Piotr and Duane: "Come to MAX in Milan!"

For anyone out there still with any doubt of whether or not they should come to MAX EMEA in Milan, Dec 1-4.



Here is a partial list of the top evangelists and luminaries who will be there:

• Enrique Duvos
  
• James Governor


• Piotr Walczyszyn
  
• Christophe Coenraets


• Lee Brimelow (Flash Blog)
  
• Mihai Pricope
  
• Kevin Hoyt
  
• Ted Patrick
  
• Cornel Creanga
  
• Serge Jespers
  
• Mihai Corlan
  
• Andrew Shorten
  
• Ben Forta
  
• Andrea Vascellari
  

oh yeah - and me too....

See you there!

Duane's World Episode 13 - Konductor, How to Drag & Drop in AIR

This episode was filmed in Vancouver where I was lucky enough to catch up with Konductor Software's Derek Zarbrook. Derek demonstrates how Adobe AIR has been used to enhance a user's experience in content management, and how Dreamweaver extensions can improve the workflow for designers




I also wrote and recorded a grind core metal song for this episode under my alter-ego Duane Chaos. The download is available via the link on the video.

MAX 2008 :: Going off big time and secret show!!!

I don't know what the limit is or how many more we can squeeze inside MAX, but I just got an internal email stating the number (sorry - cannot share) and I believe it will be amongst the largest 3 events I have attended this year! MAX is gonna rock, especially this year. Why? Well - first, we have tons of new content and stuff to show. Second, there are major industry setting announcements.

My own sessions are actually mostly sold out. Check this out:

Four out of six are sold out completely. If you want to still catch the AIR Boot Camp though, it will be taught in Milan in December. I am sure we can talk Enrique into a new sets of labs for building service clients with Adobe Flex and AIR too since all 3 courses sold out.

BIG (NOT SO) SECRET EVENT!!!




On Monday November 17, there is a special live band party at 330 Ritch. My band 22nd Century is playing and we will be covering stuff off our first CD as well as new songs from the upcoming 2nd CD and tons of covers from Ramones, Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins and other hard rock/punk bands.. Take a listen here - if you like the music, download it and come along. Email me dnickull at adobe dot com to get tickets for this event. IT ALSO IS HALF SOLD OUT!!! This is being sponsored by Nitobi, Konductor Software and Mix Match Music!

My invitation to everyone on my Tuesday classes:

Let's Rock late on Monday night then do the sessions Tuesday AM!

Palin dupe not new, they did it to Bush too.

Having read of the great dupe whereby Sarah Palin got rooked by two Canadian pranksters, I had to both laugh and shake my head at the immensity of the stupidity. First - I laugh because it is good to remind us that no matter what our status in society is, we should still all be the target of practical jokes. Sarah Palin got rooked - it was funny. People play jokes on me - it is funny. There is a line though where the joke reveals something personal about the prank victim that we all wish we hadn't seen. In the cases below, what we learn is that the prank victims are both ignorant and liars.

Another great Canadian comedy team, This Hour has 22 Minutes, also did this to Bush prior to his first term in office. George Bush was surprised to be receiving what appeared to be a ringing endorsement from the Canadian Prime Minister in the months leading up to his election.

I reprinted this from http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/000957.htm

During an interview, George Bush was aparently happy that he had received the ringing endorsement of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Poutine:

"Prime Minister Jean Poutine said he wouldn't endorse any candidate in this election, now he says he believes George W. Bush is the man to lead the free world into the 21st century."

Bush warmly accepted his endorsement:

"He understands I want to make sure our relationship with our most important neighbour to the north of us is strong and we'll work closely together."

Problem was that we have never had a PM named Jean Poutine. Poutine is a dish eaten by my fellow Quebecois brethren made from french fries, gravy and cheese curds. Our PM was Jean Cretien.

Bush lied! He lied and he should have admitted that he did not know anything about Canada. He should have known the name of our leader at least or not pretended to know him on a personal level. Before the Americans elected him, weveryone in Canada knew this guy was not to be trusted.

But alas - now it is Sarah Palin's turn. She too should have admitted a similar ignorance of her neighbour (not Russsia which is separated by water, but Canada which is firmly joined to Alaska). If her insistence that being a neighbour qualifies you for making foreign policy decisions is true ipso facto, we are all in trouble. Here is what happened with Sarah:

Pranksters: Some people said in the last days, and I thought that was mean, that you weren’t experienced enough in foreign relations, and you know, that’s completely false, that’s the thing I said to my great friend, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stef Carse.

Sarah Palin: Well, he’s doing fine, too, and yeah when you come into a position underestimated, it gives you the opportunity to prove the pundits and the critics wrong. You work that much harder-

Our Prime Minister is Stephen Harper. We have never had a PM by the name Stef Carse.

Where are the REAL Republicans? Where are the smart, fiscally conservative, small government, let's be successful Republicans?

For the record, I like both Obama and McCain. I think either would be a good leader. I don't really know Biden but he seems experienced. What scares me more than anything else is that there is a small chance Sarah Palin may one day hold the most powerful office of the US. I honestly do not believe she is fit for that job.

Beware Mutant Pumpkins!

Happy Halloween.

Adobe Evangelists caught on video discussing MAX secrets

Warning - this is shocking! It may not be suitable for all family members, frightens small children and bruises fruit at up to 60 paces.

Busy Adobe Evangelists? Private Party?

Well - this is the message I got today when I logged on. Guess which button I pushed?

;-)

For those of you who I did not get stuff done for - sorry about that. It will take me weeks just to organize the calendar which I do not have time for until MAX 2008 is over with.

Speaking of MAX, if you have not yet considered it or registered, get it done ASAP! My band (22nd Century) will be playing a side show at 330 Ritch Club on Monday Nov 17, 2008 (10:00 - 12:00 PM) at a special invite only event sponsored by Mix Match Music, Nitobi and Konductor Software. The details are here. Let me know if you want an invite!

Our set will include our own originals (some for the first time ever) plus the following:

Zero, Smashing Pumpkins
Saturday Night, Nickleback
Good Grief, Foo Fighters
No Secrets, Angel City
Echo Beach (Punk Cover), originally by Martha and the Muffins
Longview, Greenday

More greatness from fellow evangelist Lee Brimelow

Today Lee sent out a message internally. Here is the message:

Today I interviewed Justin about the changes to the FileReference class. I’m sure you have heard about this a lot in your travels. You can direct people to this interview for more details on the reasoning behind it.

http://theflashblog.com/?p=463

We also just released an article on the ADC that goes into even more detail.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10_uia_requirements.html?devcon=f2

Thanks,
Lee

Lee Brimelow
Platform Evangelist - Adobe Systems
www.gotoandlearn.com
www.theflashblog.com

Defining RIA: Borders, a case study?

Rich Internet Application (RIA). What is it? How would you explain it to someone? It is not easy to do since the "rich" part is really subjective. For years I have thought about this definition as part of the Web 2.0 Patterns book and the troubles we will have trying to quantify something as intangible as "rich" (rich is something a lot of us used to be until we looked at the stock market lately).

Today I got a break on it. HB Mok (a colleague at Adobe), sent out a notice that there is a case study done on the Borders.com web application showing they had a 62% increase in conversion! While the Adobe talking points on this were around how Flex was used, I also found this valuable for anyone trying to reinvent their business. Naturally, if this is your interest, you will want to download the Allurent Case Study from here.

I don't want to spoil the entire case study but I will relay some of the more important findings:

o 62% higher conversion

o 41% more products viewed

o 11% more likely to recommend

Borders.com is worth taking a look at if you haven't already.  Is it possible that "rich" from RIA really means that you have the information at your fingertips you need?  Could it mean that your forms load quickly and embrace undeniable logic (example - not asking you for a "zip" code if you're shipping to Canada)?  Could it mean the perfect balance of graphics, data and interaction, all blended perfectly in an intuitive package that speaks to the users?

I have to ask these questions pragmatically.  Flex gives you the power as a developer but you still need to do the architecture behind it.  I applaud Borders.com for their work of art combining logic, emotion and function.  

To the developers and architects at Borders - well done!  

Duane's World 12 - Open Source, Oysters and Beer!

This is part two of the coverage of Open Everything from Hollyhock. In this episode, I get to talk to Mark Surman (Shuttleworth Foundation) as well as collect further thoughts from Joel Solomon and Mozilla's Zak Greant. The code and tunes section features a tutorial on how to detect keyboard events and use a case and switch statement in AS3. The code to write AIR applications that use full screen interactive mode is explored too with the tunes of SR-420!

Flash SEO Research: Google DOES use Ichabod to index Flash

For Flash Search Engine Optimization fans, this will be very interesting!



The first part of my research project into how Google and Yahoo use Ichabod to index flash is complete. OK. Before you get all excited about what you see above, let me give you the caveat that results may vary slightly on your browser, however they should generally be the same. The Google search for duanes world was done on a machine in Vancouver, Canada (Google provides some regional variances for search results). For the search "Duanes world", the site http://tv.adobe.com beat out http://technoracle.blogspot.com. The latter has a huge text "Duane's World" across the top while the former is built completely in flash. Even more spectacular is the fact that the Duane's World episodes are in fact dynamically loaded at runtime by the flash page template.

There are factors that influence this so it is not a pure experiment. External links to these pages and user click patterns obviously are factors in this elevation. What is important is to see the patterns of Google and Yahoo actually picking up text from Flash.

UPDATE: Ignore the following section on Pixton. I made a really dumb mistake and Google was in fact indexing the alt text to a jpg rather than actually reading SWF content.

******************************IGNORE*****************************

Another experiment shows that this is in fact happening now. Look down the search page a bit further and you will see a link to a flash comic strip at Pixton.com as shown below:



Read the synopsis words very carefully, then go to the link and you will note that Google has in fact read static text from the flash comic strip at Pixton.com.

http://pixton.com/comic/jofxlbkq

****************************END IGNORE*******************************

For Flash Search Engine Optimization, there are other studies I am doing which will be released live at the MAX 2008 show in Milan Italy.

The latest Video interview on Flash SEO from Web 2o0 in Berlin

Technoracle (a.k.a. "Duane's World"): Flash Search Engine Optimization tricks

Technoracle (a.k.a. "Duane's World"): Flash Search Engine Optimization tricks

Flash Search Engine Optimization tricks

I just finished speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on the topic "Search Engines and Flash: Secrets, Tricks, and Black Magic"

Adobe Flash (*.swf) is a binary format and has not always been accessible to search engine spiders (small bits of code that algorithmically determine a page’s content for rankings in search engines). SEO experts have developed several key workarounds and new technical developments have made new functionality available to search engines and developers alike.

During this talk, I showcased some advanced tips, tricks (Black Magic) and some of the secrets I have used to get sites ranked over their HTML counterparts. Attendees will learn how to increase initial page rankings as well as monitor and increase dynamic page ranks. Sites like Sombrio come up #1 out of over four million and are 95% flash.



So how does it work? The slides have some tips but the real work will be revealed when the research project findings are announced at MAX in Milan this Dec 2008.

Search Engines and Flash: Secrets, Tricks, and Black Magic

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: search seo)

The slide deck discusses a number of great strategies including using XHTML as an XML data provider for data grids (this way allows use of the semantics of the title and h1 tags while offering your Flash content in plain text for bots to digest).

Remember - Adobe MAX 2008, Dec 3 is when the results will be shared. At that event, we will distribute all the finding for anyone to analyze! Be there!

Oh - one more thing. Do not do evil things to get to the top of Google. There is a system and a set of rules. You do not have to abuse the rules to win. Trying to get high rankings for terms your site is not relevant for serves no one, yourself included.

RedMonk captures Adobe-SAP SOA story

While many of us tech-heads have lived in ServiceLand for years, the mainstream media and analyst communities have not fully understood the true benefits. RedMonk, the analyst firm out of the UK, is IMO one of the first to really put the pieces of the Web 2.0 + SOA for the enterprise together. In one of his latest posts, James Governor writes:

Adobe is particularly notable from an enterprise pace layering perspective because unlike many other technologies that fall under the heading Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Adobe has focused on delivering service oriented front ends that can be integrated with back end services with a minimum of fuss and code. This is loose coupling - of distributed components.

James observes that we at Adobe have had trouble communicating well in the past. We are an enterprise software vendor and we have a very mature SOA story. LiveCycle ES is a textbook example of SOA in action when deployed with SAP systems.

During SAP CEO Leo Apotheker’s keynote on Tuesday morning at TechEd 2008 he introduced a new concept called Timeless Software. In fact, this expression itself is timeless as noted by Christopher Alexander in "The Timeless Way of Building". Regardless of the changes in technologies and user interface designs, the separation of concerns (a pattern often noted as MVC) has been taken a step further. This is a pattern worth noting for the upcoming Web 2.0 Design Patterns book.

Kudos to Leo for explaining this and kudos to James for translating it so mere mortals can understand the immense value of this timeless way of building.

Apple losing the Web 2.0 crowd?

Last year at the Berlin Web 2.0 conference, I took this photograph of the entire front row sporting Mac laptops. The blog post was entitled "Does Apple own Web 2.0?".

This year the trend has seemed to be more of a Microsoft/Mac stalemate. It appears that Vista has really come into favor with some of the alpha geek crowd. I also see Ubuntu gaining in popularity. Apple's iPhone, while popular, continues to suffer from complaints of bad battery life. The most popular PDA by far is the Blackberry. Long battery life, great business features and a sleek and cool design.

While I was contemplating buying some apple stock, I am now thinking RIM looks like a great deal.

Drupal User Group Talk on Flex/AIR, PHP and Zend

Here is the video. Special thanks to Lee Brimelow and Kevin Hoyt for the help and code samples on this topic. Yes - I did really scoop the last cold beer at the meeting! If you want the slides, please email me at dnickull at adobe dot com.

Drupal User Group Talk and Code Samples

Last night in Vancouver I spoke at the Drupal User Group about Flex and PHP. Kevin Hoyt is owed a major thanks for helping me get set up in time and wrote a ton of materials for the class. The gist was to talk about how to use a Flex front end for a PHP middle tier.



PHP (especially Drupal) is great for plumbing MySQL into the front end of web applications and web pages. There are some issues when trying to skin Drupal applications however. These mainly pertain to the inconsistent support for CSS from the various browser cowboys. Flex can help alleviate some of that workload and makes a great companion for PHP.

The materials from the presentation can be downloaded from this website:

http://www.nickull.net/presentations/Drupal/index.html

Jon Bosak on PDF, ODF and OOXML

I have known Jon Bosak for years. For most, he needs no introduction and has been credited with many things from being a co-inventor of XML to really moving technical standards into the limelight they deserve. Most people are completely in the dark about just how much the standards game truly affects them, paying out hefty software license fees without realizing some of that goes to pay for patents and other IPR activity.

Jon has now composed what could be his magnum opus on the topics of the recent debate over OOXML and ODF. I encourage everyone to read it. It is available here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/bosak/pub/nys-open-records-policy.html

Jon - thank you from everyone!

Buy! Buy! Buy!

I got up early at 6:00 today thinking I would beat other investors to the punch on the TSX exchange to buy Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce stock at $48. After all, the dividend yields roughly 7.5% at that price! Way to slow! By the time the order reached the desk it was over $56 per share and peaked at 58 so far. My suspicion was correct - every smart investor is up making orders and we Canadians really suck at planning holidays (yesterday was thanksgiving for us). I tried to get onto the NASDAQ server to find some bargains and got the shot above.

This is when it seems like a good time to remind myself of the herd mentality and not fall into the trap. Golden rules for the stock market:

1. Don't follow the herd
2. Don't buy or sell on emotion
3. Buy when others are selling, and
4. Sell when others are buying.

Have to run now and get in line to put in another HTTPRequest() object to the NASDAQ server.