Developers are classically referred to as prima donnas. We are a needy bunch that left unchecked can cause a number of ailments. But, is this characterization really limited to Developers? I find that everyone channels their inner “prima donna” to some degree. This means they want some level of influence, interaction, visibility into the processes that are important to them. We dislike inconvenience and treasure being free to express our ingenuity and cleverness!

This isn’t really an unrealistic expectation, is it? I mean… clients pay us a lot of money to develop systems for them. If it is my pocket book shelling out dough, you’re damned-straight I want to be involved, and know how my money is being utilized… sooner, rather than later. The system designers, whether BA, IA, PM, QA (or other acronym), want to feel pride that they are significant to the success of a project. Quite frankly, the effects of group collaboration on idea generation is extremely effective.

However, the point is that this process operates most efficiently when it is completely transparent. Transparency - a simple word. But a powerful concept that applies to everything from Sarbanes-Oxley to my physician’s visit. It boils down to trust and honesty; because you MUST give visibility to everyone involve.

Enter stage left, Agile processes. Agile shares a lot with the somewhat illusive web 2.0 moniker. The point of both is to make the processes more transparent, collaborative, and organic. We employ a variety of Agile called Scrum. I really hate cheesy processes and the silly names they use. Scrum is no exception. I has its own names, including ScrumMaster, Sprints and Retrospective; generally based on the English Rugby sport. It elicits smirks and giggles nonetheless. Lot’s of humor on the web:

YouTube: High Moon Studios: A Portrait - Scrum

YouTube: Scrum Masters 2

It’s all funny and insightful in its own right, but I take it seriously from the conceptual level. How I look at it, most fail to realize that Agile isn’t about providing good solutions faster as much as it is about engaging the customer to provide the correct solution for their needs. The point is “customer engagement and satisfaction”. The most efficient way to achieve this goal is to involve the customer as much as possible throughout the development lifecycle. It is integral that they are available to clarify, elaborate, and prioritize the features and designs they want from the feedback we give them.

As a manager of “prima donnas”, I want to empower my developers to deliver the best product they can currently conceive that meets the customer’s expectations. To me, this means that I need to put the developer as close to the customer as possible. Agile development processes and tools generally answer this need.

The basic premise is to start with “what you know” develop with “refactorable” techniques in “small iterations” and “solicit customer feedback” often. There are a lot of concepts in that small sentence. “What you know” implies that we don’t belabor the requirements since it’s hard for the customer to truly visualize what they want in its entirety. “Refactorable” implies that we are going to develop in such a way that change isn’t hard. “Small iterations” and “solicit customer feedback” imply that we want the customer to be an active participant in the software we develop. Plain and simple, we know software is expensive and we want to bet on the best system to ensure that your money buys what you need now, and can easily grow to what you need tomorrow.

We utilize tools like XPlanner, Basecamp, and MediaWiki to engage our customers, while enabling our developers to use the best tools to deliver the best product to our clients.

This past weekend’s SoCon07 event was a big success, with 100 people attending the Friday night dinner session and well over 200 people attending Saturday’s conference -held at Kennesaw State University. The Friday night dinner session consisted of table discussions moderated by some of Atlanta’s leading internet thought leaders, such as Jeff Haynie, Sanjay Parekh, Leonard Witt, and others. I had the pleasure of joining them as a table moderator for the discussion on “Building Online Communities”. It was a spirited discussion, not just on popular online communities such as MySpace and Facebook, but also what can be done in a closed environment such as within churches and businesses. There was an interesting social networking application that was created right here in Atlanta called Yaplet, that has some very interesting use cases in online shopping as well as general information sites. It creates a new niche in contextual chat that I think has some legs. Many thanks to Christina and Matthew Might for bringing their thoughts to bear on the discussion, as well as all the other attendees for taking the time to share their expertise and interests.

The Saturday event was kicked off by Leonard Witt and Sherry Heyl, and was then headlined by Chris Klaus whose past efforts in internet security helped put Atlanta technology companies on the map. Chris is now heading Kaneva which is doing some innovative work in creating a platform for virtual worlds. Like the “unconference” it was dubbed, discussions ranged from the esoteric to the mainstream. The main takeway for me from the event was that Atlanta’s internet economy is broad in terms of interests, and deep in talent. Many thanks to the people both in front of and behind the scenes who helped make this weekend a success.

TechCrunch posted a new update with Second Life stats:

- Registered users are up to over 3 million, up from 124,000 a year ago (closer to 2 million when you remove duplicates)
- At any given time between ten and thirty thousand people are online

- They currently have 258 islands generating between $200 - $300/month in hosting fees

The biggest hurdle they have is the relatively low number of people online at any given time, which really is interesting considering the amount of money being spent in-world daily ($1.1 million as of this posting).

Yahoo has continued its recent trend towards remaining relevant today and launched a BETA of a game changing service called Yahoo Pipes and the response from the early adopters has been so good that they had to shut down the service for the better part of the day to increase capacity. I will explain my take on the service shortly but first a quick overview of what the service aims to be as it evolves towards its 1.0 release.

Much of the web today is a hodge-podge of data mixed in with the visual representation of that data. Web pages look good and present value to users but do not interact easily with other web pages or services. There has been a movement towards making web content more structured and the ultimate goal for some visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee is the idea of the sematic web in which different types of content and services on the web can interact intelligently, and with a minimal amount of human intervention.

Standards such as RSS have helped free up some types of content into a structured and streamable format. This, combined with web services such as FLICKR, Google Maps and others offering SOAP and REST API formats have helped lead to the rash of mashups web users have been beneficiaries of over the past couple of years. While mashups have been relatively easy to create from a programmers perspective, they have not been easy to create as an internet savvy but non-technical end user. Yahoo Pipes aims to change that. Though it is named after UNIX pipelines, from where the Yahoo service gets its inspiration, the approachability of the service, with its visual assembly environment aims for a different crowd than the obscure and often obtuse command line interfaces of such UNIX stalwarts as vi and shell scripting. Pipes allows its users to visually connect the input and output nodes of different pre-built modules together to create mashups with significantly less effort than is currently required. Not that mashups are difficult to create, but now they have gone from requiring a little bit of a programmer’s time to requiring only the end users efforts. The output of the Pipes mashup is pushed out in RSS, RDF, JSON, or ATOM format so that it can then be reused again by someone or something else. Toss in a user content sharing on Pipes and suddenly every user can feel like a king.

My take on Yahoo Pipes after briefly being able to use the service is that it is a harbinger of the next stage of the democratization of data. By empowering users to mix RSS feeds, repurpose content, and define their own complex flows of data and services it helps bring power to the true users of the data. The marketing data, sales data, and financial data of an organization are controlled not by their respective departments but primarily by the technology department. This model will remain true for some time, but as elegant and powerful services such as Yahoo Pipes come into their own, and as the web continues to expose data feeds via standardized formats the end users will be able to expose, repurpose, blend, and consume the data in original and meaningful ways by themselves.

Great programmers will always be needed, and I believe they are the true artistic masters of our time. As great programmers create not just great applications and services, but great tools to allow the true end users to repurpose those applications and services we will all be better off. Web savvy end users want to stand on the shoulder of giants not wait in line for their IT department to respond to their requests. Just as programmers today sling code more efficiently using Rails instead of slogging through Assembler, non programmers are now being exposed to elegent and evolving services such as Yahoo Pipes to enable their own ideas and meet their own needs.

To be fair IBM announced an early stage approach towards end user created flows today in the form of QEDWiki - work on the name guys, but otherwise a great service as well. Marc Andreesen has built a platform over at Ning to allow for the easy creation of social networking sites. Yahoo Pipes is more generalized and likely to catch on versus those platforms. Tim O’Reilly calls Yahoo Pipes a milestone in the history of the internet. In my view its one of the biggest steps towards the democritization of data, de Tocquiville would blog relentlessly about this if he were alive today.

I stumbled upon found an excellently produced video that summarizes what Web 2.0 is. It was created by Micheal Wesch at KSU - not Kennessaw State University where tonight and tomorrow the SoCon conference is taking place, but Kansas State University. Wesch is an Associate Professor of Anthropology there. I highly recommend this video below as being worthy of the next ~4+ minutes of your life. 

I hope to see many of you at SoCon 2007 this weekend. It’s 2.0 networking in 1.5 days.

In the last decade or so, CSS has taken the boring world of markup and turned it into a more colorful world to write in. Before CSS, the “oh so popular” font tag was a regular occurrence. Today, we can create web sites without font tags, or other types of formatting tags, that were needlessly being used. This is all possible thanks to CSS.

We can do all our formatting internally—defining margins, padding, font color, font size or even bolded text. So what could be the next step in the world of markup languages? Let’s start with an example. Say I was HTML, while CSS was my clothing, hair style and - dare I say - piercings. What would my personality and my behavior be like? For those web designers out there, imagine creating an id or class and assigning a particular behavior or personality to it that is an element, not just a style. When assigning an id to a span or div tag, it would look a certain way and behave in a certain way. What would that be like? How would that work?

Let’s go back to my example from before, a web designer who is creating me (remember I am the HTML code), has just finished creating my mouth and even used CSS to add gold teeth to it. Now the designer is thinking “this looks pretty good, now what does the mouth do? Does it move? When I put food in it what does it look like when it chews?” Because these questions cannot be answered with HTML or CSS, the designer is stuck. He could go to the developer and ask him how this would work, but the developer is more concerned with how the food is being digested rather then what it does when it chews. The designer now needs to find a way to add the behavior to his new creation.

By using JavaScript in combination with CSS the designer can now add the necessary functionality to his site and have it look good in the process. Some other designers will tend to use Flash to solve this problem. While Flash is the obvious choice for sites that are 100% Flash driven, it’s becoming less of a practice to use Flash for working on just a small and simple component of the site. The advantage to adding “behavior” to a site using JavaScript is that it allows the site to be more organic, with the remainder of the site and all its components.

Again, let’s go back to my example, where I am the HTML. If the designer were to add Flash to my mouth in order to add “behavior,” this would be the same as taking my mouth and making it robotic instead of flesh and bone. And that would just look weird. I either need to be completely robotic (Flash) or completely flesh and bone. And because JavaScript has the ability to manipulate HTML and CSS, this would provide a more “organic” feel to a web site.

Okay, now let me preface this entry by saying that I am usually a HUGE skeptic when it comes to new, cool fads on the web. And for the most part, it has taken me a while to accept that aspects of Second Life will hold lasting value to the business world.

What I do believe will happen is that, just like the internet in the early 2000’s, the Second Life bubble will burst. But what typically happens after these big pops, is that useful and practical ideas will remain; and I think that there are elements of a concept I recently discovered that could have some legs.

For the movie, Smokin Aces, they created a Second Life game that allows you to become an assassin. By going to a hotel, picking up a hit list and weapon, you are on your way to being a trained killer. You can get more details at www.smokinaces.net/secondlife

Why do I think this is interesting? The concept of living out a movie fantasy and truly becoming an alter ego that you could never become in real life, such as being an assassin, is very powerful. It allows people to play out their deviant side that is normally suppressed in real life.

This is different than a normal video game or advergame in that the targets are not a computer generated foe. They are in essence “real people,” and the act of killing someone is much more criminal, just without the consequences of real life.

What does this mean for the business world?

Advergames and “guerilla” branding efforts can be taken to a whole new dimension. In most current advergames, you are playing a character and making that character do something, but it’s not you. In Second Life (or any other virtual world), you are YOU…or at least some projection of the inner you. And that means that YOU are fully immersed in a brand experience. It is a much deeper level of participation and connection with a brand. And isn’t that the whole point of many of these ultra-creative online branding efforts?

So, okay. I’m not quite ready to jump on the Second Life bandwagon, but my eyes have been opened to the possibilities.

For those of you that watched Super Bowl XLI last Sunday, you might be surprised to learn that it was the third most watched TV program of all time. And if you’re like most people, you watched the Super Bowl for the commercials as much as you did the game. The most watched commercial (not sure how official this is, its just what I heard on ESPN radio) during the Super Bowl was the “Bud Light Classroom”.

However, according to AdBowl.com, the Bud Light “Rock, Paper, Scissors” was voted the favorite - it was my favorite as well.

You can see these videos are being hosted on the recently launched Bud TV website (and yeah, its annoying but you have to register - ugh). So far there are a lot of mixed reactions about Bud TV but I think its far too early to tell if this initiative is going to be successful or not. They promote that there will be an HD quality version coming soon and there’s already some decent content with more to come.

The most recent issue of MediaPost’s OMMA (one of my favorite magazines) has an article entitled, “A Leading Role: Be the Content”, which talks about the concept of advertisers and companies producing content rather than trying to advertise around content. I would link to this article but OMMA also requires you to register to see their content online - ugh again. The author makes the intelligent distinction that the content shouldn’t be about your brand, but rather it should support your brand. I agree with this whole heartedly.

And apparently this concept isn’t a new one, dating all the way back to the 1920’s when Procter & Gamble created soap operas to appeal to “a large audience of household-shopping decision makers”. I had no idea that was how soap operas were started but Wikipedia confirms it.

The CBS show, “Two and a Half Men”, recently released a commercial where they are in-world (slang for in a virtual world).  It’s interesting but I’m trying to figure out why they did it.  From what I can tell they don’t have any plans to enter virtual worlds (at least they don’t suggest that).  Perhaps they saved on the cost of hiring the actors to act out the scene rather than just using their voices?  Maybe some production guy is a Second Life junky or something.  Whatever their reasons, its interesting nonetheless.

One of the first recorded correlations was the relationship between height and salary. Taller people earned higher salaries than shorter people. That wasn’t good news for me =). But there are actually lots of correlations like this. Some work to my advantage, others don’t. Some make perfect sense and others seem impossible to explain.

Consider this. There’s a strong, positive correlation between ice cream purchases and murder rates. When ice cream purchases increase, murder rates increase. When ice cream purchases decrease, murder rates decrease. If your job was to prevent murder, what would you do with this information?

Some people say that they’d increase the presence of law enforcement in ice cream shops.  This is based on the notion that murderers like to buy ice cream – perhaps to make themselves feel better about killing people. If this notion were true, murderers would definitely be a lot easier to catch.  Just sit in an ice cream shop and wait. Eventually, they’ll be there. Others say that they’d prevent known criminals from purchasing ice cream. This is based on the notion that ice cream sets off some kind of murderous trigger in people who have criminal tendencies. By making sure that criminals don’t get access to ice cream, we could make society safer. We could also prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place. Restricted access to ice cream would be just another negative consequence of becoming a criminal. Still others say that they’d put a ban on ice cream sales all together. This is based on the notion that anyone can become a murderer after eating ice cream – that people who eat ice cream are like time bombs waiting to detonate. Kids everywhere would be devastated by the ban but it would be totally worth it in the end. After all, human life is much more important than dessert.

Hmmm. These all seem like decent plans until you do a little research to find out more about the relationship between ice cream and murder rates. Truth is, there’s a third variable that influences both. It’s the weather. When the weather is hot, people are more inclined to buy ice cream. When the weather is hot, people are also more prone to violent acts.

Research agencies like to talk about relationships between variables. Clients get excited by these findings and both like to make plans based on interpretations. But relationships between variables can be misleading.  Variables can be correlated without causing variations in one another. In science, we say…

Correlation does not imply causation.

It’s good to identify that relationships between variables exist. But it’s better to determine why they exist. In this industry, we must be careful when interpreting reports of correlation and making recommendations based on findings like these. If not, we may end up making recommendations that aren’t useful — or that even backfire when we’re trying to reach our goals. If not, we may end up arming cold ice cream shops with law enforcement personnel when they are desperately needed in the hot streets.