Wed, 22 February 2006
We're talking today with David Swedlow, who is hosting the panel discussion on Beyond Folksonomies at the 2006 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, March 11-13. I'm going to borrow the panel description from SXSW because it sheds some light on the topics we're covering with David. As the web evolves, contextual navigation is increasingly necessary. The top-down, authoritarian, Semantic Web approach is way too restrictive, and the bottom-up, free-love, rebelliousness of folksonomies is way too permissive. What's next? A compromise of extremes? A middle-out approach? Something completely different? David and I jump into the deep end of the pool on a variety of topics that are at the edge of the computing scene. If you've been playing around with Delicious bookmarks, technorati tags - social tagging, tag clouds and memetrackers like Memeorandum, TailRank, Megite, etc. - then you'll find this conversation interesting. If you've been following Steve Gillmor and the Gillmor Gang discussions on Attention Trust, then keep listening. We delve into that as well. That topic led us into a discussion around one's identity on the web and what that will mean in this new web environment. David also talks about a shift coming in website marketing, away from counting page views or unique visitors to learning more about a person's attention and focus at a website. This is more than just recording what they visit at the site; it's more two-way. We talk about how you might log your web activity and make this attention log available to others upon request. Maybe they pay you for it! Listen in now to get in on all this. I totally enjoyed my time with David. I hope you do too. Be sure to check out David's blog at http://www.opposablemind.com/ for more of his creative and insightful thinking. Comments[11]
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Sat, 18 February 2006
What's Happening with RSS in an enterprise? With me today in our TalkingPortraits studio is Charlie Wood, the founding principal of Spanning Partners, which is an independent consulting firm specializing in enterprise applications of RSS and related technologies. I'm delighted and excited to dig in on this topic and learn more about what's happening in this area. There seem to be two groups right now: Those that are using RSS (developers, bloggers, podcasters and forward-thinking business-marketing types), and those that don't seem too excited or informed yet about the impact of RSS. Where do you fall? Lately I've become keenly interested in the deployment issues around RSS in enterprises - the big companies with IT groups that have significant investments in legacy CMS or CRM systems. I've run into a lot more difficulty than I would have predicted, mainly because the large system vendors aren't too interested in RSS. Why is that? These are the issues Charlie and I talk about. We have a concern that management in major enterprises is going to suddenly wake up one day to the fact that the use of RSS is all over the place, internally and externally, both in enterprises and throughout the groups their customers do business with. All of these people and groups would be using a hodgepodge of free or cheap online services that provide various types of RSS capabilities, and in ways that circumvent the in-house IT group. That's not a good thing - yes ... no ... what do you think? Are you seeing this becoming an issue in your organization? We touch on these topics, and I would appreciate hearing your comments. Charlie has wide-ranging experience with content management and syndication, including roles in software development, presales, sales, and product management. He intimately knows RSS at a marketing perspective and a programming level as well. A rare breed. Most recently Charlie served as vice president of enterprise solutions for NewsGator Technologies. Previously he was director of enterprise solutions at Stellent. Charlie also served as group product manager for content management and syndication at Vignette. Since June 2004, he has operated Moonwatcher (globelogger.com/moonwatcher), a blog covering the emergence of RSS in enterprises. Charlie holds a BA in Computer Science from the University of Texas. He lives in Austin with his wife and twin boys. Direct download: TP-charles-wood-enterprise-rss-2006-02-20.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 8:15 AM Comments[9]
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Sun, 12 February 2006
Open Source Data Center Management Platform - with Will Hurley CTO of Qlusters Welcome back to the Talking Portraits studio in South Austin. This podcast has a fairly technical nature to it so I'm going to set the stage here for a broader audience. I think you'll find this interesting. I sure did. Have you ever wondered what a IT data center looks like or how it operates? There isn't much to really see these days. It's not like the olden days of a single huge computer with blinking lights. It's more like racks of computers that look like really thin PCs, and the center is more like a collection of locations around the world in rooms or small closets. Ten years ago, when I was an IT manager at Motorola, I managed mulitple servers for the semiconductor design team. It's a 24/7 job where you carry around a pager just waiting for something to go wrong. You then jump in your car in a hurry to your data center and start moving cables around, bringing new servers on line whenever there is a problem. OK, that was 10 years ago, but sadly, for smaller businesses with multiple servers, it's gotten only slightly better. What was true then is true now, to a degree: You hand-code some Pearl scripts to lash together servers in various ways, hoping this will hold you for a while, until problems or peak service demands hit you - often unexpectedly. This afternoon I have Will Hurley with me from OpenQRM.org to talk about his company's technology that is an Open Source management platform for managing data centers. What's fascinating is how his business is structured and how they have zeroed in on a marketing opportunity with business value that is easy to identify. OpenQRM has a very creative approach, generating profits and supporting the open source community at the same time. I like that. Their goal is to help small to medium-sized businesses more efficently manage data their center(s). Qlusters' product is Open QRM and it includes the same kinds of features you see from the big vendors in this market - automatic, Policy-based Provisioning - only their tool is open source, so it's more easily extensible. I learned a lot in this interview and hope you do too. Let's speak with Will (or Whurly) now. Tom Special thanks to Andreas Haefliger's playing of Chopin for the intro and outro on this podcast. You can find his CD on Magnatune: Andreas Haefliger: Mozart on the Piano Comments[2]
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Sat, 4 February 2006
Meet Tim Downs, founder of RFID-World.com. During a recent set of Podcasts I produce over at www.dbazine.com, I started hearing Oracle and DB2 database administrators talking about the coming tidal wave of data storage and data management originating from the increase in use of RFID tagging technology. This got me thinking. I meet a person a while back who actually started the first and largest RFID conference -- Tim Downs. I wondered if he'd be interested in doing a teaching piece on RFID. So I called him up to get his perspective on the topic and this is what we have to listen to this week. I hope you find it helpful. Here is the Wikipedia definition of RFID: -- Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is a small object that can be attached to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person. RFID tags contain silicon chips and antennas to enable them to receive and respond to radio-frequency queries from an RFID transceiver. Passive tags require no internal power source, whereas active tags require a power source. -- Guerreiros da Noite by Luis Claudio from the Pod Safe Music Network Enjoy Tom Direct download: Talking-portraits-tim-downs-rfid-2006-02-04.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 8:04 AM Comments[1]
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