Post by Megan Totka
ChamberofCommerce.com

The world of data and information continues to rapidly grow, and the cloud is following suit. The corporate arena, packed full of information, has embraced the cloud with open arms.

Wondering how the cloud changing business? Take a look at just a few of the roles the cloud is playing in the today’s corporate arena.

Decrease operating costs

1Starting a business is an investment, and it continues to cost a lot of money once it’s up and running, sometimes taking years to really churn a profit. Businesses are often looking for ways to save money in the workplace. Cloud computing can save your business a lot of cash. For one, cloud service providers take care of maintenance and system updates, so most large businesses have been able to achieve IT savings. Cloud computing services don’t cost the business much, so by utilizing options like circuit design software, security, and management software, businesses can do more for less while simultaneously providing rich experiences for their customers.

Unparalleled mobility

2The cloud is a platform that is everywhere, giving the corporate world unparalleled mobility. Employees can work from home, across the country or even on the other side of the world through the cloud. Employees can gain access to and share business-related data from anywhere, supporting the trend of working remotely. The cloud’s storage capabilities mean that files, documents, and data are all stored in a central storage location allowing employees to stay on the same page even if they aren’t sitting next to each other in a brick-and-mortar office building.

Increased security

3While it may initially sound risky to store mass quantities of sensitive data offsite, the cloud is actually one of the most secure forms of data available today. Information is stored on the cloud and not in a device, which means the data is always accessible and secure, even in the event of theft. Cloud service providers take extra precautions to protect data and grant access only to those users who have encrypted passwords. In addition, the service providers use only the most up-to-date security monitoring software to make sure security breaches do not happen.

Manage growth

4Whether you are using social media to prospect for new clients or focusing on your email marketing campaign to reach a wider audience, the cloud can help you. An undeniable benefit of the cloud is that its resources are elastic so you can increase capacity and tap into resources as needed to better support growth. Small businesses often face the enormous and impossible challenge of predicting what resources it will need in its near future. There’s no way to find the exact balance of having what you need to maximize all opportunities that arise without spending too much money. This is where the cloud comes into play. Cloud resources don’t require businesses to attempt to predict needs; instead, the business can react to these needs as they present themselves and use what is required to manage growth and enhance efficiency. The cloud gives your business eminent flexibility.

Greater reliability

5Cloud-based services are often more reliable than services that are delivered on-site, especially if the servers or other hardware are older. Cloud service providers have a devoted and experienced staff that is often able to resolve problems in a more timely fashion than a typical small business with limited IT staff and resources.

The cloud plays a major role in data storage on the corporate level. Cloud technology is worth integrating into your business plan; its advantages are widely touted for a multitude of reasons from the freedom it provides to its heightened security. No longer is the cloud viewed as a fuzzy concept, instead it’s considered a platform that is vital for both growth and stability.

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Last week we discussed how the Semantic Web relies upon markup languages that tag Web content, making it easier for machines to interpret. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, including tagging content as structured data or linked data.

Today we’ll take a look at marking up your content as structured data using microformats.

Microformats for structured data

Microformats are one of the standard markup formats used to create structured data. Like any markup language, they consist of tags and attributes that are used to “mark up” your Web content so that a search engine can recognize the content as structured data.

Content that is typically marked up using this standard includes contact and location information, reviews, products, and events. To transform your data into structured data using microformats, you simply add some additional classes and tags to your existing HTML, adhering to the microformats standard.

To demonstrate, let’s look at the “hCard” format. This format is used for marking up information about people, companies, organizations, and places. Here is how the marked-up content will look within the HTML of your Web page:

————-

<div id=”hcard-Deltina-Hay” class=”vcard”>
<a class=”url fn” href=”http://www.plumbwebsolutions.com”>Deltina Hay</a>
<div class=”org”>PLUMB Web Solutions</div>

<a class=”email” href=”mailto:[email protected]”>[email protected]</a>
<div class=”adr”>
<div class=”street-address”>P.O. Box 242</div>
<span class=”locality”>Austin</span>

<span class=”region”>Texas</span>
<span class=”postal-code”>78767</span>
<span class=”country-name”>USA</span>
</div>

<div class=”tel”>512-555-9999</div>
</div>

————-

And this is how it will appear on your website:

Deltina Hay
PLUMB Web Solutions
[email protected]
P.O. Box 242
Austin, Texas, 78767 USA
512-555-9999

To the naked eye, there is nothing special about this content. It is nothing more than your contact information with links. Search engines and Internet browsers, however, will now be able to interpret the content as structured data — specifically structured contact and location information about you and your company — and display it or use it accordingly. All you need to do is mark up your existing contact information using the microformats standards.

Microformats.org has a lot of resources to help you out, including an hCard creator that you can use to generate code similar to that in our example.

Other basic formats you may want to take advantage of right away include:

• hCalendar: For marking up events (microformats.org also has an hCalendar creator).

• hProduct: For marking up your products and services.

• hReviews: For marking up reviews. (microformats.org also has an hReview creator)

Structured data in action: Google Rich Snippets

As we also discussed in last week’s article, Google is using structured data to display Web content in search results using what they call “Rich Snippets.” The Rich Snippets feature will check a web page for structured data and display it accordingly in search results. Here is an example from Google’s blog, showing the search results of a page whose content is marked up with the hReviews format:

Most of the time optimization efforts for semantic search take place behind the scenes, but Rich Snippets is a way you can actually see tangible results right away.

Google also has a Rich Snippets testing tool you can use to check the content of your page to ensure your marked-up content is compliant. See the image at the top of this post for results from the page we placed our hCard example code onto.

If there are any errors in the mark-up, the tool will point them out.

Using microformats to mark up simple content as structured data is not a difficult task as demonstrated here, but if you have a lot of relevant content to mark up like ongoing reviews or a lot of products, you should add microformat classes and styles directly into your existing CSS stylesheets. You can use tools like Oomph, a microformats toolkit, to help undertake the task.

Upcoming articles in this series will cover how to use the RDFa markup standard for structured data as well as an introduction to linked data.

This article first published as An Introduction to Structured Data Using Microformats on Technorati.

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The Semantic Web is a big step toward Web 3.0, where the ultimate goal is to make Web content more machine-friendly and thus, in turn, more useful to humans.

Most websites are produced using HTML, which is a markup language used to make a website “look” a certain way. The Semantic Web, on the other hand, is based on markup languages that focus on tagging the content by what it “means.”

A more “semantic” Internet will allow search engines to produce more relevant results because the searched content will be “marked up” in such a way that the engines (machines) can make better sense of it.

The Semantic Web is not AI (artificial intelligence), as some people seem to think. It is about making the content easier for machines to interpret, not about making the machines themselves smarter. Two ways in which this is accomplished is through structured data and linked data.

Structured data: Making it easier to share information

You can prepare your content in a way that will help search engines include it in very relevant search results. For instance, you can offer ways for your contact information, products or reviews to show up directly in a Google or Yahoo search result by adding a few tags to your content that will transform it into what is called “structured data.”

Contact and location information, events, products and reviews are all perfect types of structured data and can be tagged in standard formats called “markup formats” to make it easy for search engines to recognize them as such.

Structured data has been around for some time, waiting in the wings for the search engines to take it seriously. In 2009, Google introduced “Rich Snippets,” a feature that recognizes markup formats and displays the content in your search listing accordingly. See the image at top for an example.

Google is supporting the two most standard markup formats: Microformats and RDFa. Both of these standard formats are very straightforward. Anyone with experience building a website or using a content management system like WordPress can easily use them to mark up their existing Web content as structured data.

Linked data: Create apps from rich datasets

Linked Data also refers to a way of structuring data, but it does so by using the Web to create links between data from many different datasets and classifies it using an established data commons.

By using a common reference to represent a piece of data, that data can be linked easily to and from other sources of data, creating what is referred to as a “Web of Data.”

The most impressive of these Webs of Data is the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. In the center of this “cloud” (only a small part of it) is “Dbpedia,” which is the dataset that feeds Wikipedia.

The resulting “Web of Data” can be accessed by semantic Web browsers that navigate between different data sources, similar to how traditional Web browsers navigate between HTML pages.

One of the things that make Linked Data so powerful is what one can do with the data once it is linked. Given the right tools and know-how, anyone can draw from this tremendous resource to create powerful applications.

Cross-posted to Technorati.

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In this first series of articles, we discuss each of the fundamental elements that are moving us toward an application-driven, Web-based, mobile computing era, and how they will ultimately affect search optimization.

Web 3.0 aims to make online content easier for machines to understand and opens up and links large sets of data in consistent ways.

Finding a definition for Web 3.0 is no easy task when most people are still trying to grasp Web 2.0. However, it is a necessary task since Web 3.0 technologies are encroaching on the Internet quickly. Perhaps the best way is to start at the beginning.

Web 1.0: The Internet in one dimension

In the beginning, the Internet was flat. Think of it as a collection of documents (Websites) lined up side by side. Though many of the sites may have linked to each other, those links simply took a user straight to the linked site, and maybe back again.

Each website was classified using metadata composed of meta-keywords, meta-descriptions, and meta-titles that described what the content of the website was about. At their simplest, search engines used established search algorithms to comb through all of the websites’ metadata to return what it considered relevant results based on your choice of keywords.

The inventor of the Web, Timothy Berners-Lee, refers to this phase of the Internet as a “Web of Documents.”

Web 2.0: A two-dimensional Internet

This next generation of the Internet added another dimension: collaboration.

This added dimension means that websites were linked in a more collaborative way. Instead of sending a visitor away from a site to view related content, the content is actually drawn into the visited site from the related site using RSS feeds or widgets.

But it isn’t only the websites that are more collaborative, it is also the users of the websites’ content. Internet users tag and comment on content and collaborate and interact among themselves.

Search engines have a whole new layer to consider in their searches: user-tagged Web content and the relevant connections between the users themselves.

Berners-Lee named this Internet phase the “Web of Content.”

Web 3.0: The third dimension

Even with the rich metadata, collaboration between websites and users, and user-generated relationships to draw from, machines are still machines, and they still find it difficult to discern actual meaning from human-generated content. The third evolutionary step of the Internet aims to fix that by adding the dimension of “semantics.”

The goal of this phase is to make the content of the Web more easily interpreted by machines. Web content is typically written for humans, which means that it is produced with aesthetics in mind — little attention is paid to consistency or relevancy of the content itself.

Tim Berners-Lee calls this phase — rather passionately — the “Web of Data.”

With a more digestible definition of Web 3.0 in hand, the subsequent articles in this series aim to make the concepts of the Semantic Web, structured and linked data, cloud computing, and application-based technologies just as painless to digest. To be continued.

This article was first published as Web 3.0 Demystified: An Explanation in Pictures for the Rest of Us on Technorati.

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It surprises me how many people don’t know about the fabulous work being done by the Aspen Institute, the 59-year-old international nonprofit organization that works on environmental and economic concerns. It’s a sort of constantly evolving think tank perfectly suited for the new economy: The Aspen Institute convenes roundtables — in Aspen, Colo., Washington, DC, India, Israel, all around the globe — and generally gathers 25 to 30 experts and thought leaders to tackle important public policy issues. During my last two trips to Aspen I met and spoke with Al Gore and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

I’ve been lucky enough to participate in three such roundtables and to write the following reports, which the institute turns into print books (available for purchase) and makes available as free ebook downloads in the PDF format:

• The Mobile Generation: Global Transformations at the Cellular Level, 72 pages, February 2007: a look at the profound changes ahead as a result of the convergence of wireless technologies and the Internet, with an emphasis on how youths use mobile technology (download ebook as PDF).

• Civic Engagement on the Move: How Mobile Media Can Serve the Public Good, 110 pages, July 2008: a look at the startling growth in the use of cell phones and other mobile devices and the ways mobile technology can be used to advance the social good (download ebook as PDF).

• And now the just-released Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The next-generation Internet’s impact on business, governance and social interaction (image above), 110 pages, May 2009: a look at the next-generation Internet and how it will impact all facets of society.

Download the free ebook (as a PDF). Or see the landing page. (If you came here from Twitter and are interested in the subject, my ID is @jdlasica.)

Aspen Reports now using Creative Commons licenses

I’m happy to report that Charlie Firestone, executive director of the institute’s Communications and Society Program, took up my suggestion and has agreed to release the new report under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license, the same license I’ve been using for all of my blog posts for years. That means anyone is free to republish excerpts of the report, or the report in its entirely, for noncommercial purposes. (See excerpt below.)

Not only that, but Charlie has agreed:

• to retroactively release my still-timely two earlier reports, Civic Engagement on the Move and The Mobile Generation, under the same CC BY NC license.

• to publish all upcoming Roundtable on Information Technology reports with the CC BY NC license.

• to recommend that all of the institute’s Communications and Society Program publications be published the same way. “I will take it up with the Aspen Director of Communications, and perhaps other reports at the Institute could be published with that license as well,” he tells me.

This, to my mind, is a coup for Creative Commons, given the world-class scholarship and policy proposals that the Aspen Institute is now making freely available for redistribution and remixing.

I especially enjoyed the four days in Aspen I spent with extraordinarily bright and friendly people like John Seely Brown, Esther Dyson, Ann Winblad, Marc Rotenberg, Padmasree Warrior (Cisco CTO), Rod A. Beckstrom (co-author of The Starfish and the Spider), Arjun Gupta, Jeff Dachis, Bill Coleman, Mark Bregman and Christine Varney, whom the Obama administration recently tapped to become assistant attorney general.

I haven’t published excerpts of my previous Aspen reports, and because they’re in PDF format the search engines can’t index them. So here is an extended excerpt from the report’s Introduction, which should give you a hint about why cloud computing will affect all of our lives:

Excerpt: Why the Cloud Matters

According to Newsweek: “At the end of August [2008], as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We’ve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross website in less than 15 minutes.”

The New York-based tech start-up Animoto, which lets users create professional-quality, MTV-style videos using their own images and licensed music, was averaging 5,000 users a day until it suddenly received a burst of new users who discovered it through Facebook. Its traffic surged to 750,000 visitors over three days. The number of servers Animoto was running on jumped from 50 to 3,500 during that span of time. “It was just numbers we never imagined we would ever see,” chief
technology officer Stevie Clifton told a Seattle newspaper. “It was fun and scary and pretty cool.” Thanks to AmazonWeb Services, Animoto’s servers did not crash, because Animoto does not have any servers. It outsources its computing power to Amazon.comand pays only for what it uses. The ten-employee company is now expanding. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos touts Animoto as the poster company for cloud computing.

The tales of the Red Cross and Animoto neatly sum up the contrast between the former economy and the emerging cloud economy. If the Internet economy is an apt descriptor of the changes taking place around us today, then the term cloud economy could justly be ascribed to the still larger global disruptions ahead. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has called this “the cloud computing age.”

What is the cloud?

What is the cloud, where did it come from, and what does it portend?

The computing industry has evolved rapidly over the years. Mainframe computers, which began it all, were centralized with a professional class accessing information from terminals with little computing power; data transfer often took place on foot, as people carried floppy disks from one machine to another. Mainframes gave way to minicomputers (chiefly used in labs and factories in the 1970s), which begat personal computers, which brought processing power to the individual’s
desktop with basic applications likeWord documents and spreadsheets.

The personal computing revolution became portable with laptops, handheld devices and smartphones. With every evolutionary step, computing’s underlying architecture became more distributed. As the Internet became widely adopted in the 1990s, personal computers not only stored data locally but downloaded and exchanged data all over the Web.

We are now in the middle of another shift. As the Pew Internet & American Life Project put it in a September 2008 study:
Recent evolutions in information technology have led to a more distributed computing environment, while also
reviving the utility of centralized storage. The growth in high-speed data lines, the falling cost of storage, the advent of wireless high-speed networks, the proliferation of handheld devices that can access the Web—together, these factors mean that users now can store data on a server that likely resides in a remote data center. Users can then access the data fromtheir own computer, someone else’s desktop computer, a laptop that wirelessly connects to the internet, or a handheld device.

This is where cloud computing enters the picture, as users at home and in the workplace have begun to manage their data, run applications, crunch numbers and operate entire enterprises on a virtual platform in the sky.While the actual computing may be taking place on the next block or on the other side of the world, to the user it looks as if it is happening on the screen in front of you.

The leap to the cloud echoes what occurred more than a century ago, author Nicholas Carr said in his keynote talk at the 2008 Xconomy conference. In the 19th century, companies often generated their own power with steam engines and dynamos. But with the rise of reliable electric utilities, companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into a shared electrical grid. Information technology is undergoing a similar evolution today.

The public may not be familiar with the term, but many are already doing cloud computing. We have been using Web applications for years without any concern about where the applications actually run. The Pew study found that 69 percent of Americans connected to the Web—and especially younger users—already use some kind of cloud service, such as Web email (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail), online data storage (IDrive, Mozy, Box.net) or online software. For example, Google Docs
offers Web-based office tools such as word processing and spreadsheets. Zoho, a start-up in Pleasanton, California, offers an even more robust suite of office productivity tools. Del.icio.us offers an easy way to access bookmarks online. Bloglines and Google Reader are Web-based RSS readers. Tens of millions of us have uploaded videos to YouTube and sent photos to Flickr, SmugMug, Photobucket and other hosting sites.

The cloud has become our entertainment network: we are spending hundreds of millions of hours on sites like YouTube, Hulu and Flickr. The cloud has become our social network: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5 and similar sites now claim hundreds of millions of members. The cloud has become our virtual library: when we do a Google search we are fingering the cloud. The cloud has become our workbench: we manage projects in Basecamp, share large files with Pando, tweak photos in online photo editors like Adobe Photoshop Express and Picnik, and edit videos online with JayCut and Jumpcut (now closed). The cloud has become our development network: open source programmers trade code on sites like SourceForge.net and Drupal.org.

The term cloud computing, which came into wide use in tech circles only in early 2007, does have a specific, technical meaning. It refers to a collection of resources—applications, platforms, raw computing power and storage, and managed services (like antivirus detection)—delivered over the Internet.One Forrester Research analyst defined it as “a pool of abstracted, highly scalable, and managed compute infrastructure capable of hosting end-customer applications and billed by consumption.”

Gartner Group defined cloud computing as “a style of computing where massively scalable, IT-enabled capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ to external customers using Internet technologies.” …

A broader meaning

But many people now accept a broader meaning for the cloud, and this is the context in which the roundtable tackled the subject. More than a decade ago Oracle CEO Larry Ellison declared that the network would become the computer, and many people now refer to the emerging next-generation Internet as “the cloud.”One should think of the cloud not just literally, as an information technology infrastructure, but as a metaphor for this new frontier of democratizing possibilities that these disruptive new communication technologies herald.

An SAP white paper released in September 2008 warned that policymakers are not aware of the dramatic economic impact of the “Future Internet,” as the paper calls the cloud. The report concluded: “The next generation of the Internet enabled by software will lead to the most significant changes in the economy in the next decade. It will drive productivity gains in many industries and shape the future of the services sector in all knowledge-based economies.”

At the Stanford Summit in July 2008, Anna Ewing, executive vice president and chief information officer of Nasdaq, invited people to think of the cloud as putting high-powered enterprise technology in the hands of the masses via the Internet. Russ Daniels of Hewlett-Packard suggested the key ingredient is virtualization—using someone else’s computer to do the heavy lifting for you. Polly Sumner of Salesforce.com said the smallest retail store can now use software as a service to run its financials and manage customer relationships in the cloud, while entrepreneurs will build processes and a new generation of
applications we cannot even guess at yet.

In other words, what the cloud is may be less interesting than what the cloud does—or could do.

The New York Times wanted to convert 11 million articles dating from the newspaper’s founding in 1851 through 1989 to make them available through its website search engine. The Times scanned in the stories, converted them to TIFF files, then uploaded the files to Amazon’s S3, taking up four terabytes of space. “The Times didn’t coordinate the job with Amazon—someone in IT just signed up for the service on theWeb using a credit card,” IDG News Service reported. Then, using Amazon’s EC2 computing platform, the Times ran a PDF conversion application that converted the 4TB of TIFF data into 1.5TB of PDF files. Using Amazon’s computers, the job took about 24 hours.

When Nasdaq wanted to launch a new service calledMarket Replay to sell historic data for stocks and funds, it turned to S3 to host the data and created a small reader application using Adobe’s AIR technology that let users pull in the required data. The expense of storing all that data on Nasdaq’s own servers would have been prohibitive. Instead, by offloading the data to the cloud, Nasdaq now has a modest new revenue stream.

Other examples abound. Medical robotics firmIntuitive Surgical and recruitment services provider Jobscience use Salesforce.com’s cloud environment to create new applications. Pharmaceutical companies tap into AmazonWeb Services to calculate simulations; the U.S.Marine Corps is using it to reduce its IT sites from 175 to about 100, and The Washington Post used it to turn Hillary Clinton’s White House schedule during her husband’s presidency,more than 17,000 pages, into a searchable database within twenty-four hours. The European consultancy Sogeti has used a cloud built by IBM to test new ideas and cobble together an IT system for a company-wide brainstorming event.

To handle this burgeoning demand for the cloud by businesses and consumers, bigger and more energy-efficient data centers—7,000 in the United States alone so far—are being built. Besides Amazon, Google reportedly has two million servers running around the world. Yahoo! is busy building huge server farms, and Microsoft is adding up to 35,000 servers a month in places like its data center outside of Chicago, which covers 500,000 square feet at a cost of $500 million, with plans to hold 400,000 servers.

[end excerpt]

I’m fascinated by the cloud and the kinds of things the new technologies is enabling in society — especially entrepreneurship. I may write a book on the subject, if I can find the right co-author.

You can find citations for the examples mentioned above in the report itself. This and other reports can be ordered online at www.aspeninstitute.org or by sending an email request to [email protected].

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