The Power of Open Put To The Test

Recently I wrote an article (in Dutch) for our company's periodical, Quintessence, on 'The Power of Open'. In this article I introduced readers to the concepts of respectively open source, open standards, open architecture and open innovation. Living up to the saying 'practice what you preach', I plan to run a little test with several open-source applications myself. Instead of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Explorer and Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), I will use their open source equivalents Thunderbird, FireFox and OpenOffice. It will be especially interesting to see whether I can collaborate effectively with colleagues and clients who(still) work within a Microsoft environment.

Watch this space for comments on my experiences throughout this test.

Postscript: Given the existing incompatibility issues between Microsoft Office en OpenOffice, I plan to wait until the release of OpenOffice2.0 before commencing with this test.

Postscript 2: It would be fair to say that the test will focus on OpenOffice, as I have been using FireFox for nearly a year already and have tested a beta version of Thunderbird as well.

Plugging del.icio.us tags and IT conversations

In today's earlier post I mentioned blogs, podcasts and photo-blogs. All these tools enable us to enroll in something that is often referred to as 'social networking'. With its book reviews, Amazon was one of the first companies to offer internet users a way to share their opinion about a particular book with others, so that the latter could take this into consideration when deciding whether or not to buy and/or read a certain book. In the somewhat the same way, del.icio.us tags help people to find interesting web content, without having to use search engines to do so. Basically a sort of online bookmarks, tags are used to mark interesting content. All these links are collected on a personal page, referred to as 'my del.icio.us' and serving as online bookmarks that are always available to me, independent of the computer I am using. But that's not all. Not only can I now easily navigate back to these sites, I can also find out about other sites that have been tagged with the same keyword by other users. Although the relevance and effectiveness of these references depends primarily on how different people describe similar and/or comparable phenomena, it is an interesting way to indexing and navigate the world wide web indeed.

When it comes to podcasts, I want to call your attention to IT conversations. This site offers podcasts featuring speeches and presentations delivered by speakers at major IT conferences worldwide. Instead of having to attend these conferences yourself, taking time off from work and paying a hefty fee, you can now listen to some of the most interesting speakers for free and at a time that's convenient for you! BTW, one of the IT Conversations' series, Larry's World, is also available as a podcast through Apple's iTunes.

Still @ internet speed

This month it is 10 years ago that Netscape had its IPO. This month's Wired (www.wired.com) has a special on the subject, looking at key figures from each of the 10 years since. It is incredible to realize how much things have changed in 10 years. But developments are still coming along at internet speed. Since my last post in March (shame on me...) podcasting has taken off in an incredible way. Amongst other things, Apple's decision to have support for podcasts build into iTunes and thus making podcasts easily available to all those iPod owners out there contributes to podcasts' sudden popularity.

Something that has been going on a little longer is photo-blogging, with Flickr (www.flickr.com; recently acquired by Yahoo) as its prime example. At Flickr people can share their pictures with the rest of the world, adding tags and thus making them searchable for others. Of course you'll find quite a few party pics at Flickr, but it is incredible to see what some artistic types (or just much better photographers than me..) come up with. Not only will people be able to record their lives and the world around them in writing (blogs), speech and sound (podcasts) but also in images (photo-blogging).

It will sure be interesting to see what Wired's special in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the (commercial) internet will look like...

Postcript: I am still debating whether or not I should buy myself a digital camera and register for a Flickr account. The film that's in my analog Canon IXUS is over 2 years old, carrying photos from some rowing events and a holiday in the Western desert of Egypt in December 2003. Hence, I am not sure whether I would suddenly start taking pictures more often to share them with others. How rational, don't you think?