Modeling and Documenting and Communicating! Oh My!

Dorothy: Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!

IT Architecture reminds me of that timeless quote presented above, taken from the movie The Wizard of Oz, except the IT jungle is filled with models and documentation and communication  (Oh My!)

Let's start with models. I'm not referring to the gorgeous women models who prance down runways peddling famous fashion designer clothing. Nor am I talking about the latest car models from auto manufacturers like Ford, GM, or Toyota. I'm also not using the term in the same way that weather forecasters or economists define models, or molecular models in chemistry, graphical models in computing, or even role models in parenting. Rather, I'd like you to think about plastic models like those sold as kits by Revell.

A-10 WARTHOG	37 FORD COUPE	70 CHEVELLE SS	PT 109
CORVETTE C5	RMS TITANIC	JU87R-2 STUKA	VISIBLE V-8 ENGINE

Think of these models as cheap (as in inexpensive) representations of the real thing. Building architects also often create something similar when they want to show what a structure will look like before it's actually built. Sometimes these architectural models are 3-D. Other times, they're just 2-D drawings.

IT architects need to be able to build inexpensive representations of the real world inside the computer. For instance, a Relational Data Model uses TABLES to map to real world ENTITIES. For example, you can envision a one-to-one mapping between a row in a CUSTOMER table and a real-world instance of a customer. A Data Architecture model must also be able to reflect RELATIONSHIPS like the one-to-many relationship between customers and orders (i.e., any individual customer may place one or more orders), or the many-to-many relationship between customers and locations (i.e., customers may operate facilities located at multiple addresses).

Models provide a way to think about real world things. In other words, models contain the "hooks" from which facts can be hung. The actual facts themselves are what documentation is all about. For instance, if, once again, we're referring to Data Architecture, it's the job of documentation to capture all available knowledge about instances of entities and relationships. The models include the framework for organizing the knowledge. The documentation serves as the vehicle for saving the knowledge.

Finally, modeling and documenting won't do you much good unless you can communicate the information to the people who can actually use it. Communication involves the transfer of knowledge. Many different groups of people can benefit from simple, easy access to documentation describing knowledge organized according to models that can be readily understood. That's what IT Architecture is all about!

Five Questions Totally Unrelated to Architecture

Beware: If you're uninterested in postings that deviate from the primary architectural theme of the ITscout Blog, then you'll want to skip this one because it's totally unrelated to architecture.

First, I congratulate the Chicago White Sox who unquestionably deserve the title of world champions. Their finish to the 2005 baseball season was incredibly reminiscent of the Boston Red Sox run last year, including a sweep of their National League opponent and an end to a longstanding curse. My question, though, is, why is this team called the White Sox? The Red Sox actually wear red socks. Why do White Sox players wear black socks with their uniform?

Second, because of the work of Chicagoan and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, we've learned quite a bit about the Plame probe now that "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted. Bottom line, it's fairly evident that the Bush administration's approach to governing, including foreign policy, has been handled pretty much like a political campaign -- divide people into friends and foes. This partisan warfare strategy, perfected by presidential advisor Karl Rove, is what has led to the current legal and political problems plaguing the White House. But, after 22 months of investigation into the CIA leak, I still have one burning question. Who gave Valerie Plame Wilson's name to Chicago Sun-Times reporter Bob Novack? It was his newspaper column that started this whole sordid affair. In his press briefing Fitzgerald only mentioned N.Y. Times reporter Judith Miller, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, and NBC's Meet The Press Washington bureau chief Tim Russert. What about Bob Novack? Who told him?

My third question involves the United Nations. Specifically, how is the U.N. going to react to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks that "Israel must be wiped off the map?" Supposedly, respect for the principles of national sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of member states is the bedrock of the United Nations charter. But, I suspect nothing will happen, except maybe corruption, because Iran, like Iraq, has oil. Of course, given how Saddam Hussein's regime bilked the U.N. oil-for-food humanitarian program of almost $2 billion through illegal kickbacks, coupled with how U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell misled the world body regarding WMDs in order to justify America's invasion of Iraq, one has to wonder, does the United Nations still have any legitimate purpose?

Speaking of oil, Exxon Mobil just earned $9.9 billion in third quarter profits. Shell made a quarterly profit of $9 billion. ConocoPhillips and ChevronTexaco earned a paltry $3.8 and $3.7 billion, respectively. So, now we know where all that money went as drivers paid over $3.00 per gallon for gasoline after Hurricane Katrina. Let's see, oil companies are reporting astronomical record profits while Texas oil man George W. Bush is president and both houses of Congress are controlled by the GOP, the Gas & Oil Party. Is anyone really shocked by all this? My question, though, is, if the oil companies are rolling in dough like they are, how much of Middle East oil money is going to fund the Iraqi insurgency? As N.Y. Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman has pointed out, "we are funding both sides in the war on terrorism." This insane situation is absolutely nuts, which leads to my fifth and final question of the day.

How in the world did George Bush get re-elected? My question, which I'm sure John Kerry must also be asking, is, did Abraham Lincoln perhaps get it wrong -- not about slavery, but rather, about secession? In 2004, Bush received 62,040,606 votes; Kerry 59,028,109 votes. That's a difference of 3,012,497 votes. But, if you breakdown the numbers you'll find that Bush carried the 11 states of the Confederate States of America by a whopping 5,039,494 votes, meaning that Kerry carried the rest of the country by 2,026,997 votes. If you toss into the equation Kentucky and Missouri, both often considered unofficial members of a 13-state Confederacy, then Kerry's lead in the non-Confederate USA widens to 2,580,245 votes.

State	Bush Votes	Kerry Votes	Difference
South Carolina	937,974	661,699	276,275
Mississippi	684,981	457,766	227,215
Florida	3,964,522	3,583,544	380,978
Alabama	1,176,394	693,933	482,461
Georgia	1,914,254	1,366,149	548,105
Louisiana	1,102,169	820,299	281,870
Texas	4,526,917	2,832,704	1,694,213
Virginia	1,716,959	1,454,742	262,217
Arkansas	572,898	469,953	102,945
Tennessee	1,384,375	1,036,477	347,898
North Carolina	1,961,166	1,525,849	435,317
Missouri	1,455,713	1,259,171	196,542
Kentucky	1,069,439	712,733	356,706

In Moore's Law We Trust

The Future of the iPod?

R&D: Where the Rubber Hits the Sky...

Microsoft appears to be struggling for perhaps the first time in its long and illustrious history. The company has been replaced by Google as the darling of Wall Street. In the media, rarely a day goes by that you don't read about some prominent employee leaving the firm to go work elsewhere. There doesn't appear to be any buzz or excitement about Microsoft's current crop of products, especially by comparison with all the hoopla Apple has generated with its iPods and iTunes.

Stock Price

• Microsoft's current stock price, near the end of October 2005, is $25.11


• A year ago, in late October 2004, the stock cost $27.90


• Two years ago, in late October 2003, it was $26.14

Okay, I get it. The stock price has been essentially flat. Perhaps the problem is now that Microsoft has been paying out big dividend checks to its stockholders, the company has not been investing enough in research and development. Is that possible? Let's look at the numbers.

R & D Expenses

• In 2005, Microsoft spent a whopping $6.2 Billion for research and development


• In 2004, Microsoft spent even more -- almost $7.8 Billion


• Back in 2003, the R & D budget was $6.6 Billion

That's more than $20 Billion over the past three years!!!

That's "B" as in "Billion"

What in the world is going wrong here?

Frankly, for the $20+ billion spent on R&D over the past three years, you'd think Microsoft should be introducing a slew of innovative new products.

I suspect a lot of that R&D money was spent on the development of Vista (previously known as Longhorn), Microsoft's next generation Windows Operating System, and Office 12, the next version of Microsoft's omnipresent Office Automation suite. The problem is I wonder how many Windows XP and Office XP customers are chomping at the bit, waiting with bated breath, counting the days until Microsoft releases its next generation of products. Moreover, I imagine most folks will wait awhile even after these products get released before purchasing, just to make sure the bugs have all been ironed out. Additionally, if you were to ask me, I'd say most people are sufficiently satisfied with the current crop of Microsoft products that they already own. If there's some big pent up demand for Vista and Office 12, I'm just not seeing it yet. Besides, who knows when these products will actually go on sale. Microsoft's reputation for shipping products on time has become pretty tarnished over the past few years.

I suppose imitation has long been Microsoft's strong suit -- not innovation. After all, MS-DOS originally imitated a predecessor operating system known as CP/M that ran on Z80 processors. Similarly, Windows was always considered a me-too product compared to Apple's Macintosh. Even the hugely successful Office Suite was basically viewed as little more than a GUI-based set of word processing and spreadsheet tools bundled together in the tradition of Lotus 1-2-3. Likewise, Access, the Office database tool, was chiefly seen originally as mostly just an imitation of Borland's Paradox product.

The tradition at Microsoft has long been one of initially introducing mediocre products only after some more innovative player had previously blazed the trail ahead of them, and then doggedly working at improving those belated Microsoft products in subsequent releases. This pattern seems to hold true for Internet Explorer, IIS, Xbox, and even C#. In other cases, Microsoft entered markets via acquisition. That certainly was what happened with Hotmail, FrontPage, SQL Server, Visio, and multiple lines of commercial-off-the-shelf software from Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, and Axapta.

There have been a few areas where Microsoft has created new markets as a result of their own homegrown innovative capabilities. For example, ASP (Active Server Pages) and the original MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server) were clearly leadership offerings in the early days of server-based application development software. And, Visual Basic has long been an industry leader with its pioneering efforts at improving programmer productivity.

Looking at Microsoft today, much of what's reported in the press suggests that they're sticking with the imitation strategy that has worked so well in the past. They appear to be pursuing every major Google initiative, especially desktop search, web search, mapping, published books, etc.

To help the firm learn how to innovate, they acquired Groove Networks. I doubt they cared too much about the Groove networking software. My guess is what Microsoft primarily wanted was Ray Ozzie, with his proven track record as an innovator. Today Ray is Microsoft's chief technology officer.

My advice to Microsoft, not that anyone there is asking me for my opinion, is that they really ought to step back and reevaluate themselves now, rather than later. I watched DEC die. I almost witnessed the death of IBM. IBM survived only because of unimaginable metamorphic changes during times of great pain and stress. Microsoft ought to seriously think about how they can learn the same lessons IBM learned, but to do so now while the company is still healthy. I believe if they look critically at what they've gotten in return for $20+ billion in R&D costs over the past three years, maybe they'll see that as a signal, because $20+ billion is one sh%tload of money.

Evaluate ITguide, Pleeeeze!

I love reading Seth Godin, author of six books including his latest, All Marketers are Liars. This isn't the first time I've referenced Seth's Blog in the ITscout Blog (e.g., see The Key To Successful Blogging). He just seems to have a special knack for capturing the essence of what I'm thinking or how I'm feeling.

One column Seth posted last month especially resonated with me, probably because it coincided with the release of my company's latest product, ITguide. Entitled "Open Big," Seth wrote, "We all want to open big. We want our product launches to be instant successes." But, unfortunately, the real world doesn't always work that way. The bottom line, according to Seth, is that while it's way way easier to start things than it used to be, today's online snowball effect, by far more powerful than the old-world scream & dream approach, still rarely hits all at once. "So," Seth asks, "what's it mean to you?"  Excerpted below are his answers to that question:

• Make something worth making.


• Sell something worth talking about.


• Believe in what you do because you may have to do it for a long time before it catches on.


• Don't listen to the first people who give you feedback.


• Don't give up. Not for a while, anyway.

As I wrote in an earlier ITscout Blog posting:   Is anybody there?   Does anybody care?   Does anybody see what I see?

If you haven't done so already, then please allow me to ask you again one more time to Evaluate ITguide, Pleeeeze!

What's an Architect?

This past year I received a Microsoft MVP Architecture award. Since Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are recognized for their knowledge and expertise, it's a great honor to have had my contributions as an architect acknowledged. The only issue I have is that it seems even Microsoft themselves don't really know what an architect is or how to classify MVP Architects. Most MVP categories map directly to Microsoft products, such as SQL Server, Excel, or Visual Developer - C#.  Some others, such as XML or Web Services, link to a specific technology. But, architecture is clearly neither a product nor a technology. So, the question remains, what's an architect?

Harry Pierson, a key member of Microsoft's Architecture Strategy team, describes architecture as the bridge between business and technology. In essence, that means architecture is orthogonal (i.e., perpendicular) to both.

IASA, the International Association of Software Architects, has formed a working group charged with the task of specifying a roadmap to help clarify the "largely uncharted" profession of architecture. Personally, I'm hopeful the team's end result will describe three levels of architects:

• On one end there are software architects who have a project-oriented focus. They're responsible for building concrete solutions to specific business problems.


• On the other end are enterprise architects who, by definition, are charged with the job of modeling their IT organization's whole technological landscape spanning different business units and functional areas. Four types of architecture are subsets of an overall enterprise architecture: 1. business architecture; 2. data architecture; 3. application architecture; and 4. technology architecture. The critical success factor for enterprise architects is determined by their ability to communicate and explain information technology to non-technological business managers.


• Finally, there's a third group of overseer architects who sit half way between software architects and enterprise architects. These folks are charged with the responsibility of ensuring consistency across multiple project teams, but with a narrow focus specifically targeted to a particular architectural issue. For instance, security architects need to oversee multiple projects to make certain that new solutions are all properly safeguarded. Similarly, a business may want to create an architectural team to concentrate on customer data in order to ensure consistency across all business units and customer facing applications.

As difficult as it has been to come up with a definition of the term architect, there's no problem identifying where the demand for a definition is coming from. Virtually every IT professional aspires to become an architect. The job title of architect represents the technological pinnacle of the IT profession. Architects can walk the walk and talk the talk. In other words, the group of people identified as architects can bridge the gap between technology and the business. Some are:

• strategic -- enterprise architects
• tactical -- overseer architects
• operational -- software architects

Regardless of level -- strategic, tactical, or operational -- architects are the leaders serving at the frontier of IT. As skilled communicators who do not hide behind technology jargon or talk down to nontechnical business people, they are uniquely qualified to help their organizations identify how to use IT to gain strategic advantage. Given their solid grounding in their firm's overall business needs, their holistic view of their organization, and their thorough understanding of the underlying dynamics governing changes in technology, it's their job as recognized experts to challenge entrenched in-house thinking. Unfortunately, skilled, business-oriented technology strategists are in short supply. That's why companies like Microsoft, with their support for MVP Architects, are beginning to embrace the emerging field of architecture.

Two Books I've Got To Read

A common refrain I continually hear is how busy everyone is -- so busy there's no time to read blogs. I guess what's ironic is that I think of the ITscout Blog as a reading filter for busy people. I explicitly try to pass along only particularly interesting, eclectic information, combining elements from a variety of sources.

At this past week's PopTech! 2005 conference in Camden, Maine, there were two books mentioned that I've absolutely got to read.

The first is Suketu Mehta's book, MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found. A fictional work, Suketu's writing won the Kiriyama Prize, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. He has also won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia. With 14 million people, Bombay is the biggest city on the planet of a race of city dwellers. Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us.

We Americans are horribly provincial, often limited in our perspective by being terribly self-centered. Globalization requires that we must learn more about other people's world view. In the 19th century, Britainnia both literally and figuratively ruled the world as "the sun never set on the British Empire." Then, in 1875, the United States seized the title of being the world's largest market. We've held that position ever since. But, as many pundits have suggested, America may fairly soon be seriously challenged by Chindia, a term often used by Vinnie Mirchandani. (By the way, did you know that after the recent acquisition of MG Rover Cars by Shanghai Automotive Industries Corp. (SAIC), there are now zero British-owned car companies?)

The second book that grabbed my attention is almost thirty years old, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. The phrase "selfish gene" was coined by Dawkins as a provocative way of expressing the gene-centered view of evolution, which holds that evolution can be viewed as acting on genes, and that selection on organisms or populations almost never overrides selection on genes.

One of the keys to life is replication. DNA is a replicator machine. Sometimes, though, the copies aren't exactly perfect. Most of the bad copies are simply discarded. But, occassionally, the new bad copy is better in some way than the original. An organism is expected to evolve to maximize the number of copies of its genes passed on globally (rather than by a particular individual). Dawkins describes biological organisms as "vehicles" used by their genes for making more copies of those genes, regardless of the effect they might have on individuals or species. Genes that help the organism they are in to survive and reproduce also improve their own chances of being passed on; so most of the time "successful" genes will also be beneficial to the organism. Darwin cannot be faulted for the absence of the gene as the unit of selection from his explanation of evolution since the basic mechanisms of genetics weren't understood at the time.

What totally captured my imagination about this book was a concept Dawkins popularized called memes (which rhymes with dreams), a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to genes. A meme consists of some sort of a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics). Memes are contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection.

In essence, according to PopTech! speaker Susan Blackmore, "first our planet was infected by life (DNA); then the planet was invaded by a second replicator: meme machines."

Examples of memes are ideas, catch-phrases, tunes, clothes fashions. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.

It sure seems obvious to me that when architects talk about patterns, what we're referring to is essentially the same as what's described above as memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it.

All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

Bob Metcalfe on Knowledge

Speaking at PopTech! 2005, Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet (and a constant presence at PopTech! since 1997), explained the three facets of knowledge:

1. science -- gathers knowledge
2. technology -- applies knowledge
3. education -- transfers knowledge

Of course, he also justified his being overweight, explaining how it helps compensate for his natural human tendency of being promiscuous and a hunter-killer.

Google-mania

Here we go again! What are we going to call it this time, the Web 2.0 bubble?

In case you missed it, Google's rapidly rising profits soared to new heights in the third quarter as its Internet-leading search engine churned out a sevenfold earnings increase that blew past analyst expectations.

Seriously, I wonder how many people even understand how Google generates its sales, let alone how it managed to it make $381.2 million during the three months ended in September (compared with net income of $52 million a year ago).

Wall Street has responded by running up the price of Google's stock (GOOG) to almost $340 per share. That means Google's market cap (the price of its stock times the total number of shares outstanding) is rapidly approaching $100 billion!

By comparison, both GM and Ford each have a market cap worth just under $16 billion. HP is worth just under $80 billion, while Verizon and Time-Warner are both worth just over $80 billion.

Do you remember when the New England Patriots' Gillette Stadium was going to be named CMGI Field, or when AOL purchased Time-Warner? That was back when Internet fever was sweeping the land. Does Google's soaring stock price imply a market relapse?

100+ Blogs... and Still Posting...

On November 4th, 2005, it will be six months that I have been blogging (see Dipping my Toe into the Blog pond). Since then, I've written over 100 postings. What mistakes have I made? What lessons have I learned?

To help answer these questions, I turn to Jakob Nielsen, usability guru and Alertbox columnist, who last week published Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. I sure wish I knew then what Nielsen is telling me now.

I'm afraid I'm guilty of committing Nielsen's first Design Mistake which involves Author Biographies. I never really took much time to populate information in the About Me section of the ITscout Blog. I guess I had hoped my work would simply speak for itself. I pretty much naturally assumed that any visitors to the ITscout Blog were also registered users on my personal web site, ITscout. I suppose I could have mentioned that I am also CEO of Flashmap Systems, Inc., but the ITscout Blog is not a corporate blog -- it's a personal blog. The views expressed on the ITscout Blog are not necessarily those of Flashmap Systems, Inc. I suppose I could have explicitly stated that previously, for over twelve years, I was President of Hewitt Technologies, a Division of Hewitt Associates, or that prior to that I was employed by Digital Equipment Corp, IBM Corp., Control Data Corp., and Arthur Young & Company. Perhaps I should have also mentioned that I have lectured internationally to tens of thousands of IT professionals, or that over a million of my ITscout Roadmap wall posters have been distributed worldwide.

I guess I do okay on Nielsen's second Design Mistake, Author Photo. Of course, now that I'm bald and fat, my wife says she still loves me. She'll miss me, but she still loves me. (Only kidding!!!)

I also think I score pretty well on Nielsen's third Design Mistake, Nondescript Posting Titles. I am quite proud of my posting titles, such as: Democracy Now!, TOGAF, Micro$oft's % of Total IT Spend, Architectural Constituencies, Architecture and Politics, So, You Want Software Reusability?, WMDs: Then and Now, "Beam me up, Scotty", Terrain, Deep Debt, Microsoft Turns 30, Painful Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned, Trojan Horse Judge, Ike Was Right, Navigating the Web Using Social Bookmarks, IT Is Like a Box of Chocolates, The Long Tail, A Culture of Standards, Cardiac Pats & Sox, Roberts Rules, Is Anybody There? Does Anybody Care?, America's Nightmare Worsens, The Key To Successful Blogging, How Do You Share Valuable Information?, Help Me... Help You..., The Best A Man Can Get, Architecture Is a Very Hard Sell, Create Your Own Technology Architecture, Unraveling the mystery of IT costs, Less Is More -- by Barry Schwartz, 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.', What is "IT Governance"?, Mess O'Potamia, Technological Revolutions, An Architectural Pattern, Stupid Is As Stupid Does, Virtuoso Teams, A is for Asynchronous, Now, if My Software Only Had a Brain ..., The Birth of Google, IT Portfolio Management, Enterprise Architect’s Roles & Responsibilities,Simplifying EA, What Enterprise Architecture?, What SEARCH Won't Find, Knowledge Management (KM), Repairing the World, Simplifying Complexity, Meetings, Talk or Drive, Don't Do Both, RSS -- Part Three, Why I Blog?, SEI's Capability Maturity Model, Nuclear Power, Mensa Invitational, Where does Business Process fit?, Gates outlines the future of software, The Joel Test, Technology Architecture--3-Layers--4-Models,RSS & Microsoft, Usability...Usability... Usability..., Local WiFi turns into federal case, The Spirit of New England, Stop "Fake" Analysis, Business Process Breakthrough Needed, Federal Enterprise Architecture, Defining Taxonomy & Classification, Fake News Follies, Executive Cockpits, Celebrity Power, 7 Essential Elements of EA, Browser Wars Redux, XML Uber Alles, .NET vs. Java, Enterprise IT Consolidation, What's in Your Portfolio?, IT Infrastructure, RSS -- Part Two, Registries vs. Repositories, Business Intelligence, RSS -- Part One, Limits of Speech Recognition, Application Development Life Cycle, Do You Believe Inflation Is 2%?, Mad Genius from Bottom of Sea, Life Principles, Software -- Engineering or Craft?, Rationalizing Software, How Much of EA is BS?, Consolidate. Standardize. Prune., Scaling Standards, It's COTS to be Good, Categorization versus Search, Ontological Classification, Why Hasn't SOA Lived Up to the Hype?, Architecture, Portfolio, and Standards, Prune IT Systems, Not Budgets, The New Enterprise Architecture, Getting Started with Standards, IT Transformation, IT Standards Manifesto, What is IT Architecture?, and Dipping my Toe into the Blog pond.

I don't believe the ITscout Blog suffers from Neilsen's fourth design mistake, Links That Don't Say Where They Go.

However, the ITscout Blog does commit a serious faux pas with respect to Neilsen's fifth and sixth design mistakes, Classic Hits are Buried and The Calendar is the Only Navigation. Both of these issues are due to limitations in Google's Blogger software. That product is free, but I guess sometimes you get what you pay for.

I have nothing to apologize for regarding Neilsen's Design Mistake #7, Irregular Publishing Frequency.

On the other hand, Design Mistake #8, Mixing Topics, is an entirely different story altogether. I've really grappled with this issue. In the beginning of my blogging experiences, I tried to stay pretty close to the vest by only writing about architectural issues. But people whom I respect were telling me to make the blog more personal. Perhaps I've gone overboard, writing too much about topics completely unrelated to IT architecture and standards. Yet, I can pretty honestly say that I've let it all hang out. I have not shied away from expressing my personal opinions on a wide range of topics ranging from architecture to politics, and everything in between.

Neilsen's design mistake #9 deals with Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss. Here, again, I plead guilty. Professionally, I've never worried too much about burning bridges. I have no intent of retreating... ever! Instead, I try to call 'em as I see 'em. I'm not real adept at spin. My preference is to concentrate on honesty.

Finally, last but not least, is Neilsen's design mistake #10: Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service. I'm guilty as charged. From the get go, I made the decision to go with Blogger. I'm really wondering if that was a bad decision. Since I originally Dipped my Toe into the Blog pond, I've come to discover a number of limitations in Blogger. It doesn't support Categorization capabilities. Nor does it provide advanced features such as Trackback or Permalink. Jacob Neilsen says that having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com is "the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn't be taken too seriously." I'm in a quandry. Is now the time for me to make a change? As Neilsen states, "the longer I delay, the more pain I'll feel when I finally make the move." Any feedback on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

Democracy Now!

I must admit that over the years, I've very rarely tuned in to my cable network's local community television network. I suppose that occassionally, while surfing from station to station using my remote control, I've stopped once in a great while to view my home town government's Selectmen meeting or to watch a local high school sporting event. That was before I discovered Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent news program airing on public access TV as well as on some NPR, community, and college radio stations. Produced by the Pacifica Radio Foundation, Democracy Now! is also broadcast on satellite television (DISH network: Free Speech TV ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); and "podcast" on the Internet.

Nowadays, I tune in to my local community television channel almost everyday. I like to regularly watch Democracy Now! on Lower Cape TV, Channel 17, every morning between 8 and 9 am.

The Democracy Now! program provides access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S.corporate-sponsored media, including independent and international journalists, ordinary people from around the world who are directly affected by U.S. foreign policy, grassroots leaders and peace activists, artists, academics and independent analysts.

For true democracy to work, people need easy access to independent, diverse sources of news and information. But the last two decades have seen unprecedented corporate media consolidation. The U.S. media was already fairly homogenous in the early 80s: some fifty media conglomerates dominated all media outlets, including television, radio, newspapers, magazines, music, publishing and film. In the year 2000, just six corporations dominated the U.S. media.

"Corporate" media outlets maximize profits. "Public" media outlets accept funding from major corporations, as well as from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Every Corporation for Public Broadcasting board member is appointed by the White House and confirmed by the Senate.

Democracy Now! is funded entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers, and foundations. They do not accept advertisers, donations from corporations, or donations from governments. This allows them to maintain their independence.

You may not always agree with Democracy Now!'s independent programming. For example, it recently broadcast an interview with veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk of the London Independent. Robert Fisk has been reporting on the Middle East for thirty years, covering every major event in the region, from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution, from the American hostage crisis in Beirut to the Iran-Iraq War, from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to Israel's invasions of Lebanon, from the Gulf War to the invasion and ongoing war in Iraq. Fisk, author of the book, "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East," believes "the war in Iraq has been lost already."

Whether you agree or disagree with people like Robert Fisk isn't the point. I believe it's extremely valuable and important to have an opportunity to listen to alternative ideas and opinions. Democracy Now! is completely refreshing because it provides programming that is completely unlike anything else on TV or radio. If it's journalism's role as the Fourth Estate to always challenge power, then between 8 and 9 in the morning, Democracy Now! does a whole lot better job than Katie Couric and Matt Lauer on NBC's Today Show, Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson on ABC's Good Morning America, or Harry Smith and Julie Chen on CBS's The Early Show. Viva la difference.

Click here to read a complete transcript of Robert Fisk's interview entitled "War is the Total Failure of the Human Spirit" .

TOGAF

The ITscout Blog has frequently referred to TOGAF, The Open Group's Architecture Framework, and in particular, the fact that TOGAF defines four types of architecture that are subsets of an overall Enterprise Architecture.

1. Business Architecture
2. Data Architecture
3. Application Architecture
4. Technology Architecture

Popkin, recently acquired by Telelogic, has published an excellent Intro to TOGAF whitepaper, a portion of which is excerpted below.

TOGAF is a framework and a method for performing Enterprise Architecture. This makes it different from something like the Zachman Framework, which is a framework that is concerned only with content and not a method for building Enterprise Architectures.

TOGAF has two main components

1. ADM -- Architecture Development Method
2. The Enterprise Continuum

Both are visually depicted below:

The Architecture Development Method

The ADM is a detailed, step-by-step method on how to build, maintain and implement an Enterprise Architecture. The outer circles of the graphic represent the major phases required to iteratively build and maintain Enterprise Architecture. As indicated by the circle at the center of the graphic, the ADM is continuously driven by the Requirements Management process. It is important to note that Requirements Management denotes, not a static set of requirements, but a dynamic process whereby requirements for Enterprise Architecture and subsequent changes to those requirements are identified, stored, and fed into and out of the relevant ADM phases in a cyclic fashion.

ADM forms the core of TOGAF. The business, information systems, and technology architectures are always aligned with requirements and related business goals.

The Enterprise Continuum

TOGAF's Enterprise Continuum specifies a progression for developing architectures and solutions using architecture building blocks and solution building blocks, in a continuous, iterative fashion. A building block is simply a grouping of functionality defined to meet business needs. An architecture building block is described with a general level of detail. Solution building blocks reflect real products or specific custom developments.

The relationship between the Architecture Continuum and the Solutions Continuum is one of guidance, direction, and support. You build an architecture by navigating the two continuums, from left to right, top to bottom, so that you are specifying architecture building blocks at each stage, and then the solution building blocks that implement them, and continuing rightward, building upon the solution and adding increasing detail.

The TOGAF ADM guides you through the left-to-right progression from the general architectures and solutions (on the left), to organization-specific ones (on the right).

A Foundation Architecture consists of architecture building blocks and corresponding standards that support a complete computing environment. TOGAF's pre-supplied Foundation Architecture consists of the Technical Reference Model and Standards Information Base.

A Common System Architecture is complete in terms of a particular problem domain, but incomplete in terms of the overall information system functionality. Examples of Common Systems Architectures are a Network Architecture, or a Security Architecture. A System Solution is an implementation of a Common System Architecture comprising a set of products and services.

Industry Architectures include pre-built, off-the-shelf architectures that have been developed for particular vertical industries. These often include pre-built data models and business processes. An Industry Solution is an implementation of an Industry Architecture.

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Micro$oft's % of Total IT Spend

Vinnie Mirchandani, in his deal architect blog, writes that Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, in his keynote speech at Gartner's annual ITExpo showcase, told the audience that Microsoft only makes up 1.5% of total IT spend! Vinnie points out that if that's true, given current Microsoft revenue, "the IT spend denominator has to be around $3 trillion."

Vinnie is convinced Ballmer must have made a simple mistake, like misplacing the location of the decimal point. According to Vinnie's calculations, the correct value is "closer to 15% of IT spend."

Architectural Constituencies

Who is the audience for Architecture?

The answer is, lots of different people.

First, there are Enterprise Architects. These folks are responsible for looking at architectural issues across multiple different business units and/or multiple different functional groups. Enterprise Architects, themselves, can be divided into four (4) sets of individuals. There are people focused on business processes. Others are responsible for data. A third group focuses on applications, particularly issues pertaining to partitioning and integration. And, finally, there are persons whose job it is to organize an enterprise's technology portfolio, especially for communicating IT standards.

A second group of people interested in Architecture are Software Architects. These individuals work as members of project teams. Their focus is narrowly channeled. They are responsible for either building or buying a specific solution to a business problem.

A third set of Architects sits somewhere in between projects and the enterprise. These people might be referred to as domain (or program) experts. For example, they might be concerned with customers which means their expertise is required across numerous projects touching multiple business units. Or, they might be responsible for a specific area of technical expertise, such as security. Their goal is to define uniform ways of solving general problems.

A completely different group of individuals who need to be served by Architecture are the business people. These folks, who are generally not very technical, need a better way to think about IT. I've often described this as a cognitive roadmap.

Since Architecture attempts to span so many different diverse audiences, it shouldn't be surprising that's it's been so extremely difficult to develop an easy-to-understand working vocabulary for describing such terms as:

• Quality Attribute
• Business Force
• Architecture Concern
• Architectural Style
• Design Type
• Architectural Description
• Architecture Assessment
• Architecture Framework
• Architecture Governace

IASA, the International Association of Software Architects, with 1600 members in 23 active chapters, is attempting to create a Taxonomy to define these terms. I've been working as a member of a working group tasked with tackling these challenging issues. I promise to keep you apprised of the team's progress in future postings to the ITscout Blog.

Architecture and Politics

If the ITscout blog is supposed to be about architecture, why do I keep inserting political commentary?  I guess it's because I see in Architecture and Politics common traits shared by both: STUPIDITY and OBFUSCATION -- also known as BS.

So, You Want Software Reusability?

Seemingly forever, reusability has been software's fountain of youth-like elusive goal. Yet, reality has almost always been the exact opposite. Since the beginning of programming time, most software has been incredibly brittle. Developers walk around their code like they're stepping on egg shells, constantly afraid that a small change in one portion of a program will create unexpected changes in behavior somewhere else.

Architecture represents the collective wisdom of the software industry on how to achieve reusability. It began with the simple notion of separating data and process. That lesson is as valuable today as it's ever been, but the concept of Data Architecture and Business [Process] Architecture has evolved over time.

The concensus today, manifested by the object-oriented revolution, is that Data ought to consist not only of properties (i.e., data fields) that describe real-world entities, but also the operations one can perform against those entities. By organizing the programming logic associated with an object's behavior directly with its data, object-oriented facilitates reusability by making code much easier to locate when changes need to be made. Additionally, by supporting the metadata relationships of inheritance and composition (i.e., objects made up of other objects), object-oriented enables development by exception. This allows for reuse by extending code created to support generic cases with new code defined to handle special cases.

As important as business objects are, data does not exist in isolation. Rather, business objects get created and manipulated as a byproduct of Business Processes. A business process is defined in terms of business events and business rules. Note that there is always a time element associated with a business process. That is, there's a starting point, an ending point, and some number of intermediary steps in between. An enterprise is essentially defined by its underlying collection of business processes. As such, the specification and control of business processes is seen by business people as absolutely essential. Unfortunately, there's still no body of knowledge associated with business processes that's comparable to the role object-oriented plays with respect to business data. The key missing piece is an ability to easily support development by exception. In other words, there's no simple, intuitive way to modify and extend an existing generic business process in order to accomodate a special case.

Business solutions, referred to as Applications, consist of some combination of data and process. Defining how to put these pieces together is the job of Application Architecture. In creating applications, there are two key issues that need to be addressed. The first involves partitioning which means determining which portion of executable code runs on which platforms. There are various ways of partitioning processing that range from fat clients to thin clients depending on how much of the code runs on the front-end versus how much runs on the back-end. In between are various ways of handling interprocess communication, some based on remote procedure calls, others based on object request brokers, and still others that depend on asynchronous message transmission. The second key issue involving Application Architecture pertains to integration. The challenge in building inherently flexible systems is to figure out how to compose new applications that can leverage existing business logic and functionality and combine it with either newly built services or 3rd-party purchased services.

Bottom line, it's impossible for an enterprise to reuse what it doesn't know it owns. Technology Architecture is responsible for modeling, documenting, and communicating whatever it is that already exists. Unfortunately, the task of controlling technology portfolios has not received high priority. As such, it's not unusual to find multiple costly examples of IT organizations owning different redundant products that deliver essentially equivalent overlapping functionality. As the software industry evolves toward a service-oriented Application Architecture, the problems resulting from a lack of a Technology Architecture will become greatly exacerbated.

So, if you want software reusability, then focus on Architecture:

• Data Architecture
• Business [Process] Architecture
• Application Architecture
• Technology Architecture

WMDs: Then and Now

The only reason we're fighting a war in Iraq today is because of the supposed threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction. But, as we all now know, Saddam had no WMDs. Frankly, I believe President Bush knew that all along. I've seen incredible pictures taken by the Hubble telescope. I can only imagine what the government can look at by aiming a similarly powerful camera back down toward earth.

The WMDs of the 20th-century are based on nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies. Building nuclear weapons requires access to rare and effectively unavailable raw materials and highly protected information. Biological and chemical weapons programs also tend to require large-scale activities.

The 21st-century WMD technologies are based on genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR). Frighteningly, these technologies are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable their use.

The Op-Ed section of the October 17, 2005 edition of the N.Y. Times ran a piece co-authored by Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy entitled "Recipe for Destruction". Below is an unedited excerpt taken from the first two paragraphs:

AFTER a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

[Click here to read more (registration required)]

I've frequently complained about the stupidity of our Federal Government. But, publishing the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet represents a new high in the depths of stupidity. This certainly makes my constant griping about the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework seem pale by comparison. Nevertheless, I'm mad as hell and don't want to take it anymore.

America is broken. You can't keep cutting taxes while the budget deficit soars. You can't keep coming up with new excuses about why we attacked Iraq. You can't nominate non-elite Supreme Court judges. And, you don't make the definition of a Technology Architecture reference model the LAST step in the creation of an Enterprise Architecture.

Stupid is as stupid does. America used to be the smartest nation on earth. I guess now we're just a byproduct of an educational system that wants to teach intelligent design in science classes.

"Beam me up, Scotty"

MSNBC reports that "Star Trek" actor James "Scotty" Doohan took the catchphrase "beam me up" very seriously. In accord with his last wishes, his cremated remains are being launched into space.

Space Services Inc., a commercial launch operator, is due to send the late actor’s remains into space aboard its Explorers Flight. His ashes will be ejected from the spacecraft and orbit the earth for a century or two before descending into the atmosphere and burning up.

Terrain

There has never been a more exciting period to be a technologist. Yet, simultaneously, America is experiencing an incredible dumbing down. According to science pollster Jon D. Miller of Northwestern University, one in every five Americans believes that the sun revolves around the earth. President George W. Bush believes intelligent design ought to be taught in science classes as an alternative to evolution even though, unlike any other scientific theory, scientists cannot test for the presence of design, nor can they disprove the presence of design.

We are living in times of intense change. New products and services are increasingly emerging and being interconnected at a prodigious rate. Technology continues to permeate all aspects of business and society. Yet, how can we hope to compete in the 21st century unless we pursue technology more aggressively?

I have repeatedly challenged IT organizations -- both within government as well as within commercial industry -- to leverage Enterprise Architecture. Moreover, I have continuously emphasized the importance of initially focusing on the Technology Architecture terrain. Remember, in any fight between a grizzly and an alligator, I can guarantee that the outcome will depend on the terrain. Similarly, in harnessing business processes, business objects, and business solutions, I can guarantee the outcome will depend on the terrain. Define it. Map it. Communicate it. Simplify it.

Deep Debt

The U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Public Debt, publishes a web site called The Debt To the Penny. Currently, as of 10/13/2005, the value of U.S. public debt stands at $7,995,462,387,011.49.

The U.S. Census Bureau publishes a web site called U.S. and World Population Clocks. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, as of 10/14/05, is 297,420,101.

Each and every American -- man, woman, and child -- currently owes $26,882.72.

Microsoft Turns 30

Wired News ran an interesting Associated Press report entitled "Growing Up: Microsoft Turns 30". The unedited excerpt below embodies the first three paragraphs of the article:

SEATTLE -- Microsoft promises its software will make people better workers -- more productive, more profitable, more able, as the company likes to say, to achieve their potential. Yet some wonder why the software behemoth isn't taking more of its own medicine.

As Microsoft hits 30, critics reel off a list of complaints that sounds like, well, a Microsoft commercial: stifling bureaucracy, frustrating miscommunication, different units working on overlapping technology without adequate cooperation. In short, the very ills Microsoft promises to cure with its software.

Growing pains have delayed products, leaving the door open for Microsoft to be beaten to market by younger, more nimble competitors led by Google and Yahoo. Meanwhile, Microsoft shares have been trading at about the same level for several years.

The anemic performance of Microsoft's stock must be wreaking havoc on the company's culture. How many Microsoft employees became millionaires over the years as the company's stock rose and split, and rose and split, again and again? But, now, the stock price has stagnated and employees are no longer getting rich based on options.

I wonder if it's time to start worrying about Microsoft following in the footsteps of Digital Equipment Corp., one of my former employers. I remember when DEC was known for employing the best and the brightest. Similarly, I remember hearing all kinds of stories about the phenomenal brain power exhibited by Microsoft's workers.

There are many parallels between DEC and Microsoft. Both companies were founded and led by truly amazing entrepreneurs -- Ken Olsen and Bill Gates. Both companies were known for superlative products -- VAX & VMS for Digital, and Windows & Office for Microsoft. Both companies were renowned for incredibly strong balance sheets. Both companies provided employees with fabulous benefits that demonstrated how much they respected and cared for their people.

Sadly, though, DEC is no more. It's really a shame, too, because DEC could have had it all. But, as most everyone might remember, Ken Olsen never believed anyone needed a personal computer.

Back in 1981, even before IBM introduced its original PC (running Microsoft's DOS), DEC could have stormed the PC market with UNIX-based personal computers (running on F-11 and J-11 chips). Back then, DEC PDP-11's were almost like Ivory Soap in that 99 and 44/100% of all people who had ever run UNIX had probably run it on a DEC PDP-11. I remember too that almost every commercial customer of the earliest PCs, like the Apple II or Radio Shack TRS-80, was previously a DEC minicomputer customer.

DEC was, first and foremost, always a hardware company. Software simply helped to sell hardware. DEC was extremely afraid of Japan, Inc., the term used to characterize Japanese electronic manufacturers who, back in the early 1980s, were killing the American competition for TV's, VCR's, stereos, and microwave ovens. DEC was petrified they could never successfully compete in a commodity market. Instead, the company tried to morph itself into a mainframe-like company along the lines of IBM. A huge mistake that ultimately led to the firm's demise.

Microsoft, on the other hand, succeeded largely because of its total, interminable, laser-like commitment to personal computing coupled with its GUI-based personal productivity software products, namely Word and Excel, which pummelled its character-based competition, namely WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

In the beginning, Microsoft epitomized the industry's movement toward commodity-based computing and away from proprietary-based hardware platforms. Today, however, Open Source is perceived as the opposite of Microsoft. In the end, Microsoft finds itself locked in what amounts to virtually the same exact struggle that IBM and DEC were in oh so many years ago. When you're the market leader, the name of the game always winds up revolving around account control.

Account control is what killed DEC. It almost wiped out IBM, but for the miraculous job of transformation pulled off by Lou Gerstener.

In my opinion, Microsoft ought to step back and reevaluate its strategy. Personally, I think Microsoft should carefully study what happened to DEC and IBM. It might then consider doing what's best for the industry as a whole and its customers in particular, rather than focusing primarily on account control.

Painful Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned

Don Dodge works for Microsoft. His job is to "help VC's and start-ups be successful with Microsoft." He certainly has the proper pedigree having previously worked for Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks.

Although we don't know each other personally, Don and I do share a tiny amount of common professional DNA in that we both, once upon a time, worked for DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) in the database arena. (Also, I've been told, Microsoft employees are encouraged to visit my ITscout web site as part of their new hire orientation.)

Don's blog, labeled "Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing," recently included a posting entitled "Napster - the inside story and lessons for entrepreneurs." At the end of his commentary he includes a really nice list of lessons learned. Below are edited excerpts:

• Never get too far ahead of the market. Creating new markets, new business models, and value propositions is very difficult and takes lots of time and money. Pioneers are usually unsuccessful, the fast followers make most of the money.


• Understand who your customer is, what problem you solve, and how much they are willing to pay for it.


• Never start a business focused on solving a big company's problem. They don'’t know they have a problem...and they are probably right. That is how they got to be so big in the first place.


• Test your assumptions before spending lots of money. Interview your potential customers. Understand what their top 10 problems are. Don't try to convince them that you have a solution to a problem they don'’t know they have.

As an entrepreneur, I too, unfortunately, can readily identify with what Don has written. My company, Flashmap Systems, was a startup exactly five years ago this month. We shipped our flagship product less than one year later, ten days after 9/11. The good news is we're profitable today and we have existing customers that read like a Who's Who of corporate America. The bad news is how arduous the journey has been.

Our pioneering approach to helping enterprises harness Technology Architecture and IT standards has unquestionably involved the creation of new markets, and this has taken much more time and effort than I would ever have imagined back in October 2000. We also thought we knew who our customers were -- Enterprise Architects. But, we completely misgauged how little money or influence most real-world enterprise architects actually have.

Perhaps the biggest challenge my young company has faced corresponds to the third item on Don's list of lessons learned. Undeniably, we started our business by focusing on solving a problem big companies have -- the need to improve the efficiency of established IT investments. I assumed it would be intuitively obvious to large businesses that they'd be interested in cutting their technology portfolio costs between 10 and 25 percent by consolidating, standardizing, and simplifying. As such, I committed the major faux pas of not surveying potential customers, as Don suggests. I can certainly attest that it's very difficult to convince potential customers that "we have a solution to a problem they don't know they have." Still, I'm just continually amazed that business people don't realize how much money is wasted by owning redundant products that deliver overlapping functionality. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is most definitely not a well understood concept in today's business environment.

Recently, Gartner has reported results from their annual IT Staffing and Spending survey that indicates U.S.-based organizations plan to increase their IT budgets next year. Still, the results of the survey also suggest that "organizations plan only small increases in their IT staff budgets, and they plan reductions in their budgets for IT contractors." The largest planned increases are in software budgets. You'd think someday, somehow, somewhere, managers would finally begin to realize the need to consolidate, the need to standardize, and the need to simplify. Maybe in the future Don Dodge will be able to write about ITscout, ITguide, and ITatlas as "The Next Big Thing!"

Trojan Horse Judge

Harriet E. Miers, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, has her own Blog:

The blog of the #1 smartest President ever's #1 pick to be the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court!

Seriously, the whole idea that conservatives are questioning whether Harriet Miers supports President Bush's policies is funnier than the blog site referenced above.

Ike Was Right

Did you catch Andy Rooney on '60 Minutes' last night?

Andy talked about how:

• the United States is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq


• the annual U.S. military budget exceeds $455 billion


• how our military has 1,155,000 enlisted men and women and 225,000 officers -- one officer to tell every five enlisted soldier what to do

Andy reminded us of what President Dwight Eisenhower said upon leaving the White House in 1961:

"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Click here to read the entire transcript of Andy Rooney's commentary last night.

Unfortunately, what Andy didn't mention, but perhaps should have, is to also remind the American public about the most important lesson we learned from Ike's Vice President, Richard Nixon. Nixon's Watergate scandal can best be summed up with three words: "Follow the money!" In other words, where is that $5.6 billion a month being spent? Who is getting rich off of a $455 billion annual military budget?

I really miss the innocence that was so pervasive when Eisenhower was President -- back when TV shows like "Leave It To Beaver" and "The Adventures of Superman" were broadcast in black & white. Nowadays, it seems, Corruption, Incompetence, and Greed have replaced "Truth, Justice, and the American Way."

Navigating the Web Using Social Bookmarks

Tagging is the buzzword used to describe how people are navigating the web using social bookmarks. It's just like creating a Bookmark or Favorite inside your own web browser. That is, whenever you visit a web page you might want to revisit again, you can create a descriptive tag that's easy to remember. Now, imagine being able to share your bookmarks with others, and also being able to see everybody else's tags. In other words, all your bookmarks as well as other people's bookmarks are all stored on the web and accessible from any computer or browser

The MIT Technology Review ran an interesting article on this topic in June 2005 entitled "Tagging Is It" by Wade Roush. On September 20, 2005, NPR's All Things Considered Commentator David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about how "'Tagging' Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet"

The four most popular sites where members are voluntarily classifying and categorizing web content are:

1. del.icio.us
2. Furl
3. Flickr
4. Rojo

All of the above are free.

The idea behind tagging is, according to Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us, that "a bunch of people doing 'okay' tagging may actually have a higher net value than an authoritative organization telling you how information should be organized."