One of my favorite quotes. Substitute the word "passion" for "art" and this can apply to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

To the young people of this country I wish to say:

If you practice an art, be proud of it, & make it proud of you; if you now hesitate on the threshold of your maturity, wondering what rewards you should seek, wondering perhaps if there are any rewards beyond the opportunity to feed & sleep & breed, turn to the art which has moved you most readily, take what part in it you can, as participant, spectator, secret practitioner, or hanger-on & waiter at the door.  Make your living any way you can, but neglect no sacrifice at your chosen altar.  It may break your heart, it may drive you half mad, it may betray you into unrealizable ambitions or blind you to mercantile opportunities with its wandering fires.  But it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right; it will open the temple doors to you & enable you to walk with those who have come nearest among men to what men may sometimes be.

- Maxwell Anderson

I was recently read the summary of the Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketer, as depicted in the graphic here. There are numerous other reviews of this report, including the one by MediaPost's OnlineSpin.

What I find most striking to me about the Forrester report is what they left out, rather than what they included. This report ranked "community platform vendors", not community platforms. The difference is profound and central to most social media strategies.

While the community platform vendors that Forrester ranked offer valuable consulting services wrapped around their software, the fact remains that their software is proprietary. This means a small number of people coding and testing the product.

In contrast, open platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. have literally thousands of developers and testers. This means innovation and maturity that is exponentially more powerful, so long as the organization guiding the platform understands how to harness that horsepower.

Forrester as much as acknowledged this omission in their closing paragraph:

the exploding WordPress blog platform has demonstrated how open standards can become a huge platform advantage because they rally stakeholders, especially passionate developers, to iterate and innovate at a rapid clip. I hope and anticipate the same will happen in the community platform space.

For the 5th entry in my blog series on Web 2.0 Technology Topics, I turn to web feed readers. Feed readers are software that resides either on your personal computer (Mac, Windows, Linux) or on a web server and allow you to collect content from a variety of different websites into one single place.

One of the most powerful technologies in the Web 2.0 arsenal isn't so much a technology as it is a style of communication. I'm referring to a blog, which derives it name from the combination of the words web log, meaning a website where entries are written and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. You can learn from links at the end of this article, but here I'll focus on understanding backend technology.

I recently started writing a column for the European Newsletter of The Concours Group (updated: now part of nGenera). I'll use my blog here as a place to post these articles and make them available to others.
The purpose of the postings listed below is to build some common vocabulary in fairly simple "business terms". These articles will intentionally be short and written for non-techies. Here's an initial list of Web 2.0 technology topics that I plan to cover (or already have). As articles are written, the topics here will link to them.