tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15597720509274322602024-02-06T21:40:42.492-08:00Jeremy Geelan's "New Media" BlogAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-45648602047026777202014-03-01T21:52:00.000-08:002014-03-01T22:17:48.960-08:00What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Smarter<span style="font-family: inherit;">In ten days' time it will be three years to the day since I was
successfully operated on for pancreatic cancer. Some of you reading this may be unaware of the <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.jp/2011/03/how-web-can-help-fight-cancer.html">prior story</a>; worry not, this is not a post about cancer. It is, though, a post about survival.<br /><br />There's a saying about how 'What doesn't kill you makes you
stronger' that many undergoing chemo- and/or radiation therapy often
hear, or even use themselves, to make light of the unpleasantness of the
process and to remind themselves that there is a flip side to the nastiness of the "planned poisoning" that they are enduring: it
may extend their lives and is therefore “better than the alternative” (as in,
death).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuqlqKnFgEKnL87h-o5zki1zAanth2a6SfJU_lVDpvbuU75Y-KrUeSEVAO6qYWOMBPIuYHDA9QXcBHkFub2rO-2b3aWnPbjatRiwTXbn8NAFPLGdqwwolqlgASCAbhU2R9zyBB4rqER-4/s1600/JeremyGeelan_PurpleProfileForWorldCancerDay_Feb4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuqlqKnFgEKnL87h-o5zki1zAanth2a6SfJU_lVDpvbuU75Y-KrUeSEVAO6qYWOMBPIuYHDA9QXcBHkFub2rO-2b3aWnPbjatRiwTXbn8NAFPLGdqwwolqlgASCAbhU2R9zyBB4rqER-4/s1600/JeremyGeelan_PurpleProfileForWorldCancerDay_Feb4.jpg" /></a><br /><em>My purpled Twitter avatar, to mark World Cancer Day last month (Feb 4</em>)</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But recently a colleague of mine in the world of the
Internet, <a href="https://twitter.com/GuyKawasaki">Guy Kawasaki</a>, hit upon a headline - I have yet to check whether it
was Guy's own or whether he was passing on something from elsewhere - that, for
me, is much more pregnant with meaning and possibility, in terms of viewing
cancer in the first place, and chemothererapy/radiation treatment in the
second, as a potential inflexion point for anyone who survives one or both:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><strong>What
Doesn't Kill You Makes You <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Smarter</i></strong><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This, for me, is the much more honest and uplifting statement. Do I feel
stronger, having dodged the bullet - thanks to radical Whipple surgery - of
the deadliest of all the cancers? Not really. If I could restore my strength to pre-diagnosis
levels or above I'd be happy as a clam; realistically speaking, it is not
especially likely, as there remain one or two challenges associated with Whipple
surgery which tend to linger no matter how hard one tries - a surgically
rearranged digestive system is plain not as effective as one that's been left
intact. <br />
<br />
On the other hand, do I feel<em> smarter</em>? Most emphatically, yes. The things that addressing
and overcoming adversity teaches you - about yourself, about those who love you
and are loved by you, about your professional colleagues both direct and
indirect, about total strangers and/or long-lost friends; about nutrition,
about the Internet, about the healing power of music and above all of love,
about cognitive mysteries such as "chemo brain" and the reassurances
increasingly offered by brain science; about physical capacity, about mental
agility, about emotion, about faith…<br />
<br />
In truth there isn't a single aspect of the human condition about which you do
not, on being confronted with an early departure from the game of life, end up
a tad smarter if on the contrary you have the good fortune to survive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8JSekdxMwcKGWNOigEWIF47Ma7Vn3fqC0qm_0LeH9Q9wxaXnULn5CwowGrsjKKtQS3whIbE0ORFSd-0RE2yY5es3j8KeAx3O0w1o7njO6OPe6eKE6d8j_B8FRJjDxngUQoDW0SgMCJqI/s1600/PancreaticCancerSucks_BIG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8JSekdxMwcKGWNOigEWIF47Ma7Vn3fqC0qm_0LeH9Q9wxaXnULn5CwowGrsjKKtQS3whIbE0ORFSd-0RE2yY5es3j8KeAx3O0w1o7njO6OPe6eKE6d8j_B8FRJjDxngUQoDW0SgMCJqI/s1600/PancreaticCancerSucks_BIG.jpg" height="320" width="228" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />"Survival" and "survivor" remain the
metaphors of choice when dealing with people like me but, speaking here only
for myself, I am not sure how useful those words are. We are *all* survivors,
after all; we all survive, daily, onslaughts of inconsiderateness or even plain
cruelty, of injustice either direct or indirect, of disappointment and/or even
despair. We <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>all</u></i> survive week
in, week out the challenges of work and play, of life and love, of learning and
of teaching, and of the eternal search for meaning in which we are all, to
greater or lesser extents of awareness, engaged.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So the human being who "survives" cancer, of
whatever variety, is no different from one who survives any other of life's
curve-balls: bereavement, for example, or financial ruin. There is a
commonality, and it is that of the bounceback or comeback. We humans are resilient.
We have mastered endurance. We are *all* survivors. Of something. Of life
itself, perhaps.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But the Kawasaki headline offers a more nuanced perspective.
<br />
<br />
Just as travel broadens the mind, or university, so pancreatic cancer it turns
out is a hugely enriching life-phase that does, no doubt about it, leave you
smarter. That it might just as easily have left you dead is not I think the
point; many things kill us, from traffic accidents to natural disasters. But
how many things actually make us smarter? We learn about humility - that is a
given when quite literally your life (in the form of your innards) is for
multiple hours in the hands of a surgeon. We learn about the irrefutable power
of positivity. We learn about the boundaries of medicine and the central role
of self-healing. We learn about the perils of certainty, and the corresponding
importance of flexibility and agile modification of behavior and/or treatment.
We learn about the often neglected importance of hydration. We learn about what
truly makes us, and those around us, tick.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now don't get me wrong. There are other ways to become wiser in this world,
all of them less painful, less intrusive, and less detrimental and disruptive
to the routine of yourself and your family. But that does not detract from this
one, enduring truth, and I can vouch for it first-hand: What Doesn't Kill You - really, truly madly, deeply...take
it from me - Leaves You Smarter.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-40178996711974836112014-01-29T00:14:00.002-08:002014-01-30T07:18:57.543-08:00All Aboard for the Internet of Things“What makes for a red-hot company?” IDG Connect Editorial Director
Martin Veitch asked himself rhetorically in November 2013. “Knowing
which closely-held companies have the strength in depth to succeed is an
inexact science,” he answered, “but there are some clues.”<br />
<br />
A sufficient number of Veitch’s all-important clues – which include
good management; a strong story; enthusiastic customers; a vibrant
developer/partner community; strong funding from reputable companies;
sales; growth; the positive views of experts in the field; market
opportunity; and competitive differentiation – existed in the case of
Kaazing to lead Veitch to include the Silicon Valley start-up in his
final list of <strong><em>“20 Red-Hot, Pre-IPO Companies in 2014 B2B Tech”</em></strong>
which IDG Connect, a division of IDG which is in turn the world’s
largest technology media company, published November 21, 2013.<br />
<blockquote>
“THINK OF IT AS A ROCKET UP THE INTERNET’S TROUSER LEG” –Martin Veitch, Editorial Director, IDG Connect</blockquote>
<br />
The IDG article explained how Kaazing “uses the emerging HTML5 Web
Socket standard to speed up communications and create what it calls ‘the
living Web’. Think of it as a rocket up the Internet’s trouser leg, if
you will, or HTTP reimagined for the more liquid world of the modern Web
versus the document-centric, static model of the Web circa 1995.”<span id="more-2648"></span><br />
<br />
Veitch then concluded, sagely: “With 5 billion Web users forecast for
2020 and with the Internet connecting to more and more devices, we
desperately need this sort of technology to come good.”<br />
<br />
His point is well made. In the brave new world that has since 1999
been called ‘Internet of Things’ (commonly abbreviated nowadays to just
IoT), there are already millions of embedded electronic measuring
devices connected: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors,
cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs.
They probe and monitor everything from cities to endangered species.
There are sensors monitoring the atmosphere, our ships, highways and
fleets of trucks, our conversations (thank you, NSA!), and even – in a
movement called the Quantified Self (QS) – our bodies.<br />
<br />
<div style="background: #ebebeb; border: 1px solid #cccccc; margin: 0 0 20px; padding: 10px 20px;">
<h3 style="color: #777777; margin-bottom: 5px;">
In the IoT, the Internet is getting in the way of the things</h3>
<div style="color: #777777; font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 5px;">
“The
intersection of the Internet of Things and the future will to a very
great extent happen on the Web, since nearly everything that technical
and business innovators want to do around IoT needs to make use of
Internet-level protocols. But the ‘things’ they want to talk to are
typically encircled by Web infrastructure like firewalls, proxies and
such.”</div>
</div>
General Electric, which prefers to call the IoT the “Industrial
Internet”, estimates that it will boost global GDP by a whopping $15.3
trillion in 2030. Cisco calls it “Internet of Everything” and is saying
to anyone who’ll listen that IoT-related activity will boost global
output by $1.6 trillion per annum throughout the next decade.<br />
<br />
In his IDG report, Veitch mentioned that there are forecast to be 5
billion Web users by 2020; but what he didn’t mention is that there will
be 10x that number of connected “things” – that’s to say, the Internet
of Things will be called upon to connect not just 5 billion people, but
also 50 billion things, from sensors to milk cartons, with trillions of
connections between them. These things, like the people, will be
always-on, always-connected, and always trying to communicate.<br />
<br />
The intersection of the Internet of Things and the future will to a
very great extent happen on the Web, since nearly everything that
technical and business innovators want to do around IoT needs to make
use of Internet-level protocols. But the “things” they want to talk to
are typically encircled by Web infrastructure like firewalls, proxies
and such. Which means that what is critically required is an entirely
new architecture, a “Web Communication” architecture if you will.<br />
<br />
And this is exactly what Kaazing has devised. It has devised gateways
that extend benefits of scale, speed, predictability, reliability, and
security across the multiple languages (protocols) spoken by the
“things” that are becoming so densely connected in the IoT world. In
fact Kaazing’s pioneering gateways will allow companies to on-board
billions of different things (machines, individuals, and enterprises) to
the Web in an always-on and always-connected state at unprecedented
scale – and with enterprise grade performance, predictability,
reliability, and security.<br />
<br />
Kaazing’s customers can expect the performance of the Kaazing Gateway
to provide for up to 100x latency and 1000x bandwidth reduction
compared to those solutions being supported by the existing, “legacy”
Web. In short, Kaazing has found a way to make the Web work more
efficiently, securely, and reliably. “With tech company valuations at
their highest for quite some time,” wrote Martin Veitch at the
conclusion of his <strong><em>“20 Red-Hot, Pre-IPO Companies”</em></strong>
piece, “signs of a bounce-back in major economies and several new waves
of technological change, these are exciting times to be a new
disruptor.”<br />
<br />
<div style="background: #ebebeb; border: 1px solid #cccccc; margin: 0 0 20px; padding: 10px 20px;">
<div style="color: #777777; font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 5px;">
“Kaazing has
devised gateways that extend benefits of scale, speed, predictability,
reliability, and security across the multiple languages (protocols)
spoken by the ‘things’ that are becoming so densely connected in the IoT
world.”</div>
</div>
To which all at six-year-old Kaazing, which has recently (October
2013) picked up a little over $8M from NEA and CNTP and is working hard
to establish an early but impressive lead in the Internet of Things
market, would say one word: “Amen”.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Full disclosure:</strong><i> I have since 2007 been Founding Media Adviser to Kaazing Corporation and in mid-November 2013 joined the company as its full-time CMO.</i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-48117284998711313122013-03-10T16:14:00.001-07:002013-03-11T04:27:14.947-07:00Small Cancers, Big Data, and a Life Examined<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="articleGraf">
<i>"The unexamined life is not worth living."</i><br />
—<b> Plato</b></div>
</blockquote>
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<div class="articleGraf">
There's no doubt that Plato was on to something. The observation, from Plato's <i>Apology</i>, is a recollection of the speech Socrates gave at his trial...and for all that Socrates may have lived a little before Tim Berners-Lee and knew nothing of HTML or the World Wide Web, he was nobody's fool.<br />
<br />
Sometimes it is only by pure chance that some of us get a chance though to subject their own lives to Socratic scrutiny. In my case it arises because on this day two years ago I was operated on (successfully as it turned out) for the most lethal of all the cancers, pancreatic cancer – and if you can't scrutinize your life two years after having it salvaged by a sure-handed surgeon <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-web-can-help-fight-cancer.html">who succeeded 100% in resecting the tumor concerned</a>, then when can you?<br />
<br />
But here's the thing. In conducting my weekend scrutiny, I realized that most of my life – since my four children were all conceived (same wife, honest!) while I was relatively young – wasn't so much unexamined as unknown....to the kids, I mean. So I have decided to celebrate the two-year annivsary of my Whipple surgery by sharing with them some highlights of the life that I have been so very fortunate as to enjoy, and which two years ago today was given an extension that I hope I can somehow do justice to.<br />
<br />
It's easy to deal with my education, since it took place in precisely three places: at my tiny primary school, St. Christopher's, followed by The John Lyon School, from which I went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. <br />
<br />
Here they are, in order:<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP67lMlfDm2KbT6SctdQJbVxM26s1WLRNV3tkSHFp9rkwwJFcp-QkrhHWER1D9JNbouaFbJj8Nfc-hE6Xd1kwXYeHutVlOJCYRE8b_aNoZGVgUXJhIcTMsRO3KyL1-I2Y7fJMRxWUVDVo/s1600/StChristophersSchool_Entrace.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP67lMlfDm2KbT6SctdQJbVxM26s1WLRNV3tkSHFp9rkwwJFcp-QkrhHWER1D9JNbouaFbJj8Nfc-hE6Xd1kwXYeHutVlOJCYRE8b_aNoZGVgUXJhIcTMsRO3KyL1-I2Y7fJMRxWUVDVo/s320/StChristophersSchool_Entrace.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>St. Christopher's School, Wembley Park, Middlesex</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmWTZqSJXLtB50cZYyRV0HJNKERORnfIEY9h97T7I3e6apqK4H7nHzsIyejmpmHcflZQkRTLlfrKUsDSmIO5OTgi6iF9kwZ8xtqqlWcDz0lC8Z7BrMjnc5O_iGR_eh23_DRQpuDI4ArcQ/s1600/JohnLyonSchool_AerialPhoto2012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmWTZqSJXLtB50cZYyRV0HJNKERORnfIEY9h97T7I3e6apqK4H7nHzsIyejmpmHcflZQkRTLlfrKUsDSmIO5OTgi6iF9kwZ8xtqqlWcDz0lC8Z7BrMjnc5O_iGR_eh23_DRQpuDI4ArcQ/s320/JohnLyonSchool_AerialPhoto2012.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The John Lyon School, Harrow</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEdeGGsRi5-HH2Ytdn7chk6Uk8Yp1hs2LdsbLkn8hE3EwUhMswlZp-Ba5cnQJVk8P_7CrGmZcXIyKh3NJBrm0DaWx-iTlKTvQw8fLl1CJPjaTH5-u59JRTK5ERq3OJ4zaVcSl7TyShHPc/s1600/TrinityCollegeCambridge_GreatCourt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEdeGGsRi5-HH2Ytdn7chk6Uk8Yp1hs2LdsbLkn8hE3EwUhMswlZp-Ba5cnQJVk8P_7CrGmZcXIyKh3NJBrm0DaWx-iTlKTvQw8fLl1CJPjaTH5-u59JRTK5ERq3OJ4zaVcSl7TyShHPc/s320/TrinityCollegeCambridge_GreatCourt.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Great Court, Trinity College, Cambridge</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Quite a progression, in terms of architecture (and, admittedly, in terms
of education too; Trinity College, which was founded by King Henry
VIII, somehow survived my time there unscathed but only because long
before my arrival it had already nurtured Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Byron,
Ernest Rutherford, Wittgenstein, Vladimir Nabokov, Lord Macaulay, A A
Milne,
Andrew Marvell, Nehru, G E Moore, several British prime ministers,
George Herbert, the mathematician G H Hardy, Thackeray, A E Housman,
Bertrand Russell, and last but decidely not least no fewer than
twenty-seven Nobel Prize winners in the sciences – more than the whole
of
France, as
the Master of the Trinity in my day, the late The Rt. Hon. The Lord
Butler of Saffron Walden, hugely enjoyed pointing out).<br />
<br />
Traditionally
one's education is followed by one's profession but in my case I was
already, while at Cambridge, (far too) busily at work – having founded my own
publishing company in my second year, and having become, long before my
final year, a creator of daily radio features for a commercial radio station
based in what was at the time London's tallest office tower, Capital
Radio (pictured below).
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG86_OddLGvqVVenEfjVl416GA-j4Q9TX8yeve-EoPC4Mu2lO0Diu8hS3XXczzFBMpI-uBeTKFHHRvD8jEF1-t-lZTdJobj5QKHIe83DFfAxLy587JVsA_zlgRJli79gF7RkkospayNX0/s1600/CapitalRadio_EustonTower.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG86_OddLGvqVVenEfjVl416GA-j4Q9TX8yeve-EoPC4Mu2lO0Diu8hS3XXczzFBMpI-uBeTKFHHRvD8jEF1-t-lZTdJobj5QKHIe83DFfAxLy587JVsA_zlgRJli79gF7RkkospayNX0/s320/CapitalRadio_EustonTower.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Capital Radio, London NW1</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The popular success of my radio endeavors led in time to the start of my career at BBC
Television & Radio (pictured below are BBC TV Center and BBC
Broadcasting House, the two epicentres of my BBC years).</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXmOiMJIr2nc2w9H0emYVP5sZWErqnBly9RBgFB_gz4WYdGFhUGQnnkT4BHmjWJ7Ct14dxphQYjIXKxTc3gFCy10auTD34wmWp1CtclLNIUVLkARt6v1txjxBtLg63oLOURvmmt7oa_LI/s1600/BBC_TVCentre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXmOiMJIr2nc2w9H0emYVP5sZWErqnBly9RBgFB_gz4WYdGFhUGQnnkT4BHmjWJ7Ct14dxphQYjIXKxTc3gFCy10auTD34wmWp1CtclLNIUVLkARt6v1txjxBtLg63oLOURvmmt7oa_LI/s320/BBC_TVCentre.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>BBC Television Centre, London W12</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8eL1B6G6DbMcCk1LjReX2ryPgLKhZ14rNgFheIcSpY40wjSwF7WZehDx248-byNr0jVzk7Yf1G56prEApNsiqU64ekesbIkb3Tg3piaCWUD_Q3xlPqyZBfqbPG5JUnixPF4-1JIljhGQ/s1600/BBC_BroadcastingHouse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8eL1B6G6DbMcCk1LjReX2ryPgLKhZ14rNgFheIcSpY40wjSwF7WZehDx248-byNr0jVzk7Yf1G56prEApNsiqU64ekesbIkb3Tg3piaCWUD_Q3xlPqyZBfqbPG5JUnixPF4-1JIljhGQ/s320/BBC_BroadcastingHouse.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>BBC Broadcasting House, London W1</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
And those BBC activities were complemented by a delightful side-job as feature writer for the British national daily the <i>Daily Mail</i>, where I had the good fortune, under the then editor Sir David English, to write op-ed pieces about the vagaries of the English language.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvq51RDZ7HDErV3qqxV_tu_llL_rNtnxaAUp1i_6SD4-SRIQiqha2stlmEVCnuw-z0W-OMlVUH1zQGi0t11I0fd5bro7UrBR8ddIcS4Fc3vzdjk6iERlbNXSWAiS6nOSpIA1nCXYNRjo/s1600/DailyMailHQ_NorthCliffeHouse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvq51RDZ7HDErV3qqxV_tu_llL_rNtnxaAUp1i_6SD4-SRIQiqha2stlmEVCnuw-z0W-OMlVUH1zQGi0t11I0fd5bro7UrBR8ddIcS4Fc3vzdjk6iERlbNXSWAiS6nOSpIA1nCXYNRjo/s320/DailyMailHQ_NorthCliffeHouse.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Northcliffe House, Central London HQ of the Daily Mail</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgayqsim6x-2GzDq_jQdRfBBmT3KTslguyR1iG9g_WzlAsl9HaKg8DZveCCBUbJcV9tkrqDJ-gG-iKQ0J62vtibOD9e-9YXoSHWYzCCZgJfT71OEEyOjGcJmZj1oBYMigBrxhARIsNHlo4/s1600/DailyMailHQ_NorthCliffeHouse.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
Next came the lure of book publishing, specifically academic book publishing...below are some of the many volumes in the long-running "21st Century Studies" series with which, guided by an incredible International Advisory Board of gifted visionaries and three very close colleagues who were highly accomplished forward-thinkers in their own right, I became most closely identified as Founder & Publisher: <br />
<br />
<img alt="Beyond the Dependency Culture Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275963163" width="115px" /> <img alt="Chaotics Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275956912" width="115px" /> <img alt="Rescuing All Our Futures Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275965594" width="115px" /> <img alt="Changing Visions Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275956769" width="115px" /> <img alt="The Evolutionary Outrider Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275964092" width="115px" /><br />
<img alt="Beyond the Dependency Culture Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275963156" width="115px" /> <img alt="Caring for Future Generations Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275965013" width="115px" /> <img alt="Culture Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275964993" width="115px" /> <img alt="Valueware Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275967147" width="115px" /> <img alt="The Foresight Principle Cover Image" height="164px" src="http://www.abc-clio.com/controls/coverimage.aspx?isbn=9780275952921" width="115px" /><i><a href="http://www.abc-clio.com/series.aspx?id=51878"><br />Praeger Studies on the 21st Century</a> </i><br />
<i>- Praeger Publishers (now ABC-CLIO)</i><br />
<br />
The appeal of analog publishing was steadily superseded by the lure of its digital equivalent, and so began the 13-year U.S. journey which began with magazine publishing but soon morphed into Web publishing. Below are just a handful of the 15 or so print titles that I had the good fortune either to edit or to co-create, before the print versions were retired in favor of their Web equivalents:<br />
<br />
<img class="rg_i" data-sz="f" name="lD-_s44KrboJPM:" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRqihr40Tqyn_-Qc9MtiT5qhcOUI_3YG-MP3wuYA5x4kuVpILhg" style="height: 202px; margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; width: 157px;" /> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHp3N4sSoJ768wgH6yCeyfHEiNhN-JgJrAuo5svguf2HyFwhFVbcxiGENabjOipL2pdOER-c92IwSrBioLn1qM8_3lwa1uypykh5j3jpmtBZdKbRyFVpUsgBJmROsPZdZlMLEZQxL9bBs/s1600/SOAWorldMagazine_cover_specimen.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHp3N4sSoJ768wgH6yCeyfHEiNhN-JgJrAuo5svguf2HyFwhFVbcxiGENabjOipL2pdOER-c92IwSrBioLn1qM8_3lwa1uypykh5j3jpmtBZdKbRyFVpUsgBJmROsPZdZlMLEZQxL9bBs/s1600/SOAWorldMagazine_cover_specimen.jpg" /></a><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL1silZvldyHf-bVcQXjx7uZ3VeHIhMPqww_px4XFY6TSah1RgtYrFTmufPBibvBRU-ImIZ_VtwzpP-Ybk9zrvvw7IldNDnHdO8jgpKXPbBWyv_EFoEU6VVcQncztuoABA7Ol3ZBEBFI4/s1600/ITSolutionsGuide_coverspecimen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL1silZvldyHf-bVcQXjx7uZ3VeHIhMPqww_px4XFY6TSah1RgtYrFTmufPBibvBRU-ImIZ_VtwzpP-Ybk9zrvvw7IldNDnHdO8jgpKXPbBWyv_EFoEU6VVcQncztuoABA7Ol3ZBEBFI4/s1600/ITSolutionsGuide_coverspecimen.jpg" /></a></div>
<img alt="http://res.sys-con.com/story/oct08/698919/VJ_CoverMockUp.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://res.sys-con.com/story/oct08/698919/VJ_CoverMockUp.jpg" /><br />
<br />
But no one said that technology magazines, whether published in print or online, would be sufficient to quench the thirst of Enterprise IT professionals for information, news, and analysis of the incredible trajectory of the Internet and all the many associated technologies it has over time fostered. <br />
<br />
Accordingly much of the past decade has been devoted to helping produce different series of conferences and expos, from <b>XML DevCon</b> in 2000 and <b>Web Services Edge</b> in 2001 through <b>SOAWorld</b> and then <b>AJAXWorld </b>and <b>Real-World Flex</b> to <b>Virtualization Conference & Expo</b> and then, from 2008 onwards, the international <b>Cloud Expo</b> series, to which we've added <b>Big Data Expo</b> and (soon) <b>SDN Expo</b>.<br />
<br />
These various shows, too, are most easily summarized visually. So here goes with a more or less random selection of shots from the 50+ shows that I have had the pleasure and the honor of "sharing and chairing"...<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XIh_tt_ZUyqiSIT5CUMgMZRShNMKlRNSI4SFCHBzExjElvJ00chGjVJLpWscCwAdQxnaRP3zDWWq0HUKbJWkTHdiQA12dl2i5gg4gowHSvMhR_va4lle02FPZFWcYxvN93kWnWVg6X8/s1600/XMLDevCon_Entrance.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XIh_tt_ZUyqiSIT5CUMgMZRShNMKlRNSI4SFCHBzExjElvJ00chGjVJLpWscCwAdQxnaRP3zDWWq0HUKbJWkTHdiQA12dl2i5gg4gowHSvMhR_va4lle02FPZFWcYxvN93kWnWVg6X8/s320/XMLDevCon_Entrance.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>XML DevCon, New York City, 2000</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbCrH3aOso5QT_gXicF0FC6Ey5d_WUq6zF9CZJ2W8tPGAjsHJlbf4LHv8jEQovs0Rt-Y1nGPdZjRaIrCvLxbQ3iSrXHExX3sL_mKdCYzceVG52EVcBzDL_5kCeHkzCe_ATIbmrF682Cwk/s1600/WirelessDevCon_2000_SYS-CONRadio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbCrH3aOso5QT_gXicF0FC6Ey5d_WUq6zF9CZJ2W8tPGAjsHJlbf4LHv8jEQovs0Rt-Y1nGPdZjRaIrCvLxbQ3iSrXHExX3sL_mKdCYzceVG52EVcBzDL_5kCeHkzCe_ATIbmrF682Cwk/s320/WirelessDevCon_2000_SYS-CONRadio.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Wireless DevCon, Santa Clara CA, 2000</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB03PMAsUwezgzofWbGoJab1sPcARjXg2F3X76rTAr3PYqt4C4we7eHlUPeEdh7CgcQNtmtNNf_t-euEAfFV6q23wjNjm340FBDik4-3lolAAEznzWjBGTjW1yAoJyPeR2aay8T90jrZQ/s1600/WebServicesEdge_2005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB03PMAsUwezgzofWbGoJab1sPcARjXg2F3X76rTAr3PYqt4C4we7eHlUPeEdh7CgcQNtmtNNf_t-euEAfFV6q23wjNjm340FBDik4-3lolAAEznzWjBGTjW1yAoJyPeR2aay8T90jrZQ/s320/WebServicesEdge_2005.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Web Services Edge, Boston, 2005</i><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8iDVleMTzIenk-8OFQtRPOOcfAmK7oqfahoMjIlv8wLKJLBxglj9e2IceRZs0rOMmNt2ZKnjnxQXEAUX7l8TbuyrGYgxmMNMbkDi3Ny7t0ZtC1anv6dUpVBIB0qyCwcH9CO5oFwivSSQ/s1600/Real-World_Ajax_March_13_NYC_Jouk_Pleiter_468.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="116" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8iDVleMTzIenk-8OFQtRPOOcfAmK7oqfahoMjIlv8wLKJLBxglj9e2IceRZs0rOMmNt2ZKnjnxQXEAUX7l8TbuyrGYgxmMNMbkDi3Ny7t0ZtC1anv6dUpVBIB0qyCwcH9CO5oFwivSSQ/s320/Real-World_Ajax_March_13_NYC_Jouk_Pleiter_468.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>1st AJAXWorld, New York City, 2006</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span id="goog_815645171"></span><span id="goog_815645172"></span><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT4UMO4csGc5oQrnvhn7n7QJlaq9UIzsaZXI-9LdqZ-81vA6YRdtQdaWKyhFNtuPW8FnHB21NOpOb9Ww0cfPabkdG5wQ9KuM8sfmr8ciKUowFMmboHMTsXqKs_skG95IqdInkH-kuqS38/s1600/AJAXWorldConferenceOct3_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT4UMO4csGc5oQrnvhn7n7QJlaq9UIzsaZXI-9LdqZ-81vA6YRdtQdaWKyhFNtuPW8FnHB21NOpOb9Ww0cfPabkdG5wQ9KuM8sfmr8ciKUowFMmboHMTsXqKs_skG95IqdInkH-kuqS38/s320/AJAXWorldConferenceOct3_0.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>6th AJAXWorld, San Jose CA, 2008</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfUqLaewYW0fa-P8B0AHivfQoXrJnM6pJq5z51VEl6PVgJB5XB30S88V4110s_ANSbLRpLH06syYrpCkoUGEX5F5m9J8IbPdulXZMCw7eYOUD395srjw2UmzdsR4GthpXD4qQ3Ul90APY/s1600/Cloud_Expo_Sign_468.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfUqLaewYW0fa-P8B0AHivfQoXrJnM6pJq5z51VEl6PVgJB5XB30S88V4110s_ANSbLRpLH06syYrpCkoUGEX5F5m9J8IbPdulXZMCw7eYOUD395srjw2UmzdsR4GthpXD4qQ3Ul90APY/s320/Cloud_Expo_Sign_468.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>9th Cloud Expo, Santa Clara CA, 2010</i></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcZh7F-7M4iOBW5Pjw8NHXxlKtw4lJEgfRDFchmx9bw4JU1s_grRbbF16QJm7eOlMF5omOq4Err1P9Zj9yNQqqjhwWnZq6Zuf1HvL20DjVUsbFTxADx_yvUyFmnv1sgts4lXI-p6z9IhI/s1600/10thCloudExpo_Day+3+morning+keynote+ad.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcZh7F-7M4iOBW5Pjw8NHXxlKtw4lJEgfRDFchmx9bw4JU1s_grRbbF16QJm7eOlMF5omOq4Err1P9Zj9yNQqqjhwWnZq6Zuf1HvL20DjVUsbFTxADx_yvUyFmnv1sgts4lXI-p6z9IhI/s320/10thCloudExpo_Day+3+morning+keynote+ad.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>10th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York 2011</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZa7-0VeusL7qOXxlvHNLtdKiJJzlcARd26sxNeg3IpBgfnNYMk2DzKQLoxwZa_k_h72ah-43stcMMOJsVkjUFDZGM7SOOLmuC3b2TjZv2oOetpP-gcAqibwJqp0qcoc3RaIphXNlkZ-M/s1600/12thCloudExpo_ChangingTheITWorld.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZa7-0VeusL7qOXxlvHNLtdKiJJzlcARd26sxNeg3IpBgfnNYMk2DzKQLoxwZa_k_h72ah-43stcMMOJsVkjUFDZGM7SOOLmuC3b2TjZv2oOetpP-gcAqibwJqp0qcoc3RaIphXNlkZ-M/s320/12thCloudExpo_ChangingTheITWorld.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>12th Cloud Expo | <a href="http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/">Cloud Expo New York</a> - coming in June!</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
So there it is. A brief life-journey triggered by Small Cancer (that's what they term it when the tumor is only 2cm or less in size when they diagnose it...which is all too rarely the case with pancreatic cancer but I was one of the lucky few)...and which has ended in Big Data!<br />
<br />
We will have to see if this counts as a life-examination – probably not, more of a very quick skimming of the surface...in which case my life remains "unexamined" by Socratic standards.<br />
<br />
But at least it gave me the chance to dig out some old photos, and to make a start at least on making up to those four children (and <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=kirsten+geelan">their wonderful mother</a>) for not often enough, over past thirty years, being on the same time zone as them...let alone the same continent!
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-54200646471992860992013-02-11T10:05:00.002-08:002013-02-13T00:28:30.776-08:00Three Days to a Very Strange Anniversary...<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsMyaVm6hRBrWIcGEEyl0bfaI87Y92E7LYyscRJkbNSqvDwCzv4-FdEVG4kGP3BIm_5KXpMpzhY_Rxi79cS0OOBzNoxUFL6Cm5FkJqFHJiEF3Aw7iu1qQgTfTQRDxtZSXUB5SidqXwdZA/s1600/JG+at+Podium+Cloud+Expo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsMyaVm6hRBrWIcGEEyl0bfaI87Y92E7LYyscRJkbNSqvDwCzv4-FdEVG4kGP3BIm_5KXpMpzhY_Rxi79cS0OOBzNoxUFL6Cm5FkJqFHJiEF3Aw7iu1qQgTfTQRDxtZSXUB5SidqXwdZA/s1600/JG+at+Podium+Cloud+Expo.png" /></a>
In just three days' time it will be exactly two years since the weirdest Valentine's Day I have ever experienced, or hope to experience again.<br />
<br />
February 14, 2011, in short, is etched into my diary and my brain as the day when I was diagnosed – out of the blue – with pancreatic cancer.<br />
<br />
They say one should always be grateful for what one has. Accordingly, the appropriate emotion ought perhaps to have been a feeling that I was incredibly and wonderfully lucky, <i>because I was not dead.</i> After all, St. Valentine died on the the 14th of February, on the Via Flaminia in the north of Rome. Hence Valentine's Day. Whereas there was I, alive and well, being told by a doctor in Sarajevo's famous <span class="st">Koševo</span> <span class="st">Hospital </span><span class="st">–<span class="st"> </span>a huge complex of buildings on a hill in north Sarajevo</span> <span class="st">–<span class="st"> that a malignant tumor on the head of my pancreas was what had caused me to turn, from head to toe, yellow. (Jaundice.)<br /><br />Turning yellow is what saved my life. Many people, so late are they diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, are dead within three months: my good fortune (for that is truly what it was) was to be told something on Valentine's Day that, had I not found out about it till Christmas Day, might have had a very different outcome indeed.<br /><br />I have</span></span><span class="st"><span class="st"> <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-web-can-help-fight-cancer.html">written briefly</a> elsewhere about how very soon afterwards I was</span></span> wheeled
in to an OR at the Copenhagen University Hospital for Whipple surgery,
the radical procedure in which, as one fellow pancreatic survivor <a href="http://www.pancan.org/section_stories/story_details.php?id=1120&lang=1">recently expressed it</a>, "Everything around the pancreas that can be removed, cut, whacked, chopped, <i>is</i>." That operation, simply put, saved my life. It involved the removal of parts of four organs and the reconstruction of my digestive tract and was followed up by <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-four-months-can-very-soon-feel-like.html">chemotherapy that lasted seven looooooong months</a>.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXrjXH-iR-djoOQX4OX-F01rUdEpU-cb9enWkhUAV1qTb5k4Ck5FbNhmsFEpjxrIAz0A7iOxsHZmENFbmYBz6tMIhw-uKTMyobNoVnPmBQTYVq3Kj7LYRmgSCPnaCzjh9Ifj7zuGfXmd0/s1600/JG+in+%23KnowitFightitEndit+t-shirt.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXrjXH-iR-djoOQX4OX-F01rUdEpU-cb9enWkhUAV1qTb5k4Ck5FbNhmsFEpjxrIAz0A7iOxsHZmENFbmYBz6tMIhw-uKTMyobNoVnPmBQTYVq3Kj7LYRmgSCPnaCzjh9Ifj7zuGfXmd0/s320/JG+in+%23KnowitFightitEndit+t-shirt.png" width="238" /></a>But two years on, here I am. I have out-lived Steve Jobs, may he rest in peace, who had the exact same surgery <span class="st">–</span> though the pathology of his pancreatic cancer was somewhat different.<br />
<br />
Unlike Jobs, but in common with Patrick Swayze, Joan Crawford, Margaret Mead and Luciano Pavarotti, who all sadly lost their lives to it, my Valentine's Day diagnosis was that I was suffering from the more common form of pancreatic cancer called adenocarcinoma. The bad news about exocrine tumors like pancreatic adenocarcinoma is that they tend to be more aggressive than neuroendocrine tumors, the
kind that Jobs had. The good news though is that if caught early enough they can be treated
effectively with surgery. In other words, they can be resected, cut out. "All" that the patient needs is the good fortune to be diagnosed before the cancer has spread beyond such organs as can safely be resected.<br />
<br />
I had just such good fortune, and the rest is history <span class="st">–<span class="st"> as</span></span> is half of my pancreas, all of my gall bladder, all of my duodenum (the first section of the small intestine), a goodly portion of my common bile duct, and the distal or lowest third of my stomach. <br />
<br />
Since the overall five-year survival rate for pancreatic adenocarcinoma is less than 5%, being one of the lucky few who can have it operated into oblivion is an incredible gift. Whipple surgery is reckoned, by the <span class="st">Copenhagen University Hospital (<wbr></wbr><i>Rigshospitalet</i>) </span>in
which I had the operation, to increase the 5-year survival rate from 5%
to 40%...which is an astonishing improvement in the odds. I was very happy to agree to it: I quite fancied still being alive and kicking in 2016!<br />
<br />
After the Whipple surgery, being told that your tumor has been successfully removed, and that all of the many surrounding lymph nodes also removed during the operation have tested negative for any spread of cancer, is a deeply uplifting experience. Having to undergo the physically brutal elective self-poisoning we call chemotherapy was somewhat less uplifting, but "belt and suspenders" was the approach of my team of Danish oncologists. With four children, a wife, two cats and a dog, why run the risk of the surgeons having missed a few sub-microsocopic cancer cells? <br />
<br />
Cytotoxins are nothing if not effective: besides, "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger"<span class="st"> –<span class="st"></span></span> right? <br />
<br />
That is all I am willing to say about chemotherapy. Fast forward thirteen months beyond the end of that chemo, and you get to today. Pancreatic cancer survivors aren't especially numerous, for reasons <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/06/health/conditions/pancreatic-cancer-steve-jobs">that CNN spells out quite succinctly here</a>, but that only makes it more important that we lucky ones speak out and, hopefully, embolden others to do the same. <br />
<br />
As well as saving it, Whipple surgery also changes your life, since is rearranges your innards in ways that boggle the mind when you see it <a href="http://liverandpancreascancer.com/whipple-procedure/about-whipple-procedure.html">spelt out in words</a>. Digestion of entire meals is no longer an option, but a world of snacks is better than no world at all. Because my pancreas was my digestive system's main enzyme-producing organ, my aim in "Year Three" must be once and for all to master the nutritional and digestive complications of no longer having sufficient enzymes. I've not quite figured it out, not yet.<br />
<br />
This two-year milestone seems as good a time as any to share one or two images <span class="st">–<span class="st"></span></span> do please let me know if you think it's true what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5-gSIWoX9vY8bCg84uLexQ9BdRyHnBka9_TWM2M2sFMhzWwsA2nIwQwd9sr8sCh53LRDLaodkU0DMg86ZPNp1NaeUcOpBguio31RTRUqyhoUGMeg1j7BzQn8z2NaFeYzSkVmgjSdggeQ/s1600/11+March+2011+-+Rigshospital%252C+Copenhagen+DAY+ONE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5-gSIWoX9vY8bCg84uLexQ9BdRyHnBka9_TWM2M2sFMhzWwsA2nIwQwd9sr8sCh53LRDLaodkU0DMg86ZPNp1NaeUcOpBguio31RTRUqyhoUGMeg1j7BzQn8z2NaFeYzSkVmgjSdggeQ/s1600/11+March+2011+-+Rigshospital%252C+Copenhagen+DAY+ONE.jpg" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">So far so good: the Whipple Surgery is complete. <br />(Flashback to March 11, 20<span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span>1)</span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3PdUaso-bk3y0a3vLx2VKkIBCasLOoU5S3G1XzqmKlldoe9CSoxY0sv4sipcRGf80nJF467F5PKiycIFjyMe3quk1p2SKVl-F6xHJx15kymC2obaivG4syF0QD4axdA3DvNmSe7TTp24/s1600/CIMG1279.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3PdUaso-bk3y0a3vLx2VKkIBCasLOoU5S3G1XzqmKlldoe9CSoxY0sv4sipcRGf80nJF467F5PKiycIFjyMe3quk1p2SKVl-F6xHJx15kymC2obaivG4syF0QD4axdA3DvNmSe7TTp24/s320/CIMG1279.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Oops, this isn't quite how anyone was hoping the surgical incision </i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>would look ten days later, but in the end it healed just fine</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzo0sno-ZG0jjK7WqEmI6JYyT7emcZutcNOqfl-phW1wNg0T9ofPmHyUhBuxNVgNVPqlqxpHsMCBPprmVsV2ZiayIZ6r99H45qsKjSWHsiL7b_k7ntVN2i7ST8iCulF3cNAiPFv9nerIg/s1600/SYS-CON.TV+Preparing+for+Interview+with+John+Engates+June+2011.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzo0sno-ZG0jjK7WqEmI6JYyT7emcZutcNOqfl-phW1wNg0T9ofPmHyUhBuxNVgNVPqlqxpHsMCBPprmVsV2ZiayIZ6r99H45qsKjSWHsiL7b_k7ntVN2i7ST8iCulF3cNAiPFv9nerIg/s320/SYS-CON.TV+Preparing+for+Interview+with+John+Engates+June+2011.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPRQAd24QtdE0umWYaf0ZWA8exEYrAbLfu3s7-ba4vMQ6N5NTtDDXLa_98KBr7bbiqSXZZqYB9n9qe1ngfN3GngLrQJaRl0Z7BuaHuWPBQ2dGGiXx5lthOKJpHq-cPH3_1tgPJ8d5IEuI/s1600/JG+in+New+York+Studio+June+2011.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Back in the TV studio<span style="font-size: x-small;"> in</span> Times Square, just three </span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">months after the Whipple surgery. Studio makeup is a wonderful thing!</span></i></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-46135059546615025072012-03-11T01:16:00.017-08:002012-05-22T06:04:17.842-07:00Making Hay on a Sunday in March<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtebfe0x6COtoJ0UtBuTxV7crY286pvlBaNnpC6JSGEiQz6L_zb3Vczhmcfj2E0W3-VXAIVPI3pDekf6zYZMCPHiv_oA_S4U2HmkRlPFotdU1PtmQ8w-8ok2u-bVDoFhavugvk42mPqzk/s1600/One+Year+Anniversary.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtebfe0x6COtoJ0UtBuTxV7crY286pvlBaNnpC6JSGEiQz6L_zb3Vczhmcfj2E0W3-VXAIVPI3pDekf6zYZMCPHiv_oA_S4U2HmkRlPFotdU1PtmQ8w-8ok2u-bVDoFhavugvk42mPqzk/s200/One+Year+Anniversary.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718597343750861538" /></a>It isn't very often - no, wait, it is completely unique, having never happened before - that I write to each and every one of my LinkedIn contacts simultaneously. But as the proverb goes, "circumstances alter cases."<br /><br />The "circumstance" that causes me to risk Web-wide ire at my misuse and abuse of Reid Hoffman's gallantly unspoiled business tool is the arrival of the 365th day of survival since being operated on for pancreatic cancer. One entire year! Never has a year taken so long, never have 365 days seemed more like 1,365. But a year it is, and given the givens it deserves to be marked in some way. This is my way.<br /><br />Worry not, I am not going to hit you up for money. (Even though the <a href="http://pancan.org">Pancreatic Cancer Action Network</a> could most certainly always use it.) I am not even going to hit you up for emotion.<br /><br />Nope. Far worse than that, I am going to hit you up - briefly - for attention. Because, to be brutally blunt, it isn't at all clear what kind of timeline anyone lives on once pancreatic cancer rears its ugly head; and so my resolution today is to make hay while I can - or, as the Hindus apparently put it, to turn the mill while there is still sugarcane.<br /><br />The chances are that you will know someone who has been diagnosed with cancer, perhaps even with pancreatic cancer. If so then, like my wife and children the day I was diagnosed in a hospital in faraway Sarajevo (pictured below), you probably headed straight to Google...and were startled by what you found.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs9fxA6GrKy7cl3CNp8WA_EiGdNgT0Ul2c-lT_7ueNDWEsEh2r8ltqgpfEoOP7Xrhhmo86KroCj8mIAaBR6rN30U3oThbgcUZd5W2SAu-snUUQ7nSXfQeMvsdz2N8TpD7_QcWqs7-WwcU/s1600/Ko%25C5%25A1evo+Hospital+Sarajevo.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs9fxA6GrKy7cl3CNp8WA_EiGdNgT0Ul2c-lT_7ueNDWEsEh2r8ltqgpfEoOP7Xrhhmo86KroCj8mIAaBR6rN30U3oThbgcUZd5W2SAu-snUUQ7nSXfQeMvsdz2N8TpD7_QcWqs7-WwcU/s400/Ko%25C5%25A1evo+Hospital+Sarajevo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718572400352844642" /></a><p style="text-align: center;"><em>Koševo Hospital, the university hospital of Sarajevo in Bosnia</em><br /><p style="text-align: left;">Few diseases, I suspect, return search results quite as gloomy as pancreatic cancer. A typical one is as follows:<br /><blockquote>Pancreatic cancer has a dismal survival rate...</blockquote><br />or this<br /> <br /><blockquote>overall survival is dismal - 20 percent after one year and only 4 percent after five years</blockquote><br />I mean, I am no statistician, and neither were any of my four kids, but these "survival rate" stats read, back then, less like a glimpse of hope and more like a death sentence.<br /><br />But then when the heck did anyone ever rely on statistics, right? Besides, what matters is how early the tumor is found (earlier = smaller = better), whether it is deemed to be operable, and how well the surgery goes. There don't seem to be any stats for those lucky enough to have undergone a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreaticoduodenectomy">Whipple operation</a> - the life-saving, if radical, surgical procedure that, 365 days ago today, was how I spent my morning.<br /><br />I have already <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-web-can-help-fight-cancer.html">written briefly</a> about the experience of being both diagnosed with the deadliest of all the cancers and spared/saved from it all within the space of three weeks. I had a stab, too, at trying to sum up what it is like, after the Whipple, to <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-four-months-can-very-soon-feel-like.html">be prescribed follow-up chemotherapy for seven long months</a>. None of these posts was very well written, but the intent was just to share an experience, in case might help provide some kind of insight either to those who had worse luck than mine, perhaps even to those who fared better in similar circumstances...and most especially to the rest of you who have been lucky enough not to one day, just three months after completing your third New York Marathon, be told completely out of the blue that you've got the deadliest of all the cancers. Remember to say a brief 'thank you' tonight in your prayers!<br /><br />Here's how it went down 365 days ago in Copenhagen University Hospital (<a href="http://www.rigshospitalet.dk/RHenglish/Menu/Departments+and+Clinics/Abdominal+Centre/Department+of+Surgical+Gastroenterology/?WBCMODE=Auttarget">Rigshospitalet</a>), which is where I had the Whipple procedure - in which, as one fellow pancreatic survivor <a href="http://www.pancan.org/section_stories/story_details.php?id=1120&lang=1">recently put it</a>, "Everything around the pancreas that can be removed, cut, whacked, chopped, <em>is</em>."<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw-Q3VQAofRnuh8QWErqFQURYyeIfANv7b1AcKq0C0Y1fgrhdGIIm7wo33XB3vxov1JxcGNELycKkJQcNK2ZKN3XwF7nwSy45tXl2liFw-Odg4qvILZUsJ9Hxa-XGq_An7d5BMkqHTETo/s1600/Rigshospitalet+Copenhagen+Denmark.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 218px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw-Q3VQAofRnuh8QWErqFQURYyeIfANv7b1AcKq0C0Y1fgrhdGIIm7wo33XB3vxov1JxcGNELycKkJQcNK2ZKN3XwF7nwSy45tXl2liFw-Odg4qvILZUsJ9Hxa-XGq_An7d5BMkqHTETo/s400/Rigshospitalet+Copenhagen+Denmark.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718582784099889106" /></a><p style="text-align: center;"><em>Rigshospitalet, the university hospital of Copenhagen in Denmark</em><br /><br /><p style="text-align: left;">Reassured by the fact that around thirty of these operations are performed each year by this same team of surgeons, I remember one year ago today smiling first at my wife, who was right there beside me as they prepped me for the op, then at the anesthetist whose job it was to put me under...and saying a private little prayer in my head, before oblivion took over.<br /><br />There's something curiously daunting about going to sleep in full possession of your innards, but with the certain prospect of waking up with your inventory of bodily organs severely depleted. <br /><br />The lion's share of my pancreas, all of my gall bladder, a goodly portion of my stomach, and an assortment of small-intestine-removal later...I did indeed wake up. And what a relief it was to find that 1. I was alive and kicking and 2. that I was in no kind of pain - just "downsized" internally. In fact I was now significantly less complicated under the hood!<br /><br />Departments of Surgical Gastroenterology are probably not famous for being fun places to hang out, but if you have to for one reason or another - including this Whipple operation, which is one of the most complicated they do - I can certainly recommend the incredible team at Copenhagen's Rigshospital. <br /><br />Recovery from a Whipple is an especially brutal process because the basic trick is to do it just as fast as humanly possible, getting back onto one's feet almost immediately, even if only to stand up. Other tricks include repeatedly saturating one's system with oxygen via special breathing exercises that have been shown to speed up the post-operative healing process...even though the last thing you instinctively want to do, when your midriff has been more or less sliced into two, is to breathe deeply. (Trust me on this!) <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5-gSIWoX9vY8bCg84uLexQ9BdRyHnBka9_TWM2M2sFMhzWwsA2nIwQwd9sr8sCh53LRDLaodkU0DMg86ZPNp1NaeUcOpBguio31RTRUqyhoUGMeg1j7BzQn8z2NaFeYzSkVmgjSdggeQ/s1600/11+March+2011+-+Rigshospital%252C+Copenhagen+DAY+ONE.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5-gSIWoX9vY8bCg84uLexQ9BdRyHnBka9_TWM2M2sFMhzWwsA2nIwQwd9sr8sCh53LRDLaodkU0DMg86ZPNp1NaeUcOpBguio31RTRUqyhoUGMeg1j7BzQn8z2NaFeYzSkVmgjSdggeQ/s320/11+March+2011+-+Rigshospital%252C+Copenhagen+DAY+ONE.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5589051303171194434" /></a><p style="text-align: center;"><em>365 Days Ago Today - "Smile, you're on Blogger.com!"</em><br /><p style="text-align: left;">Whipple patients typically lose 10% of their body weight in the pre- and post-operative period. It has taken an entire year to put even half of that back on! You might think that it every teenage schoolgirl's dream, but I am no teenage schoolgirl and I can tell you, nothing is stranger than finding that none of the things you ate before are going to help you put weight back on...and that instead you have to become a fat-chaser, a scavenger on the lookout for calories wherever you can find them.<br /><br />I failed miserably, for at least the first three months. Putting butter on my bread, ignoring most vegetables as having insufficient protein for the amount of room they took up in my tummy, these sorts of changes seem simple - but they are not! I adore, sorry past tense, I adored, salads. But lettuce leaves and spinach leaves and suchlike are a thing of the past, once the part of the pancreas that produces enzymes is tossed into the surgical waste-bin. Because there's nothing to help digest them...which means basically that they get stuck, and it is excruciatingly painful as well as deeply frustrating.<br /><br />The pancreas is of course where your insulin is manufactured too. The after-effects of Whipple surgery differ according to how much or how little of the pancreas is left by the surgeons, but in my case all I can say is, though incredibly lucky to be left with at least a bit of it, the process of eating say an orange or a banana seems to have been undermined forever. (Guess what my two absolute favorite fruits were? I guess one should never take ANYTHING for granted. I wonder how many bananas and oranges I scoffed over the years without ever really giving it a thought; whereas now, those two tastes are almost foreign to me, I can hardly remember either of them.) <br /><br />Worries over dietary changes and internal rearrangements were pushed firmly onto the back burner the day, on the very point of leaving hospital and being declared a resounding success from a surgical point of view, I was told that seven months of chemotherapy was going to be needed too. Belt and suspenders. Pancreatic cancer is like the worst kind of serial killer, and no one was intending for me to take any chances.<br /><br />So I had survived the disease. Now all I needed was to survive the cure!<br /><br />As I say, I already wrote about what it's like, after the Whipple, to <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-four-months-can-very-soon-feel-like.html">be prescribed follow-up chemotherapy for seven long months</a>. That was at the mid-way point. Since my 189 days of chemo ended, my overall health seems from the outside enviable - and probably is, at least to almost everyone but me, who feels it has been disappointingly slow, unexpectedly erratic, and very little different from <em>during</em> chemo itself. Energy levels remain fluctuating rather than steady, sleep patterns likewise, and concentration is a word that seems almost to have tumbled out of my dictionary for good. <br /><br />The ugly question naturally reared itself: if the Whipple surgery went so well (and it did, the surgeons were 100% adamant about that), why wasn't I by now back to Marathon form, both professionally and personally? And the answer will come shortly...courtesy of the bloodwork and the scanning techniques that Rigshospital once again is bringing to bear on this onetime athlete's body of mine. Cross your fingers; certainly I am crossing mine on this anniversary of anniversaries. One thing is sure: it isn't for want of trying - I have been trying once more to use running as my health barometer, and really have tried again and again and again to get back my running Mojo - just as, professionally, I have sought to regain my Cloud Mojo.<br /><br />But it appears that convalescence is not <em>only</em> a question of mind over matter. Sometimes one needs "a little help from one's friends" - including, in this case, from Copenhagen University Hospital's brilliant oncologists - who understand the nuances of X-ray computed tomography! <br /><br />Once they've advised me how best to proceed from here, I shall let you know (more succinctly next time, I promise!) how the future trajectory is looking. Hopefully the current little setback will be put into context and the overall prognosis will turn out to be simply Cloudtastic ;-)Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-55720700723628149712011-10-06T03:36:00.000-07:002011-10-06T03:42:46.882-07:00RIP Steve Jobs 1955-2011<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBwxT3cVxDA7RI1OPqHiL7RJUYlYhyphenhyphenTjmMaINpqmHxu-0o5LsOd79ZFwmQGxgCDbq8yyB08F-Shg3WBqDU7Di9Wth1T5XMXK8M2NtVqT7m4iabSdFmhJVYSwHYHZe7QhsuEPM8tAo3flQ/s1600/Steve+Jobs.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBwxT3cVxDA7RI1OPqHiL7RJUYlYhyphenhyphenTjmMaINpqmHxu-0o5LsOd79ZFwmQGxgCDbq8yyB08F-Shg3WBqDU7Di9Wth1T5XMXK8M2NtVqT7m4iabSdFmhJVYSwHYHZe7QhsuEPM8tAo3flQ/s320/Steve+Jobs.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5660326941900106386" /></a>With his passing just six weeks after stepping away from his role as CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs has made Wednesday, October 5th, 2011, one of those days that many of us will remember for the rest of our lives - a day when someone whose shining brilliance and persistence brought him victory after victory throughout the past four decades. The only thing that beat him, and even that took seven years, was pancreatic cancer.<br /><br />In the interests of full disclosure, I should say right away that the same major surgical procedure Jobs had in July 2004, called a pancreaticoduodenectomy (or "Whipple procedure"), <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-web-can-help-fight-cancer.html">is one I myself underwent in March of this year</a>, and for the exact same reasons. The full (and somewhat grisly) details of the procedure are perhaps <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreaticoduodenectomy">best left to Wikipedia</a>, but one thing I can vouch for is that it requires, shall we say, one's full attention. <br /><br />The idea, for those of us - like Jobs and myself - "lucky" enough to have a tumor on the <i>head</i> of the pancreas rather than elsewhere, is to remove not just most of the pancreas but also a welter of other internal organs that alas represent the collateral damage of this particular operation. I may put quotes around lucky but in truth it really <i>was</i> a stroke of luck, for both him and me. Because the prognosis for pancreatic cancer anywhere else in the pancreas is not exactly uplifting.<br /><br />The Jobs operation in July 2004 went well, as did mine in 2011...a tribute to the prescience of the U.S. surgeon Allen Whipple who first devised the procedure as long ago as 1935, making it one of surgery's longstanding success stories. Resecting a malignant tumor is a serious business, Whipple's original methodology has understandably been refined and improved, but those surgeons who perform this procedure - which can take anything up to eight hours - are to my mind surely some of the bravest and finest in the front-line of oncology.<br /><br />Allen Whipple died in 1963 when Jobs was just eight. But it would have been interesting had the two of them met, because both were pioneers in the truest sense: they were both individuals whose gift was to be the first to enter a new region, thus opening it for eventual occupation and development by others. <br /><br />The regions of technology that Jobs and his companies (plural) entered first are known to us all. His legacy is all around us. The international Cloud Expo team, in particular, will be thinking of him in just one week's time, when <a href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111004006592/en/Apple-Launch-iCloud-October-12">Apple's iCloud service is due to launch</a>.<br /><br />RIP Steve Jobs.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-50845471738952391962011-08-31T01:28:00.000-07:002011-08-31T02:22:31.707-07:00Live By the Web, Die by the WebI just this morning received the following enthusiastic message from Klout:
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMpC3VhMPuehAKLdpxLMRESeEMdmWpesb4kD_Ujt7MzAnyawdBA1J3EwMhTb4HD-T7fnl32Dge66l95hz4JvXo74gHk1zs8Kl-fVrzt1hcJ9vIwVT6uBvS3W-bxTktmNHT5h6z-7WfsWg/s1600/Summer+of+Klout.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 216px; height: 227px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMpC3VhMPuehAKLdpxLMRESeEMdmWpesb4kD_Ujt7MzAnyawdBA1J3EwMhTb4HD-T7fnl32Dge66l95hz4JvXo74gHk1zs8Kl-fVrzt1hcJ9vIwVT6uBvS3W-bxTktmNHT5h6z-7WfsWg/s320/Summer+of+Klout.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646934579511859634" border="0" /></a>
<br />
<br /><i>Summer of Klout <p id="achievement-description">Way to go! Your Klout Score braved the dog days of summer and still came out on top! Maybe it's time for a vacation?</i></span>
<br /></p>
<br />This made me chuckle, because if one thing is true about my Summer it is that I didn't brave the dog days, not at all. Instead I vanished into the haze that those few lucky enough to be cured of pancreatic cancer can vanish into. Part physical, part psychological, it's a kind of Never-Never Land - or, more accurately maybe, a Sargasso Sea, a zone characterized by the calm winds of the horse latitudes.
<br /></p>
<br />So, no matter what <a href="http://klout.com/jg21/achievements?n=tw&v=achievement_earned_modal">Klout</a> may say to the contrary, this was for me a summer of seaweed rather than sagacity...and I apologize to those who were expecting me to show greater resilience to my chemotherapy. No one has been more surprised than me. I am certainly not out, but it would be wrong of me to pretend that I'm not down. I'll come back fast, I always do; but it may not be till the final doses of Gemcitabine have been injected into me in the epic half-hour infusions that come twice every three weeks to crush my white cell production and, along with it, that of any would-be neoplasms.
<br /></p>
<br />"Better safe than sorry," that's all one can say. Along with, "Roll on, 9th Cloud Expo!" - because by then, I will be free and clear of chemistry and cytotoxins will no longer be mixed in with my bloodstream.
<br /><p>
<br />I - quite literally - cannot wait.
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-74971351300069472312011-07-11T01:43:00.002-07:002012-03-11T03:19:35.161-07:00How Four Months Can Very Soon Feel Like Four YearsStrange just how much can happen in one-third of a year.<br /><br />Four months ago to the day, I was wheeled into an operating theater in Denmark's top hospital. In the intense few hours that followed, a gifted surgeon and a deeply professional team obtained a dream result: they successfully resected a malignant tumor from my pancreas and then took an incredible number of biopsies from surrounding tissue, just to be on the safe side. Each and every one subsequently came up negative, so the cancer hadn't spread.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicK-tVHB5sZmFiLkAYTOOyTJyb82G7nWcZiubzstWCCKZpLyab4mPRwDuYBU14RyRKeGxi0gU2iHvkTrRRmmyycgJI-btwSHtKhgv0q2ZSKfiebHGHUpJuhIhCCwdTHNs7zcCwjrZPBiY/s1600/11+March+2011+-+Rigshospital%252C+Copenhagen+DAY+ONE.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:10px 10px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicK-tVHB5sZmFiLkAYTOOyTJyb82G7nWcZiubzstWCCKZpLyab4mPRwDuYBU14RyRKeGxi0gU2iHvkTrRRmmyycgJI-btwSHtKhgv0q2ZSKfiebHGHUpJuhIhCCwdTHNs7zcCwjrZPBiY/s320/11+March+2011+-+Rigshospital%252C+Copenhagen+DAY+ONE.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628015293798325698" border="0" /></a>I wrote briefly about the experience of being both diagnosed with the deadliest of all the cancers <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-web-can-help-fight-cancer.html">and spared/saved from it</a> all within the space of three weeks. Many people have asked me: how have things been going since?<br /><br />The answer is not simple, for one reason: chemotherapy.<br /><br />As part of its world-beating approach to combating deadly cancers, Denmark's University Hospital recommends and requires that a "cured" patient nonetheless undergo follow-up chemotherapy...for six months.<br /><br />Three of those months - nearly - have now elapsed, though I have to admit that no month when you are undergoing chemo "elapses" (if only). Having one's post-operative existence divided up into 21-day cycles, each one marked by rising levels of heavy metals in one's body, well it's no walk in the park, alas. And the side-effects of <a href="http://www.gemzar.com/Documents/pdf/PancreasTherapyGuide.pdf">the chemicals used</a> [PDF] - I can testify - are in some ways as insidious as the original cancer, in that they are gradual, but comprehensive.<br /><br />In my case, and remember each and every cancer patient reacts difficulty, I managed the first three cycles, 63 days, with only a few setbacks. But the fourth cycle somehow knocked me sideways, which is why you have heard so very little from <a href="http://twitter.com/jg21"><span style="font-weight: bold;">@jg21</span></a> on Twitter, and seen so very little of me on Facebook since June's wonderful <a href="http://cloudexpo2011east.sys-con.com/event/schedule">8th Cloud Expo</a> in NYC.<br /><br />The past three weeks, in fact, have brought me face-to-face with some very harsh realities. The final three months of chemo are going to be a challenge...and, in order to successfully meet that challenge, I am going to have to dramatically rearrange my professional priorities so as to maximize healing time, minimize stress, and optimize my working day.<br /><br />For all indirectly affected by this epiphany, which would probably have been better had it come a tad sooner, I apologize. But never has "less is more" been truer. For me to be back to fighting fitness - and weight! - for the Fall, I need finally to accept that convalescence (from Latin <span style="font-style: italic;">convalescere</span>, whose root is in <span style="font-style: italic;">valescere</span>, to be strong...which I currently am not) isn't something that you just "fit in" around all your other commitments; it is something you have to prioritize ahead of those commitments.<br /><br />My aim in July, August and September then is to write, but to do so largely offline. You will still see the results online, but only as and when they are uploaded. Look out soon, for example, for my updated and hugely expanded <span style="font-weight: bold;">Top 350 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem</span>, for an entirely new feature,<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Around the Cloud in Eighty URLs</span>, and assorted other features aimed at providing convenient one-stop destinations for Cloud insights and information.<br /><br />I need a 3-month respite from Twitter. By the final three months of 2011 I shall be completely done with chemotherapy, will no longer be tasting heavy metal at the back of my throat 24x7, will no longer be falling asleep for 12 hours at a time, and will no longer see every muscle group in my entire body subject to the ravages that only chemo can exact...a fierceness that has no respect for former waist or neck sizes.<br /><br />I repeat to myself twenty times a day that it is better than the alternative. And it is. But it would be wrong of me to pretend that this hasn't been the longest four months of my life, and that I am steeling myself for a rough final three months still ahead.<br /><br />When all is said and done, it seems a ridiculously small price to pay for surviving pancreatic cancer. I am very very grateful.<br /><br />It brings to mind the words of the writer Melodie Beattie, who memorably noted:<blockquote>Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, [and] the unexpected into perfect timing."</blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-6415344986370792152011-05-22T18:49:00.000-07:002011-05-22T18:51:38.289-07:00The "Summer of Cloud Computing" Begins...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7M7gmBVUoQd28WBJFL4ybIJTAnZOkJjPpudLhfXJGuDKvBRAZrj_4Ni6Mc4506-M2tGglIE3RROty2nkbru51INRrGFa9flHT3mpSEZTh9p4yo_q-vbWT52Um11llKjh-7rOKiS_zYhE/s1600/8th+Cloud+Expo+billboard+NYC.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 91px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7M7gmBVUoQd28WBJFL4ybIJTAnZOkJjPpudLhfXJGuDKvBRAZrj_4Ni6Mc4506-M2tGglIE3RROty2nkbru51INRrGFa9flHT3mpSEZTh9p4yo_q-vbWT52Um11llKjh-7rOKiS_zYhE/s320/8th+Cloud+Expo+billboard+NYC.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5609722015393196338" border="0" /></a>On June 6-9, when the doors to <a href="http://CloudComputingExpo.com">Cloud Expo New York</a> open at the Jacob Javits Center, IT infrastructure and operations professionals from around the world will be able to see with their own eyes that the "Summer of Cloud Computing" has well and truly begun.<br /><br />With company participation from every level of the cloud computing ecosystem and a <a href="http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/event/schedule">non-stop, 4-day technical program</a>, Cloud Expo New York features expert speakers from every top Cloud player, including Abiquo, Amazon, Amplidata, AppZero, Aprimo, AT&T, Backupify, CA Technologies, Capgemini, Cbeyond, CiRBA, Cisco, City of Portland, CloudCamp.org, Cloud.com, Cloud9, CloudSwitch, CodeFutures, Dell, Dell Boomi, Desktone, Eucalyptus Systems, FastIgnite, Fiorano, Full360, Fusion-io, Global Digital Forensics, GoGrid, Google, HP, HyTrust, IBM, iGATE Patni, Impetus, Interactive Intelligence, Interxion, KPMG, KuppingerCole, Layered Technologies, Layer7, LogLogic, McAfee, Microsoft, MIT, Monster.com, Mycroft, National Reconnaissance Office, NetDialog, The New York Times, NJVC, NYSERDA, OpSource, Oracle, OutSystems, OxygenCloud, Parabon, PayPal, PerspecSys, Ping Identity, Pitney Bowes, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Quest Software, Racemi, Rackspace, Red Hat, RightScale, Rise Partners, Riverbed Technology, Robust Cloud, Roundarch, Servoy, SnapAppointments, Spoon, Stoneware, Sybase, Telx, 1010data, Terremark, Trend Micro, UShareSoft, Virtela, VMware, Voxel, WidePoint, Xiotech, Yahoo!, Zapthink, Zetta and Zeus Technology.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB-Cup-W1E0cFrBZoh006IZ80MvN1J_9maSCZ80e8HrETv2T4FBM_x7QBKvIemPHpFWvWHFFb7r9-9XVCc_r1VE0OUhhE3MTxeSUjO9iQfpmY-O63w8o9gNZ_In8FL9C5S7iuEQfU6LOU/s1600/Cloud+Expo+New+York+Jacob+Javits+Convention+Center.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 239px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB-Cup-W1E0cFrBZoh006IZ80MvN1J_9maSCZ80e8HrETv2T4FBM_x7QBKvIemPHpFWvWHFFb7r9-9XVCc_r1VE0OUhhE3MTxeSUjO9iQfpmY-O63w8o9gNZ_In8FL9C5S7iuEQfU6LOU/s320/Cloud+Expo+New+York+Jacob+Javits+Convention+Center.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5609722424282955330" border="0" /></a><br />On the Expo Floor, with over 100 booths, leading technology solutions providers will be showcasing a welter of technologies aimed at making cloud computing reliable, stable and manageable for customers large and small.<br /><br />The quality of the speakers is best evidenced by the fact that they include:<br /><br /><ul><li><span style="color:#333333;">Co-Founder and CTO of <strong>Dell Boomi -<span style="color:#333399;"> Rick Nucci</span></strong></span></li><li>President of <strong>Dell Services - <span style="color:#333399;">Steve Schuckenbrock </span></strong></li><li>CEO of <strong>Abiquo - <span style="color:#333399;">Pete Malcolm</span></strong></li><li>CEO & Co-Founder at <strong>RightScale - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Michael Crandell</strong></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong><span style="color:#333333;">Sr. VP of the Application Platform Division at <strong>VMware - <span style="color:#333399;">Rod Johnson</span></strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"> <span style="color:#333333;">CTO of <strong>Rackspace - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>John Engates </strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">CEO of <strong>Backupify - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong></span></span></span><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Rob May</strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong><span style="color:#333333;">CEO & Founder of <strong>GoGrid - <span style="color:#333399;">John Keagy</span></strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"> </span></span><span style="color:#333333;">CTO of Worldwide Services at <strong>Microsoft - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Norm Judah</strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong></span></span><span style="color:#333333;">Group VP of Software Cloud Strategy for <strong>Oracle</strong> Fusion Applications <strong>- </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Chris Leone</strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong> </strong></span></span><span style="color:#333333;">VP of Global Cloud Computing at <strong>Yahoo! - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Todd Papaioannou</strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong><span style="color:#333333;">Technology Evangelist at<strong> Amazon - <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Jinesh Varia</span> </strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"> <span style="color:#000000;">Developer Advocate at <strong>Google - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Chris Schalk</strong></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong></span></span><span style="color:#333333;">Sr. Software Engineer at <strong>IBM - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Doug Tidwell</strong></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong> </strong></span></span><span style="color:#333333;">Director, Cloud Global Practice at <strong>HP Enterprise Business - <span style="color:#333399;">Marc Wilkinson</span></strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">CIO of the <strong>National Reconnaissance Office - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong><span class="il">Jill</span> T. <span class="il">Singer</span></strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">CTO at <strong>PayPal - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Scott Guilfoyle</strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong><span style="color:#000000;">CTO & Co-Founder of<strong> Eucalyptus Systems - <span style="color:#333399;">Rich Wolski</span></strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Sr. Director of Cloud Platforms at <strong>Red Hat - <span style="color:#333399;">Tobias Kunze</span></strong></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000000;">Co-Founder & CEO at <strong>OpSource - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Treb Ryan</strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">VP, Cloud Services at <strong>Terremark - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Bill Lowry</strong></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">CEO of <strong>FastIgnite - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Simeon Simeonov</strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">CTO & Co-founder of <strong>UShareSoft - <span style="color:#333399;">James Weir</span></strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333333;">Advisor Lean IT & Cloud Computing at <strong>CA Technologies - <span style="color:#333399;">Gregor Petri</span></strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333333;">Distinguished System Engineer at <strong>Cisco - <span style="color:#333399;">Jim French</span></strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Sr. Mgr. of SaaS Products & Cloud Solutions at <strong>HP - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Neil Ashizawa</strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">CTO McAfee Content & Cloud at <strong>McAfee - </strong><span style="color:#000099;"><strong>Scott Chasi</strong><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Business Development Director at <strong>Oracle - <span style="color:#333399;">Arturo Pereyra </span></strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;">Co-Founder of <strong>CloudCamp - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Dave Nielsen</strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;">Director at <strong>KPMG - <span style="color:#333399;">Bhargav Shah</span></strong></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;">Sr. VP of CRM at <strong>Oracle - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Anthony Lye </strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;">CTO & Chief Architect at <strong>Layer 7 Technologies - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>K. Scott Morrison </strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Partner Engineering Consultant at <strong>Spoon - <span style="color:#000099;">Lee Murphy</span></strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><strong></strong></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color:#333333;">CTO of<strong> Sybase - </strong><span style="color:#000099;"><strong>Irfan Khan</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;">CTO of <strong>Vordel - <span style="color:#333399;">Mark O'Neill</span></strong></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">CEO of <strong>AppZero - <span style="color:#333399;">Greg O'Connor </span></strong></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Founder & CEO of <strong>Oxygen Cloud - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Peter Chang</strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">VP of Cloud Architecture & Services at <strong>Virtela - <span style="color:#333399;">Ron Haigh</span></strong></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Co-Founder & CEO of <strong>Fusion-io - <span style="color:#333399;">David Flynn</span></strong></span></li><li>Co-Founder of <strong>The Rackspace Cloud - <span style="color:#000099;">Rackspace<br /></span></strong></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#000000;">President at <strong>Layered Technologies - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Brad Hokamp </strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#000000;">SVP of Facilities Engineering at <strong>Terremark - </strong></span></span><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Ben Stewart</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#000000;">Founder/CTO of <strong>PerspecSys - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Terry Woloszyn</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">CISO for the <strong>City of Portland - <span style="color:#333399;">Logan Kleier</span></strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Co-Founder & CTO of <strong>Ajax.org - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Rik Arends</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Engineering Fellow with <strong>NJVC - <span style="color:#333399;">Kevin Jackson</span></strong></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Founder & CEO, <strong>Parabon Computation - <span style="color:#333399;">Steve Armentrout</span></strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Managing Partner at <strong>ZapThink - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Jason Bloomberg</strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Sr. Sales Engineer at <strong>Eucalyptus Systems - <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Paul Weiss</span></strong></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"> <div><span style="color:#333333;">CEO of <strong>Servoy - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Jan Aleman</strong></span></span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">VP of Product Marketing at <strong>Oracle - <span style="color:#333399;">Rex Wang</span></strong></span></span></span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color:#333333;">Global Director for Global Application Outsourcing at <strong>Capgemini - <span style="color:#333399;">Mark Skilton </span></strong></span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">CTO at <strong>Ping Identity - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Patrick Harding</strong></span></span></span></span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Corporate Business Development at <strong>Zeus Technology - <span style="color:#333399;">Raja Srinivasan </span></strong></span></span></span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO at <strong>Riverbed Technology</strong></span><strong> - Steve Riley</strong></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Product Development Lead at <strong>Rackspace - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Josh Odom</strong></span></span></span></span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Co-Founder, CEO & CTO at </span><strong><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Stoneware</span> - </strong><span style="font-weight: bold;">Rick German</span><strong></strong></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">VP of Community at </span><strong><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Cloud.com</span> - </strong><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mark Hinkle</span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Software Manager at </span><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The New York Times</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </span>- <span style="font-weight: bold;">Paul Robbins</span><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;"><strong></strong></span></span></span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color:#333333;">Chief Solution Architect at<strong> Desktone - <span style="color:#333399;">Danny Allan</span></strong></span></div></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Director of Advanced Technology & Products for <strong>Quest Software - <span style="color:#333399;">Thomas Bryant</span></strong></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><strong></strong>Director at <strong>PricewaterhouseCoopers - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Brian Butte</strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Java EE and GlassFish Evangelist at <strong>Oracle - <span style="color:#333399;">Arun Gupta</span></strong></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">President & Co-Founder of <strong>HyTrust - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Eric Chiu</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">CTO & SVP, Operations at <strong>OpSource - <span style="color:#333399;">John Rowell</span></strong></span></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Co-Founder of <strong>KuppingerCole -</strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong> Tim Cole</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Product Manager in the Cloud Division at <strong>Rackspace Hosting - <span style="color:#330099;">Megan Wohlford</span></strong></span></span></span></li><li>Communications Director at <strong>Interxion - <span style="color:#333399;">Jelle Frank</span></strong></li><li><span style="color:#333333;">Co-Founder of <strong>1Plug Corporation - <span style="color:#333399;">Penelope Everall Gordon</span></strong></span></li><li>Founder at <strong>SnapAppointments - <span style="color:#333399;">Cody Harris</span></strong></li><li>Co-F<span style="color:#333333;">ounder of <strong>CiRBA - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Andrew Hillier</strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;">Co-Founder of <strong>SnapAppointments - </strong><span style="color:#000099;"><strong>Brock Holzer</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="color:#333333;">Director of Integration Solutions for <strong>Aprimo - <span style="color:#333399;">Amelia Ross</span></strong></span></span></span></span></span></li><li>Executive VP at <strong>LogLogic - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Bill Roth</strong></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong><span style="color:#333333;"><span><span style="color:#000000;">VP Engineering at </span></span><strong>NetDialog - </strong></span></span><span style="color:#333399;"><span><strong>Tim Rühl</strong></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span><strong> </strong><span style="color:#333333;">Developer, Web Services <strong>JBoss/Red Hat - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Anil Saldhana</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong></span></span><span style="color:#333333;">Vice President, Products at <strong>Zetta - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Chris Schin</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong> </strong></span></span><span style="color:#333333;">CIO, <strong>Enterprise Business Partners - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Pradip Sitaram</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong></strong></span></span><span style="color:#333333;">Sr. Director of Engineering and R&D at <strong>Impetus Technologies - </strong><span style="color:#333399;"><strong>Vineet Tyagi</strong></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><strong> </strong> <div><span style="color:#000000;">2011 Instructor at</span><span style="color:#000000;"> <strong>Cloud Computing Bootcamp</strong></span><strong> - </strong><span style="color:#000099;"><strong>Larry Carvalho</strong></span></div></span></span></span></span></li><li><span style="color:#333399;"><span><span style="color:#333333;"><span style="color:#333399;"><div><span style="color:#000099;"><strong></strong></span></div> <div><span style="color:#333333;">Business Development Manager at <strong>Ajax.org - <span style="color:#333399;">Lieke Arends</span></strong></span></div></span></span></span></span></li></ul>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-3584128394139434342011-05-05T20:13:00.001-07:002011-05-05T20:13:57.050-07:00Social Comparison Engine Meets Cloud Computing & PaaS<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJoTJ2fk6TNT588agqMV2FT5_wSVkBX0X6d_dOEdZD8j8zOhZg3XpGfZuOBvqHtAjpSDAH9wW5JJjRCXzKSgFcP09DeUWADDrCMN-8ZyuqXMWwvAQBFx_SnN44qHin7tEIDOw9ter0ee0/s1600/Vanina+Berger.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 110px; height: 110px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJoTJ2fk6TNT588agqMV2FT5_wSVkBX0X6d_dOEdZD8j8zOhZg3XpGfZuOBvqHtAjpSDAH9wW5JJjRCXzKSgFcP09DeUWADDrCMN-8ZyuqXMWwvAQBFx_SnN44qHin7tEIDOw9ter0ee0/s320/Vanina+Berger.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5603435784972372770" /></a>One can add the word "social" to any other word in the English language right now, and somewhere, sometime, a group of software developers will turn the colloquy into some kind of a website or application.<br /><br />Take "social" + "comparison" for example.<br /><br />In 2006, whileon maternity leave, French-born Vanina Berger (pictured) - a senior software engineer - wanted to compare unusual things such as the best place to give birth. Realizing that it was not so easy to find comparison tables about things that were not products to sell, she began wondering if perhaps what was needed was a comparison engine, a tool that allowed one to collaborate with others to maintain a matrix with a lot of interesting details, advanced criteria such as ratings, etc. In short it would be very nice to have a generic, collaborative and social tool that helps everyone to create easily comparisons...about ANYTHING.<br /><br />Vanina's partner Alexis Fruhinsholz found the idea interesting and started to work on the project at the end of 2008. The result was <a href="http://socialcompare.com/">SocialCompare.com</a>, a site I'd not heard of until the team behind it reached out to me yesterday to ask if I'd like to use it to conduct a comparative survey of PaaS/Cloud services.<br /><br />The results are below. Let me know what you think about SocialCompare.com as an application. I am certainly intrigued.<br /><br /><iframe width="100%" height="520" src="http://socialcompare.com/en/w/platform-as-a-service-paas-for-cloud-applications-scalable-cluster-of-services#" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"></iframe>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-68041596328790273602011-05-01T21:47:00.000-07:002011-05-02T17:20:11.802-07:00It Is Time To Help the Web Be All It Can<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHgSPRPAzbQXgt7bWzbQp5yZU9BFlv0P2TDmVjVUIkYsAk5WNGpjIIZ0vgfV2h3iX5RWrmlZ65lkv7c-HI-O1O1g_IaTNWFSBBAcetLnPmK71iPnFdZ2_Cr_thntqkqxLDRysVelZ36_Q/s1600/CERN+statement.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 248px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHgSPRPAzbQXgt7bWzbQp5yZU9BFlv0P2TDmVjVUIkYsAk5WNGpjIIZ0vgfV2h3iX5RWrmlZ65lkv7c-HI-O1O1g_IaTNWFSBBAcetLnPmK71iPnFdZ2_Cr_thntqkqxLDRysVelZ36_Q/s320/CERN+statement.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5601985125011345826" /></a><br />May 1st seemed the perfect day to just take a few moments to pause and take stock. This is going to be the only year of my life (I hope!!) involving <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-web-can-help-fight-cancer.html">an escape from death</a>, and in those circumstances it is difficult to prevent oneself from wondering how best to use the gift that has been handed to me: nothing less than the remainder of my life.<br /><br />So let me report on the results...<br /><br />First, a brief historical preamble. Eighteen years ago - on April 30, 1993 - CERN released the source code of the world's first Web browser and editor into the public domain. It was called WorldWideWeb, all joined together just like that, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee has some <a href="http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c.gif">screen shots</a> of it <a href="http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb">at his CERN page</a>.<br /><br />It would be very difficult to argue anything other than that, in the eighteen subsequent years, the technological trajectory that CERN's browser heralded has resulted in tumultuous changes in business, education, government, entertainment, and society. Did it cause them? Maybe not. Did it accelerate them? <i>Hell, yes!!</i><br /><br />"CERN's intention in this is to further compatibility, common practices and standards in networking and computer supported collaboration," wrote CERN in its accompanying note to the release of the code (pictured above). It was a phrase that resonated with me then, and it is one that resonates with me still today. "Computer supported collaboration" - on which I <a href="http://openlibrary.org/books/OL1103287M/Groupware_in_the_21st_century">published a pioneering book in 1994</a> edited by the late Peter Lloyd - is, in my view, the philosopher's stone of the World Wide Web. Like that imaginary substance that people in the past believed could change any other metal into gold, "eCollaboration" has been touted throughout every one of those eighteen years as the real payoff from the Web....if only companies, organizations, governments and indeed society at large could figure out how to harness it.<br /><br />Email is the world's most widespread form of computer supported collaboration. Facebook is another, far more recent one - as is YouTube and eBay and Skype and of course Twitter. Yet <a href="http://newnewweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/speaking-today-in-tokyo-at-new-context.html">it is my view</a>, and <a href="http://newnewweb.blogspot.com/2007/02/blogging-is-just-tip-of-co-technology.html">has been for many years</a>, that none of these technologies or applications or sites unleashes the true potential of co-intelligence - the shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration (and competition) of many individuals. <br /><br />So how can we get from TBL's browser to a truly co-intelligent world?<br /><br />That, as I reflected on May Day in my book-lined, technology-rich work studio, is the crucial and most significant question of our time. It is also a question to the exploration and answering of which I am intending to devote a significant proportion of my efforts, moving forward. <br /><br />"There is a quantitative element to human affairs," as H.G. Wells once famously wrote. "Doing something does not amount to very much <i>if we do not do enough</i>." [my emphasis]Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-72014562993732079112011-04-16T09:39:00.000-07:002011-04-16T23:22:07.699-07:008th International Cloud Expo: It is going to be simply Cloudtastic!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbLfpr1WqEK14Kk_Z3uptA5I4GawNNjmwRGbLYcLXwb1HyF2QOeTYcEc2-TRKiymyVUZb1io1GiAwnIZiUWngnePssfUTncjFVCrQiNd6fvfBHNTyzbME3Jnw3yslff9olg4QyiUUPEfA/s1600/Cloud_Expo_NY_2011_468_Graphic.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbLfpr1WqEK14Kk_Z3uptA5I4GawNNjmwRGbLYcLXwb1HyF2QOeTYcEc2-TRKiymyVUZb1io1GiAwnIZiUWngnePssfUTncjFVCrQiNd6fvfBHNTyzbME3Jnw3yslff9olg4QyiUUPEfA/s320/Cloud_Expo_NY_2011_468_Graphic.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596223466488473442" /></a>Okay, things have been happening just so fast and furiously just recently that many people have asked me to just take a deep breath and help them play catch-up. Here goes...<br /><br />Basically all you need to know is that I am back from having "lost" two months of my life.<br /><br />In those two months I somehow managed to 1. discover that for some reason or other I was not myself, 2. ascribe the blame (wrongly) to a recurrence of the shingles that I had contracted 27 years ago, 3. achieve a diagnosis (correctly) of a massively distended gall-bladder, and 4. pursue that line of inquiry to its logical end...which was alas that the entrance to not just my gall-bladder but three other internal organs - a sort of 4-way traffic junction if you will - was being obstructed by a two-centimeter tumor lodged at the head of my pancreas. <br /><br />Stranger still, in the same two months I also managed to 5. have the tumor resected (sliced out) successfully, 6. have my entire digestive system rearranged in a so-called "Whipple procedure" (feel free to Wikipedia it, but make sure you are sitting down first), 7. recover from the radical surgery and 8. begin the first cycle of a nine-cycle, six-month course of "preventative" chemotherapy aimed at minimizing the possibility of any return of pancreatic or any other kind of cancer to anywhere in my body.|<br /><br />It wasn't quite the 2011 that I had scheduled back in November and December of 2010.<br /><br />To claim that my work didn't get majorly disrupted would be ludicrous, delusional. On the other hand, Cloud Expo New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo - thanks to the amazing team effort that has characterized this event since its inception seven successful shows ago - is trending to be the biggest Cloud event ever. We have over one hundred exhibitors from every level of the cloud computing ecosystem and a non-stop, 4-day technical program, with expert speakers from every top Cloud player, including Abiquo, Amazon, AppZero, AT&T, CA Technologies, Cloud.com, Dell, Dell Boomi, Eucalyptus Systems, Fusion-io, Google, HP, IBM, Layered Technologies, Layer7, LogLogic, McAfee, Microsoft, OpSource, Oracle, OutSystems, OxygenCloud, PayPal, PerspecSys, Quest Software, Rackspace, RightScale, Spoon, Stoneware, Terremark, Virtela, VMware, Xiotech and Zetta.<br /><br />Altogether, not too shabby. But then, this is the tech conference world's top team. Cloud Expo New York may be only the eighth successive Cloud Expo, but it is actually my fiftieth consecutive event as Conference Chair...so we are building on a fairly decent track record of eleven busy years of producing conferences for the Internet technology community.<br /><br />But before you worry that maybe, among my newfound plans, there might lurk some wheeze to write the book Pancreatic Cancer is Good for You, let me assure you that on the contrary never in all my life have I felt so humble and privileged and plain dumb lucky. <br /><br />I am fully aware that the odds I have beaten - or, rather that I have been helped to beat by a brilliant piece of highly invasive surgery carried out both fast and well - were very very long. Lots of different stars had to line up for me to be declared, essentially, cancer-free just seven weeks after being diagnosed with what turned out to be a malignant tumor straight out of Pancreatic Cancer 101 - as in, not only able to kill, but usually successful in killing, if not within a year or two, then almost always within five.<br /><br />"The silent killer" is what they call pancreatic cancer. Its survival rate is, in the words of one of the earlier websites that (alas!) I chanced upon very early while trying to get a sense of what I was up against, "dismal." And even the less dramatic and more scholarly sites that I found a little later were still very forthright: only 20% of pancreatic cancers are even operable...and of the 20% that are operated on, only a certain percentage seem to end up cured. Most still seem to end up dead. (The mystery of that one still defies me, but perhaps other patients are typically older, or less fit, than I was when diagnosed, so that their tumors, although removed, left traces of cancer behind...) <br /><br />But then again, what actual use are statistics? What matters, when you are up against a major medical challenge, is you...not some sample of other patients. What matters is to feel strong, to feel loved, and to feel optimistic - and I was blessed with all three. So actually it isn't really surprising at all that I beat the odds. With all that strength (partly from fitness, mostly from stubbornness!), all that love (from my family, my friends, and colleagues who have simply blown me away with their compassion and concern and positive karma, and not least all that optimism (supplied to me at birth in almost infinite quantities)...how could I ever have failed?<br /><br />I promise you that this is last time that any of you will have to endure hearing about one man's brush with "PanCan" as this scary killer is called. From here on all have to say about it will be said through actions rather than words, specifically my participation in the 2011 San Francisco Marathon on July 31, when I hope you will consider helping raise $10,000 for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (>www.PanCan.org) which is trying to double the survival rate for pancreatic cancer by 2020. The money will go directly to much needed R&D, much neded because for whatever reason very little real progress has been made in fighting this particular cancer in the recent past. <br /><br />Either way, whether you decide to allocate a few dollars to fighting PanCan or not, know that I will be there on the podium as ever at Cloud Expo New York, and that you will truly not be able to discern any difference: I will still be my same old self...for better or for worse! So look out for me as conference emcee, Power Panel moderator, SYS-CON.tv host, and as a general all-purpose go-to guy if you have a bone to pick with Cloud Expo or (even better) a constructive suggestion as to how we can go on making the event more and more valuable to those who participate, whether as delegates, speakers, exhibitors, sponsors, or attending press & analysts. I should be pretty easy to find! :)<br /><br />So.....see you in New York City at the Jacob Javits, 6 - 9 June. It is going to be simply Cloudtastic!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-44514700114130091972011-04-08T20:20:00.000-07:002011-04-09T07:01:58.956-07:00"Small Bites All Day Long – Whatever Tastes Good."<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE8wATSap4iesygr85K9uSHxXcjn7aQfR1qsf-FjneP9mrkSHpH5OBjoV78eAWJuNTL2L0IHn_K6nZ-yAsnnSKzs_IFsbKoj8-nNGbsA0m0Lx2Wat18Sv816AbbLX93VWpqAdWvIIMJw0/s1600/British+Computer+Society.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE8wATSap4iesygr85K9uSHxXcjn7aQfR1qsf-FjneP9mrkSHpH5OBjoV78eAWJuNTL2L0IHn_K6nZ-yAsnnSKzs_IFsbKoj8-nNGbsA0m0Lx2Wat18Sv816AbbLX93VWpqAdWvIIMJw0/s320/British+Computer+Society.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5593430178147310754" /></a>Occasionally in the life of every commentator, even those of us who look at the future of the future day and night, you experience what amounts - yes, there is no other word for it - to an epiphany.<br /><br />The earliest techno-epiphany I experienced was not, in reverse chronological order, the realization that mobile was the new normal, nor that computing was going unswervingly social, nor even that the Web was going to forever alter the economics of insight capture and distribution. Nope. It dates much further back, to the advent of the Internet itself.<br /><br />Of course, as a Brit, when I talk of "the advent of the Internet" I am doing what Americans do when saying that the Second World War started in 1941...I am speaking about it from a wholly insular perspective. But this was back in the day, and that was how the world was. We are talking about the world pre-"globalization" - a world where each nation, roughly speaking, paddled its own canoe.<br /><br />My employer in those days was the British Broadcasting Corporation, and it is indeed through the BBC that my epiphany came. At the time I worked for both BBC-tv and BBC Radio in separate but simultaneous capacities, so it was natural that I also ate my own dog food and both viewed and listened to the BBC more or less 24x7.<br /><br />That is why it is easy for me to remember the day in the early 1990s that, on BBC Radio's most popular and influential morning show, the then Chair of the British Computer Society was called up by the presenter of the show and asked, bluntly: "So how would you go about explaining this 'Internet' thing."<br /><br />The BCS Chair didn't miss a beat. Of course he'd probably been asked the question a dozen times before in the past little while, but never by a presenter from mainstream media. He could have alluded to the Internet's origins, attempted to bedazzle the huge morning audience with his erudition and knowledge. Instead he did what so few people, in such circumstances anyway, do. He nailed it.<br /><br />"The best way to comprehend the unique quality of the Internet," he answered, "is first to understand that it is made up many small parts, loosely connected."<br /><br />Many. Small. Parts. Loosely. Connected.<br /><br />That was it. That <em>was</em>, unmistakeably, the very essence and core of the Internet. But it was the first time that I had ever heard it boiled down so magnificently...into just five words.<br /><br />That was all a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time ago, and since then we have seen the creation of the Web, the dot-com crash, the fallow years, and now the New Boom/Bubble. But the five words <em>still</em> resonate with me. And what is more, they were the first thing I thought of when someone recently sent me seven rather similar words, and caused an entirely new epiphany...this time in a more personal context.<br /><br />Let us not get too bogged down worrying why anyone would be giving me nutritional advice. Suffice it to say that I have been obliged recently to review my eating habits, mainly because of having lost 10% of my body weight to a radical surgical procedure aimed at curing me of pancreatic cancer. And, in this context, a fellow cancer survivor just wrote me - full knowing that I was struggling to maintain the 90% that was left, let along get my weight back to <em>status quo ante</em>, that's to say, before my Whipple surgery - a brief note of advice.<br /><br />Here was her wise counsel: <b>"Small bites all day long - whatever tastes good."</b><br /><br />So what was the epiphany? Well it was this: the advice was proffered in the context of nutrition, but those seven words leapt out at me in another context completely - forgive me, dear reader, for at this point you will realize that one of the things about cancer survivors, particularly those who have been operated on successfully and are now undergoing six months' of preventative chemotherapy, is that they constantly wax philosophiocal.<br /><br />I mean, surely those seven words - sent by a dear, dear friend - are a recipe not just for recovery after radical surgery...surely they're a recipe for life itself? For in the banquet of life what better advice could one possibly give a favorite nephew or a beloved son or daughter than this? "Take small bites all day long - whatever tastes good." :-)Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-79740993146660267662011-04-02T20:36:00.000-07:002011-04-02T21:44:55.082-07:00Are We Tweeting Ourselves To Poverty?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Ta0LHCXPxA3-8Vy0uAedHLxKoi31naGqZM_gsQ56syL272w24f-adHvR6VDUc4D_YOLpkyjFd5I1pBnL47X1UjiD9pMXquR39bqklpTZB4cQyoN7z18hrGnE9YMHa1xIkdTbUyVZbT8/s1600/James+Franco.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 186px; height: 271px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Ta0LHCXPxA3-8Vy0uAedHLxKoi31naGqZM_gsQ56syL272w24f-adHvR6VDUc4D_YOLpkyjFd5I1pBnL47X1UjiD9pMXquR39bqklpTZB4cQyoN7z18hrGnE9YMHa1xIkdTbUyVZbT8/s320/James+Franco.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5591209390768051426" /></a>So James Franco has declared that 'Social Media Is Over' and done the unthinkable...he has <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/james-franco-declares-social-media-is-over-shuts-down-twitter-account/#comments">shut down his Twitter account</a>. <br /><br />Will the world stop spinning? Is this the end of western civilization? What next, will people stop asking questions on Quora, will they cease to publish photos on Facebook, will we see the end of Skype-messaging? Worst of all, might the long-awaited Godot known as "Enterprise 2.0" now never turn up?<br /><br />Well I have news for us all: Franco may be righter than he knows.<br /><br />It is not that Social Media Is Dead, however. It is that "Social Media" itself is too fanciful a term, right up there with "Social Shopping." <br /><br />Personally I am not convinced that Twitter is primarily a social medium, I see it more as a collaboration tool that has been momentarily sidelined and become stereotyped in its usage despite its infinite applicability.<br /><br />But then that is the curse of "Social" - the word has a track record of bogging down all that it engulfs.<br /><br />One example. I am so ancient that when I first studied "Social" and Political Science at Cambridge, there wasn't even a Social Science faculty, my degree course was affiliated to the <em>Committee</em> of Social & Political Science. Adding the word "Social" to science, back in the day, was akin to adding the word "Fair" to trade. People smelled a rat!<br /><br />Now it gets added to anything and everything, so that we have the Social Graph, we have Social Data, and we even have Social Authority. But the mother and father of all the "Social" colloquies remains "Social Media."<br /><br />Let's see whether James Franco's move this week triggers a debate as to whether we are not about to see a correction in the international marketplace of ideas, a retrenchment from the strangely misguided notion that the hand the writes the most Tweets rules the world.<br /><br />No wonder China is out-pacing the U.S. on so many metrics of productivity and economic progress: <a href="http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/social-media-accounts-for-22-percent-of-time-online/">according to Nielsen</a>, social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the U.S.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-28224225486240784112011-04-01T16:05:00.000-07:002011-04-08T19:17:36.458-07:00We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants...<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3RI0uDARRkBT3CF-FopXmoRzVZTUhr_vwCMs3GRGqlp0KyKUC_AcgQ65IjG_ADO4AFnHYXXDHW9hlGLZQkQdscdpXZkT3Fm_gj7iErbSqpye2TFtglsBpygz35UgYBdwS6F5VRCNg76o/s1600/CloudExpo%252520Team%252520PanCan%252520April%2525202011_0%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3RI0uDARRkBT3CF-FopXmoRzVZTUhr_vwCMs3GRGqlp0KyKUC_AcgQ65IjG_ADO4AFnHYXXDHW9hlGLZQkQdscdpXZkT3Fm_gj7iErbSqpye2TFtglsBpygz35UgYBdwS6F5VRCNg76o/s320/CloudExpo%252520Team%252520PanCan%252520April%2525202011_0%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5593402194455494226" /></a>What more could anyone want from one's dearest colleagues than unstinting support and love when <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-web-can-help-fight-cancer.html">adversity strikes</a> and you need good karma by the bucketload? <br /><br />Major props to the <a href="http://CloudComputingExpo">Cloud Expo New York</a> support team in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey - three of the dedicated team of masterminds behind 2011 Show Registration, East & West coast, the Conference website and the logistics of all the <a href="http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/general/sponsors0611.htm">Exhibitors & Sponsors</a> to 8th International Cloud Expo.<br /><br />Thanks, guys! July 31's SF Marathon will be my chance to thank you all for your amazing positive energy...without which I surely wouldn't have been able to bounce back so fast and so strong in time for the June 6-9 show - currently trending to be our best event ever, with more expert speakers on a greater variety Cloud topics and from a wider range of players in the Cloud Computing ecosystem than ever before.<br /><br />The beneficiary of <a href="http://pancan.kintera.org/teamhope2010/jg21">all funds raised through my July 31 run</a> will of course be the <a href="http://PanCan.org">Pancreatic Cancer Action Network</a> - hence the proudly purple T-shirts here!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-68738170244462396582011-03-31T20:34:00.000-07:002011-03-31T21:29:41.614-07:00Necessity is the Mother of Invention<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCtchPhgIl4KaPol_nIVmU8mQOeQrK_e5lHxXc85zN4JnPa_bW_9r12Tewchmi0zzFLpZgVK0xDWT6eyViPY9QJ1ooSijHaAIomkuC0pxG4f_OJrLel17xK_W2HRadlOWoA-JuKDvuc1I/s1600/Necessity+Is+the+Mother+of+Invention.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCtchPhgIl4KaPol_nIVmU8mQOeQrK_e5lHxXc85zN4JnPa_bW_9r12Tewchmi0zzFLpZgVK0xDWT6eyViPY9QJ1ooSijHaAIomkuC0pxG4f_OJrLel17xK_W2HRadlOWoA-JuKDvuc1I/s320/Necessity+Is+the+Mother+of+Invention.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5590466172609983746" /></a>Of all the "ists" in the world - artists, motorists, psychologists, anesthetists, equilibrists, whatever - the one type that probably everybody dreads in the very type I am due in just a few hours today to meet for the first time in my life: an oncologist.<br /><br />Let me say this as gently as I can: no one wants to experience the kind of involuntary system re-boot that is involved whenever something as radical as <a HREF="http://www.uchospitals.edu/specialties/cancer/pancreatic/surgical/whipple.html">Whipple surgery</a> is involved. But Whipple patients still have a whole second challenge ahead of them: even if, as in my case, the surgery is completely successful, the recommended Next Steps involve chemo.<br /><br />While not as debilitating as some other forms of chemotherapy, the drug Gemcitabine (a.k.a. GEMZAR) is most likely to become my new poison of choice. I won't know until the oncologist tells me how long the treatment will last, but I gather it may come in 21-day cycles. Given the proximity of <a href="http://CloudComputingExpo.com">Cloud Expo New York</a>, I certainly hope the chemotherapy is a resounding success!<br /><br />Meantime, I will continue to work even, if as in this photo, I have had to be creative at times...to avoid creasing my stomach where the scar from the Whipple operation is still knitting together only very slowly. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-84661135207598895112011-03-28T01:38:00.000-07:002011-03-28T07:12:05.132-07:00How the Web Can Help Fight Cancer<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5-gSIWoX9vY8bCg84uLexQ9BdRyHnBka9_TWM2M2sFMhzWwsA2nIwQwd9sr8sCh53LRDLaodkU0DMg86ZPNp1NaeUcOpBguio31RTRUqyhoUGMeg1j7BzQn8z2NaFeYzSkVmgjSdggeQ/s1600/11+March+2011+-+Rigshospital%252C+Copenhagen+DAY+ONE.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5-gSIWoX9vY8bCg84uLexQ9BdRyHnBka9_TWM2M2sFMhzWwsA2nIwQwd9sr8sCh53LRDLaodkU0DMg86ZPNp1NaeUcOpBguio31RTRUqyhoUGMeg1j7BzQn8z2NaFeYzSkVmgjSdggeQ/s320/11+March+2011+-+Rigshospital%252C+Copenhagen+DAY+ONE.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5589051303171194434" /></a>There is really no other way to do this than just to blurt it out: six weeks ago I was diagnosed - unexpectedly and completely out of the blue - with pancreatic cancer.<br /><br />What has one of the deadliest forms of cancer got to do with "New Media"? Quite a lot, it turns out. Because thanks to the Internet, I was able - before my consulting surgeon could even say it to me - to learn that in cases such as mine where by some quirk of fate pancreatic cancer is detected early enough, there is a very radical surgical procedure that is claimed to be curative. Curative as in, if everything goes okay, you emerge from the operating theater cancer-free.<br /><br />Needless to say, Wikipedia played its role here. Its entry on the so-called "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreaticoduodenectomy">Whipple procedure</a>" is a classic of detail and balance.<br /><br />But Facebook wasn't far behind. There is both a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=7630091738&topic=10207&post=47341#!/group.php?gid=7630091738">Pancreatic Cancer topic page</a> and a separate, and invaluable, topic page on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=7630091738&topic=10207&post=47341">the Whipple procedure</a>. Honestly, who'd a thunk it?<br /><br />The final new-media <i>pièce de résistance</i> came when I was thinking about what to do, having had Whipple surgery just ten days previously, with the entry I had already secured last December into this year's <a href="http://www.thesfmarathon.com/">San Francisco Marathon</a> on July 31.<br /><br />The answer was obvious: use the Web to transform it into a fundraising run, a personal 26-mile journey toward helping raise funds towards doubling the pancreatic cancer survival rate by 2020.<br /><br /><a href="http://pancan.kintera.org/teamhope2010/jg21">Here is the donation link</a>: I am not saying that it is exactly a barrel of laughs to have cancer diagnosed one week, Whipple surgery three weeks later, and chemotherapy due to start just three weeks after the surgery...but I will say that, if you have to undergo such a fate, then using the Web to make it easier to endure, manage and understand is definitely the way to go!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-19011767561484603312011-01-28T20:29:00.001-08:002011-01-28T20:58:41.705-08:00A Twitter Epiphany? The Power of a Hash Tag (#jan25)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG-MmzVIMvD9YsKQO2gwFT5G-P2ZnLeh3CW1H6TSFPV9ugqj4ERl90OYukxfQnmfkUF02JF2AW_btCK4-7rASf5yTWS3b0xASKUkvhrnVXS-oq3pqhwLYZM7mmlBBf8JGbrH1xPdN32UQ/s1600/Walk+Like+An+Egyptian.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 210px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG-MmzVIMvD9YsKQO2gwFT5G-P2ZnLeh3CW1H6TSFPV9ugqj4ERl90OYukxfQnmfkUF02JF2AW_btCK4-7rASf5yTWS3b0xASKUkvhrnVXS-oq3pqhwLYZM7mmlBBf8JGbrH1xPdN32UQ/s320/Walk+Like+An+Egyptian.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5567467738687760370" /></a>As America - on the East Coast anyway, including in Washington, DC - tucks up in bed, the sun is rising on Egypt. Which seems an appropriate time for @jg21 to briefly explain what I had in mind when resolving for the past 12 hours or so to re-Tweet as many of the comments and links flying around via Twitter as I found meaningful, informative, and (often) inspiring.<br /><br />"Freedom of expression is a human right," blogged Twitter co-founder Biz Stone Friday, on Day Four of the blockage by the Egyptian government of Twitter and Facebook. And this was not mere opportunism by Stone, because it is <a href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-blogging-is-not-true-co-technology.html">the exact same thing that he said four months ago</a>. Here is what he said already in September:<blockquote><br />"Twitter isn't a triumph of technology it's a triumph of humanity. A more connected world leads to a more empathic world."</blockquote><br />So that is the proposition I set out to test. Does Twitter really have the power to increase the sum total of empathy in this often troubled world? Call it, if you like, an exercise in "empathetic calculus."<br /><br />One <a href="http://dassuigeneris.wordpress.com/">kind and co-hearted soul</a> has already been kind enough to mention - via Twitter of course! - that my "barrage" (his word, but I make no objection!) of re-Tweets <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/dasSuiGeneris/status/31195855763546112">had an effect on her</a>, and a good one:<blockquote><br />"@dasSuiGeneris<br />#FF @jg21 for a barrage of #Jan25 & #Egypt Retweets. Reading about the situation in Egypt makes everything else seem... minuscule in scope."</blockquote><br />In a follow up exchange, he was even kind enough to say "good work sir. We are in dire times. The horrors of the world cannot be hidden thx to technology. We are ALL of this world." So I feel that I haven't intruded in vain upon people's attention-span, even if my chosen means was a little front-on, I feel certain, for many people.<br /><br />In a follow-up post over the weekend, I will try and analyze what my Twitter-fest did for <em>me</em> personally, as opposed to my Tweeps - whose forbearance I call out here and for which I shall be eternally grateful. <br /><br />This much I can tell you in advance: it has been a transformative experience, so far as my view of microblogging is concerned.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-10884522365620164472011-01-26T17:35:00.000-08:002011-01-26T18:09:20.226-08:00Facebook, Google, and the Near-Term Future of the USAOn the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average <a href="https://twitter.com/wsjbreakingnews/status/30283298123022336">topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008</a>, it is impossible not to correlate the eloquence and optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in the USA about the future.<br /><br />Obama grasped the nettle full-on. "We are poised for progress," he declared, adding:<br /><blockquote>"Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing."</blockquote><br />As one blogger expressed it, though - and he is a former Goldman Sachs trader called Tyler Durden, so he ought to know wheref he speaks:<blockquote>"There was a massive pink elephant in the room called reality though."</blockquote><br />Durden's gripe is with the unreality of Obama's praising Google and Facebook so highly in an America where 26 million people are unemployed or underemployed. It is with his failing to address that while the salaries of U.S. CEOs are up, the average median employee salary on a comparative basis is stuck somewhere in the 1970s.<br /><br />"This is our generation’s Sputnik moment," Obama said, in the most-quoted sentence of the entire address. America, in other words, needs to enter an Education Race akin to the Space Race that it entered in 1958.<br /><br />What role will New Media activities play in all of this? Facebook may be many things, but a tool for better education is not one of them. Google stands a better chance in that regard. But Twitter? Can tweeting really help restore America's lost position in the world?<br /><br />Those who live by new media die by new media. The 44th president of the United States of America needs to be careful when hitching the wagon of his presidency to stock prices and IPOs...can we all really have already forgotten the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble">Dot-com bubble</a>, which peaked in March 2000, when the NASDAQ lost nearly nine percent of its value in just six days and many dot-coms began to run out of capital and were acquired or liquidated?<br /><br /><em>What do you think? Is the 'Sputnik moment' a metaphor that can help re-boot America? What web-based organizations instil more hope in you, commercial giants like Facebook and Google...or non-commercial minnows like Wikipedia? How can we best preserve a World Wide Web in which there is room for both?</em>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-90601675632728584972010-11-05T20:40:00.000-07:002010-11-05T20:48:54.772-07:00Is Ballmer Bailing?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-cEZRgFxmpr3J2BkKt1fWdWYGmlVhSmYg7eCVYk-f4QbJBGPTzub3LznUSdAjUEHqWAtlSF_8tV4WK4G_OqUI6vZSGn93fmoqFLl68TuEgkIcWz_XEbf6FBwRuVh92jYEg_XAw8E8T4Q/s1600/Steve+Ballmer.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-cEZRgFxmpr3J2BkKt1fWdWYGmlVhSmYg7eCVYk-f4QbJBGPTzub3LznUSdAjUEHqWAtlSF_8tV4WK4G_OqUI6vZSGn93fmoqFLl68TuEgkIcWz_XEbf6FBwRuVh92jYEg_XAw8E8T4Q/s320/Steve+Ballmer.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5536278555140442962" /></a>"Even though this is a personal financial matter, I want to be clear about this to avoid any confusion," wrote Microsoft CEO Ballmer on the Microsoft website, to quell fears that his sale of $1.3BN worth of shares in the company was maybe a sign of an imminent departure from the hot seat that he has occupied for the past ten years.<br /><p>He added:<br /><blockquote>"I am excited about our new products and the potential for our technology to change people's lives, and I remain fully committed to Microsoft and its success."</blockquote><br />For those with a good memory, they may recognize <b><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/may03/05-23ballmerstatementpr.mspx">that this same exact wording</a></b> is what Ballmer's advisers have also used in the past. Such as in May 2003, when he also sold some of his holdings of Microsoft stock "to gain some diversification of his financial assets."</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-22231119232680097542010-09-29T22:04:00.001-07:002010-09-30T00:08:41.985-07:00Why Blogging is Not a True Co-Technology<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGfAsIOe7PMQUnvO5W2AokexwCb9lL025qM8oMNqn9leOGrBionBZMbdjjLRH1ztwDO9UYgaX_OkIlZabm5zvcGTO5rBwmVP4e7MJsU9AY22S5UQm56MeE1e1rdG9MusTzUF27BUa3hXQ/s1600/Biz+Stone.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGfAsIOe7PMQUnvO5W2AokexwCb9lL025qM8oMNqn9leOGrBionBZMbdjjLRH1ztwDO9UYgaX_OkIlZabm5zvcGTO5rBwmVP4e7MJsU9AY22S5UQm56MeE1e1rdG9MusTzUF27BUa3hXQ/s320/Biz+Stone.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522564524319746946" /></a>Speaking today in Tokyo at <a href="http://ncc2010.garage.co.jp/">The New Context Conference 2010</a>, the founder of Twitter, Biz Stone (pictured), put onto the record two sentences that will stand the test of time in the era of social computing:<br /><blockquote>"Twitter isn't a triumph of technology it's a triumph of humanity. A more connected world leads to a more empathic world."</blockquote><br />Interestingly, Stone makes this observation in the self-same week that saw the sale of TechCrunch, Inc. to New York-based AOL - triggering a spate of commentaries along the lines of This Is the Death of Independent Blogging.<br /><br />Is this an inflexion point? Hell, yes. And a big one. This week is also the week in which, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/GuyKawasaki/status/25942630186">as Guy Kawasaki reminds us</a>, that Twitter's traffic overtook that of MySpace. <br /><br />So what is going on? Why is independent blogging being characterized as dying at the very moment that tweeting is becoming as natural a part of the interconnected world as breathing?<br /><br />The key, I believe, is in that word "ïnterconnected" - because blogging, for all its merits, has always suffered from that one huge shortcoming, namely that (notwithstanding the excellent innovations like RSS, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback">Trackbacks</a>, the Technorati real-time APIs and even <a href="http://blogsearch.google.com/">Google's Blog Search</a>) <span style="font-style:italic;">it truly isn't very interactive.</span> I blog, you blog, he/she/it blogs. We hyperlink to each other, but that is about it. Blog feedback threads are frustratingly isolated silos. In fact, to be blunt, blogging is about as innovative a use of the Web as propping open your office door with a Xitami web server.<br /><br />Tweeting, in contrast, is quite another pair of shoes. Twitter is a true co-technology. And only co-technologies will truly flourish, in the second decade of the 21st century.<br /><br />Biz Stone is right: "A more connected world leads to a more empathic world." That is after all one of the pillars of co-intelligence, of the belief that none of us is as smart as all of us.<br /><br />It is going to be the most interesting decade ever. You heard it here first!<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Disclosure:</span> I have never been a huge proponent of blogging, as made transparent <a href="http://web2.sys-con.com/node/157184">by this 2007 article</a>.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-21064758205460800342010-09-12T23:15:00.000-07:002010-09-13T00:05:57.654-07:00Will Oracle Bid for HP?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyKvpSRr6yIebcDCwdZu1LhLMHge4yNrmrufJTAN2mux8G6IaKt8zlTaiDcQ_SgfPAW_UdoQZ0bI_VDKvqSGfdXKrybC-66u_EPXZAO-G-Ad254Os9lu8fT3X1f-wbt6Q-5Fy3-g0mr6g/s1600/Oracle.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 160px; height: 120px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyKvpSRr6yIebcDCwdZu1LhLMHge4yNrmrufJTAN2mux8G6IaKt8zlTaiDcQ_SgfPAW_UdoQZ0bI_VDKvqSGfdXKrybC-66u_EPXZAO-G-Ad254Os9lu8fT3X1f-wbt6Q-5Fy3-g0mr6g/s320/Oracle.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516286932292141074" /></a>"Larry Ellison is borderline bat-shit crazy on a good day," the analyst Rob Enderle is quoted as saying in a <a href="http://srph.it/9tGMUZ">piece</a> last week by Sam Gustin - a senior writer at DailyFinance, an AOL Finance & Money site.<br /><br />Enderle was prompted to utter this remark by speculation that perhaps the Oracle CEO is about to embark upon the acquisition of his life: of HP.<br /><br />"I think his bet is that he can damage HP enough that it drops in value and he can wander in with an offer," Enderle is quoted as having added.<br /><br />So is it possible that Ellison the Conqueror, CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977, truly has the $90BN HP in the crosshairs of his acquisition rifle-sight? Can a $120BN company somehow buy and absorb a $90BN one?<br /><br />Well certainly he now has on board the exact right man to tackle the integration of such a purchase: none other than HP's own former CEO, Mark Hurd. And, as Gustin expresses it:<br /><blockquote>'Ellison is a man with ambitions as big as his MIG-29 fighter jet is fast, and he's got a history of stating that the info-tech industry will further consolidate in the same way the auto industry consolidated into the Big Three in the U.S.'</blockquote><br />"When your end goal is global dominance, difficulty is a mere distraction," Gustin notes. <br /><br />Enderle was quick to highlight a revenge-is-sweet angle to, to the possible scenario.<br /><br />"[W]hat could be sweeter revenge for Hurd than winding up running HP again - as a part of Oracle?"<br /><br />Credit for first raising the possibility of an Oracle-HP bid goes not to Enderle or Gustin, btw, but to former FT journalist <a href="http://twitter.co/tomforemski">Tom Forenski</a>, who was already writing speculatively about such a scenario <a href="http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2010/08/test.php">back in mid-August</a> - that's to say, before Mark Hurd had even been made Co-President of Oracle.<br /> <br />With cloud computing now driving a sea-change in how enterprise IT datacenters are put together, one thing is certain: more consolidation is right around the corner.<br /><br />Only time will tell if an Oracle bid for HP will be next. This one, as they say, will run and run.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-28729309026132932042010-08-19T18:02:00.000-07:002010-08-20T03:53:20.917-07:00The Top 50 Bloggers on Cloud Computing<span style="font-style: italic;">Ever since I first published here my tentative list of Top Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem - </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://jg21.blogspot.com/2010/05/top-250-players-in-cloud-computing.html">now expanded to a list of 250</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> and growing daily thanks to community feedback via my Twitter account (<span style="font-weight: bold;">@jg21</span>) and a </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/08/from-a-to-z-the-top-250-cloud.php">very kind mention by ReadWriteWeb</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> - there have been suggestions that another prism through which to view cloud computing might be that of people rather than companies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Now </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://twitter.com/HighTechDad">Michael Sheehan</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> has encouraged me to Just Do It, so let me get started...as per the previous Top Cloud Players list, this list will a work-in-progress and is totally porous, so don't hesitate to ping or tweet me if there are folks I have missed. In particular <span style="font-weight: bold;">if you are a journalist whose "beat" is Cloud Computing</span>, please let's be hearing from you, and we can maybe widen this list from Cloud Bloggers to Cloud Commentators.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">For now though let's get started. In alphabetical order - to avoid invidious arguments about "pecking order" - here goes:</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/damrhein">Dustin Amrhein</a> | <a href="https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/cloudview/?lang=en">"A View from the Clouds"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/randybias">Randy Bias</a> | <a href="http://cloudscaling.com/blog">"Cloudscaling"<br /></a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/ReneBuest">Rene Buest</a> | <a href="http://en.clouduser.org/">www.CloudUser.org</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/larrycincy"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Larry Carvalho</span></a> | <a href="http://robustcloud.ulitzer.com/">"Robust Cloud"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/samcharrington">Sam Charrington</a> | <a href="http://cloudpulseblog.com/">"Cloud Pulse"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/EventCloudPro"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Colin Clark</span></a> |<a href="http://blog.cloudeventprocessing.com/">"Cloud Event Processing"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/petercoffee"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Peter Coffee</span></a> | <a href="http://cloudblog.salesforce.com/">cloudblog.salesforce.com</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/ruv"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reuven Cohen</span></a> | <a href="http://www.elasticvapor.com/">"Elastic Vapor"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/adrianfcole"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Adrian Cole</span></a> | <a href="http://jclouds.tumblr.com/">jclouds.tumblr.com</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/tcrawford">Tim Crawford</a> | <a href="http://timcrawford.org/">"Cloud Computing & IT Optimization"</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">James Downey</span> | <a href="http://cloudofinnovation.com/">"Cloud of Innovation"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/wif">William Fellows</a> | <a href="http://blogs.the451group.com/">blogs.the451group.com</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/SFoskett"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Stephen Foskett</span></a> | <a href="http://gestaltit.com/">"GestaltIT"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/peakscale"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tim Freeman</span></a> | <a href="http://www.timfreeman.org/">www.timfreeman.org</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/jayfry3">Jay Fry</a> | <a href="http://datacenterdialog.blogspot.com/">"Data Center Dialog"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/bernardgolden"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Bernard Golden</span></a> | <a href="http://advice.cio.com/theopensource">"The Open Source"</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">James Hamilton</span> | <a href="http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Perspectives"</span></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/beaker">Christofer Hoff</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span>| <a href="http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/">"Rational Survivability"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/kevin_jackson">Kevin L. Jackson</a> | <a href="http://kevinljackson.blogspot.com/">"Cloud Musings"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="https://twitter.com/sjin2008">Steve Jin</a> | <a href="http://doublecloud.org/">www.DoubleCloud.org</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/samj">Sam Johnston</a> | <a href="http://samj.net/">www.samj.net</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/BenKepes"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Ben Kepes</span></a> | <a href="http://diversity.net.nz/">"The Diversity Blog"<br /></a><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/markusklems"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Markus Klems</span></a> | <a href="http://markusklems.wordpress.com/">"Cloudy Times"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/DavidLinthicum"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dave Linthicum</span></a> | <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/david-linthicum">"Cloud Computing"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/williamlouth"><span style="font-weight: bold;">William Louth</span></a> | <a href="http://williamlouth.wordpress.com/">williamlouth.wordpress.com</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/lmacvittie"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Lori MacVittie</span></a> | <a href="http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/Default.aspx">devcentral.f5.com</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/paulmiller"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Paul Miller</span></a> | <a href="http://twitter.com/paulmiller">"Cloud of Data"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/stu"><span class="fn">Stuart Miniman</span></a> | <a href="http://blogstu.wordpress.com/">blogstu.wordpress.com</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="https://twitter.com/Archimedius">Greg Ness</a> | <a href="http://www.infra20.com/">www.infra20.com</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/CloudCEO"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Ray Nugent</span></a> | <a href="http://cloudshaping.com/">"Cloudshaping: What's shaping the Cloud"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/gevaperry">Geva Perry</a> | <a href="http://gevaperry.typepad.com/">"Thinking Out Cloud"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/GregorPetri">Gregor Petri</a> | <a href="http://thecloudacademy.ulitzer.com/">"The Cloud Academy"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/GeorgeReese"><span style="font-weight: bold;">George Reese</span></a> | <a href="http://enstratus.typepad.com/blog/">enstratus.typepad.com/blog</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/guyro"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Guy Rosen</span></a> | <a href="http://www.vircado.com/blog/">www.vircado.com/blog</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/ellen_rubin"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Ellen Rubin</span></a> | <a href="http://www.cloudswitch.com/blog">"Enterprise Cloud Computing Blog"</a><br /><br /><a mce_href="http://twitter.com/SCOTTSANCHEZ" href="http://twitter.com/SCOTTSANCHEZ"><b>Scott C. Sanchez</b></a> | <a mce_href="http://cloudnod.com/" href="http://cloudnod.com/">"Cloudnod"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="https://twitter.com/HighTechDad">Michael Sheehan</a> | <a href="http://www.hightechdad.com/">www.HighTechDad.com<br /></a><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/krishnan"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Krishnan Subramanian</span></a> | <a href="http://www.cloudave.com/">"CloudAve"<span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span></a><a href="http://www.krishworld.com/"><br /></a><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/cloudbzz"><span style="font-weight: bold;">John Treadway</span></a> | <a href="http://www.cloudbzz.com/"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"CloudBzz"</span></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/jamesurquhart">James Urquhart</a> | <a href="http://news.cnet.com/the-wisdom-of-clouds/">"The Wisdom of Clouds"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/vambenepe">William Vambenepe</a> | <a href="http://stage.vambenepe.com/">"IT Management in a Changing IT World"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/werner"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Werner Vogels</span></a> | <a href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/">"All Things Distributed"</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://twitter.com/philww"><span class="fn">Phil Wainewright</span></a> | <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/saas">"Software as Services"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/swardley"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Simon Wardley</span></a> | <a href="http://blog.gardeviance.org/">"Bits or Pieces"</a><br /><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/wattersjames"><span style="font-weight: bold;">James Watters</span></a> | <a href="http://wattersjames.posterous.com/">wattersjames.posterous.com</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/arwilliamson"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Alan Williamson</span></a> | <a href="http://alan.blog-city.com/">alan.blog-city.com</a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/alexwilliams"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Alex Williams</span></a> | <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/">"ReadWrite Cloud"</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">John M. Willis</span> | <a href="http://www.johnmwillis.com/">www.johnmwillis.com</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;" mce_style="font-weight: bold;">EDITORIAL NOTE:</span> <span style="font-style: italic;" mce_style="font-style: italic;">As I say, all suggestions for additions are welcome. Based on previous experience, this list will no doubt grow, and probably very fast! Thanks in advance for your suggestion to <a href="http://twitter.com/jg21" mce_href="http://twitter.com/jg21">http://twitter.com/jg21</a> </span><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-14156514257639526792010-07-01T22:20:00.000-07:002010-07-01T22:27:17.373-07:00Is 2010 the End of the Beginning for New Media?<span style=";font-family:Arial,Verdana,Sans-Serif;font-size:10pt;" > There was a mind-boggling <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/media/31carr.html?ref=business">article</a> in the New York Times recently opining that the only way for the Washington Post Company to sell <span style="font-style: italic;">Newsweek</span> will probably be <span style="text-decoration: underline;">to pay someone to take it</span>:<br /><a target="_blank" href="https://mailapp02.register.com/9a32d52a/gds/%20http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/media/31carr.html?ref=business"><br /></a>This surely is an inflexion point in the life of all of us who have lived - and loved - publishing for decades. It's right up there with the day that Encyclopedia Britannica realized that its Beyond Paper future lay not in CD-ROM editions but online. <span style="font-style: italic;">Newsweek</span>, and perhaps <span style="text-decoration: underline;">any</span> print weekly, is simply no longer financially viable...not as a physical magazine, anyhow.<br /><br />This is a classic example of The Law of Unintended Consequences. If Tim Berners Lee had thought for a moment, back in 1990, that his invention at CERN of http + HTML + server + browser was going 20 years later to eliminate <span style="font-style: italic;">Newsweek</span> from newsstands worldwide, he might have gone back to studying physics instead of ushering in the World Wide Web.<br /><br />But what's done is done, and what interests me in this Times piece by David Carr is not so much the End-of-<span style="font-style: italic;">Newsweek</span> story as the meta message of the article <span style="font-weight: bold;">which is the contention that we now live in an age where the periodicity of publications has become a potential showstopper:</span><br /><p style="margin-left: 40px;"></p><blockquote><p style="margin-left: 40px;">'But in the current digital news ecosystem, <span style="font-style: italic;">having “week” in your title is anachronistic in the extreme </span>[my emphasis]<span style="font-style: italic;">,</span> what an investor would call negative equity. </p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"> And in a publishing landscape filled with the lame and infirm, weeklies are the most profoundly challenged. A weekly schedule, with its tight turnarounds and frenzied production, is costly as a matter of course. Monthlies can still do step-backs for readers who don’t expect to see what happened five minutes ago, and daily newspapers have co-opted the newsweekly formula to build in real-time analysis.'</div></blockquote><br />I have to say, I am not at all certain that I buy that argument: "having 'week' in your title is anachronistic in the extreme," I mean. It sounds profound, but I think it's a crock. I created a feature for a weekly back in 1982, so very nearly thirty years ago, that to this day, were I to throw it up online, would probably be read by 100,000 people a week: it was called, simply, "The Week in Words."<br /><br />Far from being a liability - not as long as a month, seven times longer than a day - the concept of a week remains in my view an almost <span style="font-style: italic;">perfect</span> container: for thoughts as for deeds. Who does not view their life through the prism of the week? Who does not turn over a new page in their mind every Monday morning?<br /><br />The comments David Carr makes about the math are interesting but they are hardly shocking. With a $40M subscription liability, he writes that any new owner would therefore be obligated to <span style="text-decoration: underline;">print</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Newsweek</span> for the next 18 months at least - which makes no allowance at all for the possibility of "converting" subscribers in some way to another product or service..surely a manageable process given the known predilections of those individuals (thoughtful, probably high-income, influencers); why would they not be happy to be converted to a premium insight service, run as an online-only offering?<br />,<br />The other number Carr zeros in on is the reduction in the rate base from 2.5M to 1.6M. But no Web-based offering ever cuts back its rate base...managed correctly, anyway, a premium insight service will only ever grow its number of members...until it reaches a certain size anyway - which for commentary and analysis of this sort is surely greater than any member of the Graham family is able to comprehend.<br /></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1559772050927432260.post-77551378146068189182010-06-10T23:22:00.000-07:002010-06-10T23:24:08.166-07:00Will EngineYard Be VMware's Next Cloud Acquisition?Investigative writer Stacey Higginbotham, who is never happier than when immersed in SEC filings, tech specs or poking through a data center, and who has spent the last ten years covering technology and finance for publications such as The Deal, the Austin Business Journal, The Bond Buyer and Business Week, <a href="http://gigaom.com/2010/06/10/vmware-in-talks-to-acquire-engineyard/">speculated</a> yesterday afternoon on the GigaOm site that VMware might be contemplating its next Cloud acquisition - to go with Zimbra and SpringSource.<br /><br />In its sights, says Higginbotham, is <a href="http://engineyard.com">EngineYard</a>. Is VMware going to add Ruby on Rails to its Java mix? Only time will tell...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05554845955074271275noreply@blogger.com0