It'll be a busy day for me today, as I'll be flying from the Tucows offices in Toronto to Santa Clara, where I'll be attending, manning the Tucows booth and moderating a panel session at ISPCON Fall 2006 in Santa Clara at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I'll be filing stories as usual throughout the week, both on the goings-on at ISPCON and the 'net in general.
This will probably be my only shot at posting here today, so I thought I'd go wide and cover a number of stories.
Hanging Out with Doc Searls
The opening day keynote at ISPCON will be Internet Service: The Fifth Utility? and will be presented by Elliot Noss (Tucows CEO and my boss' boss) and Doc Searls (Cluetrain Manifesto co-author, Linux Journal editor and adult supervisor of the blogosphere). I'll shoot video of the keynote and I'm hoping to catch Doc for a quick podcast interview as well.
A New Toy!
Tucows has purchased a new toy for me to use: the M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 digital recorder. It'll get its first serious shakedown at ISPCON, where I'll use it to conduct on-the-spot podcast interviews and take notes from my trip. While I'm at it, I'll keep notes on my experiences with it and post a review here.
“What the Web 2.0?”
On Wednesday afternoon, I'll be moderating a panel at ISPCON titled What the Web 2.0? in which the panelists and I will talk about the implications of Web 2.0 for ISPs and hosting services. Here's the description of the panel, straight from the conference site:
You can talk all day long about blogs, tags, MySpace and YouTube
without putting a single dollar in your pocket. We're going to spend
this hour together doing the exact opposite. First we'll cover the
“what and why” of the subject through an overview of the direct and
indirect value these big trends represent for ISPs, Hosts and
customers. Then, we'll address the “how” of providers and customers
alike who are leveraging these technologies out in the wild with some
best practices. Finally, the “wow” being the business impact it is
having, it's potential, overall customer behavior/usage habits, effects
on bandwidth, churn, ARPU, adoption and of course how this all
translates into real dollars in your pocket, better customer
relationships and unique value in the marketplace.
And here are the panelists:
- Javier Hall, CCO, Userplane
- Kevin Henrikson, Director of Engineering, Zimbra
- Josh Jones, CJO and Co-Founder, DreamHost
- Ivaylo Lenkov, CTO and Founder, SiteKreator
- Dallas Bethune, Co-Founder / CTO, DreamHost
It's great to have these guys on board; I'm really looking forward to moderating this panel. Once again, I'll record audio (and possibly video) from this session.
Web 2.0 Conference
In San Francisco — 40 miles north of ISPCON and on the same days — venerable publishing company O'Reilly will be hosting the Web 2.0 Conference 2006. Expect O'Reilly and company to take a little razzing for heat for their registration of the phrase “Web 2.0” as a service mark for their conferences; you may remember the controversy that cost them a little community goodwill back in May. The practical upshot of the service mark is that only O'Reilly may use the term “Web 2.0” in the name of a conference.
Seeing as my only scheduled obligation at ISPCON is to moderate a panel on Wednesday afternoon, I might find a way to sneak up north and crash a couple of Web 2.0 conference parties and chat with some of the players and hackers. If I do, you'll read about it here.
Timed to coincide with the Web 2.0 Conference is the O'Reilly report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices. Tim describes it in a posting in the O'Reilly Radar blog:
So it's with a great deal of pleasure (less travel required!) that I'm
announcing a special report that I've been working on for the past few
months with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com fame, entitled Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices. John has taken my What is Web 2.0?
paper and expanded on it, producing a detailed analysis of the Web 2.0
core principles that I outlined there and has specified best practices
that are derived from them, a number of drill-down analyses of sites
(including amazon.com and flickr) to show how they apply those
principles, and perhaps most importantly, a self-analysis tool.
The PDF version of the report sells for US$375. According to the promo material, the report:
- identifies eight core patterns that are keys to understanding and navigating the Web 2.0 era
- details the problems each pattern solves or opportunities it creates
- explains the technological, economic, and demographic market trends driving the development and adoption of Web 2.0
- illustrates best practices through case studies of industry leaders
- provides tools for hands-on self-assessment.
State of the Blogosphere
I'm going to read Dave Sifry's latest Technorati State of the Blogosphere report on the flight to San Jose. Here are some quick highlights from the report:
- Technorati is currently tracking over 57 million blogs.
- The blogosphere doubled every 5 – 7 months from Q2 2004 to Q2 2006, and today the blogosphere is doubling in size every 230 days.
- They've been aggressively removing spam blogs, a.k.a. “splogs” from their index — the fraction of the new blogs that get into Technorati index that are splogs has been reduced from about 8% to about 4%.
- The total posting volume of the blogosphere is about 1.3 million posts a day, which is double that of this time last year.
- The top languages of the blogosphere, in order of decreasing popularity: English, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish, with Italian, Portuguese, Russian and French sharing a four-way tie for fifth place.
State of the Computer Book Market
Tim O'Reilly has posted the second part of his quarterly “State of the Computer Book Market Report” on O'Reilly Radar (in case you missed it, part one is here). Here are some highlights:
- Web Design and Development has been the most substantial
bright spot in the market, with 22% year-on-year growth in this
category. This might well be expected in a period in which Web
2.0 is the buzzword du-jour. In addition to breaking topics
like Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Javascript, and ASP.Net, there's been
nice growth in books on web design and web page creation. Books
on blogging and podcasting have also finally caught on, after
several prior false starts. - Microsoft's server release earlier in the year is still
driving strong sales of books on C#, Visual Basic, and SQL Server.
However, other database topics are also up modestly. - The growth in books on digital photography has slowed
considerably. If not for the inclusion of the iPod category, the
Digital Media supercategory would be flat. - The hardest-hit part of the market was books on consumer
operating systems, down 17% from the same period a year ago. - The professional development and administration segment was
down 2%, but might have been worse but for the strong performance
of Microsoft languages, Python, Ruby, software project management, and database topics. - Ruby has continued to grow apace, although its 255% growth rate
is off last quarter's torrid 687% increase! Interestingly, PHP
also picked up some steam, up 11% vs. last quarter's 6% YoY
increase. Python's 27% YoY gain, up from last quarter's 6% gain,
shows even more strength. In short, while Ruby has become the language
of
choice for many web startups, PHP and Python are both far from
out of the game. With the addition of web frameworks like
Django and Pylons, Python is becoming a real contender
as a first rate language for Web 2.0 applications. (Google's commitment
to the language doesn't hurt either, as Google is a hiring magnet, and
Python skills are much in demand.) - The decline of Java book sales has accelerated, while C#
books have continued their steady increase. When you aggregate
books on both C# “.Net Languages” (books that cover both C# and
VB.Net), the C# book market is now about 12% larger than Java. (Of
course, some of those .Net Languages book purchasers could be buying
them for their coverage of VB.) - Javascript book sales are up 152% — actually less than we
expected given the new release of JavaScript this fall. If you
aggregate sales of ActionScript books with JavaScript (and
ActionScript is, after all, a dialect of JavaScript), it is now
the 2nd largest language (after Java), in terms of book sales. (It's
third if you aggregate the “.Net languages” category entirely to VB
rather than to C#. See the note above about Java vs. C#.) - While sales are still tiny, we see signs that developers are
taking a second look at languages such as Lisp and
Scheme. Specialized languages such as MDX (used with SQL Server) and Lua (used for game programming) are also showing growth.
30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed
Last but not least, one more ISPCON presentation: my boss, Ken Schafer, will be making his presentation, 30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed on Thursday. Here's the offical conference description:
Many ISPs and Hosts fail to realize the full potential of their own
websites and spend little time updating, let alone optimizing them to
achieve key business objectives. What's the desired outcome for your
site? Serve as a local community portal, a customer extranet for
support or webmail, a place to showcase solutions, convert new leads to
customers or just tired brochureware for that snazzy $19.95 dial-up?
During this fast-paced “no holds barred” session, Internet best
practice expert Ken Schafer will guide you through 30 ways to make your
site dramatically better and meet key business objectives. Using dozens
of examples, we'll provide eye-opening insights into how these Quick
Wins and Big Ideas can shape your site and provide an unfair advantage
over your competitors. GUARANTEE: If at the end of the session you
don't feel you have at least five techniques that will improve YOUR
site, Ken will personally assess your site and give you five ways to
improve it!
As with the other Tucows-sponsored ISPCON events, I'll be recording this one and I'll tell you where you can find it once it's been posted.