Kaizen Bits

Last week, while I was giving a couple of talks in Bogotá, this blog was hacked. The infection probably propagated from another one I have installed in the same Dreamhost server and it also affected my homepage and two other domains.

The hacking was caused by an outdated Wordpress installation and it took me 24 hours here in Bogotá to clean and re-isntall everything. I would like to hereby apologize in case anybody was reading me on the web (most of you do over feeds) and could have any trouble.

Thanks again and apologies for any inconvenience.

This is an interesting picture I always show in my courses / talks about Web 2.0. For some time, I thought Orkut would really extend in a different country than Brazil and Tuenti could also move forward from Spain. But now I just reckon Facebook is (and will remain) the absolute ruling champion and the other are simply local (but very interesting) phenomena.

Three new jobs from the Seth Godin blog to consider. From the beginning, I was interested in the second one:

• Community Manager: Since my friend Ina was appointed Community Manager in Rummble, I could see the potential of her great experience in blogs, social networks, etc.
• Stats Fiend: This is the one I have been thinking of ad maximum for a potential research project. Tracking the “appearances” in search engines, blogs, media, social apps and the own impact factor in the web.
• Manager of freelancers: In a networked economy, freelancers are the building blocks of IT teams.

I was interviewed after my talk at the University of Murcia. We talked about Web 3.0, Cloud Computing and and this is the article finally published in Europa Press with excerpts of our conversation.

Enjoy!!

Adobe has announced a Flash version for the nice market of the iPhone. However, Apple has given a number of (open source) first steps in a different direction. With SproutScore, Apple would avoid Flash lock-in and dependance on a unique provider.

However, to me, this is an important issue. If the iPhone really wants to become the new mobile Web multimedia device we have always dreamt (and if you see its sales, figures and expectations, it might happen), Flash and RIA are probably one of the most delicate issues.

In that sense, I always loved a W3C-like solution, where consensus and working groups create fully-fledged recommendations that everybody could use. In this market, it is different because there might be a lot of money involved, but didn´t big software providers commit with BPEL in 2002 as a de facto standard for composing Web Services and creating workflows?

An interesting Web 2.0 tools list. I did not want to make this entry that short, but that´s the way it goes

Stumbled on a couple of services to relate IPs with geographical location. Namely:

• Maxmind
• Ip2location
• Ipligence

These services are relating geolocation and they could offer interesting added-value services now they call to the importance of the “local web”. Do they have an API though?

This great video is actually real food for thought:

• The amount of technical information is doubling every two years. In 2010 it is expected to double every 72 hours.
• Most majors being studied now did not existe a while ago (Nanotechnology, New Media,etc)
• Shift happens, again.

It is always good to have these think-hard videos on the Web

I have been reading and working on the Software as a Service (SaaS) phenomenon for about two months now and I think it is the next big thing. At least in what regards to Business Process Modelling or Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).

Why? The answer would be better why not. Lately the SOC space is kind of bland. There are some initiatives going on regarding service computing but the gist of the approach is not really paying attention to the real advantages of having a huge amount of services hosted in different slices of the same application and that, my friends, is what SaaS is all about.

Something like ten years ago, Application Server Providers (ASP) with the only difference that code did not have to be replicated all over the infraestructure, now each tenant has its own slice.

Still, I have some questions to myself: How does SaaS relates to SSME? Why there are no open source SaaS implementations? How difficult it would be to create one?

I have always hated, loathed and detested changing my working environments. Why? Simply because I am not an early-adopter, a citizen A, a beta tester. And this has been particularly my disappointment when working with wikis. Why again? Because they are really cool.

Two years ago I had my first experience with Wikis, when we were preparing an entrepreneurial project. We were located around the world, it was difficult to communicate and we used a wiki. I did not like it. Did not spend the time to understand how to create pages, links, organizing the writing. Nothing.

A month ago, I started to work on a research common project with somebody I like a lot, but he is on the other side of the ocean. Our email conversations turned out unmanageable and unwieldly. Guess what? Wikis came again and I took the time (even though I have no time at all, bloody proposals) to learn about them, install them and use them.

The experience could not be better. I installed MediaWiki and it is wondeful. It is simply and ease (even though, the response time of my server are not as good as I would expect, you can still feel the synchronous call) but yet again, they are really practical. Thanks, MediaWiki!!