Saturday June 24, 2006 Gone but not forgotten
It's hard to see colleagues move on for any reason, but one of the good things about Sun is that we often find people returning later - indeed, some of our key leadership right now are re-hires. Sun has always had a policy of not re-allocating employee serial numbers so that people can come back.
There's a radical new step emerging though. Sun alumni can now apply to have their blogs aggregated at the new community.sun.com aggregator page by filling out a form, staying part of Sun's extended family. I hope we'll see a broad spread of blogs syndicated there - there are so many people I want to stay in touch with, Geoff Arnold included. No reason why turning in your badge means I have to stop respecting your considered opinion (assuming I did before!).
Posted by webmink
( Jun 24 2006, 07:36:38 AM PDT )
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Sunday February 26, 2006 Blog Family
This is a periodic pointer to the blogs that I run. Apologies if this is all familiar (but I know I have some regulars who aren't aware of this...).
This blog, SunMink, is where I write on technology topics related to my job at Sun as Chief Open Source Officer. Things written here do not necessarily represent Sun's (or any other entity's) official position, and have not necessarily been checked by anyone else at Sun.
Over at WebMink I write on other topics of personal interest, especially music, photography, reading, politics and metaphysics.
At The Mink Dimension, I aggregate both of these blogs together with my Flickr photos, del.icio.us links and other stuff into a single, chronological stream.
All of the above have syndication feeds so you can subscribe to as little or as much as you wish in your syndication tool of choice.
Posted by webmink
( Feb 26 2006, 08:32:18 PM PST )
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Saturday February 18, 2006 Comment Symmetry
For the record, I do not believe that a blog has to have comments to be a "real blog", no matter what people say. The whole point of blogging is that one gets a space to say things the way they are, personally and in the same "voice" as anything said privately, in a place that has a unique and permanent URL so it can be referenced. The right way to comment on a blog at any length other than the passing comment is to write it on your own blog and link.
Having said that, there's a certain delicious symmetry (and rumour-related timeliness?) to seeing on the same day JBoss closing down comments on its blogs and Jonathan Schwartz opening his blog up for comments...
Posted by webmink
( Feb 18 2006, 07:47:06 AM PST )
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Friday February 03, 2006 Blogging breaks
Note to conference organisers: Stephanie Booth has a great idea here:
The audience is in the real-time information business if you have lots of bloggers in the room, so if you don’t want them to spend half the talk time uploading photos, chatting, and writing up blog posts. So, how about give us blogging breaks, and plan post-sized talks? Wouldn’t that be neat?
Those people paying all their attention to their laptops during the talks are actually your friends...
Posted by webmink
( Feb 03 2006, 02:56:27 PM PST )
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Wednesday January 18, 2006 Start the stopwatch
OK, start the clock - let's see how long it takes The Register to acknowledge and correct the egregious error they made in the article Software patents loom large again. In that article, the anonymous writer asserts that
The bill had been supported by the European pro-patent lobby, which included corporations such as Microsoft and Sun, who claimed that the directive would encourage investment in research and development in Europe.
What rubbish! Microsoft was indeed a prominent proponent of software patents. On the other hand, as was well documented, Sun and Red Hat were the core of a small but significant industry group lobbying around the position that the directive would be harmful because it threatened the freedom to create interoperable free/open source software. Anyone who had been paying the slightest attention to the issue, or did more than the most cursory research, would know this was the case.
[Click! Corrected at 2pm PST Jan 18. Thanks, Drew.]
Posted by webmink
( Jan 18 2006, 03:59:06 AM PST )
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Saturday December 03, 2005 Back to BlogEd
My colleague Henry Story has been quietly and faithfully labouring away to create a top-class blog editor for us all to use on blogs.sun.com and he's pretty close to paydirt now. He's waiting for the Atom 1.0 specification to be complete before he really declares victory, but as it stands BlogEd is a pretty cool tool anyway. I used it for a while back when there was just James Gosling working on it, and gave up because it wasn't flexible enough - it old allowed simple page builds pushed to a server with FTP back then.
Today, BlogEd offers support for the MetaWeblog API in its Roller, Blosjom and Moveable Type flavours, there's full WYSIWYG editing as well as raw HTML editing for HTML hackers like me, there's multi-blog support so I can look after several blogs (all mine get aggregated at The Mink Dimension), and best of all it's a Java application so it works everywhere I do. You can give it a try right now if you want as there is a WebStart variant - there's even a Mac OS X native version for smart people with Macs!
So I'm giving it a try again. It just happily downloaded my entire blogging history from blogs.sun.com, and I'm now trying a new entry to see what it looks like. Maybe I'll be able to edit offline at last, David!
Best part though is it is all open source, licensed under BSD. The configurability, the platform independence, the ability to launch from the web yet use offline, all suggest BlogEd could have a bright future as an embedded part of online tools. Give it a try, and maybe join in with its community.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 03 2005, 07:30:20 AM PST )
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Tuesday November 29, 2005 Rumours of my death...
Flattery abounds, it seems - I am flattered by David Berlind's concern for my health and sanity (and have forwarded it to my manager to act on as I head out to the Java User Group in Stockholm for tonight's meeting...). And I completely agree with him about Jim Grisanzio as an excellent commentator. But I have to say that one of the reasons I feel at liberty to leave my blog untouched for 20 days while I go to speak in Japan and Brazil (and, I admit, take it easy over Thanksgiving) is the fact that I've already multiplied the workers at the harvest by the very creation (with many others) of blogs.sun.com and by its uptake by 3,000 or so Sun employees.
Having said that, one of the things I've not quite come to terms with is how to keep up a stream of worthwhile blogging while I am engaged in confidential activity. I find my thought processes consumed by it and my ability to keep hints of it out of my serious writing very hard. Consequently, I tend to stick to del.icio.us postings and personal comment over on Webmink during such periods. I'm back now, though, and I have plenty to say on both open source governance and on open document format standards...
Posted by webmink
( Nov 29 2005, 02:12:49 AM PST )
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Wednesday October 12, 2005 Sun Podcaster Gets Published
Posted by webmink
( Oct 12 2005, 04:40:40 AM PDT )
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Wednesday September 07, 2005 A Boy And His Dog Go Travelling
A while back, Tim Bray and I did an interview with Sun's venerable Bill Howard all about the idea of blogging and where blogs.sun.com came from, philosophically speaking. It appeared soon after in Sun's customer newsletter, "Inner Circle", and we were both quite pleased with how it had turned out.
Imagine our surprise, then, when we discovered that the article had been deemed worthy of an appearance on the Sun.Com home page. I first spotted it when hits started to show up in my referrer log from people curious to read the blog of this loud-mouth featured on the home page. Even more amazing was the discovery that, unable to secure a suitably approved photo of Tim and myself, the editor had used a photo we'd both been trying to keep secret, showing our last visit to the office after Tim's recent experimental surgery.
You may not know, but actually "Bray" is a modified version of his original family name, "Bark". You'll see on the right that I'm largely unchanged (my hair is spiked but otherwise that's just how I look usually) but Tim has suffered extreme weight loss and grown a coat of white and brown hair - and unusually is not wearing a hat.
The story is rapidly spreading across the world - so far I have found it in French, German, Dutch, Chinese, Spanish and Polish as well as in English - so Tim's little secret is out. When you see him, remember to give him a pat on the head, ask if he wants walkies and most especially ask if Atom is his favourite brand of dog biscuit.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 07 2005, 04:51:24 PM PDT )
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Sunday September 04, 2005 Blogging on the Radio
If you're in the UK, you may be interested in listening to national Radio 4 at 4pm on Tuesday where the Shop Talk programme will be exploring "Business Blogging" (the programme will also be available online from Wednesday, for about a week). I had the pleasure to appear on the programme, which was recorded last Tuesday, along with the glitterati of the UK blogging scene - Adriana Cronin-Lukas, a UK blogging consultant, Heather Platts who runs soap manuafacturer Eieflud and has recently started a blog, analyst Azeem Azhar and James Cherkoff, another blogging consultant. There was also a recorded interview with online tailor Thomas Mahon.
As Adriana points out, the smooth but strongly directive approach taken by the very professional presenter, Heather Payton, meant that there was little room to really explore the UK blogging scene as a phenomenon. In particular and to my regret I didn't even get to plug the UK blogging conference, 'Our Social World', which is happening on Friday in Cambridge and will likely be an excellent venue for the discussion Radio 4 missed. I'll be there, maybe you will be too?
Update: Listen to the programme if you dare! (link likely to rot away on Sept 13)
Posted by webmink
( Sep 04 2005, 05:54:17 AM PDT )
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Sunday August 28, 2005 I/O in iTunes
Richard's new I/O Podcast (inside Sun for the outside world - Inside/Outside) is now available for subscription from iTunes. It joins Radio 4's "From Our Own Correspondent" on my subscription list!
Posted by webmink
( Aug 28 2005, 08:26:57 AM PDT )
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Thursday August 25, 2005 I/O Is Here
I just got off the virtual phone with Richard Giles, who is starting a podcast channel called I/O. He plans to roam the halls at Sun providing some transparency through informal interviews with people doing stuff that's in the news or should be. He asks dangerous questions - I hope the resulting interview doesn't get me into too much trouble when it comes out!
Posted by webmink
( Aug 25 2005, 05:19:24 AM PDT )
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Monday June 13, 2005 Chronicle and Blogging
I actually like the article in the San Francisco Chronicle on blogging today, even if Ben didn't actually link to my blogs despite the long interview! Key quote:
"The blog-and-lose-your-job (scare) is vastly exaggerated," Phipps of Sun said. "If someone is dumb enough about blabbing about company secrets, it doesn't matter what medium you give them. They'll still blab about company secrets."
Credit for the "don't be stupid" summary ought to go to Scoble by the way, not me (still, he got a link & I didn't...)
Posted by webmink
( Jun 13 2005, 09:27:18 AM PDT )
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Tuesday April 19, 2005 Kebabs At Last
I'd like to welcome Sun's newest blogger - that's Emma in Northampton, who is set for world domination. When we started blogs.sun.com she was exactly the sort of Sun employee I had in mind. Our vision for blogs.sun.com was to create a vehicle where the people Sun trusts most to speak on its behalf - that would be our employees - are able to do so. We expected to hear authentic, original and passionate voices from around the world. We wanted everyone to meet the real heart of Sun - not its marketing wing, not its PR professionals, but the real people who are engaged in delighting customers every day.
So Emma, an experienced blogger (who I have never met) branching out onto blogs.sun.com for the first time, is exactly the sort of person I was hoping to find blogging here. I'll be adding her to my Bloglines aggregator - welcome, Emma.
Posted by webmink
( Apr 19 2005, 07:31:30 PM PDT )
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