Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Oracle OpenWorld: The Oracle Empire's Customers/Users Conference

Oracle OpenWorld was held in San Francisco from September 19-23, 2010. This year’s particularity was the addition of the “Java One “conference after acquisition of Sun Microsystems. This made the event, according to Oracle, the largest conference in Oracle's history. With more than 41,000 attendees it was too large for the Mascone convention center complex and used many hotels in the area as well. Despite the sophisticated conference organization, going from one location to another proved to be difficult, inconvenient and time consuming. Many JavaOne attendees also felt slighted being at Hilton not Mascone and some even found the experience painful!

On the content side and from Human Computer Interaction standpoint, 5 years after acquisition of PeopleSoft and then Siebel and others, the promised land of “Fusion Applications” with all the best of features from all, sounded still quite like a promise. I was not able to see any concrete demonstrations of human computer interaction illustrating advances in technology or innovations in user interface or user experience.

On the technology side an important theme and hot topic seemed to be Cloud Computing, as one finds in most technology conferences and events these days.

All related sessions on this topic were well attended. Curious attendees struggled to see what is really happening in cloud computing since many presentations seemed to be somewhat light in terms of content. We still need to wait and see what the real results and impacts of Cloud Computing will be. Maybe at next year's Oracle OpenWorld - if one is optimistic!

A.M.

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Published in:
HCI International NEWS - November 2010 - Number 44

Book Review: Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL

In a well illustrated and easy to read book on Social Media Networks, the authors offer in the introductory chapters (1 to 3) definitions and overview of social media networking concepts along with multiple examples of analysis techniques. Then, NodeXL, an interesting open source template for Excel is used to illustrate the analysis techniques. Easy instructions are given through tutorials on how to use NodeXL for social media network analysis (Chapters 4-7). Chapter 8-15 provide ample cases studies illustrating networks analysis for email, Twitter, hyperlinks and more, thus enabling readers to use the tool proficiently to conduct social media network analysis.

With an extensive list of related references, colorful charts and graphs, this book is a valuable resource to all professionals involved in designing, evaluating and researching social media networking. It is also an excellent textbook choice for a social media networking related courses.

A.M.

Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL - Insights from a Connected World, Derek Hansen, Ben Shneiderman, Marc Smith, Morgan Kaufman , Elsevier, 2011, ISBN 13: 978-0-12-382229-1
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HCI International NEWS - November 2010 - Number 44