July 2006 Archives

Tim Bray builds on a question by Tim O'Reilly: "What standard of open-ness can we apply to Software-as-a-Service offerings, to the Googles, Yahoos, and Amazons of this world?". His answer: Open Data.

At the end of the day, information outlives software and transcends software and is more valuable than software. I think any online service can call itself “Open” if it makes, and lives up to, this commitment: Any data that you give us, we’ll let you take away again, without withholding anything, or encoding it in a proprietary format, or claiming any intellectual-property rights whatsoever.

It seems to me that if you don’t have that, you have nothing, and if you do have it, you have, if not everything, at least a solid foundation to build on.

That’s basic, Level 0, openness. For extra credit, a service could also say: We acknowledge your interest in any value-added information we distill from what you give us, and will share it back with you to the extent we can do so while preserving the privacy of others.

So, do we need some sort of Open Service analogue of the Open Source Definition? It couldn’t hurt. I suspect that if we can get the basic idea across, then we’re in old-fashioned consumer-advocacy territory; and I suspect that it will only take a small number of painful experiences for consumers to understand the issue at a pretty deep level.

I'm updating my blog engine, Movable Type, from version 3.16 to 3.31. It's still a work in progress that promises to be a bit painful, as I'm already facing a big problem with a character encoding issue. I thought I had solved it almost two years ago, when I converted this blog from Latin 1 to Unicode, but now it's back to the same mess again. Not fun, since I did a simple upgrade, in place, without changing anything, and the previous blog was already served as UTF-8. If someone has faced the same issue, I'd be happy to get some hints on what's going on. The prospect of converting the database again isn't fun, knowing that I've already got a mix of encodings in there (someone just placed a comment on my French blog, forcing a rebuild with a mixbag of Latin 1 and Unicode chars).

Oh, and for the poor who'll face the same issue: if you get kicked out and forced to login again and again with MT refusing your previous credentials, delete your MT cookies and don't forget to check the "Remember Me" option when login again. I wasted one hour on that silly bug.

And a personal help call to the Six Apart luminaries who would happen to pass by (hello Jay!): I keep being banned from the ProNet mailing-list, with Mailman pretending that my email address is bouncing. I've got not clue what's going on (it's not bouncing anything on my side and has been working well for years on several lists), and none, absolutely none of the options provided by Mailman will work (the links cause an error and the mailing-list owner email address is rejected as non-existent by the 6A mail server). I'm stuck.

P.S. ok, char encoding issue fixed, not sure exactly what happened beyond a messy mix of unicode and Latin 1, or Latin 1 stored in a unicode table, or, well, it looks like fixed now (fingers crossed). Next step: getting rid of those years old ugly templates coming straight from my initial MT 2.x installation...

P.S.2 Mmmh, the template refresh has caused some funny things to happen in my RSS feeds, like doubled items, strange sorting (in NNW the first item is an old post back from April). Sorry about that. I also found a bug in MT3.31 around authentication, where MT confuses login names with commenter names (i.e. the MT author "Voilà" is confused with the commenter "voila").

Dixon Wilson, a British accounting firm, is going to learn a lot about blogs in no time for being the first company¹, in France, to sack an employee because of her blog.

Read: things fall apart and Wrote blog and got the sack. V bad. Will sue.

Let's see how ridicule Dixon Wilson gets, as the news starts spreading around French blogs...

Updates:
- Guillermito: Free Petite Anglaise !. "Damn, I hate this stuff. I hate when people are punished for not being robots. For being bright. For being humans. For being talented and creative."
- CNN: 'Bridget Jones' blogger fire fury. I love this part: "Sanderson claims she was dismissed for "gross misconduct" because her blog, clearly carrying her picture, risked bringing the company into disrepute." Indeed.
- Catherine has posted an article on the Guardian: I was fired for blogging where she says she opted for a trial rather than a settlement. Although the latter would be the fastest and probably best option for her, she's making this affair a case of principle, hoping that "Petite versus Goliath will help clarify some of these issues and create some useful legal precedents for French bloggers who may fall victim to a similar fate in the future."

Note:
1. She might not be the first, if I believe this (though this one didn't get the same exposure, and motives of dismissal are not so clear).

Over the past few years, the blogosphere has grown some sort of collective wisdom and values that you are told — including by yours truly — to carefully watch and adhere to if you ever want to join, especially if you're going into business blogging. Among those values, we find things like being authentic, transparent, or... spontaneous.

As far as I can tell, spontaneity is a double-edged sword, as evidenced by the reactions to the first Dell blog named "one2one, Direct Conversations with Dell. Those guys have just taken the plunge and before they have resurfaced to breeze, paf!... Jeff Jarvis — Mr Dell Hell himself — wants to maintain them under water, quickly followed by Steve Rubel. Both accuse Dell of, among other "blogocrimes", not listening and not linking to critics. Well, it looks to me that they are listening, and that some folks, in being spontaneous, are jumping their guns a bit too quickly.

From Dell's last post, I found the posts from Shel Holtz and Robert Scoble who are more constructive. Niall Cook shows one trait I like about blogs, the capacity to make updates and amend oneself in retrospect (that's somehow linked to intellectual honesty, I think), which is something I don't see on Jarvis and Rubel's posts, yet.

We, the blogeois (so much better than bloggerati, isn't it ;-)), like giving others lessons (although, apparently, we don't like the reverse that much). It looks to me that, for corporate blogging, we're still collectively learning and that lessons will be taught back as corporations embrace the medium. Jarvis and Rubel are just fueling the fears and reluctance against corporate blogging (case in point: Nicholas Carr takes it as QED that "for most companies, a corporate blog probably won't be worth the trouble").

I'd be tempted to say "much ado about nothing, cut them some slack." But as one of those folks who are excited about the potential of blogs in business, and into it, the best quote I can make is:

A lot of folks who are blogging "experts" talk about blogs in a way that scares the hell out of normal business people.

This quote is from the first of a series of excellent posts from Six Apart, which I encourage you to read if you're willing to test the waters of business blogging:

• How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people


• Control Your Comments: It's Your Lobby


• It's Okay To Screw Up! A Case Study


• Another Sacred Cow Debunked: You Don't Have to Write All Your Posts

Oh, and of course it's more than ok to be spontaneous on your blog. Just don't forget that common sense is also part of the game.

The Big Four Alumni Blog has been searching who's blogging at the Big Four and has some nice words about the Capgemini CTO Blog that I created with our CTOs and launched mid-May (emphasis mine):

CapGemini recently unveiled its CTO blog with some key technologists --Global CTO Andy Mulholland, Ron Tolido, CTO for Northern Europe and Asia, and Juhana Juppo, CTO Finland --- blogging on relationship between business and IT, the impact of service-oriented methodologies, business intelligence, RFID … whatever they feel like basically. Again a technology oriented authorship, but a much higher level. Much like Accenture, CapGemini appears to be testing the waters, but seems to put the right amount of publicity and coverage for this blog.

Nice review, thanks guys! I think we're past just testing the waters ;-).

Here are a few statistics for this blog, reporting on 181 days, from Jan 01, 2006 00:00 to Jun 30, 2006 23:59.

Overview

Note: hits are all inclusive; pages are only HTML and text pages; downloads are files including all Atom and RSS feeds but excluding all graphics (Flash files are counted as graphics).

Details on visits

Note: Robots include search engines, spiders and aggregators. I still don't have an accurate way to track usage of the RSS feeds (and the raising power of online aggregators don't make those things really easier to analyse, at least not yet without digging into the log files.)

Main totals and daily averages

Also for those 6 months, unique hosts totaled 264,311.
Note: "Cur. Day" are daily averages for the last 7 days of June.

Since the launch of padawan.info 3 years and 7 months, I've published 892 entries that received 1104 comments on my English blog, some 1255 links on my "Food for Thoughts" linksblog, plus 643 entries that received 3399 comments on my French blog. (Note: I disabled TrackBacks a year ago because they're still dead to me.) The ratios of comments/entry remain stable at 1.2 in English but up in French to 5.3 (from 4.4 in 2005) — it's tempting to attribute that again to our legendary "grande gueule", but it's more likely related to the release of my book on business blogging (Blogueur d'entreprise) in January, which garnered excellent feedback, plus the fact that the French represent my biggest audience (need to look up the figure).

Comparing the monthly metrics between Dec 05 and Jun 06, the trends are: +43% in page views, +36% hits, +36% visits, +13% unique hosts, +130% bandwidth (don't tell my host!).

So it looks like the figures keep improving for the third year in a row, which is nice. You can see my statistics for 2005 for a comparison.