Free Software Linux

WPBook

So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs).

A few weeks back I was part of a panel at North Shore Web Geeks which they titled The Great CMS Debate.

John Eckman, Jay Batson, Marc Amos, and Tom Herer. Photo (c) Trev Stair

Washington, D.C. — March 3, 2010 —The Open Identity Exchange (OIX) www.openidentityexchange.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting an Internet-scale trust ecosystem, announced today it will commence work on an open government pilot under the requirements set forth by the ICAM Trust Framework Adoption Process (TFAP) established by U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

Last Thursday over 60 OpenID advocates met at Sears World Headquarters in Chicago for a full day of discussions on progress to date and future plans for OpenID deployment and utilization. There is a summary of the event on the OpenID Foundation wiki. See Twitter coverage of the event with the hash tag #openidux

Who Attended:
Companies represented included Sears, NPR, PBS, AARP, MTV, Fox News, Universal Music Group, Kodak, Tribune Interactive, White Pages, OpenTable, Scout24/Deutsche Telecom, GameStop, Bank of America, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Microsoft, PayPal, Facebook, JanRain, Exact Target, Ping Identity, and others.

In a time when many tradeshows are experiencing lower then normal attendance the 8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 8x) had record attendance this past weekend in Los Angeles. I was there exhibiting and conducting a community training day for Zenoss and was very impressed by not only the quality of the program but the enthusiasm of the attendees.

Here are some of the highlights:

Happy to announce (a bit late, I suppose, in that the event is sold out - though folks coming who don’t get to see the debate can still join us for networking and beer) that I’ll be moderating the Great CMS Debate this Thursday, Feb 25th, 7:00pm, upstairs at The Grog in lovely downtown Newburyport.

The event will be hosted by North Shore Web Geeks and sponsored (as in some free beer) by The Atom Group.

If you are involved in analyst relations you will find this funny.

Technorati Tags: analyst relations, Forrester, Gartner, Redmonk

Sounds like cloud computing to me

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, Humor

Latest cloud news and links:

Puppet versus Chef: 10 reasons why Puppet wins

John contends that Puppet has a bigger head start and that Chef has a huge gap to close or remain a tool for the Ruby on Rails cloud crowd.

Puppet, Chef, Dependencies and Worldviews

Last fall, Redmonk analyst Michael Coté published a paper (PDF) noted how a lot of companies were scaling back big conferences and shift to informal self-organizing unconferences like BarCamp or Mashup Camp. I actually prefer these conferences to the normal circus style tradeshows driven by marketing dollars and hype.

Working through beta testing on WPBook 1.5.

Let’s see if this gets into my stream. I’m testing publishing to the author’s stream, as well as to pages which have granted stream.publish permission.

The biggest challenge so far is keeping track of who those users are, since WPBook doesn’t currently store any info about who is using it.

This tweet from former MySQL AB CEO Mårten Mickos caught my eye. It shows a trend of increased demand for MySQL and PostgresSQL expertise while job postings on job websites for  those with Oracle and Ingres expertise declined.

Open Source for America just posted a video on how open source can play a role in U.S. government on YouTube. Open Source for America(OSFA) is a non-profit organization with the following charter:

22 companies including NTT docomo, KDDI, Sony, NEC, etc. have formed “ID Platform Federation Forum”. With JPY12 billion (approx. US$1.3M) in funding from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the forum members will initiate the experiment, based largely on OpenID, by the end of the year. The forum itself is operated by Nomura Research Institute (NRI).

Mobile content and commerce has flourished in Japan after the deployment of mobile browser communication for the mobile phones in Japan. As of 2008, it amounts to JPY1,352,400,000,000 (approx. US$15M) and showing 17% growth even under stagnant market conditions [1]. It has become so important that it is often said that a service will not be viable without mobile web support.

In response to the newly enacted “Fund Transfer and Payment Services Act of Japan”, the OpenID Foundation Japan has announced the formation of the “Payment Working Group (WG)” on December 8, 2009. The Payment WG consists of 14 member companies and aims to create whitepapers on ”Guidelines for Secure Management of Information”, “Guidelines for Outsourcing” and “Guidelines for Identity Verification and Authentication” as well as the best practice and profiling document for implementing fund transfer and payment service built on OpenID.