Kevin Micalizzi

Another great video from Lee Lefeever at the Common Craft blog, Wikis in Plain English.

It’s a great video that explains Wikis in simple English. Worth a few minutes of your time.

-k

I came across this video on the Blue Flavor blog.

It’s a great, high level, introduction to what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is.

[Update 9/4/2010: Unfortunately they made this video private on YouTube.]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

“There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.” – leelefever at the Common Craft Blog

Definitely worth a watch. -k

If you aren’t familiar, activeCollab has been an open source alternative to Basecamp.

I just saw the post “Status update followup” on the activeCollab blog and it sounds like this project is going the same way many others have — to commercial product with a reduced-functionality open source version.

In June, 2006 when the activeCollab blog started, the first post talked about why activeCollab was free. The list included:

3. Making money. I find it normal to expect something in return for your work. activeCollab will always be free but there will be commercial support as soon as we hit 1.0 for people who need a little more that community support, you can hire me to customize activeCollab to fit your needs or help you integrate it with system you are already running on your server. Or you can just see what I can do and hire me for some project not related with activeCollab.

From what I see in the “Status update followup” there are 2 key changes:

2. Core development will be done by newly founded company while community will be able to contribute through plugins and tools that use API

3. License will change and some of the advanced features will be available only in commercial version (read on for details)

I can only guess as to why the changs were needed. There are 2 that come to mind immediately: a. it’s tough to earn enough money developing for free; b. you can’t build the consistency and predictable development cycle you need to sustain a product in an all volunteer community.

It’s a shame to see it happen. I can’t fault the developer for the change. I just wish I knew how to build a successful open source model that can thrive long term.

-k

Have to say I agree with Michael Arrington on the Google Reader. I tried it once a while back and wasn’t feeling it. Though it is probably worth mentioning, I have a hard time staying with any particular reader for any length of time.

Since then, I’ve come back to it and have noticed Google made some improvements From the Reader page, you can now drop a list to look at entries from specific feeds or within specific labels. Before, when you wanted to see your feeds, either to filter or to edit, you had to click a subscriptions link and wait for the list to load. I’m subscribed to around 130 feeds right now, so it used to take a minute or so to load. The new drop list with the feed names loads quickly.

Overall the application is responsive enough for me to interact with, though my greatest complaint is that it sometimes takes a few hours or more for new feed entries to appear.