Is a tension we’re going to see more of, methinks. A lot more of.

As many of us transition from passively consuming roles to active producers of information, it’s natural that some of that production – even most of it – reflects our respective interests. It’s just as natural for some – even most – of our respective audiences to not share those interests. Hence the tension.

On the one hand, I’m decidedly in the John D. camp (big surprise) that says one should write for oneself first. On the other, I sympathize with an audience that craves relevance.

This tension has been observable within the blogging world for some time now; I’ve witnessed complaints about many popular bloggers for their indulgence of [pick a hobby], and have certainly fielded my own share regarding the Red Sox content here. Personally, I don’t particularly care when someone I like to read posts off topic content, either because the efficiencies of an aggregator make the cost of irrelevant content effectively nil, or because I might learn something. As a result, when folks like Bob Sutor or David Churbuck have – in the past – contemplated a fork in their blog, I’ve voted against. I’m not as big a Dylan fan as Bob, and certainly don’t enjoy clams as much as David, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get anything out of posts on both subjects.

And yet I have in the last few weeks forked my own blog, creating an entirely separate property wherein I feed my Red Sox addiction. As an explanation, I can only offer up that this was as much about me as it was about my audience. With the legitimacy of sports blogs on the rise, it seemed that to be taken seriously I needed to invest more than the occasional off topic post here. But I’d be lying if I claimed that audience needs didn’t come into play; hard as it may be to believe, there were many times last season when I abstained from writing a Red Sox post in this space because I’d recently done just that.

Or take the link posts automatically generated and posted here each night. One friend mentioned that they were borderline noise, and that he was contemplating creating a feed that filtered them (fortunately, I already have one for those of a similar persuasion). But from my standpoint, I generally put effort and thought into every link I make (I certainly don’t link to everything I read) – and thus value the generated linkposts, and curiously enough, a portion of the audience enjoys them as well.

Far more acute, however, is the tension for me on Twitter. Over there, in a stark contrast to my blog, my primary concern is audience. If my blog is about me, Twitter is about thee (in theory). While I’m sure the success rate is abysmal, the intent of virtually every entry – those that aren’t replies, anyway, and even with some of them – is to do one of amuse/entertain/inform/point to something interesting. When it comes to Twitter, I try to adhere to a slight modification of the “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything rule,” string substituting the above qualities for “nice.” Some of the content, of course, is just dressed up life mundanity (yes, I made that word up), but the effort to render it at least somewhat amusing or informative is there. Usually.

And speaking of replies, they happen to be a perfect example. Subsequent to the first or second @ reply in a longer running Twitter conversation, there’s always some underlying guilt, driven by an awareness that on some level I’m inflicting this conversation on a wider audience that may but more likely may not be interested in its contents. Why, I often ask myself, am I not direct messaging?

Many, however, apply the mindset I bring to blogging to Twitter – write for yourself first, everyone else second. Who am I to blame them? Isn’t my mantra, after all, that you are your most important audience? And while I might not have any personal affection for the kind of high volume lifestreaming that’s a typical result of that approach, many of its practitioners are enormously popular, so there’s little statistical evidence that my personal qualms are common or even widely held. Several folks I know, in fact, have cut their followers because they didn’t post enough, while I’m the exact reverse: I cull mainly those who post frequently. The cost of following someone who doesn’t post, after all, being nothing. The cost of following those that post mundane details without the veneer of humor is less obvious, but no less real for that.

As is probably obvious by now, I have no answers for you, and more to the point, it seems self-evident to me that what answers are to be found will vary widely from medium to medium. I do believe, however, that the tension, if not its level, will remain a constant, because we’re all complicated creatures, and complicated creatures do not always relate to one another.

When I was in high school, and it came time to apply to college, my primary goal was as straightforward as it was unambitious: to get in. Obviously I had certain preferences, but like musical chairs I more or less didn’t want to be the one left standing. Most kids, I’m sure, are of the same mindset, which is why they labor through the often tedious application process for so-called “safety schools” that they would prefer not to attend. What differentiated me then wasn’t the fact that I applied to a safety school, but rather the fact that I applied to about a dozen of them.

Recognizing that my relative indifference towards academics and a lamentable lack of real athletic talent did little to distinguish me from my peers, I fell back on the shotgun approach. Apply to enough institutions, my thinking went, and somebody would have to accept me.

Fortunately for everyone – or at least me – Williams rolled the dice and everything worked out nicely. After a positively abysmal freshman year, anyway.

Perhaps because the tactic played a role in the fine education that I received, I find it curious that so few enterprises are willing to embrace it when entering markets with which they are unfamiliar. Many if not most of the vendors we speak with focus, understandably, on the science of community and software development. But while the science has its place, the fact is that the software world is, like the MLB Playoffs, a crapshoot. And success is often far more art than science.

Consider the evidence. Google, for example, built one of the largest software businesses in recent memory more or less under the noses of incumbents like IBM and Microsoft. Were the latter firms somehow stupid, or mismanaged? Hardly. Their condition is instead described as kind of myopia, as characterized by an occasionally slavish devotion to the science of the software business at the expense of the art. Google itself proves the point, as they themselves missed the scope of the social networking opportunity perceived by upstarts like Facebook and MySpace, which compelled them to adapt Cortés’ plan B. The lesson? Even smart, well run software organizations – which I would argue Google, IBM and Microsoft all are – can fail to identify massive market opportunities. There’s an art to it, after all.

The reasons for these misses are many and varied, if cogently summarized for you by Paul Graham here. The part that I’m interested in, however, is this tidbit:

Big companies also lose because they usually only build one of each thing. When you only have one Web browser, you can’t do anything really risky with it. If ten different startups design ten different Web browsers and you take the best, you’ll probably get something better.

The more general version of this problem is that there are too many new ideas for companies to explore them all. There might be 500 startups right now who think they’re making something Microsoft might buy. Even Microsoft probably couldn’t manage 500 development projects in-house.

That diversity and competition breeds more innovation than a lack of both is hardly a revelation. Well, at least if you’re among the now minority in this country that still believes in evolution. In a manner of speaking, evolution is nothing more than the shotgun approach writ large. Really, really large. Both are at their essence manifestations of the power of volume.

Paradoxically, however, evolution in the context of software is inherently misaligned with the science of the software business (yes, I do appreciate the irony of an argument claiming that evolution isn’t “science”). Adherents to the science of software will typically rely on a wealth of market statistics, focus group reports, and more to draw logical conclusions as to how to design, position and sell their product. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who are cognizant of the limitations of the available data – the challenges of accurately measuring open source adoption for one, or issues with focus groups for another – and would prefer to rely on Darwinian competition to predict what they recognize they cannot.

Admittedly, true software evolution isn’t practical within the context of a single organization. As Graham acknowledges above, even an organization the size of Microsoft can’t manage hundreds of projects effectively. Intelligent software firms, however, have adopted a hybrid approach that borrows some of the best from both worlds. They use software science to manage their own product portfolios – a task for which it is usually well suited, but selectively apply software evolution via the acquisition of startups. To judge from the balance sheets, this dual pronged approach is relatively effective.

The question we continue to try and answer with our clients, however, is whether evolution or the shotgun approach have more of an internal role to play than has generally been assumed. While I’ve never had the theory confirmed for me, it has long been James‘ contention that the decision to open source Cloudscape – now better known as Derby – was just such an act of internal software Darwinism. Rather than try to decide via the science of software (which is all too often influenced by a third factor not to be discussed here, the politics of software) whether or not Cloudscape had a future, why not let evolution make the decision as to whether it will sink or swim?

In spite of such successes, however, science still dominates the business landscape within most of the software houses we speak with. Rather than try multiple markets and channels, looking to fail fast and often, vendors will often put the bulk of their eggs in a few, consensus driven baskets. Which is an approach, frankly, that it’s difficult to argue with given the results.

And yet the unanticipated success of high profile technologies like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and even Rails suggest that complementing software science with software evolution is likely to yield even more impressive results. By all means, employ science to focus and hone your investments when necessary, but don’t forget that evolution is where true innovation comes from.

Disclosure: Of the firms mentioned, IBM, Microsoft, and MySQL are RedMonk customers, while Google is not.

Once upon a time, the notion of delivering application functionality over the web seemed fanciful. The misguided thinking of some web zealots. I should know, having worked in shops that did both client/server and portal/web development. Shops that left me similarly skeptical (in the distant past).

But of course that was then, and this is now. The application landscape circa 2007 is, of course, heavily web oriented. As some of the gray beards in our midst have pointed out, it’s as if we’ve come full circle back to our green screen mainframe days. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And so on.

Over the last quarter or more, however, we’ve seen a resurgence in interest in what are often termed Rich Internet Application technologies, or RIA. Between the high profile vendor announcements (Apollo, JavaFX, and Silverlight) and some lower profile alternatives (RCP, XULRunner), the number of available paths for would be web application developers to walk down are proliferating rapidly. That much is clear.

What’s less clear is where some of these paths might lead to, the degree to which they stray from the major web thoroughfare, and what it might cost over the longer term to walk them. Or, in some cases, why there’s a separate path in the first place.

While I’m certainly not in a position to answer all of the above, perhaps by exploring some of the questions in more detail we can make tracks towards some answers. To the Q&A.

Q: Before we begin, anything to disclose?
A: Lots, in this area. All of the vendors behind the “high profile” RIA offerings mentioned above – meaning Adobe (Apollo), Microsoft (Silverlight), and Sun (JavaFX) – are customers in some capacity. As are backers of some of the “lower profile” technologies, such as Eclipse (RCP) and IBM (RCP, XULRunner). I think that covers it.

Q: Just to set expectations appropriately, what are your thoughts on the need for RIA technologies in general?
A: I’m a confirmed skeptic. Are there areas of opportunity? Sure. The JavaFX focus on mobile devices, as an example, I think is one area of significant opportunity because a.) the browser paradigm isn’t cemented on mobile devices, and b.) it probably is not the best usage of limited screen sizes. Likewise, there are things that HTML, CSS, Javascript and so on simply can’t deliver without some help – things like video.

But overall, I’m less convinced than many that we actually need some of the technologies being offered.

Q: Why is that? Some of the demos, after all, are very cool.
A: Well, let’s set aside my concerns with the ulterior motives and agendas at the moment, and just focus on the actual use cases. Ultimately, I come back to something Tim Bray wrote nearly four years ago. In part, he said:

On more than a few occasions—most recently in the context of Avalon—I’ve observed here that both IT admins and end-users prefer browser-based apps to traditional compiled clients, for everything except content creation. Every time, I get emails and incoming pointers from people saying “You just don’t get it, the Web interfaces are so tired, we really need a richer UI paradigm.” The interesting thing is that these reactions are always—every time, without exception—from developers. Not once has an end-user type person written in saying they wished they could have a richer interface like the kind they used to have in compiled desktop apps.

I agree with this. Forget the fact that I spend better than 95% of my day in a browser – yes, even for email and so on – because I’m as far from the typical user as you’re going to get.

Just consider your family and friends: are they mostly working off of network based applications? Webmail? Search? Banking? And so on? If yours are anything like mine, the answer is yes.

Cue Joel Spolsky:

“Users don’t seem to care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich client is, uh, richer.

So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it’s certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.”

Q: But still, there are things that rich clients can do that thin clients cannot, correct?
A: Of course. Just as there are things that thin clients can do that rich clients cannot. Or, as in the case of cross platform compatibility (try and find Linux support for Apollo or Silverlight) choose not to.

But the thing I find fascinating about the capabilities question is how quickly that’s changing. A few years ago, it would have been ridiculous to suggest that CRM could be delivered via the browser. Now? Saleforce.com and SugarCRM seem to be doing fairly well at that, and we at RedMonk are very pleased with Highrise. Even applications that have been held up as canonical examples of applications that can’t be delivered via the web, like Photoshop, are going online.

As Bill de hÓra says:

The real question is, what requirement cannot be met by a browser based app, *especially* if you include XUL? I mean fundamentally can’t be met or utterly pointless, not just “difficult” (difficult is merely motivation). The benchmark used to be a word processor, now it seems to be Photoshop.

That is indeed the real question, as far as I’m concerned.

Q: So you’re not convinced, in other words, that the extra bells and whistles are going to compel adoption?
A: In some cases, they certainly will. But ultimately, history seems to indicate that ubiquitous availability trumps functionality. The browser is available on any platform; at this juncture, at least, many of the aforementioned RIA technologies are not. Which is not to mention that the functional gap has narrowed dramatically over the past few years: application responsiveness was addressed in part by Ajax, offline capabilities are in the process of being solved by a variety of approaches.

Q: What do you think the market opportunities are, then, for the RIA technologies mentioned?
A: Obviously, I think the individual technologies will start from their respective ecosystems. Apollo will appeal to Flash/etc developers, JavaFX to Swing/etc devs, Silverlight to .NET folks, and so on. And to be clear, those respective ecosystems are nothing to sneeze at; they’re very sizable in their own right. Each technology, in effect, has a built in opportunity in front of it to leverage.

The question will be, in my mind, to what extent each can grow beyond its own developer base. Can they, in other words, begin to poach some of the developers that today are developing pure web applications. Can they persuade these independent developers that a.) there’s a volume audience waiting for the type of internet application that cannot be delivered using today’s pure web technologies, and b.) that their respective infrastructures are the right path now and going forward.

Q: What do you think the answer is?
A: Reactions, as you’d expect, depend largely on who’s doing the commenting. If you’re a Flash developer, or a Java developer, or a .NET developer – what Tim would refer to as a sharecropper – the odds are you’re pretty excited. And that’s probably a good thing; more capabilities for those platforms is certainly welcome.

But amongst folks that I read, what I see is substantial and mounting concern over, potentially, a threat to the web.

anaesthetica:

“The answer to the question of Mozilla’s direction seems dependent on what one sees as the proper goals of Mozilla. Is Mozilla simply a browser company? Is it broader than that: a platform for internet applications? Or broader still, as the central front and last best hope for a free and open web?”

Coté:

“To cut to the chase: the growing Flash/Flex/Apollo RIA reach rankles me.

It seems like a direct threat to the web.

The path that I’ve seen Adobe going down is creating their own networked platform. As I think of it “the web without all that web.” Instead of using the web, you’d use the Adobe client, be it Acrobat to edit forms or one of the RIA clients, or, at least, an HTML page with an embedded Adobe RIA.

There is no single vendor that’s created and provides the platform of the web: as you may recall, Netscape and IE tried the proprietary lock-in gambit. And then were were Java applets, ActiveX, and all manner of other end-routes around plain old HTML. In the end, no vendor or approach has been able to shove the web off into a corner and treat it just a back-end.”

Jeremy Zawodny:

“The browser is the new desktop and Microsoft is hoping that the CLR and Silverlight in general will be the new Win32 API and/or virtual machine. And they’re doing it in a way that only Microsoft can: by delivering full documentation, debugging tools, very large partners, and a world-wide network of trained evangelists and support staff. Say what you will about the company, but they know how to roll out software to developers. They’ve been doing it for a very long time.

That’s really what this is about. It’s not about competing with Flash. Microsoft is thinking much bigger than people seem to be giving them credit for.”

Mike Shaver:

“I don’t think you should need to buy, or even use-for-free, any given tool to build the web, and by using and helping to drive open web technologies Mozilla lets people choose the tools they want to use. We don’t force you to use the ones that we make money or marketshare on: you can use Eclipse or Firebug, Rails or J2EE, Komodo or Notepad, YUI or Dojo. If you ask the people who are building the exciting and significant apps on the web today, be they gmail or eBay or twitter or facebook or flickr or even Windows Live Search, I bet you that vanishingly few of them use IDEs. They use the tool that works best for them, for a given problem, sometimes using a bunch at once. I would be very surprised to discover that all of a given team even uses the same text editor, to be frank.”

Mark Pilgrim:

“Play with your vendor-specific runtimes. Don’t call me when you wake up one morning with a pink line in the round window and your BFF vendor won’t return your calls. If you need me (but of course you won’t), I’ll be holed up in my drab unpainted toolshed around the corner, quietly building applications on the web that works.”

Rafe Colburn:

“These latest announcements are a continuation of the great history of vendors trying to get people to abandon HTML in favor of the proprietary flavor of the month. The most successful attempt has been Flash, but it hasn’t made significant inroads against HTML. Most Web sites built using Flash are derided as useless and idiotic. Java Applets, ActiveX controls, and all other attempts along those lines have been failures. The title of this post refers to one of the original threats to the Web — Microsoft Blackbird. Back in 1995, everybody was talking about it as a richer, more powerful platform to replace HTML. (Check out this Byte article for a breathless preview that contrasts it with Java.)

Needless to say, I’m still betting on the web. I imagine the latest generation of proprietary web-based platforms will wither on the vine just like their ancestors.”

Sam Ruby:

“A worst case scenario may very well be that, over time, increasingly more and more content gets rendered by a common plugin that is closed source and controlled by a single vendor.”

Simon Willison:

“The fawning over Silverlight and Apollo is incredibly short sighted.”

Ted Leung:

“In the end, though, I probably won’t be doing much with Silverlight, for the same reasons that I’ve written about before. The technology has definitely gotten stronger, but the other issues haven’t really changed much: there are no tools for the Mac or Linux, and as far as influencing the technology, you’re just standing outside the Big House, pressing your nose up against the window.”

Q: Most of the concern, then, seems to center on the vendor oriented initiatives: what of the alternatives?
A: Glad you asked. Back in March, Anne posited that the real threat to Apollo was Firefox, not Silverlight. I think she’s correct in her assertion that Mozilla is the real player here, but to me its the combination of Firefox and XULRunner that’s the real threat. One of the more perplexing developments in all of the discussions of Apollo, JavaFX, Silverlight, and so on to me has been the glaring omission of XULRunner. For the unfamiliar, XULRunner Wikipedia defines XULRunner as “a product in development which will serve as a runtime environment for XUL applications. It replaced or renamed the Gecko Runtime Environment.”

In development it very well may be, but the projects being built on top of it are interesting. Mitchell mentions Joost and Songbird, but I’m far more intrigued by its usage within IBM’s Lotus portfolio. Faced with some of the same challenges application development wise as Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun – but without the same need for platform relevance – IBM chose the Mozilla route. Along with, of course, their RCP foundation.

As James Andrewartha has very kindly kept me appraised of, there’s considerable upheaval within the Mozilla community at the moment concerning XULRunner, so that may be playing a role. See, for example, Chris Brentano’s comment from here:

I think that despite what Mozilla and Co think their obligation to the community is, the community obviously has a different perception. Chris simply stepped up to say what many people I’m certain were thinking. Mozilla took millions of users under their wing, offering a “Better, More Secure Web Experience”, and while they’re giving away their product for free, they still have to support their customer base, and part of this (as Chris described) is to keep the web open and free by stepping up to the challenge of proprietary and closed frameworks such as Apollo, Silverlight and Java FX. By failing to do so they fail the millions of people they liberated from closed proprietary products such as IE that they worked so hard to free people from.

You don’t criticize if you don’t care, as the saying goes, and I think Mozilla’s moves to address the specific issues here are almost besides the point.

What’s far more relevant, and far more interesting, is the importance a number of developers are beginning to place on what was once little more than an interesting project. In a strange way, the introduction of Apollo, JavaFX and Silverlight have galvanized interest in the Mozilla based project, and compelled it in some fashion to (willingly?) become the standard bearer for a multi-vendor controlled future.

Q: How do you mean non-vendor controlled? Aren’t we likely to see open source implementations of JavaFX and Silverlight, at a minimum?
A: Indeed we will. The open source JavaFX project page is already up, and Miguel and his intrepid band of Mono developers have committed to implementing an open source version of Silverlight under the project name of Moonlight. And while Apollo isn’t open source, Adobe is releasing the Flex technologies.

But while these are commendable decisions on the parts of the respective vendors, open source does not in this sense equate to independent. In some respects, it’s akin to the difference between the open source Linux and MySQL projects. You can freely obtain the code for each project under the same license, but the former project is contributed to and driven by a number of parties while the latter is maintained and developed solely by a single entity.

Q: The motives, then, are what you are questioning?
A: In part. Consider the shift to web applications, from a vendor perspective. At one point, you needed expensive tools to design me an application that I needed to a.) pay you to run, and b.) pay someone else for an operating system to run it on. That’s good for vendors.

For the general computing public, that’s still largely the case, but the trend is clear: applications are increasingly being developed using free tools and delivered via a medium that is indifferent to my operating system, and I may or may not pay you for the application. That’s good for customers.

There will be, rightly or wrongly, concern on the part of developers that the RIA technologies are little more than an attempt by vendors to stave off a future in which they’re significantly less relevant. Hence the increased attention to technologies like XULRunner.

Q: What about choice? Isn’t it good that developers have more choices for designing richly functional applications?
A: As mentioned above, I do think it’s a positive for the respective communities that these technologies are made available to them. But, like many of the folks above, I’m concerned at the larger ambitions harbored by some of these technologies. A proliferation of content delivered in Silverlight, as an example, would negatively impact me as a Linux user. Ditto for Apollo.

But I’m also concerned that the task of web development – already non-trivial even with a handful of viable browsers – could get even more difficult. Beyond the technology implications, the Paradox of Choice is sure to be operative.

Q: Considering the above, then, what lies ahead for the mentioned technologies?
A: Keeping it conservative, as I dislike intensely the business of prediction, I’d say the following: Apollo will capture the attention of the Flash/Flex crowd, but have difficulty displacing XULRunner for applications such as Joost or Songbird. Silverlight, will initially gain traction as a Flash alternative for Microsoft-heavy shops, and build from there. JavaFX, meanwhile, will build out from its mobile story, which is quite strong, but have trouble with desktop penetration. RCP will remain buoyed by IBM’s dedication to the platform, while XULRunner – depending on how the community perceives their response to recent criticism – will pick up momentum not because it’s a platform of choice for ISVs small (Joost) and large (IBM) – but rather the fact that it’s not the competing technologies. Beyond that, it’s too difficult to say.

Q: So in short, your views are…
A: If you’re working with the web, and staying true to the path of platform independence and compatibility, you’re with me. If you’re not; if you’re trying to replace and/or subvert the web, you’re against me.

When Twitter launched, I remember being mostly uninterested. Like a great many of its skeptics, I couldn’t imagine caring what people had for breakfast, what time they went for lunch – what they were doing at that minute. And now, as a Twitterer of some months? I still don’t. Not really.

Sure, for the folks I know closely, it’s of some interest. As it is for the folks that lead spectacularly interesting lives. But if you’re anything like me – that’s not you. So what’s the best way to Twitter?

As is likely obvious by now, I have no real idea. I’ve considered Alex’s “Tweetin’ Right” post, and I think he’s on the right track, but for me I think it’s a more simple equation. While I might not particularly care what you’re doing, I am most certainly not averse to being entertained. Twitter asks the fairly basic question of what I’m doing. Instead, I try to answer the more complicated question of what am I doing that’s potentially entertaining.

Often, that’s not much, which is where Simpsons quotes and such come in. In other words, I’m trying not to inform, but to entertain. Mostly unsuccessfully, I’m sure, but the effort has to be worth something.

As I continually remind a friend of mine I’m trying to prod into blogging, one of my literary favorites once said, “There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.” I certainly don’t view Twitter as literature – if it is, the apocalypse may be nigh – but I think the principle is sound.

You may or may not agree with the assertion that there are moments in everyone’s day that would make good literature, but it’s difficult to argue that there are moments in everyone’s day that make for good entertainment. Or that can be described in an entertaining fashion. You just have to know what they are, and how to document them.

I certainly would not claim to have mastered that art. Nor would I presume to instruct would be Twitterers that that’s the one true path. It is, rather, just one man’s opinion of the kind of Twitter feeds I personally like to read, and am likely to subscribe to. Enough, in at least one case, that I’d probably pay to read it.

But to each their own, of course, and be sure to take all of this for what it’s worth: not a whole hell of a lot. If you like to Twitter a laundry list of the day’s activities, go for it. Whatever keeps you posting is probably a good thing.

“In cryptanalysis, a crib is a sample of known plaintext, or suspected plaintext; the term originated at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking operation during World War II (WWII).” – Wikipedia

If you read the headline quickly and assumed that I’d synthesized a way to apply MTV Cribs in a fashion that made intelligible your web traffic, you’re going to be disappointed. My apologies. I’m referring, as you’ve undoubtedly gathered from the quote above, about a very different kind of crib. One which is less flashy than multi-million dollar mansions and blinged out stretch Humvees, but still interesting. At least to me.

In the world of codebreaking, a crib is a shortcut to trying to crack a given cipher – it’s cheating, essentially. Faced with a difficult encryption scheme that defied conventional analysis, codebreakers would guess at message contents in an effort to shortcut the decryption process. In World War II, as an example, one might reasonably guess that messages originating from U-boats operating in the Atlantic might contain words like “destroyer” or “convoy” or “sunk.” By comparing the anticipated content against intercepted encrypted transmissions, Bletchley Park could dramatically reduce the time needed to break codes.

This practice only works if you can successfully anticipate the message content, however. If the other side is aware of the usefulness of cribs as an attack technique – as the Germans most certainly were – it’s inevitable that they’ll educate their personnel on the subject. Instruct them to avoid common words and phrases, thus neutralizing the potential for having their cipher attacked via a crib. Which is where seeding comes in.

As the Wikipedia article discusses, when the usual cribs failed due to strict adherence to radio protocols on the part of the Germans, Bletchley Park would have the Royal Navy “seed” a particular area with mines – thus guaranteeing that transmissions containing the name of that mined bay or whatever would be subsequently sent. They manufactured themselves, in other words, a crib.

While the above is hopefully an adequate if cursory dissertation on the basics of cribs as they pertain to codebreaking, it is not an explanation of how they relate – if at all – to web log analysis. Web log analysis, after all, is a slightly less earnest – not to mention complex – endeavor than codebreaking.

But consider for a moment the trail that we all leave when we visit a webpage, say when I visit your blog. Assuming that you have a webserver package capable of logging the visit and presenting it in some readable fashion, I implictly deliver to you a.) my IP address and b.) my pageview history. Taken individually, these are not terribly helpful. In combination, however, my IP and history can tell you quite a bit.

IP’s can be fairly easily traced back to a general point of origin. If I visit your site, as an example, you might be able to trace it to me as an individual, but you’d know that someone originating from a Comcast IP in Denver visited your site and looked at this page(s).

Still fairly cryptic. But what if you have a crib? Say, you mention my name in your article, and a few hours later a user from a Comcast IP in Denver arrives at your piece from a Technorati search for “stephen o’grady.” Or maybe you IM’d me a random link that a Comcast IP from Denver visited in approximately the right timeframe. You still can’t be entirely sure that it’s me, but given that your usually anonymous visitor is a.) visiting from Denver and b.) searching for articles about me, it’s fairly likely that you’ve correctly ascertained my identity.

And what if you saw – from that same IP – a del.icio.us URI beginning http://del.icio.us/sogrady?...? Post-modernists might still claim that you can’t really know that it’s me because you can’t really know anything, but the rest of us would provably acknowledge the obvious: that’s me. My IP – which was once opaque to you – has been decrypted into plaintext: my name.

As it happens, I’m a MyBlogLog user so if you’ve got their little bit of Javascript enabled on your page I’ll save you the effort and tell you that I stopped by – and even give you a poorly cropped picture of me as a bonus – but the identification procedure above requires no permission and not a whole of intelligence.

I’m not inclined to debate the questions of whether this is good or bad, because ultimately it’s irrelevant. Whether you like it or not, if someone’s paying attention you’re announcing yourself every time you visit a webpage – even in situations where your IP is not static but rather dynamically assigned. This will be news to some of you, and obvious to others, but I thought it worth mentioning. Largely because I’m beginning to wonder if some of the sharper folks out there haven’t caught on to the value of cribs, and begun to employ them strategically to identify visitors and gain better intelligence on who’s visiting and what they’re reading.

This technique is likely to have implications for you, whether you’re looking to see if someone you’ve written about has read your piece, or whether you’re concerned about the tracks you’ve been leaving all

Equivalent for batteries. The chips get faster every year, and they even grow more power efficient, but battery technologies lag their hardware counterparts by a significant margin. It’s immensely frustrating as a mobile worker, or should I say bedouin.

Whether it’s cellphones, laptops, PDAs, GPS units, or anything else mobile, odds are probably good that you wish you had better battery life. But it’s not just a matter of how long the battery holds a charge – it’s the actual battery life span.

For the folks that leave their laptops plugged in all day every day (that’s bad, in case you were unaware), I can understand that the batteries will burn themselves out quickly. But I’m pretty conscientious about letting the battery on my X60s run down regularly, and when traveling I don’t really have a choice in the matter.

But here I am about 8 months after the folks from Lenovo kindly sent me an X60s for testing with a battery that won’t hold even an hour’s charge. What’s more, it declined precipitously; as of last week, the battery was in fine shape – it went south more or less overnight.

I certainly don’t fault Lenovo here – it’s not their fault battery technologies have evolved little in the past decade – but I can’t help but think that a variety of mobile technologies are being held back not by chip speed, not by wireless connectivity, but by the simple ability to stay powered up.

And in the meantime, I’m off to get a new battery.

When speaking with those who don’t know us that well – and occasionally those that do – one of the questions we hear most often centers around enterprises. Specifically, to what degree we can – or cannot – speak for them, about their interests, their adoption, their buys. The answer is, as so many things are these days, complicated. It is not, however, a surprising one given a.) our predominantly vendor customer base and b.) our focus on technology adoption rather than buying trends.

But while we’ll happily acknowledge that we spend more of our time with developers, architects, and engineers than their IT manager or CIO bosses – by design – we’re usually quick to note that we also spend a significant portion of our time on the line with customers of all shapes and sizes. These conversations can and often do blur the lines between briefing and consultation, but they’re of significant value to us.

As are, increasingly, the implicit dialogue enterprises have with our site, as observed by our traffic logs. For all that we’re at a disadvantage to some of the larger firms with large enterprise customer bases, when it comes to web intelligence we have an inherent advantage: open content. I see far more web queries from enterprises, governments and educational institutions across the globe on a daily basis than any analyst could possibly service. It is, after all, always going to be easier to ask questions of Google than it is of the analyst firms.

I mentioned last week that someone from a large investment bank in New York was looking for information about Solaris package management. Interesting datapoint, I think. As is the fact that one of the largest healthcare providers in the US showed up looking for information on compliance and service oriented architectures. Or the query from a law office concerning WordPerfect to ODF migration. Ok, maybe the one from the defense contractor on corrupt iTunes libraries is slightly less important. But what about the fairly sizable SI that wants to know about open source economics? Or the state governmental agency interested in a OneNote equivalent for Linux? Or the problems that the UN is having with Google Analytics? Or the Spanish university interested in mashups and SOA? Or…you get the point, I’m sure. And that’s without getting into what we see from the vendors themselves – you should see the traffic on Q&A’s after a product launch. I’m frankly a bit surprised that organizations don’t anonymize themselves via proxies to a greater degree than they do.

It’s necessary, of course, to consider context when looking through traffic logs. You (generally) don’t know who within a given organization is querying, or why. And the query itself could be offhand, of no general significance. But even so, the datapoints themselves can be of interest, possibly on an individual and certainly on an aggregate basis. My only regret is that the traffic analysis tools themselves are still relatively primitive, delivering little in the way of business intelligence on the available data. Even Google Analytics, which goes further than the likes of Statcounter in that department, does little to provide me the type of intelligence I’m looking for. Mining the data, then, is still a regrettably manual process (yes, I think there’s an interesting reporting/BI software opportunity therein).

But if you doubt the value, just look at your own logs and take a look at what your competitors are searching your site for. In our case at least, it’s often worth a chuckle or two.

Earlier this week, I used some data from our traffic logs – courtesy of Statcounter – to make a point regarding the importance of fixing the shell. There are many such points that can be made, but there’s another one today that validates something I’ve believed for some time now but have had difficulty convincing others of.

As many of you know, package management is a personal hobby horse of mine. Merely bringing it up is the proverbial red rag to a bull. For a couple of years now, I’ve been campaigning for and agitating on behalf of package management in those systems that lack it, and standardization amongst those that have it already. Some of this lobbying has been in public, some has been behind the scenes, but it’s all driven by the belief that package management systems can lower barriers to entry not just for technology acquisition but ongoing maintenance and security patching. For a variety of reasons, however, my suggestions typically fall on deaf ears, although there’s been a significant uptick in interest in recent months.

But just to drive home the point – to validate my contention, as promised above – I thought I’d drop in a quick datapoint from today’s traffic to this space:

(NAME REDACTED)

New York, New York, United States, 0 returning visits
Date Time WebPage
February 23rd 2007 09:34:39 No referring link
February 23rd 2007 09:34:40 www.google.com/search?q=%2Bsun %2Bsolaris %2Bpackage %2Bmanagement&hl=en
tecosystems » Has Solaris Turned the Corner?

The name I’ve redacted? One of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street. I know the Solaris folks are thinking and working on this, and hopefully this will give them additional incentive to tackle that problem.

I’ve complained ad nauseam about the default shell within Solaris, which is both antiquated and primitive compared to newer shells, with little impact thus far. Most of the folks from Sun I speak with agree that it’s unfortunate, and that it should be fixed, but after several years of complaints nothing’s changed. The usual response is either a.) we can’t because of obscure booting or compatibility reasons, or b.) it’s easy to change it to bash, zsh or something less than several decades old. Either way, I think it’s hurting their ability to recruit new users to Solaris – particularly those coming from Linux.

For example, here’s something from today’s Statcounter weblog:

adsl-[IP REDACTED].dsl.sntc01.pacbell.net ([NAME REDACTED])

California, San Francisco, United States, 0 returning visits
Date Time WebPage
February 20th 2007 12:25:40 www.google.com/search?q=solaris bash word erase doesn%27t work&ie=UTF-8
tecosystems » Solaris-ing the New RedMonk Gear

It’s possible, I suppose, to interpret this differently, but in all likelihood this is someone Googling to find out why backspace doesn’t work on Solaris as it does on Linux, OS X, or Windows. The post they ended up at (I’m number five in that particular query) describes my distaste for the shell, but only indirectly how to set a user up with bash as an alternative. Based on the query, it seems safe to assume that this particular user appreciates the no-backspace “feature” about as much as I do.

What does one user matter? It’s easy, after all, to ignore me because I’ve publicly stated that I have no intention of migrating RedMonk’s business to Solaris, as I’m comfortable on Linux (Ubuntu, more specifically). Even if I hadn’t seen similar queries in the past, however, and I have, I’d care if I was Sun because the name I redacted was – unless it’s someone with the same uncommon name – one of the co-founders of a startup that just about everyone’s heard of.

I know it probably seems spectacularly unimportant to the Solaris engineers, but even little barriers to entry like this can deter would-be Solaris converts. Documentation, installation, and small decisions like the default shell can seem trivial when weighed against some of the technical differentiators within Solaris, but the historical popularity of Windows should be evidence enough that the volume market is more interested in ease-of-use than superior technology. Not learning from that would be a shame.

Disclaimer: Sun is a RedMonk client, Canonical – the corporate entity that funds Ubuntu – is not, although I will be speaking at UbuntuLive Day during OSCON.

If one accepts as a given that bottom up marketing is the increasingly most relevant approach from a technology marketing perspective; accepts, in other worlds, that David Kilcullen is correct and that the cold war paradigm of leaders negotiating with leaders desparately needs to give way to a model more focused on messaging populations, the logical question is what next?

Appealing to a population, after all, is a non-trivial task. The PR and marketing folks a bit ahead of the curve have started the business of identifying so-called “influencers” – individuals that may have more than a normal share of attention accorded to them. But as the volume of PR and marketers grows, the ability to effectively reach the influencer endpoints is diminished. Social networks, after all, are less efficient than their digital counterparts.

What’s important now, as I see it, is triangulation. I’m certainly not the first to mention this, but as it’s still poorly understood it warrants mentioning. The concept is simple: a single pointer to a new technology, service or whatever – even from a trusted source – is likely to have minimal impact, particularly if it requires effort to explore. But the second notice, from a trusted party, triggers a little click of recognition, and is far more likely to register. Further mentions only escalate this, until the interest to skepticism ratio tilts in favor of a trial.

This has been my experience with a variety of the services I use on a regular basis, from del.icio.us in the past to Twitter more recently. With almost no exceptions (Gmail’s one that comes to mind, Yubnub’s another), I heard of the service and largely ignored it, assuming – correctly, in most cases – that if it was important enough, I’d eventually be persuaded of that via visible adoption and usage. I’m slightly more proactive these days, as I usually will at least register my usual login just in case the service later proves useful, but I typically go right back to ignoring it following that initial signup. Until a certain number – never the same – of people I trust begin using it thus compelling me to take a second look.

What does this mean, for those of you charged with growing interest and communities? Just what you’re afraid that it does: that every user counts. That every user is a potential influencer. The notion of an easier to target, uber-class of influencer was a useful shortcut, but always a temporary one. It would behoove you, then, to work with your product managers and developers to ensure the lowest possible barriers to entry for the service. Because it’s going to be a lot easier to triangulate yourself some interest if the barriers are few. Otherwise you may be forced to quandrangulate or quintangulate yourself a new customer.