Martin Fowlers updated paper on The New Methodology where he covers the history, reasons and advantages of agile methodologies. He also covers the different agile methodologies out there.
Author Archives: Ron Bieber
Interview with Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, Founders of MySpace
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Forbes has an interesting interview with Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the founders of MySpace, in which they talk about how they built such a successful site in two years. Its nice to see a story of a couple of guys that used common sense to be successful.
The Patent Epidemic
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I found a reference to this on Slashdot – BusinessWeek has a really good article describing the goofiness that is the U.S. patent system.
Why Companies Monitor Blogs
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An interesting article on the effect blogs have on companies and why more companies these days are actually monitoring the things written on the internet.
Man Goes on One Year Podcast Only Diet
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Dan Safkow donates his television, DVD player and assorted radios to Goodwill and relies completely on podcasting and online content for entertainment. Dan’s website can be found at podcastyear.blogger.com.
Corporate Blogging Increases Sales?
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Hugh Macleod talks about how bloggers helped to double the sales of Stormhoek wines in less than 12 months. Interesting read. The most interesting distinction in this one is how participating in blogging changes the company more than the market.
Subversion 1.3.0 released.
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The Subversion team announced yesterday the official release of Subversion 1.3.0. This release includes around 30 bug fixes along with new functionality such path-based authorization for svnserve, –xml support for additional commands and performance improvements on the svn status and blame commands. See all the detail in the release notes.
The Year of The Podcast
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Slate.com’s Andy Bowers reflects on where podcasting has gone in 2005 and some predictions on where it might head.
Build Google and Yahoo Maps Without Coding
I stumbled across MapBuilder as I was browsing the Google Code site today. MapBuilder was referenced as one of the sites featured projects. The application is pretty interesting, allowing you to visually create a map using either the Yahoo Maps or Google Maps API and then to export the source code for inclusion on your web site. There is also an option to host your maps directly on MapBuilder and reference them from your site with a button that links to a list of all of your available maps.
There are quite a few things that are really cool about the site:
- Supports both Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps.
- No need to learn the details of the mapping API’s – just create your maps and go.
- MapBuilder does geo-coding, using the Yahoo! Geocode API’sand geocoder.us while Google Map API’s require lattitude and longitude in order to do anything with them.
- MapBuilder does the “driving directions to / from here” for you. No need to create custom code for this functionality.
- MapBuilder will also do custom development for you if you want something different from what the basic services provide. I’m assuming there is a fee involved, but I couldn’t find reference to it.
- The site facilitates building communities around maps that people create on the site.
- Best of all, it allows the “common man” to include mapping capabilities on their web sites without having to know how to code in Javascript and HTML.
MapBuilder is a really good example of new, unintended possibilities that are exposed when web applications are designed as a set of API’s using the web as a development platform rather than the siloed approach that we have used historically. This application was written by a third party not affiliated at all with Google or Yahoo!, but because of the way their applications were written they have the possibility of an audience that they did not originally target by allowing someone to build applications around their base functionality.
One should note that creation of a user account is required in order to use the full functionality of the MapBuilder site. They basically ask you for a username, password, and your email address. Thats it. Registration for either a Google Maps API key or Yahoo! Maps API key is also required if you would like to host your map on your own web site rather than hosting it on MapBuilder directly.
Bieber Labs 