First off, let me say that I am a huge proponent of free and open source software. With that said, I am also very much a capitalist. I do not feel these are mutually exclusive characteristics, although some would disagree with me.

This article was conceived as a critical review of Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. However, I came across a rebuttal by Nikolai Bezroukov that covers most of my criticisms already. As such, I will limit my discussion to one specific quote that I find to be a blaring fallacy, for different reasons than expressed in Nikolai Bezroukov’s rebuttal.

“Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software “hoarding” is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.”

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To Ning or Not to Ning - that’s the question around here. Who has the time to join (or start, for that matter) another social network? I have enough trouble finding time to twitter.

The subject did come up in a marketing meeting the other day and while some of us thought Ning was dead there were others who thought it just might be gearing up to take over as one of the best advertising opportunities out there.

I may just be one of them.

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Microsoft adCenter now has a new advertising tool that’s in beta for Excel O7. It’s a keyword research, expansion tool that provides great in-sight on keyword relevancy, cost history, demographics and geographic information. It looks to be a great tool for really honing in on target markets and localized terms.

Take it for a test drive for FREE but you’ve got to have Microsoft Excel 07.

adCenter add-in

It’s not a good morning when I walk into Starbucks and the line is out the door. The other day this happened and the lady behind me inches towards me and says “You gotta really want it today, huh?”. Pfft, lady, I want it everyday. But, let me be honest with myself though, and tell you what I really want. I want to walk into a coffee shop— a local coffee shop—like the first coffee shop I ever frequented in Pacific Beach, California. No corporate mugs or teddy bears. No ham sandwiches, glazed donuts, or skinny-2
pump-vanilla-1 pump-caramel-no whip-lattes. It’s such a vague memory now, but I remember coffee, and banana nut bread which came in fresh from a local vendor. It was simple.

“Err on the side of simple.”

This was possibly the downfall of Starbucks: the opening of too many stores, selling too many products, and not concentrating enough on the coffee consumer. But has that changed? With declining sales, and changing CEO hands from Jim Donald to Howard Schultz earlier this year, Starbucks closed its doors for 3 hours on February 25th for a barista training session among 7,1000 stores. What was the purpose? According to The Seattle Times, “The retraining is part of Starbucks’ plan to revive its brand and sales growth, which by one measure sank to an all-time low last quarter.”

Last month Schultz introduced its five-point plan to boost sales and bring back the customer experience. The press release used terms like “revolutionary” and “reinvention”, but what received my attention was the term “online community”.

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The official Google blog announced recognition of the the ”nofollow tag” in January of 2005. This tag did not reach awareness on a wide scale until Matt Cutts, Google’s mouthpiece to the SEO world, further clarified in his blog the many uses of this controversial link tag.

This post explains one excellent alternative use for the “nofollow” tag — helping divert “link juice” to the most important pages and give stronger link flow to improve your SEO results.
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Recently, one of our clients asked us to design a website layout specifically for the iPhone. LevelTen has created one iPhone specific web application in our past, but we have little experience with best practices. This prompted me to research some iPhone web applications and find out what makes a good web app vs. a bad web app. These are my findings: Read the rest of this entry »