Day 2 has been as awesome as day 1. Hats off to all the presenters and to the Distilled team for a great conference. Here are the links that the speakers spoke of today.

NOTE: This article was written by Mike, featured on .Net Magazine on August 5, 2011.

Any project manager or business executive would say, “Mike, going continually outside of scope and working for free is no way to manage a project.” And to an extent they’re right--going out of scope is a major project management faux-pas. Everyone in the industry has been trained to keep the project on-time, within budget, and within scope. But maybe that’s why taking the road less traveled isn’t such bad advice. Know your clients. Know their likes. Know their dislikes. Know everything they are and everything they can be. Know them like your one true love, and you’ll know their needs before they even know them. Do whatever you can for them (within reason) and worry about money later. They’ll be your biggest fans. Connections will be made, deals will be closed and money will be made. In the end, the sum of your relationship will be more than its individual parts (or costs).

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the world’s biggest social networking service will “launch something awesome” tomorrow. As a consequence, the web is buzzing with speculation about the exact nature of the launch.

Some think it could be a platform designed to rival Apple’s App Store, while a recent report in The New York Times said that Facebook was preparing an app for the iPad. Others have cited the recently leaked Facebook photo sharing app for the iPhone, or maybe an integration with Netflix.

I’ve mentioned before my esteem for ExpressionEngine, a robust CMS that we use a lot. My admiration for this product also extends to one of its add-ons, the powerful ExpressionEngine Structure, which is well worth a few words in its own right. It enables us to create pages, generate navigation, and manage content via a simple interface which lets us build sturdy sites that our clients really like.

Cloud Computing is the term which has been attached to what is now generally regarded as the next stage in the Internet’s development: the renting or borrowing of software online by users rather than buying and installing it on their computers. As a business model it is pretty much the same as, say, Yahoo mail services, but takes the concept a lot further. The Internet “Cloud” would enable whole businesses to access a centralized hub to run their software tools, processing and storage, as online rented facilities. The way technology is used to service customers, suppliers, and partners would be totally different and already some companies like Amazon and Google have substantial IT resources in the cloud. They report that many of the constraining issues of, for example, cost, capacity, time and power, associated with the present Internet environment have been either substantially reduced, or eliminated.

Google has just re-engineered its search engine to reduce the search rankings of websites that, according to the company, offer a low grade of information. The move, widely seen as an attempt to improve relationships with newspapers and magazines, seems to be having a severe impact according to analysts of search engine data. Following the change in Google’s search algorithms, many websites that previously ranked highly in certain keyword searches suffered a sharp fall, but some defended their content quality contending that they had been unfairly associated with less reputable sites. At the same time, many high profile news, social networking and retail sites seem to have benefited from the change by surging upwards in Google’s rankings.