Pete, Corey and I attended LinuxWorld last week. A good time was had by all. I bumped into Ethan, the author of Nagios. It was good to see him again. I was surprised that given his recent modeling boon he doesn't yet have an entourage. Soon I'm sure.

MindTouch had a booth in the Novell pavilion. As always we blew some minds with Deki Wiki and dropped some jaws. Traffic to the booth was great and we set another one-day record for downloads of Deki Wiki. Aside from the big spike we're now averaging around 500 downloads a day and still growing strong.

The show should have been called Novell-World. Novell was every where. I enjoyed re-connecting with Frank Rego and Josh. These guys are great. Also, I got a chance to meet Mattias, the PM for SLES. Seemed like a good guy. Much thanks to Novell for helping us to have a presence at LinuxWorld, you guys are wonderful.

Highlights. Well, meeting the dudes from OpenVZ was cool. Pete and I got a killer OpenVZ shirt. I'll Flickr a photo of it later. It has the commands for creating, status-ing, and taking down a VZ. Cool stuff. In general I did well on the tshirt front. I only made it to a couple sessions. I prefer to man the booth. As always, I really enjoy to folks about Deki Wiki. The best of those I attended was a talk on GPLv3 with a dude from the Software Freedom Law Center. I enjoyed meeting Robin Miller, and Peter Galli from eWeek whom I just happened into lunch with, reconnecting with Ross from SF.net and I was stoked to get a Debian shirt (etcha-sketch model). Pete was super enthusiastic about a couple VMware presentations. If only I had a shot at their IPO. 🙂 They have such a compelling technology.

Overall summary of LinuxWorld: more suits than I expected, but I'm really glad to have been there. How else would I have met Amazon's head of S3?

I spent last week riding a motorcycle about Florida and watching dolphins. Tara, Ashby, and I had a blast in Daytona, FL with our much needed family vacation. I’ll put up a write up as soon as I have time.

Our new VM is available for download. www.getdekiwiki.com. Based on the big spike in downloads in the last few hours it seems many of you have already noticed. We also have new support plans and pricing. You’ll find these are very affordable. Please buy. 🙂

I’ll be at LinuxWorld with PeteE and Corey for the next few days. We’re in the Novell pavilion. If any of you are here. Stop by and see us.

Timed for OSCON07, Deki Wiki v1.8.1, release “Hayes”, is now stabalized and available to the public. Find out more at the official “Hayes” release page, the new Deki Wiki page, or peruse the new Install and Upgrade Guide.

I just about laughed myself out of my chair this morning. I visited Sourceforge.net, only to be proven wrong on a comment I made here. When lo and behold…who do I see? I see Ethan’s handsome visage staring longingly back out me! WHOA! I did a double take. I then proceeded to LMFAO. The advertisement in question is to the right. I guess Ethan is now a software model! I always told him he was the most handsome open source programmer I’ve ever met. I guess this was a Splunk ad. Ethan, will you do ads for MindTouch? Please?

Ethan is awesome. When I lived in MN he and I lectured on open source at the University and we also made an ill-fated attempt to get an open source community lab off the ground. I should mention PeteE was also instrumental in our failed attempt. 🙂 In our defense, we only had about a year before I bailed for warmer climes.

I still stand by my claim that PeteE is an open source developer poster child and I have photographic evidence of it here.

I would be remiss if I didn’t share what little link-love my blog can muster with Vivek at StartupSquad.

While I had expected the usual addition of widgets into the wiki platform, I was in for a surprise. The new build, which is branded as MindTouch Hayes, comes with a powerful new service-oriented extension model. Instead of being mere content consumers, MindTouch customers can now have access to composite applications by federating applications or data across without bothering about the OS, code language,… —StartupSquad | MindTouch Hayes – Wikis become services enabled

I noted Mashable has Roy‘s Tabulas listed as networks you can add to your profile. Roy’s site gets about 1M views a month and has over 100,000 registered members. It’s one of Roy’s many side projects outside MindTouch. It’s had slow and steady growth. Aside from writing the app and adding a feature once in a blue moon the only thing growing the community is the quality of the application. Although, Roy might laugh at that statement. 🙂 Anyway, I was curious. How does Tabulas, a quiet little organic community stack up against something like Pownce. According to the graphic you see here, surprisingly well. Of course, these are totally different apps, but I thought it was interesting. Perhaps Pownce will now have an organic growth curve. Then again uncov, my new favorite blog, has this:

Pownce is a web service that lets you “share stuff with your friends”. Translated into non-retard speak, this means “a website where you can go to put notes and files and shit up for other users”. What was that? You remember FTP too? Yeah, from nineteen seventy-fucking one? Now it has pastel colors, and it’s invite-only. – uncov / pownce

🙂 Uncov rules.

The Wiki has become the collaborative writing tool of Web 2.0. Wikipedia and its related properties have lead the charge, and behind them have come a slew of competing and complementary products. Unfortunately for most, very few of these products had enough innovative new features to live up to MediaWiki’s (the engine behind Wikipedia) fame.

Recently, I have come across what I feel is the next big step in Wiki. Instead of relying exclusively on text, Steve Bjorg and Aaron Fulkerson are turning the Wiki into a web services platform. I had a chance to chat with both of them and they explained the newest iteration on their Deki Wiki platform, “Hayes”. — Steve Spalding | How To Learn About Deki Wiki

Very cool.

I *love* community publishing. One of my core beliefs is that newspaper web sites need to be much more of a dialogue. But building a site with essentially just community-publishing tools and calling it “hyper-local” seems a little lazy/crazy to us. – Rob Curley: LoudonExtra.com Launches

Rob Curley is a bad ass mofo.

In a previous post inspired by Pulver’s I stated: “Goodbye LinkedIn. Hello Facebook.” Some folks, such as Matt Sponer, fear their true self being exposed. I understand this. Matt says:

Hi Aaron,

I agree that Facebook is a wonderful way to keep up with people.

However, I feel that using it for both business and personal online social play can degrade one or both uses. It forces one to choose:

1) A less playful and more distant online tone with your friends and family. No slinging virtual poo with your little cousin. Your personal use of the site suffers.
–or–
2) Potentially inappropriate personal information being mixed into your professional online presense. Your coworkers can read both your blog and see your little cousins feces icons on the same page.

What do you think? How will you handle this?

Matt

My response to this is:

I think you are absolutely correct. Most people will not feel comfortable exposing their playful side to their business network. Personally, this is a concern that I do not share. I’m very open with who I am. My professional record speaks for itself. If someone dislikes my personality we probably wouldn’t make a good professional fit.

There is an even more important point hidden in this post. I’m reposting comments that were made in Facebook. Platform or not, Facebook will fall if it does not open.

This is hysterically funny. No, it is not a joke. This is a real app. “Feed your spam to sharks!” Yeeeaaahhh!!