Over the past two weeks, the Faraday Media development team have been hard at work migrating all our products and initiatives into a new datacenter.  The new data center was much more suited to Faraday Media technology - much easier to scale, much faster and more reliable.

As part of our efforts, we’ve finally had the opportunity to give Particls and the Engagd platform their own dedicated servers, effectively quadrupling our processing capability.  This will allow us to service our partners and customers with increased reliability and confidence.

We’ve taken the opportunity with the new servers, to finally move our blogs off Blogger and onto a hosted WordPress solution, giving us far more flexibility with our blogs and presentation.

One problem, however, after we upgraded to WordPress 2.6, was that when we changed the permalink settings (to something more tollerable than ‘?p=x’) suddenly, index.php worked fine, but any other page reported as ‘not found’.  After serverl long hours Googling for the answer, there was lots of “answers” for WordPress on Apache (specifically about correct access to the .htaccess file and ensuring the correct PHP/Apache modules are installed) - but none about how to solve these issues on IIS.  It turns out that there are a number of known issues with 2.6 on IIS, which are now solved with the release of WordPress 2.6.1.

With most of our migration issues now sorted, we can now confidently continue to deliver our attention and data portablity solutions to the masses secure in the knowledge that our services are scalable and our bandwidth is plenty.

Ross Dawson has published a list of the top 60 web apps in Australia in the BRW this week. At number 5, our very own Engagd.com - the engine that powers Attention Profiling for the web at large as well as Particls version 2.

This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the development team. A huge thanks to Ashley Angell, Paul Jones and Jon Cianciullo who have been working tirelessly to manage, build and polish the Engagd platform.

Particls itself came in at 21. That will change of course once we launch the new version!

Thanks to Ross for his hard work compiling the list and including us.

Ashley went to Sydney to demo Engagd at the celebration party. By all accounts it was a big success. Somehow he made a developer platform interesting for a non-technical audience. Good work my friend!

Ross Mayfield, Co-founder and CEO of SocialText, is asking for:

“There is a new kind of aggregator, for more real time attention, that needs to be build to work across status services. I’m not sure if it will be built into existing news aggregators, if existing status clients will evolve into them, or it will be something new. I just know it is coming. It will leverage status service providers and Lifestreaming you find in services like Dandelife and Jaiku.”

He just described Particls.

An always-on flowing river of updates in a neat little sidebar - powered by RSS.

My friend Marianne Richmond has pointed me to a great video by Jeffrey Sass and a post by Jeff Pulver.

The video is a great little parody of the information and social deluge we are all experiencing trying to keep up with the million social graphs and applications we are participating in.

Jeff writes:

As real-time social media continues to evolve, I will know where my friends are, what they’re facing, if and when they need help, when they have discovered something interesting and many other things they care to share at any moment. The people in my social media communications circle represent a group of people I feel much closer to than some other people whom I’ve known for a long time but never really have gotten to know. Sort of the difference between a well developed character in a novel as compared to someone whose character never gets really developed.

The parody video is supposed to highlight, however, the lack of scalability for all these social interactions. The mainstream will never participate in all these platforms at the same time. They will likely choose a few key apps and stick to them.

The key, however, is to make sure that our Social Graph is portable and our AttentStreams are syndicated.

As Jeff writes:

Over time this experience will only get better as the current high “signal to noise ratio” problems that many of us experience get solved with the advent of widely available social media filtering tools which will be able to be applied against the people/topics that matter the most to us.

A filtered stream of notifications is exactly what we need. Thank heavens for my Particls sidebar.

Alex Iskold over on Read/Write web writes once again about the Attention Economy. He eloquently describes the state of proprietary Attention silos and the need for open standards and APIs for capturing and remixing Attention Data and profiles.

He rightly points out that APML could be a key driver to bringing about a more open and transparent ecosystem.

The APML Workgroup is still growing and the first round of APML supported apps are now well underway starting with Particls, then with Engagd and with Dandelife, Cluztr and iStalkr (using the Engagd API).

Read his post to learn more.

Announcing the all new Particls Sidebar.

The new Particls Sidebar is your personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to you online.

It’s real-time. It’s animated. It’s social. It’s always there, keeping you informed.

It can also be set to “Auto-hide” so that it takes up less space while keeping users informed.

It is now the default output adapter for Particls. It joins the Ticker (now disabled by default) and Popup Alerts as part of the bundled set of adapters.

Nick Hodge, a Professional Geek at Microsoft says “I think Particls just changed my life. I’ve replaced my Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar with this new version of Particls. Having Particls watch the web for me keeps me on-the-ball, more than caffeine. Well, almost.”

Experience your news, alerts and updates like never before. Subscribe to your feeds, type in your interests and watch them stream in like a slick river of news.

Got a better idea? Write your own output adapter. Particls is the best Alerts and Attention Management Platform around.

Coverage

Coverage has already started…

• Mashable
• Techcrunch
• Nick Hodge

A whole set of blog posts have sprung up last couple of days about the need for a tool like Particls.

Alex Iskold on RWW writes:

“We need a tool, an assistant, that understands our processes, understands what we are doing, when we change tasks and when we finish them. It needs to be with us everywhere - on and off line and on the go. As much as possible, this tool needs to help us juggle our tasks and restore the context, recall and store information and make our life easier for us. This is not Artificial Intelligence, this is basically a glue for all the things that we are trying to juggle and ways we are trying to juggle them.”

In response a number of others have chimed in:

• A rash of good writing
• Moving toward machine processing—the certain destiny of web evolution
• Continuous Partial Attention

This is exactly the goal of Particls. We are not quite there yet - but it’s certainly a worthy goal.

Do you think we are cool? Of course the least cool thing you can do is say you’re cool. So we would never say we were cool. That would just be uncool. But maybe you can say it for us?

Nominate Faraday Media (the company that brings you Particls) for the Anthill Cool Company Awards.

Thanks - you’re so cool

The issue of Brand Monitoring is one of those things that is super important, but super hard to get a grasp on. There are tools that measure influence like BuzzLogic and others that let you search for blog posts like Google Blogsearch and Technorati, but a tool that monitors the conversation and alerts you in real-time seems to be hard to come by.

Recently, more and more people are talking about Yahoo! Pipes for brand monitoring. It’s not a bad idea. Pipes is a great tool for assembling complicated RSS pipelines and could, with quite a bit of work and understanding, be used to get a pretty good brand monitor going.

Or you could use Particls. Particls is like a Yahoo Pipe dedicated to monitoring topics of interest. Your brand is definitely of interest. So is your high profile/visible staff, and your competitors, and their products, and your suppliers, and their brands.

You want to know everything about everything related to your business so you can react quickly and decisively.

Manufacturers, VCs, Lawyers, Retailers, Startups - you name it. Brand and Business Monitoring is critical.

So don’t just think of Particls as your solution for the latest Paris Hilton news - it can also get you the latest M&A news - right along side Flickr photos from your kids.

We actually use Particls to monitor news and chatter about Particls. Many people are actually surprised at how quickly we respond to blog posts and tweets as a result.

The latest version of Particls has lots of nifty enhancements and improvements however I wanted to bring your attention to one in particular.

There is a setting in the ‘Skins and Settings’ property sheet called ‘AutoupdateType’

From now on, we will be pushing ‘Experimental Builds’ first, then Minor Builds second, then Major Builds third.

This means if you consider yourself a hardcore tester and true Particls fan, you can get more updates, earlier, by using the ‘Experimental Builds’ setting. This exposes you to more risks (as far as using Beta software goes), but it also means that you can get in early and have your say on bugs and features

It also means that if you are a user who prefers to keep a stable, smooth operation, you will see less updates and less hickups in your Particls experience!

Thanks to the usual hard work of the Dev team especially Ash and Paul for this one.

You would have learned about this first on Tangler and Twitter.