My friend Ken Yarmosh is doing some soul searching about blogging. Since I go through this same thing periodically myself, I understand his feelings. Here are the ten rules I left as a comment on his original post:
In the old days of planned release schedules and successively more capable release functionality, the term “beta” was applied typically to limited-release software where both distribution and user environments were tightly controlled and monitored.
Nowadays businesses are being built upon “beta” software that goes into universal web wide availability along with statements of incompleteness and limited support. Users are invited to use and write about the software. Users get early peaks at and access to useful features. Producers get real world feedback which helps further the development of future releases.
Within one week of coming home after a successful first year at Virginia Tech, Number One Daughter started her Summer job hostessing at a large and popular riverfront restaurant in Old Town Alexandria. While driving her to work one day, I asked her how things were going at the job. The conversation that followed reminded me several things relevant to intelligent management practices.
Lately I've been reading Ross Mayfield's Weblog, which I discovered while tracking back an incoming link from him to an earlier posting of mine, Corporate Resistance to Enterprise Web 2.0.
Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext and has feet (literally) in both the development and business worlds when it comes to real world applications related to Enterprise Web 2.0. I like how he thinks and writes about enterprise adoption of systems and processes based on Web 2.0 technologies.
I'm fascinated by peeks into the inside of what actually happens in the real world of Getting Things Done. The web site Bare Naked App could therefore be a voyeur's delight.
How Secure are Secure Facilities?
One of the things I've learned from reading and listening to the thoughts of my friend Martin McKeay, a security expert, is that the best technology can be undone by poorly or inconsistently implemented processes.
I thought about this over the weekend when I drove a friend of mine from Alexandria to the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland.
Should We Be Able to Buy and Sell our Personal Financial and Medical Data?
When I first heard about USA Today breaking the NSA domestic phone spying scandal involving the major long distance phone companies, I wasn’t surprised. I won’t even be surprised when, in the next few months, word leaks out that Federal agencies are also involved in non-court-approved electronic screening of domestic call traffic looking for specific words and word combinations.
Readers of ALL KIND FOOD will notice that its pages are not encrusted with badges, tag clouds, blog rolls, linkbacks, permalinks, scrolling comments, advertising, Amazon links, dancing babies, and other detritus and ephemera. I call these "Blog Page Doodads." My blog doesn't go in for doodads. That’s by design.
When Jeremiah Owyang recently announced to members of The Podcast Roundtable that he had added a cloud of tags supplied by ZoomClouds to his blog, I did wonder if I should add something like this to my own.
I've decided not to, at least for the time being.
I am puzzled by the seemingly robust nature of the US economy and the lack of a melt-down due to runaway gasoline prices. I still remember the inflationary hardships caused on the 1970’s by rapid rises in crude oil prices and the inflationary spiral that priced so many people out of the housing market due to huge rises in interest rates.
Why do economic conditions seem smoother now despite massive trade imbalances, crushing federal deficits, and an unending commitment to costly (in terms of blood and money) foreign adventures such as Iraq?
Is it the Internet?
Are DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems compatible with the current growth in the use of blogging and social networking technologies that actively promote the sharing of information? Maybe not.
There’s an interesting book excerpt available on the Harvard Business School’s “Working Knowledge” web site titled Managing Alignment as a Process, by Robert S. Kaplan and colleague David P. Norton. I read through the excerpt and what it says about “alignment” is interesting to put into the context of enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and processes.
David Berlind's How the portable player tail wags the DRM and operating system dogs (ZDNet, April 25, 2006) is a good indicator of why I haven't written much about DRM here lately.
I originally started writing about DRM last year when I realized its use in music CD's threatened my lifelong music collecting hobby. Now that I've pretty much given up buying music, DRM is pretty much a spectator sport for me.
Techweb reports on a current effort by a government entity -- this time it's Minnesota -- to open up document format standards. There was a time when such eventualities were addressed by source code escrows that would guarantee a software user access to the tools to recreate and support a product, format, or system should the original vendor or developer go belly up.
Last January Jeremiah Owyang and I wrote a “white paper” titled Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools. In this 20 minute podcast (available here) we discuss how our thinking has changed since then.
One thing that has become clear since January when Jeremiah Owyang and I co-authored Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New "Web 2.0" Tools is that "it's not just about the technology." Web 2.0 is about how people communicate. Technology is an enabler.
Richard McManus' Is Google or Microsoft best positioned for Web Office? I say Google is an addition to the growing volume of voices accepting the "when" not "if" of Office 2.0, which I've also written about.
Thanks to a scan of my Netvibes feed page I ran across a very interesting item called Are Software Patents Evil? by Paul Graham. This is not one of those brief stream-of-consciousness blog entries, this is a serious piece that reviews and comments on the serious issues surrounding patents, software patents in particular.
The number and type of “Office 2.0” applications continues to expand, as documented recently by Ismael Ghalimi. He is testing these applications and is publishing the results as he goes about looking for ways to be totally dependent on browser accessible applications and remote storage.
Basically, “Web 2.0″ means different things to different people.
* To the programmer, it’s a set of tools and techniques that have the potential for fundamentally altering how network based applications and data are managed and delivered.
* For start-ups and venture capitalists, it’s an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of another bubble.
* For the corporate CIO or IT manager, it’s another set of technologies and architectures to be adopted and supported in an era of continued I.T. department budget strains.
* For newer or smaller companies, it’s an opportunity to acquire technical and business process infrastructure at a fraction of the investment made by older and legacy companies.
* For the marketing manager it’s an opportunity to “end-run” a traditionally unresponsive I.T. department.
* For the CEO of an established legacy industry, it’s a threat of loss of control over customer relations.
* For the customer it’s an opportunity to establish and maintain relationships that are both personally fulfilling and empowering in the face of the traditional power of larger institutions.
A progress report on the Peer to Patent Project has been published in the form of a useful PowerPoint presentation available here. The presentation, by Professor Beth S. Noveck of the New York Law School, was scheduled for presentation on March 23, 2006 at the University of Michigan.