At Barcamp Boston yesterday I held a session to answer a question: how to you recruit people to help out on your open source and side projects?

The problem is one that vexes many developers. You develop a useful bit of code. Maybe it’s for your own use or maybe you created it during a hackathon. Then you want to give back to the community. So you open source it and upload it to github. Maybe you create a web page for it and a bit of documentation.

But then the requests start coming: can you fix this bug? Can you add this piece of functionality? Can you help me use it?

And while you’d love to develop and support it, you don’t have the amount of free time it requires. Yet it’s clearly useful to people. So the question then becomes: can you recruit other people to help?

Continue reading >

Google announced a new privacy policy and terms of service today. Buried within, was this innocent sounding, but insidious language:

We may use the name you provide for your Google Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Google Account. In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services. If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo. [emphasis added]

Essentially, as of March 1st, Google can change your identity and expose your details to others without asking you. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

No opt-out. No recourse other than to stop using Google services entirely.

Google has made clear they would prefer everyone use a single online identity, which they control. Two years ago, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time, during a panel at Techonomy stated:

“The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity,” Schmidt said. “In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”

Governments demanding everyone have a single, verified online identity has dangerous consequences. Google voluntarily forcing people into a single, verified online identity before governments demand it is just plain evil. Continue reading >

Are you a business professional who uses the Internet to perform research, use web-based business software, manage your customers, prepare reports or analyze data?

Then you should learn JavaScript.

JavaScript used to be just for geeks. But increasingly JavaScript is becoming the lingua franca of the web. The skill of writing JavaScript lies where typing was in the 80s. It’s not required yet, but it gives you a competitive advantage.

JavaScript can help you:

1. Add functionality to your spreadsheets
2. Customize your web-based business software
3. Automate your Windows applications
4. Enhance your desktop
5. Tailor your browsing experience
6. Build database reports
7. Visualize your data

Marc Andreessen wrote a recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Why Software Is Eating the World. While he focuses on software companies, software inside companies, particularly simple scripts, is having the same dramatic impact. Continue reading >

Yesterday I gave a talk entitled “How Citizens Can Use Open APIs to Create New City Services” at Asheville Cloud Day 2011. I aimed to inspire city IT personnel to create open APIs and to show everyone else how they could leverage those APIs. You can find the slides of my talk here.

While I’ve been aware of open APIs, I had never used one until I was preparing for this talk. I learned how to use open APIs about a month ago after watching the excellent video Google Docs Unleashed from AppSumo. Open APIs are surprisingly easy to learn and use, and I encourage everyone to try out the import functions of Google Spreadsheet that allow you to access them.

In preparation for my talk, I did some research about open APIs and the “mashup” applications built on top of them. This post details the results of that research and walks through the live examples I gave during the talk for those who want to learn more. Continue reading >

Google produces creative April Fool’s Day jokes. This year Google announced on their home page the release of Gmail Motion, a way to interact with Gmail using gestures. With Microsoft’s Kinect usurping the iPad as the best-selling electronic gadget of all time, it seems entirely plausible Google could release this technology. Which, of course, is the key to a good April Fool’s joke.

With the ongoing rivalry between Google and Facebook, and Google’s release of Google+1 on Wednesday, I thought it would be fun to envision Facebook’s response to Gmail Motion, if it was real.  As it happens, I had the day off, so took a couple of hours to write, direct and edit a short video response with my friend Jim Lauzon from LaZoom Tours called Facebook Gestures. You can watch the video below. Continue reading >

Net neutrality bubbled to the top of the news stack today with the submission by Google and Verizon of their net neutrality principles to the FCC. Bloggers and news outlets cried “The End of the Internet is Nigh” with heated emotional tirades describing apocalyptical scenarios of what would happen to the Internet if net neutrality was ignored.

I started the day mildly in favor of net neutrality. People I respect, like Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig and Vint Cerf, support net neutrality, so I thought it was a good thing. But the more reading I did, and the more I thought about the issues, the more I came to the conclusion that “net neutrality”is being redefined in ways that have broad consequences for the future of the Internet. And while I agree with some of the principles of net neutrality, on the whole, I’d rather live in a world without it.

While reading today through articles about net neutrality, I kept running across the same inaccurate claims and doomsday scenarios by people who seemed not to understand the dynamics or history of the Internet. This article goes through these claims and attempts to dispel those myths. Continue reading >

Google Fiber for Communities is a new initiative being launched by Google which aims to bring gigabit Internet access to homes within a community yet to be selected. Why does Asheville and the surrounding areas need Internet access which is 100 times faster than the typical broadband connection today? Read on. Continue reading >