After years of being spoiled with a TV in my office (a benefit when working with big media) I spent the last two years unable to keep up except for frequent scoreboard checks.

So it was nice to read that this year they will be streaming for free on iOS devices, of which I have several.  It looks like I will have an opportunity to run some realistic bandwidth tests on our internet connection.

CBS, Turner Will Stream March Madness to iPhone, iPad For Free | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.

But I keep finding areas where this just isn’t easy for those that contribute to the social.  My case in point would be restaurant reviews.  I have a few sites/apps that I use – Yelp, UrbanSpoon and MenuPages – and they all encourage and support reviews.  As I travel and look for feedback on new places to eat I would like to give back and share my experiences.  But in doing so I wind up adding my opinions and content to three different sites, making it difficult for me to step back and learn from that data.  I have to manage three separate accounts and if I want to pull up my favorites I can’t easily do that since they are spread out across the sites.

I can recall Marc Cantor going on about Microformats years ago and they have been widely implemented but this hasn’t prevented what naturally happens in a competitive space, that communities aren’t necessarily connected.  Clearly the technology exists to make sharing possible, but the nature of running a business means that most communities aren’t open.

Now we have several efforts underway through popular sites to make it easier to use the same credentials across numerous sites but this doesn’t fully address that your online identity isn’t portable.  In my example with restaurant reviews and votes I can’t visit one destination and see my library of reviews.  I hope that as the new generation of social sites mature that we go beyond just portable login and get into easily collecting our complete identity’s and contributions.

CNN aided in the demise or print

Of course at CNN.com this has been a focus for years, especially the progressive rendering to combat that long homepage.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: You and site performance, sitting in a tree….

I suppose it isn’t a bad thing to look like the NY Mayor but I just don’t see the resemblance.

What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.

I have spent years on the enterprise side of development and pushed on occasion for more iterative development methodologies and can say that the more successful projects I can recall started as a more simple effort and grew.  Those that attempted to solve all the problems with the flip of a switch got mired in change requests and requirements docs and in the end made everyone just want to deploy the thing so we could move on.

I have a great sense of accomplishment for the systems I have been a part of constructing, developing and then maintaining but many came before the Internet had as many options and examples as there are today.  Building a large scale, flexible CMS in the late ’90′s for example didn’t offer any options to pull from open source or commercial products and tools.  Today that is different and I think most companies are starting to understand.

In the last few years with two different large Internet companies I can say that the enterprise is starting to come around.  While there are still a few core competencies that are worth that do it all yourself mantra, most are now seen as a utility that should be handled in the most efficient manner possible.  It might be that since the two companies I have experience with are both on the Internet side of things and thus faster to catch on, but I think that most companies are realizing that there is no need to write code every time a need arises.

The push for change needs to come from more folks at my level – those that have the authority to make decisions and the influence to explain the potential rewards over the perceived risks.  I agree with many of the comments that the enterprise is focused on no risk (or transferring that risk to a partner) and that often backs them into a let’s do it ourselves corner.  The job for the next class of leaders and executives is to understand the new Internet culture and take some of this and weave it into the enterprise.  This will empower the development teams (and the product teams) and should result in more innovative projects coming from not just the startups but from the once staunch Fortune 1,000 as well.

ongoing · Doing It Wrong.

Vanish – Finding Evan Ratliff

Of course those that do this for real wouldn’t likely gather the attention and sophisticated audience that would organize around tracking them down, but it does help to understand how people are able to disappear from their life and start over.  The challenge was put out to catch Evan within a month to claim a $5k prize, which helped to motivate catching him.  In real life I expect most that do this don’t have a reward and you can only imagine the police force having few resources to keep up a search.

Evan in this piece makes a few intentional mistakes to help motivate the search, but it still took a wide network of people to uncover his new home.  I wonder if he would have been caught it he truly had done all he could to avoid it.

It mentions in the post that CNN asked him to create a visual record of the site’s last 13 years.  I would love to have a higher resolution version (think poster size) but don’t know if anyone will bother to create it.

The Sport Shoe was pretty big in its prime, a force here in Atlanta with stores covering Atlanta.  They opened a few big box style stores and ultimately ran out of steam and closed after more than 20 years.

Just another example of how these new communities are allowing folks to get back in touch.

I am just starting to really dig through the new version to uncover all the new niceties, but the interface is clean and I can now easily get to the most common tasks in less clicks.

Oh and I won’t have to update it manually moving forward, now you can update from within WordPress itself.