The TeleInterActive Press

Lance Walter, VP of Marketing at Pentaho, let us know that we had neglected to include jFreeReport in our blogroll and lens. I plagerized his email in describing jFreeReport in the lens links to reporting tools.

This site is a great resource. A consultant referred me to it and said it was the best consolidated source of information on osbi that he had found.

I had one suggestion. In the OS Reporting Projects - would you consider adding a link to JFreeReport? www.jfree.org/jfreereport . We use it as part of Pentaho, but it's also a standalone java reporting library with some pretty nice capabilities and a decent community around it.
-- email from Lance on 2006.02.23

Thank you, Lance.

We want to extend heartfelt thanks to Nicholas Goodman, who hosted Julian Hyde of Mondrian fame, and James Dixon, Senior Architect and Chief Technology Officer ("Chief Geek") and Lance Walter, Vice President of Marketing for Pentaho, and Clarise, and me at the Thirsty Bear, the night before the Open Source Business Conference. We had over three hours of great conversation on open source, the conference, BI, the Oracle rumored purchase of JBoss, Sleepycat & Zend, and just rambling along on a bunch of topics.

Some of the more interesting geeky areas of discussion centered around data modeling, UDM, CASE tools, data stewardship and metadata management and use.

But I think that the most interesting area of discussion was in supporting the community around an open source project, and identifying the target audience for our OSBI book [update: no publishers are interested in the OSBI book as of 2007], for open source BI projects, and for BI programs in general.

While we weren't able to attend OSBC, we got a taste of it through drinking Thirsty Bear ales and bears and we've added a module to our OSBI Lens providing links to disucssions about the OSBC.

We're quite proud to announce that for the past week our OSBI lens, concentrating various resources for Open Source Business Intelligence, has been in the Squidoo top 100, generally ranked between 50 and 90. Take a look at our lens, and let us know what you think in the comments below. How can we improve it?

Once again, Mike Arrington's generosity led to a splendid party. Techcrunch and these parties have become the signature for Web2.0 events.

The Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party is now officially over
-- Mike Arrington at 2:01 a.m.

I left well before Mike posted that, but not before I got to hook up with some folk I knew and meet some folk for the first time. Mike's events are always great for networking.

• Of course the whole point of the party was to pick up another copy of Naked Conversations [Buy the book] and have it signed by the authors, Shel Israel and Robert Scoble. Mine was signed by Shel, but Robert was out "checking on the food". While I had met Shel and Robert before, and exchanged email and blog comments with them, this was my first opportunity to talk to Shel for a bit. He is indeed as nice a guy as his card proclaims.
• I saw Andrea and, later Ethan Stock of Zvents, both of whom I had met at the Riya Launch Party.
• Buzz Bruggeman was there, as was Bill Daul, both of whom I had met at ANZA. Bill introduced me to Douglas Engelbart. Both Doug and my father were among the first radar men in World War II, though I don't think they knew each other then.
• I was interviewed for a podcast by Michael Johnson of PodTech News - I'll link to it when it's released.
• Alex Moskalyuk of Yahoo!Tech and I had a good talk about tagging analysis and corporate significance.
• I met Andy of Microsoft, whom Bill describes as a bright young fellow.
• And I chatted for a bit with Brad Meador from ClearContext who is seeking to change the way you use email.
• Reintroduced myself to Scott Beale from Laughing Squid.
• Waved to Marc Canter and spoke briefly with Dave Winer

It was a great time. Mike, thank you and your sponsors very much for your generosity.

The idea that we would require multiple blogs per author and multiple authors per blog with the possibility of cross-posting is one of the deciding factors in our choice of b2evolution over Wordpress, plog or other blogware platforms.

Joking aside, Om's spot on. His instincts are right, and I can see this being a big theme of 2006 - people getting their second, third, forth blog. Blogs are cheap/free so why not? And for many of us it's already the case.

The question, therefore, is what can blogging platforms do to cater for this? Movable Type does multiple blogs and Blogger and TypePad also cater for it. So come on Matt, you gotta get WordPress multiblog working.
-- Ben Metcalfe in "Where do you put all that other stuff?"

We also couldn't agree more. There's only so much differentiation that can be done through categories. My partner and I each wanted a personal blog that could go in any direction that tickled our fancy at the time, as well as our focused blogs on the TeleInterActive Lifestyle and Open Source Solutions for BI.

The idea that folk would want to publish in multiple places also is one driver behind Marc Canter's philosophies, as he pointed out in "Cross Posting and the Future of having Multiple Blogs".

So, when looking at support from blogware, also look at support for micro-content, identity management, and OPML. Such is where the near future lies. The far future... who knows?