O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies

Web 2.0 Expo CFP Extended One-Day; Now Closes 10/9

2008-10-07T22:33:01Z

Because of the emails, IMs, and phone calls asking about late submissions to Web 2.0 Expo SF we've decided to leave the CFP open an extra day. So if you wish to speak you'll be glad to know that the CFP for Web 2.0 Expo SF will be open until October 9th.

We use this Call For Participation to find speakers for our sessions and tutorials. With the of help our committee, my co-chair Jen Pahlka and I select the content that will best service the attendees. Your submission should clearly answer the following questions: "How will this session will benefit the attendee?", "What will they learn?" and "Why are you the person to speak on it?". Including a brief outline of your talk shows us you've thought this through. These are the tracks we are trying to fill (with an abbreviated set of questions):

Main Conference Tracks (approximately 13 sessions each)

Strategy & Business Models
What are the critical and key strategies for building Web 2.0 businesses, platforms and business models? What should attendees be preparing for during the downturn? How can they compete in Asia and European markets?
Marketing & Community How can a company best use its web marketing dollars? What's the best and most manageable way of using social media to interact with your customers? What's the latest magic behind SEO and SEM? How can you protect your brand online?

Design & User Experience

How do we bring the skills that have served us well for the past several years to mobile devices? How do the expectations of your users change when they're interacting with you on the go? How do you meet -- if not exceed them? This track looks at the technical concepts, process innovations, design patterns, and frameworks that inform today's web applications, from the perspective of user experience and interaction design.

Fundamentals

We'll discuss the state of the art and the relevant open questions around the building blocks of Web 2.0: user-generated content, tagging, collective intelligence, co-development with your users, licensing, policy, identity, trust, transparency and data ownership and access. This track is designed to help those newer to the Web 2.0 understand how to bring the core concepts of Web 2.0 together to deliver a great web application.

Development

The Web has shown us a new way of building and releasing software. Moving at lightspeed is expected. Lightweight frameworks with support for standards and interactivity are the chosen weapons of the day. This track is for experienced programmers looking to improve their understanding of the technical ecosystem --what's baked now and what's lurking below the radar.

Focus Tracks (approximately 5 sessions each))

Web Operations
Web Operations are critical to every organization that depends on the web for revenue. Sessions will cover infrastructure automation, scaling Rails and LAMP stacks, virtualization and cloud computing, caching, load balancing, monitoring, and more.
Mobile
The mobile web has been been undergoing a dramatic evolution, with the prevalence of the iPhone, Android and forthcoming Blackberry platforms. This track looks at the technical, business, design and marketing aspects of mobile web applications.
Security
It should be no surprise that as Web 2.0 hits the mainstream, security issues move into the spotlight. This track looks at technical, design and business aspects of security, from the assumption that true security is not a question of code alone.
Entertainment
Games, videos, and other digital content are finding forms of expression as media mash up, brands become content providers, and the social web looks more and more like a big game every day. With unparalleled engagement and monetization metrics, what do other Web 2.0 developers have to learn from the innovators in the online entertainment space?

Looking for other way's to participate? This year's Expo we will be reprising the Web2Open (our onsite unconference) and Launchpad (a startup judging contest). More details for each program will come later.

Mobile Advertising: You're Doing It Wrong

2008-10-07T21:26:41Z

Don't miss this great post by Chris Heathcote deconstructing Google's first steps into map advertising on the web and mobile map apps. There's still some usability and use-case work to be done, but it's interesting to see their initial take. As many people have predicted, text ads are difficult to make work on the mobile screen; in Chris's words, "On the web, a banner is 1-5% of the page; on a mobile it’s close to 30%". Chris doesn't feel Google has the problem solved yet (and, in fairness, I doubt Google does either).

You're Doing It Wrong

A Star is Born? NY Times syndicates outside blogs but that's not enough

2008-10-07T18:53:00Z

Recently the New York Times announced that it will be syndicating content from three well-known blogs, Read/Write Web, Giga Om and Venture Beat. The New York Times is using these blogs as an extra-sensory organ; they can dial into what is happening in the tech sector (and particularly the West Coast with this trio) without allocating a lot of internal resources to it. Smart move.

As newspapers are locked in a desperate bid for survival I get the sense that we are watching the business equivalent of A Star is Born. In this case the iconic, shaggy-maned newsman falls for a feisty blogger with a horrific perm. Two strangers meeting in life's stairwell; One headed down - the other headed up... Let's hope this pairing has a better ending.

Syndication seems to have one goal - leverage that content to build online ad revenues. I hope the Times has more up its sleeve because this is just a “more of the same” strategy. Ad revenues for newspapers dropped $3 billion in the first six months of this year. With the Wall Street implosion it looks like revenues will continue to collapse as overall big-spend, ad budgets decline. I say this despite predictions of growth in '09 online ads because big print newspapers need both online/offline revenue to stay viable. Bumping online ad sales in place of plummeting offline ad revenue will not come close to solving the fundamental problem.

In order to survive newspapers need to:

1. Get better at their core revenue business: advertisting. Use behavioral targeting to maximize ad prices - better user profiles equal higher revenues. Currently traditional newspaper ad networks are outsourced, weak and generic. Understanding these technologies should be a core competence inside a modern news organization.

2. Aggressive online diversification. U.S. Newspapers missed a chance to claim the classified space. Craigslist got there first and locked the newspapers out (in most U.S. markets). Schibsted, a pioneering media company in Europe, has a very healthy online classified business because they got there first. (Similarly Schibsted is competing with Google for search b/c they have huge data assets in content and video etc. that they are using to compete). Online services like this feed off of network effects - leaving precious little for runner-ups. It is too late for US papers to compete with Google or Craigslist but there are other areas that have not been claimed. Newspapers need to move aggressively to create services that deliver value; all-things-local; niche classifieds, local real estate, political polling data, creating decision markets with their readers etc. Newspapers still have assets that are hard to rival: large sales teams with great relationships; top-notch content-creation teams; established brands with public trust and, last but not least an online readership that can help become a pillar of new innovation.

3. Gene Therapy: This is what I call “the harder stuff.” Traditional newspapers require a DNA transplant. Many of the tenets of the social web: innovation from the outside, publish-then-filter, rapid adaptive behavior (fail forward fast) and learning from failure all meet with stiff organizational resistance. If newspapers do not empower their online businesses, take more small risks and get out of the way there will be nothing left in a few years to reclaim.

Newsgathering organizations serve a vital civic function - but without a clear revenue model they will become an artifact of the last millennium. Time is not on their side.

What else do newspapers need to do to save themselves?

Effect of the Depression on Technology

2008-10-07T10:00:00Z

Here's the state of play as I see it: it is expensive and difficult to borrow and this shows no sign of change; the US debt is rising instead of falling, propelled by the Iraq War and the reliance on China for material goods unreciprocated by a reliance from China on American goods; and this adds up to difficult times for business in America for at least three years and possibly longer. From these premises, it's possible to cautiously guess at what the future will hold. (Bearing in mind that every day brings new revelations about the grim state of world finance, so the crystal ball is murky at best)

First, this recession will be good for innovation because recessions generally are. During boom times, companies direct development and occupy great talent with at best evolutionary improvements over the state of the art. Companies are great chasers of new things, but aren't great at making new things. A recession means technologists cease to be paid vast amounts to duplicate the work of others. The Great Tech Bust of Ought Two gave us 37Signals, Flickr, and del.icio.us and there's a strong argument to be made that many companies spent the next six years chasing what they created.

Second, this recession will be great for free and open source because of the shortage of cash. Last recession saw the mainstream legitimisation of open source operating systems (youngsters, take note: there was a time when it wasn't automatically okay for an IT department to use Linux) because it was clear and away the most cost-effective choice. The saying I use is, "come for the price, stay for the quality". Perhaps this recession will legitimise many of the applications (CRM, finance, etc.) higher up the stack. (However, I'm not about to stick my neck out and predict 2009 as The Year of the Linux Desktop)

Third, open source services and cloud computing will benefit from the tight financial situation where conditions will favour opex and not capex. It wil be nigh impossible to borrow to buy hardware or a major software license. An open source software product is free to get through the door, and services around it are delivered from opex not capex. Similarly, cloud computing lets a company pay a little to use someone else's enormous capital investment. It looks like, if the rumours are true, Microsoft will launch Windows Cloud just in time. Don't expect to see anyone else putting in new data centres any time soon—in fact, the days of deep-pocketed investors covering high burn rates are over for a while.

Most consumer apps will be a harder sell with the US dollar in the gutter while the country haemorrhages cash overseas. This is bad but won't make profit impossible, you just have to really be making something consumers need. Apps like Wesabe might find a whole new audience in a recession (disclaimer: O'Reilly is an investor in Wesabe). The conditions don't suit speculative acquisitions, so expect a return to the focus on the bottom line that (very briefly) characterised the fallout from the '01 tech bust. Sorry, dreams of getting people to pay for your toothpick collector social network may have to wait until the return of the stupid money in 2013.

As Phil Torrone said, people will have more time than money. This is good for open source software, but also for hardware and Make-style reconnection with the objects around us. The low-cost high-impact physical events we've created (Ignite, hacker meetups, coworking spaces, foo/bar camps) will thrive even as big-ticket conferences feel the effects of pinched pennies. The killer app in the "web meets world" space may just come from a Maker with spare time who sees a great need.

That's how I see the world and what I think it might favour and disadvantage. How do you see it? What am I missing? Share your views in the comments, and a Head First SQL fridge magnet set for the commenter whom I find the most insightful.

Numbers for Digital's Rise

2008-10-06T10:00:00Z

I talk a lot to people who don't quite understand the scale of the media shift from atoms to bits (update: corrected), so I always have my eyes open for numbers and anecdotes that illustrate the point. The latest I found are from an article on Apple's threat to shut the iTunes store if it has to pay more to songwriters:

Digital downloads grew 38 per cent from 2006 to 2007 to become a $1.26 billion business, making up 23 per cent of the market for recorded music, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Sales of physical music media such as CDs, cassettes and DVDs declined 19.1 per cent to $7.5 billion in the same one-year period.

I'm still looking for convincing numbers on film and TV movement to digital. For example, does anyone have numbers on how well Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog (the web-only offering from Buffy creator Joss Wedon) did?

DonorsChoose Giving Campaign Technology & Learning

2008-10-02T22:34:03Z

DonorsChoose is having their annual Blogger Challenge. O'Reilly's blog network hat is in the Technology Blog category along with Fred Wilson, AllThingsD, BoingBoing and Techcrunch. Let's see whose readers will bring more donations in. Donate here.

I personally just donated to help a kindergarten class get WiFi. We've selected other technology-oriented requests for us to assist. Join me in helping to bring technology to the classroom.

In a time of financial crisis it's good to never lose sight of how important education is to our collective future.

Technorati Tags: donorschoose

Customer Service is the New Marketing: Interview with Lane Becker

2008-10-01T21:42:10Z

The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers.

Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and bad to the 1.4 billion people on the Internet. Zappos exemplifies the positive benefits of extraordinary customer service while Comcast shines a light on the perils of getting it wrong.

Lane (co-founder of Get Satisfaction) speaks better than anyone about the power of building relationships via a strong customer service focus. During the Web 2.0 Expo New York we had a discussion that digs into
· What is meant by Customer Service is the New Marketing
· The challenges of moving to a customer-service-as-marketing model

The most insightful moment, in my opinion, comes when Lane talks about how even smaller companies, and companies not structured to provide superior customer service, can use new technology to get it right.

My favorite quote: "Historically, customer service has actually been customer avoidance" Remember that next time you need to schedule Comcast!

Lane agreed to answer some of the comments to this video post - so if you have questions - fire away.

(Disclaimer: OATV is an investor in Get Satisfaction)

Apple Drops iPhone NDA

2008-10-01T15:52:06Z

Apple has dropped the NDA covering the iPhone SDK. Developers will now be able to discuss how they develop for the iPhone. This was one of the biggest complaints developers (and technical publishers) had about developing for the platform. Apple posted the following message.

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

This is great news. I look forward to the many online tutorials, events (like our own iPhoneLive) and books (like the Prag's) that will bloom.

I am sure that the developer excitement around open-source and not-NDA'd Android was a factor in the decision making. Hopefully, Apple will listen to more constructive feedback (such as the latest Engadget Cares essay) and start letting apps of all type, even those that compete with their own, be released on the iPhone platform.

(Image courtesy of Jonathan Roher)

Tele Atlas Customers Get Tomtom Data; Let the Crowdsourcing Begin

2008-10-01T08:18:42Z

Tele Atlas is going to start selling Tomtom speed profile data. This is the first sign of the acquisition having an impact on customers and potentially the geo-data market. The speed profile data is quite impressive, as described in a press release:

The speed profiles database is derived from almost half a trillion speed measurements that TomTom customers in 25 countries have been sharing with the company over the past two years, making it unique in terms of both size and richness. Today this speed profile database already provides highly accurate information about actual average speeds for every five minutes of the day on any day of the week on all of the roads in 23 European countries and 90 percent of the roads in the United States. To achieve this kind of accuracy, those 18 million kilometers of roads had to be driven and measured on average more than 2,000 times at different times of the day and during different days of the week.

This data should give companies an edge when routing their customers (it already assists Tomtom consumers).

This is just the beginning of the collaboration between the two companies. As mentioned here previously the acquisition makes the most sense when Tomtom's devices are able to updates Tele Atlas' data stores. The same holds true for the Nokia-NAVTEQ acquisition. The crowdsourcing of geodata is going to be a very common business practice in the future.

OSCON moves to San Jose

2008-10-01T08:08:55Z

The official word is out, OSCON 2009 will be moving from Portland, Oregon to San Jose, California. We've received significant positive feedback on the move, and messages of welcome from Bay Area open source contacts, but also some messages of disappointment from the local Portland open source community, and from non-local attendees who enjoyed visiting Portland every year. We're also sad to leave, Portland has been an incredible incubator for the conference, as it is for many open source ventures. OSCON was first launched in Monterey, California, and then moved to San Diego, California. In 2003 we moved to Portland, to the Marriott Hotel on the Waterfront, and in 2005 we moved to the Oregon Convention Center on the other side of the river. During our time in Portland, we received incredible support from the local open source and technical communities, and from the Portland Development Commission. In Portland, OSCON grew from 1300 registered attendees in 2003, to 3000 registered attendees in 2008.

Clearly Portland was good for OSCON, but at the same time, we move most of our conferences every few years, to allow new local communities and organizations to participate and to provide new activities for non-local attendees. And while every conference planner likes to see yearly growth as a sign of a healthy conference, it's a challenge to find space for 3000 people plus a projected growth of ~20% (based on previous years). The largest available keynote space at the Oregon Convention Center (the largest conference facility in Oregon) holds approximately 2500 people in our current layout (with a stage and airwall space to divide into smaller rooms for day sessions), and has an absolute maximum limit of 3600 people. 2008 marked a record high of OSCON attendees being turned away from sessions they wanted to see, due to firecode restrictions on the maximum occupancy of the rooms. Even Tim O'Reilly was turned away from two sessions. Given a choice between restricting conference registrations to a pre-set limit (like we do with the Web 2.0 Summit) and finding a bigger space, we knew the right choice for a community-oriented conference like OSCON was to find a bigger space.

We're thrilled to see LinuxCon starting up in Portland, and hope that the energy of yearly Portland-local open source events that grew to complement OSCON will naturally migrate to LinuxCon. Jim Zemlin, who I've known for years, emailed me as soon as an article was released speculating that LinuxCon was started as a reaction to OSCON leaving Portland, to assure me that they had been planning LinuxCon in Portland long before they knew OSCON was moving, and reiterating the Linux Foundation's full and continued support for OSCON. We plan to do cross-promotion between OSCON and LinuxCon, and maybe even cross-conference discounts (if we can work out the practicalities of verifying registration at an unrelated event).

We don't know yet how long we'll stay in San Jose. Some aspects of the space are ideal: it's got a strong local open source community, it's certainly large enough to host us now and for a few years in the future, and it'll be convenient for the attendees and staff to have the conference hotels connected to the session space again. And, with the rising cost of fuel and travel, a huge local open source population in the greater Bay Area is a definite advantage. But, it's hard to tell exactly how good a fit any space is for a given conference until you've actually held the conference there. I'm sure some things about the space will be less-than-ideal, and we look forward to the feedback from OSCON 2009 attendees (both good and bad) to help us make an educated decision on the location of OSCON 2010 and beyond. We also welcome suggestions from open source communities in other cities (with conference facilities to host 3500+ people), as candidates for future years.

Thanks for your part in ten fabulous years of OSCON and open source. Here's to another fabulous ten ahead.

Getting Web 2.0 right: The hard stuff vs. the harder stuff…

2008-10-01T04:33:46Z

I had a powerful conversation recently in Europe with one of the top executives of a major industrial company. They have 100K+ employees in over 50 countries. When he joined five years ago their business was struggling and in need of major transformation; their stock was at two dollars a share, they had ethics issues and product quality problems - you name the malady, they were suffering from it…

Fast forward to 2008 and now they are one of the most extraordinary success stories in Europe - stock is over $28 a share, great profits, growing operations, well regarded in the business community etc. When you fly through a European airport they are everywhere.

I asked him how they were able to turn such a large, multinational ship around.

He told me most executives talk about “the hard stuff” vs. “the soft stuff”. Their focus for success in the organization is on the hard stuff - finance, technology, manufacturing, R&D, Sales - where the money is to be found, where costs savings are to be made. The soft stuff - leadership, culture, change and implementation - is there in rhetoric but not in reality (e.g., “people are our most important resource”). But the truth is that it is not the “hard stuff” vs. the “soft stuff”, but the hard stuff vs. the harder stuff. And it is this “harder stuff” that drives both revenues and profits by making or breaking a decision, leading a project to a successful conclusion - or not, and allowing for effective collaboration within a business unit or an organization - or not. He told me it was a consistent focus on the harder stuff that allowed them to turn their company around.

This is an apt description of the problems we face in bringing Web 2.0 into the enterprise. Web 2.0 is a game changer - it holds the potential to turbo-charge back office functions, foster collaboration and transform every business unit in the enterprise. Yet the resistance occurs when it comes down to implementing Web 2.0 because it represents a series of shifts that challenge traditional business culture and models of leadership. How often have I heard the knee-jerk reaction, “we can’t let our customers talk to each other” or “we don’t share our data” or “we are going to upgrade to a new platform - we are on a three year plan to get it done” (I keep a list of these reactions so please help me add to it). If developing a web 2.0 strategy is the hard stuff - moving that strategy forward is the harder stuff - and the bigger the company I work with - the harder the harder stuff is.

Why Dell.com (was) More Enterprise 2.0 Than Dell IdeaStorm

2008-09-29T12:58:43Z

In my keynote last week at Web 2.0 Expo New York, I made the comment that, cool as Dell Ideastorm is, the fundamental supply-chain approach behind dell.com is actually a better example of how Web 2.0 applies to the enterprise. I also made the provocative assertion that WalMart is a Web 2.0 company (or at least a model of how Web 2.0 principles apply to the enterprise.)

Based on questions I've heard since, I thought I should explain further.

Many people have been seduced into the ideas that Web 2.0 is all about explicit collaboration, contribution, and "the wisdom of crowds." So, for example, on his Web 2.0 Watch List, Seth Godin wrote: "For our purposes, my definition is that most of these companies are, as the wikipedia says, sites that 'let people collaborate and share information online in a new way.' So," he says, "Google doesn't make the cut, because most of their traffic comes to their search engine."

Now, I will say categorically that any Web 2.0 definition that excludes the Google search engine is broken. But it's broken in an instructive way, one that shows what the problem is.

Web 2.0 is ultimately about understanding the rules of business in the network era. I define Web 2.0 as the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them, or more colloquially, as "harnessing collective intelligence." This includes explicit network-enabled collaboration, to be sure, but it should encompass every way that people connected to a network create synergistic effects. So let's take Google:

The very act of creating a search engine via spidering relies on a user-contributed network. Where does Google get its raw material except from us? When I publish this blog post, I'm contributing to Google (and to every other search engine.)
Google's PageRank algorithm extracts an additional level of implied metadata contributed by links. All spiders follow links to discover new content; PageRank taught us that some links matter more than others. The engine became smarter by understanding a bit more about what people were contributing even when they didn't know they were doing so. Many a new breakthrough in Web 2.0 (e.g. Facebook's social graph) comes from making implicit contribution explicit in some way, gathering its benefit and amplifying it.
Google's real-time ad auction is the heart of their economic engine. Their stroke of genius, which gave them their seemingly insuperable lead over the other search engines in ad monetization, was to understand that selling the top ad position to the highest bidder was actually leaving money on the table. Given that advertisers only pay for clicks, Google realized that if they could project the likely click-rate on an ad, they could sell top position to the best combination of price and click rate. A $5 cpc ad clicked on 3x as often as a $10 cpc ad will make $15. By instrumenting, measuring, and responding to the click rate, Google made ad auctions smarter - through harnessing implicit user contribution.
Google also measures click-through behavior, surfing habits, and everything else they can get their hands on that will help them improve search results or ad performance. All of this is fed back into a real-time loop that is constantly trying to automate and optimize the user experience. Sounds a lot like the human brain, eh? (At least one with lots of learning plasticity.)

If there is only one thing that enterprises ought to learn about Web 2.0, it's this one: building information systems that allow you to adjust in real time based on interaction with your customers is the true mark of a networked enterprise.

If you understand the following three things, you know everything you need to know about Web 2.0 and the enterprise:

Harvest every bit of user contribution, not just the explicit. Your business has thousands of touch points with customers. When they buy from you, they contribute data as well as money. When your suppliers increase their prices, or change their delivery times, they contribute data to you. When you advertise, and people respond (or don't), they contribute to you. When you introduce a new product, when you do something your customers love, or hate, and people talk about it, they contribute.

Your data is one of your most critical business assets. Are you doing everything you can to wrest competitive advantage from it? I'll remind you again: PageRank and the real time Adwords auction were both hidden in plain sight. Understanding what data you have, and what meaning you can extract from it, is the holy grail of Web 2.0.
The era of IT as a back-office function is over. It's no longer good enough to gather data and analyze it, then propose and adjust strategies over the next budget cycle. You must infuse your organization with IT, so that, like Walmart, your supply chain responds every time a customer rings up an item at the cash register. This is how Walmart is like Google. No, not the website, but the live enterprise, which learns and responds.

That's why in my enterprise 2.0 talks, I usually end by saying "turn your IT department inside out - or wait for some innovative startup to do it for you." Banks could be building something like Wesabe's Value Engine and tips feature, which extracts collective intelligence from credit card data; phone companies could be doing something like Skydeck's extraction of your social network from your phone bill. In fact, they'd be in a way better position to build integrated services against this data than startups that are having to first extract the data from corporate databases one customer at a time!
Web 2.0 thrives on network effects (also known as virtuous circles): data begetting more data, services getting better in such a way that they are used more often, until you are so far ahead of the next guy that he can't catch up. That network effect is enhanced by letting other people use and build on your data, not by keeping it private. What we've seen is that the first company to create network effects in a particular class of data tends to end up owning that data simply through having the biggest pile, or the best results, not because they have unique data. (Again, Google: Microsoft and Yahoo! have the same data for the most part; Google is better at creating value for others from it.)

I will note that Dell recently announced that they were abandoning their long-heralded build-to-order methodology in favor of standardized commodity boxes. But I still stand by my statement.

There are two possibilities: first, that Dell is wrong, and their new supply chain approach will not save them, just make them more like everyone else. It could be that their "live suppy chain" approach just got too crufty, too complex - the article linked above suggests more than 5000 possible configurations. Maybe what they needed to do was to make the system smarter again by streamlining and simplifying.

But it's possible too that the competitive advantage to be wrung from a live enterprise only takes you so far, and that in certain circumstances other advantages are more important. It may well be that the PC market has reduced itself to such commodity status that standardization trumps customization. It may well be that the costs of physical goods mean that the laws of virtual networks are only partly true in that realm.

I haven't studied Dell's situation and market sufficiently to have a fixed opinion. But the answer is knowable - a good field of study for business school cases. It's worth repeating something I once said about open source, but now for Web 2.0: This is science, not ideology. Our goal is to understand what works, and why.

P.S. I also talked about the ideas here in my piece from last year, What Would Google Do?

2008 New Zealand Open Source Awards

2008-09-27T18:00:00Z

Wednesday night in Wellington is a lot more exciting when the New Zealand Open Source Award ceremony is on! The Minister for Communications and Information Technology, David Cunliffe, made a brief speech lauding open source and was around to hand awards to the winners. We gave out prizes for best project, contributor, use in government, use in business, use in education, use in community organization, and use for infrastructure, as well as two special awards.

I was a judge (along with Don Christie, Rochelle Hume, Colin Jackson, Janet Mazenier, Chris Daish, and Paul Matthews) and presented the Project award to Silverstripe and one of the special awards. It was quite the honour to be on stage with the wonderful winners. A list of the finalists and winners is on the NZOSA web site.

As all awards should be, they were very hard to judge. Everyone finalist was doing great work, and it was almost impossible to pick one over another. Nonetheless, Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla edged out Debian, Perl, and OpenSolaris contenders for Best Contributor. Richard Hulse from Radio New Zealand took home the award for use of Open Source in Government (their online presence is built on open source and they even offer Ogg Vorbis show downloads, e.g. for science show This Way Up). Dave Lane from Egressive in Christchurch won Best Use in Business for almost singlehandedly building the open source business scene in Christchurch. FLOSS Manuals won for Best Use for Community Organisation, beating out Wellington's rising star Brenda Wallace. CityLink won for Best Use in Infrastructure.

There were two Special Achievement awards handed out. Colin presented one to New Zealand's CIO, Laurence Millar, to acknowledge the great work the State Services Commission has done in levelling the playing field for open source and open data within Government. I was honoured to present one to Matthew Holloway, whose work on the ISO OOXML proposal was a key part of the great work that Standards New Zealand did to establish their position (they voted against it becoming a standard). Well, I would have been if Matthew had been there, but it was accepted in his absence by Peter Lambrechtsen who was also part of the Standards NZ process.

There was even drama on the stage. Colin Jackson gave the Minister some stick over the ISP-hostile DMCA-esque provisions of the latest Copyright Act being snuck in after the bill had passed the Select Committee without it. Then I, as part of my speech above Matthew, got to observe that the transparency of the Standards NZ process was something that New Zealand could be proud of--unlike the ACTA and US Free Trade agreements which are being negotiated in secret and have considerable potential to interfere with the computer industry. The Minister stood up afterward and extended an offer to us and the relevant industry representatives to meet the appropriate people after a Cabinet meeting and go over our objections with the people who need to hear them.

Many thanks to MC Mark Cubey (by day the producer of the Kim Hill show), and to Catalyst IT Limited, the NZ open source consulting company that has funded the NZOSA for the last two years and built it into the great event that it deserves to be. Go Kiwis!

Two Great Education Talks at Ignite Philly II

2008-09-27T10:00:00Z

In case you missed them in Jim's post on Ignite Philly II, there are two great 5m talks on education online that you should really check out.

Mark Yim: Engineering Education and the GRASP Lab is really cool. Dropping students into a problem with no lessons, no readings, etc. reminds me of Rilke's poem "The Man Watching", which Tim likes to quote: "What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things." Makes me want to take that class REAL BAD.

A lifelong learner might simply want progressively harder problems and a discussion group behind them. In fact, they do.

The second talk, Chris Lehmann: The Schools We Need, is also fantastic. Chris Lehmann is my hero. Dan Meyer, the other teacher blogger I worship, is a big fan of Chris's. Chris is an ex-geek and principal at an amazing school. His kids built their own biodiesel generator, patented it, and are sharing it with the third world. Fast, but inspirational, talk.

Two talks on learning and education that are well worth watching.

Is Adobe Still Sleeping Well?

2008-09-26T23:47:18Z

Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what appears at face-value from data on book sales.

Silverlight 2 is the product that Microsoft is backing in the RIA race. That in itself is worth, at least, some restless nights. Silverlight has not become a publishing event. At the present time, there are 10 Silverlight books published yet only one is on the current release and is truly a 2 book because it offers free, or paid, updates all the way through to a FCS launch.

But it does appear as though Silverlight is gaining some ground on Adobe. At least on Search volume. The image below shows the Google Trends for these technologies

silverlight [blue]
adobe flash [red]
adobe flex [orange]
adobe air [green]

A. Adobe AIR Puts Companies on Desktops

B. Adobe Introduces Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex 3 Software

C. Nokia to bring Microsoft Silverlight to mobiles

D. Microsoft reveals new content partners, DRM for Silverlight

E. Microsoft to highlight Silverlight, 'Oslo' at show

F. Onstream Media Debuts Microsoft Silverlight Webcasting Service

So the long and short of this is that Silverlight is likely not causing Adobe to lose sleep at night, but rather giving them one of those a rough, restless nights ... knowing that soon Microsoft will launch a credible product aimed squarely at them.