I’m always curious how “new media” publishing is going for other people, like Barton George of Dell who’s put out a lot of podcasts and videos over the years, including one with myself at the event. He’s one of those guys who always has a Flip camera in his pocket and managed to get some great interviews with people during the “HallwayCon” of events. Back at the Dell analyst event in Austin, we say down right outside the entrance to the new Austin City Limits studio for a chat on all that:

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Shows Notes

• I ask Barton to tell us about the ins-and-outs of recording and a little history, like being used as a news reference from time-to-time.
• I ask him to tell us how these videos and podcasts have helped out the companies his worked for, and himself. He tells us some interesting internal usage stories from Dell.
• See Barton’s YouTube channel for the newer videos he’s been doing. And, of course, there’s Barton blog for all his stuff, media and not.

Disclosure: Dell is a client.

While working on the west coast recently, I snagged Alcatel-Lucent’s Mike Maney (@the_spinmd) and asked what tools and practices he’s using right now in his job of “influencer management.” As a “Director of Influencer Management” over at his day job, he simmers in this soup all day long. We discuss the use of things like Twitter, Quora, blogs, but also the traditional out-reach and “PR” tools like events and face-to-face engagements.

Listen right now by clicking play below:

In addition to clicking play above, you can download the episode directly or subscribe to the RedMonk Media feed (in iTunes or wherever) to have this episode automatically downloaded for your listening pleasure.

Disclosure: Alcatel-Lucent is a client.

This week I’ve been at Monospace in my home town of Austin, Texas. It’s been an excellent deep-dive – with much code on screen – into the Mono world, the open source .Net implementation. Thanks to Scott Bellware (@bellware) and the other organizers, I was able to record the keynote given by Miguel de Icaza. I’m not sure what the title was, but I thought it was an excellent history of Mono capped off with a “state of Mono” end. It’s worth the listen if you’re in the Mono, .Net, or even open source development world – there’s lots of good background and history laced throughout.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Also, check out Tim Anderson’s excellent run-down and summary of the keynote from afar and Abel Avram’s overview over at InfoQ.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client.

(Cross posted from The Agile Executive.)

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In this episode, Israel and I talk with Jim Highsmith. We center the discusion around the new edition of Jim’s book, Agile Project Management, but this pulls in all sorts of general discussion about Agile:

• How did Jim get into Agile? Going from traditional software development to Agile.
• How does Rapid Development compare to Agile? Tools in RAD vs. tools in Agile.
• Pivoting on a mention of Jim being in China, I ask him about cultural differences of applying Agile, for instance, based on geo-cultural differences.
• What’s new in the new edition that leads into larger applications of Agile? Release planning, “scaling” self-organizing teams, governance issues, and measuring.
• How does Agile work in a systems, or hardware plus software situation.
• Israel asks Jim for some advice on synching up software developed in an Agile fashion with hardware folks. There’s primarily more coordination and dependency management between teams and features.
• Release planning – most Agile teams focus on iteration planning, without peaking up to concerns at the release level, e.g., budgeting, timing, and marketing concerns.
• How can “the business” get involved with the process to make sure focus is kept on the release?
• What’s this “scaling” business? Scaling a team up in size, or scaling a team out in a distributed process.
• Israel and Jim then dig into distributed scaling, adding in off-premise teams and collaboration.
• Tracking and measuring things from a (business) strategic orientation. This hits on keeping track of value (will this software make us money?), quality and other “metrics” over time. Who is that determines this “value” ongoing? Getting people to figure out “value points.”
• Israel then asks Jim for a retrospective on where we’ve been and are after the Agile Manifesto.

Also, see Jim’s sum-up of the new content in the book.

In this episode, sponsored by Reductive Labs, I talk with returning guest Luke Kaines (of Reductive Labs) and RedHat’s David Lutterkort. David has been an active member of the Puppet community for several years now, and we spend much of our time talking about the projects he’s worked on that incorporate Puppet. We also get into a discussion of how RedHat internal IT uses Puppet in their for their own applications from development to deployment.

We start out talking about Augeas, one of the projects David is currently working on. In my horkly words, it provides a “configuration file normalization API.” That is, Augeas provides a layer to read in, modify, and then spit back out all sorts of *nix configuration files, each with it’s own syntactical essentracies. For Puppet – which spends much of it’s time updating those configuration files – the connection is obvious. Indeed, as Luke says, it wouldn’t be far fetched to think that, sometime in the future, Puppet would consider replacing it’s current config file engine with Augeas. In the meantime, there’s some docs on using the two together.

Next, having been around Puppet awhile, I ask David what other uses of Puppet he’s been seeing recently. This draws up a conversation about how RedHat’s internal IT uses Puppet through Genome through their internal application development process to build development boxes and servers. We get into a discussion of how this use of Puppet effects the development cycles and tries to address the “wall of confusion” between development and operations.

We next talk about Cft (pronounced “sift”) that provides a sort-of command line recorded for admins to build up Puppet manifests. We wrap-up by talking about Cobbler which sets up and configures Linux machines over a network. And, of course, how Puppet interlaces therein.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client and, as mentioned, sponsored this podcast.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

While at CloudCampAustin recently, my good friend Zane Rockenbaugh of Dog Food Software brought all his fancy podcasting gear again we recorded another short series in the Profiles in Courage episodes. In this second episode, we talk with Rackspace’s Todd Morey.

Being one of the co-founders (along with Jonathan Bryce) of Rackspace Cloud, or “Mosso” as it used to be called, I jump right in and ask Todd to tell us the history of how the Rackspace Cloud came about. Todd had been working on UIs at Rackspace. As such, they had access to really chap Rackspace servers on which they developed some “side applications,” but found the administrative tasks – like dealing with hackers – to be a hassle. Hence, Todd and Jonathan started looking into something more, well, “cloudy” as we’d say now.

We then jump into a name game discussion. First, where the name “Mosso” game from and then, we discuss why “cloud computing” won out over “utility computing.” We discuss the awkward feeling, at least early on, of “cloud”: as Todd puts it, “it sounds almost a little too magical.” But, now that its been here awhile, we all agree it’s a dandy term.

Getting back to the history of the Rackspace Cloud, I ask Todd to tell us how the Mosso idea evolved over time. We go over several times where they had to, essentially, figure out where to apply constraints on the system. This gets us into a discussion of when an application requires too much customized access and thus, doesn’t fit well into Mosso, but would fit better in more traditional hosting.

On the topic of applications, Todd brings up email (or “messaging” as some like to call it when thrown together with calendaring and, sometimes IM) as one of the best examples of a cloud-bound application. Along those lines, we discuss some customers who’re using the Rackspace Crowd.

Thinking back to a conversation Todd and I had back at SXSW, I ask him to lay out his thinking about how (what I’d call) Collaborative IT Management applies to cloud computing. Rackspace acquired Slidehost last Fall, who had a large, active community around its knowledge-base. Todd speaks to thinking he’s been having recently about applying those practices to the wider practice of cloud support. This gets me thinking about how the traditional, packaged software role of “technical writers” could transition into this community gardening world. Never mind writing manuals, we need skilled people to document the day-to-day finds and helpful advice from the community.

Closing out on a completely non-technical topic, since Todd lives down in San Antonio, I ask him about Fiesta, the yearly, city-wide party. He gives us the folkloric story of how it came about and tells us what its like, complete with the “royal court.”

To listen to this podcast, download the podcast directly, subscribe to the blog/podcast feed in iTunes (or whatever), or click play below to hear it:

Kicking off our Agile Executive podcast series, I talk with Clarke Ching. We start out discussing two of Clarke’s books Rocks Into Gold and a longer version he’s working on. We then discuss the relation of Goldratt’s The Goal.

I ask Clarke to talk to his point that breaking things into smaller chunks end ups costing less. He says:

• In bigger projects (vs. smaller ones), we end up building more low-priority things, thus “wasting” time
• With a focus on delivering small chunks that work we get higher quality, rather then wiring up lower quality stuff

After this, I ask Clarke how he’s sorted out the boot-strapping problem of getting Agile started in organizations. He recommends:

• The Weetabix Sell – selling the benefits, not the ingredients or “process”
• Set expectations that it’s going to be hard work
• find quick wins, preferably “without doing anything”

Finally, I ask Clarke to give us a report on the Agile scene across the pond, which he does nicely.

I’m interested in more such interviews, so if you have some folks in mind, send ‘em along. Otherwise, enjoy ;>

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they’re yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Rise of Community Marketing

In the fifth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Sara Dornsife, self-professed Community Marketing Geek.

With a title like that, I ask Sara to tell us about a recent blog entry of hers describing the bloating of the marketing role as represented by job postings: doing traditional marketing and comms, community management, open source, events, and everything else. Sara says this is probably due to consolidation in jobs, companies cutting back and combining jobs together.

What Community Marketing Does

Blindly feeling out the elephant more, I ask Sara to tell us about the day-to-day activities of Community Marketing. It centers around “scaling up” community interactions; that is, figuring out moving beyond one-on-one interactions in the community of users for a product, service, etc. We compare these efforts to traditional marketing and advertising tacticts, where broadcast mediums seem to be of lessoning effectiveness.

Open Source Lessons Learned

Earlier that morning, Sara and I had both been on the SXSW panel, “Lessons Learned from Open Source.” We discuss what we discussed in that panel: namely, that open source a business model, on it’s own, isn’t too whiz-bang beyond acquisition exists. Zane asks if and how open source is used for marketing value.

We further discuss open source as a business model: my quip that you make money off open source by selling closed source; the troubling paradox of software quality and selling support; open source driving down costs & commodifying “over-priced” markets.

Doing a barcamp

Switching to conferences and events, since Sara was one of the main organizers for barcampAustin, I ask her what goes into unconferences like barcampAustin. “Not a lot of sleep,” she says. To hear Sara tell it, most of the work was done in the 8 days prior to the event, including booking Paradox (“18 and up welcome!”), rounding up sponsors, and more.

Picking the venue drives much of the format: the number of rooms you have in your venue determines how many sessions you can have at once, which, of course, determines how many sessions you have. The costs are low because people volunteer and sponsors donate all sorts of drinks and burritos. Sara estimates that barcampAustin was at about $25,000 for a 24 hour event.

Why do a barcamp?

The question, then, is why do this? For Sara, this is the kind of event she would be arranging in her role as Community Marketer, not to mention that she likes the local barcamp guy, whurley, and simply enjoys putting together and attending the event.

I ask her how she’d sell barcamps to corporations. The pay-back, for the cheap price, is a bucket of whuffie (good will and social capital) and an audience that’s more passionate than passive. The lack of “the corporate smell,” Sara says, brings higher quality attendees.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they’re yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Building a SaaS

In the fifth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Scott Diedrick, Director of Development at Mumboe which provides a SaaS for contract and agreement management.

Being the head of development for a Software-as-a-Service business, I start out asking Scott to walk us through how you build a development team and plan to deliver a SaaS. First, we talk about picking a technology stack: whether it’s rails, Flex, Ajax, or whatever front-end. Picking a stack is an important first, of course, because that drives the sorts of developers you hire. As a SaaS, you have to get your data-center lined up; while Mumboe has it’s own somewhere, Scott would recommend Amazon EC2 for new startups.

SaaS Development Teams

Next, we move onto the developer profiles. Scott puts a lot of emphasis on developers with user interaction skills. SaaS’s are often updated and refreshed much more quickly than packaged software, driving the importance of usability. Out of a team of 6 developers, Scott has two people focusing on usability and UI. Since Mumboe has a try-before-you-buy plan, a good interface is key to Mumboe’s marketing and sales process.

Thinking about the tense relationship between developers and UI folks in my past, I ask Scott to tell us how the day-to-day goes between the UI guys and developers: the designer/developer workflow/collaboration, if you will.

SaaS Project Management

Next, I ask Scott to tell us how the development methodology and project planning is driven by SaaS’s ability to deliver early, and deliver often. After launching, they were on a cadence of two week iterations to work out bugs and get feature refinements in quickly. But as they moved into adding “big features,” they’d need more than two weeks. Also, Scott points out, that a monthly update to the software drives a lot of new work for marketing, docs, and sales, all of which have to update their own material and knowledge for the new releases. With more frequent releases, comes more churn.

Is the hassle worth it? It sounds like so: customers see fixes and new features every two weeks, instead of six months or more. Customers, of course, enjoy this rapid feedback loop.

The Austin Condo Scene

Closing out, since Scott lives in a fancy condo over in East Austin, I ask Scott to comment on the condo scene in Austin. Scott divides it into two parts: the low-rise condos (usually a half or a mile away from downtown) and the high-rise condos (in downtown).

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

The Unfollow Quandry

In the fourth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Alex Muse of Big in Japan.

We start out talking about the new online etiquette quandary: is it polite to unfollow someone in Twitter? How do you sort out this gift economy stuff when the gift is your attention?

The Dallas Tech Scene

Being based up in Dallas, I ask Alex to profile the tech scene in the Dallas area. Alex says that he’s sort of frustrated with the tech scene in Dallas, jealous of Austin’s and, of course, the bar area. From this, Alex and some bar-bound friends started up bi-weekly happy hour events up in his parts. This kicked of Spring Stage, where the drink-together idea is spread to different tech scenes nationally. There’s some impressive outcomes from Spring Stage: Alex knows of 6 startups that have grown from it.

Here, I ask Alex to profile the technology tribes up in Dallas. He says there’s some rails guys and increasing mobile interest. Pulling back from the hotness technologies, I ask what the other, more traditional tech silos are like: for example, Sabre/Travelocity is up there, along with Match.com and about 4 other online dating sites. In the past, there was QueCat, which we all fondly remember

Dallas vs. Forth Worth

Wrapping up, I ask Alex to tell us what Dallas folks think of Fort Worth folks. From an outsider’s perspective, “DFW,” seems like one big metroplex. But, from within, Dallas is “totally different” than Fort Worth.