"Web 2.0" and "Web Pi" -- Reject Reality and Substitute Your Own!

In one of his best statements on the fabulous Mythbusters television show, when as often happens (which is the real beauty of the series) one of the experiments doesn't turn out as expected, co-host Adam Savage says: "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Maybe they're moving into computer programming -- lots of myths there -- you can also see them here with "father of Java" James Gosling.

This could be a useful approach to adopt with the currently much-hyped "Web 2.0"with all the articles being written about it, all the claims being made by all and sundry, all the AJAX toolkits appearing out of the woodwork, and the lack of any real agreement about exactly what it all means. Mix that in with the "acronym soup" that we're faced with these days -- SOAP, WSDL, SOA and ESB, WSDL, BPEL, and a myriad others -- and it would be a brave person who claimed to understand what it all means.

CIOs and other IT management therefore have a really tough time ahead of them to make sense of it all and decide which parts of the jumble should be used to further the success of their organizations. An interesting recent article by Edward Cone at Ziff Davis' CIO Insight magazine discusses this: Web 2.0 Reality Check

I encourage you to read the entire article, but a few points made in it are:

• CIOs in the services era will face their share of problems not only on the technology side but, just as importantly, in dealing with the cultural changes these services will bring to every organization.
  
• The whole lengthy cycle of software projects is now on Internet time, and woe to the CIO who fails to keep up.
  
• Of all the issues raised by the anticipated service wave ... none are more pressing than the changes in culture necessitated by the new regime.
  
• Meeting this demand requires a new way of managing tech projects
  
• A danger in this situation is that IT can lose its relationship with the business.
  
• IT definitely needs to think differently, because the users want more with services. But if the users think they can do it without IT, they're crazy.
  
• One of the biggest headaches with applications on demand is integration with other programs.
  
• Tying everything together right also has implications for security, especially identity management.
  
• Offline capability is still very important for users. They want productivity maintained if services go down. ... And go down they do.

Much food for thought here.

Joel Spolsky comments in his inimitable fashion that the Architecture Astronauts Are Back with their "meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite" and "The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness."

Today's environment is certainly a far cry from the overnight batch runs, fed by punched cards and generating boxes and boxes of printouts, which was still in vogue when I started with IBM in 1970. New-fangled IBM 3270 CRT "green screens" were starting to be introduced in early-adopter mainframe customer accounts, offering direct data entry and immediate display of results and being seen as the wave of the future. We didn't realize it then, but life really was simple in the good old days.

I've read opinion articles predicting "Web 3.0" -- even "Web 2.5" -- and ever onwards to "Web 4.0" and beyond.

I reckon that it's all actually heading asymptotically towards "Web Pi" or "Web π" -- you know, Pi, the transcendental and irrational number (with a value of roughly 3.14159 26536 to a mere ten decimal places).

We're on our merry way towards "Web Pi in the sky" you could say! The decimal places go on endlessly -- which is what seems to be happening with all of the opinionating and soothsaying about the future of the Web and where information technology is heading. We'll never ever reach our target, but this will provide more opportunity for the technobabble to pour forth and inundate us all.

And if all the word traffic about "Web 2.0" isn't enough, there's another plethora of gobbledegook related to Web Services Architecture ... So many standards have arisen that they need to be referred to generically as WS-* (where the asterisk presumably represents an infinite number)!

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STYLE NOTE: the above diatribe was inspired by the British TV series "Grumpy Old Men". I'm actually pretty positive about it all, at the broad level, but the nitty-gritty details get pretty painful at times. I see that the inventor of the Internet seems to be pretty happy where it's all heading too.
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UPDATE [30 May 2006]:
Richard MacManus in his Read/WriteWeb weblog has recently commented about the Top Ten Underserved Web 2.0 Markets and in that article points out the following Web 2.0 catalogs: eConsultant's Web 2.0 Directory and Sacred Cow Dung - All Things Web 2.0 -- but nobody yet seems to have started on a Web 3.0 catalog, how bitterly disappointing!

Perchance to happen upon Serendipity

I just happened upon Scot Berinato's nice little piece In Praise of Serendipity and couldn't agree more:

"Turn off the BlackBerry for a while. Wander—literally or in our minds—with no particular destination. Embrace a little inefficiency and the possibility of greatness that comes with it. Let apples fall on our heads."

For example, five or six years ago, I had a chance meeting with an acquaintance which led to a long and fruitful consulting assignement. In contrast, several months of marketing had not come up with any significant assignments or sales. And like Kekulé I have sometimes woken from a dream with a great idea, have had an inspiration while taking a shower, and have come across key information while casually browsing a book or magazine or while surfing the Web.

How about you? How much has happenstance and serendipity benefited you in your life and work?

It's the old story of "perspiration versus inspiration" ... You must be ready to recognize the occasional serendipitous event when it occurs and welcome it with open arms!

Great Walls -- of Confusion, and "Web 2.0"

If you've been pondering where the Web is heading, then a good round-up of information plus thought-provoking views and opinions can be found in the Web 2.0 Journal, and particularly those of its editor-in-chief Dion Hinchcliffe, such as Web 2.0 and the Five Walls of Confusion or Thinking in Web 2.0: Sixteen Ways

And if you're a fan of usability expert Jakob Nielsen (a favorite author of mine), why not review a few of his articles, including Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 where he mentions Web 2.0 in passing:

This year's list of top problems clearly proves the need to get back to Web design basics. There's much talk about new fancy "Web 2.0" features on the Internet industry's mailing lists and websites, as well as at conferences. But users don't care about technology and don't especially want new features. They just want quality improvements in the basics.

You really must read the entire article! And while you're at his site, take a look at Durability of Usability Guidelines where he rightly points out that basic usability features don't change all that much over decades.

If you want to delve a lot further into some other peoples' opinion on all this Web 2.0 and blogging stuff, then take a look at Andrew Keen's Web 2.0 - The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It's worse than you think or Nicholas Carr's The new narcissism or Neil Ward-Dutton's Ecosystem vs egosystem to quote just a few.

A Blog Post A Day Keeps the Doctor Away: Really?

I do like being part of the blogosphere, but its sheer size and hyper-exponential growth are rather intimidating, aren't they? It's a vast world for Internet dilettantes: a place for pleasant diversions and for endlessly stumbling across interesting and useful stuff.

Thus, in the one blogging community that I follow -- that of the of Lotus Notes and Domino -- I just serendipituosly discovered The Sickos and DominoBlogs.com (the latter enabling you to add your own blog to the list of Notes/Domino blogs).

My postings tend to be rather sporadic, because I find so many other things to corner my interest: things in the application development world (Eclipse and MyEclipse, NetBeans, Sun Java Studio 2, Oracle JDeveloper, Microsoft .NET plus Visual Studio 2005, to name some), browsers (IE7 and various others with tabbing support, RSS feeds, etc), Desktop Search (particularly free ones such as Windows Desltop Search, Exalead one:desktop, Blinkx, Copernic Desktop Search, and several others). AJAX, Python, Jython, SMIL, RSS and other types of feed, nd lots more ... not to mention keeping up with happening in the Lotus Notes and Domino arena.

Therefore I only post blog articles in fits and starts, when the spirit takes me. One of Jakob Nielsen's points in Weblog Usability: Top Ten Design Mistakes in Blogs (number 7) is "pick a publication schedule and stick to it. If you usually post daily but sometimes let months go by without new content, you'll lose many of your loyal -- and thus most valuable -- readers." Oh well, rules are made to be broken!

Specifically, I only get motivated to create a posting when I reckon that I've something useful to say that might be a bit different from what anybody else has said and that could be of some real interest and value to others. And this could be a few days or a few weeks or even over a month since my previous posting.

Are you a blogaholic: if you run a blog or two or three, do you get withdrawal symptoms or feel guilty when you don't make daily postings? If so, then you need to get a new life! And if you must make a frequent postings, keep them in mind that a lot of readersus are not in the least interested in trivia: we don't want to know that you had trouble getting out of bed today, what your dog's foibles are, or any equally mundane or inane matter that merely pollutes and poisons the blogosphere. (Talking about poisons: I certainly hope that you're not approaching the extreme posiiton of the Japanese girl described in the article Girl keeps blog on poisoning mother -- then you really do need help, and fast!)

When I joined the IT industry in 1970, it was only a visionary-cum-science-fiction-writer like Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or George Orwell who would have foreseen the Internet and its usage as we have it today in the early part of the 21st century. Things that are already commonplace in many parts of the world (but certainly not all of them yet) like broadband connectivity and interactions via blogging, wikis and podcasting all would have been wildly futuristic concepts.

As the saying goes, there's "a time and tide in the affairs of men" -- and at times the tide flows very fast indeed. Is blogging in general and personal blogging in particular going to peak soon? Is the blogging bubble about to burst, as discussed in the Chicago Tribune article Bloggy, we hardly knew ye? This article claims that there are now 20 million blogs worldwide, while Stuart Luman in Linkology writes that there are 27 million of them, showing how they might relate to one another by taking the most-linked-to 50 blogs and mapping their connections.

So if there are 27 millions blogs in early 2006 (or perhaps only 20 million of them), how many will there be by the end of 2006, the end of 2007, etc? There are already far too many blogs to cope with, not to mention RSS feeds, podcasts and all the rest. Do blogs have long-term value and, if so, what is the value? Alex Krupp, a student at Cornell University, expresses the view at http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/172278.htm that:

Few people know that the first webpage ever created, Tim's home page, was actually a blog. Blogs are the epitome of web 1.0. They focus so much on the individual that even Ayn Rand would blush. At their best they can be truly uplifting and inspiring, but on average there are some serious problems with blogs as they exist today. Blogging will be around forever, but I think that personal blogs will be dead in another two or three years.

and he goes on to talk about Web 2.0 and collaborative blogging and more:

• Web 1.0 is about allowing individuals to create and share ideas
• Web 2.0 is about allowing groups to create and share ideas
• Web 3.0 is about allowing societies to create and share ideas
• Web 4.0 is the singularity

Plenty of interesting times ahead, for sure. It would be nice to be sure about what the winner and loser technologies will be, what will last and what will disappear.

To conclude, if you only add a new blog article when you have something valuable to contribute, that's okay -- no feelings of guilt necessary if you don't post every day!

Quality always wins out over quantity. And as the sheer number of blogs reaches 30 million and then 40 million and still keeps growing, a few less postings by you or me or anybody else certainly won't be missed.

The brrreeeport blogging experiment

Read Scobleizer (Robert Scoble's blog) to find out about this experiment.

Try a search using Google -- or other search engine -- on this specific manufactured term: brrreeeport

And, while you're thinking about what this all might mean, take a look at some definitiiions of critical theory ... http://www.google.com.au/search?q=define%3A+critical+theory&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

And finally, here's a link to BlogCode.com ... "a fast, easy and intuitive source of blog recommendations based on the StoryCode.com model."

It all seems to be self-fulfilling and "incestuous" to me!

Ray Ozzie's new (Microsoft) weblog

I see that "father of Lotus Notes" Ray Ozzie has started off a new weblog at MSN Spaces and in it has just outlined a very interesting major extension of the RSS feed concept called Simple Sharing Extensions (or SSE). So it may be that the acronynym gets yet another meaning, namely "Really Simple Sharing."

This could prove to be a real winner, if it catches on and can be made to work effortlessly -- particularly if it becomes an open standard.

If done right, SSE could provide a generic and non-proprietary form of two-way synchronization between any two sources.

I'm a big fan of the excellent Lotus Notes replication model (particularly since Release 4, when replication became sensitive to field-level changes not just document-level changes). Notes replication of course is quite proprietary, so it would be great if SSE provides a form of non-proprietary replication between foreign sources.

Ray points out the draft spec for SSE (somewhat abstruse as are all such specification documents), and Frequently Asked Questions (this is quite informative).

Collaboration competition - Microsoft versus Lotus in 2005/2006

Yesterday I attended a Microsoft seimanr here in Melbourne (Australia) and it looks like Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 are going to be pretty competitlve in many regards. Microsoft seems to be very happy about SQL Server 2005's performance (against IBM's DB2) and equally with the tight integration with their other products (Office, CRM, etc).

There were a few glimpeses of Micrososft "Office 12" due late in 2006 or thereabouts. It seems that the Office underpiinngs have been significantly reworked and Office 12 will have some nice new collaborative features. Pity about having to wait another year or so before it's let loose upon us!

Meanwhile Lotus Notes/Domino 7 has shipped and IBM has the next "Hannover" release well into development. There's a lot of life left in Notes and Domino.

I've ben much closer to Lotus Notes/Domino than to the Microsoft products, so have been doing some research to increase my understanding of the features and positiong of the latter. Here are a few articles that I've looked at recently which give a nice independent summary of the Microsoft collaboration product range:

1. Increase Efficiency With Collaboration [using Microsoft technologies] - September 2004
2. Microsoft's Expanding Collaboration Strategy - December 2004
3. Microsoft Sets Its Sights on Collaboration - October 2005

On the surface, it seems to me that doing things the Microsoft way you have to cobble together a wider range of server products that IBM does with the base Lotus Notes/Domino with maybe a couple of others (such as Sametime). And the author of the third article makes a point about the more unified development model of the Lotus products.

Competitoni is good for us all: it's great to see two of the big players working so hard to bring provide productivity features. If the large attendance at yeasterday's seminar is any indication -- and this was just for Melbourne, it's probably the same all around the globe -- Microsoft certainly is managing to generate considerable interest, despite the regular slippages in their product release dates.

What improves your skills as a developer?

Chet Haase, Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) Client Architect at Sun Microsystems, discusses development of the Java client, what can improve your skills as a developer, and what you can do when you feel stumped by a problem ... http://java.sun.com/developer/Meet-Eng/haase/

Serendipitous slitherings

I've recently watched the two snakey movies on cable TV, "Anaconda" followed by "Anacondas: the Hunt for the Blood Orchid."

This led me to think back to my chemistry (industry and teaching) days, prior to getting into computing. I clearly remember one particular organic chemistry lecture about the 19th cenrury chemist Kekulé who woke up one morning from a dream in which a snake was eating its own tail. From this he deduced the structure of the benzene molecule (a.k.a. benzine), the now-familiar hexagonal ring of six carbon atoms that is the foundation of the so-called aromatic organic compounds.

The Ouroboros (link to many Google images)

I rarely am able to recall my own dreams -- whatever that tells you about me! However, a few days ago I did so for a change. It was a very innocuous dream: no hungry snakes, just a database design solution that had been baffling me for several months. I'm left wondering why this solution came to me "out of the blue" quite a few weeks after I last been actively working on the design and not getting anywhere?

This sort of thing has happened to me a couple of times before. The workings of the mind are indeed strange and wonderful. What on the surface appears serendipitous proabaly isn't so below the surface, in the nether regions of the brain where such problems are solved by some mysterious process.

I'd be interested to hear from you if anything like this has heppened to you (IT design problems, or whatever).

Once every 3 months?

"Security and business continuity plans should be tested at least once every three months to keep them updated."

So IDC recommends in this article: Asia-Pac firms unprepared for IT threats -- and they comment that many companies "may still be susceptible to disruptions from security breaches or natural disasters."

Which of course leads me to give you a not-so-gentle nudge! Have YOU have been carrying out such regular tests, and modifying your backup and recovery procedures to cope with changing circumstances?

UPDATE (17 November 2005):
Apani comments on a Harris Interactive poll about backup frequency: "Everyone knows that they should back up the data on their computers, but how many actually do it? When was the last time you did it? Out of the 2,300 US adults who were polled in late July of this year 685 (roughly 33%) didn’t back up at all…. And the majority of respondents who did back up, only perform this task once a year." Click here to read the article: You know you should... I hope that businesses would poll better than this! (Perhaps not too much better?)