I will be speaking on an open source panel at south by southwest (sxsw) on Sunday, March 11 at 11:30 am. It would be great to see some friendly faces in the audience, so please stop by!
For any of my techie friends planning to attend sxsw, drop me an email. I’ll be arriving on Friday evening and leaving mid-day on Tuesday.
I’m probably the last person in the world to join Twitter. Raven Zachary is the one responsible for finally convincing me to join. If I know you in real life, feel free to add me as a friend.
Our next informal Portland BarCamp Meetup has been scheduled! We have also settled on the fourth Thursday of every month as a regular date for the event. Any local techies are welcome to attend.
When: Thursday, February 22nd
Time: 6:00pm – 9:00 pm
Where: Jive Software Office (317 SW Alder St Ste 500)
Sponsored by: Jive Software
Jive Software is located on Alder near 3rd. Parking is available in a nearby parking garage, and it is short walk from the Max (directions to Jive Software).
If you plan to attend, please RSVP on the Portland BarCamp Meetup wiki (RSVP required):
The meetup will be very informal and similar in format to previous meetings. We’ll do a few introductions, talk for a few minutes about organizing the BarCamp, and then see where the discussion goes.
If you would like to receive notifications about any last minute changes, future meetups, and other PortlandBarCamp communications, please join our Google Group to receive email announcements.
Subscribe to BarCampPortland
We have also created a BarCamp Portland Google Calendar for upcoming events and posted the event to Upcoming.org.
We are also trying to gain support for a real BarCamp event in Portland. We will start the planning process when we get enough people signed up on the Wiki, so please add yourself to the wiki if you want to attend a Portland BarCamp event!
I have been playing around with Jyte, a recently released JanRain product, this weekend. It is a way to manage your identity via claims and cred:
Jyte is a place to make claims about yourself, others, or just about anything. It’s a place for web surfers to see what you are up to and what you’re thinking. It’s a place to learn more about friends, and for others to learn about you through your claims, votes, and cred. It’s a place to build out your social network and share it with other sites. It’s a place to use your shiny new OpenID, and a place for people who see your OpenID around the web to discover your world. (Quote from the Jyte Blog)
You should check it out, but as a warning … it is highly addictive.
If you are nostalgic for the dot com Super Bowl ads circa 2000, you might want to check out the SuperDotComAds from Meebo, Technorati, and others on YouTube.
Where will I be this weekend instead of watching the Super Bowl? With all of the other geeks at RecentChangesCamp, of course! I just Tivo the game to watch the commercials anyway.
RecentChangesCamp is free, and it runs from Friday morning through Sunday afternoon in Portland. If you are in the area, you should check it out. Proposed topics include wikis, collaboration, identity / OpenID, and more!
The short history of this story is this: Microsoft does not like the Wikipedia entry on Open XML. Since Wikipedia logs changes with information that can identify the source of the change, Microsoft decides that it would be a better idea to pay someone else to make their changes. Classy.
Doug Mahugh, a technical expert for the Microsoft format, Office Open XML, has identified himself as the Microsoft employee who contacted Jelliffe requesting his services.
In a comment posted on the popular Slashdot technology website, Mahugh published what he said was an excerpt from an email to Jelliffe, detailing “what I asked Rick to do”.
“Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we’d like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections,” reads the email Mahugh apparently wrote to Jelliffe.
“Would you have any interest or availability to do some of this kind of work? Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today.”
Wales said the proper course would have been for Microsoft to write or commission a “white paper” on the subject with its interpretation of the facts, post it to an outside website and then link to it in the Wikipedia articles’ discussion forums.
“It seems like a much better, transparent, straightforward way,” Wales said. (Quotes from The Age)
Maybe this post is a wee bit snarky, but this is what happens when I blog from the airport prior to 6am without enough green tea 🙂
Our next informal Portland BarCamp Meetup has been scheduled! We have also settled on the fourth Thursday of every month as a regular date for the event. Any local techies are welcome to attend.
When: Thursday, January 25th
Time: 6:00pm – 9:00 pm
Where: Jive Software Office (317 SW Alder St Ste 500)
Sponsored by: Jive Software
Jive Software is located on Alder near 3rd. Parking is available in a nearby parking garage, and it is short walk from the Max (directions to Jive Software).
If you plan to attend, please RSVP on the Portland BarCamp Meetup wiki (RSVP required):
The meetup will be very informal and similar in format to previous meetings. We’ll do a few introductions, talk for a few minutes about organizing the BarCamp, and then see where the discussion goes.
If you would like to receive notifications about any last minute changes, future meetups, and other PortlandBarCamp communications, please join our Google Group to receive email announcements.
Subscribe to BarCampPortland
We have also created a BarCamp Portland Google Calendar for upcoming events and posted the event to Upcoming.org.
We are also trying to gain support for a real BarCamp event in Portland. We will start the planning process when we get enough people signed up on the Wiki, so please add yourself to the wiki if you want to attend a Portland BarCamp event!
Lately, I have been thinking about the different ways that an open source business model can benefit the companies that base their businesses on an open source product. Although there are many benefits, one of these benefits is that open source can be used as a marketing strategy. I blogged about this idea in some detail on the new Compiere Blog, and here is an excerpt:
Since Compiere is freely available for download, anyone can install the software, try it, and see if they want to use it in their environment. Many of these people will never generate any revenue for Compiere, but maybe they tell a few other people about Compiere, and maybe those people tell a few more people … This viral marketing helps to promote and market open source products with little involvement from companies like Compiere. Having an open source business model can generate a level of awareness that might otherwise cost a substantial amount of money to achieve through trade shows, advertising, etc.
Using open source as a marketing strategy requires a shift in thinking for anyone coming from a proprietary background. As open source companies, we need to encourage people to download our software for free – the more, the better! It does not matter to me that someone gets our software for free without paying Compiere a dime. Yes, they are benefiting from our hard work without giving anything in return, but all I need is for them to tell someone who will eventually want to attend training or purchase some type of support or other services from Compiere.
Open source companies also need to be a bit careful not to be too heavy handed with pushing people into revenue generation. We cannot (and do not want to) force people into purchasing support agreements or other services, because this would severely limit our ability to benefit from open source as a marketing strategy. Instead, we need to provide compelling services (support and others) that benefit our customers. Those customers who need and want our help will pay for it. (Quote from the Compiere Blog)
I read about the new World Explorer from Yahoo today on O’Reilly Radar, and I decided to take a quick look at the map for Portland. A few interesting things turned up when I moused over some of the main tags to see the related tags.
The “Zoo” tag was fairly predictable: giraffe, animals, bear, etc.
“Edgefield” was related to McMenamins (not surprising since the Edgefield McMenamins is a very popular destination.)
OSCON was on the Portland map as a tag.
Beaverton, a sleepy and not always very nice suburb of Portland, relates to sunset, clouds, and sky – I can’t even hazard a guess on that one.
The most interesting: Mt. Tabor was only associated with cat. Apparently “cat people” gravitate toward Mt. Tabor.
I also noticed that going back to the map after closing my browser yielded slightly different results. I encourage you to have a look. It provided me with a few minutes of amusement anyway.
Expect fewer and erratic posts from me in the next couple of months. I am selling my house in Hillsboro and moving to the east side of Portland. Moving is always a chaotic process. In other words, I will be kicked out of my house at random times of the day so that strange people can wander through, then I get to put everything I own into little boxes only to take them back out inevitably losing certain items for an indefinite period of time.
Despite the less than fun moving process, I am excited about moving to the east side of Portland. We are looking forward to living within walking distance of coffee shops, vegetarian restaurants, grocery stores, and more. It will also be nice to live closer to downtown.
If anyone is looking for a great house with good schools, a quiet neighborhood and suburban living, I have a great house in Hillsboro! Information about my Realtor and the house can be found here and you can visit my Flickr account to see way too many pictures of the house.