After a week’s vacation, I’m back in the office. I might have left with an empty inbox and newsreader, but I returned to nearly 300 emails and over 500 news items. Actually, 300 emails for a week is actually really good – most of them are in my “low priority” folder which means they are internal mailing list emails rather than things I actually have to deal with.

Major thanks to Dale for keeping the lights on around here while I was gone. With my renewed commitment to blogging this year, I’d rather not see DevHawk “go dark” for a week while I get some R&R. If you liked what Dale had to say, go subscribe to his blog. I hope he keeps up with his daily posts, now that he’s no longer on the hook around here.

Anyway, since I have little idea what’s going on in the technical blogosphere, this is a vacation wrapup instead. Normal Morning Coffee returns tomorrow.

• We spent a week in Southern California. Two days with my brother-in-law in Santa Barbara, two days at Disneyland and two days with my uncles in Palm Springs (with travel days between). We had a blast, but that’s a lot of driving. Next vacation, we’re going somewhere we don’t know anybody and staying put the entire time.

• My brother-in-law has three kids, including a son a few months older than Patrick and a daughter a few months younger than Riley. I’ve long said I would never move back to Cali, but seeing them all play together made me think it might be worth it. I don’t have any cousins (my father was an only child and neither of my mother’s two siblings had kids) so I didn’t realize what a big deal it is. I think Patrick misses his cousin Jack more than he misses Disneyland.

• When I lived in LA, I used to have a season pass to Disneyland. But seeing it thru my kids’ eyes made it brand new again. Our two days in “The Happiest Place on Earth” were a blast, though in retrospect we should have taken a day to rest and hang out at the pool between the two days.

• Riley’s favorite ride was Pirates of the Caribbean (which she calls “Yo ho ho”). My friend Brooke told Jules that little kids “natural reaction” is to hold on tight during the drops, but Riley put her little hands up and shouted “Wee!” They recently added some elements from the movies (Capt. Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones) to the ride. My wife and I were worried they were going to ruin it, but the changes were fairly small and subtle and we liked them.

• Patrick’s favorite ride was Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters but the Jedi Training Academy was a close second. His Jedi training was my favorite moment at Disneyland. He got to train with a lightsaber and fight Darth Maul. Here’s a video clip of my young Padawan:

  The big problem with Jedi Training Academy is that they only pick a limited number of “younglings” every show. Patrick didn’t get picked the first time we went, and frankly I pushed him out there the second time without him officially getting picked. You could conceivably waste an entire day at Disneyland attending all six Training Academy shows and never get picked. That sucks.

• Biggest disappointment of Disneyland: Patrick being 1″ too short for Star Tours. I was bummed.

• Disney’s California Adventure is a nice adjunct to Disneyland, but as a stand alone park it pretty much blows, though Jules and I did enjoy the Tower of Terror.

• Disneyland seems to becoming Disney-Pixar Land. Pixar movies are the basis for several of the newer rides, including the new Finding Nemo ride opening this summer. There was an article in the Disneyland Pixar Evolution in the airplane magazine so I’m not the only one who’s noticed.

• After two days in Disneyland, I expected Palm Springs to be a let down. But instead it was a nice casual cool down after two hectic days in the Magic Kingdom. Plus it was great to see my Uncles, who we hadn’t seen since last summer when my brother got married.

• We flew home Saturday so we could have a casual Sunday before heading back to work and school today. We watched Phantom Menace last night, though the kids are still a bit young for it. We decided on Episode I instead of the original Star Wars because it has a little boy (i.e. like Patrick) and a fight with Darth Maul (i.e. like Patrick). But it doesn’t hold a candle to the original trilogy.

• The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Massachusetts lawmakers are considering a bill to punish retailers for leaks in personal data. I wonder how long it will take for a law like that to go nationwide? Looks like there may be some good jobs in retail IT data security opening up shortly.
• There is an interesting debate on the SAAS architecture in Dr. Dobb’s Portal. The money quote for me was as follows:

“Ajax and Web 2.0 are great technologies for casual use, but for mission critical you need the capabilities of a desktop app,” RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte says.

I have to admit I don’t agree with that quote at all. It seems pretty shortsighted in minimizing the capabilities of web based applications.

• As a follow-up to yesterdays entry about the 12 steps to overcome email addictionhere is a 12 step program to help you overcome being a SOAholic. There are also some symptoms you can look for to see if you are a SOAholic.
• Ram Ravishankarposts on if SOA requires web services. He makes pretty good arguments for an against a SOA requiring web services and ultimately doesn’t answer the question. I would say that a SOA doesn’t require web services, but it is very likely in the range of 90% plus that a SOA within a company is going to have at least some web services in it.
• Harry returns from his secret mission and will be back blogging on Monday. I have really enjoyed stepping in being a replacement blogger this week. While my take on technology is a bit different that Harry’s I hope that my entries were interesting and offered a bit of a different perspective on IT.

(Harry is on a secret mission in uncharted space this week, so instead of the daily Morning Coffee post, you get a series of autoposted essays. As this post is about Web 2.0, it’s obviously from fairly old from his previous role @ Microsoft.)

In my previous post, I wrote that I thought of Web 2.0 as the latest evolution of our post-industrial society. This latest evolutionary step was enabled by ubiquitous access to the Internet. We’ve come a long way on that front in just the past five years. Take for example, home networking. In 2000, less than 10% of active Internet users in the US had a broadband connection. Today, that number is just under 70%. At the same time, the consumer wireless router market has exploded. In 2000, there was no such thing as a wireless router for the consumer market. Today, you can buy a wireless router for under $100. In just under five years, consumer Internet access has evolved from being slow, intermittent and isolated to being fast, persistent and available anywhere in the home.

In addition to home networking, we’ve seen dramatic rise in mobile computer usage. Today, laptops are ahead desktops in terms of dollar sales and are expected to move ahead of desktops in terms of unit sales by 2008. Wireless access isn’t available just in the home, but in offices and at tens of thousands of wireless hotspots worldwide. Beyond WiFi and laptops, there is the availability of third generation wireless phone networks and smart phones with built in Internet and media functionality.

These technologies combine to provide a mobile and always-on connection to the rest of the world via the Internet that society is just beginning to leverage.

One of the earliest examples of the effect that the always-on Internet can have society was the original Napster. While Napster’s history and impact on the music industry is well documented, their peer-to-peer approach was only possible because of the availability of fast and persistent Internet access. Music files are fairly large, so Napster ran better with a fast connection. Furthermore, the availability of an always-on Internet connection enabled Napster’s peer-to-peer connections to be available even when the user was away from their computer or using it for other things. This allowed individuals to contribute to the overall Napster experience, even when they weren’t using their machine.

The dubious legality of Napster’s business eventually led to its shutdown. But the idea of connecting users directly to other users is alive in well in legal online services such as Skype and FolderShare.

This persistent connection was the final puzzle piece that has caused a fundamental shift in computing. There’s been more processing power and storage on the edge of the network for quite a while, but it was inaccessible. We needed fast, persistent and ubiquitous network connections to make that power available. As that network bandwidth has become available, the balance of computing power has shifted from the center to the edge. Today,

And in the Information Age, where the computing power goes, society will follow.

(Harry is on a secret mission in uncharted space this week, so instead of the daily Morning Coffee post, you get a series of autoposted essays. As this post is about Web 2.0, it’s obviously from fairly old from his previous role @ Microsoft.)

A friend of mine is doing some research into Internet topics, including Web 2.0. After reading dozens of articles each with a different definition, she asked me to sum up Web 2.0 in thirty seconds or less.

Web 2.0 is the latest evolution of our post-industrial society, driven primarily by the ubiquitous access of Internet connected computing devices.

Got it down to just one sentence and it only takes about fifteen seconds to say. The critical thing to notice about that statement is what it doesn’t include:

• No mention of specific technology outside of “Internet” and “computing devices”. That means no acronym laden techno-babble such as AJAX, REST, SOAP or XML.
• No mention of a specific platform or vendor. That means no references to Microsoft, Google, IBM, Yahoo, Sun or Apple. Likewise, there’s no mention of open source software projects like Linux, Apache or Ruby on Rails.
• No mention of Tim O’Reilly’s principles of Web 2.0. That means no web as platform, harnessing collective intelligence or the end of the software release cycle

This isn’t to say these technologies, platform vendors and principles aren’t important. They are. However, they aren’t what are happening; they are only pieces of the bigger picture. Exploring these individually without understanding the larger context is like the Blindmen and the Elephant.

I’ve recently been reading Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. It’s fascinating to read a book about the future that was written twenty five years ago. His opinion is that the industrial age peaked in the mid 1950’s and that the post-industrial age has been building steam ever since. Not coincidently in my opinion, the late fifties saw the first transistor based computers as well as the earliest work on computer networking. It is because of this intertwined history that this post-industrial age is often called the Information Age.

While it’s been building for half a century, the Information Age is only just getting started when it comes to remaking society. Over the course of three centuries, the Industrial Age saw rise to societal concepts such as the nuclear family, the school system and the corporation. It created the role of the bureaucrat. It separated the producers and consumers, giving rise to the idea of the market. It changed our view of the universe by precisely defining units of time and space. It got its energy from non-renewable sources, such as fossil fuels. In short, the Industrial Age completely remade the world. The Information Age will have equally far reaching effects before it’s done. I believe Web 2.0 is the next step in this evolution.

Toffler identified six principles of the Industrial Age: Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Centralization, Maximization and Concentration. The relevance of each of these principles is dropping rapidly as we shift out the Industrial Age. For example, weblogs represent a massive de-centralization of the news media. Online retailers like Amazon.com replaced the standardized shopping experience with a personalized one. Digital video recorders and online video sharing sites eliminate the synchronization of broadcast TV.

For each principle of the Industrial Age, there are examples of Web 2.0 companies working against it.

• Joel Dehlin, a former Microsoft employee and the CIO of the LDS church is conducting a series of tech talks. The next one is being planned for the bay area. If you are interested you can respond to his post here. The dates would be between April 22 – 26 with a tentative agenda as follows:

  • Keynote
  • Infrastructure breakout
  • Development breakout
  • Interaction Design breakout
  • Community breakout
  • Building to building video breakout

• Everything needs a 12 step program now. CNN has a 12 step program to cure your email addiction here. I started thinking about this after Harry’s post saying he had hit zero email bounce prior to going on his secret mission.

• I read an interesting blog on XNA and how it fits into Microsoft’s strategy in gaming. I am not sure I agree with all of the points, but I found the arguments to be compelling.

• My BYU Cougars are now up to 21 in the AP Poll. I can’t think of a year when both the football and basketball teams have both had such successful seasons.

• Between today and tomorrow I will be finalizing my vision document for how I think monitoring should work in the Service-Oriented Infrastructure project I am on. As I was outlining my vision it really hit me how much there is to do.