review

Drupal CMS wins a top rating from Linux Format magazine

2007-01-29T13:59:42-06:00

In the January 2007 issue, Linux Format reviewed Drupal 4.7 and compared it to Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone and Typo3.

I don't have the publication, and the online magazine just has a list of contents:

Roundup: Content management systems - Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone, Typo3

But when you look at all the checkmarks in the page image below....

...it seems that Drupal covers a full range of features they looked at. The other systems evaluated have their strengths, but it's nice to see Drupal getting some recognition for its strengths.

Dries writes:

The information is not always 100% accurate, but it certainly makes for a good starting point if you're looking for a CMS.

[Photo by Dries Buytaert]

iPod, Therefore I am - "Vanity Fair"

2006-03-17T08:03:23-06:00

Michael Wolff has written a piece on Steve Jobs for the April 2006 issue of "Vanity Fair."

This impressionistic piece is good. Wolff writes of Jobs

... it turns out that Jobs is not marginal, or eccentric, or even fanciful at all. His is the at-one-with-the-American-consumer golden gut.

Calling Jobs the "ultimate media guy," who has outdone Bill Gates at every turn, Wolff declares Jobs the real winner.

The reader wonders if the claim is valid - at least I wondered. Isn't Microsoft far and away more commercially successful than Mac?

Well, Wolff has that covered.

... one day in the near recent past everybody woke up and found out that while all the geniuses were blathering on about content this and content that, the media culture had, in fact, come to be dominated by machines. It's Steve's gadget-centric world which we just live in.

iPods, Razr phones, BlackBerrys, plasma screens, Xboxes, TiVos, laptops. Machines are the habituating, behavior-changing things. Machines themselves are fascinating, life-changing, cool, sexy.

The medium is the message.

I can't reprint the article here, but it is worthwhile reading.

But is it fun?

2006-01-04T16:00:45-06:00

Customers don't want a 1/4-inch drill; they want a 1/4-inch hole.

So said Ted Levitt and his article, "Marketing Myopia," stands as a classic.

In my own experience at Hewlett-Packard Medical Electronics, our engineers were positively charmed by their inventions, but what the savvier marketing folks understood was that the patient's vital signs were not the central reason the equipment was purchased - although it was very important - but more to the point, the physicians and staff wanted a trend line.

We "hire" products to do jobs.

Some years ago there was the "CB craze." The Citizen's Band radios were all the rage, especially among truckers. Driving an 18-wheeler, alone, over miles of interstate can be a lonely life and the CB radio became an instant fixture. There was even a hit single about truckers called "Convoy" where the CB radio was a "star."

CB is still around, but the cellular phone has largely supplanted it. Today, a strong signal and the stored phone numbers of good friends are important, but it the days of the CB, people talked pretty much to strangers.

The CB radio of old was bedecked with knobs that could be twisted and turned and tuned. At the time a CB could be purchased for about $39.99 - and it could be tweaked for hours on end.

A group of bright engineers decided that all this was too much work and they came up with a one-button electronic CB radio. Simply press the button and the electronics would zoom, lock the signal, and voila!

It was listed at $200 and word has it that exactly 3 were ever sold. Perhaps it was bad marketing, poor distribution channels, or too high a price to pay.

However, I think that what happened was that the engineers had all the fun and took the fun away from the guys on the long haul who filled the miles of road twisting, tweaking, and tuning the knobs.

Going back to DuPont

2005-08-26T12:28:41-05:00

"You can't go home again," wrote Thomas Wolf.

In the next several weeks I will be blogging on my memories of starting out - my first position out of college - and how I chanced to be hired by E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Inc., of Wilmington Delaware.

I hope this will be more than a "remember when" story. I hope to make it relevant.

Why is this a remarkable story? Why should it be told? Well, let me tell you a little about DuPont.

DuPont is one of the oldest firms in the world - founded in 1802. It continues today and is still in the Fortune Fifty (F-50) and is one of the Dow Jones firms that tell us where the stock market is. Pretty remarkable. No other firm on the Dow Jones can trace itself back that far.

More remarkable still is that DuPont is a "green" company whose corporate policy is environmentally conscious. Kermit may have lamented, "it's not easy being green," but DuPont is doing something about their impact on the environment.

I will have a chance to "go home again" and see how life has changed, remember some lessons, and discuss how corporation reinvent themselves. You have to be pretty good at it to do it for 200 years - and still going strong.

A friend of mine is a VP at International Business Machines, IBM, and she recalled a seminar that gave the names of the F-50 firms at the turn of the previous century, circa 1910. She told me about it because DuPont was on that list.

The presenter pointed out that apart from General Electric (GE) and DuPont, all those firms have faded from the scene. He went on to suggest that most corporations last three score and ten, like in the Bible, and then they fade away, living about as long as humans.

He asked the group - how old is IBM. Just about 70 years and he closed on this point.

Reinvention is tough. What principles do we learn? What values do we internalize. I think I internalized many of the present values early on - and those you read about here on PingV's "Purpose" my values flow from that experience. Laura brings her own annealing experiences and we worked these out over months of talking and reflecting. We did not ask an outside ageny to come in and hand them to us.

We have the purpose in its own section, but I though I would revisit it here as I embark on my sentimental journey. Our purpose is our keel and rudder and here it is,

Our purpose

1. Human creativity makes our world possible, gives us hope and enriches our existence. It is a driving force of the universe, and one of the great gifts of humankind. pingV was founded to embrace, celebrate and empower that gift.

2. A corporation's success rests squarely with its people. People are not interchangeable commodities. We hire people of talent who have a strong work ethic and want to make a difference in this world.

3. We are a corporate family, not a corporate culture. We recognize success comes through our distinctive strengths united for a common purpose.

4. Our purpose is to leave the world better than we found it and those who deal with us better off than when they came to us. This means we empower people to help them achieve their goals.

5. We take time to listen to peoples' goals. We strive to offer people positive choices in molding their own destinies. We want to empower those around us and in so doing, their success becomes our success, not the other way around.

6. Our focus always is on high quality work. Cost-effectiveness does not have to mean low quality. High value comes from high quality at an affordable price.

7. After we have done our work, success must be lasting and independent of us. It is human to want to plant shade trees under which we will never sit.

8. Wisdom is an art, and a gift, and a practice, and we look for it within ourselves, each other and those who come to us. We know the ultimate measures of our success are not our profits, but the honestly earned praise and satisfaction of those we have served.

9. Innovation is the servant, not the master. Technology must not become a barrier or end in itself if people are to live free and meaningful lives of choices. We want to help people share knowledge. Empowering people to communicate and interact while preserving their privacy is our contribution to this world.

10. The present time is only a point of departure. While a clear vision of the current reality is essential, it should not prevent clear visioning of what might be. Our business is built upon realities that yesterday were only possibilities.

Personal Media versus Mass Media

2005-08-11T14:20:28-05:00

Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, discusses "Personal Media" on 17 minute streaming video in part one of a series entitled "Media, Education, and the Marketplace." Professor Miyagawa's insights are fascinating and dovetail with the role that the founders of pingV have envisioned.

Professor Miyagawa speaks of "story telling," which is a pingV pillar. He speaks to how learning is changing and how the role of mass media is central.

He makes an interesting point. There is "mass media" and "personal media." Like most of us, he is part of a generation raised on a diet of mass media. His insight is into a new paradigm, not limited to children, but people adapting to personal media.

Mass media is passive, as we all know. Personal media is interactive. And he goes on to suggest there are those who produce media and those who create it. Mass media is produced to be consumed. It is produced by people who bring a point of view.

Personal media is created through interactivity. People find a point of view based on browsing. They appropriate a point of view. They appropriate things to create. They create their own stories based on what they discover in the stories told by others. These new stories are expressed as personal media.

Professor Miyagawa says that younger people are more media savvy. I would say this is not limited to children, but they are a touchstone and easier to observe. They are content conscious and more discerning. In Japan, as well as elsewhere, internet phone (i-mode) is changing how younger people learn and interact. For example, a Japanese child will spend $50 to $200 each month on i-mode. Since disposable income is limited, young Japanese consumers are spending less on mass media comic books (manga), a big industry, and more on all personal media.

I ask, is that why Hollywood is getting worried about squeezing out every nickel, because people are less likely to pay for content that isn't up to snuff?

As we control personal media more, mass media will have to produce better content and be more interactive.

That is where I think pingV is on-point for where trends are headed.

I enjoyed the short introductory presentation and only touched on a few points. I recommend Professor Miyagawa's short talk to all people interested in where personal media might be headed.

Back to the Future - MIT paves the way

2005-08-09T16:57:50-05:00

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, is doing something very exciting. They have created something called MIT Open Courseware.

I have died on gone to heaven! These courses are free and they are online and they originate at MIT. They range from Aeronautics to Writing, stopping along the way at Languages, Economics, History, Women's Studies, Business, Music, Mathematics and on and on.

Some are even on video: I was already familiar with Walter Lewin's Physics Courses from the University of Washington Channel and Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra Course available in streaming video.

I was reviewing Professor Strang's course, when by chance, I moved to another browser page at the site and there they were-the keys to the kingdom. Free. Walk in. There is the Course outline, syllabus and calendar, lecture notes, assignments, exams, further on-line resources, in some cases video or audio recordings of the lectures, and an on-line discussion group.

This is available, online, from arguably the greatest technical school in the world, perhaps the greatest university in the world, technical or not.

Two of my alma maters are also doing something along the same line. As I mentioned above, the University of Washington is broadcasting courses - both internet and television - and with relatively uncomplicated camera work along with fairly good lighting and sound, they are simply pointing the camera at the lectern and out it goes. The UW had a fabulous graduate course in Industrial Engineering just a few years back. Harvard Business School (alas limited only to alums as far as I know) has a video library of conferences and seminars that are playable over RealPlayer. Unlike the science courses where drawings play a central role, the business courses are (at least to a larger extent) comprehensible on audio-only, without slides or chalk boards, so they can make drive time a pleasure.

But in as far as I have seen, the frontrunner is MIT.

The reader might ask why this worthy of a blog. "Knock yourself out, but MIT courses aren't most people's cup of tea."

The virtual University will not replace the traditional University or classes and I will illustrate with a story of why I think human interaction is important. Two years ago I returned to the State University and took some additional mathematics courses. I enrolled in upper division mathematics classes where the other students were young enough to be my children's age. That's where I learned of Strang's MIT Course on-video. I am mature enough and interested enough in the subject not to require the professor to bang the drum to attend and to get me to do my homework. What my professors did that meant the most was that they graded and returned my homework. I got my precious "red marks" where I had messed up. That was worth the whole tuition right there.

And yes, there is a vitality that one gets in being in a classroom.

However, having the virtual courses is wonderful. If I were in secondary school and this technology was available to me, I am positive I would be taking advantage of the opportunity.

And I suppose the main reason I find this fascinating is that in the future, this kind of interactive learning will be commonplace.

As someone who has been out of school for some time, it is refreshing to know that you "still have what it takes" and likewise to find out that it does not take all that much to stay current and to also feel the excitement of staying current - notwithstanding that the sheer volume of information is mind boggling, but that is the nature of the beast for everyone.

The site is worth a look see, even for people who are not as enthralled about MIT as I am. It is a peek into the future-even if that peek is only a look just around the corner.