Commentary

Google informs me that one of the Open Source CMS Search Engines I built a while back now indexes over 18 million pages. Though it's a drop in the bucket next to broad category search engines, it's not too bad for a specialty search tool.

~ a comparative review of the political campaign websites of clinton, obama and mccain ~

Those of you who know me appreciate that I am so non-political that I verge on anti-political. Given that, you would probably never suspect me to post on the American political scene, but yet here it is.

This post comes on the heels of a request from the Web Marketing Association to review the websites of the two Democratic presidential contenders, that is, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The exercise proved more interesting than ever I expected, primary due to the insight it gives into the way the political machines are embracing the Internet and social media.

So, for all you armchair political observers, and also for those of you sincerely interested in these presidential puppet shows, I've assembled a quick snapshot of the Virtual Campaign Trail -- a overview of what the three leading candidates are doing online today.

Will 2007 be The Year of the Hat? We’re well into the second quarter and so far Red Hat is making all the right moves. Even the financial analysts are starting to trumpet the firm’s praises, with one Credit Suisse analyst upgrading Red Hat shares from “neutral” to “outperform” just last month.

I am frequently amazed at the lack of awareness of open source issues regularly exhibited by IT decision makers. I’m not talking about the people inside the server room but rather the people on the other side of that deceptively thin barrier. The bad news is, of course, the guys with the teakwood tables tend to want to be involved in decisions relating to a firm’s IT direction. Though they may not be able to tell the mail server from the fax machine, they seem compulsive about being consulted on larger IT issues (defined as “those with dollar figures attached”).

A battle is brewing for a piece of some increasingly lucrative tech turf: Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM). Analyst group IDC posits that the global Content Management market is growing at a steady rate and that software revenues from the segment will reach US$ 5.9 billion by 2010. The trend clearly has not gone unnoticed by the major players and over the course of the last 12 months we have seen significant movement in the market as the players position themselves to grab their share - and perhaps a little of the other guys’, too.