What I read last week 6.2

[1] Gin, television and social surplus
I just love the idea that there is massive attention tsunami building and building ...

[2] Nick Bostrom's Home Page
If you want to cause a fracas at your next dinner party, read The Simulation Argument. Also, check out his TED Talk on "The 3 Biggest Problems for Humanity", linked off his home page: death, existential risk, and an inability to know how good things can really be.

[3] Where are they? Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.
He's got a point.

[4] Content with style - A CSS framework.
This is brilliant - someone has applied the logic of software framework design to the creation of a set of stylesheets. Very well done. AppFuse uses this framework (or a variation on it).

How to apply for a job at Google

Simple: just build this:

http://goosh.org/

However, I wonder what Google thinks about the fact that all of their AdWords get stripped out of the search results?

M@

What I read last week 6.1

[1] Why Apple will sell 10 million iPhones
I wonder what they'll say when Apple end's up selling 12 million?

[2] Overview of Twine
Do I really need another social networking, information discovery tool?

[3] A tornado in space
I'm glad I don't live near this.

[4] First live images and videos of full screen ANDROID demos
There's something more to this whole story than is immediately obvious. Apple and Google are *very* close (Schmidt is on the board of Apple), so I don't think that either would do anything to screw the other over while they both share a common enemy. I wonder what they are up to?

[5] 'Give it Away and Pray' is Not a Business Model, but it doesn't mean that 'Free' Doesn't Work
There's a whole lot of 'buying a dollar and selling for 75c' in here. Maybe Jonah Peretti's "mullet strategy" is the way of the future?

Guys like us avoid monopolies

I just watched Bill Gates say this (look about 2m:30s into the second video stream):

"Guys like us avoid monopolies ... avoid them because we compete."

This comment is bookended by Steve Ballmer, sitting next to Bill, who has just finished explaining the perils of a potential advertising monopoly from Google.

Wow. What can you say to that?

M@

SOA What?

I was asked recently to talk to some executives about Service Oriented Architecture. In doing some research for the conversation, I found that there was a lot of information about the technical aspects of SOA, but not so much about the business/technology crossover. So I decided to write a white paper: SOA What?

Click here to see it, and let me know what you think. I've also included a brief precis below.

Precis: Describing technology from a business perspective can be a challenge. It is much easier to talk about or justify technology when it supports an existing business process because it is relatively straightforward to frame the benefits in terms of return on investment, time saved, or dollars spent. It is much more difficult when the technology provides support for other components, guides the way systems are built and integrated, or attempts to insulate pieces of infrastructure or application that face very different rates of change. In many ways, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) falls into this second, intangible category. This paper attempts to demystify SOA by examining it from a business perspective. It presents some background and an executive definition, and then outlines some misconceptions before exploring the strategic business outcomes presented by SOA. It then looks at some of the headline business impacts, costs, and risks associated with SOA rollout, along with a real world example that highlights how SOA fits into and supports modern business architecture.

M@