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Pew Research has their latest latest demographic study of internet usage online. There weren’t any surprises in the numbers to me. The younger the age group the higher the usage rate. The higher the income the higher usage rate.

Check it out here.

Tags: Demographics, Internet

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Some good news for developers came out of Yahoo this week. First off they released YUI (Yahoo Interface Library) Version 2.2.0 with additional controls including the Browser History Manager, DataTable, and Button Components.

Even cooler than a new release is Yahoo’s announcement they will be serving YUI library from Yahoo! Servers. Why is this great? Well as Yahoo says,

If you’re using YUI for your own project, we’ll serve the files for you — gzipped, with good cache-control, using our state-of-the-art network, for free. You can count on these files being continuously available because they’re the same files, served by the same source, that we use for most YUI implementations at Yahoo!.

If you are a web developer and you have not looked into the YUI library you should. I was comfortable with other JS libraries like scriptaculous, prototype, and moofx among others. Once I tried the YUI library that became the defacto JS library for projects I work on.

Enjoy

Tags: Yahoo, YUI, Web Development, Javascript

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I just read a great post from Mike over at Techdirt entitled ‘Perhaps It’s Not the Entertainment Industry’s Business Model That’s Outdated’. I was instantly intrigued because I consider myself in the camp that says it is obsolete. So I read on…

He says their business model is not obsolete, but…

What is obsolete is what people think the industry’s business model is. And, the worst thing is that the people most guilty of this are the industry execs themselves.

This instantly made perfect sense, especially with an analogy. I’ll try my own here. It’s growing fairly obvious that the PS3 is failing behind the Xbox 360 and the Wii. Why? Because Sony thinks the business model is making video game systems but in reality they are competing in the home entertainment market. This allows the Wii / 360 to own the market before Sony realizes it exists.

Back to Mike’s post…

Everyone may think that you’re buying “music” or “movies” but that’s very rarely what you’re actually buying. You’re buying the experience of going to the movies. Or the ability to have the convenience of a DVD. Or the convenience of being able to listen to a song on your iPod. And, in many cases, it’s not just one thing, but a bundle of things [...]

I wonder how many other industries this can be applied to? I bet one kind find analogous examples with Microsoft, GM, and other ginormous corporations.

It can still affect the small, agile company though - if you are not careful.

Sometimes it’s good to re-evaluate what your company does, who you compete against, and how your current model will translate into emerging markets. Or else you may end up obsolete.

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I know it’s a late warning but it’s something you should acknowledge if you haven’t yet. Regardless of your technical disposition you should know that because of the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 Daylight Savings Time (DST) will be extended by approximately four weeks. It will start three weeks earlier (March 11) and end one week later (November 4).

Why is this a problem? Well much like Y2K (remember Y2K?) there will be a fundamental change in how time is handled - only this time the problem is worse. Y2K was only a problem for institutions whose program code (done to save space back when servers had the same amount of memory as your cell phone) had two placeholders for date rather than 4.

This is a bigger problem because computers are programmed to update the date/time automagically for things like DST. Furthermore 99% of applications (both web and desktop) use time from anything from timestamping to telling you when an email was delivered.

In the Microsoft world we develop applications based on the server time. So if the server time is wrong - all the time is wrong. But it makes for an easy 1-stop fix.

The moral of the story is that you as a developer, systems adminsitrator, or CEO should make sure that your company is ready for these changes.

If you are a Microsoft shop, check out the document they prepared so you can make sure you and/or your organization is ready.

Don’t worry about your personal computer, unless you shut off automatic updates (which is dumb), because a patch will be delivered to you next week.

Preparing for Daylight Saving Time changes in 2007 - Microsoft

Tags: Time Change, DST, Microsoft, Y2K

image from leo reynolds on flickr

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I generally don’t pass on great blogs that much - maybe I should do more of that but it seems to be something everyone does so there’s not much room for new recommendations. Let me know if you want more of this.

But anyway, Wurkit Books has been one of my favorites recently for a daily dose of motivation and inspiration. The blog is run by Daniel Ritzenthaler, a partner at Forty (a great web design firm). The blog’s tagline - ‘Great Quotes from Great Books’. And that’s that.

Daniel pulls the best excerpts from the bese books on Design, Business, and Marketing.

My recent favorite from Wurkit…

You don’t need to have ideas that are startling in their originality (I’m sure you already have those). What you need is the guts to do the things you need to do.

And Daniel, as usual, adds his two cents…

It’s amazing how many people have a killer idea or an ambitious plan… It’s even more amazing how few people actually do anything about it.

Keep up the good work.

Tags: Wurkit Books, Inspriation, Books, Business, Design, Marketing

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