Farshid Ketabchi

Metadata or data about data has been an important topic in software and the web all along. In the old days we used metadata on a HTML page source to increase its searchability. That is by adding metadata or tags to a page we would tell the search engines what the page is about so that if someone searched for one of the tags, they would return the page in their search result. So a page on a given product or service (e.g. camera) could contain a list of relevant terms (e.g. photography). This is still relevant even in HTML 5 with the tag . (See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/html5_meta.asp). XML a Metaddata Language The power of XML in a sense is in the fact that it is a meta-language — a language for defining other languages. So given an XML schema you can define a language such as HTML itself. Or I can define a language for expressing customers and all its re... (more)

Leveraging Your Host Systems with SOA Web Services

The promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA), increasing benefits of Web services, and continued business use of legacy systems have all coalesced to usher in a new era of flexible IT alignment for business needs. With only a fraction of legacy applications being Web-enabled and increasing enterprise investment in SOA, organizations need to know how they can use Web services to leverage their legacy systems. Web services can be used to leverage host systems and enable the transformation of legacy applications into Web-enabled composite applications. Such applications can b... (more)

Enabling Social Bookmarking and Link Sharing for Your Web Content

In a previous post “Shall we bookmark?” I discussed social bookmarking and covered several of the social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Reddit, Diggit and StumbleUpon. In this post I briefly describe how you can easily add social bookmarking buttons to your web pages or blog posts so that a reader or visitor to your blog can use any of such sites to bookmark your blog post or page. There are several services that have made this very easy by packaging up access to numerous social bookmarking sites into a dialog or pop-up window configured as a single button that can easily b... (more)

How do I tweet? Let me count the ways...

New Media on Ulitzer One of the great and unique things about Twitter is that it is a fairly simple and easy service to use. From an end-user perspective, setting up an account at twitter.com and starting to tweet is a couple of minutes of work. I can describe the concept of Twitter and its features to any internet-savvy person in 5 minutes. The basic functions on twitter.com can be summarized as follows: Create an account/profile Search or look up users Follow/un-follow a user Tweet — post an update Send a direct message to a follower Reply to a user or mention users I suppose ... (more)

Using Social Media in Your Business: Strategic or Tactical?

A while ago I read a blog post from a marketing executive who wrote that he had prohibited the use of certain words in his strategy and planning meetings. Among those words there where many popular social networking and media words such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Though that might seem odd at first, it makes a lot of sense. The point is that while social media may serve as an effective method of promoting your business, it is only a set of tools and channels that you may use to execute against your business plan and strategy. It is part of the tactical stuff that you do ... (more)