County Arcade, Leeds

The global CloudCamp movement continues to grow, with events over the next few weeks in Denmark, Germany, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and across the United States. And now, I’m very pleased to announce that the English city of Leeds is joining the party.

CloudCamp events have been taking place in the UK for years, and the London gatherings have picked up real momentum. Outside London, we’ve seen a few events in Warrington, Newcastle, and Edinburgh. We believe that the time is now right for something more regular; a place in which the cloud-building, cloud-using, cloud-interested and cloud-exploring can come together for talk, beer, pizza and more… without having to jump on a train to the deep south.

CloudCamps are interesting events, with a real emphasis on informality. I’ve attended several around the world, and am always impressed by the energy in the room, and by the welcome extended to newcomers. As the main CloudCamp site describes,

“CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”

Jeremy Jarvis at Brightbox and Karyn Fleeting and Joel Turner at Tinderbox Media have been driving this event forward, and they’ve invited me on board to help out. I also get to be MC on the night.

We’ve got speakers and sponsors committed, with more of both to come. If you think you should be one of those doing the speaking or the sponsoring, do let us know.

So, if you like talking Cloud, if your boss has ordered you to learn Cloud, or if you’re just keen to understand a little more about what this Cloud thing can do for you, stick the evening of 14 June in your diary, sign up (for free) on Eventbrite, and come along to the Hilton DoubleTree in Leeds for an evening of fun, learning, beer, and more.

See you there!

Image of the County Arcade in Leeds by Flickr user Francisco Perez

Image via Wikipedia

Way back in 1979, before YouTube’s three founders could either walk or talk, The Buggles claimed that “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Queen countered in 1984 with Radio Ga Ga, in which Freddie Mercury sang (of radio);

We watch the shows, we watch the stars
On videos for hours and hours
We hardly need to use our ears
How music changes through the years.

Let’s hope you never leave old friend
Like all good things on you we depend
So stick around cause we might miss you
When we grow tired of all this visual
You had your time you had the power
You’ve yet to have your finest hour

As many of you know, I’ve been running a poll over the past week, to understand whether my future podcasts should remain audio-only (my not-very-well-disguised preference), or start to include more video. And, at least for the type of content I create, it would appear that the lyrics by Queen’s Roger Taylor are spot on; audio wins.

There’s some more detail to tease out of the results, after the break…

Seventeen individuals completed the survey over a period of seven days. Asked “Which type of podcast would you like me to produce?” (the only mandatory question), 15 selected ‘Audio only,’ 2 selected ‘Both audio and video,’ and none selected ‘Video only.’ Amongst the (optional) comments, there was a recognition that video would have value if there were more to watch than just two talking heads. I don’t see any point peppering a video with screenshots of a web page that the viewer could just visit for themselves, but there is certainly value in showing people how to complete some task or process. Luckily ( ) my podcasts don’t involve that degree of minutiae…

“A video version would be a little more trouble for us, a lot more for you, and for what? To watch badly-lit panelists stare into their webcams? Stick with what you have. It’s great.”

The remaining questions were optional, but most respondents chose to answer them.

Asked ‘How often do you listen to my podcasts,” 50% reported listening to “all” or “most of them,” 30% had heard “one or two,” and 18% had not listened to any.

Most of my podcasts tend to run for between 40 minutes and an hour. Asked about their preferences for length, 70% of respondents stated a preference for the current length. There were, of course, a number of caveats in the comments. These broadly suggested that a podcast should be as long as it needed to be, rather than padding a conversation in order to reach some arbitrary length. That’s pretty much what I do just now, so that’s good.

When I started podcasting, I used to slave over the audio for hours. I edited out every ‘um,’ every ‘ah,’ every plosive, and every pause for reflection. Now I don’t bother. Instead, I add a short intro and edit out the worst of the howlers (coughing fits, retracted statements that might make lawyers twitch, etc). From my perspective, that gives the best balance between editing time and listening quality, and the survey’s respondents agreed. One respondent said I shouldn’t bother doing anything at all to the audio file, 12 said “do what you do just now,” 2 asked that I “do more to edit the ums and ahs,” and one opted for “edit to the max – give me the sound bites, and voice overs and summaries.” I think I’ll quietly ignore that last one, and keep going as I am.

So… keep doing audio, keep them about the current length, and stick with the current level of editing. Isn’t it great when a survey tells you what you want to hear?

That said, there may be scope for doing some talking heads-type video at events. That sort of video is about capturing atmosphere as well as getting the interview… and would probably be much shorter. 5-10 minutes, maybe. We’ll see…

Disclaimer: lots of wordy verbiage, crammed full of caveats, hedges, and warnings about sample size, survey methodology, and bias.

And as for the songs? Well, judge for yourself. The Buggles video off YouTube doesn’t appear to want to embed (who knew that WordPress had a taste filter?), but here’s Queen…

Related articles

• A conversation with Richard Wallis, an experiment, and a survey (cloudofdata.com)

Richard Wallis

Our conversation is also an excuse for an experiment. I have been producing audio-only podcasts here and elsewhere for a number of years, but have always tended to avoid producing video. It’s more effort, it requires more bandwidth at both ends of the conversation, and I’ve never really been convinced that it adds very much to a conversation between two people. Anecdotal evidence would also suggest that my current podcasts are consumed in environments where video would not work; washing dishes, walking dogs, and sitting on buses.

However, rather than just continue to presume that my biases are correct, I’ve decided to give video a try. Richard kindly agreed to participate, and the result is available on YouTube and embedded here.

An audio-only version is also available for download if you prefer. The introductory remarks in this version are slightly different to those on the video, as they come straight from the original conversation.

It’s perhaps unfair to draw too many conclusions from this first attempt, but a few things are immediately apparent. The whole process takes an awful lot longer. The files are larger, so processing and uploading times increase 2-3 fold. Uploading a separate audio file also takes a bit of time. Simply dumping the Skype recording into iMovie worked just fine… but I’ve (so far) not managed to find any way to balance the audio levels. Garageband lets me do this with my audio-only podcasts, but iMovie doesn’t seem to, so Richard’s side of the conversation comes across as quite a bit louder than mine.

Having done one, I’m still not convinced that the video adds anything to the conversation. But what do you think? If you’ve listened to any of my podcasts, please take a moment to complete the short survey over at SurveyMonkey. Your responses will help me to decide where to go next.

Many thanks.

One important part of those procedures should surely be effective communication with customers, (especially?) when they’re paying good money.

So when my connection to Karoo, the local ISP, disappeared this afternoon, I wasn’t particularly concerned at first; I assumed that this temporary glitch would be quickly resolved.

Like a good customer-focussed organisation, they have a status page. According to it, all was well. Some time later, still with no network connection, the status page (reached on my iPhone) still claimed all to be well, and I began to worry that the problem might actually be with my router.

Following a few iterations of unplugging, restarting, etc, I was still not getting a connection, and Karoo’s status page still happily reported all to be well with their network.

So, is it better to give out patently false information (as Karoo were doing here) or to take the status page offline for good and simply say nothing?

Eventually, I rang Karoo’s helpline. A recorded message admitted to ‘some’ problems, and suggested a 15 minute wait to speak to one of their operatives. 20 minutes later, I hung up.

They couldn’t even tell me the truth about the length of their tech support queue.

My connection is back now, about an hour and a half after I lost it. In the grand scheme of things, not a huge outage. I’m sure the engineers were on the scene quickly, and worked hard to fix whatever the problem was.

So hopefully they’re as disappointed as I am in the woeful lack of effective, timely or accurate information from their customer support team.

There’s really no excuse, Karoo.

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One of the biggest drains on time, effort and motivation in this business is the hell of arranging physical and virtual meetings with clients, prospects and podcast interviewees. Few of those people are in my timezone, we have no shared Exchange or Lotus Notes to endure rely upon, and I have absolutely no control over the calendaring solution that they choose to use in managing their own time. For all I know or care, half of them might still retain secretaries with quill pens to keep their paper diaries.

Over the years, I have tried a lot of tools with varying capabilities. Some were full-featured overkill that attempted to assert far too much control over my workflow. Worse, some of them tried to control the workflow of my invitees — people with whom I might only interact a couple of times — and that was completely unacceptable. At the other end of the scale, some were extremely simple and didn’t even understand the notion of timezones.

Of all these tools, I probably had most success with When Is Good, but still found myself tending to rely upon manual processes and a special iCal calendar called ‘Scheduling Hell’ into which I could record all of the appointments that I was in the process of confirming with people. The sea of red spread across my calendar most weeks — a mass of tentative appointments that would eventually resolve down to a far smaller number of actual events — is becoming a little ridiculous though; the waiting for invitees to respond means I’m often left unable to tackle new opportunities when they come up.

I’ve been trying a new tool for a little while, and am happy to report that I may finally have found the answer. The tool is Tungle, and it came out of beta this week to positive coverage across the blogosphere. I spoke with Marc Gingras, CEO of Montréal-based Tungle, this afternoon to hear a little more about the product and his company’s plans.

Tungle has come a long way since its initial alpha release of a plug-in to Microsoft Outlook two years ago. A $5 Million Series A investment led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures last year provided the wherewithal for the 18-person company to learn a lot from use of the Outlook plug-in and finish reinventing its tool for the Web, free of the platform and application limitations of their first offering.

Tungle now works with the major web browsers, and synchronises back and forth with calendaring solutions such as Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Entourage and iCal. Earlier this year they also announced a partnership with IBM to bring the same capabilities to Lotus Notes, which Gingras suggests will  ensure coverage for 99% of professional users of electronic calendars. I have experienced one or two glitches in Firefox 3.1b3 under OS X, and although the team at Tungle have not yet been able to reproduce my problems they are looking into it. The site works perfectly well in the latest beta of Safari 4.

As a Tungle user, you are able to painlessly import one or more calendars and then keep them in sync with Tungle itself automatically. Tungle doesn’t replace your chosen calendaring solution, and does what it can to integrate seamlessly into familiar workflows. You are also able to import contacts if you wish, making it a little easier to invite people to meetings (you can select them from your contact list in Tungle instead of having to cut and paste or type email addresses) but also making it possible to share calendars in a manner already familiar to enterprise users of Exchange or Notes; but in a software-agnostic fashion that extends far beyond the corporate firewall. I’m not sure that this feature helps with my requirements, and have not imported any contacts yet; I’m quite happy to paste their email addresses in from elsewhere when I need to, and I prefer being in control of the meeting organisation process and the sharing of ‘free’ time with others. This is actually one of the most useful things about Tungle for me; it’s not a take it or leave it solution that requires me to do a load of things that I don’t want to. The meeting scheduling capabilities were what I wanted, and they work perfectly well without me having to take the rest of the feature set (including a ‘Meet With Me‘ capability that would allow anyone with a confirmed email address to request a meeting with me) before I need it.

Scheduling is a breeze, with a helpful wizard (and a tour) to walk you through the process the first few times. After selecting a topic, duration and location (which, helpfully, can link out to search Google Local for all those meetings you want to organise ‘in the coffee shop nearest X station or Y meeting venue’) you add the names of contacts you wish to invite and are then shown a view of your synchronised calendar in which you are able to select a range of possible dates and times for the new meeting. Invitees (who don’t need to be Tungle users themselves) receive an email directing them to a web page on which your proposed times are displayed, and simply select the time(s) that suit. Once the chosen time has been agreed it is automatically synchronised back to the organiser’s own calendar software (iCal in my case) via Tungle’s connector. Non-Tungle users receive an email with details of the confirmed meeting, in a format that may easily be added to their own calendar.

Anyone who has tried to organise meetings with busy people knows that the best course of action is often to offer a lot of possible times, in the hope that at least one will suit all the people you want to meet. The problem, as I found with my ‘Scheduling Hell’ calendar, is that you end up having to hold huge sections of your week for tentative appointments in order to avoid double booking. An incredibly useful capability in Tungle removes this problem almost entirely, as the times offered for a meeting are dynamic and can change (automatically or manually) after the invitation has been sent. Say I send two separate meeting invitations for appointments tomorrow. In both cases, the invitation offers any time between 9am and 6pm. The recipient of one invitation is quick off the mark and selects a 10-11am slot. The recipient of the second invitation then clicks on the link in the email they received and visits Tungle to schedule our meeting. Despite the fact that I offered them 9am-6pm, Tungle knows that I am now busy 10-11am and automatically adjusts the invitation to only offer 9-10am and 11am-6pm. Brilliant. Maybe I can wave goodbye to my Scheduling Hell.

Tungle also offers a useful set of management tools, and I have high hopes that those will continue to evolve; it would be useful, for example, to be able to temporarily overlay all the time slots currently offered to people on my calendar (a quick and dirty equivalent to my old Scheduling Hell calendar), and to have easy tools for chasing non-respondents after a period of time.

Given all of this functionality, how will Tungle manage to remain free? As it becomes more successful, its costs are only going to increase, and the company has committed to providing free access to the current feature set moving forward. There aren’t any ads, and while Jim Courtney points to future integration with WebEx or GoToMeeting there don’t seem to be many really compelling pieces to hold in reserve for a future subscription-powered version. Location-based advertising by coffee shops keen to attract the meetings of Tungle-toting mobile workers who will buy a latte and then hog the sofa and the power socket for a couple of hours? Surely not…

Gingras and his team are clearly thinking hard about this, with plenty of money still in the bank to support their free growth for a year or more and concerted effort being expended to lower the cost of acquiring and servicing new users as the site grows. Conversations with various interesting partners are moving forward, and he suggested that there will be news of partnerships — and various optional premium offerings — when the time is right.

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Amid mounting international concern that the guidance lasers aboard Jeff Bezos‘ new Floating Amazon Cloud Environment would interfere with Rudolph‘s sense of direction, sources close to the Amazon Web Services team tell me that they’ve been forced to alter priorities and switch attention to an early release of the next product on their roadmap.

Today sees the release of Amazon‘s latest web service; the Hadoop-powered Elastic MapReduce;

“Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit.”

The company’s press release quotes VP for Product Management & Developer Relations, Adam Selipsky, who notes;

“Some researchers and developers already run Hadoop on Amazon EC2, and many of them have asked for even simpler tools for large-scale data analysis. Amazon Elastic MapReduce makes crunching in the cloud much easier as it dramatically reduces the time, effort, complexity and cost of performing data-intensive tasks.”

MapReduce was brought to prominence by Google, and is one of the principal techniques at that company’s disposal in enabling them to break massive data sets into manageable chunks suitable for cost-effective processing on the commodity hardware for which they are known. The abstract for a Google research paper on the topic outlines the value proposition reasonably succinctly;

“MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper.

Programs written in this functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program’s execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system.

Our implementation of MapReduce runs on a large cluster of commodity machines and is highly scalable: a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines. Programmers find the system easy to use: hundreds of MapReduce programs have been implemented and upwards of one thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google’s clusters every day.“

Hadoop is a Yahoo!-nurtured Open Source equivalent to Google’s MapReduce, managed as a project of the Apache Software Foundation, and reputedly scalable to handle many petabytes of data distributed across thousands of CPUs.

As Adam noted in the press release, customers (such as the New York Times and Netflix) are already using Hadoop on Amazon’s Web Services. Today’s announcement makes it easier to cost-effectively and transparently commission (and decommission) the required compute resources. This is the ‘elasticity’ referred to in the new service’s name, and is an increasingly important aspect of the current generation of Cloud-based compute services; much of the economic value proposition lies in only using (and therefore paying for) the resources you actually need to complete a task. If demand increases, the number of (virtual) machines available should rapidly increase to cope, and they should shut back down just as rapidly when the demand passes;

“Amazon Elastic MapReduce enables you to use as many or as few compute instances running Hadoop as you want. You can commission one, hundreds, or even thousands of instances to process gigabytes, terabytes, or even petabytes of data. And, you can run as many job flows concurrently as you wish. You can instantly spin up large Hadoop job flows which will start processing within minutes, not hours or days. When your job flow completes, unless you specify otherwise, the service automatically tears down your instances.“

Elastic MapReduce is currently available only for data centres in Amazon’s US region (so non-US customers can use the service; they just have to be able/willing to transfer the data beyond their borders), and is priced in addition to existing EC2 instances with Elastic MapReduce on a $US0.10 per hour ‘small’ instance costing a further $US0.015 per hour (yes, 1 and a half cents per hour) and on a $US0.80 per hour ‘extra large’ instance costing a further $US0.12 per hour.

Elastic MapReduce is another nice example of slow, incremental improvement to Amazon’s core Web Services offer.

It remains to be seen, as developers get down to using it for real, whether it’s pitched as a low-end disruptor that simply rounds out another piece of the emerging AWS whole, or if it’s a viable competitor in its own right to the recently announced Cloudera which sees taking Hadoop to mainstream enterprise customers as its raison d’etre;

“Cloudera can help you install, configure and run Hadoop for large-scale data processing and analysis. Get Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop and start working with Big Data today.“

Update: Amazon’s Jeff Barr provides a lot more detail in a post to the AWS Blog.

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In my recent cull of subscriptions to print media, BusinessWeek had no difficulty whatsoever in avoiding the chop. It consistently offers a useful and timely perspective on events in the world around me, and (subjectively) seems to intelligently consider the tech perspective on things more often than some of its competitors.

Last September, the BusinessWeek.com site rolled out the beta of a new service; Business Exchange. Closely linked to stories in the magazine and features on BusinessWeek.com, the Business Exchange is a fledgling social network within which members can access background material on stories, submit additional resources of their own, and comment on the content they find. Business Exchange links frequently feature prominently at the end of articles in the magazine, but I’m quite surprised at how rarely I find myself explicitly directed back into the magazine from the site. For a quick introduction, see this video of a recent presentation by BusinessWeek Executive Editor, BusinessWeek.com Editor in Chief (and active twitterer), John Byrne.

According to BusinessWeek’s Director of User Participation, Ron Cassalotti, over 1,000 topics have been approved on the site since it opened four months ago. One of those (the Semantic Web, of course) was started by me, but I also consume and contribute content across a range of other topics relevant to my business interests. Much of this activity is relatively passive, but the site also offers the ability to grow a network of like-minded fellow members, to flag items of interest, and to comment on content shared by others.

User profile and topic pages are visible to non-members, and also rank highly in Google; as Ron demonstrated by showing me how much higher my Business Exchange profile page ranks than my far older LinkedIn profile.

Topics are suggested by BusinessWeek staff and by members of the site, and I get the impression that topics tend to be approved if the topic is in-scope (for BusinessWeek readers) and actively discussed out on the open Web. Ron tells me that there is no formal taxonomy for topics, which certainly makes it more straightforward for his team to adapt to evolving member interests and the shifting nature of the News. The lack of a formal taxonomy raises issues of its own, of course. I, for example, followed both ‘Cloud Computing‘ and ‘Cloud Computing Research.’ The former was proposed by Business Exchange member Ralph Perry, and the latter by BusinessWeek Senior Writer Stephen Baker in gathering background content to inform articles in the magazine. For a while I simply cross-posted content to both, but the numbers would suggest that Stephen’s topic is ‘winning,’ and attracting the eyeballs. Presumably at some point a back-end process (or one of Ron’s team) will make a decision to simply merge the two topics?

The network – and its features – are clearly still evolving, and there’s a way to go. I do find myself on the site most days, though, exhibiting web site visiting behaviour that I thought I’d left behind years ago in favour of my RSS reader.

And today? I find that I’m the Business Exchange’s Featured User, there for all the world to see… 

Thanks to Ron and the team, and if you keep up the good work I’ll keep coming back.

My next step, of course, is to move from being Featured User on the Business Exchange to getting my work printed in BusinessWeek itself. Then my social network-sceptical mum really will be impressed!

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I will be taking a bigger step in 2009, when I move from full time employment with Talis to see what else I am capable of as an independent consultant.

A lot has happened since 2005. I joined a provider of software to UK libraries that had aspirations to be something bigger, and played my part in the team that made sure we got there. Operating entirely on money the company earned through its existing product lines, with no debt and no external investors, we set about refreshing those existing products and challenging many of the sector’s long-held presumptions about engagement, participation, openness, innovation, and control. From Library 2.0 to Open Data, we were visible on a global stage, we were active, and with white papers, public speaking, blogging, podcasting, facilitation, cajoling, challenging and networking Talis played a significant part in shaping perceptions that are now widely viewed as norms.

The company had bigger fish to fry, though, having embarked upon an ambitious development programme to deliver a technology Platform upon which the next generation of Semantic Web applications could be built. Talis set about assembling the talent required to build that Platform, and I set about building brand recognition in markets and territories where Talis was previously unknown.

In November last year, Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb listed Talis as one of 10 Semantic Apps to Watch;

“Talis is a 40-year old UK software company which has created a semantic web application platform. They are a bit different from the other 9 companies profiled here, as Talis has released a platform and not a single product. The Talis platform is kind of a mix between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, in that it enables developers to create apps that allow for sharing, remixing and re-using data. Talis believes that Open Data is a crucial component of the Web, yet there is also a need to license data in order to ensure its openness. Talis has developed its own content license, called the Talis Community License, and recently they funded some legal work around the Open Data Commons License.

According to Dr Paul Miller, Technology Evangelist at Talis, the company’s platform emphasizes ‘the importance of context, role, intention and attention in meaningfully tracking behaviour across the web.’”
(my links)

Last month, he revisited the ten and concluded;

“Over the past year, Talis has continued to make a name for itself as an evangelist for the Semantic Web, most notably through the blogging and podcasting [1, 2] activities of Paul Miller. Talis also produces a great magazine for Semantic Web, called Nodalities, and has an active company blog under the same name. As for the company’s products, the platform seems to be iterating nicely and is being used in niche library and government applications.

RWW verdict one year later: Talis has successfully positioned itself as an authority on Semantic Web in the blogosphere, which we love because it’s a great way to keep track of Semantic Web trends!”
(my links)

Through our blogs, our podcasts, our magazine, our presentations and our support for the community, Talis has played a key role in raising awareness and credibility for the Semantic Web as something more than an academic exercise. Talis, and others, have set about demonstrating that it offers a viable set of technologies that reach to the heart of business processes in a wide range of areas. Through activities such as the monthly Semantic Web Gang and ZDNet’s Semantic Web blog, I have played my part in bringing together some of the key players and giving them a Platform on which to share their ideas and experiences.

We have been concerned with more than just technology, though, and have devoted as much time to understanding and illustrating the economic, strategic and organisational disruptions that face businesses now and moving forward. Our early and ongoing support for the Open Data cause is a case in point, underpinning our shared belief that value is shifting at many points throughout the enterprise; previously hoarded data is no less valuable than it was, necessarily, but the opportunities to benefit when the value proposition is reconsidered from the perspective of the open Web are enormous.

I have played a significant part in all of this, and have learned much from the differing perspectives, backgrounds and experiences of my colleagues inside Talis… and all of the people I’ve met outside the company.

As Talis moves into 2009, ready to focus far more on showing how its products and solutions will solve customers’ problems, the time has come for me to look for new challenges. I’ve been careful not to gratuitously push Talis products over the years, and I believe that I have been successful in explaining complex issues in an accessible fashion along the way. I hope that I have demonstrated neutrality, authority, and perspective, even whilst in the full time employ of a single company. There’s a lot to build upon there, and a real opportunity to extend that reach even further. So I’m going to be setting out on my own and taking on work with clients that can benefit from that track record. Analysis, consulting, advice, speaking engagements and more.

I’ve started talking to a lot of people recently, and am already noticing some very interesting prospects which I will be firming up now that this news has entered the public domain. I’m always open to additional offers, of course!

And the first customer for the newly independent me? Talis. My current employer will be contracting part of my time to continue working on some of the broader external activities I was already doing for them. The Semantic Web Gang, for example, will continue to be underwritten by Talis, and I remain its host.

So interesting times lie ahead. I’m excited by the opportunity and daunted by the challenge in almost equal parts. I look forward to seeing where this leads next, and I am sure that I shall see many of you along the way.

Paul.