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From the Editor

"Enterprises everywhere are realizing the inherent benefits of running their core IT services in the cloud,” said Todd McKinnon, most recently VP of Engineering at Salesforce.com from 2003 to 2009, and now CEO of the on-demand identity and access management service, Okta. "This shift ...
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 fly...
On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008, it was 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 ...
Speaking Thursday in Tokyo at The New Context Conference 2010, 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: "Twitter isn't a triumph of technology it's a triumph of humanity. A more conn...
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 Newsweek from newsstands worldwide, he might have gone back to studying physics instead of ushering in the World Wide Web. Bu...
"Mass psychology" scientists study this kind of phenomena and the "mass psychology of fascism" is of course the most famous lab case. The extraordinary experience SYS-CON Media lived through became part of a Forbes Magazine investigative cover story called "Attack of the Blogs" that fo...
Web 2.0 was a big scam to start with. The name "Web 2.o" was stolen by Mr. Tim O'Reilly (the prophet) from Imagine Media's brilliant new launch of "Business 2.0 Magazine" during the heyday of the dot-com explosion. The promise of Web 2.0 was that everybody in the software industry woul...
What drives a technology CEO or CTO to success in today's constantly changing technology ecosystem? We look at the question through the lens of the many interviews and articles we have published at SYS-CON.com which deal, sometimes only in passing, with exactly this issue. Executives q...
'Web 2.0' is an example of what the historian Daniel Boorstin would have called 'the Fertile Verge.' Web 2.0 is also a Boom Town, and - as Virginia Postrel points out - 'Boom towns break down barriers; they mix together talent from everywhere; they challenge complacency and overturn a...
Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's cont...
Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet chasers is dealing with organizations where change is required, not only in a company...
When Microsoft parted with $240M for a 1.6% stake in a company with $140M in revenues and $30M in profits, was it over-paying? Conspiracy theorists were quick to say that the move was deliberate, to inflate the overall value of Facebook to $15BN and thereby prevent anyone else from buy...
The BBC carried a report yesterday that raises the alarming possibility of extending cellphone use on board airplanes from just either end of a journey to throughout the duration of the flight. The key to the whole thing, the technical trick that circumvents the problem found in 2003 b...
A war of words has broken out in the world of Web 2.0 - between the software developer who created or was a lead contributor to several of the most popular XML dialects and APIs related to web publishing (RSS 2.0, XML-RPC, OPML, and the MetaWeblog API), Dave Winer, and the founder of ...
What comes after Google? Where will the Web, the Internet, the whole nexus of telecommunications, i-Technology, and the quest for a better world, take us? My strong sense is as follows: if Web 2.0, as the joke goes, is about how we can make money out of Web 1.0, then Web 3.0 is going t...
Google's recent foray into delivering an Ajaxified Web application stack, the Google Web Toolkit, says much about Google's pragmatic method of delivering innovation to the market. I for one, would heartily recommend it for certain applications, while actively advising against it for ot...
With apologies to Bruce Eckel, I sat down this afternoon and put together a draft list of the first-order elements of Web 2.0 thinking. It's not that I have the hubris to consider this list official in any way but it should be a serviceable starting point for debate, discourse, and ref...
Though it's a complex and often subtle topic - and recognizing that Web 2.0 definitions vary across the community - we believe 'Web 2.0' captures the current spirit of innovation in online software. And while some may dislike the term itself, we believe it's useful, broadly recognizabl...