Lost!

I just received an email, actually - 4 email to various addresses, that contained an Exclusive invite to Alfresco’s North American Community Conference.

My problem is that Alfresco tends to spam their mailing list with some pretty interesting stuff. Thunderbird marked each email as spam, blocked the HTML content and they even used a third party for their mailing list instead of using…an open source package… At least Spam Assassin didn’t throw it away before it got to me. Unfortunately, this company may be getting funding and customers, it still does not have the professionalism that one might require.

While I could attend the gala, I’m not spending the required amount for an international flight from Frankfurt to San Jose to cover a company that I continually beat up. One of these days, I really hope I have something good to say about them.

Oh, and yes, I am working on a bigger Alfresco story - glad you asked.

Not really ECM news - ok, not ECM news at all…but… it’s cool. StartupSchwag.com has launched to provide people like you and I startup stickers, shirts, etc. They are able to get away with this by actually charging users for montly subscriptions vs trying to make startups pay for the products. So, those that want the stuff, pay for the stuff.

According to most blogs that I’ve seen so far, they have approximately 400 users paying $15 a month for Schwag. I’m willing to pay that for startup shtuff.

In fact, on of the first photo’s of Schwag being worn where from Lisa Brewster from Sophistechate wearing a TechCrunch shirt.

Actually, I can turn this into ECM news, more like Content Management News. Thought it was interesting that StartupSchwag.com used WordPress for their corporate site. All the secrets of the web are in the code…

The HTML v.5 draft was released on the 22nd and I’ve had a little bit of time to read some of the 488 pages, and there are some interesting things.

For one, there are hugely obvious sections where RSS, Video and Sound have influenced the new standard - allowing for embedding RSS directly into the HTML (ie: no widget needed) as well as new embed code for Video and Audio.

Blog influence comes in with Article and Dialog tags becoming standard inside HTML, although there are a few more than can be used as well that completely fit within the Blogging world.

So, before I get into the nitty gritty, some may wonder why the change has occurred. With the advent of so many fully-function, Web 2.0 websites, it seems that many developers, myself included, have used their own tags to show things that have become the norm. For instance, WordPress uses the “POST” class to show a post - imagine that. Even SharePoint uses “TOP” as the same indicator of content. There are several other web applications that use roughly the same DIVs for the same type of content - HTML v.5 is an attempt to standardize that. Continue reading…

Over the last 2 days, I’ve been testing a new blog logging service: MyBlogLog.com and there are some interesting things in the stats: Alfresco is dominating the incoming and outgoing links on my blog.

Even though I haven’t had time to write up a decent Alfresco story in a very long time, it still seems to be very popular when compared to SharePoint. While I’d love to write about it and SharePoint more, I just don’t have the physical resources to do so since my test server isn’t fully developed yet.

Don’t worry - I’m working on the test server, and when I do get it up and running, I’ll even post how cheaply you can get a serious test server up and running very cheaply.

So, why is Alfresco information dominating my blog? Could it be that it’s supposed to be cheaper than SharePoint? Perhaps because it’s Open Source? If you’re interested in Alfresco, I’d be really interested in hearing why. What things do you want covered? What types of screenshots do you want to see? Would you rather see news or stories on customization?

I’ve been sitting back for a bit scheming on how to make money since being unemployed. Currently, I’ve got a business plan going for a website, but it’ll be a few months before it’s even Alpha. But, within the last few weeks, several things have happened to slow down progress on that project: ECM projects that actually pay real money…

There are several ways to get noticed, but the easiest way I’ve seen is Monster. If you have an ECM background with SharePoint etc, it’s very easy to get noticed by recruiters around the globe and even Microsoft. I’ve personally gotten emails from Microsoft asking me to apply to their SharePoint team. (In that situation, I actually got an email from the Internal MSFT PM, not to mention nearly every recruiter in WA.) I’ve noticed that if you update your resume every Continue reading…