The Massachusetts Software Council wants to put together a panel on corporate blogging and is looking for prominent business people in the Boston area who maintain blogs. They don’t have a clear fix on the topic just yet, but I expect it’ll related to how businesses can understand the blogosphere and use blogs as communication devices. If you know someone who’d be a good speaker, please comment on this post or send me an e-mail. Thanks!

It’s Sunday, so let’s lighten it up a bit :-).

The best gadget I’ve purchased in a long time is a Garmin GPSMap 60C handheld global positioning receiver (about $300). I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that you could pinpoint your position on the planet to within a few feet but I didn’t anticipate the value it would have in everyday life.

On a practical level, having a GPS in the car is saving me time and aggravation. I never get lost any more because I know almost immediately when I’m off track. I’ve also started experimenting with finding shorter routes to places I routinely visit, which has cut down on time and gas consumption. I can even plan longer trips by punching in coordinates before I leave and then following the route the unit calculates (you need to invest in special software for this). You can look up the coordinates to any address on the globe, BTW, at Maporama.com.

For recreation, the GPS opens a few new doors. I’ve started geocaching, which is kind of an online global scavenger hunt that has turned out to be way more fun than I thought it would be. Not only do my kids and I get a kick out of finding the secret treasure hidden in forests and cemeteries but the activity has taken me to nature preserves, walking trails and public parks that I didn’t even know existed. I’ll even take the GPS on the road with me and take a break for an hour here and there to geocache in another city. Such a geek I am…

Travelers can download specialized maps of routes and locations around the globe to create a sort of digital TripTik. If you have a lousy sense of direction, you have to get one of these things. It will make your life so much easier.

I’ve been interested by commercial applications of GPS since I first noticed a unit being used as a range-finder on my golf cart years ago. GPS are already routinely used in fleet management applications. You can imagine why UPS would value this information but there are other cool ideas as well. A friend contacted me just the other day who works at a small company, Everyday Wireless, that specializes in tracking school buses. School administrators and nervous parents can pinpoint the location of a bus at any time and display it on a web page. Any parent who’s stood in the cold with their child for 20 minutes waiting for a late bus can relate to this application. I’ve long wondered what would happen if you could shrink the size of a GPS receiver to something that could fit in a cell phone or a tooth. Imagine the uses of a technology that could track anything’s position on earth to within a few feet. Imagine the abuses if privacy limitations weren’t respected.

One more GPS-related item in my morning ramble: I listened to an interesting podcast of a presentation by Todd Young of Rosum Corp. This startup has figured out a way to use broadcast TV signals to pinpoint locations in dense urban areas or inside buildings where GPS doesn’t work. I have no idea how effective this technology really is, but the founder of Rosum is one of the inventors of the GPS system. For sheer innovation, this idea is tough to beat.

USA Today had an interesting op-ed piece this week by a retired journalist who wrote about the experience of being libeled on Wikipedia and being unable to do anything about it. John Siegenthaler, Sr. said his bio (which no longer appears to be listed on Wikipedia) was spurious and riddled with factual errors. It said he spent 13 years in the Soviet Union, started one of the country’s largest PR firms and – hold on to your hat – was once suspected of involvement in both Kennedy assissinations. All not true.

Siegenthaler tells of the tortuous process he endured to have the biography taken down and his frustration at being unable to identify the author of the spurious information, an ordeal made more difficult by the protections of the Communications Decency Act. The Wikipedia information was also picked up and reprinted without question by Reference.com and Answers.com.

Siegenthaler’s experience is an anomaly, I’m sure, and the vast majority of information on Wikipedia is no doubt correct. But it is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of the Internet to misinformation. Wikipedia has gotten a lot of justifiable praise for creating a workable structure for community information gathering. The fact that the service works at all would have been fairly mind-boggling five years ago.

But the Siegenthaler story is a reminder of the vulnerability of the open-content model to manipulation. The Wikipedia disclaimer page includes a stark warning that “None of the authors, contributors, sponsors, administrators, sysops, or anyone else connected with Wikipedia in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages.” Kinda scary, huh?

We’re entering what could be called the Age of Search, where information is freely available and, increasingly, freely editable. Google and other search engines will provide you with a rich list of facts but they do little to distinguish between the credible and the suspicious. In the Age of Search, critical thinking becomes a more vital skill than fact-finding. There’s an interesting podcast interview with Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun, that makes a case for this. Khosla observes that his children have come to regard information as a commodity that’s easily available and freely shareable. The challenge for this new generation, though, is to exercise the critical thinking skills to separate good information from bad.

Google’s technology doesn’t do all that good a job of that. For example, a search on the phrase “How high is Mt. Everest?” turns up at least five different answers (it’s generally recognized to be 29,035 ft.) . It’s the searcher’s job to figure out which response to believe.

The profusion of search technology only makes this more important. I think we’re going to see an explosion of search options in the next few years. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for someone to invent a critical search engine that contains an algorithm for evaluating the reliability of information.

Thanks for Peggy Rouse, editor of the reference site whatis.com, for alerting me to this story.

I attended a seminar this morning by The Massachusetts Software Council on Open Source & the Enterprise: Enterprise Adoption and it was the best $50 I’ve spent in a long time. Dan Bricklin moderated, which was a good reason to attend right there. Dan’s new passion is podcasting and he was recording the event for posting in the next week or two (keep an eye on his blog for details). I love Dan. He brings such energy and enthusiasm to his work, running around with microphones and audio equipment, you almost forgot this guy is an industry legend and one of the smartest programmers in the world. But on to the subject at hand…

The takeaways I got from listening to Nick Gall, who’s a Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, and speakers from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Fidelity Investments is that open source software (OSS) has clearly turned the corner in the enterprise and is now seated at the table with the software elite. Noting that open source represents the transition of power from the vendor to the user, Gall predicted that OSS will nearly quadruple as a percentage of software spending over the next four years. While that’s still a relatively small percentage (Gartner’s actual forecasts are under embargo until next Wednesday), it’s a huge dollar amount when you factor in the growth in overall software spending during the same period.

Gall sees the action shifting quickly from infrastructure markets where the LAMP stack is already well-established into applications. Business programs like SugarCRM, Asterisk, OpenOffice and Compiere are beginning to make their presence felt and even in the infrastructure area, newcomers like mySQL and JBoss are challenging the proprietary leaders. Helping this trend is the move by companies like Sun and IBM to put large libraries of proprietary code under the GNU General Public License, thereby presenting new competition to the market leaders. Gall pointed out that these gestures aren’t necessarily altruistic: open-sourcing is an alternative to supporting old code and gives second-tier vendors a chance to disrupt markets where they couldn’t achieve dominance.

Gall sees OSS making greater inroads in new applications than as legacy replacements. At the same time, the software industry will undergo a transition from its current dependence on licensing fees to reliance on service and support revenue. This is already happening, he noted, as many software companies now get as much revenue from service as from sales.

Revenue declines can be partially offset by lower costs. In fact, Gall said, “By 2010, software companies that don’t incorporate OSS into offered solutions risk becoming uncompetitive due to the cost of in-house engineering. ” Wow. Talk about making it to the big leagues.

The business model for open-source vendors certainly is different. These companies spend less on development because much of that work is done in the community. They also spend less on distribution, since trial downloads are the way the software spreads. These companies have a leaner business model and, at least for now, get closer to their customers, according to the two Fidelity speakers at the event. Those speakers – Mike Askew and Charles Pickelhaupt – agreed that open-source suppliers tend to be more accommodating of their needs and more responsive to their requests.

Much of the discussion centered around the GPL, which is undergoing its first major revision in nearly 15 years. Speakers agreed that the current GPL has too many vagaries and loopholes to make it completely enterprise-friendly. The language makes enterprise users nervous, for example, that proprietary enhancements that they make to a program covered by GPL may have to be disclosed to the world, thereby negating their value. There’s also lingering concern over SCO’s campaign last year to recover license fees from Linux users, including some enterprises. Gall said the concerns are real. Until the license issues get hashed out in court – and ultimately by the Supremes – users have every right to be cautious, he said.

Speakers largely agreed that a lot of the old myths about OSS are precisely that: myths. The community support model is responsive and effective, they said. The quality of most mainstream OSS applications is at least as good as that of their commercial counterparts and you don’t need a highly skilled team of programmers to make open source work. Independent service providers are rushing in quickly to fill that void.

Fidelity’s story is especially interesting. The company first adopted an open-source development platform, TKL, in 1995. In fact, that TKL program once accounted for almost 10% of the trading action on the NYSE, said Mike Askew, an executive in Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology. It has since been rewritten with more modern technologies, including Java. Fidelity uses more than a dozen open-source applications in production, including Apache, Tomcat, Axis, Eclipse and Jetspeed-2. And, in keeping with Gall’s prediction about the growth of open-source business applications, is looking at BIRT and OpenOffice as alternatives to mainstream business products.

Fidelity has an open mind about all things open source but does put candidates through the wringer. Open-source alternatives to existing applications must demonstrate comparable functionality and go before a review board that sets standards for certification, support and maintenance.

Though open source is an exciting new opportunity, the wild-west nature of the market is still an irritation to some users. Fidelity VP Charles Pickelhaupt noted that his firm has counted 58 different variations of open-source licenses. And code revision cycles that can lead to daily builds can make version control a chore. Nevertheless, Fidelity is charging ahead. Not only is OSS comparable to proprietary alternatives in most cases, “Many people think it’s superior,” he said.

The quirky boingboing.net website isn’t usually the type of media outlet to become embroiled in a contentious privacy issue, but the site has done yeoman’s work over the last few weeks in documenting a scandal involving Sony Music’s apparent complicity in installing spyware on its customers’ computers.

The incident centered on the discovery by a security expert in late October that Sony’s BMG music division had included spyware in music CDs distributed to legitimate customers. The software, known as a rootkit, enabled viruses, keyboard loggers and other nefarious programs to be parked on users’ computers without their knowledge, even if the users had declined the licensing agreement presented to them when they inserted the affected disc.

The existence of the rootkit was first documented by security expert Mark Russinovich in his blog on Oct. 31. Sony at first dismissed the complaint, then acknowledged the problem when F-Secure, a Finnish security company, confirmed that it, too, had identified the problem. However, Sony’s initial response was to deny that the problem was serious and to promise a fix when it was good and ready. The Recording Industry Association of America, which is always good at providing comic relief, worsened the situation by basically stating that rootkits are no big deal because every record company uses them. Meanwhile, the blogosphere went into overdrive.

Russinovich’s blog was flooded with comments, the issue spread to the computer security community in general and eventually two states attorneys general picked up the baton and promised to investigate the matter.

Sony eventually relented and promised to recall the offending CDs. The rootkit, it said, had been introduced by programmers at an outsourcing firm engaged by the company and had been shipped without Sony’s knowledge. BoingBoing.net members rubbed salt into the wounds by identifying posts by programmers engaged by Sony that asked as far back as 2001 how to install software that users couldn’t detect. Ouch!

It looks like Sony BMG is going to come clean and offer replacement CDs to all victimized users. But the incident serves notice of how the blogosphere is affecting corporate policy-making. If blogs didn’t exist, this problem would never even have come on Sony’s radar. Or, at the very least, the company could have contained the objections with a minimum of hassle. But bloggers not only uncovered the story but pressed it relentlessly until the national media took notice and forced a corporate response. Sony BMG gets a black eye out of all of this by looking like it dragged its feet in addressing a known security problem. And bloggers get a gold star for identifying the bug and pressing it until a big corporation was forced to respond. Score one for new media influencers.

Dan Mitchell points out in this article in the New York Times (registration required) that Google has become the ogre of the Internet simply by being Google. In other words, the fact that the company is in a position to grab the top position on the Internet is enough for many people to assume that Google is evil. This without any countervailing opinion for Google, which seems to prefer not to speculate about world domination and actually prefers to talk about being a good corporate citizen. Could it be that business success is, in itself, a ticket to vilification? I remember when Microsoft was the scrappy, user-focused upstart. Google just made the transition to bad boy that much faster. Can a successful company every really win?

I just listened to an excellent podcast on how to create and post podcasts (how recursive is that?) by Lisa Williams and Ryanne Hodson from BlogHer 2005. If you’re interested in getting started with podcasting, this short (56 mins) essay will tell you the high points and give you advice on products that can get you started. The good news: turnkey software is on the way that will make the process of creating and posting podcasts much easier. The bad news: it’s still a pretty daunting task if you’re not technically inclined.

Lisa Williams also has a fun four-minute how-to video about podcasting that you should watch.

Adam Green’s posting about Google Base on his blog looks a little bit paranoid but I’m intrigued by the fears it exposes. I seem to remember that it wasn’t that long ago that Google was the scrappy new competitor that was going to keep Microsoft honest. Now, in the minds of many people, Google has become the insatiable oligarch that aims to dominate the Internet and usurp their personal freedom.

Robert X. Cringeley’s column on PBS.org puts forth this same Google uber alles vision with regard to Google’s investments in dark fibre, server farms and web hosting. It’s a dark vision of one company controlling the Internet by monopolizing the way people search for information and, ultimately, the information itself.

It seems you can’t win the battle for public opinion in this industry. The greatest sins of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, the IBM of old or any other black-hat competitor is simply that they executed better than anyone else, captured the lead position and drove their advantage to increase their domination. There is no shame in that. On the contrary, the stock markets demand nothing less. The idea that these companies are compelled by some nefarious goal to dominate markets and rob users of choice is ludicrous. They’re too busy trying to meet their investors’ inflated goals for the next quarter to dream of world conquest.

It is amazing, though, how quickly a company can go from hero to villain in this overclocked industry. Success sort of automatically makes you public enemy #1. Google embodies many of the principles we admire in modern corporations: speed, innovation, decisiveness, flexibility. Why do these qualities make it such an object of ridicule?

Dan Bricklin has released alpha code for a new product he’s calling WikiCalc . It looks like kind of a multi-user spreadsheet. It’s hard to explain and I’m not sure I grasp the concept completely myself but you can imagine the potential for groups to share access to a tool that kind of lets them build a forecast or a business plan. I suspect at most companies the process of building a sales forecast, for example, is pretty messy. Spreadsheets get passed around by e-mail and consolidated manually and if someone has an interesting insight it simply gets thrown into the chaos. If you could create a way to construct forecasts iteratively with a tracking system that lets you see who contributed what, it would be pretty powerful. I’m sure Dan has thought this through a lot better then I have.

Keep your eye on wikis, by the way. While there’s nothing new about the concept of collaborative decision-making (Lotus Notes was doing some of this stuff 15 years ago), wikis bring an open, Internet-based structure to the process. There’ll be a lot of development activity around this platform.

IT Conversations has announced plans to expand and diversify into biotech, science, open source, the future, media, mobile technology and other specialty fields in a group called Conversations Network. The principals apparently intend to continue to offer the service for free, although some paid services are under consideration. This is great news if you’re interested in tech podcasts. Doug Kaye, who runs ITC, has put together an effective governance system for organizing hundreds of volunteers and wants to scale up.

I have great respect for what Doug and his associates are doing. They could easily sell this operation or take on sponsors. Instead, they’re pursuing more of a quasi-sponsorship approach a la PBS. I’ve spoken to Doug about this and he appears to have no intentions to build this business into a big monemaker. There’s a practical issue, too: if ITC becomes a for-profit company, its access to content will be cut off or severely restricted by competitive media companies. So Conversations Network almost must remain nonprofit to continue to offer breadth and quality.

Tech publishers should take note, though. IT Conversations could emerge as an important channel to your readers. It’s become my first step for tech podcasts.