Whoever you are and whatever you do; it is not about how good you are and how good your songs, smiles, poems, door handles, decors, paintings, services and buns are.However, speaking about buns, you won’t gain much from the fact that they are known beyond your street and community. There is a chance that your buns will become a local attraction, so that every tourist will by all means drop in to taste them on the way to the art gallery. Still that tourist won’t be able to enjoy your buns for breakfast while at home.

If your activity is not very much dependant on time and location and you are not the sole service provider in the area, you certainly need advertising. If not advertising in its pure sense, then at least some efforts to make your business known beyond the circle of your actual clients, their friends and relatives.

There was a time when ads in the local newspaper would spread the word about you to everyone. Then came a time when you needed to bother about radio-coverage, publish a couple of leaflets, and, who knows, may be your city was big enough to have a TV channel.

Today, however, the issue of spreading information is not that simple. The thing is that the pool of information is bottomless. If you want to get your message through to me, for instance, it’s no use trying to do it with conventional advertising techniques. It was 1.5 years ago that I last saw a newspaper; I only occasionally come across a radio broadcast once in a couple of weeks; as for the television, I don’t watch it at all. And it’s not that I’m a snob who doesn’t care about the world around. The thing is that I don’t have time to follow all the information sources. And even if I did watch TV, how could one guess which of the dozens of channels I would pick that day. When there used to be only 3 TV channels, the term “information space” made some sense. But since their number saw an incredible increase, there have appeared numerous, practically isolated information spaces.

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Tags: adwords, facebook, general thoughts, google, MySpace, orkut, search engine optimization, SEM, SEO, SMO, web 2.0
Posted in SEO, general thoughts, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

This morning started with exciting news by Google introducing Google App Engine that allows web developers around the world to build applications and use the same infrastructure that Google uses. Google provides authorization which is using gmail addresses and hassle-free deployment and scalability.
Below are the links that will quickly update you on the story:

1. Official news on Google Blog;

2. Home page where you can sign up for Google App Engine Account and download SDK plus other misc small things;

3. Getting started guide;

4. Gallery of applications which are already created (wow – more then 20 apps during the first day)

Now – it’s only a beta and registration is closed for the first 10.000 developers that were lucky to join the program. Our CTO is the happy person. There are many limitations which are currently in place but much of those should be lifted after the official release. The only supported language now is Pyhton. Luckily (or should I say proudly) here at MoveYourWeb we have such people and working on the first applications already.

There is HUGE buzz in the developers community already with the rumors that it’s competing with Amazon Web Services such as S3. The benefits are obvious – you concentrate on developing while not worrying about the system administration and servers. It would probably can compete with Facebook Applications platform also. During the last year the developers around the world were engaged in developing applications for Facebook trying to leverage it’s user base (and for good). Say every 1/10 customer of ours showed an interest in developing applications for Facebook. What might happen now is that everyone will want to leverage the user-base that Google has and build the application for on their engine also. You have gmail account already, right? With this say – it’s all the guessing game in the day one after the release and we will see how it will evaluates. For now we can just state: we are in this game already and working on our test applications plus we will be happy to help the existing and potential customers with the development of applications using Google App Engine.

Tags: amazon web services, facebook application development, google apps engine, web 2.0, web development
Posted in web 2.0, web development | 4 Comments »