Mårten Mickos

Mårten is wonderful. SteveB and I just bumped into Mårten and his lovely (and equally brilliant) wife Anicka at the San Jose Airport. They were on there way to Phoenix to celebrate with MySQL..errr…new Sun execs. We were all delayed. Every time I speak with Mårten he impresses me. Now that I’ve met Anicka I’ll tell you I think she is even cooler. 🙂 Anyway, in usual Mårten form he made me laugh my ass off, one particularly choice quote, which for his sake I’ll not put into context was: “It feels good, like when you pee in your pants…it’s warm.”

Data Sharing Summit is Back

Main Page – Data Sharing Summit
The Data Sharing Summit is back, and bigger.

We received such a positive response to the Data Sharing Summit in September, 2007. And, given the ongoing emergence of different data sharing initiatives, such the finalization of the OpenID2 spec, emerging Open Social and other social graph API’s, the 1.0 release of the Higgins Framework, as dataportability.org, Social Networking Portability, FOAF and XFN as standards gaining traction, DiSO, MT activity feeds, etc. we decided that it was a good time to hold another summit.

Our purpose is to provide gathering spaces in which all parties can work together on the challenge of data sharing. We create the agenda the day it happens. It is about getting things done and figuring out the tough problems – there is no committee deciding who does or does not get to ‘present’ it is about breaking up and really diving in figuring out the solutions and building the consensus to get adoption.

We are pleased to announce the following two Data Sharing events:

* The Data Sharing Workshop, April 18 – 19 at the SFSU, Downtown Campus.

* The Data Sharing Summit, May 15, at the Computer History Museum.

I attended the first DSS last year. It was valuable, fun, and, with Kaliya as the facilitator, very well organized. I recommend it highly; although, I do not believe I’ll be able to make it this year I would merrily were my schedule to permit.

UNC vs. Duke in three frames

To the goal.

I was never really into Basketball when I attended UNC. It just seemed strangely jingoistic, but now I find myself oddly proud of being a UNC Alum when basketball season comes around. I’m not yet painting myself Carolina Blue or anything…or even watching the full game for that matter, but this photo does make me grin. Not only does Dook have a crappy Computer Science dept relative to UNC, but apparently they have a crappy basketball team in comparison too. 🙂 What three frames could show UNC punking Duke in Computer Science…hrmm…

MindTouch technology and progress report

I’m cross-posting this one for those friends and family who don’t read the MindTouch blog (all of you). I’m just so damn proud of what we’ve achieved. 🙂

Technology image

Over the past few days I’ve been grinding away on the most comprehensive written explanation of MindTouch’s technology completed to date, at least, high level laymen explanation. I finished it today and then Steve polished it and added a couple sections.

Technology – MindTouch
MindTouch is the developer of Dream and Deki Wiki. Dream is a Distributed REST Application Manager that Deki Wiki is built on. Deki Wiki is a wildly popular wiki, but it is much more than just a wiki. In fact, Deki Wiki is a wiki interface to a composition of loosely coupled web services that serve as a distributed application platform. Meaning, users of Deki Wiki get the immediate value of a wiki: improved collaboration around text, file, and email, but are also able to connect and mashup systems, databases, external services, and Web 2.0 applications in the form of composite applications and data mashups. This is achieved while still allowing a site administrator, presumably an enterprise IT professional, to provide governance of the data and services that users can access. The end result is a user-centric interface to data that is dynamically generated from data silos and the ability to create business user specific applications (situational applications).

I encourage everyone to read the full write-up. The quote above is just the abstract and the article should be accessible even to the less technical reader. I’m amazed at how far ahead we are of anyone else in this emerging space. Our technology is easily a couple years ahead of anyone else and there are some very big companies entering this space including IBM, BEA, SAP, etc. I know we have a brilliant team, but in comparison to the big boys our resources are just a drop of water in an vast sea.

I frequently marvel at what we’ve built, but what I find even more amazing is how we’re dominating the market. Primarily because I’ve always known we have a team of amazing engineers, but I guess I never realized just how damn good we are about getting the word out. Case in point, there isn’t any vendor that is seeing the kind of distribution and adoption that MindTouch is driving. To be honest it is shocking when one realizes how much more market penetration MindTouch has. I knew we could build some bleeding edge technology, but I hadn’t thought we would be equally successful in marketing it to the extent and as quickly as we have managed. Especially since it’s been entirely organic. People find our software by searching for “MindTouch” and “Deki Wiki”. Our SEO is atrocious. Anyway, if you look at only our download stats at Sourceforge you’ll see we’re driving around 1100-1200 downloads a day. It is important to note that this only accounts for a portion of our total distribution. Deki Wiki is now in several build systems and other people are regularly redistributing our software from places other than Sourceforge. MindTouch Deki Wiki is being distributed well over 2,000 times a day! There is no other vendor even remotely close to this in our space. What about adoption? Well, I looked at some stats earlier this week and I was stunned by our total count of unique users. That is to say, it was more positive than I ever imagined. 🙂 Of course, we can only count a percentage of the total unique users of Deki Wiki, but we have a really good idea what percentage we’re counting. As I said, I was stunned and very very happy with what we’ve accomplished in this first year and half of Deki Wiki being public. I will announce these numbers at a later date.

Now it’s time for the obligatory “thank you”s. Credit to the Gardeners, these are the folks that have been spreading the word. It certainly wasn’t due to any PR or advertising efforts on our part because MindTouch just began these campaigns near the end of last year. So, MindTouch users and customers please continue to spread the word and we’ll continue to make kick ass software.

The Pulse of Open Source

Raven came up with this idea at the OSTT08 conference a couple weeks back to aggregate the tweets of folks who are active in open source. He’s called it The Pulse of Open Source based on the previous Pulse of PDX, which I would like to see used for the creation of a Pulse of San Diego site. Hopefully Nate Ritter or Hober will make this happen. Cool idea. I think thanks are in order for Michael Richardson, and the seemingly ever-present 🙂 Scott Kveton.

Initially I put the list of twitterers at my personal wiki. I think this is only a partial list at this point, but some of you may like to click-through this list and follow folks directly from your twitter account.

Thanks Raven! (and others)