April Fools Comes Early This Year
April Fools` has just now swept over the Eastern coast of North America and already hoaxes and jokes are spread thick and heavy across the web. Of course, it makes sense that European websites are already posting April Fools' jokes, but I'm not sure if what seems early to me is just an indication that [...]
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Helping Businesses Catch the Cluetrain
Back in the misty reaches of time — just before the last millennium turned, to be precise — four smart people got together to write about the growing gap between companies and markets. The result was called "The Cluetrain Manifesto", a cogent and plainly-written set of theses about how the Internet changes some of the [...]
For Geeks, by Geeks: The Open Web Conference
In a binary view of the world, there are two types of of technology conferences: those run with a profit motive and those run for by technologists for technologists.
The Open Web Conference falls into the latter category. It is an event organized by the Vancouver PHP Users Association (who are a bunch of web developers, [...]
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OSI Report for 2008 Week 10
This report is a summary of Zak Greant's Open Source Initiative activities for the week of March 9th to 15th, 2008.
This Week
This was my first week of real activity in 2008 (except for my attendance of the March 2008 OSI face-to-face meeting.)
My primary activities were embarrassingly few. I worked with Alolita Sharma and Andrew C. [...]
Adventures in Experimental Cooking: Vobla Soup
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Vobla, originally uploaded by zak_greant.
Early last week, I ventured out to our local German and Eastern European deli. While picking up the regular assortment of cured meats, [...]
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Mozilla Foundation Report for January 2008
This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the month of January 2008. In the future, I'll return to posting weekly reports. For more information on the other foundation-related activities, see the status reports published by David Boswell, Frank Hecker and Gerv Markham.
This month has had an unusually strong focus on [...]
Advancing the Mozilla Manifesto
Most regular readers of this blog are familiar with the Mozilla Manifesto and with the work that the Mozilla Corporation undertakes to advance the manifesto. It is good work. Actually, it is great work from a great community of people. However, the corporation focuses most on Firefox and the related software and communities. The manifesto [...]
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New Pitches for the Lab with Leo
My work at the Mozilla Foundation is, not surprisingly, focused on advancing the Mozilla Manifesto.
After my last Firefox 3 segment on the Lab with Leo Laporte TV show, I started thinking about pitches for new segments that tie in with the manifesto.
The rough ideas I've so far had are:
Deep Customization of Firefox: Make your browser [...]
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FOSSNUT: The Free and Open Source Software Norwegian University Tour
LinPro AS (a Norwegian Linux and FLOSS services firm) has organized a speaking tour of Norwegian universities. The tour will visit three Norwegian schools and will focus on introducing students and faculty to Free Software and Open Source. Speakers include FreeBSD & Varnish hacker Dag-Erling Smørgrav, eZ Systems AS CEO Aleksander Farstad and yours truly. The schools we plan to visit [...]
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20000 km, $7000, 7 days and 4 tons of CO2
… or, "Making Event Attendance Count"
Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I [...]
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