Check This Out! Podcast

Media Contacts:

Leesa Barnes
leesa.barnes@gmail.com
(647) 225-3792

Jay Moonah
jay@jaymoonah.com
(416) 885-5341

Barbara O'Brien is the author of The Mahablog, one of the leading left/progressive blogs, and is known for her insightful and well-reasoned analysis.  Now she has extended her efforts into podcasting, with--so far--a couple of short and very listenable episodes.  Her first comment was a reflection on the legacy of the late President Gerald Ford.  In this week's entry, Old Tapes for the New Year, she talks about how each generation reacts to its own understandings--or misunderstandings--of the lessons of the previous war.  If you're interested in an articulate left voice in podcasting, add The Mahablog to your podcatcher.

Overall, the University suffered about $200-$250 million in physical damage and an approximate $150 million operating loss. The physical damage will ultimately be covered by insurance, and some creative financing has spread the operating hit out over several years, leaving the endowment in tact. Needless to say, the University has taken a serious look at its core mission and made some strategic decisions. The law school has fortunately emerged from this strategic restructuring virtually unscathed. The administration has even restored our faculty-wide discretionary book and travel allowance for the Spring semester. Although we like to think that these and similar lagniappes resulted from the law school’s longstanding status as an effective and efficient operating unit within the University’s business model, we certainly didn’t mind loaning Dean Ponoroff to the University President for a few months to help guide these decision. [Emphasis added.]

The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time.

Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency. A web developer at a major online service remarked: "We put up two or three new features on some part of the site every day, and if users don't adopt them, we take them down. If they like them, we roll them out to the entire site."

Cal Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr, recently revealed that they deploy new builds up to every half hour. This is clearly a radically different development model! While not all web applications are developed in as extreme a style as Flickr, almost all web applications have a development cycle that is radically unlike anything from the PC or client-server era. It is for this reason that a recent ZDnet editorial concluded that Microsoft won't be able to beat Google: "Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day."