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We hosted Word Camp New York in our offices on Sunday - Matt Mullenweg spoke about the "State of WordPress" and in a word, it's strong. That was clearly visible from the crowd in the offfice, we had nearly 140 people spend their day with us listening, talking, participating. I heard a lot of good things from how to make your blog more effective to video in blogs. I really enjoyed hearing about how WordPress is being used and meeting a lot of the participants.
Special thanks to Jonathan Dingman to getting this organized and Hal & the Divas for getting it going. The presentations and a video will be posted on the website as soon as they're available.
Posted at 12:02PM Oct 07, 2008 by bs in Web.next |
Hurricanes, BBQ & Video Games
I had an interesting week of travel to Texas for the Austin Game Developers Conference last week. It seemed like a great time of year to visit Austin until Hurricane Ike headed towards the Texas coast and I realized that I had a connecting flight through Houston. Somehow, it was okay and my flight into Austin was only an hour late. That was important because I had to start on my BBQ quest before heading to the conference and stopped from some decidedly non-NJ style brisket for lunch.
I spent the afternoon at a session on Developing Games with Open Source Technologies. It was very interesting to hear about the tools that are available through open source communities for developing and deploying games. The afternoon concluded with an overview of Project Darkstar including examples of how to code to the Darkstar APIs. It was good to get that perspective and the talk concluded with an announcement of the Project Darkstar Developer Challenge - a chance to win some great prizes including passes to the 2009 GDC. Somehow the day ended with more BBQ while I was exploring Austin with the Darkstar team.
I was impressed with how much activity there was in the expo hall at GDC. This was a good group of game developers and most were interested in learning more about what was being presented. I've been to a lot of conferences with Sun and this was one of the more actively attended booths. The demos were crowded and attendees were stopping by to find out more about Project Darkstar. There were crowds in the booth from the start of the expo on Tuesday until the show was turning off the lights on Wednesday afternoon.
I'm glad that I got to attend the conference, it's always good to spend time with our CGO and the talented Project Darkstar team!
Posted at 11:37AM Sep 23, 2008 by bs in Web.next |
Communities and stuff
I was in National Harbor, Maryland last week for Sun's sales meeting and technical training. It was a very long week with a lot of old friends but also some very good content. I helped with sessions that talked about everything from Project Darkstar to the Open Solaris Web Stack project. We had some amazing presenters and terrific content for the systems engineers from all over the Americas.
The end of the week was a session that included a panel discussion with a Snowman , a Doctor and a Mink . It was a lot of fun getting to lead a discussion with these guys about technology, architecture and open source. And yes, those are all hockey jerseys and mine does say "Sokol" in Cyrillic letters for the Sokol-Kiev hockey team.
Posted at 01:53AM Aug 13, 2008 by bs in Web.next |
Social, social, everywhere
I started off the week on a whale watch along with a lot of other people, I think. It was hard to tell, because it was a virtual whale . Monday was the start of the Apple WWDC and a lot of people were planning to follow and connect via Twitter. While the folks at Twitter talked about what they've done to increase their capacity, chances were that the volume generated by the conference would cause the fail whale to make an appearance. This wasn't quite as interesting as a real whale watch, but much less bouncy for me. That's because it wasn't me riding the waves, it was Twitter bouncing up and down. I'm not sure why, but do like that the FailWhale has a website and a fan group too.
It's a good thing that I was able to watch this from the air conditioned comfort of my home office, the heat wave in New Jersey was pretty bad earlier this week. It did give me a chance to catch up on some things I've been watching. As I get invited to more and more (and more) professional and personal social networks, I have to wonder how this will tie together. I think people are already making choices based on convenience or capacity. It's either more convenient to stay with a few networks or people just don't have the capacity to continually join more networks. I've drawn the line at any more social networks unless there's some compelling reason or business group that seems interesting.
I am fascinated by the number of different approaches to social networking and I am interested to see how this grows. There's clearly benefits to being connected - both professionally and personally. I've reconnected with co-workers from 20 years ago and found friends that I knew in high school who are now living nearby. But there are the also the social networks that haven't thought through what they offer or even how they offer it.
I do see this getting worse before it gets better. It's getting easier than ever to setup a community whether you use a hosted site like Ning or KickApps , or use a toolset like SocialSite to add features to your website. This is truly the long tail of communities in action, which is definitely a good thing. The ability for disparate groups to connect is one of the tremendous benefits of the web.
The capacity limit has caught up to me though. I really don't need another set of credentials to YASNS (yes, that would be yet another social network site) with redundant, although slightly different data about me and my friends/colleagues. There's got to be a better way to manage your data and coordinate access to different sites. It seems to me that OpenID had some traction, Data Portability has a lot of conversations and Open-foo -the next hot new thing - is probably coming.
In order to continue the growth of social networking sites, I think that users will demand some changes. In fact, I'm probably not alone in being ready for some change. The big question is how this will be resolved. I think that some of the loose concepts around federation are very useful to help solve this. Depending on what kind of personal information you want to share, some it can be quite sensitive. Because of this, you want to be certain about how it's stored and who you've given that data. The idea of a feed-based mechanism with a personal datastore like a Mine! can be quite compelling. In the end, the ability to manage and track my own data is the goal. The mechanism needs to be fairly straightforward and provide the ability for existing sites to adopt the functionality. In the short term, there may not be a lot of incentive for social networking site to adopt such a mechanism but it's crucial for growth in the long term.
Posted at 03:00PM Jun 13, 2008 by bs in Web.next |
The Start of Internet Week NY
I was invited to a reception at Gracie Mansion last night with Mayor Bloomberg and Katherine Oliver, who's Commissioner of The Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. It was a lively, crowd with a very full house, but a great chance to see Gracie Mansion on a beautiful day and talk to some people that I haven't seen for a while.
Internet Week NY is a great city-wide unconference to celebrate technology and the internet in NYC. There's over 50 events scheduled for the week, culminating with The Webby Awards next Tuesday. As Mayor Bloomberg said last night, New York has a strong history with Technology companies from Silicon Alley to new technology companies starting in the city and that "there is no better time to celebrate our digital media sector".
I'm excited to see so many activities from interesting breakfasts to career panels to Diggnation happening over the next week. It's a great way to showcase what the city has to offer and I hope that this starts a long tradition of Internet Week in NYC.
Posted at 06:13PM Jun 03, 2008 by bs in Web.next |
The Internet in Middle Earth?
I'm not sure if it's Middle Earth is in the Internet (which it surely is) or that the Internet is part of Middle Earth. It's not a huge leap to think that there are Lord of the Rings fans on the Internet. But, I apparently missed the bigger connection.
I saw an article on TechCrunch about "Old Media" and discussions from the Mediabistro Circus last week in New York City. It sounds like I missed a good session given by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired. He talked about the relationship and interactions between traditional media sources and user generated content along with corrosponding ad cost models. Chris has been talking about The Long Tail for nearly four years now and has some interesting thoughts on where the money is. He has a robotics site DIYDrones that's hosted on Ning. It's a not a large study, but I believe it shows the value of niche or "long tail" sites - he sees greater than ten-fold revenue for his ads on that network versus the standard rates on MySpace. His advice at the conference to help drive that: “Be the tallest dwarf.”
From dwarfs to Digg, at the same conference. Daniel Burka talks against the "notion of One Page To Rule Them All," even with Digg which brings together headlines from around the web. It's an issue of control or the lack thereof. There's not single source for information that can cover everyone's interest. Yes, you can search for the information but the idea of a central portal is long gone. That's why custom tools and aggregators like FriendFeed are becoming more popular. I get my news and feeds from a variety of sources and I fully expect the number of sources to grow. There's no way for traditional media to keep up and try to control those interactions.
Other than the Lord of the Rings references, the theme at the conference was about accepting and embracing the conversations that the web enables. That not only adds value to social networks but the traditional media. Enabling that conversation keeps readers engaged and helps make the experience more valuable for others. I didn't see any references to hobbits but I'm sure that I can figure out where Frodo fits in...
Posted at 11:40PM May 27, 2008 by bs in Web.next |
London in April
I spent most of last week in London or travelling there. I arrived Tuesday morning for the Internet World UK conference , held in Earls Court. I took the redeye Monday night so that I'd arrive with some time to rest before my session on Tuesday afternoon. As they say about the "best laid plans", rest was nowhere to be found before I had to present. I was really happy with the attendance at the conference and the room for my session was almost full. There was a good crowd and some interesting questions, although my references to Diesel Sweeties and xkcd were not completely familiar to the audience in London.
My session was titled "Web 2.0 Scale" and talked about some concepts and expectations around the web sites today, especially how community and participation can impact your strategies for applications and scaling. The concept of architecture has changed from Web 1 where we talked about architecture in terms of "blueprints" to provide a firm foundation to Web 2.0 where the focus has shifted to patterns and dynamic services that have a more loosely coupled foundation but retains the same requirements for stability and scalability. The toolset is very important to help build and maintain the application and infrastructure, so I reviewed a bit about NetBeans and OpenSolaris.
I spent the rest of the week in the office and meeting with both customers partners, plus I was able to explore a little bit of Chelsea. It's a great neighborhood with a lot of history. There's a lot of interesting old houses from the 18th and 19th century that are really remarkable. I walked by the Chelsea City Hall where some celebrities have gotten married and I did like the sign on the drinking fountain. They did tell me that the area used to be country and was somebody's hunting lodge nearby.
Posted at 11:35PM May 04, 2008 by bs in Web.next |
Really virtual or virtually real?
It's been a really interesting week for me, especially since it didn't involve any sort of plane travel. There were a few trains and a bit of snow though. Unfortunately, the snow and the ice were both real which made for some interesting mountain biking this morning.
This virtual topic is pretty timely given the innotek announcement this week. It adds a great developer desktop tool to the xVM portfolio. I've been playing with Parallels and the latest OpenSolaris developer preview build, so I'm excited to try VirtualBox.
But that was really only a part of the virtual topics that I've been talking about all week. It all started innocently enough when I met a friend for lunch to catch up on some of the projects that we're working on. He's a master at connecting people and has a both an active blog and a series of networking breakfasts with interesting panels. The funny thing is that I met him seven years ago when he was at a start-up and we've just recently reconnected via another friend. So, we talked about the reach of the virtual world and how easy it is to keep updated via tools like Facebook or LinkedIn. However, sometimes you need the in person interactions to have those spontaneous and unexpected results. I'm going to be travelling for a while, so we can switch back to virtual communications now.
I also spent some time talking about virtualization as a feature of utilization vs. virtualization for management. We've heard the about the low average utilization on a per server basis and how server sprawl grows as individual servers are provisioned for individual applications. We've done a lot of work looking at server consolidation whether it accomplished via domains or LDOMs or zones or some combination. We have the ability to manage those virtual systems and their associated applications, networking and storage and there are tools to help plan and manage that.
What's really interesting is virtualization for management and how that can help with large scale web infrastructure. Project Caroline is a SunLabs project designed to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. It can help enable software-as-a-service to help make systems dynamically available and scalable. While this is still a project, I like the approach because it's not only about scaling but also about managing. There's a tendency for fast growing sites to continue to add resources without reviewing the existing architecture. This is absolutely understandable because of the time to market pressures and need to meet user demand quickly. However, I think the ability to add an abstraction layer that can take dynamically grow resources would give sites a chance to better leverage their infrastructure.
As virtualization technologies continue to mature, I think that capabilities will grow in both areas. This becomes more important as we get more cores and threads in a single server. As for the personal virtual interactions, I'm fascinated to see where that goes. In the meantime, lunch meetings in New York are always good.
Posted at 12:28AM Feb 16, 2008 by bs in Web.next |
Biking, technology and the web
This could be the latest craze in online gaming - combine cycling, technology and the internet. Talk about a mashup... Oh wait, there's already MotionBased that takes GPS data from your cycle computer and plots it onto a map. It could be more addictive than Webkinz is for your kids (or you). But, it's really just what I've been talking about for the last two years in my blog. I just checked to see when I started this blog and it was officially posted on September 30, 2005. I can't believe that I missed my own anniversary! There was a slight gap in the middle, although it's picked up a bit lately.
So, two years later and I'm starting a new job at Sun - Chief Technologist for the Web Industry Practice. It's very exciting for me to be in such an interesting role. We're a small group, but focused on what we can do to help web companies. The groups focused on different types of companies including internet services, new media, social networking, e-commerce or gaming. There's an interesting collection of technology from Sun, partners and free/open source software that we're working with. It will be interesting to see how my experience from the Media & Entertainment companies will help with these customers, especially as more content is distributed through these sites. Plus, there's common needs relating to understanding customers, integrating new features and scaling for performance.
It's going to be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to meeting new customers, co-workers and seeing new places. Stay tuned!
Posted at 10:02AM Oct 05, 2007 by bs in Web.next | Comments[1]
Sports and the new web
I went to a very interesting ny:mieg panel Wednesday morning - thankfully, it was interesting since it started very early in New York City. The panel talked about "Enhancing the Sports Fan Experience" and featured speakers from College Fanz, The NFL Network, CSTV, Kickapps and NEP Broadcasting. The panelists all had experience with sports broadcasting and bring a unique perspective to building sports communities on the web.
Bill Rasmussen, founder of ESPN and now College Fanz had a great perspective on providing a place for fans to gather, cheer and celebrate or scream at their favorite teams. It was said that there's more passion around sports than other topics and I believe that it continues to be true. According to Rasmussen, that's especially true for college sports because there's such a long affiliation with the school. Today's professional sports teams can change players or even cities, but once you've attended a school - it's your alma mater for life. That not only gives a long time period that people follow a college sports program but a continually growing audience.
I've seen this with sports in general, whether it's MLB , NFL, NHL or Cricket. Sports websites in general drive tremendous traffic and visitor loyalty. The ability to follow your favorite teams and players while receiving updated scores and stats is a great resource for both the casual fan and fanatic. Fantasy leagues, statistical tracking and community building are all driven by the content on these sports sites. New communities like College Fanz only help to extend the attraction. Sports fans will always find places to congregate and celebrate, these sites give them a virtual destination to call home.
Posted at 05:57PM Sep 15, 2007 by bs in Web.next |
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