enterprise 2.0 the bdg way

My Oracle OpenWorld Sessions

2009-10-07T13:22:36.397-04:00

I'm going to be speaking in two different Oracle OpenWorld sessions on Sunday. They are OOW-S312303 -- Enterprise-Enable Dynamic PHP, Ruby, Python Apps: Oracle WebCenter Interaction and OOW-S312304 -- Enterprise Ruby on Rails: Rolling with JRuby on Oracle WebLogic Suite.

Here We Go Again: SXSW 2010

2009-08-26T13:24:09.361-04:00

I know it feels like we just put the wraps on SXSW 2009, but Panel Picker Voting is already live for 2010! This year they're using the Panel Picker to crowdsource session proposals for all three conferences: Music, Film and Interactive (whereas in the past it has only been used for Interactive).

As you well know, Social Collective, Inc., a company I started to serve the conference industry with better and more social software tools, provided the official social network and schedule builder for SXSW 2009. We're on tap to provide that service again this year -- in fact, the site is already live at my.sxsw.com. We have some exciting new features planned for this year, so stay tuned for announcements on that front as we get closer to the event.

So, even though we're intimately involved with SXSW, I still have to EARN the privilege of speaking there. 30% of that is decided by YOU, the voters. So, in the name of shameless self-promotion, I must ask you to vote for my proposed talks (if you think they're worthy):

SXSW Interactive: Developer from Mars Takes on Designer from Venus
Every great project needs a designer and a developer. Yet sometimes working side-by-side can be about as fun as pulling teeth. A veteran developer and a veteran designer use real-world anecdotes to spar on the dynamics that make it challenging for people in these two disciplines to collaborate effectively.

Neo-patronage: Can It Save the Music Industry?
Starting with the idea that all recorded music should be free (as in beer), I will explore the idea that a system of "neo-patronage" -- think of the way European artists were commissioned during the Renaissance -- can help reinvent the beleaguered music industry to ensure that artists can get fairly compensated in a world where music is free for consumers.

You have until Friday, September 4th at 11:59PM CST to cast your vote. Thanks for your support and see you at SXSW!

ODTUG S672: ACED Sundown Session -- Middleware and SOA

2009-06-26T14:46:17.650-04:00

ODTUG S672: ACED Sundown Session -- Middleware and SOA from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

ODTUG S680: Top Ten Tips for Java Developers on Oracle WebLogic Server

2009-06-26T10:38:16.977-04:00

I just returned from the fabulous ODTUG (Oracle Developer Tools User Group) Kaleidoscope conference in Monterey, CA. I had the pleasure of giving two solo presentations and sitting on one panel.

I recorded both presentations and the panel. Here is the first full recording for your edutainment pleasure.

ODTUG S680: Top Ten Tips for Java Developers on Oracle WebLogic Server from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for two more new videos which will be posted very soon.

Chris Bucchere Can Haz Professional Speakerness

2009-04-07T01:32:54.277-04:00

So, rumor has it that I'm now a professional public speaker. Sch-weet! How did that happen, you might ask? Or maybe you're thinking, if Bucchere can haz professional public speaker-a-bility, how can I haz professional speaker-hood too?Well, it's actually easier than you think. Here is a simple, five-step guide so that you too can haz professional public speakerness:1) Speak (a lot) -- this is really crucial. You need to have a good track record of presentations, lectures, etc. Hopefully you have a nice collection of audio and video clips too. If not, well, then start volunteering to speak at different events in your area of expertise to help build your speaker cred. And bring a friend with a handy-cam.2) Find a photo you like of yourself. This is not 100% necessary, but it might be nice if your "speaker page" (look ahead at Step 3) has a photo of you on it. If you can't speak well, at least maybe you can haz good looks. Purrrrrrrr.3) Hire a great designer (like Paula Bee) to give you good looks, even if you don't have them naturally or via surgical enhancement. Your speaker page should be your home on the web for all your past and upcoming public speaking engagements along with links to your other achievements, e.g. books you've published, companies you've started, podcasts, blog posts, web sites, awards, testimonials, etc. Let your ego guide you to the highest form of self-aggrandizing and narcissistic speaker web page Valhalla. w00t! (Oh, BTW, if you haven't done any of those things, maybe you're not actually cut out for professional public speaker-dom just yet.)4) Ask for money. No one is going to pay you to speak unless you ask them. How much? Well, that depends on who's asking, how much of your career you want this to be (e.g. are you a full time professional speaker or a full time software developer with a speaking habit/hobby), and how much you think your words of wisdom are actually worth. Start small and grow your rates as you continue to build your speaker cred. Oh, and negotiate a bit, please. A certain person recently asked for $40,000 + two first-class airline tickets, hotel and meals. He ended up getting $20,000 and flying SLF-style, by his damn self. (For you those of you who haven't heard of that great TLA, SLF stands for "Self Loading Freight," which is the most succinct and accurate description of coach-class airline travel that I've ever heard.) 5) Ask for feedback. Just so that you don't think my ego has inflated itself beyond all sense of reason and responsibility, I do want to let you know that I take feedback very seriously. Nearly every event at which I've spoken has had some formal or informal feedback process. And if not, there's always Twitter. Why bother telling me you didn't like my talk when you can tell the whole fucking world, right? Seriously, carefully consider and respond to each bit of feedback -- positive, negative and all points in between -- and consistently use feedback to make each talk better than the last. Brad King had a great tip on responding to feedback: use humor. If someone calls you a douchebag, respond by saying, "Thanks for your feedback! Since we don't know one another well, can I ask that you please refer to me as Mr. Douchebag from now on?" You might get surprisingly good results -- often a line like this can convert a hater to a fan.If you keep that up, before you know it, you'll be a coveted and highly compensated professional public speaker. However, it's not all fun and games. Please be prepared to really "Bring It/Kill It" when you speak. Repeat business is super important and no one's gonna pay for your speaking services again or recommend you to anyone if you give a dull and lackluster performance. As Dubya so eloquently put it: "Can haz fooled me once? Shame on you. Can haz fooled me twice? Well, um, you can't fool me twice 'cause I can haz Presidency or some shit." Oh, STFU George. (And while I'm on the subject of politics, who anointed Karl Rove as [...]

My SXSW Panel: Social Networks for the Anti-Social

2009-06-26T10:31:01.604-04:00

UPDATE: SXSW released a complete audio recording of this panel!

I'm at SXSW again this year. I attended SXSWi last year and, if my memory serves me correctly, I also attended SXSW Music in 1995, though I might be confusing it with H.O.R.D.E., Austin City Limits or one of the other great music festivals in this fine city which is known internationally for its eclectic music scene. Anyway, because The Social Collective is powering my.SXSW, I actually have the pleasure of spending 10 full days in Austin and attending all three festivals this year: Film, Music and Interactive. I'm also speaking, oddly enough, in a Music Panel called Social Networks for the Anti-Social. I have to warn you, most panels (at any conference, not just SXSW) totally suck and this may not be an exception. But who knows, it might be a completely magical and transcendental experience, but you won't know unless you check it out.

You Are What You Eat

2009-02-10T15:33:18.153-05:00

I've never really understood the phrase, "You are what you eat." If it were true, I'd probably be an In-N-Out burger (double double animal style) or something far worse for you and/or better tasting.

Recently, I overheard someone on Twitter saying something to the effect of: "You are the sum of the five people you hang out with the most." My immediate reaction was to disagree vehemently. I'm totally not like that! I'm exactly who I want to be! I don't subject myself to the influence of others like that! Etc.

Not only am I completely wrong about this, but it may be that -- in some strange cosmic way -- I'm actually the sum of ALL the people around me, good, bad and everything else under the sun.

Today I discovered TwitterSheep. (No, this has nothing to do with sheep, fraternity rituals or anything else of a sexual nature, I assure you.) TwitterSheep simply looks at your followers and constructs a tag cloud based on keywords in their bios. That's not really remarkable, but what is remarkable is that when I ran my Twitter account through the application, the resulting tag cloud literally read like my own bio. Seriously. It's a visual representation of terms that -- when you sum them all together -- equal me. The largest words are what I do and care about most.

Am I right about this? Are you the sum of your followers? Try TwitterSheep and let me know how it worked for you!

my.SXSW Launches on The Social Collective

2009-02-04T16:29:27.643-05:00

We're rolling out a huge conference site today called my.SXSW for the legendary film, music and interactive festival SXSW!

We certainly haven't done a scientific study about this, but using "thumb in the air" math, I would venture to guess that this is the largest conference ever to roll out a white-label social networking platform. We're very pleased they they chose The Social Collective.

You can read the full story on Collectively Speaking, The Social Collective blog.

There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

2009-01-25T22:48:48.724-05:00

Today Robert Scoble wrote a really interesting and thought-provoking article on his blog about the alleged suspension/removal of Joel Comm's Facebook account. He draws a parallel to the revocation of Robert's own Facebook account and makes a good case for Facebook being outta line. Here's my response to Robert:In defense of you, Joel and countless others who have been suspended or removed from Facebook, it certainly doesn’t seem like you’re being treated fairly. It’s hard to imagine that someone with 5,000 confirmed Facebook friends and ten times as many followers on Twitter could be considered a spambot. Generally speaking, online communities, wikis, social networks, etc. have a way of policing themselves; content that other people enjoy gets shared and promoted while spam and other “noise” gets blocked or ignored. Facebook and other social sites would all be best-served by this sort of grassroots self-policing, rather than a top-down approach.However, there’s a subtle point to which some other readers have alluded in the comments. You wrote, “I don’t support companies that ‘erase’ MY data without my permission.” What you may not realize is that based on Facebook’s TOS, what you think are “your data” actually are not “your data,” not by a long shot, not once you’ve posted them on Facebook.If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In return for providing “free” distribution of “your” content, companies like Facebook, Google and the likes are creating massive databases of incredibly valuable “information capital.” This in turn allows them to offer you a “free” service while they sell this information capital — the stuff you gave them, remember? — to advertisers. That pays their bills, which in turn allows them to continue to give you “free” content distribution.Average people (who upload videos of dogs on skateboards, etc. to Facebook) don’t care about data ownership and are perfectly happy to hand the rights to their content over to Facebook or Google it order to share it more easily with their friends. Average people — however — aren’t one man media outlets, either, but YOU are. So, being an internet/social media mogul, I’m sure you understand that content distribution isn’t free.The solution? Host your content yourself! People like you and Joel have the resources to pay for your own hosting AND you have loyal audiences that will follow you wherever you go. You can leverage social media to help the viral spread of your content, but the obvious goal of your participation in social media and social networking should be to drive eyeballs/click-throughs back to YOUR site so people can view YOUR content, ensuring that YOUR advertisers get bang for their buck.It really all boils down to two old sayings: there’s no such thing as a free lunch and you get what you pay for. Want to pay for your own hosting and distribution? Then you can own your own content. Want to get free distribution from Facebook or Google? Then be prepared to give them something in return.[...]

How to Convince Your Company to Pay for a SXSWi Pass

2009-01-14T11:45:15.660-05:00

Times are tough, right? Everyone is slashing spending, especially around travel and conference budgets. But you need (read: want) to be at SXSWi. So it's time to convince your boss that your attendance at SXSWi is something that the business needs to be successful.Fortunately, if your company does or wants to do anything with the interwebs (and seriously, who doesn't these days?), this is easier than you thought. Just follow these five easy steps.1. Look at the SXSWi speaker/panel lineup and pick ten panels that are relevant to your line of work. I'm a web 2.0 developer with more than a passing interest in social media, so this is easy. But the panels run the gamut of topics, so you should be able to find something that works for your business/industry. Here's an example: Building Personal and Company Brands with Web 2.0 Tools. Every company wants a stronger brand, right?2. Copy the titles and abstracts into an e-mail to your boss and elaborate on how you'll benefit from them. More importantly, give specific reasons why what you learn will help you and your team, peers, etc. achieve 2009's business goals. To continue with our example, my company needs to grow our social media cred. The panel consists of Saul Colt, C.C. Chapman and Gary Vaynerchuk. According to their bios (on their web sites), Saul is "an accomplished marketing professional, with more than a decade of diverse high-level experience and a respected publisher" and C.C.'s company, The Advance Guard, "focuses on helping brands of all sizes smartly and strategically leverage emerging technologies for radical marketing programs." Gary doesn't really require an explanation, but if your boss has been living in a cave, then you might want to drop a few adjectives like "inspirational" and "passionate." Example: This panel will help me form an action plan on how to grow my company's social media cred, following the examples set by these three extraordinary social media mavens.3. Outline the maximum line item costs for the event. The pass, the travel, the hotel and the food. If you really want to go, make your food budget less than $50/day, your hotel budget less than $100/day and cover the rest (if necessary) with your own cash. Don't provide a total, as it might overwhelm your boss at first brush. Besides, I'm sure he or she can add.4. Plan a post-conference re-cap meeting. This is crucial! Set a date and make a list of team members who you will invite, including your boss. During this meeting, promise to share the highlights of what you learned at SXSWi and what you recommend that the business do differently. Explain how these revolutionary ideas will boldly move the company forward in ways they never could have imagined.5. Split the difference. Remind your boss that the conference takes place Friday-Tuesday (March 13th to 17th). If you travel after work on Thursday or on Friday morning and return to work the following Wednesday, you're only missing three days of work AND you're donating your time to the company you love so much over the weekend.There you have it, your "free" pass to SXSWi. Well, it's not exactly free. You have to deliver on all the promises you're making to your boss, especially if you want to go next year! Now if only it was this easy to justify the music festival. . . .(Thanks to allisonb00, the inspiration for many things in my life, including this blog post.)[...]

BIL Conference 2009 Selects The Social Collective to Provide Conference Social Network

2009-01-13T15:18:30.512-05:00

(I-Newswire) - Long Beach, CA

The second annual BIL Conference, scheduled to take place on February 7th and 8th, 2009, announced today that they have selected Herndon, VA-based BDG's white-label conference social networking platform, The Social Collective, as their provider for conference registration and social networking services.

BIL is an ad-hoc conference for people changing the world in big ways. It’s a place for passionate people to come together to energize, brainstorm, and take action. Last year's BIL had over 300 attendees. This year, almost twice that have already signed up on the social network. Confirmed speakers include TED Prize winners Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity and Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD.

Other proposed talks include Silona Bonewald's (founder of The League of Technical Voters) "Transparent Government Starting With The Federal Budget" and Ben Huh's (of I Can Has Cheezburger) "What's Funny About The Interwebs."

BIL's "unconference" format permits anyone to speak, so interested parties may sign up to give a talk.

The talks are then "favorited" to the main stage by peers, or remain in a breakout room if they don't receive enough favorites.

"We chose The Social Collective because it's a great way to herd smart people," said BIL Conference co-chair Todd Huffman. "In addition to posting new talks and adding talks to their favorites, people can create and join groups, engage in discussions, make a new network of friends and keep their new relationships alive post-conference. The format was a great fit for BIL, but I can see it working well at more structured events, too."

"We're really enjoying the experience of watching and participating in the growth of the online BIL community, powered by The Social Collective," said BDG chief and one of the The Social Collective developers, Chris Bucchere. "The BIL team has been a pleasure to work with and the community has been very supportive of our efforts. The outstanding content and people involved should make BIL one of the must-attend events of 2009."

For additional information or to register for free, visit the BIL Conference web site.

Top Ten Tips for Writing Plumtree Crawlers that Actually Work

2008-10-26T23:02:44.776-04:00

Just in time for Halloween, I've decided to publish my Top Ten Tips for Writing Plumtree Crawlers that Actually Work. This post may scare you a little bit, but hey, that's the spirit of Halloween, right?[Editor's note: yes, we're still calling it Plumtree. Why? I did a Google search today and 771,000 hits came up for "plumtree" as opposed to around 300,000 for "aqualogic" and just over 400,000 for "webcenter." Ignoring the obvious -- that a short, simple name always wins over a technically convoluted one -- it just helps clarify what we're talking about. For example, if we say "WebCenter," no one knows whether we're talking about Oracle's drag-n-drop environment for creating JSR-168 portlets (WebCenter Suite) or Plumtree's Foundation/Portal (WebCenter Interaction). So, frankly, you can call it whatever you want, but we're still gonna call it Plumtree so that people will know WTF we're talking about.]So, you want to write a Plumtree Crawler Web Service (CWS), eh? Here are ten tips that I learned the hard way (i.e. by NOT doing them):1. Don't actually build a crawler2. If you must, at least RTFM3. Hierarchyze your content4. Test first5. When testing, use the Service Station 2.0 (if you can get it)6. Code for thread safety7. Write DRY code (or else)8. Don't confuse ChildDocument with Document9. Use the named methods on DocumentMetaData10. RTFM (again)Before I get into the gory details, let me give you some background. First off, what's a CWS anyway? It's the code behind what Oracle now calls Content Services, which spider through various types of content (for lack of a better term) and import pointers to those bits of content into the Knowledge Directory. This ability to spider content and normalize its metadata is one of the most underrated features in Plumtree. (FYI, it was also the first feature we built and arguably, the best.) Each bit of spidered content is called a Document or a Card or a Link depending on whether you're looking at the product, the API or the documentation, respectively. It's important to realize that CWSs don't actually move content into Plumtree; rather, they store only pointers/links and metadata and they help the Plumtree search engine (known under the covers as Ripfire Ignite) build its index of searchable fulltext and properties.Today, Plumtree ships with one OOTB CWS that knows how to crawl/spider web pages. Not surprisingly, it's known as the Web Crawler. Don't let the name mislead you: the web crawler can actually crawl almost anything, as I explain in my first tip, which is "Don't actually build a crawler." But I'm getting ahead of myself.So, back to the background on crawlers. Oracle ships five of 'em, AFAIK: one for Windows files, one for Lotus Notes databases, one for Exchange Public Folders, one for Documentum and one for Sharepoint. Their names give you blatantly obvious hints at what they do, so I won't get into it. Along with the OOTB crawlers, Oracle also exposes a nice, clean API for writing crawlers in Java or .NET. (If you really want to push the envelope, you can try writing a crawler in PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, C++ or whatever, but it's hard enough to write one in Java or .NET, so I wouldn't go there. If you do, though, make sure that your language has a really good SOAP stack.)So, after reading this, you still want to write a crawler, yes? Let's get into my Top Ten Tips:1. Don't actually build a crawlerYes, you really don't want to go here. Building crawlers is not that hard, as there's a clean, well documented API. However, getting them work is a whole other story.Most applications these days have a web UI. So, take advantage of it. Point the OOTB web crawler at the web UI and see what it does. Some web UIs will work well, other won't (particularly if they use frames or lots of ja[...]

bdg welcomes Michael Buckbee!

2008-09-30T00:26:55.057-04:00

We're very pleased to announce that industry veteran, entrepreneur and Rails developer Michael Buckbee joined the bdg team today as CTO and Lead Developer on The Social Collective!

Mike's career path is surprisingly similar to my own -- in multiple ways. Fresh out of college, he joined a health industry startup called Aristar in 1999. They were acquired by SoftMed, which was then acquired by 3M HIS. (Recall that I worked at Plumtree, which was bought by BEA, which was bought by Oracle.) Unlike yours truly, who left Plumtree in 2002, Mike stayed on at 3M. As someone who just doesn't know what it means to get bored, he also started several side projects. The most successful of these was Fabjectory, which could best be described as a 3D printshop that allows people to take their avatars (or other objects from the virtual world) offline and reincarnate them as real life figurines.

Again, our paths resemble one another, in an almost uncanny way. As I was toiling away on Feedhaus, Mike was building FeedMail, which essentially tried to allow people to read and respond to email from inside a feed reader. Like Feedhaus, the idea never really took off. However, some of Mike's other projects -- like Fabjectory -- generated an amazing amount of buzz, including articles in the New York Times and WIRED. Prior to starting Fabjectory, Mike had yet another side project called Second411 which allowed people to search for virtual items both in-world and on the web. Second411 was purchased by ESC in October of 2006.

Never one to settle for just a few side-projects, Mike also worked on FoxyMelody, Watchlister, OneToFive, FeedSpeaker and an open source HTTP queue that runs on Google's Application Engine. Here at bdg, we've long been in the business of throwing lots of spaghetti at the fridge and seeing what sticks, so obviously Mike will fit right in. Visit Mike's blog and project page for more about his amazing career.

As Lead Developer on The Social Collective, Mike is already busy getting the site prepped for SXSW 2009, which will launch early in Q1.

Please join me and the rest of the bdg team in extending a warm welcome to Mike!

I Don't Even Like Radiohead, But. . . .

2008-09-26T18:13:16.234-04:00

I wouldn't consider myself a Radiohead fan. But what they just did is about to turn the music industry on its head . . . again. Check out this snippet from an e-mail they just sent me:

To coincide with asking radio stations to think about playing Reckoner we are breaking up the tune into pieces for you to remix. After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes...

Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304

...we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here.

Sample, cut, take the sounds, whatever. Play it in a club. Or your room. Then if you want you can upload your finished mixes to http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged by everyone else. You can create a widget allowing votes from your own site, Facebook or MySpace to be sent through too. [Emphasis mine.] To start things off we asked James Holden and Diplo to do their versions.

Whatever you want to call this (user-generated production?), it's downright brilliant. The idea that I -- a mere mortal -- get to mix and produce the next Radiohead song and that my version (if the general public likes it) could be the next big Radiohead hit is simply a mind-blowing and totally game-changing idea. Starting with Napster, then Kazaa and other P2P networks, then the idea that a major-label artist like Radiohead would put up an album (In Rainbows) and ask people to name a price for it -- including $0 -- the music industry has changed dramatically over the past ten years. And Radiohead is, as usual, leading the charge.

Chris Bucchere's Oracle Open World Schedule

2009-01-31T01:11:15.658-05:00

I'm headed to Oracle Open World on Saturday, 9/20. Here's my proposed schedule. Like I said earlier, I'm probably going to spend most of my time in the unconference anyway, but here's what looked interesting to me.

[Editor's note: I've removed the gCal from here because it defaults to the current date, so it's not really usable anymore, now that Oracle Open World 2008 is a thing of the past.]

If you'd prefer, you can also access this schedule in XML or ICAL format.

SXSW to Use The Social Collective for SXSW 2009!

2009-01-31T01:29:39.362-05:00

I am very pleased to announce that today bdg and SXSW have decided to partner to use The Social Collective to create a new registrant community for SXSW 2009.

More details will follow soon. But for now, please join me in a collective w00t for the entire bdg team while we celebrate this amazing milestone for us. We all look forward to seeing The Social Collective in action at SXSW 2009!

Sneak Preview of Chris Bucchere's SXSW RSS Preso at the Oracle Open World Unconference

2008-09-03T09:24:29.797-04:00

For anyone attending Oracle Open World, I'm planning to give a preview of my SXSW 2009 talk entitled "Not So Simple Any More: RSS's Bleeding Edge" in the unconference track at OOW. (This will happen regardless of whether or not SXSW selects my talk for inclusion in the 2009 agenda.)

The talk is scheduled for Monday, 22 September 2008 at 2 PM Pacific in Moscone Overlook II. BTW, I'll probably be spending most of my time in the unconference track at OOW, because I'm just that kind of guy.

Conference Social Networking Made Simple

2008-08-31T20:09:40.459-04:00

Three and a half months have transpired since our stellar debut at BEA Participate. (In internet time, that's a lifetime.) But better late than never, I'm very pleased to announce the launch of our marketing home on the web: www.thesocialcollective.com!

Please have a look and let us know what you think.

Friday Fun: Rails, Django and Caprese Salad

2008-08-29T19:42:24.631-04:00

I had this Twitter argument today with former coworker, fellow web developer and friend Bryan Hughes:bucchere: The Spring Framework is driving me crazy. If this were Rails, I'd be done already. huuuze: @bucchere If it was Django, it'd be faster and ready to scale.bucchere: @huuuze I'm not interested in a religious war right now. Please don't provoke me. ;-)huuuze: @bucchere No war -- even the Rails guys agree: http://is.gd/1ZZubucchere: @huuuze Apparently Gluon is even faster than Django. But is anyone using it? You have to consider factors other than performance.huuuze: @bucchere Um, Django's used by thousands. It's not some fringe framework. Guaranteed anyone that's used RoR and Django will prefer Django.bucchere: @huuuze How could you make that "guarantee" when you've never used Rails? I said I didn't want a religious war, you damn Python Nazi. ;-)huuuze: @bucchere I've built a couple site using Rails. How many sites have you built using Django?bucchere: @huuuze bdg's svn server just crashed. I have more important things to do than continue this pointless argument.huuuze: @bucchere Then quit wasting time on Twitter. I'm not trying to start anything with you. Just be aware that RoR isn't the only game in town.bucchere: @huuuze There are lots of religions too. And if I want to pick one and say the others are "wrong" then that's my prerogative.huuuze: @bucchere Whatever dude. Not sure why you'd say Django is "wrong."bucchere: @huuuze All I'm saying is that language/framework wars are like religious wars. I have mine, you have yours. Leave it at that.bucchere: Enjoying a homemade caprese -- my favorite salad. (Now watch while @huuuze tells me his favorite salad is better than mine.)huuuze: @bucchere Having never tried caprese, I have no opinion on the matter.bucchere: @huuuze LOL. I'm glad we can still be friends. :-)huuuze: @bucchere Get real. I'm only friends with Christians and Django users. ;)* * * So the time it took me to compile this discussion made me wonder why Twitter doesn't have threaded discussions. Summize (now search.twitter.com) has "conversations" but, like Facebook's wall-to-wall feature, just because the posts occur consecutively, it doesn't mean that they're actually "in" the same thread. If I were re-writing Twitter, adding threaded discussions -- and with it, the ability to reply to a specific Tweet -- would be near the top of my list.Happy Friday everyone (and happy 3-day weekend for hard-working and hard-twittering Americans)![...]

Shameless Self-Promotion

2008-08-19T22:04:33.897-04:00

At last year's SXSW I said to myself: "Self, you need to be speaking at this conference next year."

Help me fulfill my self-fulfilling prophecy and please take a minute to vote for one (or both) of my proposed talks! Unlike the SXSWi Web Awards last year, you don't have to vote every day -- once is plenty.

The first is a solo presentation on the future of RSS.

The second is a panel discussion on whether it's better to have one horizontal social network like Facebook or loads of smaller, niche social networks.

Thanks for your support.

Middleware for the REST of us

2008-08-18T15:25:19.468-04:00

I'm sitting in my third Oracle Fusion Middleware briefing, this one at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. Thomas Kurian has been going through all the products in the Oracle stack in excruciating detail.First let me say this: Thomas Kurian is a really smart guy. He holds an BS in EE from Princeton summa cum laude (that's Latin for really fucking good). He holds an MBA from the Stanford GSB. He's been working for Oracle forever and he even knows how to pronounce Fuego (FWAY-go). I'm dutifully impressed.Unfortunately, all those academic credentials and 10+ in the industry is barely the minimum requirement for getting your head around the middleware space. Either I don't have enough (0) letters after my name, or I just don't get it.For starters, there are way too many products -- the middleware space is filled with "ceremonious complexity" (to quote Neal Ford). App servers, data services layers, service buses, web service producers and consumers -- even portals, content management and collaboration has been sucked into this space. Don't get me wrong: the goals of the stack are admirable -- middleware tries to glue together all the heterogeneous, fragmented systems in the enterprise. Everyone knows that most enterprises are a mess of disparate systems and they need this glue to provide unified user experiences that hide the complexity of these systems from the people who have to use them. That makes the world a better place for everybody.That was also, not coincidentally, one of Plumtree's founding principles and the concept -- integrating enterprise systems to improve the user experience -- has guided my career since I got my lowly undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Stanford in 1998.So, it's a good concept, however, if you're considering middleware because you're trying to clean up the mess that your enterprise has become, you need to ask yourself the following fundamental question: does middleware add to or subtract from the overall complexity of your enterprise?Your enterprise is already insanely complicated. You've got Java, .NET, perhaps Sharepoint, maybe an enterprise ERP system like SAP and say, an enterprise open source CRM system like SugarCRM or a hosted service like SalesForce.com. The bleeding edge IT folks and even (god forbid) people outside of IT are installing wikis written in PHP (e.g. MediaWiki) along with collaborative software like Basecamp written in Ruby on Rails. I'm not even going to mention all the green-screen mainframe apps still lurking in the enterprise -- wait, I just did. This veritable cornucopia [editor's note: I love those two words, especially when used together!] of systems just scratches the surface of what exists at many large -- and even some mid-to-small-sized companies -- today.So clearly there's a widespread problem. But what's the solution?At the end of his impressive presentation, I asked Thomas the following question: "How can middleware from Oracle/BEA help you make sense of the fragmented, heterogeneous enterprise when you have existing collaborative (web 2.0) technologies written in PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. running rampant throughout IT and beyond?" (Okay, so I wasn't exactly that pithy, but it was something close to that.)His Aladdin-esque answer came in the form of three choices:"Take control of" and "centralize" your IT systems by replacing everything with Oracle Web Center spacesDitto by migrating everything to UCM (Stellant)Build a services framework and aggregate everything in one of four ways:Use a Java transaction layer [...]

How the New Facebook Utterly Destroyed my Favorite Application (and Why That Makes Me Sad)

2008-08-16T16:10:59.636-04:00

I used to love Feedheads. It's a simple, elegant and beautiful application that does one thing really well: help you share your Google reader shared items.

Unfortunately, the "new" Facebook has rendered the application utterly useless and I can't think of a good way, as an end-user, to fix it. In fact, as someone who's built two facebook apps, I can't even think of a way that the Feedheads developers can fix it. What a calamity.

So here's the problem: the News Feed (and the Mini Feed) introduced an option that allows end-users to set the story "size" as shown on the right. When a Google shared item story comes through Feedheads now, it defaults to the "one line" size and as a result, it doesn't say anything other than "Chris posted an item to Feedheads."

Thank you very much, Facebook. That piece of information is completely useless. People who are reading your feed need to click through into the Feedheads application in order to see what story you posted -- and the whole point of Feedheads is to help you share your shared items, not make them harder to find.

(As a result of all this, Facebook also broke one of my applications, called WhyI. It has < 200 users, so very few people care, but . . . the point of the app was to help people ask themselves and their friends questions that have to be answered in five words or fewer. And of course, the questions and answers would show up in the Mini Feed and News Feed. But not anymore! Now it just says: "Chris posted a new mini-update using WhyI." Again, a totally useless piece of information. Drats.)

As an end-user, I can set the "size" of each feed item. So that means, after I hit Shift-S in Google Reader -- which doesn't take much effort -- I have to wait for the story to be published in Facebook and then, if I remember (which at this point is unlikely), I have to go into that little drop down on the right and set the size to "small" instead of the default, which is "one line." And here's the best part: I can't tell Facebook to remember this, so I have to do it every time.

All this just to share a shared item on Google Reader through Feedheads . . . ick.

Here's the best part. I just noticed that Facebook added their own feature to the new and "improved" news feed. You can import your shared items from Google Reader! And, not surprisingly, the news feed actually shows the stories' titles. In other words, Facebook took a great application -- Feedheads -- and replaced the functionality with their own feature; in the process, they rendered Feedheads useless.

This makes me sad. I only have one thing to say:

Wow, Facebook, how very Microsoft of you.

Nobody's Gonna Read This (and Why That Makes Me Happy)

2008-08-15T17:27:47.886-04:00

Boy do I love the fact that no one reads this blog. And to the few people who are exceptions to that general rule -- thank you for being so supportive!

I just hit two or three web pages in a row (TechCrunch, Digg and the Meebo blog) where each post I read had 80+ comments that reminded me why I rarely ever actually read comments.

Haters, trolls, flamers, spammers -- whatever you want to call them, the internet is ridden with people who are filled with spite and rage. The funny thing is that in no other forum (except for perhaps while driving) are people this cruel to one another. It's just not socially acceptable.

I realize that e-hate isn't a new problem: in fact, it dates back to the early days of UseNet, Netiquette and the ol' "do we allow AOLer's on the internet" debate. While doing some fact-checking on wikipedia, I was really amused to read about Godwin's Law, which sums up what I'm talking about better than I ever could: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

We all know the Kathy Sierra story. I'm glad she had a thick enough skin to re-emerge in the blogging world and on Twitter because the world is a better place with her contributions than it is without them.

We all remember The Great Sarah Lacy Twitter Massacre of SXSW 2008. I recently met Sarah at a tech event in DC and, believe it or not, she doesn't have horns, literally or figuratively.

Jason Calacanis recently "retired" from blogging. When I read his post, I immediately thought that it was just a PR stunt, but I'm beginning to realize that I can sympathize with his viewpoint. I really don't want to ever be an A-list blogger or "internet famous" because it's just like painting a big target on your own ass.

I love my family and close friends, I love the physical neighborhood in which I live and I love the virtual networks that have developed around my career and my passions for the past 15 years or so that I've been using the internet.

But honestly, a big part of me doesn't want anyone else to read this. Not because I don't take criticism well. (I don't, but then again nobody does.) I just wish some of the same general rules that apply to social interactions -- at say, a cocktail party, a baseball game or at the supermarket -- would apply to the internet.

Comments welcome. Just be nice, ok?

Are Twitter Replies Fundamentally Broken?

2009-01-31T01:31:27.599-05:00

Has anyone noticed that Twitter replies are fundamentally broken? Or, I should say, at least the "Replies" *tab* is jacked.

This isn't another "Twitter is down" post -- this is about a feature that doesn't work as it's designed.

As far as I can tell, replies to me only end up in my "Replies" tab if my Twitter account name (@bucchere) is the first token in the tweet. Yet a lot of people reply to multiple people or use the "@" notation in context, e.g. "I'm playing tennis with @bucchere."

That "reply," although it's clearly got my name in it, won't end up under my replies tab. Oops.

In The Social Collective, any time an @ token is found, it stores the message as a reply to . Isn't that how Twitter should work as well?

Has anyone else noticed this? Is anyone else annoyed like I am by this obviously broken "feature?" WTF?

There is a workaround, but it's kludgey. You can use Summize (now located at search.twitter.com) to search for @ (or just if you like). I did this, then ingested the resulting RSS feed into Google Reader and now I go there instead of to my Replies tab in Twitter. FAIL.

[Update: This is now fixed. Yay, Twitter!]

New Video: Demo of Conference Social Application

2008-08-05T10:56:29.681-04:00

This is a 30-minute clip from the general session at BEA Participate from back in May. Jay Simons and I demo the social application that bdg built for the conference.


BEA Participate 2008 Social Application Demo from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

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