August 2005 Archives

I got a little panicked when I read Ian Kennedy's report from the first day of the business blog summit on his blog Flashpoint. He makes a lot of points with liberal linkage to additional information, and I always feel overwhelmed when presented with that much new information in an area where my knowledge is still developing. (I am also a little intimidated by certain diners because of their book like menus.)

As a consultant who is exploring the small business use of blogs, I felt like I should be a lot more familiar with at more of the names and ideas he mentioned.

I would like to give you a detailed report on the state of blogging today.

But such a post from me would be redundant since David Silfry, the founder of Technorati, who knows so much more about the subject is writing just such a report, and he's got spiffy graphs too. David is in the midst of a multipart series of posts presenting up to the minute statistics about blogs and analysis of what the data represents.

Check out the reports on his blog, Sifry's Alerts.

• Part 1 : Blog Growth
• Part 2 : Posting Volume
• Part 3 : Tags and Tagging
• Part 4 : Spam and Fake Blogs
• Part 6 : The A-List and the Long Tail

I read another important bit of history the other day. I have written before of the Open Source movement, and a variety of open source tools. Many of these tools I have mentioned, such as GIMP and GRUB are part of the GNU project, primarily sponsored by the Free Software Foundation. It would be fair to call theses tools "Free Software" as much as it would be to classify them as "Open Source".

The other day, I read a biography of RMS by Sam Williams entitled Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software. This book is available through the publisher O'Reilly, and also released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

I thought the book was interesting for two reasons. It brought some of the distinctions between the advocacy of RMS leader of the Free Software movement, and that of Eric Raymond, who has become one of the leading advocates of the term "Open Source" in place of "Free Software". To put it in a nutshell, which is arguably where both of these heroes of mine belong, RMS demands source code for political reasons, while ESR demands the same in the name of improving the quality. I think that is in essence a business argument.