Blogging Roller

In the past we've had up to ten attendees. A US congressman, an actual female and once even Sam Ruby showed up, but since Cafe Cyclo shutdown and we moved to Helios it's been just Josh and I. That's fine and all, Josh's a great guy, but we'd really dig some company. So come on down and entertain us with stories of your fascinating blog-related legal troubles, sinister government conspiracies you've exposed via podcast, that band you saw last night or maybe just the time you forgot the HTML tag for making text blink. Did I mention they make a great latte at Helios? They have beer too.

When: First and third Tuesdays of every month at 6:30PM

Where: Helios Coffee (Map)

413 Glenwood Avenue
Raleigh, NC 27603
919.838.5177

In case you haven't heard the news or followed my Latest Links: at an analyst conference last week IBM announced a new server-side product suite called Ventura that includes blogging, social bookmarking and social networking. Ventura is Java EE-based, runs on Websphere (with DB2 or Oracle) and the blog server component is based on Apache Roller (incubating) 3.1. That's the very same version of Roller that we're currently running at blogs.sun.com.

So how do I feel about it? I'm thrilled to see IBM contributing to, building on and supporting the Roller project. No matter how you cut it, that's good news for Roller users including those at blogs.sun.com who are already benefiting from IBM's contributions (e.g. tagging support in 3.1). Of course to be honest, I'm also a little disappointed that Sun isn't shipping and supporting a Roller distribution -- that's always been one of my goals. Sun has put heck of a lot of engineering time into Roller, helped to grow the community in the Apache incubator and benefitted greatly via blogs.sun.com -- it sure would be nice to share those benefits with our customers by offering service and support.

• People Over Process: IBM SWG: Lotus "Ventura"
  "the most exciting thing I've seen at the event is IBM's 'Ventura' project"
• Elias Torres: A New Ventura
  "The experience of taking something built by the community and making it a product has been incredibly rewarding"
• snellspace.com: chmod 777 ventura
  "Sprinkled throughout the entire suite is support for Atom and the Atom Publishing Protocol"
• The lost outpost: Ventura is revealed
  "I've been a user of IBM's internal blogging platform - known as BlogCentral, and based off of Roller - for well over a year now."
• Mixing Dojo and Roller
  "category chooser that uses Dojo (a powerful JavaScript library) to create a Fisheye effect"

Hmmm... That link to Cote's People Over Process blog is now a 404. I'll let Cote explain that if he wants to. You can find details similar to those that Cote posted in Luis Suarez's blog post titled IBM Lotus Ventura: IBM's Take of Social Software within the Enterprise. Here's an excerpt: 

Lotus Ventura is supposed to be IBM’s adventure (Pun intended ) into the social computing world for the enterprise. Yes, once again, that IBM 2.0 thing. And as you may have been able to read already over at Cote’s weblog post Ventura would be an application that will integrate a number of different social software tools that, as James mentioned, some of us, inside of IBM, have been using for years now!:

1. IBM’s BluePages (a.k.a. IBM’s employee directory): So that expertise location within the enterprise can be easier than ever having access not only to knowledge workers but also to the information behind those same knowledge workers. That is, their information.
2. Dogear: IBM’s social bookmarking application: and which I have talked about over here a few times already.
3. Activities: Of which you would be able to read some more about on the presentation I shared yesterday over here from Mike Roche (Slides 6, 23, 46 and 49) and of which I will talk about some time later on.
4. Communities: Given my role as a community builder and knowledge manager, this is actually one of the components that I will be really looking forward to and that, as time goes by, I will be able to share some further details on it.
5. Roller: Or, as we all know, weblogging; yes, that is right. Ventura will have a component that would connect knowledge workers with the world of weblogs using the Roller weblogging engine, which is basically what we have been using as well inside IBM with Blog Central. I have been keeping my Intranet weblog over there for nearly three years and it would be an incredible experience to be able to see it integrate nicely into Ventura’s other components. Nifty!
6. Integration with other components: Like search or Lotus Sametime 7.5, amongst others. Actually with the inclusion of that integration with Sametime 7.5 we would be getting the best out of both worlds, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. And all that available from a single point of entry. Can it get better than this ? Hummm. I don’t think so.