It all started at Feb 13, 2003 and it became true love. I admit, sometimes I cared too little about you, at other times my love for you was hot and intense. I was always true to you and I cannot imagine life without you. We both have gone through an evolution in the past 4 years. We made new friends and are always happy to meet some more. Such is life, such is blogging.
Yours forever,
Sandro
Arrived in Badajoz yesterday for the Free Software World Conference. Right now I sit in the empty “Sala Azul” with Görkem.
The venue looks nice, plenty of people. Unfortunately, all talks in Spanish yet, even Richard Stallman’s.
Just met Erkan, who leads the Pardus project. That’s a Linux distribution mainly for the Turkish market and it’s financed by the Turkish government. They pay 15 full time Linux devs – seems like the largest state run Linux developers group. Will write more about that project later.
In the realm of the tOSSad project, a survey on usability proved that some of the most popular Open Source software is indeed user-friendly.
The survey included the following projects and quite a large number of respondents from across Europe answered the questionnaires:
The report’s results in short are that these projects provide:
Most of the participants have used the relevant software for more than 1 year, hence they seem to know why they like it.
The survey includes some interesting charts with the details. Here are some of the most interesting points:
76% say because it is for free, 60% because they like the idea of Free Software/Open Source. The 76% seem quite obvious to me – the world is greedy. I would not have expected the 60%, that’s a lot of ideological support!
75% say because of tabbed browsing. There must be a reason why IE7 got that too…
Easy to install?
(please read the survey for the various related charts)
Easy say 68% concerning OpenOffice.org, 78% Firefox. The numbers are different concerning GNU/Linux: only 16% say that it is very easy to install hardware. That shows to me that the installation routines of software which is not directly interacting with hardware are much easier to handle. It would have been interesting, if the survey also had asked whether a survey participant is happy with the Plug and Play capabilities of MS Window or thinks that GNU/Linux works better.
Disclaimer: I am a member of the tOSSad Steering Committee on behalf of eZ Systems.
There is one flamenco CD in my collection which I like most. It’s actually modern flamenco, with various influences from other music styles (mostly Jazz), created and sung by a real grandmaster of flamenco: Enrique Morente. The CD I am talking about is Lorca, a musical version of some poems of Spains famous poet Federico GarcÃa Lorca.
Each song is unique, dense, intelligent, emotional. Though I don’t understand the lyrics (my Spanish is just too poor), I can feel the poems solely through Morente’s music. I’d love to see him live one day.
There are a lot of good resources out there which tell you how to blog successfully. I have recently started to collect them on my Wiki page “Successful Blogging”, which I will update regularly. Unfortunately, they rarely tell you how to cope with the evolution of a Weblog.
At February 13th, it will be 4 years that I posted my first blog entry – I am still lovin’ it! Let me tell you about some of the changes I had to deal with in those 4 years and what you can do about them.
The most important changes were:
Points 1. and 2. lead to the fact that I repeatedly lost some link love, especially on Google and Technorati, because Trackbacks and Pingbacks got lost. Just recently, I managed to import all posts I wrote in my first 2 years of blogging – it’s amazing to see that some of them made it back to be listed among the most visited pages in my site stats (mostly referrals from Google).
What’s most unfortunate is that I could not recover comments to old postings. Well, I could, manually, but that would mean a lot of work. Lost comments is like lost friends.
If you want to avoid the same mistakes, make sure
When it comes to point 3., it has a lot to do with point 4.: The level of active blogging correlated with what I did. I blogged more actively while I was self-employed, simply to raise awareness which would lead to consulting contracts. After getting employed, there were times when I was simply buried with work that did not require me to blog.
Concerning point 4., I believe that there is nothing you can do about the shifting focus of what you write about. I even think that Weblogs are there to show how individuals change over time and how their interests change.
If I narrowed down my blog to one specific topic (e.g. Open Source ECM), it would not be in sync with my personality. My general interest is in being open and combining Open Source software with the knowledge society. That’s a rather broad topic, but also a thrilling conjunction where most new things happen these days.
The only problem I see is that my tagcloud does not reflect the change of interest. Some tags (e.g. “pear”) appear much too prominent, although they are outside of my scope of interest these days. Hm, I should get a chronological slider for my tagcloud, just as they did here to display Microsoft’s evolution based on a tagcloud.
In the end, it’s all about transparency and authenticity in the blogosphere, including the ability to deal with changes. Blogging is a lot about learning to cope with evolution, reflecting upon what happened and letting others know how to avoid some of the traps. Hope that helps!
I’ll be at the 3rd Free Software World Conference in Badajoz/Spain from February 7-9. Last year’s event was huge with 6500 attendees.
I will be one of the presenters of the tOSSad EU project, where I am a member of the steering committee on behalf of eZ.
Will you be there as well?
In August 2006, I spent a few days in Sweden together with my wife during vacation. The most beautiful place we found was Stenshuvud National Park with a wonderful long long long sandy beach. There were only a few tourists, lots of nature, no buildings, hundreds of ladybirds. Sounds romantic and you bet it was a great place to celebrate our first year of marriage.
We stayed at a B&B close to the park called Ekenäs Gård with nice rooms and fantastic breakfast. A really lovely place. Make sure you get the big room with the balcony should you intend to go there.
David A. Wheeler made clear that Open Source is indeed commercial. Let’s iron out another misunderstanding: Open Source is not altruism!
The confusion – that Open Source is based on altruism – is a dreadful mistake. Speakers who argue that it happens due to the unselfish concern of developers for others, are simply unable to understand what is happening.
Those who say Open Source is altruism think of knowledge as a scarce resource, that only altruistic persons would share. The opposite is true: knowledge is an abundant good. For “trading” it, you get attention, trust, authority, etc. – all the things that help you to further develop your expertise and be successful.
As long as you don’t understand that point, you won’t understand the knowledge economy of Open Source. To extend Wheeler’s statement: Open Source is commercial when it comes to making money as well as “buying” knowledge with knowledge. This has nothing to do with altruism.
Sandro Groganz 