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Going With The Flow

In a recent posting on my personal blog, I commented on the different kinds of postings people make to blogs. On our internal blogs at Sun, I stumbled across a good reflection by a colleague (and related comments by others) on a weblog I'd not previously encountered (I'd spotted comments like those made by James Tauber, but only because of Technorati - I had to work at it). The problem with trying to have a discussion spread across a myriad blogs is there's no meaningful way to read it.

I would never have read the comment (about wanting to use trackbacks and blog-hosted discussion) if I hadn't just stumbled across it, and if a newcomer to our conversation wanted to see what had come before s/he would stand no chance of finding all the blogs involved and threading together the comments in an order that made them intelligible. The discovery seemed to me to demonstrate the problem with a blog-centric approach to conversation (something that's bugged me for ages)

I believe the ideal flow goes like this instead:

1. An initiator makes a statement on their blog and either it is carried on an aggregator shared by the community (in our case, the internal equivalent of PlanetSun) or it is copied to a suitable mailing list/forum.
2. Others comment on the posting on the mailing list/forum
3. From time to time, the conversation reaches a point where a small-scale refactoring is needed or a new substantial point needs to be made. These are posted to one of the participants' blogs and a link is posted to the conversation.
4. Steps 2 and 3 iterate until the conversation starts getting structure
5. One of the participants refactors the conversation into a wiki page
6. Participants in the conversation edit the wiki page and discuss the edits on the mailing list/forum. It may at times be necessary for a participant to make a blog entry with significant new information, but in general the discussion is now forum & wiki rather than blog & forum
7. The discussion gradually tails off as the wiki entry now represents the shared knowledge of the community represented by the discussion participants.

[Also posted on Webmink]

Borg and the Penguin

It was interesting at LinuxWorld (back near the start of August) to see how many people from Microsoft were attending. Indeed, at both my session and the one with Sterling Ball, a show of hands revealed a row or more of Microsoft employees (sticking together for mutual protection?).

Josh Ledgard was there, and while I must have been speaking a bit fast (I've never worked for MSFT, I was just an ordinary developer in the Word beta program, back in the days before MSDN made it into a business) I think he's on target with his report (even the StarOffice crash). As he notes, the 3D graphics innovations Sun is bringing to Linux were a big hit:

It seemed the most innovative demo was Sun showing off " Project Looking Glass". This was a three dimensional desktop environment for Linux that looked like some mix of OS X(Complete with that funky pop-up start bar) and Longhorn. The audience went crazy for this.

IBM claims to have put more than $1 billion behind open source software, but the company is failing to pay even a modest amount of lip service to one of free software's most needed products.

I saw plenty of people with windows laptops and plenty of OS X notebooks, but outside of the booths and Sun sessions I was surprised at the lack of people running Linux. Sure, their slide decks talked a big game, but it looked a lot like Powerpoint and Windows XP underneath for Dan Powers(IBM VP of Grid Computing and Emerging Technologies) and several others. For presenters and general show goers I saw it felt like the order was MS > OS X > Linux. It surprised me enough to mention it I guess.

Linux on the mainframe might be interesting to a few customers, but it's not the OS's future. If IBM wants its Linux investment to keeping paying off, the vendor should push solid open source achievements instead of plugging Microsoft where it's convenient.

I'm also not even sure what the details of our licensing policies are, but if you were at LinuxWorld you were educated on how evil they are. No one at the show claimed that Linux was free, but one company that made the Linux switch did claim that no evil lawyers have come after him since they switched for being 8% under licensed. It just depresses me to lose customers because of this.

[Also posted to Webmink]

Getting ready for the big bang

Supernova is part of what The Register calls "a giddy social whirl of conferences and and other airmile aggregation opportunities". As most of the speakers have weblogs, we have the opportunity to peek inside and perhaps get a preview of some of the content.

Cory Doctorow has started an interesting thread, on a topic Liz Lawley hinted at a while back - whether always-on-ness is helpful or harmful. I remember the same questions about compulsive use of the PDP-11 when I was at university, mind you, so it's not a new question. Delegates at this event however will have an impressive array of alternative feeds even without leaving the event - a wiki, blog and blog aggregator just for the event, before they've event started reading speaker blogs and the like. Positive: If my speech is no good the delegates won't suffer (or even notice); Negative: My speech will have to be pretty compelling to even make people look up.

Mind you, if the have the HeckleBot Joi Ito writes about, being ignored will be the least of my problems. With WiFi becoming common at conferences, there's more and more back-chat going on live, and while I've been known to play too, I'm not sure it's altogether a good thing to turn a conference into a gong show.

Amy Wohl hasn't been blogging much lately, maybe because the fight with spam is becoming overwhelming. The worst part of the spam problem is the way some of the anti-spam tools are being deployed. I tried sending an e-mail to the committee I chair at OMA yesterday and was greeted with a bounce message thus: "554 SPAM-Relay detected". While spam is clearly a bad thing, software that assumes if can detect it 100% reliably without user confirmation is clearly deluded. The best server-side software I have found so far is MailScanner (written by my neighbour Julian Field), which is more a pluggable framework than a single solution. But with broadband access available, I prefer to handle it client-side. David Weinberger relies on PopFile, and so did I until I got my PowerBook and started using the Mac Mail.app, which has filtering built-in. Leaving the final decision to the user (even if it's to blindly ignore things tagged as spam) seems vital to me.

It goes further than just spam. One of the discussions here on java.net is about inappropriate postings. As well as discussing whether it should be personality dominance, community consensus or technical merit that sets standards (all three can be the same thing, of course), Clay Shirky's excellent essay on groups reminds us that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and that spam is just the harbinger of the sort of group behaviour that killed Usenet for most of us. His suggestions on how to design for success bear investigation.

This post has already gone on far too long - following Anil Dash's lead I should probably stop here and not be too much more ADD. Assuming my attention span will hold that long, my talk at Supernova will be about the way becoming massively-connected is having consequences at all levels in both technology and society. The network is now the computer, and the effects - always-on-ness, appropriateness of communications, a gong-show attitude and more - are inevitable, important but hopefully transient if we can learn from research and history. Much more of an issue for me is how the development and maintenance of standards will evolve. Massively-connected development is in beta-test; massively-connected specification is in early alpha-test. These are the key trends.

[Also posted to Webmink : the Blog]

Open Design

I have commented to a few people that Blogging is a Big Deal. Not, I hasten to add, because I think that anything more than a core of special people (special can have many meanings, but I like Halley's article...) will ever decide to participate in a meaningful way in that specific activity. Rather, it's because of the work that it's catalysing, both extending blogging and going way beyond, as Jorgen Thelin hints and Tim Bray explains.

Weblogs are, in my opinion, the most successful application of web services to date. They have been successful because a combination of social factors and sufficiently OK technology have come together at the right time, and because they have a universally almost-agreed format for the content of the conversations. Most of the fuss in the world that calls itself web services has been about the plumbing, and no doubt one day there will be wonderful things happening there, but for now the big win has been for the application with a standard content format, transferred using whatever communications method comes to hand (for the most part, HTTP - XML-RPC has and continues to be crucial too, and while I don't share Tim Appnel's distaste for mentioning it I do share some of his reservations about its future).

That's why I consider the current online debate about whether XML-RPC should be used for nEcho divisive (Update: and is seems Sam agrees). It does a great job baiting certain individuals but fundamentally nEcho has to be about a content description first and then later about a way of communicating it.

Blogging was already a fascinating social crucible, empowering millions to express themselves and thousands to engage in distributed, accountable conversation. Now it's spawned a unique technology encounter. Open source has given us a development methodology for the massively-connected era. We now see the spontaneous formation of a potential design methodology for the massively-connected era.

[Also posted to Webmink : the Blog]

Storm in a Soup Bowl

While totally invisible to the bulk of humanity, there's been a storm in a soup bowl of late as the Great and Good of blog-tech have been focussed into a Wiki to design a successor to RSS and the Blogger API - the name 'Echo' has been mooted as a placeholder. The choice of a Wiki is itself interesting, as Clay Shirkey notes, and from the messages its host has added to many pages the soup bowl has been straining at the seams. I've tried hard to keep up with the discussion, as has Norm, but the sheer pace of the hive mind is too much for anyone with a day job to cope with.

The reason for the storm? Well, As Clay hints, one or two of the well-known figures in blog-tech have taken the creation of a personality-reduced space as a personal affront. I really don't want to get into the personality side of things, although I have been surprised and saddened to see the venom that's been expressed in some postings by people I respect.

One issue that needs considering though is whether this project is there to offer an agreed unification of RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 (and stop there) or whether it's there to go further. The project's motivation page says a lot on this, and comments moving towards each extreme have been popping up all over, but I think it's clear the answer lies between the extremities. I completely agree with Sam that seven elements is the magic number for things people can manage to agree about in one breath.

But when it comes to not inventing things, I'm not so sure. Mark Pilgrim is on the ball as usual, and the point here is that there are so many exciting things that will come from an agreed content format for this slice of web services. I don't just mean threading and other features for blogs either. If we don't co-operate now on defining the format, someone will inevitably come along and lock us in. So I still support 'Echo' and I hope you will too, preferably by actually joining in.

[Also posted to Webmink : the Blog]

Supernova

To take a recent example, you had a conference about blogging's impact on the business world where bloggers sat on panels with other bloggers, some of which were blogging what was said, while other bloggers sat in the audience blogging about all of the blogging discussions.

Sun Bloggers

For a while now I've wanted a reference list of people at Sun who maintain weblogs (first called out by Timothy Appnel). I've not found one, so decided to throw one together - Sun Bloggers. If there is a list I missed, or there are bloggers I've not encountered, let me know.

[Also posted to webmink.net]

The Dog that Didn't Bark

I really like the report on Corante about java.net but it raises for me the question of why none of the other sources I respect in the blogging community have even mentioned the launch of blogs and wikis on java.net, let alone come in with a critique (positive or negative). In particular, I've not seen anyone in the blogging A-list that I track with NetNewsWire mention or critique java.net, and the greatest omission of all was the lack of any comment on Slashdot (until June 13). What gives? Is there no interest in what Corante (arguably) calls "the first large scale developer community to incorporate wikis and weblogs"?

[Also posted at Webmink]

Decompression

Heading out of town today, I met Mark Thomas from IBM at the Hertz office. Seems he too needs a break after JavaOne. We're both (independently) heading to Yosemite for the weekend - in fact, I am writing this from the 'Happy Burger' in Mariposa ("if it's not perfect, don't serve it" ). I see Duncan's off to Wisconsin, as is Glen. I guess we all need to decompress - I wonder where other participants have gone for the weekend?

Dot-Stuff

I've seen a few people commenting on the new java.xxx URLs - Paul and Bertrand, for example. The java.com site is target for some misunderstanding (some of it great fun!). Rafe Colburn for example says:

Maybe I'm just naive, but I'm convinced that there is little overlap between people who care about Java and people who want a virtual Christina Aguilera on their mobile phone.

When it comes to the java.net site, people have been asking me why the site sounds so like something Microsoft markets. java.org wasn't Sun's to use, so to paraphrase Bono in the lead-in to U2's cover of 'Helter Skelter', "this is the suffix Microsoft stole from the Internet, now we're stealing it back." You can draw your own parallels.

Elitism?

Alan Williamson wasn't too impressed with Jonathan Schwartz's keynote yesterday, it seems (complete with IDE demos - I hope he's enjoying the Project Rave demo I am watching now!). I'm very interested in his comments on the desire to expand the Java developer base from 3 million to 10 million. He says:

The threshold that we call someone a developer, is going to be dropped significantly ... Sun have historically treated the developer with respect. Giving them the attention and kudos they solely craved. Java developers are real developers; they don't want to be labelled with the Microsoft VB/Marco crowd. Sun will have to be very careful in how they are going to take this forward without alienating and devaluing the current developer base.

The distinction that I'm starting to see is that there no longer seems to be much of a role for a general purpose programmer. The primary skill required of a Java programmer these days seems to be significant expertise in some set of related specifications.

Cruisin'

I'm taking the chance to roam the exhibit hall today and just bumped into my friend Neil Bauman of GeekCruises, who is here promoting events like his Java Jam. I've been a speaker at a couple of his events, and both times have been memorable. Neil's idea is to run training events that deliver the very best speakers (like Sun's Kathy Sierra, whose new book is being well received), provide a compelling personal package by placing the event on a cruise line yet bring it all in at an overall competitive price (he says it better than me). Having got his XML eXcusrsion going a few years back I'm pleased to see he's still winning

Round-table

The last few years I have been privileged to moderate a round-table discussion between the leaders of the J2EE community, hosted by JavaPro magazine. Each year I'm struck by the way there is a diverse competitive landscape for Java. This year the diversity was as strong as ever, with great participants like Ted Shelton from Borland (leading their corporate strategy), Graham Hamilton from Sun (the current brains behind J2SE) and David Litwack from Novell (creator of PowerBuilder and now driving web services at Novell).

I'll leave reporting on the content to JavaPro, but for me each year the fact that a competitive round-table is even possible is a cause for celebration and a mark of the success of Java. Within the community we naturally focus on our concerns and issues but seeing a room filled with high-energy companies like Borland, Novell, BEA, Motorola and Sun always reminds me that the openness of the Java community is a remarkable thing.

Java - to Mars and beyond!

Dinner last night was an excellent opportunity to meet Ronald Mak, a researcher at NASA Ames who is respoonsible for the middleware powering the information feeds used by Mars Probe scientists. You may remember seeing the way NASA was using Java at past JavaOne conferences, but it's really come a long way since then. Mars Probe scientists and engineers have a powerful Java client application called CIP (Collaborative Information Portal) that displays images, data, schedules, reports and the rest of the information needed to run the Mars Exploration Rover (MER).

Ronald told me that the diversity of the client environments - Windows, Mac, Unix (including Solaris and Linux) and more - means Java is the only way they could even imagine providing CIP to the MER team. His personal responsibility is the web application server that powers CIP, and he's used all the power of J2EE (including the new Web services support) to make it happen. Java is also in wide use in the R & D areas at Ames, including modelling and simulation.

So when the weather finally allows it, MER will be one of the most exciting Java input devices around. I wish them luck with their mission!

Update:It launched!

Webmink About Town

I've been blogging for 18 months or so over on my personal page so it's a delight to finally be able to write under the java.net banner. Starting at JavaOne 2003 in San Francisco I'll comment on trends, oddities, gadgets and whatever else catches my eye as I travel. I'll cross-post anything relevant from my personal blog but if you want to read about my politics, musical taste etc you'll need to read that blog too :-)

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