I crashed the DEMO cocktail party. Steve and I presented at DEMO last year and this year I have some friends officially attending the event. It’s in town; so I stopped by. I met some “famous” people who are bloggers. Turns out some “famous” bloggers don’t like technologists who upset their world view. Who knew? Specifically, it seems I’ve angered a prominent blogger, or two, whose day-jobs are as software entrepreneurs. As a result I’ve had a few in the “famous” A-list blogger crowd turned loose on me. Dag nabbit! Periodically I bump into these guys who relish telling me that I’ve insulted their close and personal friend. ?!? How? Because we kick ass? This competitor had a three year head start and we’re squashing them. Hell, if it weren’t for the <back-handed-compliment>prominence of the head of the company no one would even know of them..</back-handed-compliment>

I was introduced to this Shel Israel dude at the party. His name sounded familiar. I wasn’t real sure who he was, but he sounded familiar. I gather he’s well known, maybe even “famous”. He asked what I did. I told him MindTouch develops the world’s greatest wiki. He said something about a competitor. I said: yes, I really appreciate his hard work <sincerely I do>. However, we’re seeing over 600 installs a day to their 20. Shel Israel then made some snide comment about my tattoo. He took the time to point out that tattoos are in violation of Jewish law. I have a tattoo in Hebrew that is sometimes visible. ?!? LOL, You should see the one on my ass, it’s a beaut! 😉 (I thought to myself) He then informed me I insulted his close and personal friend <the competitor> and politely stomped off. I’m summarizing and I’m omitting the B-list blogger who presented me with a shockingly similar exchange and who referenced Shel. Funny stuff really. Anyway, I guess Shel didn’t like the cold hard facts of our 40 to 1 adoption rate differential. Facts suck. I wish everything could be spun. Later that night I approached Shel again and I sincerely tried to make nice. He’s “famous” man! He could make me! Ok, yes my intensity _can_ be misinterpreted. I believe it was. Again the dude was, at best, curt. Indeed the woman standing with us apologized to me. I assume on his behalf.

Graeme and Marc will be covering DEMO. Keep up with the event on their respective blogs. These guys may not act like royalty, but they are class acts and good solid journos. The only insight I have to offer about company’s at te event is that while at the party I met the dudes who are doing FeedHub. Cool concept. I’m testing it out now. We’ll see how well they do this.

Anyway, crashing the party was fun. DEMO is cool. Perhaps I’ll meet you while crashing a party near you. 😉

Photo credit: Brian Solis

Cross post

Tech~Surf~Blog: MindTouch Is Kicking Wiki Butt
When I read an article recently in Information Week that compared various options for content management systems, including wikis, I thought it was strange Mindtouch wasnt included. So, I asked cofounder Aaron Fulkerson, who was equally perplexed. “Were seeing 500 too 600 installations of our software every single day, and yet many in the media dont seem to know us,” he said. Aaronfulkerson “Weve seen 2304% growth in adoption in the last year. And a 1666% growth in just the last three months.” Similar open-source companies, like SugarCRM and Zimbra, he told me, have had $20-30M in investment and drive similar adoption rates to what MindTouch has achieved with just a $3.5M investment to date. I say thats a pretty powerful entrepreneurial story. “Weve achieved the success we have so far by being open, honest, and authentic. We listen to our tribe,” said Fulkerson.

Yes, apparently MindTouch does know how to build community. I think we’ve proven this. Our company’s growth is directly attributable to our ability to build a community around our products. Personally, I’m amazed how quickly we’ve done this. We only just launched Deki Wiki July 25, 2006. We have managed to cultivate a vibrant community in one short year!

To be clear, our ability to build community is largely attributable to our product. However, all the cool community technologies in the world are useless if you’re not honest, authentic and attentive to the wishes of your tribe. We listen to our tribe. They know best.

When I say our product I want to be clear about something. Deki Wiki isn’t MindTouch’s product. It stopped being MindTouch’s product about four months ago when it “hit” big and we went from 50 downloads a day to a few hundred a day. When I say our product I’m including the extended community of users and developers in that ‘our’. In short Deki Wiki belongs to the tribe. MindTouch is only the primary implementer of the tribe’s desires and needs. This tribe has increasingly steered the development of Deki Wiki. Beyond the product road map the tribe has also dictated things like product messaging and pricing. MindTouch is only adapting to the input provided by the tribe.

I was once fond of 60 Minutes. I just watched <time-shifted> the 60 Minutes interview with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad from last Sunday (September 22, 2007) in which Scott Pelley “interviews” Ahmadinejad. What a farce. That wasn’t an interview. This was an attempt to publicly ostracize the radical Ahmadinejad. The result was making this radical anti-semitic Islamic religious nut seem like the moderate and well-reasoned of the two. Pelley you’re a moron! My God. Way to go. You smug prick. Are you working for an Iranian PR firm? You may as well be. Here is the transcript. To fully appreciate it you have to see Pelley’s condescending grin as he proudly proclaims he is “quoting George W. Bush directly for the record” whom he declares to be “without question” a very pious and learned leader. So I inserted learned bit, but it’s certainly implied. It takes a special kind of prick to make Ahmadinejad look rational. When did 60 Minutes become a propaganda mouth piece for the United States? You’ve lost my viewership Pelley. You frickin’ dong.

Taxonomies (hierarchies), folksonomies (tagging), enterprise search, chronologies, RSS, oh my!

Just a quick introductory demo of Deki Wiki.

Bryan Thatcher published his photos of the 9/11 NYC Trade Center attacks for the first time. Bryan lives in NYC. He is the President of Fusebox which is the creator of Empressr. He’s a great guy I often run into at technology conferences and someone I always enjoy speaking with.

Bryan’s photos are powerful. I saw them initially in my Facebook stream. These images immediately grabbed my attention. These force us to remember this horrible event, which can be a good thing, I think. However, I wish we could encapsulate the terror the USA has illegitimately subjected other nations to in an equally simple and powerful set of images. On a day like today I wish Americans would also reflect on the endless war we’ve entered, the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the United States persistent disregard of the Geneva Convention, torture, domestic surveillance, the suspension of Civil Rights and Habeas Corpus, the unprecedented expansion of executive privilege, a complete lack of federal accountability, and Hurricane Katrina. These are all things we Americans should be reflecting on today.

There is a call for a 9/11 General Strike.  I think this is a good first step. What does one do when they wake to find themselves part of the Empire? Obsequiousness  is consent. It makes us all just as guilty as those who stood by as New Orleneans drowned, farmers sold to the US Government are tortured and held indefinitely in Gitmo and other invisible prisons, another hundred thousand innocent Iraqis are starved and killed, and war profiteers with direct connections to the White House reap hundreds of billions in rewards for their manufactured war. We are Americans. This if our government and corporations. We must all individually speak out. We must share our outrage. We must participate in protests and acts of civil disobedience. Otherwise we are complicit. This isn’t a political issue. It’s a human and civil rights issue.

Cross post

Thanks to the generosity and hard work of MindTouch’s thriving open source community, aka the Gardeners, Deki Wiki has been translated to French, German, and Russian. We’re in four languages, enjoy!

This new video is a more concise version of the previous “Live Data Services” video. We’re now referring to this as extensions. This more accurately describes the new feature. Enjoy!

Tara, Ashby, and I visited Cabrillo National Monument last Sunday. The park is located at the tip of the Point Loma peninsula, west of San Diego. In case you didn’t know, in Spanish, “loma” means “hill”. It costs $5 for admittance. Your pass is good for 6 days. Our first visit we stopped by the visitor center and the monument to Cabrillo. He was the first European explorer to set foot on the West Coast of, what is today, the United States. We returned yesterday and reused our pass and this time we hiked about the tidal pool. The park is gorgeous.

After Cabrillo we drove to Ocean Beach, which is near, and grabbed brunch at a restaurant across from the beach that has a children’s play area inside. Ocean Beach is where all the old hippies settled. I dig the town. It reminds me of Santa Cruz. Most folks feel it’s a tad too grungy for their taste and frequent Pacific Beach or La Jolla shores instead.

Activities at Cabrillo National Monument:

Learn about the 16th century explorer that the park is named for.

Hiking. The two-mile Bayside Trail affords spectacular views of San Diego Bay and the city beyond, and takes you through one of the last remaining remnants of coastal sage scrub habitat in the world.

The rocky intertidal area at Cabrillo National Monument is one of the best protected examples of these unique ecosystems in Southern California.

The Lighthouse. It has been reported that it can be seen up to 39 miles away while at sea. It is one of the original eight lighthouses on the West Coast, restored and refurnished to reflect what life was like in the 1800s.

And more…

Resources

• Directions to Cabrillo National Monument
• Official park site
• SDSU resource
• Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo

Deki Wiki just broke the top 100 projects at SourceForge.net! We’re #95 out of 152,449 projects. We’re not even a year old! Holy crap! This is a small thing, but it is validating and is evidence of our growing momentum. Ok, and quite frankly I think it kicks ass. I sent Ethan Galstad an email, who is the author of Nagios and ranked #93, to tell him we're goooona geeet hiiim! 😉 In case you're wondering SourceForge.net bases it's project rank on downloads, site traffic, and various other factors. Thanks to all the Gardeners who are helping to spread the word.