I for one agree with the observation. What I feel we are seeing is the flattening of our overall relationship depth.  To explain this, let me talk about the positive impact upon relationships first.

My Social Network Gains

My use of social networks is divided up into two groups, professional and social.  I know that this is not necessarily the norm.  That said, I have seen the tools that I use overall fall into two categories, regardless of focus:

1. Network Mapping: This is LinkedIn (professional) and Facebook (personal).  If I know someone well enough, I link to them.  Essentially, the tie has to already exist. Obviously there is more that can be done with these tools, but we’ll hold off on that.
2. Idea Sharing: This is Twitter and my blog, both professional in nature. I share ideas, both short and long, and over time the audience has grown.  This growth has been through connecting and sharing other ideas.  The connections are to mostly “new” ties.

LinkedIn, by itself, has not significantly grown my network.  It has just helped me keep track of my professional network.  LinkedIn’s capabilities have grown over the years, but my usage has not to a large degree.

As for Twitter/blogging, as of right now, I have about 900 people following me on Twitter and I am following about 200.  I’d guess that there are at least 10-20 people that I have met that I could readily reach out to and have a drink with if I was passing through their town.  A small handful of them might be upset if I didn’t reach out if I was passing through their neck of the woods

This is purely counting people that I wouldn’t otherwise know, not those that I’ve met through real life that I’ve connected to online after meeting in real life.

Overall, a net gain.  Let’s look at Facebook…

Weakening my Strong Ties

On Facebook, I have about 150 friends.  Most of them I knew before I joined Facebook, and a vast majority I met in real life first.  They include family members, my best man, and my closest friends from high school.

The people that I listed are people that I kept in touch with before Facebook.  There are many that I have resumed contact with since joining.  Typically we exchange a few messages and maybe meet-up once.  After establishing a ne “baseline”, we track each other through Facebook, exchange comments, and move on with our lives.

Let’s look at the close friends.  We would regularly call each other, go out of our way to catch-up over drinks, and generally interact as much as our lives and the distance would allow.

Now, we mostly track each other through Facebook.  We feel we know what is going on in each other’s lives.  The urge/need to reach out over the phone isn’t as pressing.  This seems good because I spend so much more time online, so it helps save time.  Aside from maybe commenting on their statuses more than average, I interact with them online as much as most others on Facebook.

My strong relationships seem to be becoming weaker.  My interactions with my close friends are, on average, more superficial than they where before Facebook.

My friendships seem to be moving towards the mean.

Is this Good?

Let’s quickly sum-up:

• Lots of new ties professionally.
• Average strength of new ties, and of previously existing weak ties, is stronger
• Average strength of old, strong ties, is weaker

The answer really depends on your goals.  In my professional life, Social Networking is making things better as I meet more people and gain new opportunities.  The entire Enterprise 2.0 conference is a direct result of my use of Social Networking tools.  My social activities were also entirely the result of my Social Networking. On the whole good things.

That said, there is nothing like talking to good friends all night about anything and everything.  My professional life exists to support my personal life, so the weakening of my personal ties is actually a concern.

Then there is Dunbar’s Number.  Simply put, this is the number of stable social relationships that a person can maintain.  The number is 150.  So, with more professional relationships, personal ones will invariably be pushed aside.  As bad as it sounds, this is probably a wash given that it is relationship 151 that will be dropped.  If that particular relationship was more important to me, it wouldn’t be the one that gets neglected.

Let’s be fair, there is nothing stopping me from calling people like I used to do.  on the other hand, there is nothing stopping them from calling either. It happens much less on both sides, so it isn’t just me.

Will I give up Facebook? No, it still serves a purpose that was not being met before. I am going to make a more concerted effort to connect the old fashion way with my close friends.

So excuse me while I go call my best man.

Two years ago, I reflected on my first year and shared numbers. By that time I was pushing for an ECM standard for the SOA world.  I had just learned that there was an effort underway that we would later learn was called CMIS.  This month, that journey ended and it became a standard.

One year ago I was more goal focused as I looked back.  I worked on two of the three goals, failed in the Design Patterns, but I think it was a heck of a year.

I cannot take credit for what has transpired in the last three years, well maybe a little for the improved Momentum, but not for most of it.  A lot of it would have happened anyway.  At most, I have helped push alongside the rest of you.  That said, goals have been achieved and it is time for new ones.

Which leaves the real question, What next?

Where Do We Go?

Blogging is work. Anyone who says otherwise is either nuts or uninformed.  It is easy to start a blog, but to continue it, one needs a passion, a mission, or inspiration to keep it going.

For three years, CMIS has been my passion.  I have shared many other topics, but the underlying desire has been the improvement of the Content Management profession.  CMIS is a powerful mechanism for solving the challenges that we face in the industry.

To be honest, the ECM vendors, all of the “leaders”, have been moving under the momentum they built-up a decade ago when ECM was a new term.  They hit their “goal” and are trying to find new ways to sell the same software.

Many challengers to the leadership have been very good at mimicking the leaders in order to look like the leaders.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us.

We need a new vision.  We need new leaders.  Why new?  Because we don’t have either now in the industry.

That is my goal now. We need a vision and a vendor that can lead the way and deliver.  Being an outsider, I can’t just walk down the hall and make it happen.  I’m looking for it and pushing people to be bold and to share their vision with us.

I am going to spread the word and get people to start asking their existing vendors, and potential vendors, the difficult questions.

I’m pretty sure I will upset some people this next year, though I started that process when I called out EMC.  Other vendors are guilty as well, and many aren’t going to like me after the coming year.

In the end, I don’t care because in a few years, if all goes well, we’ll have a few vendors that we can believe in, both from a technical foundation and a vision for the industry.

2010 is going to be a busy year.  People may look back on May 2010 as when it all started (and not because of this post), but it will you to make the change happen.

Numbers, Why Count?

And now for the anti-climatic moment where I spew the obligatory stats or tidbits of information that I feel will show that I matter.  This year is all about percentages.  Raw numbers are tricky things, so let’s count growth…

• Two weeks ago I had my best week ever, by about 25%.  Last week is just shy of the previous record.  It was the highest non-EMC World week by a mile or three.
• The odds are that by the time you read this, I’ll have already set my record for best month, with a week to go.  Given the last two weeks, no shocker.

What does this mean?  Nothing.  To be honest, it doesn’t matter.  Like any blogger, I obsess, but my goal is to reach the people that make a difference.

If you read this far, you are one of those people.

Boy, did I blow that one.

After about a month of experimentation, I’m ready to report my thoughts, experiences, and urge all of you to join the discussion.

What is Twitter?

I can tell you what it isn’t.  It isn’t email, IM, or blogging. It is like having a conversation at a party where you can search the other conversations to join them, without leaving your current one. You can converse with others and work together to solve problems. You can share your thoughts/insights/whimsies with the world.

140 characters at a time.

For somebody used to rambling on in a blog post, this was a real adjustment, but once you learned the symbology (“@” user/reply, “#” topic/event, “D” direct message, “RT” re-Tweet), the benefits are outstanding.

What have I used it for so far?  What haven’t I used it for?

• RSS Feed: Follow analysts, bloggers, companies, and others and get a stream of links that help you keep on the leading edge of the news and events that shape your life. There is a lot more than the IT world out there.  The Mumbai attacks? The twitterati were there first and were the source, rightly or wrongly, of many news reports.
• Micro-blog: I often have thoughts that don’t really scream for a full blog entry. It may just be a cool link with a thought. As I hate multi-topic blog posts, many of those things never saw the light of day.  Well, now they have a place to go.
• Industry Tracking: I keep up with what other are doing by seeing their thoughts as they sit through conferences, attend meetings, or go about their work-day. I can track what AIIM is doing or how the Alfresco developer community is building new CMIS tools.
• Instant Messenging: This is semi-direct.  I can send a message to someone and later, even if I’m not online, they can reply. If I ask them a question in the open, tagging it with their name and a topic, I might get the answer from someone else.
• Technical Help: Having a problem, tweet it.  Somebody out there may have encountered it and have a solution.

I could go on.  Those are all just personal benefits. Chuck Hollis experimented the other week and is now hooked.  He dived in and spent a full day learning about Twitter and wrote a great post on Understanding Corporate Twitter. He recently tweeted that he was entering Twitter follow bankruptcy. He is realizing that if you have a lot of followers that you can’t get back to them all sometimes.

Another business aspect can be read about at MediaPost where they talk about how some companies are using Twitter for business, and how some have learned how not to use it.

What Do You Do Now?

Get out there.  Now! Don’t wait for this post to end. (Well maybe wait…read the rest and write a nice comment telling me how much I am off-base). It is just a few easy steps.

• Register at Twitter.
• Start to follow me (@piewords), or not.
• If you are in the ECM space, look at some of the people I am following. They may have some discussions and thoughts that interest you.
• Find a Twitter tool so you are free from the standard web page.  I like TweetDeck, but I started with TwitterFox when I wasn’t following many people. Only use one as there are limits as to how often your account can bug the Twitter servers.
• Watch, learn, chime in a few times. Remember, people are watching and searching.
• Discover how TinyURL is useful. I use the TinyURL Creator add-on for Firefox.  TweetDeck has one built in for multiple short-URL sites.

It can seem overwhelming if you start following a lot of people at first.  Over time you learn to filter and reduce it to background noise, taking note of only the truly interesting things. You can’t follow every link or you won’t get any regular work done. Then again, I actually get some regular work done with Twitter.

Critical Mass Goes to AIIM

AIIM already has a larger number of users. With the sponsorship of AIIM, it should easily maintain that lead. The question is, how active will those users be on the site? Numbers mean nothing if people aren’t active. So it all boils down to content.

Information Zen has personal blogs and the ability to add user content and videos. It has a discussion area and the ability for users to add events. It also allows for the creation of groups by individual users and pages for those groups. The only thing missing is a wiki.

Content Management Connection, Bloggers Unite

The one thing I like about Content Management Connection (CMC) over AIIM is the ability for it to auto-post my blog to the site. In fact, the whole community seems focused on blog content. There is a wiki, but it doesn’t look active and I can’t determine how to add to it.

The blogging system has some limitations. The ability to keep my original blog and the copy on CMC tightly linked was poorly explained and didn’t seem to always function as desired. The ability to delete something that I posted is not present. Responses to emails asking for help were non-existent.

Oh, and they edited one of my blog entries without checking with me first. The wanted to make it more timely. If they had asked, I would have done it myself. Next to copying a post and claiming it as your own, editing someone else’s post is right up there as a bloggers pet peeve.

As a whole, CMC has some growth needed technically and managerially. Plus, it will have to work harder than AIIM to hit a critical mass of users.

Information Zen and Community

I am going to focus on Information Zen for now. There is a lot more there and I think that it may be a better platform for developing ECM SOA standards and Design patterns. I also know that the people that I want to reach will either be there or have colleagues that will be there.

The blogging may be more limiting, but the ability to build a community seems stronger. Plus Bex and Jed are already out there.

So remember when I asked you to start collecting those security scenarios for using ECM in the great big world? The place where we will collect those will most likely be on Information Zen. Let me get a few thoughts together on how to best use it and then we can start collecting.

In the meantime, join Information Zen and look for Pie.

After almost a week, I have learned this much:

• I have readers on every continent except Antarctica.
• My southern-most readers are in Chile, South Africa, and New Zealand (the winner I think)
• Outside of the US, the most hits in a country are the UK, India, and a few other countries in Western Europe hidden under the large red dots.
• Most surprising location? Central China (Yinchuan?) Cape Town in South Africa and Mashhad(?), Iran were close seconds.
• Most surprising non-hit? Ireland. Only after looking at the European coverage did it stick out.

Going to reset the map occasionally, though I am not sure how often. It is going to be a little toy for a while.

Ask Yourself Why?

This is important. Why are you starting a blog? Do you want to:

• Contribute your knowledge and expertise to the collective knowledge base of the Internet?
• Share your opinions with the world, and maybe become famous in the process?
• Work towards some sort of change?
• Advance your career or improve your company’s image?

No matter the reason(s), you want people to read what you have to say. If you don’t, just go start a private journal.

The easiest blog to write is one that shares your everyday exploits with friends and family. It is like an easy website that people can go to in order to see pictures and find out what you and the family is doing. Your readers already know you, so you can just be yourself. If you put something on your blog that makes you look like a dork, they already know if that is the exception or the rule. Your life is your content. The only concern here is maintaining your desired level of privacy.

Family/friend blogs are the easiest to write. If that is what you want to create stop reading and fire away.

Whatever your reason, Know What It Is. That reason will directly impact what happens next. The rest of this post focuses on the non family/friend blogs.

A Blog is Work

There are 52 weeks in the year. If you want to achieve many of the goals suggested above, you probably need to average at least a post a week. The more you post, the more people will come and read what you have to say. Even at one a week, that is 52 posts. That is 52 things to say.

If you only have 5-10 things to say and just start saying them in different ways, people will stop reading. If that is the case, look at posting articles on a common site. For Documentum people, soon there will be the new EDN.next where you can post just a few entries.

People always start blogs with things to say. The key is to not have a few things that you want to share that you want, but a goal. What is it that you want to communicate to the rest of the world? If you want to post a blog on technical things that you have discovered, you can post less frequently and become a reference site. Just make sure that you add entries occasionally or you will just become another orphaned blog.

I started off by wanting to rant. I discovered a message, ECM SOA Standards are needed. I have since added a goal, Build a community around ECM and Documentum. I still share information and expertise. Those are simple stand-alone posts (Except for my massive volume of posts on EMC World). What keeps me inspired is taking experiences and applying them to the message and the goal.

It is still a lot of work. I probably spend two hours on the average post. I want to present a positive image. That means reading my posts over for typos and refining my words so that they are clear and somewhat concise. I track-down links and put them in my posts to help describe underlying concepts and to share what others think on a particular topic. I have to review submitted comments regularly and reply to them when necessary. I have look to see what sites and blogs are linking to me so that I can see what they are saying, and in what context.

That leads to my final point…

Blogs Start Conversations

People may link to your blog and comment upon it. If they seem rational, start a dialog. This provides more value to your readers as they can see your ideas being challenged/validated by someone else. It also allows for refinements and improvements to your ideas. Some of the readers at the other site may even become regular readers.

On the flip side, to really get some dialogs started, you need to look at other blogs that talk about similar, or interesting, topics. See what others are saying and write your own posts commenting on them. Be sure to add to the conversation and not just re-phrase, or copy, what is on the other site. This dialog and linking brings in those other writers and you can start a nice dialog.

In the ECM world, there aren’t a lot of bloggers. Many blogs are technical in nature, which doesn’t lead to dialog. Finding opportunities for dialogs can be challenging and sometimes the other writer doesn’t participate. Don’t get frustrated if you can’t start a dialog. Just try again with another post.

Not everyone will like you or agree with you. That is the nature of the beast so don’t worry about it. Defend your points, but don’t get bogged-down in an endless fight.

What I Told my Buddy

He wanted to start one or two blogs. One on Real Estate, where he does investments and buying/selling, and one on Technology, where he used to do quite well with as a consultant before moving on to real estate. I gave him two pieces of advice, one for each blog.

The Real Estate blog is a professional blog. That means drafting and reviewing and trying to provide value to the readers, otherwise they won’t come. I told him to look at some existing bloggers and see what they were doing. We discussed his audience and agreed that potential investors and partners were the most likely readers. Many home buyers aren’t going to take to the blogsphere to find an agent. The blog could help him on that front, but the returns would be worth the effort if that was his intended purpose. I advised him to invest in a domain name for the blog and to write a few entries in advance of going live. That would help get him a jumpstart on the whole process. Finally I told him that it would be a lot of work, but if done well, potentially rewarding.

The Technology blog is more of an interest for him at this point. I told him, Dude, no way! (Yes, I say dude). He might have a few topics, but his day-to-day work wasn’t going to lead to a plethora of things to discuss. The amount of work to write a post after his initial first few posts would be excessive. If he does the other blog for over six months and it is going well, only then should he even entertain the idea.

So Why Do It?

Blogs are a lot of work. They can also be extremely rewarding. I haven’t made a dime from my blog, but I have met a lot of good people and engaged in a lot of good discussions, both online and off. These have helped me do my job better, made my blog better, and thus helped my clients and readers. Plus the warm fuzzy that I get when I see that spike in hits is rewarding.

I’m sure that this post isn’t going to lead to such a peak. If it helps you there start a blog, it will be worth it.

Blogging can be a lot of fun. It is for me.

“Many works transmitted online, such as websites, are revised or updated frequently. Generally, copyrightable revisions to online works that are published on separate days must each be registered individually, with a separate application and filing fee”

-and-

“Copyright protects original authorship fixed in tangible form (17 USC sec. 102(a)).”

So my take-away is that, by default, bloggers are not covered as it is never “fixed”. You can register your blog/website, I think as describe in Circular 62, but I would check with the Copyright Office Public Information Office. There is a special registration for “dailies” (Circular 62a), but I’m not good enough to be sure about posting at least 2 posts a week. I can see that I have failed to post at least 8 times a month in two of the last six months. There is also the issue of many blogs not being a “Collective Work”, which I think would rule either of those alternatives invalid.

If you are a lawyer and can cite a precedent that says that my blog is covered, please let me know. I’ll share whatever I can validate with everyone.

What About Creative Commons?

I think the Creative Commons FAQ has the best statement:

“Applying a Creative Commons license to your work does not give you the same, similar or alternate protection to registering your copyright. Creative Commons licenses apply in addition to and on top of an existing copyright.”

So I am probably not protected at all. I’m keeping the Creative Commons license that I chose and mentioned previously. It shows my intent.

Without registration, my legal recourse is, at best, limited here in the United States. As I would have to pay a fee every time I register my new material, I don’t think that is going to happen. I don’t make money on this, so it is of debateable worth.

I’ll just have to resort to calling violators out and hope that the energy of the blogsphere will focus on helping each other out on this front.

• James will criticize ECM security as a whole and then point to one or more issues.
• I then attempt to explain why those key “issues” aren’t issues.
• James will then elaborate or comment on my post in one or more follow-ups, usually explaining something that I didn’t put in my post for one or more reasons. In the case in point, I didn’t take it deep enough. While doing this, he ignores any defenses I may have made of the “issues”. He invariably bringing up other “issues” as well.

Rather than continue the cycle, and eat my time up, I’m going to post one more time on this topic and move on for now. Some disclaimers of my own:

1. I no longer work for a vendor, and I never did on the development side of the house for an ECM vendor. (I was a hired-gun for PC DOCS in the late 90s). My job is to architect and deliver solutions that are secure, fast, and scalable. When I find a problem, I let the vendor know and work around it. When I find a cool solution that I can share contractually, you’ll see it.
2. I am not writing a manual here. This isn’t a wiki where I am going to come back and update things. This is basically a long series of articles. Due to time and space, I don’t put everything down in detail. I understand that my readers have to take the time to read everything, and I’m sure not going to write something that seems too long, like these disclaimers.

That being said…

Do Your Best

James is right. I’m not a big fan of his tactics at times, but his basic message is important. Security is important. You can’t always point to a return on the investment, but when it goes wrong, it is too late.

You try and test for the unexpected. That means architects banging on the system just to see what they can do. That means using testing automation software when the scenarios start to get out of hand. That means testing on as many different platforms and configurations as possible.

If a product has a bug, which is what a security issue is when you get down to it, it means that the tests missed something. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the testing was poor or treated as unimportant. It means that the developers and testers weren’t all-knowing and missed something. If lots of bugs and security issues pop-up, then you question the entire process and the commitment.

The bigger the system, the more bugs that will be found. A committed vendor can improve its testing at a rate at least equal to the growth of the product. There will be bad releases. The question is, do they continue to be that bad or does the vendor improve?

If nobody finds a security hole or bug in the real world, that means that nobody is using the system. Simple as that. The vendor can do all the right things, but there are so many quirks out there in the “wild” that they’ll never get them all.

When a bug was found in the “wild”, back in the day, we would identify it, fix it, and add tests to catch it in the future. We would also look for similar bugs. Usually for every bug that someone reported, we would find one or two more that we could catch and fix before anyone encountered them.

Making a secure and stable product is a process that never ends. The only products that release with no bugs or security flaws aren’t growing and are in maintenance mode.

Minor Little Detail on DFS

James needs to understand one little detail about the latest version of DFS (breaking my no issue rule). His latest comment attacks the following feature:

The DFS SDK now includes a.NET productivity layer (consumer library) for development of .NET-based DFS consumers. The .NET productivity layer is functionally equivalent to the Java productivity layer, with the exception that a .NET client can consume DFS services only remotely (as web services).

The DFS .NET productivity layer is Common Language Specification (CLS) compliant; therefore, you are free to develop above DFS using your CLS-compliant language of choice (e.g. C#, VB.NET, Managed C++, even IronRuby, IronPython, etc.). Samples of C# DFS consumers are provided in the SDK as well as new XML Documentation (i.e. C# equivalent to Java’s Javadoc) and HTML Help (.chm) documentation.

DFS service development tools have been enhanced to provide a facility for generating CLS-compliant .NET productivity layer support for your won services, too. The DFS .NET productivity layer is based on Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) framework within .NET 3.0.

James, it is a development TOOL designed to help .NET developers more quickly develop DFS based applications. There is no actual change to DFS itself in relation to this feature. Calls could be made to DFS from .NET before this latest release. The difference is that before everything had to be built manually.

EMC is just trying to make life easier for developers.

On Abuse in the Blogsphere

I just want to let James know that I don’t feel abused. I said that in jest. If I truly felt abused, I’d be done.

I would have been done a while ago for his constant attacks on Craig Randall, blaming him for every ECM issue and taking him to task for not responding. Others have called it a day . I keep reading to try and call James to task on some of the things he posts and because I do learn some things outside of the ECM world. Eventually, that may not be enough motivation to keep reading.

James, please start to challenge and question people without insulting. If you don’t, you may find yourself yelling into the void and not get any response. It is your blog and your right to use it as you will. Just remember, we respond and interact at our will.

Well, James replied to me in two subsequent posts. The first post endeavored to teach me about the importance of testing for security in systems proactively. It wasn’t a lesson that I needed, having heard of the SQL Injection attack back in the 90s as a weakness in ASP applications (or at least an attack that was fairly similar). Being aware of these issues, I’ve make a point of controlling what a user can do in interfaces.

His points are valid though, so I wanted to take time to talk about them. This is my first post in a series addressing the points he brings up. So if I don’t address something now, don’t worry it’ll come.

Testing Due Diligence

I’ve been a Software Product Manager in the past (AnnoDoc, among others, when it was owned by Infodata Systems). It was a trying experience to get the software adequately tested to support every environment our clients needed. For AnnoDoc, we had to support every combination of:

• The last three version of Adobe Acrobat, Standard and Professional.
• The last two versions of Internet Explorer.
• Windows 2000, 98/ME, and XP.

That was just the client. The server had to support the last two major versions of Documentum and all the related supported platforms. It was a testing mess. We were able to deliver a product that had minimal environment specific issues. Most issues were multi-platform in nature.

We didn’t have to test security heavily. Our server component had to have an authenticated session passed to it from the Documentum client. From there, the actions that the user could take could only impact annotation objects belonging to the named user. It was fairly straightforward and heavily parameterized from an interface perspective.

Testing for the Unexpected

One of the responsibilities of vendors that provide systems is to make the system secure and safe to use. This goes beyond authentication and authorization, two related yet different concepts. This covers securing against unexpected acts by the user, both accidental and malicious.

Now, take a similar grid of supported platforms from above and add functionality and a complex user interface. Security becomes more of a risk because the interface is more empowered and has more places to be breached. Testing this through scripts and manually can be a time consuming task, and no sure thing. There are people I know that can crash an immature system in 5 minutes if they try hard. Those people typically are not testers as their skill set typically moves them up and out of any testing roles quickly.

With average skilled testers, how do you test for security flaws in the system? You need to use automated applications. The need is in direct correlation to the number of interfaces and the complexity. If it is simple, you can test manually and keep things under control. As it grows in size and complexity, the potential for critical holes increase as well.

Another reason to control what the user does? Simple. Take a successful system and empower the user to run queries willy-nilly. They may eventually ask something that brings the system to its knees trying to put the answer together. While no security breach has taken place, the system is unusable until that query completes, if it ever does.

Evidence, Present or Absent?

In his second post James points out:

If you look for “X” and don’t find it, does that prove that there is no “X”? No.

James is quite correct. Earlier, I called EMC’s reaction to the vulnerability good. The existence of the vulnerability is not proof that there is not proactive testing. The existence of several vulnerabilities could be construed as a reason for concern.

James made the accusation, so it is up to him to back it up. If he had started by asking how they did it, and he got answers that danced around the topic, that would have been some evidence. However asking the question and not getting an answer in public, voluntary, forums like blogs is not evidence.

I can think of three reasons why James may not be getting the answers he seeks. One is that he alienates some people with his approach. His approach of Incite for Insight can work with some people, but it also shuts people down, and once shut down, there is almost no starting up. I obviously do not get enough abuse in my normal everyday life as I keep coming back for more verbal abuse.

The second is maybe that the people he asks don’t know all the answers to the questions he is asking. Let’s take Craig Randall for an example. He is a nice guy and I’ve enjoyed chatting with him over the past year. He is an architect of the Documentum platform. Knowing what little I do about the product development in EMC, it would not surprise me if he didn’t know what tools the QA department used to test the software ().

As a product manager, I needed to know as I was responsible for QA. However, the actual designers and developers didn’t need to know. They needed to be aware of the issues to design against them, and to fix them when found.

Of course, there is the ever present third reason. They’ve been instructed not to talk about such things unless they are in role A, B, or C. I have no idea. In Craig’s case, option one takes precedence over the other two. Craig blogs because he enjoys sharing the new things he learns and his many of his posts show the enthusiasm of the writer. He may know the answers James seeks and may be allowed to share. He may have decided that responding to James just leads to new abuse, which is not why he blogs.

As for Bex, whom James also calls out, he explains his silence. Bex doesn’t actually work for Stellent (Oracle), which is another damn good reason.

I’m leaving the SOA, DFS, and DQL v SQL topics subsequent posts. This post is long enough…

Regarding the Recently Departed

The blog that I referred to is now gone. I can find a small cached version through Google, but it is no more. The writer claimed to be an employee of EMC, but some EMC people I know failed to find them in their Global Address List. Who knows at this point? I did determine that every single post, except the first A Message to All Viewers was copied from another blog.

I notified the original authors when I discovered the massive plagiarism, and about 12 hours later, the blog was gone. The post list is interesting and I am sharing the original array of posts in the order that they where originally copied.

• What’s New in D6
• Send Yourself an Email in the Future Using Google Calendar
• Quitting A Job
• X-Hive and the Content Server
• Aspects the new BOF type in Documentum
• Tips: Dynamically Creating Users in the DFC
• Documentum Versus Open Source

An useful collection. I was copied twice. I don’t know whether I should be complimented or doubly offended.

Creative Commons

Just like there are different licensing schemes for Open-Source software, there is a place where you can gray-scale your copyright for your blog. I was reserving all my rights and I listed how I envisioned fair use of what I wrote. After seeing a couple of fellow bloggers, Jed and Troy, make use of the Creative Commons license, I decided to follow suit.

It is pretty easy to do so. All that is required is to determine how many of your copyright rights do you want to reserve by default. I looked for one that I would be comfortable with at all times and selected Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. If you check the list, it is more restrictive than most. However, if someone was going to charge others to see what I had done, I wanted to know about it.

This has been an interesting trip through the blogsphere. Now I can hopefully return you to your regularly scheduled program.

For those that are unaware, there are several blogs out there that just re-post other people’s blog entries. These are bot-driven and usually include a link to the original post. They also typically only have a teaser posted. I ignore those because they don’t claim to have written the content and are fairly obvious.

In this case, however, it appears that the content was written by the owner of the blog. That is unethical, and I believe a violation of copyright laws. There was no link back to my blog or anything else that may indicate that it was not composed by the actual owner of the blog.

As a result, I’ve added the following to my About the Word page:

I reserve the rights to everything that I write on this blog. You can quote me all you like if you give me credit and don’t charge for it. If you are going charge someone to read my quote, get my permission first. I’m pretty agreeable and will probably just want to read what you wrote after publishing.

I think that is a pretty fair policy. I follow that policy in regards to other people’s blogs. I respect that they took the time to write something and that if I quote them, I need to not only acknowledge that it is a quote, but allow my readers to read the original in its full context.

As a personal policy, I try not to link to someone’s post unless I have something to contribute to the conversation. If something is extremely useful, I may link to it to allow other to learn. However, I don’t like just posting solitary links. Nothing wrong about it, just a behavioral preference.

As for the Offending Blog…

There are some posts that appear to be original on that blog. I may even link to one or two of those posts in a discussion that I was planning. This is all assuming that I can verify to my satisfaction that they wrote the actual posts that I reference and that credit is given where due on the posts presented.

I have contacted the blog owner and asked them to change their approach and give credit where it is due. I am going to allow them to make changes. If they don’t do so, I may share the site so that people know.

One question I am left wondering, how many other posts have been copied by that user? The answer is yes!