Just several days ago, I wrote a post in my other blog about China’s decision to block Plurk. In it, I linked to a result from Google Website Trend analysis showing that Indonesia brings the most traffic to the Plurk’s website.

Needless to say, it got me really intrigued. I then play around with it, using Twitter and Facebook as a variable to analyze. And these graphs are the results :

As you can see, Indonesia ranks as the 4^th country who brings the most traffic in Facebook, while in Twitter it is listed as the 8^th. Combine it with the fact that it’s the biggest traffic contributor for Plurk, and you get the idea that Indonesia is in fact a very prominent country in the global mapping of social networks.

One will then begin to naturally wonder the implication of this fact. For instance, what does it mean for Indonesia ? How can we capitalize on this seemingly-crucial fact that we are renowned users of social networking sites ?

It seems to me that there are two approaches to think about this issue, - classified according to the direction the effects that will inevitably happen to us. First, there is an inward implication, - although not specifically stated -, that people around the world have recognized the fact that us Indonesians are here to stay. It clearly shows that Indonesians are not just some sporadic users of social network. Instead, we are a large group of devoted people who regularly engage in connecting and networking via the Internet. This can only translate as a good thing because bit by bit, Indonesians will then gain stronger voice in this world. On the individual level, people from Indonesia will also get more opportunity to do some serious networking without being associated with any unnecessary facets of the image of a third-world country.

Secondly, and this is the harder part, is the outward responsibility we have with the fact. Now that we are being recognized as prominent entities in Social Networking world, what are we going to do with it ? Remember Peter Parker’s words when he said, “With great power comes great responsibility” ? Of course, it can be argued that we can then make contributions by building our own social networking sites. And we did that successfully, at least to an extent. But for me, it looks like we could go further than that. Why haven’t we incubate some ideas, - and then execute it, which will be useful for the whole world in a global level? You know, products as revolutionary as Blogspot, Wordpress and Twitter.

This is what I offer for you to ponder as I close this fact. I am suggesting that this is the focus that we should develop. Indonesia are so full of talented developers and workers, but few who have the required ability to perform as a brilliant thinker in a conceptual level. And we all know that ideas are where all the great things in life come from.

The year 2009 is marked as the year of elections for us Indonesians. In the early April, we voted for our legislative members, and shortly afterwards the big presidential election will follow closely. This blog is of course not about politics, and will never talk about it, I presume. That’s why I’m not going to contribute to the wildly-crowded, but lively, discussions about Indonesian politics.

What is indeed interesting to be slightly touched is the role of CTO ( Chief of Technology Officer ) in any government’s administration. This issue was brought to the surface by Barack Obama when he announced that he will appoint USA’s first CTO with the following purpose in mind :

“to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.”

As we speak, we know that he is still yet to make good of that promise. America is still waiting to see who’s going to have the first seat as her CTO. Political issues aside, I think that’s one good strategy to adopt for whoever going to run as presidential candidates here in Indonesia. Of course, speaking locally, he / she then will be called a Minister of Technology or something similar.

The job of being a CTO is surely not an easy one, let alone being a CTO for a whole nation. In the corporate world of business, a CTO job will closely reflect or overlap with the more familiar job of CIO ( Chief Information Officer ). An excellent article I read discussed about this and mentioned that :

“the CIO is responsible for ensuring that the company’s information technology investments are aligned with its strategic business objectives. To this end, the CIO has emerged as the key executive for information assets, operations, and policy…… In addition, most CIO responsibilities have expanded beyond the traditional role to include both strategic and tactical duties, as well as corporate policy direction.”

Now take that definition and apply it into a nation, - in this case Indonesia. Cross out the words “company” and “corporate”, and change it with “country” or “national”. You will then get an accurate picture of a very complicated, but challenging, job a CTO would have in our country. This position would demand an individual with a very specific set of skills and educated and experienced in such fields as information technology, electrical engineering, or computer science. He or she must also be a positive leader, an effective communicator (skilled in both listening and speaking), a persuasive negotiator, and a customer-orientated individual.

Again, I am not going to argue about whether such a capable individual exists in our country or not. Instead, I’m going to propose that every presidential candidate of Indonesia will do well to include the role of CTO in his / her planned platform. It is an undeniable truth that nobody’s perfect. So why not incorporate it into your program ? At best, - that is if you’re elected, it would help to work at technology-related issues in Indonesia. There is simply a yearning need for that cannot be ignored. At worst, - if you lose the vote; well, at least it would make your campaign sexy. Think about it.

Not too long ago, the infamous Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reported a rumor where he stated that Google was ( or maybe still is ) in talks to acquire Twitter. For a starter, it may be worthwhile to revisit his argument as to why Twitter is so valuable to acquire these days :

“More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.”

In other words, if left alone, Twitter will surely emerge as the new giant in the search industry, - complete with its abundant advertising dollars. The only question is, can Twitter sustain its current operation and mature to be a major player it seems destined to be ? Financially and technically, maintaining its operation as probably one of the strongest social media today must be a very complicated issue. Yet I don’t want to dwell on that.

What I want to talk about is Google’s take on this issue. If the rumor is true, it seems to me that it signals that they want to be the lone, solitary giant in the search engine realm of business. Not that there is anything wrong about that. We all know that as per today, they are the best in terms of skills and resources to serve the biggest search engine in the world.

What makes it more interesting is that Google actually proceeded to make its move by holding talks and discussions with Twitter before the other giant of the industry, Microsoft. Compared to the non-committal and complacent Microsoft, this implies that they again have a better sense of direction as to where the world Internet trends are shifting. And a good business forecasting ability is a crucial pre-requisite if one is to stand on the shoulder of giants.

It is now fascinating time as we wait in suspense whether Google and Twitter made progress in their discussions. On the one hand, Twitter CEO Evan Williams has already sold a successful product he made in the past to Google ( Blogspot ). On the other hand, there is this antitrust issues that put some constraints, - at least categorically, which dictates that Google should proceed carefully here. Again, Arrington noted about this too.

As we wait on any updates on this matter, I’ll just state that Google is showing that it is still going strong as a major giant here. And mind you, it is not a sleeping giant; but rather a very alert and sensible one.

Twitalyzer Home Screen

This week we witnessed the birth of yet another Twitter tool. Its name is Twitalyzer. What makes it special in the midst of so many other Twitter-related tools and applications ? Well, at first glance, it did not became apparent for me either as it looks like one of those tools to analyze your “influence” on Twitter by measuring such variables like the number of times people reply to you and mention your name.

That is, until I discovered a tiny menu on the top right of its homepage, mentioning “Twitalyze Brands”. Interested, I clicked on the menu and voila ! I was taken to a page where there was this big title banner of “Twitalyzer Brand”. Now it got me intrigued, and just for the sake of testing, I entered “Nokia” as the brand to be analyzed. I waited like three minutes before I got to see the results, but it’s all expected because Nokia is such a big brand and must be getting a lot of mention from the Twitter crowd. Fair enough.

It was not until I got to the result page that I realize that this is indeed an excellent tool. Of course, by now we need not mention again the importance of online reputation management. But until now, I was only aware of Twitter-search based tools in order to do just that. Twitalyzer Brand takes it one step further by giving you the important parameters right in the first page of the result of your brand.

Twitalyzer Nokia Result

After it has finished analyzing Nokia, - in this example -, Twitalyzer Brand told me that “NOKIA most recent brand strength in Twitter was rated as mind-boggling based on a calculated score of 88.4 out of 100…” Furthermore, it also measured the brand as having 70.5% of signal-to-noise ratio, 4:1 positive brand favor, 22.3% of brand passion, and 77.5% of clout. Now, of course I’m aware that for the curious side of us, it may not be enough. We might want to know on what calculations and algorithms such assessments are based upon, but that’s beside the point here.

My point is that, at the very least, Twitalyzer Brand can be used as a very splendid method to analyze your brand’s mention on Twitter, - and thus, manage your online reputation. Bear with me for a second, and I’ll tell you why. Excited by a neat execution of its analysis on Nokia, I clicked “learn more” under the parameter of “brand favor”. I then was taken to another page where it gave me the definition of “brand favor” ( “the ratio of citations that are generally positive to those that are generally negative” ) and the list of actual public updates where people mentioned Nokia in their tweets, - both positively and negatively. I don’t know about you, but for me, that alone is a big enough appeal to use it as a tool to scan feedbacks from people who used my products.

I suggest you do the similar thing with the other parameters. Explore the site. Also don’t forget to take a look at their features of “Time-Based Analysis”, “Benchmark Your Success” and “Twitter Brand 100” list, which are located in the bottom of the page. If there is a time that I recommend a young site, then this is it.

NOTE :  The Twitalyzer site can also analyze your personal Twitter statistics other than your brand’s.  Just click on the “Twitalyze People” menu in the top right of the page.

My last post pointed out the existence of a DRM chip within the earphone of the newest model of Apple’s iPod Shuffle. Shortly afterwards, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing wrote a short piece of news that in fact, it was an incorrect piece of news. Well, if more accurate findings were made, I’ll be the first to admit that I was wrong too. Let’s check the facts.

Doctorow quote a post of BB Gadgets where the writer and his team members actually dissected the said earphone and found that the chip inside is not actually a DRM chip but instead :

“However, it’s described as a “transmission” chip, suggesting that its role is not authentication or digital rights management, even if the result is to encourage manufacturers to pay an “Apple Tax” to license technology that allows their products to be used with iPod equipment.

This partially corroborates iLounge’s original report. iLounge noted that the new included headphones with in-line controls use an “authorization chip” to communicate with the iPod, a part available only from Apple. (Apple uses a similar chip inside the latest iPods to prevent video output from working with unlicensed iPod docks and other accessories.)”

In layman terms this means that the chip did not prevent any other earphones to be used with the new iPod Shuffle, but it will make it illegal to manufacture third-party headphones unless you have a trademark license from Apple in order to claim “Made for iPod Certification”. The chip will then act to constitute the trademark license itself. Thus, any other earphone maker can produce their own official earphone for iPod as long as they include the chip in their product.

Now to the confession. As I said before, I’ll readily admit that I was wrong when I reported that the chip was one which prevent any user from using other brand of earphones. However, I still find it sad that this piece of technology is being used NOT to prevent privacy or other criminal acts, but to deter a completely valid business competition. I’m aware that one can still officially produce an iPod earphone ( provided that it has the necessary chip inside, bought from Apple ); but ultimately, the customer will be the one who suffer the most here. Because in the end, the cost of the said chip can only mean one thing : higher prices. iLounge put it excellently with this quotations :

“From what we were told, Apple offered to sell developers the chip for $1 in a bundle with a $2 microphone, costs which are then multiplied and passed on to consumers. The component costs are now apparently lower. There are also authentication chips inside the new Apple Earphones with Remote and Mic, and the In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic—the ones that you may recall were delayed last year for mysterious reasons.”

Enough said.. !

Just when I thought that the topic that I blogged about was obsolete, I stumbled along the piece of news that Apple has inserted a DRM chip into its new iPod Shuffle, - thus effectively stopped any user who wants to use his / her own preferred brand of earphones. At first, I was skeptical, as I know that Apple is a successful brand and certainly has its own band of haters who are ready to say anything to taint its reputation.

But today, Techcrunch has posted an article where someone actually has dissected the said model of iPod and found an unidentified chip, “that appears to be some sort of proprietary digital control that prevents unauthorized transmission of commands to the Shuffle without an official Apple adapter.” Now, this may well be the evidence that we need that the Shuffle does indeed contain a DRM chip.

Which is just very sad and hypocritical. Sad, because the DRM technology which was first invented to stop any piracy to intellectual properties, is now being used to defer what is actually a fair business competition. Hypocritical, because Apple’s own Steve Jobs has been reported before to state his position that he is ( or should we say was? ) anti-DRM. Granted, Jobs is not currently on the helm of Apple due to health issues, but as David Rothman of Teleread excellently put it, “the Shuffle was probably planned long before the back-off, and second, I doubt that his people would take this radical step without consulting with him.” People may actually leave iPod as their own preferred brand of MP3 player after this.

As for me, I now find myself simply lamenting the day DRM was invented. Period. The way things are going, if big companies keep on using it, the only one being victimized is us : the valid customer. As for the piracy, I do feel that you can now conveniently use it as an excuse if you want to use DRM in your product to force people to use its own peripherals ( another of your products ). The customer is then left with no choice. Let’s just pray that somebody, somewhere will again do something about this. At the very least, we can say our opinion about this abuse of our technology.

Disclaimer :

NET is not affiliated with any of the software / application company. While I am helped by certain features of these programs, in no way I can guarantee that they will give the readers the same results. Always back-up your file before doing major changes to your computer.

OK, I’ll readily admit it. I have a weakness in getting my tasks done. Sometimes I let myself get too immersed in the details that I have difficulty in prioritizing and managing my tasks. That, and the all-too-common dilemma of procrastination of course. Am I getting familiar already ? If you share the same problem with me, read on to discover a possible method to get out of this productivity inefficiency trap.

It’s not that there isn’t a possible solution for my problem. The basic, underlying issue is time ( and self ) management here. The “First Things First” method of Franklin Covey quickly came to mind as I outlined this post. Yet I particularly want to make a certain emphasis on the wildly-popular way of “Getting Things Done” ( GTD ) as preached by David Allen, a recognized author and productivity coach across the globe. There’s a reason for this. While whether or not GTD works for you will remain up to you to decide, the benefit of practicing it can best be summed b y its tagline : “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”. Now, that’s a promise I heartily embrace, to let go of the stress of daily life.

At its core, basically GTD works by collecting your thoughts ( I like to think of it as actually get the stress blocks off my head ), processing them ( by assigning them to the appropriate contexts ), organizing, reviewing and doing them. I am summarizing a lot here. For more information of how exactly this system can get the stress out of your head and help you increase your productivity, the Wikipedia article of GTD has an excellent set of article references that should help you. My focus, instead, is to point us into one of a great ways to practice this action management method.

Enter Thinking Rock. Developed since 2005, it is a free, open-source and multi-platform (Linux, Mac OSX, MS Windows, …) organizer software, designed to practice GTD. Now I have been an avid user of task managers like Rainlendar or Outlook, but Thinking Rock differs from them radically by employing the GTD method straight from the home screen itself.

Thinking Rock

From the home screen, you are straightly coached and encouraged to employ the GTD method of collecting and processing your thoughts. This has forced me to alter my old task-management way of simple listing, to actually classify them as actionable or not. In the end, it saves me a lot of time and help me prioritize my life in such a way that I now have more time to do the tasks themselves rather than just pondering about them. Translated, it should spell less-stress for my life.

In their own words, Thinking Rock “is NOT another to-do list. It allows you to:

• collect your thoughts, also called dump your mind;
• process them into actions, projects, sub-projects, reference items or someday/maybe items;
• actions can be done by you, delegated to someone else or scheduled for a particular date;
• projects can be planned into ordered list of actions and sub-projects;
• you can review all your actions, projects and other information quickly and easily to see what you need to do or to choose what you want to do under your current context at a particular time. These views can be easily modified by you to tailor for your needs;

Having been using it for more than two weeks now, I can certainly testify that it helps me organizing my life. And as the title of this post series implies, I hope that it will also help you all. I certainly enjoy it.

The free community version of Thinking Rock can be downloaded here.

According to the Wikipedia, the term “Enterprise 2.0”refers to :

“social software used in “enterprise” (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, enterprise social software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.”

I believe that we do not need to delve further into the importance of incorporating Enterprise 2.0 in your business. The fact that you are reading this is a clear enough sign that you realize the need to evolve into such kind of enterprise, rather than staying true to the prehistoric status quo of one-way content feeding of Web 1.0. The question is how are we going to do this. In this post, I am going to suggest three ways which seem to me are the keys to plot your successful presence in the world of social networking :

• Register as a member in as many social network as you can afford to maintain. I would suggest three of the most important there is, - namely Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Other than that, be a member of other social network relevant to your business. Remember that the key phrase here is “as many social network as you can afford to maintain”. Having one too many account may stretch your time and resources in such a way that you can’t keep up with the need to update them all.
• Provide useful contents to your networks. Update your company’s official blog. From time to time, post some useful links to quality articles. It doesn’t matter that you don’t produce the content themselves, as long as you mention the necessary accreditations and don’t claim them for yourselves. This way, people in your network will eventually recognize you as a source for good content.
• Engage in conversation or other interaction in your networks. In Twitter, this means actively engaging in conversation by replying to other people’s updates. In Facebook, this may mean commenting to others’ contents or useful links in their profiles. In your company blog, this spells as the need to reply to the comments that your visitors leave in a welcoming and accommodative way.

These three simple steps may seem obvious to you as an avid web user. However, one concept that runs behind them all spell the difference between the successful web personas like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki, - to the rest of the world who seem to never raise up beyond the level of mediocrity. This concept is contained in one simple word : consistency. As I have mentioned once in my previous post, whatever you do in the Internet, you need to update, update and update your page or status or blog. There’s nothing worse than seeing a company’s blog which hasn’t been updated for a long time. It gives your audience the impression that you can’t finish what you started, or even that you are a company that lacks commitment to do your job. Hardly the impression you would want your company to have, would you ?

The good news is, once you hold fast to the concept of consistency, the three methods I mentioned above are easy enough to do, - or at least to manage. You can update them all yourselves, or you may opt to delegate the tasks to a staff specifically dedicated to do just that. However you choose to do it, just don’t give up easily. After all, tenacity is a close sibling of consistency. Do what you need to do, and embrace the fact that you are entering the new, excited realm of Enterprise 2.0. Good luck !

While it might have been several days ago that the blogosphere was being given a taste of yet another uproar by TechCrunch and Last.fm; I find the underlying issue of what happens between them disturbingly abandoned by the much-heated discussion that takes place afterwards. That’s why I decided to write this post.

It all began when TechCrunch published an article by Erick Schonfeld where they make public the rumor that Last.fm just handed over their users’ music listening data to the RIAA. Basically, they stated that Last.fm did basically just that, - albeit unknowingly, to help RIAA target some million users who have downloaded and played illegal music in their computer.

Now for those of you who are not familiar with Last.fm, they are a social network owned by none other than CBS that makes a good use of their music recommendation engine. When a user listens to a song ( and install Last.fm software in his/her computer ), the software will “scrobble” the song and send the data to the website, - telling it that such and such user played this song. This will in turn lead to a powerful music recommendation service because “you shift the song’s importance on the site. It’ll be recommended to different people, because you’ve listened to it. It’ll move up our music charts and maybe more people will hear it because you thought it was good.”

It’s important to pause here for a moment and not get ourselves get drowned in the details. To get into the background of what actually happened, - you can read the TechCrunch post here, Last.fm’s response here -, and a good neutral, third party post about it from Ars Technica here. As you would be able to see, a lot of the follow-ups / comments in the said posts tend to revolve around two big defensive fronts. Most of them were busy trying to define who is right and who is wrong, with some sporadic comments about other issues altogether, - like the legality of downloaded songs and its implications to worldwide music sales, and so on. This in itself is not wrong as it helps million of people learn about issues they otherwise might have not learned, but I feel that it masks the biggest, underlying issue of these all : responsible journalism and what it should have said.

It is worrying that TechCrunch based their news story on an uncorroborated rumor. Yes, the writer of the post tried to contact Last.fm and received an unsatisfying response which was not a categorical denial. But when it couldn’t be proven that Last.fm didn’t do it, - surely they can’t state as a fact that Last.fm did it ? For me, it’s a classic case of “my word against your word”, which is a silly thing to publish because it’s not a factual truth yet.

Granted, TechCrunch has maintained an understandable stance that they presented the story for what it is : a rumor. Schonfeld mentioned in his update of the post that “Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either. What I do have are a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly Last.fm shares user data with the record industry.”

Fair enough. But still it seems to me that one can’t just publish every rumor he finds and call it journalism. It has to have a certain standard and, yes, ethical codes if you will ; where journalism can thrive and serve the general public responsibly. It is really saddening when many that take part in the uproar caused by the post fail to see this basic premise. Instead of petty bickering about who’s wrong or right, - don’t you think that we need to have a better standard of journalism ? I rest my case.

As I write this post, one of my colleagues told me that DRM is not popular anymore. In a lot of ways, he’s right. Which is precisely why it bothered me to no end when I read a piece in Slashdot where someone found that DRM technology is still embedded in Windows 7. Further research on this topic lead me to a more worrying finding. Vista, with its wider user base, also contains a DRM system called the Protected Media Path. It will try to stop DRM-restricted content from playing while unsigned software is running in order to prevent the unsigned software from accessing the content, - sometimes even causing the computer to crash under some certain scenarios.

Like a lot of other things in life, DRM technology was created for a good cause. Basically, it is there to protect any kind of intellectual properties from being pirated for someone else’s gain. Taken from Wikipedia, it refers to any technology that attempt to control use of digital media by preventing access, copying or conversion to other formats by end users. It ranges from something as simple as a watermark on an image file to a protected audio file in a certain format like AAC or WMA.

In the recent times, it has been proven again and again that the implementation of DRM technologies more often than not resulted in unwanted consequences. In 2005, Sony BMG introduced new DRM technology which installed DRM software on users’ computers without clearly notifying the user or requiring confirmation. The plan backfired in the form of outraged customers and even class actions against Sony when it was later found that the installed software included a rootkit, which created a severe security vulnerability others could exploit. More recently, last year Spore became the most pirated game in 2008 just because it used a DRM technology called Securom.

Nowadays, ( correct me if I’m wrong on this ) the practice on using DRM technologies is frowned upon by most of everyday computer users. Steve Jobs himself has called on the music industry to eliminate DRM in an open letter titled Thoughts on Music. Since then, iTunes has started to sell DRM-free 256 kbit/s (up from 128 kbit/s) AAC encoded music from EMI.

This brings us to the big issue : Why did Microsoft still chose to include DRM in its Windows 7 ? There are two possible answers here : first, that they have some certain agreements with other software publishers to protect their Windows-based software from being tinkered on; or second, that it was an honest mistake by the Slashdot writer, - that his problem was somehow started by some other issue other than DRM ( as suggested by some of the post’s comments ). For their own benefits, I do hope that it’s the second answer.

If you are someone who use computer extensively like me to work, let’s hope that this will end soon.  But if you are someone who is planning to publish your work with DRM, I urge you to think carefully before you proceed.  Do the research, and decide whether it will be good for your business or not.