Out of the Ruins
We do not so much "stand on the shoulders of giants" as we build out of the ruins of fallen giants.
We do not so much "stand on the shoulders of giants" as we build out of the ruins of fallen giants.
Paul Downey of BT, who I recently had coffee with just outside St. Paul's Cathedral in London, has produced this absolutely brilliant poster about all things Web. Click on the image to go to Flickr to check out the labels for all the areas on the poster. It reminds me of xkcd's equally brilliant Map of Online Communities.
Another postsecret favorite. My feelings exactly -- especially now that my 50th birthday is just four months ahead.

Coolest thing to come out of Sun in a long time. In the style of Web is us using us, shows the history of publishing at Sun -- from roff (?) to wikis. The only significant flaw is that the old markup-based publishing is described as having "started with text formatting accessible to a few highly technical people." But the wiki markup at the end looks pretty much the same. <grin>
Great video scrolling through all the 3rd party apps that Apple has bricked with its iPhone "upgrade" while playing the Apple "Think Different" marketing campaign voiceover. Perhaps we should start calling the iPhone the iPown .
This is my first mobile phone blog entry. I'm using the Jott.com service to speak this blog entry and have it transcribed and sent to TypePad. Hope it works. Click here to listen Powered by Jott
Marc Andreessen has a good post on three "levels" of web platform (The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet):
I'd call the three kinds of web platform
Via AccMan Pro. Hilarious. And it rocks.
Here's the original.
Hallelujah! Somebody else finally said it. Andrew McAfee, of Enterprise 2.0 fame, has a great post about the two senses of the phrase: "It's not about the technology." INATT v1 is shorthand for "It's not about the technology alone", which is a reasonably benign observation.
INATT v2 is shorthand for "The details of this technology can be ignored for the purposes of this discussion." Andrew rightly points out that this is a dangerous assumption: "If true, this is great news for every generalist, because it means that they don't need to take time to familiarize themselves with any aspect of the technology in question. They can just treat it as a black box that will convert specified inputs into specified outputs if installed correctly."
Like Andrew, I cringe when I hear this argument -- most especially in SOA discussions and most especially in SOA discussions in the Service-Orientated-Architecture Yahoo Group (British spelling). In such discussions, technology alternatives for implementing SOA are dismissed as irrelevant and the discussion floats away on its own hot air.
I call such architectural discussions "aspirational" -- the entire focus is on architectural goals without the slightest consideration of whether such goals are realistically achievable given current technology trends. However, if you try to shift the conversation from aspirations to how to achieve them, then you will inevitably hear the mantra "SOA is not about technology". I did a search of the SOA group messages and turned up 53 matches for "not about technology"!
So thanks Andrew for reminding all of us that even lofty concepts like SOA are to some degree about the technology!
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I saw Andrew's post via this post by Stu. Also mentioned by Assaf at Labnotes.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |