|
Feb
28
|
|
This blog continues here.
I've finally managed to pull my finger out and re-host this blog on my own site.
Because I rarely have the opportunity to blog about work these days - I've decided that an external blog is more appropriate. I chose WordPress because of it's maturity, large range of plugins and themes and availability as a standard application for many hosting companies. I chose to use DreamHost after a little research - so far so good.
Now I don't feel so bad about blogging about non-Sun news on Sun property I'm making more of an effort to blog (at least once a day) - mainly on topics related to the broader Software Industry.
If you've bookmarked or blogrolled me - please update - my new blog needs the link-love.
|
Jun
4
|
|
This blog is taking a rest while I check out Twitter. I think I like the low time-investment that Twitter requires; real blogging takes time and subsequently I don't blog even 10% of what I think about.
|
Apr
27
|
|
Today, blogs.sun.com is three years old - that should be young I guess - old seems wrong - this is still a very new medium to many and b.s.c feels anything but old. Anyway, congratulations to everyone who has made it a success - the people who run it and to the 3,000 plus employees (and alumni) who make it an interesting place.
I was a bit of a laggard compared to some of my colleagues (and ex-colleagues) - I didn't join the fray until July 2004. In that time I've posted 303 entries, spent some time helping Eduardo and Carla getting The Aquarium (es, ch, ja) up and running and spent way too much time playing around with Roller templates.
As an added bonus, and to my surprise someone actually reads my blog - in fact, occasionally a lot of people. Looking back at my statcounter logs - there have been a couple of notable peaks -
- When one of my rants about the middleware market got picked up on TSS
- One of my posts got highlighted on Ajaxian (this was a big peak - 4k hits in a day; even now it draws 20-30 hits a day)
- An entry about Zimbra got linked to by Tim Bray (which was pretty humbling knowing how much traffic someone like Tim draws)
- I got linked by the Big Boss (FWIW - this drew far fewer referrers than Tim Bray's link - sorry Jonathan)
I don't write much that I expect will be of earth shattering importance and am fairly limited to what I can talk about work-wise so it's nice to know that some of what I write here is interesting to someone way down on the outer-reaches of the long tail.
Here's to the next 3 years of blogs.sun.com.
|
Apr
10
|
|
I think Tim O'Reilly has it wrong. His blogger's code of conduct, while well intentioned, is unworkable. What the web needs is a reputation system. And by reputation I mean the social evaluation of a person, group or entity. The Social Evaluation - that's the important bit.
Here's how it would work. If you want to be taken seriously, people need to know who you are; something like OpenID would be adequate for this. Strictly it doesn't really provide anyone with any level of trust that you are who you say you are - but that's OK; just knowing that you're the same entity that left comments on other sites, or contributed to a wikipedia article is enough. Next we need a way of recording a reputation against OpenIDs - people should be able to very simply score you on your level of insight, wit, general behavior, etc. on the web - this has been solved locally for ebay and slashdot; what we now need is some way to federate your reputation globally.
The need for anonymity can't be pushed aside in this system; there are very good reasons for allowing anonymity. Flaming people or competing products, pumping up your own views, etc. are not good uses of anonymity and unfortunately cast the use of Anonymity in a bad light. Like I said there are good reasons for anonymity to be maintained for those who really need it - I live in a country and work for an organization where I hope I'll never need to hide my opinion. But there are many circumstances where anonymity is required,
The idea of web-reputation is anything but new - ebay, slashdot, to name a few have been using it successfully for years to provide user-moderation; what's missing is some convenient standards for federating or compositing reputation. A couple of sites have been trying to just that - for example here's my Opinity page. Opinity is a service that allows me to have some control over my on line reputation and does some degree of reputation compositing; but it isn't perfect; and it isn't really widely enough used to be of much practical use (today).
Here's my prediction - as the web moves inevitably towards adopting user-centric identity; reputation (and federated reputation) won't be far behind.
What do you think ?
|
Mar
12
|
|
The "What's this blog worth" meme sems to be recirculating, last time I looked (October, 2005) this blog was worth $5k it's now close to $11k - that's more than 100% in 18 months - not bad. That was also during a time when I mostly wasn't blogging here - I was helping get The Aquarium up and running (which is worth an astounding $25k).
My blog is worth $10,726.26.
How much is your blog worth?
|
Jan
23
|
|
The Aquarium group blog has been running for about 2 months now and I believe it was one of the first group blogs using Roller. Tim Bray's post on group blogging prompted me to write about some of my experiences with Roller and of group blogs in general; in the hope that others might find it useful. I certainly know from within Sun there seems to be a fair amount of interest in group blogs.
First, let me describe what The Aquarium is about. It's a blog about server-side Java, relaying news about Java EE 5, Web Services, XML, and GlassFish (the Open Source java.net project which includes Java EE 5 and Sun's Java Web Services Stack). We use the blog to highlight some of the cool things that people are doing in the GlassFish community; as well as injecting a bit of our own opinion from time to time. The Aquarium is a "professional blog" - by that I mean it has an important role to play in the community and awareness building for GlassFish - and a fair amount of time and effort has been invested to get it started.
I must admit I shared some of Tim's perception of what blogs are, ie. "... being about an individual voice..." and needed a little bit of pushing from my blog co-editors. I think some of my reluctance was that I knew I'd probably need to give up my personal blog on b.s.c (which I'd been nurturing for about 18 months) due to the pressures of balancing the job Sun actually pays me to do, my family and all the other interests competing for my time. Also, I actually like reading blogs that expose a bit of the bloggers personality from time to time and would argue that it adds some depth and colour. I also like being able to use my personal blog to rant about things that bother me; though I also appreciate that others read technology blogs for the technology alone and find the personal aspect a distraction. I guess we'll find the right balance over time.
One of the obvious benefits of a group blog is that we have the ability to share the load. As I mentioned previously - The Aquarium has a real job to do and that would be a very heavy load for a single person. For the domain we cover on the Aquarium there is never a shortage of news - so volume is pretty high (often four or five postings a day) though I think Carla and myself are running up a bit of a deficit !
Roller's support for GroupsRoller WebLogger is an Open Source, Java blog server used by Sun, IBM and JavaLobby; among others. Roller 2.0 introduced some features specifically for supporting group blogs, these include :
- The ability to invite users to join a blog
- Three levels of permission - Limited (draft but not publish entries), Author (Limited + post and edit entries), Admin (Author + change settings)
- The ability to leave a group blog
There are other features that could be useful - using drafts and timed postings it is possible to create a 'pipeline' - ie. blog entries moving through the workflow - allocated to an editor, various drafts, reviewed, published. Unfortunately for us that isn't completely possible because we all use external blog editors and as far as I can tell most editors don't allow you to edit 'published / draft' posts. That said - the timed posting is pretty useful for spreading the posts through the day or timing to catch specific time-zones.
Also for the 'workflow feature' to be really useful it would also need edit locks to avoid overlapping writes on entries - this isn't something we've really had a problem with (there are only three of us) but would probably be a requirement for a larger group bog intent on using the pipeline more.
The only enhancement requests I have for Roller aren't really specific to group blogs as much as they are a requirement for high volume, busy blogs like The Aquarium. First would be the inclusion of tags - I see a 'category' as limited form of tagging - what you really need is the ability to apply zero or more arbitrary (ie. not previously defined) tags to a posting and be able to quickly search on the available tags.
Managing a Group BlogWe use a couple of wikis - one on java.net; and one internal (for all the secret stuff) to maintain a pipeline of future entries so we can keep track of who's doing what and when. We have a fairly loose process :
- identify something bloggable
- blog it or put it in the pipeline for someone else
- get it reviewed (if needed)
- post it or queue it
Additional note - mail, IM, blogs, wikis, workflow - I think these are essential tools for Enterprise Collaboration - these are the things that will probably combine to become the next generation 'Enterprise Intranet Portal'.
|
Jan
17
|
|
It's been eleven days since my last entry and only four entries in the last month - so what's up ? I'm still alive and well (as the photo taken the past weekend at North Lake Tahoe shows).
I have a couple of excuses for not posting more frequently; first I have been helping get another blog off the ground (TheAquarium[1]) who's popularity, so far, has surpassed our wildest expectations - so that's where my work related blog-time allocation goes (at some point I'll write about my experiences of group blogging - especially as it relates to Roller). As for the personal side of my blog - well things have been pretty hectic work-wise (I think people really did use the Christmas break to re-energise) - basically I just haven't had much time to blog at all.
Longer term - now that much of my work related blog-time allocation goes into The Aquarium I may even have to stop blogging here - my personal feeling is that a purely personal blog doesn't live on b.s.c so I may well move a more family and friends focused MirrorWorld somewhere else - stay posted.
[1] The Aquarium is a blog about Java EE 5, Web Services, XML, GlassFish and Sun's growing OpenSource presence - check it out.
|
Oct
24
|
|
This article in Wired is far from being a great piece of research but it did get me thinking.
I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind blocking employees from blogging. Though blogging (and putting information on the web in general) is, perhaps, a more efficient and convenient way to disseminate information - it's not the only way. Leaks, violation of privacy, etc. all happened before blogs (and before the web). In fact, as far as I'm aware there haven't been any major violations of public data, trade secrets or financially sensitive data that involed blogging* - whereas Financial and Public Institutions seem to be doing just fine with the traditional ways of losing data - eg. stolen laptops, hackers, etc.
Wouldn't such companies do better by addressing the real problem (if one exists) - which is employee's understanding their duty towards the law, shareholders, their employer and their customers and while they are at it - do a better job of protecting their customer's data. In environments with strong privacy regulations (health, public services) - everyone has to understand the regulations and implications - it's not about blogging, not about whether or not to post to Yahoo groups - it's about what's OK for public discolsure and what's not - if your employees don't understand that then THAT is a big problem.
*I'm happy to be proven wrong - post a comment if I'm missing something.
|
Oct
21
|
|
I just stumbled across this neat little app. - your value is derived on the price AOL paid for WebLogs Inc. ($25m) divided by their % share of Technorati sources - to give a $ price per Technorati link. Shame they used Technorati links (which is a limited view of the Blogosphere).
My blog is worth $5,645.40.
How much is your blog worth?
I should add that the short URL (http://blogs.sun.com/sharps) is worth another grand.
I just checked the top 2 Sun bloggers (as of today) - Jonathan's blog is worth $219k and Rich's is worth $15k - OK, time to grow a ponytail ! It's interesting that there is such a price difference - ie. you can be widely read without being widely linked to
|
Dec
2
|
|
There was an internal dicussion about posting photots to bloggs and someone mentionef that flickr can act as a relay between email and blog and could for example be used to send photos from a cell phone or PDA. So here begins my quick experiment - this was posted directly from flickrs web site using the meta web log API.
Next, I'll try posting directly from my cell phone.
