Jon Udell: InfoWorldJon's InfoWorld articlesCollaborative knowledge gardening- August 30, 2004 Next month I'll be giving a talk on social software to an audience of CTOs. To prime the pump, I've been spending some time with two of the newer services in the space: Flickr and del.icio.us. Neither focuses primarily on the six-degrees-of-separation dynamic that drives LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster, and Spoke. Flickr, as I would explain it to my friends and family, is a way to easily upload and share digital photos. And del.icio.us does the same thing for Web bookmarks. To CTOs, though, I'd...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/categories/infoworld/2004/08/30.html#a1064 The scalability myth- August 19, 2004 At one time or another, nearly every kind of information technology has been judged and found wanting. The failures are often summed up in that most damning of epithets: "It doesn't scale." The reason, of course, is that at one time or another, for one reason or another, every kind of information technology has failed to scale. Unfortunately for the victims tarred with that brush, scalability is a wildly imprecise term. Applications may be expected to scale up to massive server farms or...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/categories/infoworld/2004/08/19.html#a1063 The architecture of participation- August 17, 2004 Discussions about open source and innovation tend to cluster around two opposing memes. One says that open source can't innovate; the other that only open source can innovate. Both are wrong. Sometimes large, well-funded R&D programs can achieve breakthroughs that lone geniuses can't. And sometimes the reverse is true. Either way, the real innovation of the open source movement is the architecture of participation. It can help turn a good idea -- wherever it came from -- into a...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/categories/infoworld/2004/08/17.html#a1061 A strategic vision for dynamic languages- August 9, 2004 As operating systems consolidate around managed interfaces, they'll choose the Java and .Net VMs, not the Perl, Python, or PHP VMs. But the agility of the dynamic languages and the collaborative energy of their open source communities are two of the pistons that crank the engine of progress. These worlds need to converge -- and at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference there was new evidence that they will. Jim Hugunin, father of Jython (Python for JVM), made a pair of dramatic announcements. He..http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/categories/infoworld/2004/08/09.html#a1056 Tragedy of the network commons- August 9, 2004 A recent survey found that 75 percent of Dartmouth students have shared their network passwords. They like having people who know their password, explained Denise Anthony, a sociologist who spoke at the PKI summit conference I attended earlier this month. "They like having someone who can check their e-mail for them or log them in to places where they're supposed to be." ... As security technologists, we're easily dazzled by our shiny cryptographic swords. But while we're brandishing our...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/categories/infoworld/2004/08/09.html#a1055 |