Best Tech Podcasts

As always, during my one hour one way commute to work I was listening this morning to net@night with Amber MacArther. In this episode Leo and Amber interviewed Dina Kaplan of blip.tv. In case you are unfamiliar with blip.tv, they aspire to be “the HBO of the web”. blip.tv is available through boxee and I must confess that I haven’t really fully checked out their offerings. But it wasn’t the content of blip.tv that interested me about the interview.

I work in the .com world as a systems engineer. As we work to develop and release new products, I am always on the lookout for ways to leverage open source and other cutting edge technologies to improve our time to market and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for our products. One thing that Dina said in the interview really hit home for me. To paraphrase her comment, she said that blip.tv is always looking for ways to participate in the ecosystem of the internet. What I understood her to mean was that when it makes sense to partner with another technology service provider such as flikr or iTunes in order to realize the business objectives of blip.tv, they choose to do so as a participant in the ecosystem of the internet rather than reinventing already proven technologies.

Using open source software as a code repository to speed up time to market and TCO is not a new concept. But I’m finding that it is very new, and possibly a foreign concept, to consider ourselves as a part of the ecosystem of the internet and employ the use of internet services to augment our products.

As an example Square Space is rapidly becoming the platform for creating a blog site and if I’m interpreting the buzz correctly, it is flexible and scalable enough to consider for even more complex web site offerings. If you look back a few years, when a company wanted to launch a blog site, they might have set out to code the site from scratch. Move forward a few years and companies are probably more inclined to make use of WordPress or something similar, but hosted on their own hardware either in a local corporate data center or a managed hosting facility. But in keeping with Dina’s concept, forward thinking companies are beginning to recognize themselves as a part of the ecosystem of the internet and are farming these pieces of their internet presence off to a service such as Square Space. By doing so, not only can the company focus on the content rather than debugging custom code, this same company now no longer needs to focus on server resources and maintenance.

I’m imagining that business owners and executives view this concept as far too cutting edge, risky and foreign to the traditional way of doing business in the .com industry. It might even feel as if your own back yard is being opened to the entire community. But if you really evaluate the concept, it feels right. And more importantly, to be a good citizen of the ecosystem of the internet, the projects and products we offer and develop and excel at creating become the best choice for others to incorporate into their own business model. But not in the traditional closed source way that software products have been offered in the past. Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz interviewed Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems awhile back. He is their chief open source officer and had some very interesting insights into the future of software development that relate well to this concept. Again I am very loosely paraphrasing, but he essentially spoke about the need to open source or die as a business as we move toward the future. Open source is inevitable. The businesses that understand how the open source economic model works sooner rather than later will be better positioned for the future.

As a systems engineer I find this trend to be very exciting. But more importantly, businesses should be excited. I see this trend as the business equivalent of the universe expanding. The trend in technology shows an ever increasing desire to further specialize. A very short while ago data center businesses replaced the corporate data center. Then managed hosting replaced racking your own equipment in those off site data centers. Now we are witnessing the birth of the “cloud” where the concept of a server doesn’t even exist but is being replaced with virtualization technology. I encourage anyone who hasn’t yet examined the power of 3Tera AppLogic to do so. Even so, businesses are still to this day building out internal corporate data centers and haven’t even made the switch to off site data centers, much less managed hosting. And the thought of moving to the cloud is not even entertained.

So if the adoption of new data center concepts is slow to catch on in corporate America, then the adoption of open source as a business model and participating in the ecosystem of the internet are even harder concepts to gain adoption. Because I listen to some very excellent podcasts with very cutting edge guests, I suppose I am quite often not connected to the “real world” of mainstream, Midwestern information technology. I suppose I’m just excited about what the future holds for me as a systems engineer and I’m ready for the future now.