Wednesday November 16, 2005

ZFS Announcement on OpenSolaris - and Question of Voice
The "Welcome to the ZFS Community" announcement on the frontpage of OpenSolaris.org has a very succinct and to-the-point opening paragraph:

"ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use."

and the closing sentence of the announcement is worth repeating as well:

"Give it a spin, and let us know what you think!"

I've been asking that the announcements on the front page of OpenSolaris.org be personally signed and be written in conversational voice (not the written voice that so many of us learned during our education which is formal and stuffy and fails to capture the reader's imagination!)    I agree with much of what Kathy Sierra says in her "Your user's brain wants a conversation" and "Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass" posts.  I also appreciated Stephen O'Grady's discussion of the importance of voice as well in his "The Problem of Voice: On Paul Graham, Press Releases, and More" post.  If you haven't thought about the role of voice, or think conversational voice is only for "dummies", I encourage you to read the above posts and start caring about the readers you lose as a result of using "formal voice", "press release voice", "man page voice" and "legal voice".

This announcement is signed by "The ZFS Team" (who on the ZFS team wrote it, I want to know!) so at least it is signed.  And it does appear to be written in authentic voice.  So, thanks to the ZFS team for a an announcement that is not robotic.  And a question for all my readers - what do you think of the language in the ZFS announcement?  Is it conversational enough?  Does it keep your attention?  Does it seem authentic?

If you want to know more about the Zettabyte File System, read the rest of the OpenSolaris announcement about ZFS.  Or check out the ZFS community here.  And be sure to check out the inaugural ZFS Screencast that I blogged about earlier this morning.  Enjoy!

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: ZFS

(2005-11-16 12:10:39.0) Permalink

A ZFS Screencast for the ZFS Blog Carnival

Dan Price's gift of love to the ZFS BLOG CARNIVAL this morning is near and dear to my heart:  a ZFS SCREENCAST.  w00t!

Check it out!   You do have to be a bit of a geek (it's good to know what a filesystem is) to appreciate it, but the simplicity of the administrative model should come through regardless...

I fell in love with the concept of an authentic voice, natural demo with both visuals and an audio track when I first saw Jon Udell's killer del.icio.us screencast.  Jon later wrote an article titled, "The New Freshman Comp"  (which is worthwhile reading, particularly for developers) which he concludes with:

"Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were, but we'll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles--consistency of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement--will be familiar to programmers and writers alike."

I think Jon's right (as I've said before) and it's not a surprise to me that Dan is the one of the first in the Solaris (now OpenSolaris) engineering team to pave this screencasting path.  Dan's always peeking around corners, looking for what's coming, critiquing how we approach problems and coming up with ideas for how to communicate and how to spread the word.   In addition to doing his day job of engineering great technology.

In summary, I have 4 things to say:

1.  Here is my Huge Welcome to the ZFS bits into OpenSolaris.  This next-generation Zettabyte File System is sure to have a positive impact on the lives of system administrators - and the bottom lines of businesses.  Congratulations to the fabulous team behind this great accomplishment.

2.  Big thank you to Dan Price (and the other folks who helped him) for creating the First ZFS Screencast! 

3.  Please note that the ZFS bits are available in the OpenSolaris source code first - before showing up in a product anywhere.  We really are serious about this open source and open development thing.

4.  Thank you to Dave Johnson for giving a name (via Siflay Hraka) to what we're doing today (and what we did on the OpenSolaris Opening Day) - a Blog Carnival.  I like it.

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: ZFS

(2005-11-16 09:30:41.0) Permalink