by Ron Miller

Local School Committee Blog Becomes Budget Battle Flash Point

The times are tough now, just getting tougher
This old world is rough, its just getting rougher
Cover me, come on baby, cover me
~Bruce Springsteen, Cover Me

A local school committee member who started a blog called My School Committee Blog has become the source of controversy over an entry where she advocates closing one of the elementary schools. Truth be told the rest of the blog appears to be rather benign, but when blogger Catherine Sanderson chose to express an opinion in her blog, she became a flash point in our town budget battle.

My home town is no different than any other these days, facing massive budget short falls, town officials are forced to make hard choices, and as always seems the case when times get bad, people start looking for somebody to blame. The letters to the editor in my town weekly are full of frustrated and angry people who don't want their favorite program cut. And who can blame them.

If I recall correctly we are on year 3 of massive cuts and the schools, the biggest part of the budget bear the largest brunt. One proposal this year has called for the closing of one of the elementary schools, which as expected doesn't sit well with the parents, teachers and school officials who call it home. So when Sanderson wrote a blog entry suggesting closing this school was the most sensible choice of all the hard choices, people got angry. She responded in her blog and a debate began about blogging officials.

Sanderson has a right to blog. She makes it clear up front in the blog why she blogs and what she will and won't write about. She has a right to an opinion and a blog is actually providing more unfiltered insight into the thoughts of town officials than we are likely to get through the local town weekly.

I don't think this is really about her blogging. I think it's about frustration with the funding system. It's the same everywhere I look, but suggesting an official can't blog (express their first amendment rights) to me is just silly. You might not like what she has to say, but she has a right to say it and you are probably getting a deeper understanding of her views and decision-making process than you would otherwise.

Photo by bjorndv on Flickr

A Modest Idea: What If Microsoft Open Sourced Windows?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I came up with an idea this week: What if Microsoft made Windows open source? Before you accuse of me of link baiting, I believe this idea has merit for several reasons. It will reduce the cost of development, put the power of the community behind supporting what's become an endless and expensive project and let Microsoft concentrate on enterprise solutions and cloud initiatives.

Read my argument on DaniWeb.

Zune & iPod: A Tale of Two MP3 Players

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Last week Apple and Microsoft released their fourth quarter MP3 player sales figures, which Apple chooses to call its first quarter for some odd reason, and the numbers were a startling contrast. On one hand you had Microsoft with a 54 percent drop off in sales from the fourth quarter last year. On the other, you had Apple, selling a record number of iPods (again).

Read the post on DaniWeb.

Look beyond the license type and find the best product

It seems these are heady days for open source as more products develop and mature. It's getting to the point for many of these products that the fact they are open source is really secondary. It has less to do with the license and more to do with the quality of the product or service itself (or at least it should).

Read the full post at FierceContentManagement.

Photo by Ron Miller

Google Torches Feedburner Account Transfer

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeGoogle Torches Feedburner Account Transfer - DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller

Last week I opened my Feedburner account to check the daily traffic statistics for my by Ron Miller blog. There was a link at the top of the page encouraging me to transfer my Feedburner account, which Google had purchased back in 2007, to my Google account. Seemed like a sensible thing to do since I have all my Google services under a single sign-on except Feedburner. It turned out it was a terrible idea...

Read the rest of the post on DaniWeb to find out why it was a terrible idea.

Open Source's Moment is Now

Open Source's Moment is Now - DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller

There are number of factors coming together that lead me to believe that open source's moment is right now, today, this year.Open source already runs so many things and just last week as Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, he asked Scott McNealy of Sun to prepare a report on open source technologies as a first step toward exploring the use of open source in government...

Read why on DaniWeb.

A New Look for My Blog

Today is a big day for my blog. I hired artist Doug Eymer to design a custom masthead and color scheme for my blog and I'm very proud of it.

I think Doug did a great job and he gave me the look and feel I wanted to bring to this blog.

My plan over the coming months is to port over the material on my www.ronsmiller.com web site into this blog to have a single integrated blog and web site, a one-stop destination for my work.

I'm really excited about it. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

RSS can be a life saver in the enterprise

RSS can be a life saver in the enterprise - FierceContentManagement.

Every week when I put together the FierceContentManagement newsletter, I go through a news gathering process to find the latest news and links for that week's newsletter. It involves checking, by rough count, more than 70 websites. It also includes several Google searches for terms like Content Management, Collaboration, Digital Asset Management and so forth. Can you imagine if I had to check each one of these sites and manually run each of those searches every week to find the top stories I use to produce the newsletter?

Read the rest in FierceContentManagement

 

Google's Growth Engine Sputters

Image via WikipediaGoogle's Growth Engine Sputters - DaniWeb TechTreasures

For the last 10 years Google has been on an upward trajectory making gobs of money and astounding us all with there seemingly endless fount of innovation. For a time, there seemed to be a new product announcement every week. Google has always been very savvy about exploiting the news cycle, and keeping the brand in the public eye, but no company can grow forever and a couple of recent news stories suggest that Google's era of non-stop growth is finally over.

Read the rest on DaniWeb.

There's a Difference Between Gossip and Discussion

Image via CrunchBaseThere's a Difference Between Gossip and Discussion - DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller

There has been a lot of chatter this week about the health of Steve Jobs. On one level, it's a perfectly understandable discussion. Jobs is a public figure and as such what happens to him--good or bad--interests us. But a friend of mine suggested that any discussion of Jobs' health was crossing the line into gossip. He was not alone as comments in the many blog posts in the aftermath of this week's announcement attest. I maintain that there is room for serious and meaningful discussion about this, and that because Jobs is who he is, we should be talking about this and asking tough questions...

Read the rest on DaniWeb