ReadWriteCloud

If you’re using WordPress, the options you are mostly likely to use are to run your own stack, use a shared hosting provider that offers WordPress or to go with WordPress.com. With the rise of PaaS offerings like OpenShift, though, why not run WordPress there?

As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather than packages like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get WordPress up and running, as Amit Shah demonstrated by moving his WordPress blog to OpenShift.

I got all excited this morning when I saw a link on Hacker News to BitPocket, one of the latest so-called “DIY Dropbox” offerings that’s open source. The excitement faded pretty quickly when I hit the GitHub repo and found that it’s just a “small but smart script that does 2-way directory synchronization” without most of the Dropbox features.

Dropbox didn’t get where it is today by being a wrapper for rsync, Git, Unison or any of the other open source tools for file synchronization. If you want to replicate Dropbox’s suceess, there’s a few features that are mandatory.

Out with the old, in with the new. One of the “old” ways of thinking that finally kicked the bucket in 2011? That users could get a free ride on Web services with no catch. As Robert Heinlein famously said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). This realization isn’t new for some, but the realization should finally be kicking in for mainstream users as well.

The combination of Google’s housecleaning spree, relentless Facebook redesigns and privacy gaffes, and popular services being bought, being ruined or just going dark, users should be getting the hint: The free ride is over and the bill is due.

If I were truly mischief and wanted to game the system, I would have named this article, "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login, Part 2." If you're not familiar with the incident to which I'm referring: One of the most illustrative cases of the incomplete state of the Internet as an information system was in February 2010, when ReadWriteWeb itself happened to publish an article with "Facebook" and "login" in its headline. It soon found itself at or near the top of Google search results for the phrase "facebook login," with the result being that hundreds of Web users to this day happen upon this page when they're trying to reach Facebook itself.

The Web was not designed to require identity or authentication for data to be accessed. Up to now, most consumers have not considered this a problem - at least, not the ones who found themselves staring at ReadWriteWeb when they were expecting Farmville. This will change.

Management of temporary files, logs and other items will be a bit easier on Amazon S3. The company has just added object expiration, which allows developers set up rules for the automated deletion of files stored in S3.

Amazon recently added multi-object deletion, which speeds up the deletion of objects from an S3 bucket. However, multi-object deletion is capped at 1,000 objects (per request) and doesn't get rid of files automatically.

It has been a busy year for VMware in terms of acquisitions. This followed an almost equally busy 2010, during which it bought both SpringSouce, incorporating its technology into vFabric, and Zimbra from Yahoo, which it has kept separate.

Most of the 2011 buys we have covered in various posts here, but a few escaped our attention. I thought it would be a nice year-end post to review where things stand with each technology. By comparison, Google this past year acquired more than two dozen companies.

Measuring an intangible like "most innovative" is tricky, at best. At worst, it's a complete disaster, like measuring "most innovative" by using patents as a measure, like this infographic from Good and Column Five Media.

It's based on Top 100 Global Innovators, which uses the Derwent World Patents Index and looks at patent-related criteria.

This doesn't just use patent volume, but also looks at success in patents granted (as opposed to just patents applied for), global patents (applied for in more than one country) and the "influence" of a patent. (That is, how often it's cited.)

Maybe Marc Goodman's talk from the Strata Summit on the business of illegal data grabbed me because I just finished watching the entire series of The Sopranos from start to finish last week. But even if you don't have a penchant for mob shows, Goodman's talk is worth the time to watch.

As we wax on about the wonders of big data, Goodman reminds us "the more data you produce, the more criminals are happy to receive what you produce."

The evolution of VMware's disaster recovery guidance for customers is taking it in a direction that is actually less focused on the disaster itself, and more on business continuity. That's changing the very economics of disaster recovery (DR) software, according to VMware infrastructure product manager Gaetan Castelein.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, Castelein said that DR used to be a common process mainly for big enterprises. But as businesses everywhere are learning that disaster avoidance processes cut down on costs, the subsequent cost of implementing DR comes down as well, and that brings more businesses into the mix.

Organizations using Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud are now able to create network interfaces that exist separate from the EC2 instances. The upshot of this is that customers will be able to have a lot more flexibility in managing network interfaces for EC2 instances.

The new feature, Elastic Network Interface (ENI) is created automatically with an EC2 instance. However, unless you want to use any of the new features it will essentially behave just as before.