Spassas's Blog

Wondering on the usefuleness of web sites (in the traditional sense)

spassas — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:20:06 +0000

After designing web sites for various people and companies, I’m wondering how necessary is for a company or a professional to have his own website in today’s Web?

Three or four years ago the web-presence was absolutely equivalent to a site, but the invasion of social media networks radically changed the landscape. You can now have your own corner of the web setup in minutes, with absolutely no cost, in a super-friendly user interface. You can even have multiple corners: a professional profile in LinkedIn, a more personal one in Facebook, a blog for expressing your thoughts and ideas, a YouTube channel for your videos, a Twitter account for your status updates, a delicious account for organizing the bookmarks you like and the list keeps going… Furthermore, Web is not about presence anymore, it’s about connection: Being in the Web means nothing if you are not connected to the people that are of interest to you. While in a traditional website in order to keep in touch with people you had to struggle with search engine optimization, creation and maintenance of large and inflexible mailing lists and other strenuous (in terms of time and cost) activities, in SM the connection is an inherent, core situation.

In my opinion the same thing goes not only for individuals but for SMEs as well (let’s don’t forget that SMEs account for a whopping 96% of the European economy). Why would a small business invest money and effort in designing, deploying and maintaining individual web sites instead of exploiting the social networks for providing information, finding audience, receive feedback and promote their reputation? Why trying to attract users to you instead of placing yourself or your company in the environment that the use every day?

Of course, the traditional web is not dead. E-shops, service providers, news agencies and companies with large and complex information will still continue to maintain sites, although I strongly believe that the marketing strategy for these organizations will migrate to the Social Web as well. No one can actually predict whether the social media explosion is just another trend that will fade out in the long run or if SM will prevail as the new meaning of the Web, but personally my bets would be on the latter.

Finally, I ran into some very interesting facts and figures from http://socialnomics.net/ (an excellent resource for the social web). Enjoy the video!

e-Participation – Current state of play and future directions: The FEED project

spassas — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:05:06 +0000

FEED project was presented in the e-Participation conference “Current State of Play & Future Directions”, organized by MOMENTUM. The conference took place at the European Parliament premises in Brussels, on December 15th and included a number of presentations of European e-Participation projects, as well as keynote speeches from MEPs and members of the European Public Administration. The conference was broadcasted live from the MOMENTUM’s website, while the video recording can be found here.

The FEED team in front of the project's stand. From left: Euripides Loukis (University of the Aegean), George Kountourakis (ATC), Spyros Passas (NTUA), Kees Kerstin (Region of Flevoland), Catherine Howe (Public-I), Jiri Hrebicek (Masaryk University), Costas Koutras (NTUA) and Rob Peters (Zenc)

FEED was presented by Rob Peters while Kees Kerstin talked from a user’s point of view for the exploitation of the platform at the region of Flevoland, Netherlands. The project stand offered the opportunity to visitors to learn about the project, acquire relevant material and watch a demo of the application. Find more details about FEED at the project’s website or follow it’s news on Twitter and Facebook!

Cloud and SaaS: Cheap to compose and provide services, but is it equally cheap to manage and monitor? Let’s think of Telcos…

spassas — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:58:48 +0000

The concept of SaaS, attracts an increasing number of organizations from every sector as a cheap, easily maintainable and technology-agnostic way of service provision: Software vendors find a great opportunity to reduce the cost of software lifecycle by orienting towards modular architectures that allow software to be composed from small, easily maintainable and upgradable services, are aiming to reduce their IT costs and promote their services to an even greater audience and even financial institutions try to get in this area to manage complex transactions and facilitate their interaction with customers (private or corporate) as well as make their procedures more transparent and compliant to the various regulatory frameworks.

One of the issues raised against this cheap and easy service provision model is the control and monitoring capabilities offered. For example, Telecommunication companies have a highly complex backbone system that controls, monitors and evaluates the provided services (known as Operational Support System/Business Support System), commonly stated as OSS/BSS or B/OSS. Practically such a system manages all functional and non-functional requirements of service provision ranging from billing to network and resource management. Every new service has to be depicted in the B/OSS in order to be properly evaluated and controlled. But since B/OSS are highly complex, such alteration are strenuous and expensive. So, ok we have a way to compose and provide services cheaply. But what’s their real value when the cost of management remains very high?

FEED: A European e-Participation project launches pilot application in Greece

spassas — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:45:27 +0000

The main objective FEED is to apply a new concept in e-Participation by allowing users to have seamless access to existing federated content that matches their needs for information on the several aspects of a debated issue as well as to informative material about the specificities of the deliberation procedure in the scope of which an issue is considered. This way the level of knowledge for FEED users is enhanced both around the essence of issue at hand as well as of the procedural aspects of the deliberation process it is engaged, thus their participatory ability to contribute to the procedure through opinions that can create an impact is significantly augmented. Through FEED, simple federated content is contextually annotated according to the debated issue and legislative process specifics allowing the platform users to perceive it as a coherent body of information to be used in the various stages of a deliberation procedure.

One of FEED’s pilot applications is already deployed in the Municipality of Ano Liossia. The various features of the platform and especially the map interface enhance citizens’ knowledge about the area and give the opportunity to express opinions, share information and actively participate in the decision making process. Respective applications have been launced in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Czech Republic.

You can access the greek pilot site here. For more information on the FEED concept you can visit the project’s web site: http://www.feed-project.eu

Issues of Governance in the Cloud

spassas — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:09:52 +0000

I recently had many discussions with various people coming from both IT and Business world about one of the most hot trends: Cloud Computing. “So what?” you’d might ask… Almost everyone in the tech community is talking about the cloud these days. IBM is investing a great deal of money on it, Amazon has already launched cloud-oriented services and Microsoft is preparing the Azure. So the cloud is growing fast and it seems that it’s a matter of time for everyone to migrate their IT services in the cloud.

Cloud seems to be a great idea: distributed data and services, resources on demand, easily scalable applications and extremely low IT, maintenance and administrative costs. In that sense, Cloud seems to be unstoppable, at least in the eyes of techies. Unfortunately, business people don’t quite think so. The largest obstacle in the adoption of cloud is not technical. The issue that makes enterprises and Governments somewhat hesitant to this distributed model of computing is governance concerns.

A decentralized IT infrastructure allowing remote data storage in a multiparty, distributed environment conflicts with risk control and compliance regulations. The paradox is that the large organizations such as banks, telecoms, multinational retailers and Governments that would be the first to try and migrate to the Cloud in order to reduce their enormous IT costs, are actually the most hesitant since they’re bound to very strict regulatory frameworks controlling data privacy, security and level of service. I quote some indicative examples from a post by Daniel Schwartz of the Connecticut Employment Law Blog, titled “Cloud Computing and Employment Law: The Uncharted Sky”:

From an employment law perspective, I have not seen much, if anything on the subject. For example, Connecticut’s wage and hour laws require employers to keep track of various records of the employee including hours worked, etc. The catch? Such records need to be kept at the employer’s place of business for three years. Does storing the information in “the cloud” satisfy that?

And suppose an employee is fired for improper use of the Internet and you want to “image” (or copy) the computer that the employee has worked on to preserve the evidence. How do you do that when the computer you want to image may be in a server thousands of miles away?

Or consider the lawsuit filed by an employee and the call that needs to go out to your IT department to put a “litigation hold” on your data. How do you do that when it’s based in the “cloud”?

So, the wide adoption of cloud is more of a legal issue than a technical one. Extensive changes to national and international level will be required since the ownership of data and software will have to be completely redefined. I’m guessing that this will be a much larger problem than any technical constrain, leaving cloud as an interesting technical experiment and nothing more.

A kind of Hello Blogsphere post!

spassas — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:45:26 +0000

Ok, so this is an effort to start a blog and I’m feeling kind of awkward! So I’ll start by introducing myself….

My name is Spyros Passas and I’m an Electrical and Computer Engineer. I live in Athens, Greece and I’m working as an ICT consultant and developer in National Technical University of Athens. In general my professional interests are focused on Web technologies, social media as well as Internet branding and communication.

So, this blog is intended to present thoughts on these issues and (hopefully!) provoke some fruitful discussions! Unfortunately, my time is pretty limited so the posts probably will not be as frequent as I would like, but I’ll try to show some commitment! Of course, if you are interested, you can see some more of me through my tweets at Twitter.

That’s all with the introductory details! I’ll get serious and prepare my first (real) post! Check back soon!