Monday 13 September 2010

Student-created SEO Plugin for the FLOSS community


Recently, the open source Piwik community acknowledged the contribution of our student Victor Dibia (MSIN, AIT 2010). Congrats Victor !
Victor created an open source SEO plugin for the Piwik open source web analytics system, in the course of his Independent study titled: “Web Analytics: Application of Google Analytics API in developing a custom Analytics plug-in”, during Spring semester 2010 (with supervisors Prof. Gregory Yovanof and myself). This new Dashboard Widget displays the website's PageRank, Yahoo Backlinks, number of indexes pages, Alexa rank and the domain age, for the website URL recorded in Piwik. Victor's blog provides all the details that you need in order to use this free online tool.

Piwik is an open source real time web analytics software, that can be installed for free on your website or blog (for further details see the online demo via piwik website). The Piwik system, written in PHP and licensed under GPL, aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

Sunday 5 September 2010

736 ideas 4 a dream


Can we dream the end of poverty and social exclusion ? Can we dream that our ideas will be part of the solution ? Can an EU project consider such a dream? Yes, yes, yes !
It is very interesting to see that such innovative EU projects, do exist. Projects that are about dreams, materialised via open innovation and crowdsourcing principles.
The dream of the "736 ideas 4 a dream project" is to "free" Europe from social exclusion. How they will achieve this? Well, they collect ideas that will help with this task. They have and will continue to organise workshops that will enable them to produce 736 postcards, which will be published as a book and will be presented to the public during the Day of Europe (9/05/2011).
Now, why 736 ideas? The number refers to the number of active members of the European Parliament when the project was launched.
Have a look at the postcards that have been received, they are great !
Further details at the project website.