If large amounts of dirty data are actually valuable, how do you go about collecting it? Who's in the best position to amass huge piles? One strategy is to scavenge publicly visible data. Go screen-scrape whatever you can from web sites. That's Google's approach, along with one camp of the Semantic Web tribe. Another approach is to give something away in exchange for that data. Position yourself as a connector or hub.

Continuing my theme of filthy data. A few years ago, there was a lot of excitement around clickstream analysis. This was the idea that, by watching a user's clicks around a website, you could predict things about that user. What a backwards idea. For any given user, you can imagine an huge number of plausible explanations for any given browsing session. You'll never enumerate all the use cases that motivate someone to spend ten minutes on seven pages of your web site.

Data is the future. The barriers to entering online business are pretty low, these days. You can do it with zero infrastructure, which means no capital spent on depreciating assets like servers and switches. Open source operating systems, databases, servers, middleware, libraries, and development tools mean that you don't spend money on software licenses or maintenance contracts. All you need is an idea, followed by a SMOP. With both the cost side trending toward zero, how can there be any barrier to entry?

Many of the really hard problems in web architecture today exist outside the application server.  Here are three problems that haven't been solved. Partial solutions exist today, but nothing comprehensive. Uncontrolled demandUsers tend to arrive at web sites in huge gobs, all at once. As the population of the Net continues to grow, and the need for content aggregators/filters grows, the "front page" effect will get worse. One flavor of this is the "Attack of Self-Denial", an email, radio, or TV campaign that drives enough traffic to crash the site.

A couple of years ago, the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport introduced self-pay parking gates. Scan a credit card on the way in and on the way out, and it just debits the card. This obviously saves money on parking attendants, and it's pretty convenient for parkers. At first, to encourage adoption, they offered a discount of $2 per day. Every time you'd approach the entry, a friendly voice from a Douglas Adams novel would ask, "Would you like to save $2 per day on parking?

Wordle has been meming it's way around the 'Net lately.  Figured I'd join the crowd by doing a word cloud for Release It.  This is from the preface.   Considering that this is just from fairly simple text analysis, I'm surprised at how accurately it represents the key concerns. "Software" and "money" have roughly equal prominence. "Life" appears near the middle, along with "excitement", "revenue", "production" and "systems". Not bad for an algortihm.

InfoQ posted a video of Jim Webber and Martin Fowler doing a keynote speech at QCon London this Spring. It's a brilliant deconstruction of the concept of the Enterprise Service Bus. I can attest that they're both funny and articulate (whether on the stage or off.) Along the way, they talk about building services incrementally, delivering value at every step along the way. They advocate decentralized control and direct alignment between services and the business units that own them.

An odd thing happened to me today. Actually, an odd thing happened yesterday, but it's having the same odd thing happen today that really makes it odd. With me so far? Yesterday, while I was shopping at Amazon, Amazon told me that my American Express card had expired. While it is set for a May expiration, it's several years in the future. I didn't think too much of it, because when I re-entered the same information, Amazon accepted it.

I mentioned Tom DeMarco just a couple of days ago. I'm re-reading his great book, Why Does Software Cost So Much? for the first time in about ten years. Personally, I credit Tom as one of the unsung progenitors of the agile movement. Long before we had "Agile" or even "lightweight methods", Tom was talking about the psycho-social nature of software development.  For instance, here's an excerpt from essay 8, "Nontechnological Issues in Software Engineering":

A friend invited me to Plurk. So far, I've resisted Twitter for no good reason (other than a vague sense of social insecurity.) I figure I'll dip my toe into Plurk, though. This link is an open invite to Plurk. It'll let anyone join. Fair warning, it's also a "friend" link.