Category Archives: IT

Drupal 7 is slower but more scalable

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Nice to hear from the BCS about Drupal 7, with more content making it slower but more safely scalable.

By all accounts it should have been delivered before now, but because of lack of contributors it’s slowed right down – I wonder if any UK-based Drupal developers are helping out in this respect?

The new release of popular content management system Drupal will be slower, but more scalable, according to its creators.

Drupal 7, which is already behind schedule, is expected to be launched in either summer or autumn this year.

The open source software, which is increasing in popularity, is now thought to power around one percent of the world’s websites.

The upgrade will feature over 70 new modules and contain a substantial growth in code size.

The announcement came at the Drupalcon conference in San Francisco.

Many UK based developers booked to attend the conference have had to watch proceedings over the net because of flight disruptions.

For the super-geek there’s the added bonus that Drupal 7 connects the open source platform into the semantic as Drupal 7 adds Resource Description Framework (RDF) to mark up content such as blog posts, comments, and tags from different sources, so you can present them in your own site or searches. Apparently it’s like turning the web into one vast database – also known as the semantic web. [Or for the complex-minded, web 2.0 + semantic web = web 3.0].

Connecting Facebook status updates and fighter pilot tactics

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Really liked the link made in the fourth programme of the BBC’s The Virual Revolution between Norbert Wiener’s feedback loop for anti-aircraft gunners in WWII (ie breaking down the division between people and systems, to allow gunner’s to hit their airborne targets) and the radical impact of the status updates within Facebook (and the likes of Twitter…) on driving the internet revolution.

So here’s my question. What would happen if you applied fighter pilot military strategist John Boyd‘s concept of “the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event. According to this idea, the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one’s opponent” (see wikipedia page) to understanding of how *we* interact online?

I wonder if anyone’s applied this to produce an effective counter-cyber warfare strategy, as I can see the ‘fit’ from a theoretical point of view? [pause while *we*make a quick check..] oh yeah, see here for example as part of the University of Washington’s resource page on cyberwarfare.

More practically perhaps I wonder what would the OODA loop mean in explaining differing peoples’ actions online in the context of the BBC programme’s ‘Web Behaviour Test’ experiment?

Of course on a more practical social media level I have already blogged recently, thanks to HP Labs paper, on the value of creating good feedback loops with your top contributors:

This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop.

We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com.

Download:  Feedback loops of attention in peer production (PDF; 0.5 mb).