tecosystems » Emerging Technologies

Just (Three) More Things: Enterprise 2.0

sogrady — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:15:58 +0000

As conferences go, Enterprise 2.0 was less corporate than some, but more than most. Which may be to your taste, depending on your appetites. But while that aspect of the show held less appeal for me, it was nonetheless well worth attending, to determine how disruptive technologies are impacting real world businesses and operations and what their questions are regarding same.

With all due respect to the presenters from Fedex, Pfizer, Wachovia et al, the scene stealers for me were the Central Intelligence Agency.

Seriously.

While the application of Mediawiki (the wiki software that powers Wikipedia) to enterprise tasks as a next generation knowledge sharing tool is popular to the point of being a cliche, the CIA has driven the process further than most. Intellipedia, as an example, has replaced Powerpoint as the basis for presentations.

It will shock no one to learn that the contribution guidelines that power Intellipedia differ from those that guide Wikipedia about as you’d expect. For one, the neutral point of view favored by Wikipedia is unacceptable in intellgence gathering, when the premium is often on who knew what, and when.

But you might be surprised to learn just how much the agency was able to learn from Wikipedia, as amply demonstrated by their articulation of a few of RedMonk’s core precepts. “Me first” was their version of “It’s All About Incentive.” “Start small, to get them past the first couple of edits,” their take on our “barriers to entry” meme. And so on.

The CIA presenters also successfully dispelled a few myths regarding quote unquote Enterprise 2.0 deployments, the most important one being the assumed generational gap. It’s popular to imply that older workers cannot adapt to “these newfangled apps,” but the average age of Intellipedia contributors is 69, each with something approaching 40 years of service. While I’m not sure that says good things about the demographics of our intelligence service, it is an indication that wikis need not be anathema to the old hands.

Besides the CIA, here are three post-Enterprise 2.0 thoughts.

The Future is Cloudy

While none of Amazon, Google, or Salesforce successfully made the case to the likes of the California Public Utilities Commission, Northeastern University, or Sudler & Hennessey that all of their applications should be running in the cloud, that was merely a rhetorical exercise to begin with. What did become apparent during David Berlind’s Evening in the Clouds event and the ensuing few days at the show, is that cloud technologies either have or are in the process of crossing the chasm from novelty to mainstream option. Traditional reservations remain, but the answers are coming more quickly and are more convincing than ever.

Consumer Applications are Influencing the Enterprise

Which we’ve known for some time, frankly, but the validation was appreciated. Reactions to this trend vary, with some enterprises seeking to replicate consumer technologies with enterprise alternatives and others seeking to incorporate them in place. In any event, opportunities abound for vendors to service the needs of enterprises that want to collaborate as seamlessly and efficiently as their kids do. Expect this trend to accelerate as we see buildouts around pieces like Shindig.

Enterprise 2.0 is Not Limited in its Appeal

True, there is no definition of Enterprise 2.0; truth be told, it’s even less understood than Web 2.0. But the disruption it represents has found fans in widely disparate industries. Very often when we speak of particular technologies or trends, part of the discussion is the markets or verticals to which they have specific appeal. By virtue of its light weight, accessibility, and, yes, cost, Enterprise 2.0’s appeal seems to be more universal.

Control + Creativity or Control vs Creativity

sogrady — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 06:16:01 +0000

In response to my links from the 10th, IBM’s Carl Kessler responded to an offhand comment of mine on questions of Web 2.0, the enterprise, and control with the following:

Au contraire. I believe there is a medium. It requires some investment in education, training, maybe some tools, and a huge dose of trust (enterprises trusting their employees!). I wrote about this [here]…

If you still think there’s no medium, let’s discuss the issues – I may be missing something…

So by all means, let’s discuss.

The original quote that spawned all of this was from IBM CTO Anant Jhingran, who was speaking at a Venture Partnering Symposium. A reporter summarized his comments there as follows:

While many rejected and even mocked his mantra of “creativity with control,” Jhingran said the real challenge was to identify the happy medium between the two that would make these services appropriate for the corporate world without stifling creativity.

As you may have gathered, I respectfully disagree with Anant – who’s both very bright and very willing to listen. I disagreed earlier today in person, in fact. The short version is that I’m very skeptical of the assertion that there is, in fact, a happy medium to be found. At least as long as “control” is part of the dialogue.

Anyone that’s worked with enterprises around blogging has probably run into this. Having seen blogging discussed and occasionally embraced in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, enterprises are eager to be hip like Dr. Evil and jump on the blogging bandwagon. As long as they don’t lose control over who’s talking, what they’re talking about, and when they’re talking about it.

Which is amusing, because they never had control in the first place. If – with all of its technical prowess – Microsoft can’t shut Mini Microsoft up, what chance does, say, your average retail chain stand?

Or consider the outsourcing of corporate whitepages to Facebook idea proposed by Senor Berlind. Which are you more likely to keep up to date: the application that a wide audience of internal and external parties can access and is constantly evolving, or that old, crusty whitepages application that only your coworkers can see. If they remember it exists. No brainer, right? How hard is it to conclude that externally available applications incent participation and usage in a manner that internal applications simply can’t?

Pretty hard, would be my guess. A former employer, after all, once pulled mine and my colleagues’ contact information down from a public web page because, obviously, that would guarantee that recruiters couldn’t hire us away. They controlled that information, and jealously protected it from any evil external eyes. Until, of course, we all left of our own accord.

In spite of the “control.”

I’m sure plenty of vendors, IBM among them, will work to provide enterprises with a variety of options to help enterprises “control” their Web 2.0 experience. And frankly, if enterprises want to pay them for it, I’m not going to blame the vendor. The failure rate of these Web 2.0 integration projects, however, is likely to exceed that of CRM implementations. By a significant margin, for two simple reasons:

No Such Thing as a Light Touch:
Tools available are tools used, period. I’m quite sure, for example, that many vendors supplying DRM technologies to RIAA member companies would prefer they used a lighter touch, but we all know how that went. Likewise, most vendors would probably like software patents to not be abolished, but simply used less and more constructively. Good luck with that. Assuming that you can provide tools to control Web 2.0 applications usage and adoption within the enterprise, you should assume that they’ll be used. Heavily. The Web 2.0 applications will be controlled, all right. So controlled they’ll be marginally useful at best. Why?
Because Web 2.0 is People:
Cote said it, and he’s right. The network effects, rather than the underlying technology, are what truly differentiates Web 2.0. Enterprise technology vendors, which have traditionally focused all of their development efforts on products aimed at purely internal audiences (more on this later), often have a tough time grasping this. But think about it: if your blog or del.icio.us or Facebook or Flickr or whatever were only available to your coworkers, would you really use them? Be honest. It’s all about incentive, remember, and more people equals more incentive.

Where Carl and I agree is that the conversation will at some point distill down to a question of trust, that most valuable of commodities. Where we break is on the enterprise capacity for trust. His solution sees a “huge dose of trust” as part of the equation, but I see little evidence to indicate that the average enterprise is willing to trust their average employee, and as such I suspect they’ll lock down Web 2.0 tools to the point of uselessness if given half a chance.

Does this mean that there’s Web 2.0 on one side and the enterprise on the other and never the twain shall meet? Not at all. There are many potential integration points, and we’ve bounced around a variety of ideas with customers. And there are obvious exceptions to the above set of assertions. But in the end, creativity and control are, to me, likely to be mutually exclusive more often than not.

A Surprise Quiz

sogrady — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:21:13 +0000

Do not open the test booklet until instructed to do so. Take out your pencils and read the question silently while I read it aloud to you. You will be graded on the completeness and accuracy of your answers, and spelling counts.

You may begin now.

Does binary compatibility matter as much as we think it does?
Should kernel level instrumentation applications have the ability to crash a system?
Is the primary purpose of Community vs Enterprise distinctions to monetize or upsell community users/developers?
Is evangelist the right word for the Jeff Barr’s and Jon Udell’s of the world?
Is DRM a technology with a future?
Do (non-Windows) platforms need to be open source to compete effectively?
Is open source a potentially predatory competitive tactic?
Is forking necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’?
Are DSCM’s replacing SCM’s as tools of choice?
Are we making progress in solving the package management problem?

Time is now up. Pencils down. Please bring manila envelope with answer sheets to the front of the class.

New Music Related Habits

sogrady — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:30:23 +0000

Over the past month or two, some of my music habits have shifted significantly – and perhaps permanently. It’s too early to draw any firm conclusions about what this means for me, but I figured that those of you who are into music might either learn something or have some suggestions for me.

What’s Out:
iTunes. The store, not the player. I was never ecstatic about buying iTunes’ DRM’d tracks, because in buying those you’re also essentially committing to Apple’s platform – perpetually. Yes, you can burn the tracks onto CD’s, but when you have as I do better than a thousand tracks purchased through the service that’s not a particularly attractive solution.

But since all of my machines with one exception are non-Windows (with no Apples), Apple’s DRM is increasingly inconvenient. On the aforementioned Windows machine, I’m still an iTunes The Player user, because it’s a very fine piece of software (the horrendous 7.0 bugs notwithstanding). But I’m really trying to not pour any more money into the store component, because I lose the ability to play the music I’ve purchased on multiple platforms. Throw in the fact that the Fairplay de-DRMification software based DVD Jon’s work is not able to crack 6 or 7 DRM yet, and the decision’s even easier.

Is it cutting into my listening habits? Yes. I still haven’t gotten around to buying the new Beck or Thom Yorke albums because of my individual iTunes boycott. It’s unfortunate, but the price of liberty and so on.
What’s In:
Songbird. Let’s start with what Songbird is not: a.) perfect, b.) polished, c.) able to handle devices like my iPod, and d.) stable. Sounds damning. But I’m actually quite happy with it after a month or two of moderately heavy usage. It handles the basics – media playback and so on – just fine, and offers some intriguing features that iTunes does not, such as the ability to input any URI containing embedded media and automatically download it to your library. It also handles music streaming – like WOXY’s – with aplomb. So while I’m still wedded to iTunes for my iPod, Songbird is my player of choice for most everything else.

And before you ask, James, yes Songbird does support Last.fm and thus population of your dorktunes library.
What’s New:
WOXY.com/The Hype Machine. Most of the serious music fans I know are always on the prowl for new music. With the likes of Clear Channel rampaging through the radio industry and imposing its own brand of agenda driven homogeneity on listeners, it can be difficult to find new music over the airwaves these days. And hitting live acts can be challenging as your schedule becomes more and more crowded. Fortunately, I’ve begun using a combination of WOXY.com – an outstanding radio station based in Cincinatti (they play Camera Obscura regularly, Christine) – and a blog indexing service called The Hype Machine to help me discover new tracks. Here’s how it works:
- For a portion of the day, I listen to WOXY’s live feed via Songbird (just load the WOXY.com page in Songbird, and click on the iTunes feed link). As tracks come on that I like, I check to see the band and track information, and drop it in a Tomboy note.
- When the list gets to five or six tracks (or when someone gives you a disk with some great new music like Phoenix‘ track Rally), I hop over to the The Hype Machine and begin entering band names. The Hype Machine then scans music blogs for entries that have posted tracks matching my search, either live tracks that they’ve recorded or copyrighted tracks that are made available (probably illegally, sometimes not) for a set period of time (usually a week or less). I download the ones that are of interest, and they’re loaded into my library.
- For the tracks that have staying power, I hop over to emusic.com and purchase the artist’s album there if they have it. If not, I add it to a list for my next trip to Denver’s preeminent independent record store, Twist and Shout.
- Also, I subscribe to The Hype Machine’s feed in my reader. There are hundreds of new tracks every day, so I don’t do much more than scan this, but I’ve already found some great rare tracks from artists that I didn’t have already. Even for bands that I follow obsessively, like Pearl Jam (I have two or three thousand tracks of just Pearl Jam), there are tracks I haven’t heard before. Quite a few of them.
What’s interesting about the culture surrounding these new services is that they generally seemed well intentioned; while I tend to think that there were a variety of ways that Napster could have been monetized very effectively and fairly, it had little to no relationship with the bands in question. While The Hype Machine and the blogs that fuel it have no official relationship with the bands, they do generally speaking want the artists to succeed.

I don’t know how others are behaving with these services, but I can say personally that because of The Hype Machine I’ve bought five albums already off of emusic.com (Cloud Cult, Holly Golightly, M. Ward, Ratatat, etc), and have another dozen or so that I need to buy offline (Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton, Scourge of the Sea, The Oohlas, etc). I doubt the perennially shortsighted (and doomed) RIAA will see the opportunity here, and I expect The Hype Machine to receive cease and desist noises shortly if they haven’t already, but the fact is that they’re causing me to find more music. Which generally results in me buying more music. Which doesn’t seem like a bad thing.

Stamford Says Hi

sogrady — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 04:00:31 +0000

I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment with some backed up email (what’s new?) and my presentation for next week which isn’t quite complete, but a couple of quick items for your consideration:

Backups:
On the drive over to the airport this morning, I was thinking about my personal backup situation which if anything is more primitive and inefficient than our RedMonk procedure. While it’s not the most cost efficient solution possible, I’m sure, I’d more or less convinced myself by the time I got to DIA that this weekend I’ll begin the tedious process of getting at least my music and documents up onto either S3 or one of Joyent’s offerings. After reading about what happened to Alex today, I’m now scared that I didn’t manage to do this before I left.
Asterisk:
Quick update for those of you interested in Asterisk. My new VOIP provider Telasip finally finished porting my Packet8 home number over to their service last week, and for about 10 glorious minutes I had everything working. Calls to the home line also rang my office and cell phones, voicemails triggered not just SMS notification but actual WAV files arriving in my email account, and all the weird Asterisk features – like weather reports via the phone – were working like a charm. Then I got the bright idea that I should update my trunks (Asterisk speak for phone lines – sort of) with the ported number, and as soon as the last update hit my installation everything stopped working. Meant to fix that this weekend, but the WordPress stuff took priority. Also, the hardware device I was going to use to patch in both my RedMonk POTS line and my cordless phone is no longer on sale. One step forward, two steps back, but I’m getting closer.
Blackout Dates:
The word ‘blackout’ is definitely not a favorite of mine. It’s bad enough that DirecTV blacks out the NESN Red Sox feed that I pay extra money for according to rules that they can’t explain to me (this drives me absolutely crazy), but the airline blackouts are killing me. I have three free flights on Frontier at the moment, and probably another four on American, and one or two on other carriers like United or US Airways. Can I use them to get home to NJ for Christmas? Of course not. The entire week before Christmas is blacked out. What’s the purpose of accumulating free flights if I can’t use them? To add insult to injury, it’s looking like the flight home for Christmas is going for about double what it does any other time.
Themes:
Those of you who visit the site rather than pick this up via a reader have probably noticed that the site looks different seemingly every hour. There are two reasons for this; first, I haven’t settled on a final theme yet, and two, there’s a bug in one of the themes that apparently causes WordPress to revert to the default periodically. Your patience – and feedback if you like/don’t like one of the themes – is appreciated.
Impress:
I’m really quite frustrated with the latest version of Impress (2.0.4) – OO.o the Powerpoint equivalent. It’s crashed better than a dozen times since I’ve been working on my latest deck, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why; there’s nothing complicated or unusual about it. Unfortunately, my options are limited. I really can’t see myself running Powerpoint on top of CrossOver Office, which I have installed, because while I haven’t had any huge problems with that application I’m not terribly fond of it either. Most of the online presentation designers I’ve seen, a la Zoho, include only very basic output options so I’m not thrilled about them. I’m really going to think hard about doing my next presentation on the 13th in S5 or an equivalent.
Speaking of Presentations:
My Photoshop and/or GIMP skills being more or less non-existent, I’m wondering if one of you can tell me how to do something that seems totally basic. I’d like to start giving more presentations with non-white filler, but run into the problem that our logos are generally red text on a white background. I need, therefore, to make the white transparent, so that the graphic renders properly on a variety of backgrounds. It can’t be that hard; can any of you tell me how to do that, preferably using tools I have (read: GIMP)? Thanks in advance.

As a reminder, I’ll be here in Stamford until Thursday, returning (hopefully) late that night. Best of luck to my friends back in Denver what with the 6 inches of snow and single digit temperatures expected tomorrow. Sounds like a lot of fun

Speaking of Office Productivity Software…

sogrady — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:57:28 +0000

Do any of you particularly like your word processing / authoring / editing software? As may have been made obvious from the question, I do not. I use a variety of tools to produce documents these days: OO.o Writer to produce proposals and other formal documentation, GEdit to write blog posts (yes, it’s 2006 and I do all my markup by hand), Writely (now Google Docs) for anything that I’m likely to collaborate on. I’ve also spent more than my fair share of time over the years in Microsoft Word. They’re all functional, and more or less adequate from an ease of use perspective within the context of the specific use case, but I can’t say that I enjoy any of them.

The obvious response to that is that writing is not a terribly enjoyable task on most days, so it’s natural that the client reflects that. But I personally don’t buy that. Coding can be a similar chore, but talk to any developer about their editor or IDE of choice, and you’re likely to hear quite a lot about the tool, whether that’s Eclipse, emacs, or Visual Studio. And if you’re pressed for time, under no circumstances should you ask a TextMate user about their editor. The affection for the tool in most cases is functionally based, but I’d argue includes a distinct emotional component as well.

The basis for that emotion varies from user to user, undoubtedly, but I suspect is strongly rooted in both the visual appeal and the ability to customize the tool. In other words, does the visual design resonate on a deeper level with the user, and can you remake the tool – a la Firefox – into a custom environment that fits you perfectly?

To date, there have been precious few non-code oriented authoring environments that satisfy both of those needs. None of the tools in my arsenal today resonate on any significant level, nor am I wedded to them. I don’t know about all of you, but I’d very much like to see one – and would be only happy to pay for one.

Presentation Tools: Offline, Online and Something in Between

sogrady — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:30:05 +0000

Jon Udell writes today of the challenges inherent in creating (X)HTML based presentations based on HTML Slidy. The question is of more than academic interest to me, since I give a fair number of presentations – indeed, I have one coming up at the end of the month at the Zend Conference on the Do’s and Don’t’s of PHP in Corporate Web Apps (as a side note, if any of you are using PHP thusly, drop me a line – looking for examples to back up some of my points).

For some time now – ever since seeing S5 for the first time, I think – I’ve been considering the possibility of transitioning away from the traditional office productivity presentation format to one that’s more web native. Unlike Jon, however, I have yet to take that step. When I discussed services we use in the last RedMonk IT Report, Anthony wanted to know what I used for presentations, and for the past dozen or so decks I’ve prepared the answer has been OpenOffice.org. Of all of the OO.o applications, Presentation is perhaps my least favorite, but its affection for ODF/PDF (not to mention the fact that it runs on my OS) makes it the best choice.

I wonder for how long, though. It seems pointless – not to mention inefficient, in this day and age dominated by Ajax and the web, to link to a presentaton file, rather than the presentation. Do I really expect that my stripped down presentations are so compelling that people will first download them and then fire up OO.o/Powerpoint to view them? I think not.

My usage of the web native approach will come with an important caveat, however: anything network dependent is right out, to paraphrase the fine gents from Monty Python. Much as I might admire the technology behind online presenation applications such as Empressr or Thumbstack (first pointed out to me by Anthony), there is less than no chance that I would deliver a presentation at a conference and trust the network connection there to not hang, drop or otherwise borq my presentation. It’s not to say that there’s not a market for that type of functionality, please note: as an alternative to WebEx and so on, it’s a fine offering (as is the Presentation module from IceSoft, which I got a demo of a few weeks back and worked like a champ). But for my usage, it’s just not happening.

Even at a developer focused conference like ApacheCon or DebConf where – as Cote and I were just discussing on #redmonk – a lot of attention goes into connectivity (as opposed to the business focused conferences, where it’s more of an afterthought because everyone has Crackberries, EV-DO or both), I’m not willing as a presenter to place myself in thrall to a connection that I don’t control. To its credit, Zoho seems to understand the importance of that limitation, as their export to HTML facility allows for the bottling up and distribution of a presentation.

It’s also worth mentioning that I’m intrinsically more open to these online formats than more mainstream presenters. I’ve traditionally had little use for fancy slide transitions and so on, and at this point I’m trying to do less with my slides rather than more. Those who leverage Powerpoint and its counterparts extensively for things like animations and fancy visualizations, however, are likely to encounter some insurmountable issues with bare bones facilities like HTML Slidy/S5, or even the Empressr, Thumbstack or Zoho applications. From what I can tell, anyway. Personally, I think that’s a good thing, because for every adept user that leverages such functionality properly there are probably a thousand that do not. Be that as it may, some will undoubtedly disqualify the web native options because of the lack of such “functionality.” After all, if you can’t have all of your text fly in from the corner of the screen and spin around three times, how can you be expected deliver a presentation effectively?

The other important question here is reuse. I’m comfortable outputting my presentations into ODF because I know that should, as an example, one of my colleagues need to reuse my materials for a presentation of their own they’ll be able to do so. No matter that one’s on OS X and the other’s on Windows; ODF as a format supports clients on each platform so that Cote and James can both edit my decks once I’m done with them. The clients for editing of these documents may not be perfect, but they’re well know. The tooling for editing web native presentations, on the other hand, are less well understood. If you’re going the (X)HTML/CSS/etc route, however, the tools are not quite as clear. HTML by itself, of course, is fairly trivial. But I, for one, am not a CSS master. I’ll have to play with the web native formats a bit to see how difficult – or not – they are to achieve even the simple formatting that is my standard these days. Whether or not I use them for my upcoming talk at the Zend Conference remains to be seen, however.

Everybody Needs a Boxscore: Or, Boxscores, Microformats and the Future of Journalism

sogrady — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 02:17:32 +0000

In one of his periodic “mailbags”, in which he addresses readers’ email (we need to start doing that, I think) in a batch process, the Boston Globe’s Red Sox beat reporter Gordon Edes lamented the lack of interest in some quarters for “gamers” – written descriptions of game actions that run in the paper the following day – saying, “There is a school of thought out there that people don’t read gamers anymore.” The comment caught my eye not because I’m one of the folks he’s talking about – I haven’t read a game recap since October of 2004, I’d guess – but rather because I know precisely why I don’t read them: I have the boxscore.

For those of you unfamiliar with baseball generally, and the boxscore more specifically, the X-Files’ Mulder described it thusly:

I’m reading the box scores, Scully. You’d like it. It’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect, rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day back in 1947. It’s like the numbers talk to me, they comfort me. They tell me that even though lots of things can change some things do remain the same.

I’ve found boxscores fascinating for a long time, because they allow fans to follow games in fairly minute detail even if they’re not able to view them in person. You don’t get everything, to be sure, but they’re a relatively complete distillation of the action in a single baseball game. One of my old foremen when I worked construction in high school and college, a fine Irishman by the name of Anthony Crawford from Newry (right up the road from Rostrevor, where I stayed in an abbey for a few days a long time ago), said that boxscores were the one thing he preferred about baseball over his favorite sport, football (soccer, as we would term it). There’s just no equivalent in football, or most other sports for that matter, he used to tell me; the game lends itself to ready consumption and later dissection in a truly marvelous fashion.

Thus it is that every morning for better than six months of the year, I turn not to a reporter’s interpretation of the game’s events, but the quantitative reflection of the same: the boxscore. I might supplement that, of course by watching highlights on SportsCenter, listening to interviews of the players or managers, and so on – but the boxscore is the must have. It’s almost as if the action of the game was distilled down into some perfect, tiny, programmatically manipulable format. Sort of a microformat, in other words.

What does the boxscore have to with the future of journalism? More than you might think, I’d argue. Back at OSCON, as I wrote up here, The Washington Post’s Adrian Holovaty talked about a similar problem. And just a few days ago, he wrote it up in more detail here. The most important bit, in my view, is this:

One of those important shifts is: Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.

Conditioned by decades of an established style of journalism, newspaper journalists tend to see their primary role thusly:

1. Collect information
2. Write a newspaper story

The problem here is that, for many types of news and information, newspaper stories don’t cut it anymore.

So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text — a newspaper story — that has no chance of being repurposed.

“Repurposed”?

Let me clarify. I don’t mean “Display a newspaper story on a cell phone.” I don’t mean “Display a newspaper story in RSS.” I don’t mean “Display a newspaper story on my PDA.” Those are fine goals, but they’re examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically — and in machine-readable format.

His colleague at the Post, Derek Willis, documents some of the types of information that would be – in a perfect world – structured over on The Scoop.

The overriding theme here, I’d hope, is obvious. The best (only?) approach to extracting long term value from captured data is storage in a fashion that makes it easily parsable over the longer term. Whether the data in question the events of a baseball game or the exponentially more complex records that populate the Votes Database, it all comes down to structure and format. Prose, after all, is only slightly less opaque to programmatic approaches than audio or video.

In the entry linked to above, Adrian notes some basic structural opportunities in typical newspaper features:

An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes.

A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.

A birth has parents, a child (or children) and a date.

A college graduate has a home state, a home town, a degree, a major and graduation year.

An Onion-style “On the Street” feature has respondents, answers and a publication date.

A drink special has a day of the week and is offered at a bar.

The schedule of the U.S. Congress has a day and multiple agenda items.

A political advertisement has a candidate, a state, a political party, multiple issues, characters, cues, music and more.

Every Senate, House and Governor race in the U.S. has location, analysis, demographic information, previous election results, campaign-finance information and more.

Every known detainee at Guantanamo Bay has an approximate age, birthplace, formal charges and more.

Put differently, what these features really need is their own version of a boxscore. A format that can distill out the particulars from the body of the work. What technologies you might need to do that is a question best left for another time, but suffice to say that I agree with ric when he injected microformats into the conversation, and I also think that we’ll begin to see some creativity on the storage engine side.

In the meantime, just let me add that I think that Adrian, Derek and the gang are as important to the future of journalism as Craig Newmark.

Dynamic Indeed: Application Lifespan and Understanding Dynamic Languages

sogrady — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:04:24 +0000

Way back in the dark ages – AKA June of 2003 – my colleague wrote a subtle and understated but I thought very telling indictment of the traditional software infrastructure players, or more specifically their product marketing and design. In part he said,

Not every organization is a Charles Schwab or an eBay, but BEA and IBM tend to compete as if that were the norm not the exception.

This, of course, is just another manifestation of the problem that has led the drive to perjoratize the word enterprise with the term enterprisey.

What’s interesting, however, are the layers of belief that underly that problem. The drivers for producing complicated, expensive and yes, highly scalable, software are many – too many, in fact to list. But I’ve always wondered, usually in the context of discussions around dynamic language usage, if some of the folks building software understand just how deeply engrained some of these beliefs are.

To wit, I managed to find the time to listen to Jon Udell’s podcast with Day’s Roy Fielding on the train back from Boston yesterday, and Roy articulated something I’ve said before but never as succinctly. [1] At around three minutes and thirty seconds in, Roy said:

A lot of people think that when they’re building an application, that they’re building something that’s going to last forever – almost always, that’s false. Usually when they’re building an application, the only thing that lasts forever is the data – if you’re lucky. [2]

Before I continue, let me put this in context. One of my first gigs as a systems integrator was at a women’s clothing manufacturer in NJ (I’ll have to put up pictures of my cube there someday , and shortly after arriving there I was given responsibility for a variety of EDI, Inventory, Sales and Billing applications written in COBOL and which ran on top of a DOS/VSE mainframe (you read that right). I was horrified to learn, after perusing the very dusty and occasionally mildewed documentation for these applications, that most had been originally designed, coded and documented in the late 60’s. With rare exceptions like the EDI code, most of the running applications were some thirty years old by the time I got my hands on them. So I do know just a little bit about applications that outlive their predicted lifespan.

But I’d also submit that for each one of those major applications that will survive for decades, I probably wrote 5-10 smaller one off or small-scale applications. “I need a report that produces X,” “We got bad data from Y, and I need that cleansed and normalized,” “We completely lost our data volume for applications a, b, & c and our backup’s four days old. We need to rerun the batch operations with our sales data for the last four days,” “We need a local application, complete with database and GUI, that will store and index problem calls for on-call personnel” – and so on. With rare exceptions, I used an entirely different set of tools to solve this set of problems.

As Fielding discusses in the podcast, however, there’s a common institutionalized belief that if any given architecture is good at solving a certain set of problems, it must by definition be adept at solving entirely different sets of problems. Like Fielding, I’m not a believer in that line of thinking.

None of this, of course, is brain surgery. If all of this sounds like a “use different tools for different jobs” argument, that’s because that’s precisely what it is. This realization is reflected in the increasing adoption, just as one example, of PHP within organizations such as IBM and Oracle that have made massive investments in the Java platform. But I think that Fielding’s comments are important because they highlight the fact that recognizing that there’s a market for PHP does not in any way imply an understanding of that market.

The dynamic languages, PHP included, may be so called because of their design and convention, but the term is apt in another respect: the applications built on top of them tend to be dynamic in nature, and not terribly long-lived. Put simply, I’m contending that there are fundamental differences between your average PHP, Ruby, etc application and a typical Java project. Some dynamic language projects, of course, may survive for decades or more, but the majority are designed for considerably short lifespans than, say, their Java counterparts. Understanding the dynamic language market, then, requires the ability to use a different lens to view the world. Where Java developers might think in terms of decades or years, dynamic language developers might be thinking in days or hours. This is a crude if necessarily blanket distinction, but not one that I feel is terribly unfair.

It’s not going to be enough, IMO, for ISVs and other interested parties to merely be aware of the opportunity that the dynamic language market represents, because the gulf between the different communities is wide and the primary wellspring for the intermittent friction. They must come to terms some fairly elemental differences in approach, assumptions, and design. The same types of differences, as an example, that make Ruby on Rails (or DJango) a compellingly unique solution to a particular type of problem. The differences must be internalized, not kept at arms length – embraced, not feared. At the most basic level, enterprisey vendors must care as much as the Rails folks do about next week, rather than the next decade.

[1] Just for the record, I wanted to note that Fielding did not specifically tie his argument to the question of dynamic languages. I’m using his remarks here to make my own point, although I thought his response to Udell’s question of “Why Java?” was interesting even if the question was – as Jon noted – facetious in origin.

[2] While I’ve selected this one quote, I highly recommend listening to the entire podcast. Fielding discusses, among other things, his ideas about replacing the protocol that he’s responsible for inventing – HTTP.

RSDC: Forget What I Said Before, Jazz is the News

sogrady — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 01:17:56 +0000

While attending John Simonds’ and Monical Wells Grace’s very entertaining RSDC Bloggers Meetup, I was asked by Buell Duncan what the news of the show was. As the event being held just prior to the Jazz BOF, I responded without hesitation: ISVs. Would that I could have that statement back, however, because the news of the show was clearly and unquestionably Jazz. The project is important on multiple levels: pure technological innovation, architectural flexibility and heterogeneity, development style, and its broader, non-software development implications.

My initial response can be excused in that the ISV story is indeed an important one for Rational. Dating back to its pre-IBM days, Rational has been a brand about heterogeneity, one that bridged the Java and .NET camps in an effort to market to the widest possible audience (though their overall lack of attention to the world of dynamic languages is perplexing). Despite that heritage, however, and its Eclipse underpinnings, Rational does not have anywhere near the ISV story that it should. This conference, while better attended than it was last year, is dwarfed by its Lotus counterpart Lotusphere. With all due respect to the Lotus brand, there’s no logical reason that should be. The Eclipse project demonstrates quite adequately the vibrancy of the development ecosystem, and yet Rational has not accrued that kind of partnership return.

There’s likely no single reason for this; there are architectural, economic, branding, and logistical components to the problem. The good news for Rational is that this defect, to use their lexicon, has been identified and targeted for remediation. Part of Danny Sabbah’s (Rational GM) mandate, I have no doubt, is to turn around the partnership story – to leverage the network effect in selling a Rational ecoystem comprised of more than Rational products, much as Eclipse does. When not commiserating over the shellacking Josh Beckett took at the hands of the hated Yankees, Rational’s Diane Flis, Mike Loria and I discussed precisely this problem.

With all of that in mind, then, you can perhaps see why I answered Buell as I did. But let me explain what I see in Jazz, so that you can see why I was wrong.

I first saw Jazz, I’m fairly sure, a couple of years ago in a brief demo at the AlphaWorks booth at an earlier RSDC. At the time, it was an interesting but seemingly trivial technology that baked colllaborative technologies such as presence and instant messaging into the application development process. What I saw on stage yesterday, however, was a quantum leap from that toy. Cote’s impressed with what he’s seen and heard, and it would appear that the always sharp Darryl Taft found something of interest in the project as well. For good reason.

Just what was it that I saw yesterday that was so convincing? Well, I hate to say this but it really is one of those demos you have to see to appreciate. Basically, the application development process was inextricably intertwined with collaboration, so that developers could see changes that their colleagues had made – before they hit version control, in real time – and adjust on the fly. Changes are passed back and forth fluidly, bugs can be reallocated dynamically based on severity and those with nothing whatsoever to do with the project can still have visibility into it. If application development had been invented after Ajax, Bazaar/Subversion and instant messaging it would look a lot like Jazz.

The conclusion slide of the presentation described Jazz’s accomplishments with unhelpfully vague terms such as team awareness, process awareness, or extensible team server. I won’t presume to speak on your behalf, but those don’t mean a lot to me. What they’ve actually built, in my opinion, is a truly network aware and enabled development process and lifecycle. For all of the sophistication of some of the more recent vintage application development infrastructure tools such as the previously mentioned Bazaar-NG, they’re still rooted in software development processes that don’t leverage the full power of the network.

In a way, then, Jazz is to traditional software application development and management tools as Zimbra is to Exchange or Notes – a fundamental rethinking of the way the entire process works from end to end. A rethinking that is intrinsically network aware.

Besides the technology, Jazz is notable for its architectural flexibility/heterogeneity, and its broader, non-software development implications. Want proof of the first point? Yesterday’s demo ran on an architecture built on Cloudscape (AKA Derby), Jabber, REST, and Tomcat – and integrated at one point with Visual Studio. I couldn’t ask for more than that.

Beyond the technology, Jazz is important because of its broader implications for IBM. First, Jazz may be tremendously relevant to disciplines well beyond software development. I hadn’t really considered that possibility, but Murray Cantor, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, discussed that with me this morning, and I tend to agree. Jazz, if properly executed and built on an open architecture, would be applicable to problems afflicting a variety of verticals, from healthcare to manufacturing.

It was another implication of the Jazz project that had a lot of people at the show talking, however; their intention to develop Jazz under what they term an “Open Commercial Software development” methodology. This is not to be confused with open source, because they have no intention of allowing for external contributions and the like, but is rather traditional software development conducted in transparent fashion. Working environments, defect tracking, and interim builds will all apparently be made available publically. Candidly, I was slightly less underwhelmed by this news than were some of the other attendees, but that’s at least partially attributable to the amount of time I spend tracking actual open source projects. So while it’s not open source, it’s potentially an interesting half way model for other commercial software development organizations to keep track of. For those that are wondering how they open source community will react to it, my expectation is that they will not be tremendously impressed. You might speak with the folks from Ubuntu about the questions they feel about Launchpad – I expect you’ll field at least some of the same.

If you’re a developer, and are eagerly anticipating a day when you can get your hands on some of the bits, I’ve got some bad news for you: you’re going to have to wait a while. A long while, in all probability. The interim builds might satisfy your curiosity temporarily, but the real thing is years away, not months. Despite the unfortunate waiting period, I think this is a technology to watch. Much will depend on how open they can make it, but if the demo was any indication it would seem that Jazz might be an ideal way to solve the ISV problem described above.