Instead we are witnessing the Web's second coming, and it's even got a name, "Web 2.0" – although exactly what that moniker stands for is the topic of debate in the technology industry. For most it signifies a new way of starting and running companies – with less capital, more focus on the customer and a far more open business model when it comes to working with others.
John offers a few comments on how openness is an advantage that we didn't have the first time around, in terms of open-source (free and libre) and open behaviour (working with others).
But mostly this is a good editorial on why we're not in a bubble. Of course, every time I read something like this, my mind invariably returns to the Wired cover story "The Long Boom." Which along with their "Push!" cover story, is remembered as one of their biggest mis-calls.
On the other hand, his main thesis is modest: we're seeing acquisitions instead of IPOs and thus the public "irrational exuberance" has less opportunity to run away with the market. Though I suppose you could argue that public money is over-funding Google (whose market cap is now over $71 billion dollars) who is in turn over-funding startups through acquisition.
UPDATE: Here's a brand new essay from Paul Graham in which he makes the exact same point.
I wanted to point out that Atlassian has released major new versions of both of their products in the last two days: JIRA 3.4 (now with wiki-goodness) and Confluence 2.0 (featuring the wysiwyg editor)! The releases weren't planned so close together, but by happy coincidence both teams finished at the same time.
I'm particularly excited about these two releases because I was in Sydney as they were being polished off. I have a first-hand idea of the Atlassian development process and what goes into getting a release out the door. It's an impressive accomplishment. Plus, I actually got a feature into Confluence. How cool is that?
So anyway, great work, guys! Onwards and upwards.
I'll be heading home for Thanksgiving tomorrow. I'll be in Birmingham through Sunday the 27th. If you're in the neighborhood, give me a ring. I'll be available via all the usual methods.
P.S. My last little note made it sound as though I'm down about the whole birthday thing. I'm not. Twenty-nine was a very good year for me. Matter of fact, last night at trivia was the best birthday celebration I've had in a long time. And that was just a warmup. The real celebration is tonight!
Well, that's it. I'm thirty.
I just had a really interesting exchange with my friend Alicia. I've been trying for a couple of months to convince her to apply for one of the Customer Advocate positions at Atlassian. I think she'd be ideal — she has an enthusiasm about the web and about its social implications, a solid technical understanding for someone who's never written code, and background in dealing with customers.
However, despite my repeated nagging, I could never seem to pique her interest. Heck, I couldn't even convince her to finish her résumé. But several weeks later, Alicia explained the problem in an email.
When you were trying to get me excited about the prospect of working at Atlassian, why didn't you send a link to Mike's blog? Reading about someone's personal experience and excitement about what they're doing is 200 times more interesting than a job listing or product description.
I took a look at Mike's blog and thought "hey, these guys actually sound pretty cool" and then immediately "which is exactly what Jonathan has been trying to tell me for over six months!" It kind of stunned me that I could fail to understand you so completely.
Women are all about relationships. I don't really care what it is exactly that a company makes, I care who I'll be working with, what their goals are, what the company culture is like. The experience of working in tandem with others is what is important to me, the product just needs to be something I can be proud of associating myself with. It's not the thing, it's the process.
I had imagined several possible reasons that Alicia might have been blowing off my very sincere offer of potential employment: perhaps she didn't really want to work in technology. Or perhaps she didn't want to work in a customer-facing role again. Or perhaps she just didn't want to work at all.
I couldn't comprehend the fact that she might not want to work at a company as satisfying as Atlassian. I had been talking about Atlassian and its products on my blog for months. Confluence, in particular, has such enormous potential, and is in the dead center of Alicia's social-software interest. But as it turns out, Alicia couldn't get excited in the same way I could: by a company, or even a product — she needed to get excited by people.
It's an interesting insight. And it leads broader questions: is recruiting women for tech jobs a fundamentally different operation? Does that have any relevance on the relative scarcity of women in technology? Are we missing good candidates, not because of any active gender bias, but because we fail to convince women that tech jobs can be fulfilling?
This post from Joho the Blog seems to indicate so. It appears to have had its genesis in IBM's own internal social-software toolset.
Extensions to wikis that lets people "easily link together applications and services that are on the Web." David Sink and Joel Farrell show the QEDWiki demo. They show a table of contacts and then turn it into a database. They do a "mash up" with Google Maps and weather data. Right now, it requires on-screen programming, but they assure us it'll be much more user-friendly when it ships…. It's php-extensible. It uses AJAX.
The mystery product was also called "Appliki" earlier in the post. Not sure if that's a name or a categorical description. Not a lot of detail, but it bears watching.
in the great Quizmaster QuizBowl 3000 Trivia-off last night, hosted by the lovely ladies of team (what number are you guys?), plus Zach. Those five made up some extraordinarily tough questions. In fact, they actually came up with a few that Jason, David and I had proposed using in the real event. But I came out with 22/40, a score which, while just over 50%, would have been not-embarrassing in a real pub-quiz round, so I can walk with my head held high (and a flower pot in my hand). Plus, they gave me booze.
My cuisine reigns supreme.
Bonus trivia Question 1 from last night: The word "payola" is a portmanteau of what two words?
Bonus trivia Question 2 from last night: What was the first work of fiction blessed by the Vatican?
Hi Folk, just a quick note to say that I made it back from Sydney without incident, although my body is all sorts of confused about what time it is. I had a blast while I was there, and you can expect a few more posts catching up with what I did on my last few days — including the infamous Cup Day festivities.
Pascal Van Hecke has a nice comparison of the free wiki hosts out there right now, including many that I've mentioned here before. I've been meaning to bring my own list up-to-date for a while, but now he's done it for me. Thanks!
Reading his post prompted me to visit Wikispaces again for the first time in several months — it looks like they're making rapid progress. It's much more polished than I remember. Good work, guys.
As a general rule, I don't like sight-seeing. I don't like feeling like a tourist. (See DFW's book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again for a fairly illuminating essay on the deeply narcissistic roots of this particular psychological foible.)
But I did do some small amount of sightseeing last weekend, in that I walked down to the water (about 4 blocks from the Atlassian office) on a particularly glorious day. And so I took the obligatory pictures of Sydney's famous landmarks: the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge.
One thing that impressed me about the Opera House is the multitude on interesting perspectives on it. It's a building that the entire world knows well, but it's almost always photographed from across the harbour or from the air. Walking up to the building from the back, I was able to see it from an unfamiliar vantage. And as I continue to walk around the building, I was impressed by how many different ways there were to see it. And how the outline of the building changed as the arches moved in relation to each other because of the changing vantage point. I also thought the enormous flights of stairs on the back (front?) of the Opera House were particularly powerful in scale as you approached them on foot and then stood at their base. It's a better and more interesting building that I would have realized from the many photographs I've seen.
The picture of the bridge, on the other hand, is just a bridge, though an elegant one. But it does serve to demonstrate just what a fantastic day it was. The harbour is really gorgeous.
Jonathan Nolen 