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diana reichardt's sun.com blog
The Experiment
Last week, during a weekly feature story pitch meeting for sun.com, I was batting ideas back and forth with our home page editor on how we should cover the Web 2.0 Conference in the city starting Nov. 7. I couldn’t go to the conference because it was sold out. But we needed to do a story. So we were trying out some headline ideas on the white board when I went off into the “what if” zone and said, hey, wouldn’t the best expression of Web 2.0 be to let the people who come to our site create the content? (I think I was still a bit over stimulated by the Startup Camp in Mountain View.) But you know what? We decided to try it. And we got support for the experiment. That’s Sun's culture at work.
So, on November 6, I created a new SHARE blog that just asked people to comment on where they thought Web 2.0 was. Not what it was, or why, but where. I wanted to know if people saw evidence of it in the things they do or in the world they live in. And I wanted to know where they thought it all was headed.
After we went live on Tuesday morning, we started to get some decent traffic but not a lot of comments. I don’t think people really knew what to make of it. And I quickly learned that not everyone coming to the page would know to click on the comments field to see the posts.
So we started modifying our approach in realtime. We changed the template and linked to the permalink url so the comments would be visible right away. And then we saw our traffic jump. (Trust we when I say there is a reason I call this blog shift+reload.)
I learned a lot in the past two days. Like add more content in the lead question if you want to get a dialog going. Create some context for the discussion by providing more background on the topic. And don’t rely on the links in the right nav…they are not that visible and mostly below the fold.
One of the things I was most impressed with (and I did worry about this) was the quality of the comments, which were mainly quite thoughtful and genuine. That says a lot about our readers.
Posted at 06:08PM Nov 08, 2006 by shiftreload in Sun | Comments[0]
Startup Camp
I attended a unique event yesterday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, called Startup Camp. It was an “unconference” which, if you haven’t been to one, is a bit hard to grasp. Sure, the idea sounds cool. But what’s really cool is watching the agenda take shape as the participants kick-off the day by proposing topics that they care about for the general sessions. The agenda gets posted and then people break away and settle down into their preferred sessions.
Because it was a Startup Camp hosted in Silicon Valley, most of the people I met were either looking for networking opportunities, new ideas, or financing. We’ve been following the story on sun.com this week.
Today there was a Speed Geeking contest. The way it works is the thirty Best Startup contestants get five minutes to pitch their startup idea to groups of fellow Campers. Contestants with the best vision for a new company are awarded with a wooden nickel by the other participants. The startup with most wooden nickels wins.
And the winners are:
First place, with 27 nickels: Zooomr
Second place, with 16 nickels: EchoSign, Inc.
Tied for third place, with 10 nickels and 9 nickels, respectively: Automattic
and the "untitled" fashion startup.
Zooomr founder Kristopher Tate won for his photo site startup, which allows
users to share, search, and sort their photos using technologies such as
geo-tagging. He was awarded a Sun Ultra 40 workstation and a 24.1" Flat Panel LCD HD+ Monitor, provided by Sun.
EchoSign won second place for its Web-based document management tool and was also
awarded a Sun Ultra 40 workstation.
Tied for third place was Matt Mullenweg's Automattic, which he founded to “bring
WordPress to the masses,” and the untitled fashion startup entered at the last
minute. Both were awarded a Delphi MyFi XM2GO XM Radio Satellite Radio Portable
Audio System plus six months service.
Sounds like it was a pretty good day for ideas all around.
Posted at 05:29PM Nov 03, 2006 by shiftreload in Sun | Comments[0]
Project Blackbox: Think "Inside" the Box
Today Sun unveiled a prototype of Project Blackbox, a totally new datacenter concept that houses a fully functioning datacenter in a shipping container that can be quickly deployed just about anywhere.
Why? Because even as our customers need greater and greater compute power, they are running out of critical resources like space, power and cooling.
Project Blackbox addresses those needs by packing compute, storage, and network infrastructure capabilities into scalable, modular units outfitted with cooling, monitoring, and power distribution systems. Housed in a standard 20-foot shipping container, Project Blackbox can be easily transported using common shipping methods. And with simple hookups for water, AC power, and networking, our customers will be able to quickly deploy Project Blackbox, wherever it makes sense.
It was really impressive to see the unveiling today at Sun's Menlo Park Campus in California, and to actually walk through the container and see the servers and feel the cooling systems. When the containers arrived in our parking lot today, there were two helicopters circling the building, which caused quite a buzz for employees.
We have a great video tour with Dave Douglas, our vice president of Advanced Technology on the Project Blackbox site, and a bunch of cool photos in the gallery. You can also check out Dave's blog for his take on this project.
Needless to say, we are all very, very excited about this one. It feels like ...well, you know...
Posted at 06:15PM Oct 17, 2006 by shiftreload in Sun | Comments[0]
Five Identity Management Traps
Identity management continues to be a hot topic with businesses today. With last month's release of the Sun Java System Identity Manager 7.0 software, Sun delivered the first solution that integrates user provisioning and identity auditing to help companies improve security and compliance while reducing risks and costs. We also acquired Neogent, Inc. and partnered with Accenture to help us maintain our leading position in the identity management market. Today's feature story on sun.com Five Identity Management Traps And How To Avoid Them puts it all in context and explains how Sun helps customers bridge the gap between security and compliance.
Posted at 05:40AM Oct 04, 2006 by shiftreload in Sun | Comments[0]
A Rare Day Indeed
It's a rare day for me when when I don't find myself feeling a little bit amazed by the breadth and depth of content we develop and publish on sun.com. There are lots of folks involved and we live in an environment of continuous change. We provide fast access to products, solutions, communities, partners, and services. And we spend considerable time and effort to explain how Sun is contributing to making the world a better place, which technology advancements we're pursuing and why, and much, much more. I am starting to blog today because I want to share (keyword at Sun) my top picks on sun.com, as well as my thinking about how the old rules of publishing on the web are transforming not just how we communicate and interact, but what we think is important and why. This week, Sun sponsored the live webcast of the California Governor's and First Lady's Conference. The conference speakers were truly inspiring to me. Women rallied women to be architects of change in their lives with a powerhouse lineup of speakers, including California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, California First Lady Maria Shriver, Nobel Peace Prizewinner the Dalai Lama, The Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson, businesswoman Martha Stewart, and Meet the Press' Tim Russert. Sun brought the event to thousands of viewers worldwide by sponsoring an all-day live webcast of keynote speeches and general sessions direct from the conference floor. Right now, you can tune into conference highlights on sun.com.
Posted at 08:28AM Sep 28, 2006 by shiftreload in Sun | Comments[0]
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