large office complexes continue to be built in major cities throughout the world. ‘Green’ campaigners argue that such developments are inherently bad for the environment, and skeptics point out that by making sustainability central to their new office designs, many companies are simply attempting to offset their environmentally degrading activities elsewhere.

-First Android netbook to cost about $250
The first netbook computer running the Google Inc.-backed Android mobile operating system on a low-cost ARM chip could become available to customers within three months, the maker’s co-founder said this week.

SQLServerPedia is a wiki that is concentrated on SQL Server that is edited & administered by SQL Server professionals.

There is a serious amount of content that is well-categorized & easy to reach. Some of the categories are:

• Architecture & configuration
• Monitoring SQL Servers
• Performance tuning & more..

There are also various podcasts which are great for watching & learning the details from professionals.

And, besides the editors, there are bloggers & other contributors who help the content get wider.

For any developer who is into SQL Server, SQLServerPedia is a must-bookmark.

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