Technology - 1000Manifestos.com

Andrew Hanelly: Just Another SEO Manifesto

Creator: Andrew Hanelly is Director of Digital Strategy for TMG and for one semester in college, was a sociology major.

Purpose: To clarify what makes good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Just Another SEO Manifesto

If I had only one thing to say about search engine optimization, it’d be this: don’t chase the search engines, instead chase what the search engines are chasing.

…Content should be used to build relationships – not simply drive traffic volume – and ultimately develop an audience that trusts and values your brand or organization.

…The rise of the search engine and subsequent rise of social media has birthed snake-oil salesmen and silver-tongued, self-proclaimed gurus who set up shop to squeeze a quick dollar out of your organization. Their focus all too often is on how to use tricks (with both black and grey hats) to get your message in front of as many eyeballs – qualified or not – that they can fit on a slick measurement report.

But what they fail to measure is the disappointment, the dissatisfaction and ultimately the sour taste their potion leaves in the mouths of what could have been your audience.

Because they don’t focus on quality content.

They don’t focus on what your audience truly desires. They don’t answer questions your audience is readily asking. They simply apply a formula, manipulate the rules while they can, and disappear when the algorithm or social tide changes (or worse, offer an up-sell to the latest and greatest scam).

Without a focus on quality content, all SEO efforts are rendered useless.

…Strive to create compelling content. Listen to your audience, and let their voices inform your recommendations. Employ the best editorial minds (and standards) to generate truly powerful content. Do it regardless of the popular platform of the day…

Source

Complete Manifesto on the Engage Blog, 9 September 2011.

Relenta: The Simple CRM Manifesto

Creator: Dmitri Eroshenko, founder and CEO of Relenta, CRM for people who get things done.

Purpose: Our software design mantras that make Relenta what it is, nothing else and nothing less.

The simple CRM manifesto

Simple is more, not less

We believe that the term “simple software” is popularly misused. Designing simple apps isn’t easy, and simple doesn’t mean dumbed-down. For us, simplicity is synonymous with more ability. Simple is the software that lets you get more done with less effort.

Live and let work

We believe in not forcing you to work the way we think is right. Instead, we give you the tools and get out of your way. When faced with multiple design decisions, we apply the one that makes fewer assumptions about what is good for you.

The 90-10 rule

We believe that less is more. Our goal is the software that gives you 90 per cent of the functionality that you need with only 10 per cent of the application weight. Why not the familiar 80-20 rule? Because we can do better than that.

The one click zone

We believe that the #1 reason for poor productivity is data fragmentation across multiple apps, accounts and browser windows. Our goal is to organize any and all information required for running your daily life so that nothing is more than one click away.

Similarities, not differences

We believe that at their core, all small work groups share similar challenges. For this reason we are focusing on the similarities among our users and not on what makes them different. We build our software to be universally applicable to work groups in any trade or profession.

Amen.

Source

Manifesto on Relenta’s blog, posted August 22nd, 2011.

Eric Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Creator: Eric Raymond, is a software programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the publication of his book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he became the unofficial spokesman for the open source movement.

Purpose: To offer guidelines for creating good open source software. The cathedral represents the top-down traditional approach to developing software. In contrast the Bazaar represents the bottom-up approach typified by open-source software.

Manifesto: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

13. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.

14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Source

The Cathedral and the Bazaar on Wikipedia

Eric Raymond on Wikipedia

Image from the cover of the book.

Aaron Swartz: The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Creator: Aaron Swartz is an Internet activist, scholar and programmer. He’s been involved in the founding of such projects as Reddit, theinfo.org, Open Library and Demand Progress. This manifesto was written in 2008.

Purpose: The control over scientific and cultural information by corporations should stop. Instead, we need to fight for Guerilla Open Access by posting such information on file sharing networks.

The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”

Source

The Science of Destruction Blog Post

Microsoft: 10 Immutable Laws of Security

Creator: Microsoft Security Response Center is a division of Microsoft that investigates thousands of security reports every year to determine if a flaw results from one of their products.

Purpose: Microsoft Security Response Center investigates thousands of security reports every year. Not all real security problems result from product flaws. The most likely list of issues have been collated below.

Manifesto: 10 Immutable Laws of Security

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore

Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore

Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore

Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to upload programs to your website, it’s not your website any more

Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security

Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy

Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as the decryption key

Law #8: An out of date virus scanner is only marginally better than no virus scanner at all

Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn’t practical, in real life or on the Web

Law #10: Technology is not a panacea

Source

Complete descriptions and full manifesto

Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

Creator: Prompted by the works of Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas who wrote The Pragmatic Programmer and Pete McBreen who wrote the Software Craftsmanship.

Purpose: Raise the bar for the standard and craft of professional software development. It builds upon the earlier Agile Software Manifesto for software development.

Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

Source

The Manifesto with Signaturies

Sign this Manifesto

Some useful reading on related topics

Wikipedia background to the Software Craftsmanship movement

Other Software Manifestos

LuluSec and Anonymous: Operation Anti-Security

Michael Widenius: The Hacking Business Model

The Open Cloud Computing Manifesto

Agile Software Development

LuluSec and Anonymous: Operation Anti-Security

Creator: LuluSec and Anonymous, two high-profile hackers groups.

Purpose: Expose the secrets of the world’s governments – in the spirit of WikiLeaks.

Manifesto: Operation Anti-Security

Salutations Lulz Lizards,

As we’re aware, the government and whitehat security terrorists across the world continue to dominate and control our Internet ocean. Sitting pretty on cargo bays full of corrupt booty, they think it’s acceptable to condition and enslave all vessels in sight. Our Lulz Lizard battle fleet is now declaring immediate and unremitting war on the freedom-snatching moderators of 2011.

Welcome to Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec) – we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word “AntiSec” on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art. We encourage you to spread the word of AntiSec far and wide, for it will be remembered. To increase efforts, we are now teaming up with the Anonymous collective and all affiliated battleships.

Whether you’re sailing with us or against us, whether you hold past grudges or a burning desire to sink our lone ship, we invite you to join the rebellion. Together we can defend ourselves so that our privacy is not overrun by profiteering gluttons. Your hat can be white, gray or black, your skin and race are not important. If you’re aware of the corruption, expose it now, in the name of Anti-Security.

Top priority is to steal and leak any classified government information, including email spools and documentation. Prime targets are banks and other high-ranking establishments. If they try to censor our progress, we will obliterate the censor with cannonfire anointed with lizard blood.

It’s now or never. Come aboard, we’re expecting you…

History begins today.

Lulz Security,

Support: http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html

Support: http://www.youtube.com/user/thejuicemedia

Support: http://wikileaks.ch/

Support: http://anonyops.com/

Source

Pastebin Blog Post: Operation Anti-Security

Background Article from Tech News World

Jeremy Samuel: Social Media Engagement Manifesto

Creator: Jeremy Samuel, social media savvy blogger.

Purpose: Because engagement is more important than mere activity on social media.

Social Media Engagement Manifesto

1. Social Media Is The World’s Biggest Conversation

We all have a voice and every business that wants to participate in the Social Media conversation needs to respect that voice. As well as creating content, ask questions, make comments, join groups, pages and causes and participate in them. Some of the greatest value will be created on other’s “sites”.

2. Social Media Is The Great Equaliser

The corner store is on level pegging with the biggest of big-box retailers. The brands that will win are the ones that create the most compelling conversations.

3. People Are Here for Connection

People want to connect with friends, further their interests, support causes, get valuable information and share their ideas. You need to be thinking about what those people want to talk about, not what you want to tell them.

4. Social Media is Fundamentally Social – Share Experiences

People love stories. They engage with their emotions before their intellect. If you want to engage with people tell them stories that move them. Like the time when…

5. Social Media is highly personal

Because people create their own content, they have a strong sense of ownership over it. People put very personal details on Social Media and you need to respect the pride that people take in that content.

6. Social Media is Totally Public

Of course Social Media is intensely public. Bad news travels at almost the speed of light… good news only slightly slower. Rumours, news, causes and public outrage can spread way too fast to control. Sometimes the best you can do is hold on for the ride.

7. You Need Friends Before You Need Them

The point at which a story about your company killing baby seals or destroying pristine rain-forests hits the “air-waves” is long past the time you can start to build a community of support. The time to start building your community is now. Nurture them. Give them value… and hopefully they will be there to support you in times of need.

8. Keep Social Media Real

Even when you are posting as a company, speak as one human being to another. Nothing sounds as bad in Social Media as corporatese. If something goes wrong, come out transparently, quickly and frankly. If something goes well, share the joy.

9. Find Your Crowd and Build A Circle of Trust

Make an effort to build your network every day. Connect to people who say things that are interesting, provocative or different. Support people who show initiative. Praise things that make people smile. The larger your grow your active network, the more leverage you have.

10. Be Highly Sharable – Give Them What They Value

In the end, people want content that is compelling to them. If you really know your audience then you can build a core of advocates and influencers who will amplify your message. The secret is to give them stuff to share that makes them look great to the people who matter to them.

10. Tune In

Use all the tools at your disposal to listen to the conversations that are going on around you between the people in your network. If you know what matters to them, then you can put yourself at the centre of conversations that are truly engaging.

11. Back to Conversations

Social Media is not a one-shot tool. If you are able to build a great network and seed compelling conversations, then the real value is in sustaining and deepening those conversations. The more you can keep people talking the great your level of engagement

12. Measure Social Media

Social Media is highly measurable. It’s important to work out what matters to you… friends, comments, shares, new revenue… and ensure that you track the figures.

And a Final Word… Number 0. Tell, Don’t Sell

This one is so screamingly obvious yet so routinely ignored… You are a business and you are there to make a profit, but Social Media is not a mobile bill-board. If you try to talk to peep about your latest special, your amazing new gizmo our your wonderful new course before you have built a relationship then you are missing the point. You need to earn the right to occasionally talk directly about things you want to sell by providing incredible value the vast majority of the time.

Source

Author’s Website: www.jeremysamuel.com

The Author’s Other Website: www.dadsflyingsolo.com

The Vogma Manifesto

Creator: Adrian Miles, RMIT, Melbourne.

Purpose: The principles for creating a Vog. A Vog is a video blog (web diary) that explores the relation of the word to the moving image with an emphasis on radical notions of interactivity.

Note: A Vog is more commonly known as a Vlog today.

the vogma manifesto

[ in no particular order ]

1. a vog respects bandwidth

2. a vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television)

3. a vog uses performative video and/or audio

4. a vog is personal

5. a vog uses available technology

6. a vog experiments with writerly video and audio

7. a vog lies between writing and the televisual

8. a vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media

9. a vog is dziga vertov with a mac and a modem

10. a vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog

Note: Principles 1-9 were written 6-12-2000, Principle 10 was added 2-2-2003.

Source

Website: http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/manifesto/

Matt Sweeney: The Geek Culture Manifesto

Creator: Matt Sweeney, database programmer and author of free_geek (because cool kids are boring)

Purpose: Promotion of geek culture as a separate and distinct culture.

The Geek Culture Manifesto

To whom it may concern,

This is ours. It is by us, for us, and about us. You are more then welcome to indulge in our world if you want, but you must understand that it is our world. There is no use in ridiculing our actions. If you do not understand what we are doing, then you are not one of us, and so this is not for you. Your ridicule only proves just how out of step you are with us. It only serves to show that you don’t get it.

What we do is not a joke, except when it is. It is not parody, except when it is. It makes sense to us and that is all it needs to do. This is not something that we will translate for you. We will not explain it to you. Not out of spite, but because it is something that you can only understand if you are one of us.

If you can not understand why we do what we do, then that is fine. This is not meant for you, it is meant for us. We do not ask you to understand. We do not ask you to come to terms with what we are doing. We simply ask that you leave alone those things that you do not understand. Pretend that we do not exist, that is fine with us. Do not try to explain us though. Do not try to understand where we come from or what motivates us. If you are not one of us, then you will never understand these things.

This is ours. It will always be ours. You will never grok it, unless you become one of us. Do not try to make it yours. Do not try to co-opt it for your own ends. If it inspires you to create your own thing, then fine. The thing that you create though is not the thing we have created. Do not pretend otherwise.

You are welcome to join us. Otherwise, leave us alone.

The Geek Community

Source

Website: http://tsuibhne.net/the-geek-culture-manifesto/