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.

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...

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….

---
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.

• 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

• Introducing the Virtual Keyboard API
• Smash the Silos, Mash the SOA, Share the Mashups…
  

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 

• Zugara’s Augmented Reality Dressing Room Is Great If You Don’t Care How Your Clothes Fit
• Mobile Data: IBM Tags Wimbledon With Seer Android
  
• Mobile Devices are Finally Making Augmented Reality…a Reality. But there’s so much more to come…
  
• TEDTalks : Chris Hughes: Augmented reality made easy – Chris Hughes (2009)
• Layar: First Augmented Reality Browser
  

Browsers

• Opera Unite – some questions and answers
  
• Internet Explorer Extinct by 2013? 2009 Update
  

Trends

• Post-Crisis Trends You Have to Watch
  
• Thought Leadership: Anticipating Internet Growth in Africa: Identifying Market Opportunities
• Ubertrends Map (PDF)
  

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.

• The Web Collapses Under The Weight Of Michael Jackson’s Death
• A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture
• Sour Outlook
• Should some requirements be called out as “architectural” requirements?
• Software Architecture Visualizations – a set on Flickr
• How Michael Jackson Became a Brand Icon

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

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

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?

---
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.

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

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

• 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns
• 40 Essential iPhone Applications For Web Designers
• Quick video example of Firebug
• Aviary Launches Falcon, A Browser Based Image Editor
• Open Source Testing Tool Smackdown for REST Web Services
• Pictaculous: Color-Pickingly Delicious!

Business models

• Focus shift in Innovation: from Technology to Business Model towards Value Networks
• Does Microsoft need to go cross-platform to save Office?
• Chris Anderson’s Counterintuitive Rules For Charging For Media Online
• Enough with the Appstore model

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

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

Social collaboration tools

• Online Communities are not created equal: A rant from the trenches
• On Twitter, Most People Are Sheep: 80 Percent Of Accounts Have Fewer Than 10 Followers

• 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

• Summary of all new GMail features in Google Labs
• FineTuna: A Handy Collaboration Tool For Designers
• 21 iPhone Apps For Business

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

Note: This post is taken from the executive summary of a report I have written about this event, which can also be found here: World Copyright Summit 2009 - Report.pdf

The main objective of the Copyright Summit was, as stated on the conference tag-line, to explore “New Frontiers for Creators in the Marketplace”, and this was achieved by providing a platform for the stakeholders (represented in both speakers and audience) to engage with each other in a series of dialogues, interviews, discussions, keynotes and general networking. One immediate outcome from this has been the wider recognition of a few key messages, which are outlined below as follows:

1. Time to Change Copyright
Right from the very first keynote, on day one, to several sessions on the second day, it became increasingly clear that most stakeholders are in agreement over the need for some far reaching changes to be made on the current copyright system before it can become more effective in protecting and incentivising creative works in a dynamic digital environment.

2. Need a Central, Unified and Authoritative Global Rights Registry
The above was identified in several of the sessions as a key enabler towards a more appropriate and effective rights management mechanism in a global digital context. The key issues are global / technology related, therefore the solution would appear to lie in taking a unified approach to implementing what some refer to as a global database for content rights

3. Accelerate the Shift towards New Business Models / Mindsets
The Google Books Settlement was repeatedly held up as a prime example of the art-of-the-possible in reaching a constructive and satisfactory outcome for all stakeholders. This model may be more difficult to accomplish in other media formats, but the fundamental requirements of an open, collaborative approach / mind-set by all stakeholders is mandatory for success. It is also becoming clear that content in digital / non-physical forms may be more appropriately positioned as a collaborative service, instead of the product-unit-centric worldview of the pre-digital content world.

In conclusion, and on the above terms, this summit can be deemed a success, and CISAC -the event organisers, deserve a hearty congratulation for their commitment in putting it all together. However, it might even be more of a success if and when the mid - longer term outcome of this Summit leads to some concrete changes in the world copyright system; and perhaps in the evolution of an authoritative / unified global rights registry; as well as the adoption of a more collaborative approach, in both business models and mindsets, by the content industries and all other stakeholders.

It is this author’s sincere hope, and recommendation, that the next version of this Summit will see the inclusion of more representatives from the developing world, as well as the much over-looked consumer / end-user stakeholder group, (which includes: ordinary citizens, students and the younger, next generation of users), that will ultimately deliver the verdict on any / all future initiatives on copyright..

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Jude Umeh is a senior consultant and enterprise architect within Capgemini, and is something of a rights management evangelist. You can follow his Tweet-stream here

It all sprouted over a discussion on Yammer over the last week. I have this strong feeling that Innovation is not something that comes only from the top-leadership of an organization nor does it vary by geography it comes from. It basically can come from anyone and everyone from anywhere in this world. Another tangent around Innovation is what this blog title reads.

During my childhood days, I remember my parents used to always warn me against being lazy and ensured that I never showed laziness (even it meant getting up early on a Sunday morning :-)). However I used to always have a counter argument that unless we (humans) become lazier, we will never be able see the advancements and evolution of technology. I always gave simple examples like without being lazy we would never have innovations like cordless phones, TV remote controls and the likes. These were the obvious ones that I could show them at home; nevertheless, if one actually gives it a thought, I am sure we all would agree that YES, laziness could account to most of the innovations in the world today.

So, to conclude: laziness certainly can sow the idea-seed which when nurtured with all the hard work, can lead to an innovation.

So think lazy, work harder! :-)

P.S.: In fact, the converse is true as well. Innovation has surely led a lot of people to become lazy! :-)

Nikhil Nulkar is a knowledge management consultant within Capgemini and is passionate about web2.0 and social media. Want to know what he is up to? Follow him on Twitter

I have an odd feeling about Wave. It is not something that is in any way new I think. I believe Wave can be compared feature wise with Lotus Notes and today IBM's Lotus Connections ( I haven't done that, it is just my hunch speaking up here). Wave is currently being positioned as something revolutionary, and there is a huge buzz around it on the web. Don't get me wrong, Wave is definitely a cool thing and certainly has some very strong points, but my point is that people will simply embrace it because it is Google.

So, to conclude: if you start a new company, choose a name the ends on "LE", and nobody will question your products and buy them simply because you are cool.

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Mark Nankman is a UX Architect and Web 2.0 evangelist at Capgemini. His public brain waves can be followed on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mnankman

For example some weeks ago I was having a conversation with a colleague on Yammer. At a moment in the discussion I referred back to a previous conversation that was related to the subject, she told me that she read that discussion, because she already received my emails of this conversation. At first this was rather surprising for me, especially since I only spoke to her via Yammer and never send her an email before. When I gave it some thought, I realized that you could also Yammer via email (as you by the web interface, SMS, IM and third party tools).

What I also realized that we never get rid of email (even if we really want to) and that some services will move from service to infrastructure. Twitter and Yammer are both moving (or already there) towards being a piece of infrastructure (a protocol) and people can use these protocols to communicate with one another. People can choose which tools they use to use the protocol. It could even go further (especially with the tools that take care of distributed microblogging) and tools could even make the protocol irrelevant (which should be done, since it is about communication and not about data exchange via a specific protocol). This way someone might read the information you posted to Twitter on his TV while accessing Facebook.

It will be just a matter of time till services and protocols become more and more irrelevant to the end users, they will not even be aware of the fact that they are either using Twitter or Yammer or Facebook, the service itself is hard to differentiate on anything other than the network effect. The medium will matter, since every medium has its value. It should be the ultimate goal of every service: moving from being a service to becoming a piece of infrastructure.

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

The collaboration oriented architecture is the Jericho Forum's response to the business driver of de-perimeterisation and the technical driver of cloud computing. The Jericho's existing paterial on the COA is here.

The reference architecture is intended to drive the existing collateral on the COA to the next level, to form a more complete description of what is required and how it will meet organisations' needs. I'm facilitating the group within the Open Group Security Forum.

If you're a member of the Open Group you can contribute to the COA reference architecture. Here's a link.