Capping IT Off

free as in "free spirit"

Open source is usually associated with the word "free", and in our minds we see a comfy zero followed by our local currency symbol. Of course, it is a huge misconception to think that open source technology comes at no cost. Okay, you won't have any licensing costs. You can freely experiment with open source technology to see if it could meet whatever demands you have. You probably shouldn't endlessly experiment until you encounter the perfect solution either. Depending on the number of FTE's doing the experimentation that could become costly, and of course there is this thing called "time to market" too. Time is money. When it comes to choosing between open source and proprietary commercial technology, you will at least need to balance those factors. No, open source does not refer to free as in free beer.

The thing with proprietary technology is that it is, well, proprietary. It means that the components that differentiate the technology from the other technologies (open source and competing proprietary technology) are locked away and closed to the public. These components tend to live rather solitary lives and don't meet many peers (if any). If they would be human, they would be wretched and lonely. Sure, they often get royal treatment, but they are never free (and in a cost sense, nor for their owners). Never (well, almost never if it weren't for reverse engineering and hackers) will they be able to share their ideas and their ways of thinking with peers. Not being able to share your thoughts with others would make me very unhappy. If souls would be proprietary they will most likely become either suicidal or delusional.

Open source technology on the other hand would be very happy beings when humanized. They are truly free spirits dancing around with other spirits, sharing in the joy sharing what they are enthusiastic about, in the joy of knowing things could be improved even further. These beings are open minded about agreeing to use commonly developed standards to improve compatibility between them. They wouldn't mind at all if you would replace them with a better implementation, in fact, they would completely understand your reasons. They are fully supportive of your freedom to choose. Being outperformed by their peers only stimulates them to get better, faster, more standards compliant and more compatible. That is why open source technology can reach extremely high quality.

Okay, that is a rather black-and-white picture I am drawing here. I agree. The reality is made of all the colors between those extremes. My point is simply that sharing knowledge is a good thing. It sets you free.

Application Distribution in the Cloud

I've been following an interesting discussion within the Jericho Forum on distributing and separating applications on a cloud server.

The conventional approach today is to use VM as the unit of separation and VM images as the unit of distribution. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but VMs are very big and slow to move around, and the degree of control you get is pretty coarse.

Is there a better approach? It looks like there is - the union filesystem, unionfs. This allows a set of directories scattered around a filesystem to be mounted in a single directory. So, all the files and directories modified by a single application installation can be mounted in a single place so the people responsible for the application can see it as a single whole. To uninstall, just unmount the filesystem.

There are facilities to mount several applications in the same directory, and there are experimental filesystems to mount tar archives as filesystems.

Of course, all this is just on Unix...

We don't need social media

I finished yesterday reading the book “The logic of life” from Tim Harford (the author from the Undercover Economist) and while not explicitly touching the topic of social media, he does pose some very interesting points about the dynamics of cities, which brings me to this blog post.

If I got Tim’s point correctly, the idea is that while the level of intelligence should be more or less equal between people that live in the countryside and the ones that live in the cities, there are far more innovative ideas and inventions produced in the city. The mere fact that you have a dense concentration of people is already enough. Think about London, NYC, Silicon Valley, etc. The more people you have, the more likely it is that you will bump into other people with great ideas.

Now comes the interesting part: it relies on the fact that you get this information FOR FREE. Just by chatting with a bystander, following a discussion in a library or put it in geek terms: tweetups, unconferences, bar camps, code camps and the like. One of the things I don’t like of living in a rather small city like Utrecht instead of San Francisco or New York City is that we have few of these meetings, partially since we lack also the numbers to attend these meetings. Once in a while you have something in Amsterdam, but overall it’s pretty poor. A whole different story in SF, NYC or London where you have frequently these kind of geeky get togethers.

So does that mean that we don’t need social media anymore as I posed in the title? Does my fellow blogger Rick Mans @rickmans need to be worried for his job? Luckily for Rick and the multi-billion dollar social media industry: NO. Tim Harford even states in his book that thanks to the help of Facebook and email it is far more easy to organize people together and these kind of tools even have the result that people meet even more frequently in real life because after all, no technology can replace direct human interaction.

Think about it for a minute. No matter how great the video conferencing tools are, there is always something spontaneous that gets lost. The big value of a workshop or get together where you are physically in the same room is that you are more receptive to the 93 % of non-verbal communication. Even more, I dare to say that the fact that you are together in a single space unites the brainpower and leads to building up on each other’s ideas far more easily and quicker than with remote conferencing tools.

So, to the relief of some people I can say: social media is not going to replace physical get togethers, but only reinforcing them….

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Lee Provoost is a Cloud Computing Strategist and expert group leader Microsoft/SAP-Java/SAP integration at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

Weekly digest

Every Sunday I scan, collect and organize all my links I ran into the previous week and I send them out to our community of practice in Capgemini that is about SaaS, social collaboration tools, mash up applications and Rich Internet Applications. Since these links are public links there is no reason to not publish them here on our technology blog, especially since publishing them here will give more people the opportunity to read all the information. This week I used a shorter format to not overwhelm you with 100+ links. The category Augmented Reality I added last week, also returns this week, besides that there are three other new categories: Web3.0, browsers and Trends:

Social collaboration tools
Rich Internet Applications
Mash up
Tools
Augmented Reality
Browsers
Trends
Web3.0
General

Social collaboration tools

Is Privacy An Illusion? Facebook ‘Fans’ Claim Hack Exposes Private Profile Information (Update)
Experts: Don't clamp down on social media
The use of Twitter to spread information about the unrest in Iran can teach businesses valuable lessons about the flow of information in their organizations, according to leading lights of the IT security world.
How to Build Collaborative Software That People Will Actually Use
Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment
Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.
Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies
When Facebook re-launched its fan pages earlier this year, companies were thrilled. At last, there was a solid way to have a presence on Facebook (Facebook), and users were actually responding positively. Within a couple of weeks it seemed as though every major brand had put up a page. However, very few are using them well.

Rich Internet Applications

Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users
Bespin » Code in the Cloud
Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment on how to build an extensible Web code editor using HTML 5 technology.
The Billion Dollar HTML Tag
Can a single HTML tag really make a difference on a corporation’s financial results? It can at Google, according to Marissa Mayer, who says web page loading speed translates directly to the bottom line.
Gmail for Mobile HTML5 Series : Cache Pattern For Offline HTML5 Web Applications
35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design

Mash up

Tools

Adobe BrowserLab: Cross Browser Testing Still Teething…
18 Free Text Editors To Clean Up Your Code
Dojo ShrinkSafe — the safe way to make your JS sprightly
ShrinkSafe is a JavaScript "compression" system. It can typically reduce the size of your scripts by a third or more, depending on your programming style.

Many other tools also shrink JavaScript files, but ShrinkSafe is different. Instead of relying on brittle regular expressions, ShrinkSafe is based on Rhino, a JavaScript interpreter. This allows ShrinkSafe to transform the source of a file with much more confidence that the resulting script will function identically to the file you uploaded.
Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Now Integrated With Microsoft SharePoint
IBM adds Lotus social networking to SaaS – Mass High Tech Business News
At the Enterprise 2.0 conference today in Boston, IBM Corp. announced LotusLive Connections, adding the Lotus Connections layer of social networking tools to its LotusLive software-as-a-service offering.

Augmented reality

Browsers

Trends

Web3.0

Robot RoboCrunch Official Six-Fold Definition of Web 3.0
What is the Semantic Web really all about?
The Semantic Web is based on the relatively straightforward idea that to be able to integrate (link) data on the Web we must have some mechanism for knowing what relationships hold among the data, and how that relates to some “real world” context. The following is a lot of detail that comes from this simple idea.

General

How Companies Increase Innovation
When companies try to come up with new ideas, they too often look only where they always look. That won’t get them anywhere.
Email patterns can predict impending doom – tech – 22 June 2009 – New Scientist
EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That's the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees.
Triumph of the Default
David Chappell – The Microsoft Application Platform: A perspective
What is an application platform? Why is it important? And how should we think about application platforms in a world of cloud computing? In this session, David Chappell looks at all of these topics, providing a general model for both on-premises and cloud platforms. He then uses this model to examine several important issues in this area, including the competition between .NET and Java, why SOA is failing, and how the Microsoft platform compares with its on-premises and cloud competitors.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Are user stories an alternative to (smart) use cases?

About a week ago, someone (from the UK) send me an email with the following question:

I like your article on Smart Use Cases. Before I throw my hat in the ring on this, could you tell me your feelings on User Stories as an alternative to Use Cases?

To be quite honest, I’m not much in favor of using user stories. In my honest opinion, user stories are too unstructured to serve as a good unit of work in larger projects – although some projects actually benefit from having unstructured requirements. However, in my opinion regular use cases are unsuited to, as they differ too much in both complexity and granularity. For example, I have seen projects where implementing a single use case took several months. Not really handy in projects that are based on two week iterations, such as the agile projects we run.

We have therefore proposed our smart use cases – and have been using them for the last ten years, with ever growing success. Smart use cases are smaller, equally granular and more structured, but do not require much more elaboration than user stories. When it comes to larger projects, including for instance business intelligence and service oriented projects, smart use cases much better reflect the mapping from business processes and workflows to software development.

Furthermore, to work on user stories in iterations in agile projects (or sprints if you prefer), the user stories are broken down into tasks. Unfortunately, since user stories can be very different in nature, so are the tasks. When we use smart use cases, the tasks are always similar, that is, we design, test design, build (and quite often generate), test, rework, accept or drop them. In most projects in an almost daily cycle (the Smart product cycle). The agile dashboard in our projects actually reflect these solid tasks, which makes planning them easier.

Another argument for preferring smart use cases over user stories, is that they can be estimated on an abstract scale rather than in hours. Important is that this estimation process is repeatable, and can be done by anyone (of course with some knowledge).

Over the years we have created a rich vocabulary of smart use case types, including types for maintenance, reporting, services, BI and file exchange. Applying this vocabulary (in stereotypes) allows for fast but structured requirements modeling.

Some links can help you further investigating this material:

Smart use cases versus regular use cases. http://www.accelerateddeliveryplatform.com/SmartUseCase
The agile Smart process. http://www.accelerateddeliveryplatform.com/SmartLifecycle
Estimating smart use cases. http://www.accelerateddeliveryplatform.com/SmartEstimation
Smart product life cycle. http://www.accelerateddeliveryplatform.com/SmartUseCaseCycle
Smart use case stereotypes. http://www.accelerateddeliveryplatform.com/stereotypes

Love to hear your feedback and opinions.

Sander Hoogendoorn
Principal Technology Officer NL
twitter.com/aahoogendoorn

Twitter: the end of the gossip magazine

One of the biggest lesson that social media is teaching companies is that they should be as open and transparent as possible to the market (their clients). It has no use to cover up screw-ups or denying like Iran tried to do. With YouTube, Twitter and Facebook out there, it’s next to impossible to stop it.

As I always say in every presentation I give: “every problem is an opportunity in disguise”. The openness and transparency of social media could be used as a way to get back in control. Why wait till the crowd has discovered your screw-up and several stories which are not all completely correct run around the world in a couple of minutes?

Why not preemptively publish the story on your corporate blog and link to it through Twitter? Yes, I know that this must sound like a nightmare for corporate PR, but think about it. The crowd has shown to be forgiven for mistakes, as long as you are open and honest about it and say a genuine “I’m sorry”.

This opportunity to be in control does not only apply to companies but also to celebrities. One of the biggest issues they have are the paparazzi that hunt them down for juicy pictures and stories. Why not publishing pictures of yourself directly on your Twitter feed or telling what stupid mistake you just made? Just announce your break-up with the full story? Yes, it is a private matter but trust met, if you wait till the vultures come, it will be so much worse. Perhaps in time, this will become the end of the gossip magazine. Why pay for a magazine when the celebrities themselves are breaking the story on their Twitter feed?

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Lee Provoost is a Cloud Computing Strategist and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

For the sake of being social

Have you ever been commuting or been in a elevator for a few floors? Not a very lively and social environment is it? In the Netherlands there seems to be a rule that while commuting you are not allowed to talk to others that you do not know and the same goes for elevators. Which is weird behavior, since when you would see the same people online on a social network, they are all talking and sharing some of their deepest secrets, even to people they have not met in real life.

Often when I do a presentation about social media and how to apply it in your daily work I get the question if there is still space for real life human interaction or that it will be replaced by social media. Well if you read the first paragraph than it might the basis of a very spooky future where people interact via screen and keyboards.

However, interaction between people is something that every human being wants and needs, it just seems like the barrier online is so much lower than in real life. Online you have got a reason to talk to someone, or to an entire group (for example Twitter is about what you are thinking / doing at this moment). In a bus of elevator, there is no reason to interact or to start a conversation. Well actually there are enough resons to interact with your fellow commuters since you will not get killed by interaction and although you are taught that you should never talk to strangers, it won't hurt you, it could add value and gain you some insights. However, starting a conversation with somebody you don't know seems to feel a bit clunky in real life.

With a spooky future ahead it is a good thing we have social media. A service like Akoha offers a social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Missions might include giving someone your favorite book, inviting a friend for drinks, or buying a friend some chocolate. Something that you will not do just to make you feel good, however if you have got a reason (like a social reality game that has cards with missions on it), than you have a reason to do so. It does not feel clunky anymore, and the one you are helping could be still a bit surprised, however he will not be suspicious, since he knows why you are doing this.

Cristina Matei created something similair called Springboard. That is exactly what Akoho and Springboard do: offering a springboard to real life interaction via social media that removes the barrier we perceive when starting up real life interaction. Using social media just for the sake of being social in real life, I sure hope that is not our future, however still better than only talking with each other via screens and keyboards.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Weekly digest

Every Sunday I scan, collect and organize all my links I ran into the previous week and I send them out to our community of practice in Capgemini that is about SaaS, social collaboration tools, mash up applications and Rich Internet Applications. Since these links are public links there is no reason to not publish them here on our technology blog, especially since publishing them here will give more people the opportunity to read all the information. This week I added two new headers: ‘augmented reality’ and ‘business models’, mainly because the content below the header ‘general’ was too much that it deserved to be split up in several subjects. If you have any other suggestions for input, please let me know.

Social collaboration tools

The revolution will be twittered
Mock not. As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message.
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog
Why 1.5 Is Greater Than 2.0
What Social Media Isn’t
Social media is everywhere and for a lot of businesses they approach it likes it’s the magic wand that’s going to be the savior to their business. When you begin to talk to them, usually the conversation starts like this. “Can you help us with that Twitter thing and that Facebook thing, not to mention it’s vital if you can produce for us one of those viral videos. Second, this has to help our business look hip and cool and last but not least, we don’t have the time to really be involved in any conversations.”
Twitter as a News Gathering Tool
The future of enterprise collaboration
Citizentube: Watching video change our world
Humans prefer cockiness to expertise – life – 10 June 2009 – New Scientist
EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It's a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people's self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice.
TEDTalks : Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history – Clay Shirky (2009)
Tim O’Reilly: What Twitter has taught me
Iran protests meet the social Web: What we've learned
Chapter 1 of Enterprise 2
Semantic Enterprise 2.0 – Enabling Semantic Web technologies in Enterprise 2.0 environment
A twitterable Twitter policy
10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009
"Social media" was the term du jour in 2008. Consumers, companies, and marketers were all talking about it. We have social media gurus, social media startups, social media books, and social media firms. It is now common practice among corporations to hire social media strategists, assign community managers, and launch social media campaigns, all designed to tap into the power of social media.

But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.
Can Enterprise 2.0 Afford to be Boring?
Web 2.0 Architectures–New from O'Reilly: What Entrepreneurs and Information Architects Need to Know
SocialSafe offers Facebook ‘backup’ solution
To Join or Not to Join: The Illusion of Privacy in Social Networks with Mixed Public and Private User Profiles – WWW2009 EPrints
In order to address privacy concerns, many social media websites allow users to hide their personal proﬁles from the public. In this work, we show how an adversary can exploit an online social network with a mixture of public and private user proﬁles to predict the private attributes of users. We map this problem to a relational classiﬁcation problem and we propose practical models that use friendship and group membership information (which is often not hidden) to infer sensitive attributes. The key novel idea is that in addition to friendship links, groups can be carriers of signiﬁcant information. We show that on several well-known social media sites, we can easily and accurately recover the information of private-proﬁle users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the ﬁrst work that uses link-based and group-based classiﬁcation to study privacy implications in social networks with mixed public and private user proﬁles.
Cisco Releasing Sophisticated Collaboration Framework to Accelerate Your Business Value
Semantic & Social Web – What’s In It For You?
Personal Democracy Forum: Politics in the Web 2.0 Era
Web 3.0: 'Vague, but Exciting'
When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee first submitted his 1989 paper, "Information Management: A Proposal," his boss, Mike Sendall, wrote "vague, but exciting" on it by way of endorsing what was the blueprint for the World Wide Web.

Two decades later, Berners-Lee and others are formulating what can be called the third generation of the Web, the "semantic Web," or "Web 3.0." I know, I know, most of us are still trying to deal with Web 2.0 as part of a very confusing marketing landscape.

Rich Internet Applications

15 Resources To Get You Started With jQuery From Scratch – Nettuts+
Maybe you're a seasoned jQuery pro. Heck, maybe you're John Resig. On the other hand, maybe you read words like "Prototype", "jQuery", and "Mootools" and think to yourself, "What the heck are these?" Now is the time to learn.
Opinion: Arrogance is Limiting Framework Adoption
Thoughts on Microsoft’s move to ship Windows 7 without Internet Explorer in Europe
Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3
First Look: Object Oriented CSS
SkyFire Mobile Browser 1.0 and the Flash User Experience
XHR progress and rich file upload feedback at hacks.mozilla.org
A common limitation on the web today has been a rich file upload widget for web applications. Many sites use Flash or a desktop helper applications to improve the experience of uploading files.

Firefox 3.5 bridges one of these gaps allowing a better progress indicator to be built. Many developers don’t realize that they can use Firefox’s File object (nsIDOMFile) and XMLHttpRequest together to accomplish file uploads. This demo will feature an upload widget that gives the kind of rich progress feedback that users have come to expect, as well as fast and easy multiple simultaneous file uploads.
YouTube – What is a Browser?
State of the Browsers - IE edition
10 Ways To Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards
Geolocating Your iPhone Users via the Browser
New JavaScript features with native JSON support and JavaScript 1.8.1 additions
YUI 3: Lighter, Faster, Easier to Use
Compatibility View and "Smart Defaults"
Five Reasons Architecture Matters

Mash up

Google Wave Questions and Answers – Google Wave Preview
Mash-ups are so last year…
Mash-ups are cool – ever since Ordnance Survey, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft launched there various mapping APIs we’ve seen quite a few of them.
Hemlock: An Open-Source Real-Time Web Platform
Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York. Real time apps that use efficient methods of communicating information between the browser and the server are all the rage these days. Now Flash developers will have an easy way to get in the game.
SeeClickFix: Time for an Open 311 API
311 is a non-emergency number (like 911 is the emergency number)
uberVU brands its API as ContextVoice – launches a free and a paid service

Tools

Business models

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality: top ten campaigns (so far)
No longer the stuff of science fiction, augmented reality is fast catching on with forward-thinking brands. Zed Media's Alex Smith lists the best examples to date of AR as part of wider brand-building activity.
David Polinchock Explains Augmented Reality
ARhrrrr! : Augmented Reality Zombie and Helicopter Game

General

Backbars: Turn Headlines of Social Link Sites into Ambient Bar Charts
25 Best Programmer WebComic Strips
The Privacy Jungle: On the Market for Data Protection in Social Networks
The Privacy Jungle: On the Market for Data Protection in Social Networks
'It's Everybody's Business': Microsoft launches reality show
What makes good television? How about a bunch of people sitting around a conference table talking business strategy? Sounds like your exciting 10:30 meeting, huh. Well, Microsoft thinks it's a good idea, and with creative editing "It's Everybody's Business with Jack & Suzy Welch" – a new online reality show on MSN.com – could build a following.
More Talk, Less Chalk: Lexically Sparse Slides Improve Recall of Taught Material
Classroom use of presentation software, whereby information is simultaneously delivered verbally and visually, risks overloading students' working memory and impairing learning. We compared traditional and lexically-sparse slide presentations, using multiple-choice and short essay answers to assess learning; participants exposed to traditional slides performed significantly worse on their essay answers.
The latest version of Opera turns your browser into a web server.
What Geeks Love – Part 1
IE6 denial message for Momentile.com
The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System
Measuring The Big Shift
Why Wolfram Alpha is Important
In the new Bing-enabled world, search is hotter than ever. Your entire Search Insider lineup has been trading quips and forecasts about the future of search. Aaron Goldman thinks Hunch may be the answer to my call for an iPhone of search. Today, I want to talk about why Wolfram|Alpha is very, very important to watch. It's not an iPhone, but it is changing the rules of search in a very significant way.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Twitter is a competitive sport

Last month I noticed an interesting Tweet by Dave Winer about Jason Calacanis not being #1 on Twitter any more. After giving some thought I decided to respond to Dave that I wasn't aware of the fact that Twitter was a competitive sport. Dave replied clearly, that Twitter is competitive, like everything is. He is right, Twitter is a competitive sport, however is there a way to become #1? Is the ranking based on followers, following, number of Tweets, number of Retweets, number of replies, a mixed of all those indicators.

For example this a graph created via Twittercounter:

This graph shows the number of followers Ron Tolido, Lee Provoost and I have at the moment of writing this blog. Is there way to say who is#1? Clearly Ron is number one in the most followers, however is he winning or is winning based on something harder to measure, such as attention? With Twitter and social media being a competitive sport it is hard to identify when you score (assuming that social media is a competitive game based on scoring) and when you are being scored at. One thing is very clear and that is if you are not participating, you are certainly not scoring and certainly not winning. It doesn't mean that if you participate you will win, however it will mean that you have an opportunity to win.

While participating in social media you will win some, you will lose some and sometimes your best just isn't good enough. However not participating at will definitely result in losing. Not only losing in social media, but also losing customers, losing business, losing market share, losing revenue and perhaps even losing your business in the end. You have to be in this game, otherwise you will definitively lose.

If you like this article please retweet it

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Weekly digest

Social collaboration tools

World Map of Social Networks | Vincos Blog
A map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country, according to Alexa & Google Trends for Websites traffic data (June 2009).
Using Twitter to Connect with Audiences
Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform
33 Website Success Metrics Instead of Rankings, Google PageRank and Traffic
How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of “hits”: All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment.
7 Kinds Of Conversations That Always Stimulate Activity
Everybody’s talking: the Social track at Google I/O
The 10 Commandments of Social Media
"What do I need to do engage my company, my products, and myself in social media?" The answer is easy: participate. Get out there and get involved. If you aren't in the game, you can't win. Here's your Ten Commandments or things you need to be doing to get in and win with social media.
Microsoft CRM seamless integration with Twitter
Reconciling social computing with the enterprise
HP test mobile social network
An intelligent, mobile-phone-based social network is being tested by researchers at Hewlett Packard.
Toward a Pattern Language for Enterprise 2.0

Rich Internet Applications

How to Easily Create a JavaScript Framework, Part 1
Google Web Toolkit at Google I/O
Adobe Flash Builder 4: Data-centric Features for PHP
Functional Testing for RIAs on the iPhone
“Not Safe For Work” tag in HTML 5
Nicholas C. Zakas: Speed Up Your JavaScript
Google Open Source Blog: Introducing Android Scripting Environment
The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device.
Adaptive CSS-Layouts: New Era In Fluid Layouts?
Multifriend Selection Component
Fastest Firefox, Part 2: More Speediness
Why Blocking Ad Blockers Will Fail
Gmail for Mobile HTML5 Series: Suggestions for Better Performance
Store information on the client side with DOM Storage/Web Storage – plenty of improvements available
Web development timeline
HTML5 Storage tests
IE8 Smart Address bar: What’s new
What's New and Cool in Flex 4?

Mash up

Channel 4 to Make its Entire Catalogue of TV Programs Available Online for Free
Microsoft gives us the no-usage-limits Bing API
Google I/O: Session videos on building apps using the AJAX and Data APIs
Watercoolr – Gossip for web applications
pubsub via webhooks, or "twitter" for your applications
Translating the world's information with Google Translator Toolkit
Testing Google Wave: This Thing is Tidal
Everyone’s been talking about it: Google Wave. Google’s super communication tool has been a top trend on Twitter, a focus of media speculation, and was even able to knock Microsoft’s Bing from the top of the news cycle. But almost all the hype has been based on the demos – almost nobody’s actually got to try out Google Wave.
Microsoft Microphone: Market Research Via Facebook Apps
How SaaS Changes the Vendor-Customer Relationship
One of the lingering myths regarding Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions is that they simply change the way software is packaged and delivered to make it easier for customers to purchase and deploy them. While these attributes are absolutely true, they are only the most obvious advantages of acquiring SaaS solutions rather than legacy, on-premise software.
Google Wave Is Wikis 25 Years Later, Not Email
Wave picks up the original idea from old-time Smalltalker Ward Cunningham and moves it 25 years into the present. Wave is what Ozzie's Groove always wanted to be, but Ozzie missed the Internet, so it found a good home with Microsoft. Wave is the Facebook for more closed groups, but also the MySpace for all the social stuff you want to share with your friends, but may be not with the world.
UK Government Moves to Put Data on the Web

Tools

General

What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket?
Is innovation fair?
Case Study: Publishing STW Thesaurus for Economics as Linked Open Data
The ZBW German National Library of Economics—Leibniz Information Centre for Economics is the world’s largest economics library. It holds more than four million media items such as books, articles, journals, grey literature and databases. ZBW supports its users with fine-grained thematic access to these information resources. For this purpose the STW Thesaurus for Economics has been developed and applied since the 1990s. It provides a high-level taxonomy of subject categories, thousands of keywords (“descriptors”) and tens of thousands of both synonyms and links between the thesaurus concepts. The media items are indexed with descriptors from this thesaurus. They can be retrieved by these descriptors through the library catalog ECONIS.
Book – Collaboration in the Cloud (PDF)
The Worst Business Model in the World (And What You Can Learn From It)
Security Research & Defense : Understanding DEP as a mitigation technology part 1
Google Apps is now an Exchange-replacement; Users can even keep Outlook
Squarespace: Could It Make Web Designers Redundant?
Project Natal: Time to throw out your game-controllers
During the E3 2009 expo, which was held from the 2nd to the 5th of June, Microsoft presented Project Natal. The project brings human-computer interaction without an electronic input device to the masses. By capturing your full body movement and your voice (and being able of doing this for several people at the same time) it brings gameplay to an entirely new level.
Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon
Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business
16 PHP Frameworks To Consider For Your Next Project
Usefull MySQL articles and tutorials to improve your skills!
How The Different Mobile Data Syncing Services Stack Up
Play Your Cards Right: Run Your First Card Sort
Impossible to uninstall Safari 4 in Mac OS X – Apple pretty much follows suit with Microsoft
The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection
On ambient visualization
I want visualization to be less a part of a specific application that I go to and to be more of a natural extension to the computer itself, available from everywhere. I want visualization to an ambient experience.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

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