Control of Your Data

Keeping your data under your own control is an important consideration. When your projects are sitting on some other company’s servers, you may lose access to them. A small hiccup in the billing process could mean that your team is locked out of all the projects they have been working on. That’s a scary thought. In most cases, running project management tools on your own server means that no-one else can come between your team and your work.

Another reason to have your project management software running on your own servers is the question of security. If you are handling confidential information, you can add additional security measures. Furthermore, you’ll have a much better idea of what physical security is in place for your server if that server is your own.

All of that makes for an appealing set of reasons to run your own project management tools, but there are many reasons to go with a web-based application hosted by another company. There is the consideration of overall access: when a company stakes its reputation on keeping your projects accessible at all times, they’re going to be in a position to invest more in the infrastructure of keeping their servers up and running, quite possibly at a lower cost than your organization can manage, esepcally if running a server isn’t something that you normally need to do.

Managing the Costs

Many of the options for project management tools that run on your own server are open source, which means that they’re theoretically free to use. However, that may not be the way things work out. Of course you’ll need to factor in the costs of running your server. But there are other considerations, such as managing upgrades and even creating new features — and these can all add cost. Those costs are not necessarily more expensive than paying for a hosted application (that can depend on how many team members you’re working with, how many projects you have going and a variety of other considerations), but should be considered before making a choice one way or the other.

At the end of the day, whether or not hosting your own project management tools makes sense in terms of cost a question of core competencies. If you’ve already got team members who can effectively manage running a server and all the details that go along with it, your costs are going to look very different than an organization that needs to bring in outside help on a regular basis.

Do you host your own project management tools?

Image by Flickr user Rudolf Schuba

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While playing around on Twitter over the weekend, I tweeted an image of some asparagus from my garden, and tagged the tweet #productivitytips. Suddenly, users from as far afield as China and Senegal were finding their way to my asparagus image. I’ve never had a follower access any of my bit.ly links from either country, so I guessed that these users had found my tweet by searching Twitter for the #productivitytips tag.

Putting aside the fact that users looking for productivity tips probably weren’t particularly satisfied with my asparagus picture, this story does point out clearly that — properly used — Twitter tags have the potential to expand your exposure and your follower base. If you (or in this case, I) used them properly, that expansion could be considerable.

The properly tagged tweet acts like a teaser for the would-be follower. They find your tweet via the tag, and, if they like it and any content it links to, they may follow you. Conversely, the tagged tweet can help you to access and qualify followers — using tags wisely, you can help to ensure that the people who follow you actually want the kinds of information you generally provide.

Since my asparagus adventure, I’ve been looking into some of the ways business-focused Twitter users might employ tags strategically to expand their follower base.

Tags as Keywords

If tags provide metadata about your tweet content, then it may make sense to see them as playing a similar role to that fulfilled by meta keywords on a web page.

You might decide to define a list of key tags you’ll focus on, and apply them to your tweets whenever they’re appropriate. This approach might help you to continuously fulfill the expectations of users who follow you on the strength of a well-tagged tweet.

As a tag misuser, I often gain followers from well-tagged tweets that are one-offs — they don’t relate to the topics I usually tweet and write about. The followers I gain with those tweets quickly become disappointed by my usual tweet content, and stop following me.

If I selected a number of “keywords” (tags) that actually — and accurately — described the topics I most often tweet about, and applied them consistently wherever possible, I expect I’d be more likely to keep the followers I gained, and to build a loyal, satisfied follower base.

Tags as Content Flags

Every piece of content I publish online is tagged somehow. So it might be a good idea to tag the tweets I use to promote that content with the same tags I’ve applied to the content itself. If I write a blog post that’s tagged “social media tips,” for example, it seems logical — and advantageous — to tag my tweet with the same words.

By creating consistency between my tweet tags and my content tags, I can qualify my follower base and ensure those users are satisfied by the content they access through the links I include in my tweets.

But, perhaps more importantly, consistent tagging could help me build rapport or respect with users. If a user’s looking for social media tips, they might find tweets using that tag through Twitter. Imagine  they then arrive at my blog, which offers access to more content tagged “social media tips” via my navigation or a tag cloud. Those users may be more likely to look at that information than if I used no tags, or tagged my blog content using different terms from those I used in my tweet.

In effect, consistent tags can help me to show that I speak the user’s language, and reduce confusion. Using Twitter tags as content flags could make new visitors to your site feel more at ease, help them access the information they need, and  — if you appear to be an authority on that topic — help communicate that you’re worth following.

Tags as Trend Tie-ins

There are plenty of tools designed to tell Twitter users what the trending topics are in particular fields. The astute Twitter user could combine a trending topic tag with their standard keyword or content-flag tags. This could help them to reach a much broader audience (via the trending topic tag) and tap into a sub-segment of that audience (via the topic-specific tag).

A marketer I follow on Twitter frequently writes blog posts that are sparked by celebrity news, scandal and other popularly trending topics. He writes about these topics from a marketing perspective — saying, in effect, “this is what we can learn about marketing” from Brangelina or Lady Gaga or Tiger Woods or, well, you get the idea.

He has a great opportunity to tag his tweets around the trending topics he writes on, and to appeal to a broad audience in doing so. True, only a comparatively small portion of the readers accessing those trending topic streams will be interested in his marketing angle. However, in its own right, that comparatively small portion may add substantially to his follower base, his retweet levels, and his audience access over the longer term.

These are just a few of the tagging techniques I’ve seen in action on Twitter recently. What tips can you add from your own Twitter tag experience?

Image by stock.xchng user speedy2.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

Nokia’s been stumbling badly recently. Despite leading the cell phone world for decades, the giant seemed to have messed up planning for the smartphone future. Now some analysts think its future is brighter and have bumped up their Nokia predictions.

Both Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch now think the company is on the
up, and have revised their advice on Nokia’s stock. ML’s Andrew Griffen
noted he thinks Nokia’s earnings have “now troughed” (they’re now on
the upswing) and MS’s Patrick Sandaert explained his new thinking is
driven by “strong order intake from operators at a lower discount than
feared.” Both analysts pointed the finger at Nokia’s recent and
upcoming smartphones as a major cause of their optimism since a
successful smartphone on the market could reverse the worrying
downwards trend in the average price of Nokia’s phones over the last
several years combined with falling share of the smartphone market.
Together these were taken as a strong indicator of a company with a
future that was fast petering out.

Though Nokia’s low-end cell phone sales still keep the company atop the overall global phone market, the Finnish company was caught snoozing by the iPhone-driven touchscreen smartphone revolution. It was slow to stir in the intervening years,
and more recently Android has emerged as a huge challenger to Nokia.
Combined, Apple and Google seemed to have sewn up the smartphone game
just as it was emerged that the future of all cell phones was to become
smart. Nokia’s own efforts weren’t overly well received, and lacked
some of the tech and pizazz that its competition has. It caused serious
financial guys to worry about the company’s future, despite its huge
income and large expenditure on research. We won’t even mention the
odd, desperate-seeming, entry into the netbook game.

The new excitement is being driven by the N8, Nokia’s 12-megapixel camera-toting answer to the influential iPhone and the Android army. Despite some initial
nervousness about the N8 online, centering on its supposedly poor
performance and OS, the mood has now changed. Unlike Nokia’s other
phones, which frequently exhibit a lack of the sort of panache that
we’ve come to associate with the market thanks to Apple, the N8 even
looks like the premium device it’s intended to be. It’s due soon, and
Morgan Stanley even pips its projected sales at 10,000 units a week in
the U.K. alone.

Nokia’s N8 success is still contingent on the device arriving at a post-carrier-subsidy price that matches or beats the iPhone or top-end Androids, and having a UI (Symbian 3) that instantly pleases the browsing consumer who’s trying out cell phones in-store.

To keep up with this news follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

Had the international community been more careful about seemingly
unrelated topics as financial planning and climate change, four million
dead children would be alive today, according to new simultaneously released reports from Save the Children and UNICEF. Public health insiders know that everything–from policy to architecture to urban planning to education and employment–affects your health, but the new reports declare it outright.

A Professor by the name of Geoffrey Rose, a pioneer in the study of the social determinants of health, is the one who, in the 1950s, pulled all the sociological and medical facts together to reveal that “upstream” factors greatly impact “downstream” health factors–upstream being policy decisions, media content, educational planning, and transportation design and downstream being individual and population health consequences. Poor urban planning leads to fewer exercise options and less walkable streets. A policy choice about the location of a new park or community center can influence crime and safety levels and thus life expectancy in certain neighborhoods. 

Those are just a few examples, but when we consider such linkages on a larger scale, say in the case of the world’s millions of poor children, we begin to deal with the very in-your-face reality that nothing occurs in isolation.

There’s a reason why entire public health programs revolve around sociology and policy and education, such as Harvard’s Society, Human Development and Health Master’s Degree (full disclosure: I am a graduate of this program) or Columbia’s Sociomedical Sciences.
With researchers innovating up a storm as to what causes what and how
decisions in Washington D.C. affect the health of children in Nepal, we
ought to listen, respond, and do our part to save those kids.

“High food prices in 2008 and 2009 and falling real household incomes have reduced consumer purchasing power; poor consumers have less money to spend on food,” the UNICEF report noted. “Now a child born in sub-Saharan Africa faces an under-five mortality rate that is 1.9 times higher than in South Asia, 6.3 times higher than in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 24 times higher than in the industrialised nations.”

In light of the above, UNICEF and Save the Children, just days before the next UN Millenium Development Goals Summit, have announced that their resources will now be focused on grassroots, on-the-ground community health clinics and services and female health workers; less resources will be invested in modern, state-of-the-art hospitals and more will be invested in basic, life-saving drugs, clinics, and personnel.

[Photos by Jenara Nerenberg]

The Pakistan flood crisis has caused the death and destruction of thousands and as aid efforts pour through the country, a critical component becomes managing data–data of the flood itself, where people are going, how many are displaced, water levels, food amounts, and on and on.

A new report from SciDev.net indicates that data from such crucial sources as the Pakistan Meteorological Department’s flood forecasting division, which measures the flow of the floods, is being mishandled and poorly managed, as part of a general miscoordination of information flow and management of Pakistan’s flood disaster.

Pakistan has the necessary weather radars and other technical equipment to monitor its floods closely, but in the face of the crisis, the one thing that has been forgotten is management.

Of the data now being generated, “Much of it is being rendered useless in the absence of a sound and integrated flood management strategy and information dissemination,” National Disaster Management Authority member Ahmad Kamal said. But what’s the use of technological know-how when basic leadership and management skills are not employed to benefit from such technology and from all the data available?

In Haiti, the World Bank and Ushahidi got on the ground immediately to monitor data associated with aftershocks and the recovery needs of survivors. OpenStreetMap played a crucial role as well. So is that what Pakistan needs? An external service specializing in the collection and coordination of data, rather than relying on its own internal government resources?

“Many of the problems we have with information dissemination to ordinary
people during a crisis situation (all over the world) comes from the
same root problem: Crisis information has generally been a top down
approach by governments, large humanitarian organizations and the media.
It should come as no surprise to us that those who don’t know how to
gather information from ordinary people also don’t know how to
disseminate it,” Ushahidi’s Erik Hersman tells Fast Company.

Perhaps the next aid package from the United States government will include provisions for Pakistan’s very own Ushahidi or OpenStreetMap or some other native data-collecting system that thrives off data generated from the people, rather than collected by a hierarchical agency.

[Top image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team; bottom image via flickr/United Nations Development Programme]

The BBC’s iPlayer Web TV portal is hugely popular in Britain but can’t be viewed overseas. No matter: With today’s revamp, and planned updates, it looks like the BBC is setting a high bar for competition in the coming Net TV revolution.

The iPlayer launched in late 2007 as a way for U.K. TV viewers to catch up with programs from Aunty Beeb that they’d missed and to view legacy footage. It was technologically clever–always seeming to stay pretty much ahead of the pirates–even while its interface was pretty simple. It’s also hugely popular, as over 1.1 billion minutes of footage are served up over the system every month. Today it’s getting its first big revamp, and the BBC has listened to the needs of its users as well as paying attention to current memes for the redesign. 

The watchwords for the new site are convenience and personalization. Hence, the BBC has arranged the user landing page for so that it’s easier to find TV shows one wants to see. The player module can now be launched in a stand-alone window, meaning you can continue to watch a show while you do other things on the site, or elsewhere on the Web, much more easily. It’s also a neat way to power your TV directly with iPlayer content, if you’re one of those connected souls who’s TV is hooked up as a second monitor for your PC. Meanwhile, integrating the iPlayer profile with Facebook and Twitter accounts is now simpler, to facilitate sharing info about your shows with your friends or followers.

But this social net interactivity isn’t fast enough for the BBC, so soon the network will be building in Windows Messenger powers to the system, enabling real-time chats during program viewings. The Beeb is obviously envisaging TV show catch-up parties, with excited folks IM-nattering about this week’s goings-on by Doctor Who or whatnot … though the jury is still out over whether this is actually a good idea (check out Fox’s disastrous attempts at the same thing). In a move something akin to Facebook’s “like” button or Amazon’s “wish lists,” you can also now build lists of your favorite shows to share with people.

The revamped system is also cleverly rigged up so you can download TV show content before it’s had its first terrestrial broadcast, and although you can’t watch it during this period, it means you can do so instantly upon its TV airing. In some sense, this is the BBC enabling a Tivo-like “live TV pause” power into its service. 

Recently there were a number of rumors that suggested the BBC would be bringing the iPlayer to international audiences for the first time in 2011. We’ve heard these rumors before, but this time they have a ring of authority. Earlier moves seem to have been squashed due to the BBC’s complicated status as a quasi-public owned entity, but this time many of these objections appear to have fallen away as it’s now plausible for the Beeb to easily charge overseas viewers to see the content. 

And when this happens, the venerable BBC may suddenly burst onto the Web TV stage as a serious player. Its shows are widely syndicated around the world, and highly regarded in terms of quality of both content and production, and combined with a globally-accessible Web portal the BBC’s reach would be even greater. Though obviously only BBC-sourced content would be viewable, it will find itself in competition with other Web-TV services, which in some ways it’s already technically superseded–having had many years to perfect its back-end technology with all those billions of successful minutes of streamed TV. With a social net angle added in, its even incorporating the latest (and in some senses upcoming) trends for social media and real-time TV show interactivity. 

There’s only one question: When the BBC’s global iPlayer arrives, will the Beeb make its code compatible with other people’s set-top boxes–are we going to see it inside Google TV or a dedicated App on Apple’s new TV set-top box?

To keep up with this news follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

Mmm, mmm, I’m lovin’ it. For the past seven years, McDonald’s has pushed that message in dozens of languages throughout 117 countries. Now it appears customers of the world’s largest fast food chain aren’t buying it.

In a new survey, Consumer Reports found that McDonald’s ranked lowest on a list of fast food burger joints, outscored by Wendy’s and Burger King, and trounced by In-N-Out and Five Guys. According to the poll, which asked 28,000 people to rate 18 fast-food restaurant burgers on a scale of 1 to 10, McDonald’s was found to offer one of least delicious patties in the country–a sign that perhaps the masses are developing a palate. Or watching Morgan Spurlock documentaries. Or Jame Oliver’s show. Or reading the New York Times. Or starting to notice any number of government campaigns against obesity.

Still, regardless of the taste, customers are flocking to McDonald’s. The $22 billion company recently posted its biggest sales gain in over a year. Cheap fast-food chains tend to flourish in recessions–when Americans tighten their belts, and then break the buckle with a Big Mac, Double Baconator, or triple Cheesy Gordita Crunch–and Mickey D’s is no exception. Since 2008, the company’s shares have rocketed 10.6%, compared with a 46.4% tumble for Wendy’s and a 35.9% drop for Burger King.

But the food fight is far from over. Five Guys has jumped to the top of consumers’ palates, perhaps aided by the Obama bump–the president has made several trips to the burger joint, much to the disappointment of the first lady, whose anti-obesity campaign is overshadowed by the chain’s 920-calorie bacon cheeseburger, recently named one of the most unhealthy meals in the U.S. by the Center for Science and Public Interest.

And west-coast powerhouse In-N-Out has also found its way into the hearts of Americans. Or at least Californians, who seem to take every opportunity to boast of the restaurant’s deliciousness to deprived east-coasters.

Ultimately, while it may sound like good news that 28,000 people have voted the ultra-unhealthy McDonald’s burger to the lowest ranks, it’s not a good (or healthy) sign that 28,000 people were able to participate in a poll that included burgers from 18 fast-food chains. Until that trend ends, such changes to our national taste buds will have no affect on our bulging bellies.

[Photo: Flickr user † Jimmy MacDonald †]

Google’s doodle today is a rare thing–one of their interactive efforts. It’s a load of balls. Bouncing, colored balls that make up the famous Google logo. Everyone’s pondering why. We think we know. It’s about the future of Web tech, with no apologies to Adobe’s aging Flash.

Google’s doodles normally celebrate a special national or international day, famous person in history or some such … but today’s one has everyone confused. Plus, instead of the normal, occasionally amusing, static doodles, today’s doodle is animated: Flying colored balls rattle around before settling down to form Google’s logo, and when you move your mouse pointer over them they flee from its presence (also if you hold down shift, or alt or a bunch of other keys). Flying colored balls, however, don’t seem to signify anything other than flying colored balls.

[youtube NLGCaUsmUhc]

Their passing similarity to balloons got some people wondering about parties … but is today Google’s birthday? Some think it is, some think it isn’t–the company was inaugurated on September 4th, for example. But Google’s own company history page explains: “On September 7, 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company: Craig Silverstein, now Google’s director of technology.” So it is a Google birthday–its 12th year since its first company property opened.

But as the U.K.’s Guardian has noticed, the tech driving the doodle is important. It’s not Adobe’s Flash, which could be programmed to do exactly this, but which many think represents last-generation Web thinking. It’s actually CSS, the powerful “style sheet” coding protocol behind many of today’s websites: Each colored ball is a CSS entity (in the lingo, a “div”) that’s programmed to act by itself. This is a jokey but impressive demonstration of the power of future Web coding, using tech like CSS and HTML5, which is smooth on today’s typical PCs even though it’s rendered inside a browser. Basically Google’s saying “look what the Web (possibly via our swanky browser, Chrome) will be capable of on our next birthday!” Unless you’re browsing the Web with IE (shame on you) or Opera, which Google hasn’t made this code work properly for.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

Back in July Google said it was buying airline travel software giant ITA. Now the Justice Department is probing the deal, concerned Google’s might will put the squeeze on the industry.

The ITA deal had been rumored for a while before Google’s official announcement in July. The $700 million transaction made sense–the two companies seem made for each other, it would give Google an inside line on some very neat real-time airline data, and the firm could even use its Net-searching expertise to make the task of finding cheap flights much easier for the average Joe Consumer.

But now the Justice Department is in the early stages of a probe into the deal, according to reports. The concern is whether Google’s acquisition of ITA would strangle a data feed that other existing players in the online flight sales market rely upon. ITA, for example, sold the data that makes Orbitz and CheapTickets work. Will the way Google treats ITA cut this feed off, or will Google (by hook or sneaky crook) merely upstage these companies and steer flight-seeking consumers to its own offering? According to Google, it doesn’t compete with ITA, so no antitrust issues should emerge … but Google seems to have forgotten its sheer might, and the fact that if it enters into a market it’s not already “competing” with it can severely skew the business.

Meanwhile Google’s facing its first big antitrust lawsuit in the U.S., emerging from allegations it “manipulated” myTriggers, SourceTool/TradeComet, and Foundem’s rankings in its search results. Microsoft is also allegedly interested in a lawsuit based on the same matter. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot is apparently the first regulator to dig deep into the details of Google’s search business wheeling-and-dealing. This is bad PR juju for Google, because though it wants to pretend otherwise, it’s really all about Internet searching–this is the cash cow at the heart of its business.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.