In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise is chased by an army of government deployed robotic spider spies attempting to hunt him down:

Although this is science fiction, the US military and others are working on robotic spy bots that already drop the fiction part of the equation. This is amazing from a technology point of view and a bit scary at the same time. The following is a summary of spy bots that already exist today.

A robotic hummingbird

Pentagon researchers are building a robotic hummingbird (spy-drone with camera) for potential use as a flying spy that is capable of maneuvering through windows and inside buildings. So the next time you see a hummingbird look twice you might be watched by the military!

The robotic hummingbird is one the TIME Magazine’s list of the top 50 inventions for 2011. Watch it fly and spy:

Watch the video about the making of here.

A robot that flies like a bird

Festo, a German industrial control and automation company, built SmartBird – a robot that flies like a bird:

It is a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. See it fly:

And from the same company comes AirPenguin, a flying robot based on a penguin.

GroundBot, A spherical all-terrain surveillance robot

GroundBot by Swedish robotics firm Rotundus is an all-terrain, amphibious surveillance robot in the shape of a bug-eyed sphere. Roughly the size of a car tire, the robot moves silently at up to six mph.

GroundBot houses two cameras which provide a stereoscopic view to its remote operator.

Flying quadrotor drones

At the University of Pennsylvania a team is working on an autonomous quadrotor drones for surveillance:

In the following video you will see this small autonomous drones perform precise maneuvers like flight through windows:

The latest experiment from this team is a swarm of nano quadrotors. See them here.

• When Ideas Have Sex
• What is Intelligence?
• Seadragon / Deep Zoom Technology
• Scott Berkun: The Myths of Innovation
• Project Natal

In this fun and entertaining talk author and Carnegie Mellon alum Scott Berkun shows that much of what we know about innovation is wrong as he explores the history of innovation and creative thinking.

• When Ideas Have Sex
• What is Intelligence?
• Seadragon / Deep Zoom Technology
• Robotic Spies
• Project Natal

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the West. In fact, most of the Third World is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this.

Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine

What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading.

Hans Rosling on global population growth

The world’s population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years — and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth. This is the paradoxical answer that Hans Rosling unveils at TED@Cannes using colorful new data display technology (you’ll see).

Hans Rosling: Asia’s rise — how and when

Hans Rosling was a young guest student in India when he first realized that Asia had all the capacities to reclaim its place as the world’s dominant economic force. At TEDIndia, he graphs global economic growth since 1858 and predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US.

Hans Rosling’s new insights on poverty

Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He demos Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. Then he does something really amazing.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling uses an amazing new presentation tool, Gapminder, to debunk several myths about world development. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

Source: Hans Rosling’s Profile on TED.com

• 7 Billion People: How Did We Get So Big So Fast?
• Story Power! Tools to Create Engaging Content
• Story Power! Brain-Friendly Content through Visuals and Storytelling
• What is Intelligence?
• The Secret Powers of Time

At MIT, Cynthia Breazeal and her team are building robots with social intelligence that communicate and learn the same way people do. Her favorite robot is Leonardo. Leonardo is the most expressive robot in the world today. Leonardo’s expressiveness arises from its ability to establish and maintain eye contact, move its eyes, mouth, ears, and arms to express a wide range of emotions.

Although highly articulated, Leonardo is not designed to walk, it can gesture and is able to manipulate objects in simple ways. Although it is not humanlike, the developers have intentionally given Leonardo a youthful appearance to encourage people to playfully interact with it, much as one might with a young child.

Read more about Leonardo at this MIT Media Lab – Personal Robot Group project page.

The above video is from Cynthia Breazeal TED Talk: The rise of personal robots:

• What is Intelligence?
• When Ideas Have Sex
• Seadragon / Deep Zoom Technology
• Scott Berkun: The Myths of Innovation
• Robotic Spies

For the travelling section on this blog I was looking for a photo album that could be integrated into WordPress. I tried all major photo album plugins for WordPress but was not satisfied by any of those. I ended up putting together my own unique solution that is described below.

Step 1: Adding Meta Data

I am using Windows Live Photo Gallery to add meta data like tags, title and description.

Step 2: Geotagging

I am using Picasa and Google Earth to add geotags to each photo.

Step 3: Uploading Photos

The photos are uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. This is done via the Picasa desktop application. All the metadata is picked up by the web album automatically.

Picasa Web Albums vs. Flickr: Both services provide more or less the same feature set: albums, map view, slide show. However Picasa Web Album allows an unlimited number of albums with the free account as long as the photos do not exceed the 1024 MB limit. The free account at Flickr only shows the most recent 200 uploaded photos. In order to stay free Picasa Web Albums turned out to be the better option for my use case.

Step 4: Creating the Album Preview

To create the album preview I am using the Collage feature of Picasa.

Step 5: Embedding the Album

Full Album | Slide Show | Show Map

Finally the album preview image along with links to the full album, slide show and map is embedded in a blog post. To see how this is done just view the source of this page.

• What is Dropbox?
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• How to Create and Publish a Deep Zoom Composition in 5 Easy Steps

In this TED Talk author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas.

It’s not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.

• Scott Berkun: The Myths of Innovation
• What is Intelligence?
• Seadragon / Deep Zoom Technology
• Robotic Spies
• Project Natal

While Jeff Hawkins was creating the Palm Pilot, launching the era of handheld computing and amassing hundreds of millions of dollars, a big part of his mind was somewhere else: His true passion is something entirely different. It is an Einstein-worthy puzzle that has fascinated scientists for centuries: What is the source of intelligence?

Understanding the human brain and designing truly intelligent machines has been a lifelong passion for him. In his book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins together with New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee takes a detailed look at how the human brain works, compares this to how AI currently works and explains his memory-prediction framework theory.

Hawkins outlines the book as follows:

The book starts with some background on why previous attempts at understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines have failed. I then introduce and develop the core idea of the theory, what I call the memory-prediction framework. In chapter 6 I detail how the physical brain implements the memory-prediction model—in other words, how the brain actually works. I then discuss social and other implications of the theory, which for many readers might be the most thought-provoking section. The book ends with a discussion of intelligent machines—how we can build them and what the future will be like.

Today’s computers can solve problems in seconds that require hours or days for a person. Yet even a child can recognize a familiar face and understand speech, while the most advanced computers struggle with those tasks.

Hawkins thinks scientists working in AI and neural networks have focused too much on inputs and outputs rather than the neurological system that connects them: "Many people today believe that AI is alive and well and just waiting for enough computing power to deliver on its many promises," Hawkins says. "I disagree. AI suffers from a fundamental flaw in that it fails to adequately address what intelligence is or what it means to understand something."

"Why can a six-year-old hop gracefully from rock to rock in a streambed while the most advanced robots of our time are lumbering zombies?" Hawkins asks. "Why are three-year-olds well on their way to mastering language while computers can’t despite half a century of programmers’ best efforts? Why can you tell a cat from a dog in a fraction of a second while a supercomputer cannot make the distinction at all?"

The answer, as Hawkins and Blakeslee demonstrate, is that the human brain doesn’t compute answers to problems; it retrieves answers from memory. While it takes many steps to compute something, it takes only a few steps to retrieve it from memory. The seat of human intelligence, where all this memory storage and retrieval takes place, is the neocortex, the pinkish- gray mass that looks like a cauliflower.

The key to understanding what intelligence is, is in understanding the cortex.

By using many easy-to-understand examples Hawkins and Blakeslee do an outstanding job of explaining the organizational architecture of the neocortex and the intricate way in which its six layers of cells are connected.

"The neocortex isn’t made of superfast components, and the rules under which it operates are not that complex," Hawkins says. "However, it does have a hierarchical structure that contains billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. If we find it hard to imagine how such a logically simple but numerically vast memory system can create our consciousness, our languages, our cultures, our art, this book, and our science and technology, I suggest it is because our intuitive sense of the capacity of the cortex and the power of its hierarchical structure is inadequate."

Hawkins’ basic premise is that the human brain is a memory-prediction system for modeling the world around it. The brain stores and recalls experiences, relates them to other experiences and uses the memories of these accumulated experiences to make predictions. This ability to predict is the heart and soul of human intelligence, he says. It can also help explain phenomena such as consciousness, imagination and prejudice, or to answer such elusive questions as, What is reality?

As to the question of whether we can build truly intelligent machines, Hawkins believes the answer is yes, but those machines won’t be the humanoid robots we’re used to seeing in films like "I, Robot." Hawkins offers his own intriguing ideas on how truly intelligent machines might be like, but to find out more about this you have to read the book.

Jeff Hawkins is now co-founder of Numenta – a startup dedicated to create a new type of computing technology based on his theory described in the book On Intelligence.

If you have any curiosity at all as to how your brain works, read On Intelligence and you’ll be hooked. It is by far the best book on this topic. You can read the prolog here.

• Live Labs Pivot: A great way to visualize massive amounts of data
• Leonardo: The Most Expressive Robot in the World Today!
• bSix12 Explorer: Navigate in a way that is powerful, informative & fun
• Where Good Ideas Come From
• When Ideas Have Sex

Pivot is a new technology developed by Microsoft Live Labs that makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.

Pivot is designed to provide a much more natural way for humans to digest large amounts of information without losing their way — an idea that anyone who has analyzed giant spreadsheets may welcome.

At the heart of Pivot are "Collections." They combine large groups of similar items, so you can begin viewing the relationships between individual pieces of information in a new way. By visualizing hidden patterns, Pivot enables you to discover new insights while interacting with thousands of things at once.

In the following presentation Gary Flake demos Pivot. This will give you a pretty good idea what this technology is about:

Pivot’s most compelling feature is its ability to smoothly and quickly arrange collections according to common characteristics and then zoom in for a closer look, by either clicking on a particular item or filtering the collection to get a subset of information.

“We found that if you make it a sudden transition, people lose their way… but if you make it very smooth and continuous, people have a mental model of how they got to where they are.”

- Gary Flake

“With Pivot you can swim through the data, taking little twists and turns,” Flake says. “If you are looking at all the information at once, the proverbial forest, you can click on any one item or filter and smoothly zoom into the trees without any interruption.”

Because Pivot works with almost any kind of data, its potential uses are practically infinite. The key elements to designing a great Pivot collection are relatively simple: pick a subject matter with great images and interesting details, choose a small number of properties to filter on, and add links to related content.

The image content for a Pivot collection consists of a Deep Zoom Collection of individual Deep Zoom images, all based on Microsoft Seadragon technology.

Live Examples & Demos

Live Labs now also provides a Silverlight Pivot Viewer. This makes it possible to integrate Pivot into your own site and visualize Pivot collections without installation any additionally software (except the Silverlight plug-in). Here are some examples:

bSix12 – Explorer:

This site provides a Pivot view to explore all available blog posts. You can slice and sort the content by category, tag or date. Try the live version here.

Hitched Wedding Locations:

Hitched is a UK based wedding site that has thousands of wedding venues in the country. It now enables visitors to quickly browse and filter locations using PivotViewer.

Browse the site and give it a try.

Netflix Movie Collection:

It provides a nice example of how you can use PivotViewer to navigate a large set of information quickly and easily. You can use it to easily find and sort through all your favorite movies, and then navigate directly to the page on Netflix. Try it here.

If you like to create your own Pivot Collection read the developer documentation.

• bSix12 Explorer: Navigate in a way that is powerful, informative & fun
• Seadragon / Deep Zoom Technology
• What is Intelligence?
• UI Platforms: Which One Would You Pick?
• Project Natal

I am very exited to introduce the new bSix12 Explorer!

The bSix12 Explorer allows you to browse through all available articles on this site in a way that is powerful, informative & fun. You can filter and sort the articles by category, tag or date.

Click on the Explore menu in the main navigation to get started.

Note: This feature is based on Silverlight. If you haven’t installed the Silverlight browser plug-in yet you need to install it first.

Use the mouse wheel or click on an article or graph view column to zoom in. Once you focused on a single article the info pane will be shown on the right. From here you can navigate further by using the navigation controls or by clicking on a link in the info pane. To read an article click top right hotspot of the article preview.

Try the live version here.

• Live Labs Pivot: A great way to visualize massive amounts of data
• Seadragon / Deep Zoom Technology
• What is Intelligence?
• UI Platforms: Which One Would You Pick?
• Story Power! Tools to Create Engaging Content

Deep Zoom (aka Seadragon) provides the ability to interactively view high-resolution images.

You can zoom in and out of images rapidly without affecting the performance of your application. Deep Zoom enables smooth loading and panning by serving up multi-resolution images and using spring animations.

In the following presentation Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos the Deep Zoom & Photosynth. This will give you a pretty good idea what this technology is about:

…the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment.

The Image Pyramid

Deep Zoom, or for that matter any other similar technology such as Zoomorama, Zoomify, Google Maps etc. uses something called an image pyramid. It allows the rendering engine to pick and choose only the data that is required for a particular view. Each level is significantly smaller than the next, and is loaded as soon as it becomes available. The smooth experience is created by progressively loading each new resolution level and seamlessly blending between them. The following illustration below shows what the image pyramid looks like conceptually:

At each level of the pyramid, the image is scaled down by 4 (a factor of 2 in each dimension). Also, the image is tiled up into 256×256 tiles by default. If you zoom in to a specific area of a large image, then only those tiles needed to show the specific areas are downloaded.

After creating your own Deep Zoom Image, you end up with a folder structure that mimics the levels of the pyramid along with metadata:

The folder structure and metadata can be created programmatically or by a tool like DeepZoom Composer.

To get more details about the image pyramid and the Deep Zoom file format refer to the following articles:

• Seadragon Developer: Creating Content
• Inside Deep Zoom – Part I: Multiscale Imaging
• Inside Deep Zoom – Part II: Mathematical Analysis
• Deep Zoom File Format Overview

Deep Zoom Collections

A collection is made up of multiple images. Deep Zoom optimizes working with a collection of images by enabling lower levels of multiple images to share tiles which, reduces network traffic and render hundreds of high-resolution images at once.

For example, Deep Zoom can load and decode only one tile, and retrieve the thumbnails for a hundred images in one operation.

The following illustration shows how thumbnails are stored at various levels of detail.

Toward the top of the pyramid, all the images are packed into a single tile. In the middle of the pyramid, images share tiles, but multiple tiles may be needed to contain all the images. At the bottom of the pyramid, there is usually one image per tile.

With Deep Zoom Collections you are able to programmatically move individual multi-resolution images around the screen or filter your images. This leads to interesting applications like Live Labs Pivot.

For more detail, check out A Deep Zoom Blog: Deep Zoom Collections Explained.

Scenarios & Applications

Deep Zoom can be used in many different areas. A classic example is zooming in on parts of a large map to see different levels of detail and then, using the mouse, moving your view around the map surface. As the user moves their view, animations are used to give the user the impression that they are "moving" from one place to the other on the image.

Bing Maps is build on Deep Zoom technology. In the following TED presentation Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps powered by Deep Zoom & Photosynth technology.

The version Blaise Aguera y Arcas demoed in this presentation is now live. Go check it out here.

Another example is exploring a professional photo composition made up of high-resolution pictures. The Mona Lisa Deep Zoom Composition featured on this blog falls into this category. Also see the deep zoom art project from Kunsthaus Zürich. It is featuring 8 paintings from Van Gogh, Cézanne and Monet. Combined the deep zoom images have a resolution of over 4 Gigapixel.

Deep Zoom technology is used in Photosynth. Photosynth allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automatically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web.

Live Labs Pivot is a new technology developed by Microsoft Live Labs that makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. The image content for a Pivot collection consists of a Deep Zoom Collection of individual Deep Zoom images. The Hard Rock Memorabilia site was the first popular site that provided a “Pivot like” experience by using Deep Zoom Collections.

This site provides a Pivot view to explore all available blog posts. You can slice and sort the content by category, tag or date. Try the live version here.

• Live Labs Pivot: A great way to visualize massive amounts of data
• bSix12 Explorer: Navigate in a way that is powerful, informative & fun
• UI Platforms: Which One Would You Pick?
• Project Natal
• How to Create Attractive, User Friendly Applications?

My favorite note taking application is Evernote. This is how the developers themself describe it:

“Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.”

Capture everything

Chances are, if you can see it or think of it, Evernote can help you remember it. Type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Evernote will keep it all safe.

Organize it

Everything you capture is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If you like, you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks.

Find anything fast

Search for notes by keywords, titles, and tags. Evernote magically makes printed and handwritten text inside your images searchable, too.

Infinitely useful

Use Evernote for work, for play, and for everything that’s noteworthy. Here are a few suggestions:

• Keep notes from your meetings all in one place. Take a picture of a whiteboard and you’ll be able to find it later.
• Clip web pages to Evernote to read them later (e.g. on your phone while travelling on the bus)
• Snap a photo of a business card with your phone, and have an easy way to store and access contacts.
• Keep a record of your favorite wines by snapping a photo of the label when you find one you like.
• Remember the things you were supposed to remember. Create to-do lists, jot down random thoughts, leave a voice memo, and more.
• Get inspired. Keep a file of anything cool you want to buy for yourself or as a gift, whether it’s online or out in the real world.

Don’t have an Evernote account yet? Get started now »

• What is Dropbox?
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• How to Create and Publish a Deep Zoom Composition in 5 Easy Steps

Dropbox is the easiest way to store, sync and share files online and across your computers automatically.

Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!) Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.

Dropbox is without a doubt one of my favorite productivity tools. If you never heard of Dropbox check it out at www.dropbox.com

With Dropbox, your files are always in sync

Let’s say you’re editing a document at home. As soon as you click ‘Save’, Dropbox will sync this same file to all your other computers and mobile devices instantly and automatically. It’s as if you saved the document to all of your computers. This gives you the freedom to work on any of your computers and always have the files you need. 2GB of online storage for free, with up to 100GB available to paying customers.

Dropbox lets you share files easily

You can easily share entire folders or photo albums with Dropbox. Simply put the folders you want to share in your Dropbox, and invite people to them. You can also send people links to specific files within your Dropbox. This makes Dropbox perfect for team projects. A "Public" folder that lets you link directly to files in your Dropbox.

With Dropbox, online backup is automatic.

Any file you put into your Dropbox folder is automatically backed up. Even if your computer has a melt-down, your files are safe on Dropbox and can be restored at any time. While the free 2GB account is perfect for backing up your documents, Dropbox offers larger paid accounts (up to 100GB) for backing up your music and video collections too.

Dropbox is Your Personal Time Machine

Dropbox keeps a history of every change you make to your files so that you can undo mistakes and even undelete files. There’s no need to worry about lost work when Dropbox has you covered.

Dropbox Demo

Get your own Dropbox here.

• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• How to Create and Publish a Deep Zoom Composition in 5 Easy Steps
• How to Create a Unique Photo Album for Your Blog?

Follow these steps to create and publish your own Deep Zoom composition:

Step 1: Download and Install Deep Zoom Composer

Deep Zoom Composer is a tool that allows you to prepare images for use with the Deep Zoom technology. You can download Deep Zoom Composer here.

Step 2: Import Images

Think about the type of composition you like to create and import the source images into Deep Zoom Composer:

For the Mona Lisa Deep Zoom Composition I used a high resolution version of the famous painting as the background and many other images to hide as Easter Eggs.

Step 3: Create Composition

If you like to convert a high resolution image (e.g. panoramic photo, large map etc.) to the deep zoom format all you have to do is click on compose and drag the image from the list of available images to the design surface.

To include multiple images into one composition just zoom into the areas where you like to place the image and drag you images to the design surface. For the Mona Lisa Deep Zoom Composition I also specified menu items. To add a menu item click on menu and drag images from layers to the menu. The Deep Zoom Viewer will display those menu items and automatically zoom to the area where the image is located.

Step 4: Export Composition

Click on the Export Tab and chose a name, location and output type:

For this example I used the default settings. By default the output type is Silverlight Deep Zoom. In this case to view the composition Silverlight is required. If you choose Seadragon Ajax as the output type a Ajax based viewer will be generated that can be viewed even without the Silverlight plugin installed.

Step 5: Publish Composition

To publish the composition all you have to to is copy the files generated by Deep Zoom Composer to a Web Server. There are no special requirements for the Web Sever. Any static HTTP File Server will do. If you do not have access to your own Web Server the easiest way to publish the Deep Zoom Composition is via Dropbox. Get a Dropbox account and copy the files to the public folder of your Dropbox:

To get the public link right click the main html file generated by Deep Zoom Composer and choose copy public link. Your Deep Zoom Composition is now online and can be shared with others.

To integrate the composition into your blog you can use a modified version of the following tag:

<iframe width="570" height="400" src="http://yourserver.com/yourdeepzoom.html" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

By now you have a good understanding and many ideas how to use Deep Zoom Composer. Give it a go and share you links in the comments below. Have Fun!

• bSix12 Explorer: Navigate in a way that is powerful, informative & fun
• What is Dropbox?
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• Top 10 Tools for Learning

Do you feel some pain in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down?

These symptoms are all normal, and they’re not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you’re doing – sitting. All of these can be symptoms of not having a proper chair to sit in when doing desk work. Research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion: Sitting is a public-health risk. And exercising doesn’t offset it.

"People need to understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely different from walking or exercising," says University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. "Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little. They do completely different things to the body."

Feeling first signs of the above mentioned symptoms I was looking for a new office chair and came across Herman Miller’s Aeron.

The Aeron Chair is a popular office chair introduced by Herman Miller back in 1994. The chair is popular for its ergonomic design, which ensures comfort and an excellent fit for the user. It is definitely one of the best chairs around for computer users and for general office use and use in meeting or conference rooms.

"The human form has no straight lines, it is biomorphic. We designed the chair to be above all biomorphic, or curvilinear, as a metaphor of human form in the visual as well as the tactile sense. There is not one straight line to be found on an Aeron Chair."  says designer Bill Stumpf.

Its novel design has gained it a spot in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

Have you ever wondered why people purchase a high-end chair like the Aeron even if it costs nearly a thousand dollars? The answer lies in the health benefits. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable.

Other popular high-end chairs to look at are Herman Miller’s Mirra, the SwingChair, the Ergohuman Mesh Chair and the Liberty Chair from Humanscale.

Many office workers swear by them. But are those high-end chairs worth the money? What do you think?

• The Holstee Manifesto: This is Your Life.
• Good artists Copy, Great artists Steal
• Born To Run
• 23 and 1/2 hours: What is the Single Best Thing We Can Do for Our Health?
• Will Smith About The Key to Life

Information overload has been around since the introduction of the printing press; so why do we still consider it to be a new problem?

Clay Shirky, New York University new-media professor, writer, and consultant argues that the problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure:

“What we’re dealing with now is not the problem of information overload, because we’re always dealing (and always have been dealing) with information overload…Thinking about information overload isn’t accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is.”

Watch the video below to hear Clay Shirky’s well-argued points:

The  Gutenberg economic logic of publishing required that publishers act as filters. The Internet reduces the economic risks of publishing by allowing more and more information to be published at almost no cost.

This means it’s increasingly important for us to create better filters. Having access to information is great, but we need to filter and focus based on what we want to accomplish and what we need.

What kind of filters do you have in place to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed by too much information? Let me know in the comments.

• When Ideas Have Sex
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• Scott Berkun: The Myths of Innovation
• How to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization?
• Will Smith About The Key to Life

In a previous article I showed you why it is beneficial to support Knowledge Sharing in your organization. If you haven’t read this article yet go and check it out first: How to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization?

In this follow up post I will show you the top 6 tools you can use to as part of your Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure. The main focus is on how those tools can be used to to support parts or the entire outlined concept.

1. WordPress and WordPressMU

WordPress is world’s leading blogging platform. It is free and easy to use. The open source project is driven by a dedicated community. Due to its plug-in architecture and strong user community there are tons of plugins available for WordPress.

A self-hosted version that can be installed on any server is available. WordPressMU is a special version of WordPress that allows multiple blogs on one installation. WordPressMU could be uses out of the box to establish a corporate blogging system.

Pros:

• Best blogging solution available
• Very easy to use

Cons:

• Lack of social networking features beyond blogging (The new BuddyPress project tries to deliver something on this front)

2. Drupal

Drupal is best open source content management system available. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites. Like WordPress it also has a very strong user community and many plugins.

Pros:

• Great CMS Platform
• Social Networking Features are available.

Cons:

• Complex system, harder to use than WordPress
• Social Networking features are not integrated out of the box.

3. SharePoint

SharePoint is an integrated suite of products to create a Microsoft intranet and collaboration portal.

Pros:

• Technology might be already in use in your organization
• Integration into the corporate IT Infrastructure
• Many tools available (File Repo, Links, Wiki)

Cons:

• Document Management Centric
• Hard to customize to specific needs

4. Yammer, SocialCast

Yammer is a private Micro-blogging service for in-company use. In addition to Micro-blogging there are discussion boards and users can form/join groups. SocialCast is a Yammer competitor.

Pros:

• Easy to use Micro-blogging solution
• Good support for Member profiles

Cons:

• Yammer can not be self hosted

5. Status.net

Status.net is a self-hosted open source Micro-blogging server.

Pros:

• Similar to Yammer and Twitter but open source and self-hosted
• Good for the Micro-blogging and Member Profile part

Cons:

• Focus just Micro-blogging. Needs to be integrated into an overall platform

6. The Elgg Social Media Platform

To realize the outlined concept the integration of different tools like Profiles, Microblogs, Blogs, Wikis into a common News Feeds is key.

The Elgg Social Media Platform is the fastest and easiest way to realize the outlined concept. Elgg is a free, open source social media platform. It is more than just social networking but can support a huge variety of social media tools like bookmarking, blogging, wikis, files, RSS feeds, micro-blogging and more – all in one platform.

Elgg allows individuals to create, organize and manage their own personal resources and contacts, as well as work with others – co-creating and sharing content and resources – in groups.

Why Elgg?

There are a huge number of different social media tools available. Although some people can cope with working with a large number of tools; others are overwhelmed by this – and is even putting them off getting engaged with social media. 

Using the Elgg social media platform within an organization means:

• You don’t have to rely on cobbling together a mish-mash of stand-alone social media tools
• You don’t have to worry about the security and privacy of data held outside of the organization
• You can provide a seamless environment where members can use a range of social media tools

If you need help setting up your own Elgg environment you can contact the the Elgg consultancy services.

• What is Dropbox?
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• How to Create and Publish a Deep Zoom Composition in 5 Easy Steps
• How to Create a Unique Photo Album for Your Blog?

The number and volume of information resources on the Internet and our corporate intranets is enormous and growing exponentially. People spent a lot of time trying to find information to accomplish their tasks. Improving this process increase the competitive advantage and accelerate the adoption of new and worthy ideas.

Know-how is Know-where. The quality of decisions depends on existing knowledge. The one that use, create and share knowledge efficiently will succeed. It is not possible to keep all relevant knowledge in mind. A big challenge is having the available knowledge where it is required.

To identify relevant content it is necessary to look through many resources for those of specific interest; it will also be necessary to continuously monitor available resources (e.g. blogs, twitter, etc.) to detect new useful sources or to decide that others are no longer of interest.

This means it’s increasingly important for us to create better filters. Having access to information is great, but we need to filter and focus based on what we want to accomplish and what we need.

You can achieve this goal by connecting your team to a knowledge network. Members of each community of interest are expert in their topic and have fun sharing their knowledge and expertise with others. The infrastructure powering the knowledge network will provide straight forward tools to support social interactions, shared creation, information research, collaboration and communication. The integration into daily business is important.

The heart and soul of a Knowledge Network are the people contributing to topics of their interest and improving the quality of these topics.

The infrastructure of a Knowledge Network consists of a number of topic spaces, member profiles and shared tools. A community of interest grows around each topic.

Each Topic Space has a dedicated moderator and you may use any number of Shared Tools like a Dashboard, a News Feed, a Blog, a Microblog, a Wiki, Links, Files and aggregated Feeds. The integration of these tools with an overall news feed is important.

Each Team Member gets its own personal space and can choose to add from all available shared tools like a Blog, a Microblog, Files, Links, etc. The profile can be personalized by your team members. At least it contains a portrait image and a short role description.

Project Spaces are just special topics. The shared tools are the same. They provide a starting point for each project and contain pointers to all the relevant information. Furthermore they can be considered as shared space for ad-hoc collaboration around project specific activities. Traditionally you would do this via email. The problem is that it is locked up in our “inbox silos” and thus not accessible to any other interested team members not part of the distribution list…

To keep up to date with the activities on a certain topic you can visit the web interface of your knowledge network, turn on Email notifications or subscribe to the news feed in your aggregator of choice.

In a follow up post I will show you tools you can use to support Knowledge Sharing in your organization.

• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure
• Will Smith About The Key to Life
• Why We Do What We Do?
• Where Good Ideas Come From

In an previous post I showed you how to create more engaging content which is fun to read and easy to memorize: If you haven’t read this article yet go and check it out first: Story Power! Brain-Friendly Content through Visuals and Storytelling.

In this follow up post I will show you some tools you can use to create visuals that allow your readers to "get" something as quickly and clearly as possible.

Stock Photography

It is much more effective to use pictures and words than just words alone.

Thanks to web sites like iStockPhoto, you can get just about any image you can imagine for a couple dollars. If you use the image just on your web site you can get away with the lowest resolution/least expensive version of the photo. Here are some examples where I used stock photography to make content more appealing: Eagle or Seashell?, Fly like a Penguin!, Juggling Five Balls Of Life, Find What You Love.

Comic Strip Tools

Just take a look at the Google Chrome Comic book with artwork by Scott McCloud to understand the power of comics to transport information.

ToonDoo, KerPoof and Bitstrips are all examples of free tools you can use to create your own comic strips.

As per ToonDoo’s terms of use, you are free to use any cartoon created by you as long as you include title, author name and ToonDoo watermark. When those  mandatory elements are included, you are free to embed ToonDoo‘s or screenshots.

I used the excellent ToonDoo Maker to create the comic strip for the Designing the ULTIMATE Twitter Client article.

Chart, Sketch & Wire Frame Tools

I love wire frame tools. They allow you to sketch an idea as quickly as possible without worrying about the visual design.

For user interface related mockups try Balsamiq Mockups. You can see it in action in the following articles: About bSix12, Put First Things First, Designing the ULTIMATE Twitter Client

You can also try Lovely Charts. It is a free online diagramming application, that allows you to create professional looking diagrams of all kinds.

Drawing & Photoshop

You can create your own visual by using an image editing software like Photoshop and a drawing tablet like the Wacom tablet. For more detailed information read Kathy Sierra’s excellent article about how to add graphics to your blog, book, or presentation.

For the following article I used Photoshop to create a visual that helped me bring the point across: UI Platforms: Which One Would You Pick?

Videos & Screencasts

YouTube is the most popular video sharing website where you can upload and share videos. If you want to use a video, you can embed it into your own web page or blog. On this blog I use embedded YouTube videos a lot. There are some excellent videos hosted on YouTube to learn from.

Here are some examples of featured YouTube videos on this site: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, The Inspiring Story of Rick and Dick Hoyt, Time Management, Find What You Love.

We learn a lot by watching other people doing things. This is why screencast’s  are a powerful learning tool. It is like looking someone over the shoulder and learning from that persons experience. My favorite tool to produce screencast’s is Camtasia Studio.

• Story Power! Brain-Friendly Content through Visuals and Storytelling
• bSix12 Explorer: Navigate in a way that is powerful, informative & fun
• Best of Hans Rosling
• Live Labs Pivot: A great way to visualize massive amounts of data
• How To Setup a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

Jane Hart a Social Learning Consultant and the Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies maintains a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning.

This valuable resource is compiled from the feedback of hundreds of learning professionals all around the world contributing their personal top 10 tools.

Here is my contribution for this year’s list:

1. The Web

According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, the main objective of the World Wide Web was to be a space for sharing information. “It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute”, he wrote in his first blog post. It was, in other words, supposed to be a groupware application.

He designed and implemented the first web browser to not only display the content of web pages but also to edit and save a new version of that page. Early Web pages were fully collaborative. Mosaic, the browser that popularized the Web in 1993, allowed pages to be viewed and not changed. The original collaborative nature of web page browsing was lost.

Despite the fact that the Web took off primarily as a publishing medium people invented other ways like blogs, forums and wikis to make it the creative space Tim Berners-Lee envisioned right from the beginning.

For me the Web is without a doubt the number one tool for learning. It is the foundation that allows us to share our passion and knowledge with the rest of the world and to collaboration around shared content with others.

My favorite web browser to access the Web is Google Chrome: It is fast, user-friendly and convenient.

2. Google Search

Google search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997. It achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. It ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web pages that link there. The page rank of a web site is an indicator of the popularity of this site but it does not say anything about the quality of the content. However the premise is that people will link to sites with good content and and thus make it more popular. You can think about PageRank as a voting system for web sites.

For me Google Search is still the best way to find information on the Web.

3. Twitter

Twitter is a free online service that enables you to broadcast short messages of 140 characters or fewer (aka status updates or tweets) to your friends or followers. People interested in your status updates then subscribe to follow your messages and you can subscribe to follow others.

With status updates you can answer the question “What are you doing?” However many users go beyond this simple question and use status updates to share links to interesting content, photos, videos or music on the web. You can learn more by reading What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?

My preferred way to access Twitter is SharedMinds Desktop. With SharedMinds Desktop you can browse though all your tweets quickly and show links, user profiles and twitter search results right there in the same application. This will make you more productive and enhance your Twitter experience. You can download a free version here.

4. Blogs

In addition to Twitter, reading blogs is still one of my favorite ways of learning about new stuff. Blogs are special web sites that provide an RSS feed of published articles or posts in reverse-chronological order. RSS is a document format which allows you to keep up to date with the content on sites all across the web.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, the feed reader will check the website you subscribe to for new content. If there are any new articles, they will be displayed directly in your feed reader. The feed reader of my choice is Google Reader.

If you like to start your own blog you can check out WordPress.com, Blogger.com or TypePad.com where you can start blogging right away. For bSix12 I decided to setup a self-hosted WordPress blog. For writing blog posts I am using Windows Live Writer.

If you haven’t already subscribed to bSix12 you can do this here.

5. Podcasts / Audiobooks

Podcast and audiobooks are great tools for learning . There are many situation in which you can listen to audio while doing other things like driving to and from work, cycling, jogging and so on. In this way you can make use of otherwise unused time. Or you can save time by listening to the audio versions of books. Sometimes I find myself to tired even to read and an audiobook is a good alternative.

A very good site to find podcasts is www.spokenword.org. A great resource for free audiobooks is librivox.org. A good selection of audiobooks can also be found on Amazon.com.

6. Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, collaborative encyclopedia and a fantastic information resource. It is a starting point for most of the things I research.

7. Books

I am not spending as much time reading books as I where used to but books are still very important. For me the best place to discover new and interesting books is Amazon.com.

8. Videos & Screencasts

YouTube is the most popular video sharing website where you can upload and share videos. If you want to use a video, you can embed it into your own web page or blog. On my blog I use embedded YouTube videos a lot. There are some excellent videos hosted on YouTube to learn from.

We learn a lot by watching other people doing things. This is why screencast’s  are a powerful learning tool. It is like looking someone over the shoulder and learning from that persons experience. My favorite tool to produce screencast’s is Camtasia Studio.

9. Social Bookmarking

My favorite social bookmarking service is del.icio.us. It is a service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The search functionality is very powerful and for certain keywords I get a better search result than with Google Search.

10. Note Taking & To-do List

My favorite note taking application is Evernote. This is how the developers themself describe it: “Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.” It provides advanced features like OCR. This allows you to search for text inside images. Notes are synchronized between your devices and applications.

My favorite to-do list tool is Remember The Milk.

What are your favorite tools for learning?

• What is Dropbox?
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure
• How to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization?

With SharedMinds Desktop you can browse though all your tweets quickly and show links, user profiles and twitter search results right there in the same application. This will make you more productive and enhance your Twitter experience.

 Download now – It’s free

Open Gallery | Slide Show

SharedMinds Desktop has unique features like a powerful view engine, an integrated web viewer and flexible sorting and filtering. It supports twitter search, conversations, twitter lists, multiple accounts, multi-select, easy retweeting, URL shortening, image sharing, a single inbox and has a small memory footprint. It is a native Windows application and supports many different visual styles. For further information see the quick start guide.

 Download now – It’s free

• SharedMinds Desktop – Quickstart
• Designing the ULTIMATE Twitter Client
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• UI Platforms: Which One Would You Pick?
• The World’s First Computer Bug!

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free online service that enables you to broadcast short messages of 140 characters or fewer (aka status updates or tweets) to your friends or followers. People interested in your status updates then subscribe to follow your messages and you can subscribe to follow others. Whenever you start to follow somebody on Twitter you will instantly receive their status updates and you can read all of their messages in one place.

You can use a web browser, instant messaging, your mobile phone or you can choose from a gazillion of third party applications to access Twitter.

Watch the following CommonCraft video, which explains Twitter in Plain English:

How to get started?

The best way to find out what you think about Twitter is to experience it yourself. Go to Twitter.com and sign up for a free account. I recommend using your real name as your user name. In this way your friends will be able to find you easily.

Each user has his own profile page, in the form of Twitter.com/username (Example: my Twitter profile page is Twitter.com/RainerFalle). To customize your profile page write something about yourself, upload a picture and customize the look of your profile page. Your picture will appear next to each status update you send.

Your profile page will show information about you, who you are following and who is following you. It will also display your recent tweets (known as your timeline).

Now that you have a Twitter account, tell your friends about it!

Finding and Following people

Your Twitter experience will be defined by the people you choose to follow. Who you follow is completely up to you. During the sing-up process, Twitter will suggest some people to follow. If you are new to Twitter you can start following some of them to get used to the system.

If you already know people on Twitter you are interested in, start following them. You can use Twitters people search to find people by name. It is a little bit like coming to school for the first time. Nobody will tell you hey here is your list of new friends. Over time you will figure this out on your own.

A good way to find new interesting people is to take a look who your friends are following. Take a look at the pictures in the sidebar on your friends’ pages. Those are the users they are are following. If you click on one of those pictures, you’ll go to that user’s page.

Every time you came across a persons Twitter profile take a look at their recent tweets. If you like what you see click the “Follow” button. Following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates. When you follow someone, every time they post a new message, it will appear in your Twitter home page. How many people you follow is up to you. Some people follow a small number, others can cope with hundreds if not thousands. Remember you can always stop following people if you are not interested in their updates any more.

When people follow you you shouldn’t feel obliged to follow them back. Just follow who is interesting to you. If you don’t want someone to follow you, e.g. a spammer, than you can easily block that person.

Sending Twitter Messages (Tweets)

There are three types of Twitter messages: status updates, @replies and direct messages.

With status updates you can answer the question “What are you doing?” However many users go beyond this simple question and use status updates to share links to interesting content, photos, videos or music on the web.

An @reply is a public Twitter message directed at a specific person. An @reply is a tweet with @username at the beginning. Your message is understood as being intended for that particular person, although others will be able to see it. However, @replies won’t show up on your followers timeline unless they are the intended recipient.

To send direct messages (DM) enter d username message (e.g. d RainerFalle How are you?) These are private messages that only the named contact will see. Direct messages appear in a special Twitter inbox. You can only send direct messages to people who follow you.

To send Twitter messages you can use the Twitter web site, instant messaging, your mobile phone or a third party applications like SharedMinds Desktop. In all these cases, your "followers" will see your tweets on their own timelines immediately.

Sharing Web Links

Since you have only 140 characters for a Tweet every character counts and nearly everyone on Twitter uses a URL shortening service like http://bit.ly. For example the URL  http://bSix12.com/put-first-things-first/ can be shortened to http://bit.ly/1AX7Pw. Most Twitter clients like SharedMinds Desktop support URL shortening.

Sharing Images

Twitter doesn’t have built-in support to attach images to its 140 character messages. However there is a large number of third-party services to fill that need. Image sharing services like TwitPic and YFrog let you attach a photo and include a shortened link to that photo. Twitter clients like SharedMinds Desktop have integrated support for various image sharing services.

Retweeting

When you see a tweet you really like, you can "retweet" it. Retweeting is when you take the twitter message someone else has posted, and resend that same message to your followers. In this way the message is magnified, and may go viral.

The syntax of your Retweet should start with "RT" or "Retweet" followed by the username of the person who tweeted it and then finish with the content of the actual tweet (e.g. RT @KathySierra: Lovely post on design, simplicity, user experience: http://twurl.nl/61z016)

Originally Retweets where not part of the Twitter’s core features. It was started off as a pure convention between Twitter users. Due to it’s popularity Twitter added native support for Retweets.

Twitter clients like SharedMinds Desktop have a "Retweet" button that allow you to retweet as an orignial “old-school” Retweet or as a new style Twitter Retweet.

Twitter Search

To find out what people are talking about right now you can use Twitter Search. Take a look at the trending topics – the most common phrases appearing in messages right now. They are visible in the right-hand column of your profile page. Click on a trend to see the real-time search results for this trend.

Twitter Search is a very powerful tool to find out what is happening right now. There are many ways you can search and filter Twitter messages: by trending topic, search for #hashtags, keywords, phrases, people, language etc.

Watch the following CommonCraft video, which explains Twitter Search in Plain English:

#Hashtags

On Twitter a topic with a hash symbol (”#”) at the beginning is called a #hashtag. For example if you see a tweet like “Having fun at #mix09” then #mix09 is a #hashtag. You can use #hashtags to categorize or tag content so that related tweets can be grouped together. If everyone agrees to append a certain #hashtag to tweets about a certain topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in twitter search. The #hashtag is a favorite tool at conferences and events that allows you to talk about the event in real time and to connect to other people more easily.

Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are a new way to organize the people on Twitter. It’s a way for you to group together other users on Twitter so that you can get an overview of what they’re up to. Lists can be public or private. Public lists will be visible in your public profile and other users can follow your public lists.

Watch the following video to learn more about Twitter Lists:

Twitter Clients.

Although many people use the Twitter web page to write and receive their tweets, there are other more convenient ways to do this. For instance, you could use a Twitter desktop client like SharedMinds Desktop, TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. Those clients make it easy to organize, view, reply and retweet Twitter messages and to share links and photos. They all come with integrated Twitter search and support a lot of advanced features like multiple Twitter accounts.

Further Reading

• The Twitter Book – A Sneak Preview
• Twitter Glossary
• The Twitter Guide Book
• Twitter Reading List
• Twitter 101 – A special guide
• 10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter
• The 11 Types of Followers on Twitter

• What is Dropbox?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• How to Create and Publish a Deep Zoom Composition in 5 Easy Steps
• How to Create a Unique Photo Album for Your Blog?

In this article I like to summarize the steps and decisions I made during the setup of bSix12.com – my self-hosted WordPress blog. If you are going to install a self-hosted WordPress blog for the first time this information will save you a lot of time. If you are looking for a fast and easy way to start a blog this article is not for you. In this case check out WordPress.com, Blogger.com or TypePad.com where you can start blogging right away.

Why Self-Hosted?

If you need full control over all aspects of your blog including the database, themes and plugins you need a self-hosted blog.

Get Your Domain Name

First of all you will need a domain name for your blog. Use a tool like http://instantdomainsearch.com/ to check if your desired name is available.

Once you decided for a name, register it with a domain registrar of your choice. I am using GoDaddy. I recommend GoDaddy for the registration of domain names only not for hosting plans (see below). Search for “GoDaddy Coupons” to find coupon codes you can use to get discounts during registration.

Choose Your Hosting Provider

The important criteria’s to look for when choosing a hosting provider are reputation, performance, reliability, quality of customer support and cost. Be aware that many of the review’s you will find during your research are subjective and misleading… Next you need to decide whether to use a dedicated server or to run on a shared hosting account.

I spent quite some time to research this topic and finally settled with ANHosting. So far I am very happy with this choice. ANHosting has a reputation for providing very good performance to database centric applications like WordPress and Drupal. It is also one of the cheapest shared hosting accounts you can get. Their customer service is very responsive. ANHosting and midPhase are in fact one and the same company. You can look at ANHosting as a special hosting package provided by midPhase. The benefit is that you can start on a cheap ANHosting account – however if you outgrow your shared hosting account you can upgrade to a midPhase dedicated server easily.

The ANHosting package also includes a free domain name. I decided not use this option because I like to manage my domain names independently of the hosting provider.

Install WordPress

Most hosting packages include a tool called Fantastico to automate the installation of WordPress. This works pretty well. ANHosting includes Fantastico. However I decided to install WordPress on my own because I wanted to learn more about WordPress . The manual installation is pretty straight forward as well. You will find all information necessary to download and install the software on WordPress.org.

If you install WordPress for the first time it is a good idea to do a test installation on your own PC first. I’m using a tool called XAMPP-Lite for testing purposes. With this tool you can setup a test environment within minutes. Depending on your operating system there are different version available (Just search for XAMPP for Windows, XAMPP for Linux or XAMPP for Mac). If this sounds too complicated just stick with Fantastico :-)

To WWW or Not to WWW…

After installing WordPress you should decide which canonical URL format you like to use. Some people prefer www (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com) , others prefer a the blank domain (e.g. http://yourdomain.com).  It doesn’t matter which option you choose. Decide for one and stick to it. You can control this settings under General Settings (look for WordPress address and Blog address).

I decided to go with the blank domain (which is the default option anyway) because it’s shorter. You can still use the www prefix in your browser – however you will get redirected to the blank domain.

Choose Your Permalink Structure

Carefully think about your permalink structure. You will find the permalink options under Settings/Permalinks. By default WordPress uses the post id which is not user friendlyl. I prefer meaningful URL’s which say something about the content. From my point of view the following three options are good choices:

1. Month and post name: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
   (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/2009/03/sample-post/)
    
2. Category and post name: /%category%/%postname%/
   (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/some-category/sample-post/) 
    
3. Only post name: /%postname%/
   (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/sample-post/)

Month and post name is a good choice if you once published do not update your posts a lot. You can tell when a post has been published just by looking at it’s URL. However if you do update an older post with new information the URL might suggest outdated content…

Category and post name is a good choice if you are pretty sure that your category names will never change. For a long time this was my favorite option because it represents an intuitive hierarchical navigation structure. With a special plugin which allows you to have a blank category base it would be possible to browser the namespace in an intuitive way. For example when you look at http://yourdomain.com/some-category/sample-post/ and delete the post name you would see a list of all posts in this category. The best book I know which discusses the importance of good URL design is RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby.

In my case I decided to go with a flat post name only structure. I don’t like to have the date in my URL because I will update older articles quite frequently. I decided against the category in the URL because I might want to change the category names in future. The option with the post name alone gives me the greatest degree of flexibility. Additionally I have full control over the post name (e.g. I could assign short and easy to memorize URL’s to important posts). Be aware that by choosing this option you share the same namespace with WordPress pages. If a page with the same name exists only the page is shown not the post!

Configure your Upload Directory

By default WordPress stores all your uploaded files under wp-content/uploads. The URL’s for your media files will have the following structure: http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/{year}/{month}/yourimage.jpg

I recommend using a separate sub-domain for your media files. For example: http://media.yourdomain.com or http://images.yourdomain.com . You can still store your media files on the same server however if you later decide to offload your images to another service provider it will be as straight forward as adding a new CNAME.

Perform the following two steps:

1. Configure WordPress: Go to Settings/Miscellaneous Settings and  change the following settings:
   (optional) Store uploads in this folder: media
   Full URL path to files: http://media.yourdomain.com or http://images.yourdomain.com
    
2. Create a new Sub-Domain: Create a new Sub-Domain with the name “media” or “images” in your CPANEL and point it to your media directory on the server. If you haven’t changed the media directory it will be wp-content/uploads otherwise it will be media or images.

From now on every time you upload a file it will be accessible via your media sub-domain.

Choose a WordPress Theme

There are tons of excellent free WordPress Themes available. Just go to WordPress.org, click on Extend in the menu bar and then click on Themes to get a good overview. If you are looking for a professional WordPress theme search for “Premium WordPress Themes”. The theme I’m using is a premium WordPress theme called arthemia premium. It is not for free but it is worth every penny.

Create a Backup Plan

A WordPress installation consists of two parts: The database and the WordPress files. In order to backup WordPress you need to backup the database as well as the WordPress files. Go to WordPress.org and search for “backup” to find detailed information on how to do that.

For short: I am using the WP-DB-Backup Plugin for the database backup and the SyncBack tool for the WordPress file backup.

Offload Your Feed via Feedburner

Sign up for a free Feedburner account. Freedburner provides many additional services like traffic analysis and email subscriptions to your feed. Additionally the feed will be delivered via Feedburner which reduces the load on your own server.

Some WordPress themes like arthemia premium provide Feedburner support out of the box. Otherwise you need to use a plugin called FeedSmith to redirect your feeds to Feedburner.

Install Plugins

I recommend the following additional plugins: Akismet, WP Super Cache, Simple Tags, Google XML Sitemaps and All in One SEO Pack.

Install Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is an excellent free blog authoring tool. It works with many different blogging system not only WordPress. To use it with WordPress you need to enable XML-RPC under your Writing Settings.

Optionally you can disable the build in WordPress WYSIWYG editor to make sure it does not do funny things with your make up.  To to this go to your profile and activate the option Disable the visual editor when writing.

• Story Power! Tools to Create Engaging Content
• bSix12 Explorer: Navigate in a way that is powerful, informative & fun
• What is Dropbox?
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization