It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man possessed by a great family & a boat must be in want of a holiday. Summertime blues are upon us and I must take the high road to the seaside for 10 days to a place called the Gower. Visit http://www.explore-gower.co.uk/ to read up about this place "of outstanding natural beauty" positioned South of what used to be the Welsh coalfields.

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 1:16

Kind words from KC on his GrandAdventure blog http://www.grandadventure.net/weblog/index.php?itemid=31

"PopG is a great fit for SA2 or any austere environment, perhaps from its ability to rapidly extend Groove to non-Grooved folks. Consider the power of PopG establishing multiple Groove accounts on their servers for reachback reporting to various agencies stateside. They wouldn't need to load Groove, but with an email containing ID and password information they'd be up and participating pronto. Its especially true if you have a team isolated from anything but dialup, don't have access to computers where their Groove client is installed. PopG, simply stated, could have found itself a new niche for extending Groove: humanitarian assistance/remote C2/interagency operability across all platforms but still leveraging Groove's capabilities.", KC Bolton.

KC hits home at one of the hidden values of our business. When we talk of extending Groove one often thinks of it in terms of computer type etc. But here we re talking about the time dimension. The speed at which PopG can Groove-enable communities...

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 5:10

Where is PopG's feed... The site feed is http://popg.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 2:44

How much outage does it take to affect Google's IPO?

Yesterday I was surprised, like others, to find Google was not working. I retried time and time again and still it failed. Something interesting was happening, the world's favourite search engine was down. Such a happening was incredulous. And all this happened on the day when Google announced its IPO valuation.

Later in the day I heard news commentators join the two together and try to draw a conclusion that somehow Google's valuation would be affected. Well if that's true then such investors should find other advisors. The truth is that although many viruses are harmless there are some nasty & viruses out there and it does not matter how big you are, it is likely that you will toppple one day. And yesterday was Google's day.

The point is that the Internet is not a reliable place. By that I do not mean it is unreliable. What I mean is that outage will happen. It is a definition of how the Internet works. The Internet is designed to fail, but in doing so gains incredible robustness.

Come on, how many of you thought that Google would stay "down". Not many I am sure. The resilience of todays Internet connected society is built around redundancy. It is built around the fact that failure will happen, that failure is a fact of life. But who cares, let's learn the lessons, bolt down the hatches and get on with life. And what I would not give for a few shares in Google right now :-)

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 1:24

What keeps going when ping fails?

"In STRONG ANGEL, there were times when nothing else could get through -- Web, email, conferencing -- they all shut down when the available bandwidth shrinks too low, but Groove keeps going, even after ping.exe is no longer working."

That is just awe-inspiring, and true. One of Groove's greatest assets is its ability to work off-line and when back on-line to quietly get on with the job of exchanging deltas.

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 1:07

If you wnt a good insight into the technolgies involved in SA2 then http://www.walking-productions.com/strongangel/071704_evening_meeting.html is a movie that gives some great insights.

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 2:37

I have occasionally spouted on about globalisation versus localisation. What most people think of when they talk of that G-word is huge corporates dominating the world economy. And so they do dominate. But that's not my perspective. What I think of is the ability to operate in "local" mode across the globe. Over its time PopG has had users from places such Norway, Australia, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Canada, USA and of course the UK. (And if you are a PopG subscriber, past or present and I have forgotten to list your country then email/IM me and I will try to make amends in some future list.)

I list this list not to show off, but to indicate that although PopG's business is global in one sense, in reality it is local. The reason is because of what the other G-word is, and because of what PopG is. Together we are building very close-knit global community(ies). I know you, and you know me. You know what makes me tick and how to rattle me. But most of all we are a community. An increasingly very strong community.

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure to attend a Groove Networks developer conference in Beverly. At that conference a play was made around Groove's eco-system for its partners. At that time I treated the comment as a paternal top-down commentary on how partners might benefit from being part of the umbrella. And I am sure to this day that the comment was made in part at least with that intention.

But that paternal (or maternal!) part is, with no disrespect to any individual or group, a small trivial component on the true Eco-system that currently exists. The truth is that I know some of you better than I know myself. I trust you better than myself. And, though it is probably an odd word to utter in a business framework such as a Groove blog, but what the hell: I love you better than myself.

At that Groove conference I was having a beer and suddenly met someone face to face for the first (and so far only) time: I felt very emotional, and it wasn't the beer. We came across each other in the early days of Groove 1.x and shared a private space where we exchanged thoughts. Since then I had lost contact with over the last two years until last week. And there helping to run SA2 event I was pleased as punch that that same person was busy working on the project.

The result of this happenstance - increased productivity. When you know someone and trust them then you can just get on and do the job. If the job needs more work, it just gets done. And because you are working with friends you work harder and more openly, naturally.

I am not unique, my little story is being played out between pairs and groups of people across the Groove Globe. That's an Eco-System of the first order.

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 14:43