B. Mann Consulting

I'm testing out a new advertising network built by Jeremy Andrews. Jeremy is a long time contributor to the Drupal project, mainly through switching his site KernelTrap over to it many years ago, and then being involved with many other Drupal businesses -- architecting major portions of CivicSpace among other things. Jeremy's current "day job" aside from KernelTrap is Tag1 Consulting, who are Drupal performance experts. He also happens to have built the Drupal Advertising module.

The new advertising network I'm testing is Ad Bard. I'll excerpt the "what" from the about page:

Ad Bard's mission is to foster a friendly and useful advertising community. As a fellow Ad Bard, you will help to ensure that the advertisements in our network are useful, relevant, and non-obnoxious.

I've currently got the ad block running in the upper right hand corner of the sidebar. Yes, it doesn't look too different from any of a number of usual banner ad rotations. The current schtick is that Ad Bard is "Free and Open Source" (FOSS) friendly. It has categories of advertisers and websites in the network related to a variety of open source topics, so at this point both the advertisements and websites should be relevant to people interested in those topics. The whole site / system is

Just to throw another concept into the mix, Jeremy recently put up a post advocating that Drupal.org should join Ad Bard. The Drupal Association has been testing ads on some of the forum pages on drupal.org for a while now, as a way to generate revenue to support the project. Google ads have been tested and are running now in the right sidebar of the hosting forum (itself now hotly contested because of some of the content from hosting providers). This really brings up the issue of whether ads are appropriate for open source projects at all. If ads do have to be there, I'm much more in favor of daily / weekly / monthly sponsorship ads: they seem to be much less painful to end users, and I think more effective for advertisers, too.

One of the thought experiments / questions that I often pose people is "How relevant does an ad have to be before it is no longer an ad?" One specific example would be someone looking to buy a Canon S5 IS from my review -- is an ad on that page on a place to buy them an ad ... or a useful, in context piece of information? All a matter of relevance, I believe.

If you're an open source advocate (or project), you might want to kick the tires on Ad Bard -- I'll let you know what I think after I've had ads up for a while.

Disclosure: Raincity Studios does work with Tag1, and I'm a big fan of Jeremy. I've also shoved over a boatload of ideas that I have around advertising networks that I've been itching to experiment with. We'll see :P

First, what the heck is CHDK??! Basically, it's a "firmware enhancement" for a whole list of Canon PowerShot cameras (supported camera model list here). You follow a process where you copy some files onto your memory card, and instead of your camera booting the "regular" operating system, it boots from the memory card instead.

OK, so what does all THAT mean? Basically, today's digital cameras have operating systems -- software -- that runs many of their features. In fact, software is some times one of the main difference between "lower end" cameras and the higher end Digital SLRs. By loading this software onto your camera, you get access to a whole host of other features. The CHDK in Brief page has a list of those additional features -- the three of most interest to be so far are 1) enabling RAW mode, 2) exposure times as long as 65 seconds and 3) exposure times as little as 1/10,000 of a second. There are all sorts of other scripts that can actual be loaded and run on the camera as well. I'm interested in checking out the intervalometer aka timelapse scripts.

So, I spent perhaps 3 hours on Friday, cursing and swearing after the first 30 minutes, swapping my SD card between my computer and my camera, trying to get this stuff working. Looks like most people that are messing with this are on Windows or Linux, and getting this working on the Mac presents some special challenges.

Here are the steps (and yak shaving) that I had to do to get CHDK running on my Canon S5 IS. This assumes that you won't run screaming from using the Terminal, and are at least going to be OK cut and pasting commands in.

I just got contacted by ComputerWorld Canada, asking for my reaction to the new MySQL release:

I came across your blog and was wondering if you wanted to share thoughts on Sun Microsystems’ announcement that it will release the next version of MySQL (v. 5.1) in Q2 of this year? Do you see the new version as helping further drive adoption of the open source database, and help promote open source technology in general?

Well, this is good timing. TrevorO and I went down to the Sun Labs Open House (here's Trevor's take on a few things we saw at Sun). We were down looking at a lot of the "cloud" and related technologies that are coming up hot these days.

But back to the MySQL release. I think Sun's acquisition and backing of MySQL is great. I like the fact that all across their product line, Sun is committing to open source. They have everything from services to hardware to back it up, which just makes it easier for large enterprises to adopt open source. Maybe I'm biased, because Sun has been supporting the Drupal community for some time now, and have shown a great willingness to learn from open source communities and get better. Open source databases in general (and perhaps MySQL in particular) still do struggle with marketing perception against Oracle and MS SQL, so anything that can help raise the profile is a good thing.

But all is not great with MySQL 5.1. I don't follow the development that closely, but found an interesting post pointing out that when 5.1 is released, it's only 6 months until 5.0 gets end of lifed (EOL).

Let me close by pointing out the three things that I have been consistently saying to any Sun people that I come across:

1. Improve your social media marketing strategy: my feedback to the Sun Startup Essentials system has been that they should a) start a blog and b) publish weekly architectures of cool Sun software and hardware combinations. Yes, there is http://blogs.sun.com, and lots of high profile individuals from Sun like Tim Bray that are doing a great job, but it seems like next to none of this has trickled into the actual marketing departments. Give me an RSS subscribe widget and kill the email harvesting, people!
2. Fix MySQL clustering: it's hard, it's cranky, it needs improvement so that regular people can snap this together.
3. Open an engineering office in Vancouver: does this need a comment? Sure, it may be entirely self serving, but Microsoft is in town now, and I think you'll find a great base here on the left coast to find great people. Our concentration of open source experience in town will help, as well.

Sun is by no means perfect (they are a big co with all that implies), but I'm still really interested in some of the technology they have coming out of the labs, as well as their move to increased openness.

David Crow in Toronto picks up the community platform meme and lists some other tools / platforms available in response to Chris Pirillo's announcement regarding the building of Gnomepal on Drupal.

I already commented on Chris' initiative here, but here are some comments I made on David Crow's post:

Now, which of those listed platforms have portable data? Which of them are a suitable platform for building the (invariably) custom pieces that each community may want as they grow?

The tough part with many systems -- especially closed, hosted ones -- is that they provide great initial starting points, but then often lack in customization or growth options. And god forbid that your platform provider "go away" -- then you're completely stuck, and need to start over.

This is why I have chosen to go with fully open systems, because they can grow with communities and can never be locked down or disappear.

@Varun:
Facebook is ultimately closed and not a participant in the "open web". And it's someone else's platform with someone else's rules. I would hope that we steer around such closed instances and strive to connect openly.

@Peter Childs:
"What I’d like to see is a platform that recognizes communities are networks of interests (people & organizations) and doesn’t try to become a destination"

I think this is spot on -- don't try and a become a destination IN AND OF ITSELF -- but rather add value through various aggregation and hub features. This also seems to argue for mini-networks that cross sites.

Open platforms are as important as open data or any other cross site initiatives. I don't care what you end up picking as your community platform, as long as your data and your users can seamlessly interwork with the other systems out there. The network is not the destination.

Matt Mullenweg had to make a pretty clear statement that WordPress is Open Source in response to some sniping from MT.

I already left a comment in support of Matt, and he tossed it back my way:

Thanks Boris, I think the way Drupal and WordPress have co-existed is a great model to follow despite a few distractions along the way, and your role in facilitating that as an ambassador has been crucial. It’s rare for code for one project to be directly applicable to another, but ideas and values are contagious — in the good Isley Brothers way.

I know how this can be. We flirted with dual licensing around Bryght's mass hosting system, Hostmaster. In hindsight, it probably delayed development by 2 years. Now hosted on Drupal.org, Hostmaster has a couple of more developers buying in and it feels like we're developing some momentum.

We made a Bryght "install profile" -- a bundle of code and configuration and a little custom module for doing some cool stuff with CSS overrides. From day one, it's been hosted on our public SVN repository, and includes the original CVS tags from Drupal.org itself.

It was amusing to watch that MT4 actually had as a feature that other systems had adopted their templating system -- namely a single contributed module in Drupal that can support MT themes for bloggy sites.

Basically, sniping other open projects isn't cool. In the first meetings that the Drupal community ever had as a group, in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we had Joomla community members and senior devs. It was so fun playing with the Joomla guys and matching t-shirts and groups shots with Rasmus at OSCMS 2007. Amy Stephens +1 -- check out Open Source Community.

The "enemy" here is proprietary systems (and those really are quotes around enemy, as I recall having a great discussion with a proprietary Java based system developer this morning at CCI2008). They are not good for business, they are not good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

I ran a couple of not really that successful because they were TOO Drupal heavy "Open Source CMS Summits". I'd love to do more of them, because we have so much to learn from each other, but we are all so focused on growing our own communities, each bit of *friendly* rivalry pushing the others to get better. Like the Isley Brothers :P

Flock’s 1.1 Beta Has Arrived! And so I'm testing it (the last time was August 2005). I met my first semi-local Flock'er (Mark Lise) at the last DemoCampVancouver. They came back in force from Victoria to storm the Northern Voice conference (Flock was a sponsor).

At left, that's me watching Clayton Stark, the VP of Engineering, giving Marc Canter a demo, while myself, Rob Scales, and Dickt Hardt look on. Initial impressions (on my desktop PowerMac G5)

• Nice job on integrating Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and del.icio.us
• Oh, wait, I can set status message/tweet/whatever in the same predictable place??! Oh, um, please just build MoodBlast functionality in directly...and integrate Jaiku, of course
• delicious has links sorted by tag...my usage is most often by reverse chrono...can I toggle between a tag view and a recently added bookmarks?
• I added this Drupal aka Self hosted blog, but it seems I can't set the label of the blog (my username is the same on most sites, so a label like "bmann: blog" that is returned by auto discovery isn't going to help)
• The media bar mini-bar at the top for searching and browsing Flickr, and for drag/dropping into this blog editor, RAWKS!
• Yeah, I like the blog editor
• Some loads seem a little slow...but really, everything on my ancient, low memory PMac are slow...media bar and other stuff are saving me time
• OK, I'm now doing three blog posts at the same time...I don't think I can let go of this
• One more feature request: if I hit the "add link" button in the editor, and I've got a URL in my clipboard, please auto-fill it...kthxbye

If you hadn't heard of Flock the first time around, try it as a replacement (yep, replacement...) for Firefox. If you had gripes/crashes/etc. the first time, erase those memories and know that Canadian engineers are on the job and you should give it another try. With Firefox, you can add a bazillion plugins and do lots of functionality. Flock has it all integrated and smoothed out for lots of the social media services that people use already. Firefox is to Flock, as Drupal is to WordPress?

Works for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Anyone else using it again / for the first time? I have some ideas of other things it COULD do, what do you think?

(slight snafu in posting, but blog posts got autosaved / recovered. yay!)

Disclaimer: my company may end up doing some work with Flock. Of course, we also just helped Spread Firefox recently

Hi, you may remember me from such roles as the first Drupal Association Board of Directors. This is a bit of a recap of my year's involvement with the Association, along with an explanation of my current feeling about it, and that I won't be applying for a Board position this next year. Oh, and if you're a current or prospective Permanent Member, you should probably read this.

This is not a wrap up post about DrupalCon Barcelona (I'm notoriously bad at those, with all these fresh ideas swirling in my head instead), but rather a post about the Drupal Association.

We had an open panel / community feedback session at DrupalCon with the members of the association. I was very proud to be sitting there with those folks, even more so after each person spoke about what they want to do as part of the association. But...

...but let's not get to the "but" yet. The photo at left is myself, Dries, and Kieran sitting down at OSCON 2005. This is when we first started discussing the idea that, well, Drupal was getting pretty big, and we might need some other entity to help support it. What it really came down to is that at the very least, we needed a checking account: shuffling money between companies and Dries' personal Paypal account, etc. were getting increasingly painful. And heck, we had a conference with a whole 50 people show up!

2 years later and we've had many more successful DrupalCons. Sticking just to Europe, we had 150 people last year, and almost 450 this year. That's a tripling every year, and it's clear that the Association really is needed to help handle the logistics around these gatherings.

Back to the "but". The Association is almost a year old. It's been tough getting started, with only Kieran Lal having had previous experience serving on a board / running an association, and some of the busiest community contributors upping their contribution. We've got some of the nuts and bolts tackled now (accounting, legal, meetings, roles, etc.), have gone through some growing pains, and are pretty much ready to kick ass. We've got our first General Assembly ahead of us in a couple of months time, which will likely see the Permanent Membership grow and we'll have a new board elected.

One of the big points from the community was they wanted more feedback about what the Association was doing...but also how they can help, and what they can expect from the Association. We've talked internally and will try to adopt the Mozilla Foundation model of "reporting via blog". See Zak Greant's MoFo Weekly Reports for an example. This blog post isn't really a report in that style...I just sent off a bunch of email that should be good material for next week's report, and have tried to put a few bits of info in the footer that are a bit report-like.

And me? Well, I need to continue the process of getting things off my plate and having someone else's name attached to responsibilities, and to look at recruiting more people across the community to help run various initiatives. My main "hat" within the Board is marketing...I do a lot of that through direct outreach now, but there are so many other large and small things that could/should be done. For starters, I need to put some energy into gathering all the marketing folks back at home base -- http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-marketing. There were many "marketing only" folks that came up to me after the panel to say "how can we help?" ... many business cards to go through!

I would also like to serve as a direct channel to many large entities that are now starting to interact with the Drupal community -- larger enterprises, governments, universities, research initiatives, and so on.

In particular, it's my not so secret ambition to start at home in Canada / Vancouver and encourage local and federal governments to fund and support open source in general, and Drupal in particular. How about a 3rd Computer Science university course on "Coding for Open Source", including a section on Drupal in particular...

OK, time to wrap this up. I'm re-invigorated both about the Drupal Association and my role within it, and of course with the Drupal community as a whole after such a large gathering in Barcelona.

Update: after a little sleep, I realize I forgot to link to Planet Drupal Association -- you can subscribe to a feed of all posts there. Also a few minor updates to reports below. Case studies!

OK, OK, that's a ridiculously long title. But it's great to hear that David Ascher will be heading MailCo and taking Thunderbird in to a brave new adventure.

Stay in Vancouver? Yes, please! We're on a roll, here, and I'm rooting for more open source businesses to grow up here.

I can't believe it's been almost 4 years since I last bumped into Mark Pratt (entry from November 2003 about OpenSourceXperts). A chance IM conversation today let me know that he is now based out of Barcelona, but my trip to attend DrupalCon Barcelona means that I'm just going to miss him while he makes a trip to the US.

Mark is a Zope expert, open source business model experimenter, and more. He told me he's now got a great consulting firm, Vanguardistas, that are doing "amazing things with Zope3". I admit to knowing very little about the cool stuff going on in Zope3, so it will be interesting to hear more. And of course, we're all partners in waving the flag of open source goodness, especially in Europe.

I'll be missing Mark in Barcelona, but he's connected me to some of his colleagues at Vanguardistas, and told me that La Bombeta is where I'll have to go for delicious, cheap food. I'm really looking forward to this trip...I really have to make plans to be in Europe more regularly: there are so many great people and projects to get connected to, never mind the side benefits like great food :P