Ng Khai Portal

I am sure many of you are members of what is called ‘mailing
lists’.  These are group discussion
mails, which allows a group of people, let us say anywhere from 5 to thousands
to subscribe.  If anybody wants to
announce or comment on anything, they just send or reply mail to the mailing
list, and it automatically gets distributed to all that subscribe to that.

These allows discussions to be easier.  Some mailing lists are open to all
subscribers, and everybody can send mail to everybody.  Some mailing lists are maintained, and only
moderators or those authorized will be able to send, and the others will just
receive and read.  Some allows the
various mails to be ‘condensed’ or summarized, so that participants may not
receive too many mails but one summary or compilation a day.

One of the popular mailing list and is available for free is
yahoogroups.com ( formerly e-groups).

The reason I am mentioning this is that mailing lists are
popular, but there must be one caveat that all participants should be very
careful.  When you receive mail from
mailing lists, you will see the email of the person sending the email.  However, you have to note that the structure
of the email means that when you hit reply, you are not replying to the person alone,
but you are replying to the whole mailing list!

More than once, I saw people embarrassed on this….  They replied the email to pass a private
message to the sender of the message, not knowing that what was sent to them
was emailed by a mailing list, and therefore the reply automatically goes not
just to the sender, but to everybody in the list!

Anyhow, what makes a great speaker?  A writer tried to analyze the differences
between technology’s two most sought after speaker, Bill Gates of Microsoft and
Steve Jobs of Apple Computers.

Todd Bishop of the Seattle Times said that Gates speech
scored 9.37 in the Gunning-Fog Index meaning that it would take a person 9.3
years of education in order to understand his remarks, while Steve Jobs speech
needed only 6.9 years to be understood.   
He estimated that 5.2 of the words used by Gates is considered hard
words while Steve has only 3 percent.

In short, if you feel that Steve is a more entertaining
speaker, it may be that he used more simple words to convey his message.

One of the things you may want to know is the recent Nielsen
ratings which scored the top 10 web brands in the web.

The most popular was Google, followed by Yahoo and then
Microsoft.

Rounding up the 4^th to 10^th places are
MSN/Windows Live, AOL, YouTube, Fox Interactive ( which includes news and
MySpace), Amazon, Ebay and Apple.

How many of these top web sites do you regularly visit
everyday?

Another trend you may want to be aware of is Netcraft’s
assessment of the popularity and usage of various servers.  About 2 years ago, they estimated that
around70% of the websites were powered by Apache, with Microsoft IIS around
20%.  On their latest survey, they have
reported that Apache web sites were now around 50%, while Microsoft IIS has
grown to around 40%.  This may be
attributed to the huge efforts of Microsoft to court web designers, and also in
their efforts to improving the product.

Wilson Ng keeps a blog of his articles in www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife