I just finished watching Aardvark’d, a short movie by Lerone Wilson about four summer interns creating a cool software app. The interns were gathered in the NYC offices of Fog Creek software last summer by CEO Joel Spolsky, and given the task to build the application from scratch, create the marketing materials, pitch the product at a trade show, and of course, ship the bits before they headed back to school. The movie documents the entire experience and is well worth watching.

I have to tell you up front that I am not a big fan of reality TV and think the whole Trump thing is over-rated. The movie turns this entirely around: there are no scripted performances, the bad hair is on the geeks and is real, not some ill-fitting rug. The geeks are as real as they get. Watching it with a fellow geek, we were both transported back to our college days and enjoyed the video.

You see the four geeks-in-training being mentored by Spolsky and his staff and making mistakes and having fun, or at least fun by geek standards. More importantly, you see them learning how to build a commercial product.

The scene where the interns try to figure out whether they can safely jump to a nearby building are hilarious. And I loved the office set up: each workstation is a minimalist Ikea desk combined with Aeron chair and dual-screen LCD monitors. You get to see the team camaraderie form over the summer, and see first hand how they learn how to create a product and work through the many issues to get ready to ship.

The movie is both poignant and amusing, and often at the same time. If you ever wondered how software is created, wonder no more. And if you want a benchmark to compare how your hi-tech company operates vs. someone who knows what they are doing and doing it well, then this flick is for you. You can order a copy here.

Rich Mironov, who like me has found himself “between engagements” over the holidays, has written a very insightful analysis of where open source is going. Even if you don’t recall the Joni Mitchell “Big Yellow Taxi” lyrics, it is worthwhile reading here.

As Rich says in his essay, it is only a matter of time before open source becomes another opportunity for “turning into another IPO-driven, VC-backed, competitively focused economic model.”

Amazon.com last month released a beta of its Mechanical Turk Web Services. In the past month, this has created a very interesting ecosystem of developers, users, and contract workers. And let’s not forget about the bloggers and commentators. The whole thing is a case study in how a simple but sophisticated programming interface can quickly grow into a life force. And BTW, empower some shut-in folks to earn a few bucks.

The idea is a simple but powerful one. Think what SETI @ home (which recently changed its own programming interfaces, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment) does. It takes a very complex task, searching for radio signal patterns in the hope of finding extra-terrestrial life, and distributes the computing and processing to complete this task amongst millions of PCs that otherwise would be idle. The software runs as a screensaver and sends the compute jobs back to the mother ship when done.

Now replace the PCs with people, yes actual real carbon life forms sitting in front of their PCs. Stir in a Web Services API that allows the people to do tiny, very tiny, bits of programming jobs when they are otherwise idle, and also compensates them with tiny, very tiny, bits of actual money when they accurately complete the task. That is what Turking is all about.

You can read more about this phenonmenon here.

It is ironic. Just when the Web is going great guns, just when the post-crash bubble is bubbling, just when Google hits $300 and when Time Warner and Murdoch and Disney have emerged from their collective dalliances and started to create some solid Web content, the browser is so over, so five-minutes ago, so last week.

You have been put on notice: the browser wars are over. Moz doesn’t matter. IE is irrelevant. Opera is doing a swan song. Why? You’ll have to read the column to find out.

(Note: this was first written in 2005.)

Blogs are everywhere, and you know they have reached the point of no return when corporate IT departments begin to evaluate different blogging software tools and the topic gets cover story treatment from Business Week and Fast Company, for those of you that haven’t looked at a printed magazine in a while.

But what got me going was reading the a research report written by Suw Charman called Dark Blogs: The Use of Blogs in Business. The report is a case study of large European pharmaceutical company’s implementation of Traction Software’s TeamPage, a commercial blogging tool. Given that the report was paid for by Traction, you want to take a few of its conclusions with care, but still it gives some good advice when it comes to implementing blogs in the corporate world.

There has been a lot written about using corporate blogs for external communication, such as the CEO blogs from Schwartz, Cuban et al. But what caught my eye was how blogs have developed into a new IT tool for internal communications of the common cubicle dwellers, deep behind the corporate firewall (hence the name dark blog).

Before I roll through Charman’s conclusions I want to point out a couple of things that struck me reading her report. The pharma needed some software to keep track of its competitors and have a central place where researchers and corporate management could easily capture this information and comment on it. They were having problems with keeping up to date and getting the right people to discuss what was going on, and went looking for solutions.

They weren’t happy with their previous systems, using various Web-based intranets and applications built on top of Lotus Notes. The information they track is fairly unstructured and comes from lots of different sources. Notes is a very structured program, which is great for building databases on the fly but not so great if the information doesn’t have a consistent format and structure. The company wanted something that had the group collaboration dynamic of a blog, with the flavor of editing-on-the-fly of a wiki that was easy to use and didn’t require special software outside of the Web browser. Does this sound familiar? I can’t tell you how many companies I talk to want something similar. Heck, I want something similar for my crew here at Tom’s.

So what happened? The company built its blogs (they had several underway, which shows you how useful they were) in such a way as to tie in with the corporate LDAP directory structure (for a single user login) and to provide email notifications when new entries were posted. I think both of these are big reasons for its success, because it wasn’t as technologically disruptive to the corporate culture as it could have been. Pharmas are big email consumers, and having a blog technology that fit in with their email habits was important.

Second, they ran their blog like we run our publishing mini-empire here at Tom’s, with an editor-in-chief and a publishing process that was well defined to get material from the individual author to the Web. A lot of people mistake this process with censorship or control of information, but the actual use (and what seems to be happening at this pharma company) is to polish and make the information readable and attractive and organized. The Traction software also allows for an edit audit trail to see who was editing what piece when and a permissions system so that not everyone can edit or even view every piece. Too many blogs are just typing and not a real editorial product. You need extra pairs of eyes and brains (hopefully both connected and working together) to make sure that what gets posted makes sense.

Charman mentioned these other lessons:

• Taking blogs to the corporate masses
• The blogs’ aims were clear and precise and had been well defined
• The project had the full support of the CEO and upper management
• There was a well constructed project plan, which included consideration of high level issues such as structure, taxonomy and search requirements as well as day to day user requirements
• The open commenting system allows for dialogue with users
• Integration with existing systems and technologies created a more seamless user experience
• Read permission control means that potentially sensitive information can only be accessed only by those who need it

Charman says in the report that “Compared to setting up a similar project on a more traditional CMS or KM platform, the project has been simpler, faster, more effective and less expensive to implement.” And that is perhaps the best lesson for today’s IT departments: find a technology that you can roll out quickly, that doesn’t require a great deal of training, and get the right people behind it. While you are at it, roll it out to a focused user group to build word of corporate mouth prior to a company-wide launch.

Looking for more tips about dark blogs? CIO Insight’s Edward Cone offers these suggestions in his story about corporate blogging.

Blogging.org has a nice rundown on how to make money with your blog that is aimed more for individuals, but still has some great advice for corporations.

Granted, blogs are the new religion, or the new color black, or the return of/son of push technology or the latest killer app, depending on your time and tenure in the IT industry. But like so many other corporate IT projects, their success or failure hinges not on the actual technology itself, but how you finesse the people parts of the equation and sell the app to userland.  The pharma case study is a good example of these “softer” parts of the IT equilibrium and how well it can work. It is nice to see that sometimes IT can get it right and be the good guys for a change.

The more I use it, the more I am becoming a bigger fan of RSS. It is almost becoming a borderline obsession in the past few weeks. I like the way it acts as both a content syndication service and a notification system. And it is nice that RSS doesn’t require any specialized software, so I don’t have to download any new applications.

RSS has become popular in the age of blogs, but it has more universal and interesting applications. It is certainly here to stay.

You can read more of this post here.
And here is a great list of various RSS applications, more up to date than my post.

These days, when you think about leaders in Web services, you tend to think about IBM, Microsoft or Sun — or some other tools vendor that is providing interfaces, code and applications servers. But my candidate for the top spot isn’t a vendor of computer software. It does sell a lot of stuff, though, in fact more than most Web sites and with a wide range of products and items. My candidate is Amazon.com.

What does a glorified online bookstore have to do with Web services? Plenty. Amazon has been leading our industry in several fronts, almost since the first book was sold in the summer of 1995. Two recent developments once again emphasized how Amazon is taking steps beyond what many of their competitors are doing: Itís opening up a Web services interface to its back-end systems and allowing customers to use keyword searches to actually view a series of the pages of the books that are for sale.

You can read the entire essay here.