InfoWorld Tech Watch blog launches

I'm excited to announce that the InfoWorld News team has launched the InfoWorld Tech Watch weblog (with RSS feed, of course).  Consider this beta as we work out some of the issues with putting together InfoWorld's first group blog experiment.  Mark Jones, our executive editor for News, posted first with an explanation of what InfoWorld Tech Watch might become:

Bloggers love to talk about how this RSS-empowered medium is changing journalism forever. What's already clear to me is that blogs and 'traditional' news journalism are ideal partners for delivering, aggregating and analyzing news.  (read the rest)

We're using Movable Type 2.64 to run the Tech Watch weblog and we're really impressed so far.

Invisible IT

From this week's InfoWorld column, "Pros and cons of invisible IT":

With pieces running in the Harvard Business Review titled "IT Doesn't Matter" and all the talk about the commoditization of IT in the press, you would think that IT has gotten almost to the point of electricity -- just plug something into it, and it works. In some basic operational areas, IT has gotten substantially easier.

If you're a CTO running Windows XP on the desktop, you probably aren't hearing the same complaints about system crashes that you heard constantly during the pre-Windows 2000 days. On the back end, whether you're a Windows, Unix, or Linux shop, your servers are probably more stable than they were just a couple of years ago, but the comforting hum of desktops and servers doesn't mean that IT has become easy. There are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes in everyday IT that escape the view of many of the folks commenting on it. Unfortunately, invisibility is more or less equivalent to success.

Read the rest here.  One of my columns back in February 2002 had some similar themes: "In Praise of Laziness."

IDC and RSS

Jim McGee recently noted a number of instances of user level activity in the RSS world, among them some things that I have posted recently about analyst firms getting in on the action.   He notes a "shift in focus to thinking about actually increasing the value to customers."  Frankly, while I appreciate the value of the technical discussions surrounding RSS, I'm much more excited about the discussion of the applications of RSS for end users.  Jim's post is an thoughtful summary of that discussion.

On the end user note, there's one more feed to add to the analysts and RSS thread.  Abner Germanow and Chris Greene over at IDC (one of InfoWorld's sister companies at IDG) e-mailed me a few days ago to let me know that there are RSS believers in their organization.   Abner (Research Manager, Wireless LAN & Enterprise Networking at IDC)  wrote:

One problem our customers face is that we produce so much information it can be difficult for our larger clients to keep up. RSS feeds will help our clients manage that information flow.

To that end, IDC's press releases are now available in their first RSS feed (Chris tells me that this is Phase 1, with more to come).  Your first thought might be "who wants press releases in RSS?" but IDC's press releases appear to function more as an abstract of the research they offer, which means you can get some useful data points from them.  Of course, you can buy the full reports from them as well.  Leveraging RSS as a marketing and lead generation tool that intelligently serves the needs of people who consume vast quantities of information seems pretty smart to me.

When change is wrong follow-up

Ed Brill wrote a reasonable response to my recent column about my experiences with Lotus Notes.  Writing is sometimes an imperfect art, but the point I was trying to make (and one that Ed got clearly) was as he said "churn for the sake of churn is no good."  Lotus Notes was just an example.  Everyone has their irrational biases, and I was simply admitting mine. 

Somehow, I had managed to avoid Lotus Notes in my career (though I did have a brief encounter with Lotus ccMail when I worked at CNN).  My first exposure to Lotus Notes was at InfoWorld when I started in April 2001.

Lotus Notes isn't only used for e-mail at InfoWorld, though I would estimate that 98% of our usage is e-mail.   We have two key applications that are still Notes-based:  1) a vacation request system, and 2) a sales tool.   Notes is very much alive at InfoWorld, though we're basically in maintenance mode.

At the end of his post, Ed offers a fair suggestion:

I think it would be better, though, if the glass were half-full, and he looked at the real value of the current system vs. its alternatives.

OK, here's a quick half-full version:

• Although the e-mail interface in Notes could be vastly improved, the interface is consistent across platforms.  Whether a Mac or Windows user has a problem, you know what you're dealing with.


• Replication offers some level of data redundancy for users' mailboxes.


• Applications can be web-enabled fairly easily


• Lotus Notes is not actually that expensive


• In the e-mail realm, the Lotus Notes client seems to be mostly virus-proof


• If you have the budget to invest in a staff Notes developer, you can do a lot of different things to leverage the system


• Finally, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

In the next couple of weeks, we're upgrading to Notes 6 and I'm expecting no disruptions. . . that's why I'm sticking with Notes.

CTO on the go

Late night at the office, and a quick dinner stop at the McDonald's on 3rd and Townsend here in San Francisco (a nice glimpse into the glamour of being InfoWorld's CTO).  Saw the Wi-Fi promotions for their new wireless offering and couldn't resist. 

Bottom line:  it works, and it works well.  Completely seamless.  I think I might be the first CTO to blog using McDonald's Wi-Fi.  Do I get a medal, or maybe just a Happy Meal toy?

UPDATE: Actually, when I posted this, Radio gave me upstreaming errors and my weblog page was immediately zero-length, so maybe it doesn't work so well after all.

I should be shot?

My latest column "When change is wrong" details my odyssey with  Lotus Notes -- how I inherited it, decided to migrate from it, and ultimately decided not to go through with it for sound business reasons.  Just a few minutes ago, I read a post in our forums from Ken Yee (maintainer of the Lotus Notes FAQ) that said I should be shot for using Lotus Notes for only e-mail because it offers so much more.  In my column, I had complained about how tightly-coupled all the parts of Notes are, and Ken sees that as an advantage:

This tight integration is precisely why Notes does what it does so well. It was the first widely available PKI infrastructure, so your users can sign and encrypt documents. Security is an inherent part of the infrastructure, down to the document level, and even field level if you use encryption. You have applications (and their constant improvements) that replicate out with your data, so you don't have to have a separate infrastructure to push out new applications to users. Your users can run Notes apps remotely. All of this packaged in a RAD (Rapid Application Development) environment that lets developers (and even power users!) automate a company's unique workflows. Your developers don't have to waste time building their own pipes and infrastructure and can concentrate on making your company more efficient.

And, finally: 

Having someone like Chad as a CTO to guide your company's technology decisions is pretty scary 

I guess every day at InfoWorld is Halloween. :)  In any case, I would suggest that Ken read Ray Ozzie's essay "Extreme Mobility," which carries some extra weight since Ray drove the original concept and development of Notes.  Ray's eloquent and credible critique of Notes and his description of the design decisions behind Groove resulting from his experience in building Notes really resonate with me as a daily Notes and Groove user.  Groove has it right because Ray has it right.  (So does the CIO of a 100,000+ employee company, whom he quotes anonymously.)  It feels good to be on the phone, drop a file into a secure "shared space" and have the person on the other end say almost instantaneously -- "got it!"  No dealing with replication, firewalls, or other annoyances.  That's the way collaboration needs to work in 2003.

The new environment we're all operating in does create a certain amount of fear, but I'm guessing that the folks at InfoWorld who are being productive with Groove wouldn't see my leadership as "scary" -- they're too busy feeling empowered.

New InfoWorld RSS feeds and changes

We just added a bunch of new RSS feeds here at InfoWorld. You can see the entire list on our homepage.  Each of our top-level Tech Index categories now has an RSS feed, and we also threw in a Test Center Reviews RSS feed so those of you with RSS readers can more easily keep up with the product reviews we are doing every week.

Responding to the suggestions of folks like Dwight Shih as I promised, we've also made our feeds less "parsimonious" (as Dwight put it). Instead of just using the "deck" (journalism jargon for what you might call the sub-headline) as the description, we're using the first paragraph of the story, which certainly makes the items a bit fuller.

On the advertising front (see pointers to earlier discussion here about ads for NewsGator), we are trying out a new way of advertising using an auction-based system (similar to Google) called Industry Brains.  We're already using Industry Brains on our site (see "InfoWorld Marketplace" at the bottom of our homepage, for example), but it will work in our RSS feeds like this:  Advertisers currently bid on links in our News section.  The top bidder will receive ad placement in our Top News RSS feed for the first feed of the day (i.e. not every time the feed is updated).  The ad link and copy will appear in the description of an entry after the editorial content and indicated by "ADVERTISEMENT" text.  As I said in our early trials of RSS-based advertising, we're experimenting and look forward to your feedback, either via e-mail or in your own weblog.  Matt McAlister, our director of online product development, is driving this effort, so feel free to e-mail him if you have questions or comments.

As a final note, I just have the privilege of announcing this -- Chris Lin on our development team did all the work with her usual speed, ingenuity, and good humor. Thanks, Chris!

Keeping IT real

One of the cool things about working as InfoWorld's CTO is that I get to do all the usual technology stuff, but I also get to talk to a lot of really intelligent people in the industry.  I hear about new products and technologies early, and I get to watch developments in the industry up-close.  When new gear comes into the Test Center, I can go kick the tires on it as long as I don't get in the way of an analyst on deadline.  I really can't complain. 

At the same time, I have to keep the trains running on time at InfoWorld.  That means getting my hands dirty every days with a production CMS, databases, networks, application servers, etc.   I think it helps me write for InfoWorld with true perspective -- I'm dealing with the same things our readers deal with.  I'm sure many of my fellow IT professionals have read stories at various times in the technology press and thought, "This guy has obviously never done real IT."  Well, that gets to the second thing I like about working at InfoWorld: we stay very close to real IT. 

We make it a point to saturate ourselves in IT reality every day. Paul Krill writes about Apache, and Kevin Varley on our development team digs deeply enough into Apache to discover obscure bugs and bring them to the attention of the Apache team for fixing.  Cathleen Moore writes about the RSS and weblog standards debates, and Jon Udell helps define the direction of RSS.  InfoWorld runs a special report on fighting spam and includes a story from our own IT Manager Kevin Railsback on how we're fighting it on the ground with SpamAssassin on our live production network.  We write about weblogs and we do weblogs (with more to come).  I think staying engaged with technology in this very tangible way keeps us honest, and it's certainly fun for me.

Jupiter Research gets RSS and weblogs

When posting about Mr. Safe, analyst firms, and RSS a couple of weeks ago, I criticized Gartner and Forrester/Giga for not covering RSS effectively.  Ezra Ball at Forrester let me know that they have RSS feeds, despite a lack of significant coverage of RSS in the research they offer.

Today, I got an e-mail from Michael Gartenberg, VP and Research Director at Jupiter Research (the inline links are mine):

Hi, just a quick note that Jupiter was the first research firm to have analyst weblogs (including RSS feeds). Our Microsoft Monitor research service also has a companion weblog with RSS as well. In addition, Jupiter ran the first business weblog conference this past spring and we will be doing a follow up to it on the West Coast this fall. We have covered the RSS issues extensively in our written research as well coverage of Weblog adoption both in terms of who is writing them and who is reading them. Other firms often do not cover trends like RSS until they become mainstream, Jupiter has a slightly different approach.

Jupiter certainly deserved a mention in my original post.  Their weblog conference was well-attended by folks in the community and  they have a substantial weblog presence.  Unlike Gartner's weblogs, all of Jupiter's weblogs have RSS feeds -- a weblog without an RSS feed is like a cheeseburger with only the bread.

Good technical reasons to use Mozilla

Others have commented on the recent goings-on with Mozilla and browsers in the larger scheme of things (see Tim Bray, Jon Udell, and Dave Winer), but recently I've had three interesting problems with browsers and I'm glad that I had Mozilla on my machine to help me get out of the jam.  (I use Mozilla as my regular mail client, though I will admit that I use IE as my browser.)

SITUATION #1: This is a relatively minor thing, but I was installing a CGI-based application on a development Apache server that listens on an odd port, 9003 in this case.  After I configured the app, the first and second pages seemed to work ok, but the third page gave me the dreaded generic "This page cannot be displayed" IE 404 page.  The Address bar in IE still contained the same URL I was already using successfully (only with different query string values) so the "Cannot find server of DNS error" on the IE error page was really confusing. After searching Google, various FAQs, and the appropriate mailing lists, I decided to load the app in Mozilla, and bingo!  Mozilla said "The connection was refused when attempting to contact my.server.com:9002".  Ah ha!  Where the IE page gave me no real information, Mozilla pointed me directly to the cause of the failure.  The CGI code had required that I specify the hostname and port on the Apache server so that it could write out redirected URLs properly, and I had inadvertantly entered "9002" in the CGI code.  I changed it to 9003 and everything worked.  Small (and perhaps careless) error, but things like that happen when you're mucking around with systems and Mozilla saved me from myself.

SITUATION #2: In a story like Jon Udell's just-posted "The best way to can spam," we have an in-line graphic thumbnail that leads to a larger graphic.   After the story posted on Friday afternoon, one of our few Safari users noted that the thumbnail image didn't appear in the browser, and when the larger image was clicked on, a bunch of binary garbage flooded the browser window, but with a tell-tale "GIF89" header visible.  I confirmed the same behavior in Mozilla on Windows XP.  The cause was upstream in our production process -- some of our Mac users along the way didn't add the .gif extension to the file (you don't have to with a Mac) and both Safari (ironically) and Mozilla choked.  I couldn't find anything in the W3C's documents on HTML/XHTML to suggest that providing file extensions to image objects was required or even recommended, but Mozilla broke the tie and helped me decide whether Safari or IE was the oddball.

SITUATION #3: If you've ever worked with elaborate redirection schemes or mod_rewrite, the error messages in Mozilla are extremely helpful.  Mozilla has a nice error message that lets you know when you've created an infinite loop, while IE just hangs.  I haven't done that in a while so I don't have the specific error message in front of me, but it's saved me a few times.

Open source support really works

One of the early arguments against Linux and other open source solutions was lack of support.  People "in the know" have always known that the better projects (Apache, Linux, FreeBSD, MySQL, to name a few) provide amazing and transparent support via extensive documentation, mailing lists, and public bug databases.  Just recently, we here at InfoWorld benefited first-hand from the beauty of open source development, specifically Apache.  Kevin Varley, one of our developers, discovered a bug in Apache and it was promptly dealt with by the Apache team, with a detailed (and friendly) explanation of the bug and a patch to fix it (see the bug report).  I already knew the open source support system worked, but it was nice to see it up closer than I usually do.

Here's what happened.  We're using Apache 2.0 for infoworld.com, having upgraded from 1.3 back in January of this year.  We needed to do some basic dynamic page generation for our redesign, and we decided that the simplest way to fulfill this need would be to use conditional server-side includes -- running an app server with JSP or even PHP would have been overkill in this case.   I've used pretty much all permutations of server-side includes in the past, except for conditional SSIs, but since the documentation for this capability hadn't changed since Apache 1.3, I figured it was safe.  Unfortunately, seemingly random problems with SSI processing seemed to occur.  As Kevin noted in his bug report:

Initially, we noticed that, on certain pages on our site, SSI directives would
stop being processed about halfway through the page.  I began looking into the
problem by checking our syntax, looking for any wierd characters in a hex
editor and then finally by making small changes to the file to see if it
affected the service of the page.  The first oddity that I came across was
that if I opened up the problematic file and inserted a single space at the
beginning, the SSI directives would all be correctly processed.  If I again
removed the space, the problem came back..about halfway down the page, after a
block of SSI conditionals, the rest of the SSIs were not processed and the SSI
tags were sent to the browser.  After a little more investigation, I noticed
that the problem seemed to always manifest itself when the last character of
an SSI conditional block (e.g.  the final > in <!--#endif-->) occurred at the
8000th byte in the file .  To test this out, I created a completely new test
file, ensuring that the final character in a conditional SSI block was the
8000th byte and I placed another include immediately after the conditional
block.  Sure enough, the directives in the conditional block were processed
successfully but the include after the conditionals was sent to the browser. 
I then tested this same issue out using a virtual include directive instead of
a conditional block and the result was the same.

Ultimately, we learned from the Apache team that the bug was confined to Apache 2.0 servers that are configured with "EnableMMAP off," which is recommended if your Apache server uses an NFS volume (such as a Network Appliance, which we are using) as its DocumentRoot.  Fairly obscure stuff, but important to us.

Considering that the Apache project is driven completely by volunteers, I'm really impressed with the initial response to the bug on June 29 (Andre Malo -- in the photo here -- wrote from Germany: "Thanks for your detailed description! Will dig into the code.") and the ultimate follow-through when a patch was delivered by Cliff Woolley (from Virginia) on July 11.  Thom May also chimed in from London.  This is truly great global support and a small but illustrative example of the power of open source collaboration.

If you're running the Apache web server (or any of the other projects supported by the Apache Software Foundation), you should really contribute.   My C skills would be a burden to the Apache Software Foundation, so I'm sending them a check today.   A big thanks to Andre, Cliff, and the rest of the Apache web server team! 

Google, Kraftwerk, and the joys of computing

This week in the print and online editions of InfoWorld, my review of the Google Search Appliance is running.  Because the review appears in print, it has to adhere to certain length limitations and stick to a "just the facts ma'am" style.  On the positive side, that means I have to be concise with my words, and when I'm not, I've got helpful editors like Ted Samson to get me straight.  On the down side, it means that I have to leave out some of my "between the lines" thinking on the review.  This is probably a good thing for the reader, but I can't resist pointing a couple of extraneous things out here without the space limitations.

One line that had to be edited from my review read:

This appliance is no toy, although it does come with the first enterprise-solution manual I've seen that reads, "The appliance will play a tune when it is ready."

Yes, you unwrap the Google Search Appliance, feed it power and network connectivity, power it up, then you sit there for a few minutes until it plays a song.  I have to admit, I giggled when I heard it.  The instructions for the Google Search Appliance reminded me of the lyrics in Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator" from the album Computer World  released in 1981 (many years after IDG's magazine ComputerWorld was founded, I might add):

By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody

Kraftwerk's Computer World album is a treasure trove of geek lyrics, and considering that the album was released in 1981, it's all the more remarkable.  Kraftwerk celebrated dial-up in "Computer Love":

I call this number
For a data date
I don't know what to do
I need a rendezvous

. . . the ubiquity of computers in "Computer World" (in 1981!):

Business, numbers, money, people. . . .
Crime, travel, communication, entertainment

. . . .and in "Home Computer," you've got a six-minute, seventeen-second ode to the joys of programming with only these lyrics:

I program my home computer
Beam myself into the future

Buy this album, listen to "Home Computer," and try humming these lines the next time you're coding away.  Believe me, it's fun in a geeky sort of way.

Forrester gets RSS

In my post about Mr. Safe, RSS, and IT analysts, I criticized the analysts for not "getting it" on RSS.   I'm glad to report that I didn't have the full story on at least one of the analyst firms.  Ezra Ball, a senior web developer at Forrester, wrote to me and pointed out that while Forrester has not covered RSS heavily, they do produce RSS feeds themselves.  To me, actually doing RSS is a greater demonstration of "getting it" than only writing about it.  According to Ezra:

Forrester does provide a couple of RSS feeds: one for all research ( http://www.forrester.com/rss ), and one for "free" (requires guest registration) research ( http://www.forrester.com/rss/free ).  We've actually had these for about three years, but people are still only starting to wake up to how to consume RSS.

Thanks, Ezra.  I appreciate the note -- it's always interesting to hear directly from the developers within organizations like Forrester.  I also got one thing wrong:  Forrester owns Giga, Giga doesn't own Forrester.

A note on corrections:  I've been following the recent discussion over corrections and updates to weblogs, best summarized by Scott Rosenberg.  My policy is simple:  for simple corrections -- like the Giga / Forrester correction above -- I will note them in a new post and place an inline correction within the original item.  For more involved corrections, I will create a new post and link to the more involved explanation at the top of the original item.

RSS and business -- what really matters

As I've noted before, I had been swimming in the seas of RSS for a while as a producer of RSS content at media companies, but it wasn't until recently that I had my awakening as a consumer of RSS.  In a classic case of (possibly) bad timing, my personal RSS awakening converged with the recent Echo discussions.   Whether or not anything will change is to be determined, but my discussions with non-developers who use RSS indicate that they are pretty bored by the whole discussion and just don't want the rug pulled out from under them -- Technology Marketing writer Jonathan Angel represents this contingent well when he writes "Stop wanking and drive."  In any case, I'm reminded of an excerpt from Ellen Ullman's book Close to the Machine, a book which offers the best glimpse into the mindset of programming that I've ever read:

When the humans come back to talk changes, I can just run the program. Show them: Here. Look at this. See? This is not just talk. This runs. Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have are words and what I have is this, this thing I've built, this operational system. Talk all you want, but this thing here: it works.
(this quote is actually on page 2 of the Salon excerpt)

Of course there are valid reasons to have this discussion and valid reasons to correct some past mistakes, but my sense in reading some of the hoopla is we're simply experiencing some classic developer behavior.  In my experience managing developers and being a developer, developers are always enamored of the new system they are working on -- especially if it's one they've conceived.  The old system replacing the new system always sucks -- especially if another developer built it.  End users like Jonathan Angel end up sitting on the sidelines wondering what the fuss is about.  Sometimes the results of these overhauls are excellent, but just as often, the users feel like they didn't really get anything noticeably better after all the noise dies down.  We'll see what happens here.

The developer discussions aside, e-mail from my last column about RSS elicited some interested feedback from the business side of things, which is what really matters if RSS or RSS-like technologies are going to be ultimately successful.  Greg Reinacker pointed me to an RSS case study for his NewsGator product (full disclosure:  Greg advertises his product in InfoWorld's RSS feeds as I've discussed here).  While the case study obviously focuses on how Greg's product was leveraged in a business setting, the real story is how RSS met a defined business need, and met it well.  Yes, I know case studies are marketing tools, but I include NewsGator's marketing material here because it illustrates a coming-of-age of the RSS concept, i.e. material you can show non-technical people to help them "get it."  Also, everything in this case study rings true based on my experience with RSS. (a Google search for "RSS" and "case study" actually gives you the NewsGator case study as the first useful link -- if you know of any more RSS case studies, let me know):

Triple Point started with a simple goal: "The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information ‘hunt and peck’ that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work," says Allie [Rogers, CIO of Triple Point Technology].

I also heard from Phil Gomes, the co-founder of PR agency G2B Group, which has a blog of its own and a whitepaper on RSS and corporate communications.  Jon Udell has already covered Phil's whitepaper well, but suffice it to say that it's refreshing to see that some people in the PR world are thinking about this and getting it.  I subscribed to the G2B RSS feed so I can stay up-to-speed with where they are headed in their thinking.  The great thing about weblogs/RSS is that I can afford time-wise to peek into the thinking of this world on a regular basis -- I'm subscribed to 31 different sources currently and have yet to feel overburdened by the amount of incoming information.

As a final note on business and RSS, Paul Beard references my previous post about RSS awareness at Gartner, Forrester, and Giga, pointing out that if I search for RDF on those sites, I would do a little better.  Thanks, Paul.  I'll let Mr. Safe know, but I have a feeling he's getting pretty tired of talking about this and is thinking about other things.

PC World adds RSS feed

PC World, one of InfoWorld's sister companies at IDG, has just started offering an RSS feed with their top news.  Judging from my conversations with their online folks, expect more where that came from.

RSS killed the Infoglut Star

It's "all RSS, all the time" this week in my weblog, and my weekly column for InfoWorld is no different.  In this week's installment, I write about how RSS has really changed the way I consume information for the better:

It's fairly common knowledge in pop-culture trivia circles that the first video to air on MTV was the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," a song with a title that proved prophetic in its bold announcement of a shift in the way music was consumed and marketed. Something similar but perhaps just as profound is happening with the delivery of information online with tools that leverage RSS [read the rest here]

It's truly amazing how something so simple -- almost dumb -- can make such a difference, but trust me, it does. 

What RSS and Echo mean to Mr. Safe's Gartner

In all the discussions with Mr. Safe (here, here, here, and many more I'm sure), I've been wondering what happens just after the conversation when Mr. Safe is left alone in his office.  Tim Bray's original conversation with Mr. Safe ends this way:

Mr. Safe: Thanks, Tim. I think we’ll consider putting this on the schedule for an IT task force to take a real serious look at once we get through this fiscal year. Sorry I have to let you go now, but I have business to attend to.

I'm guessing one item of "business" might be a quick call to Mr. Safe's Gartner analyst.  Fortune 500 CIOs pay these guys lots of money to keep them ahead of the curve, right?  I did a little bit of digging, and I think that conversation will be very short:

Mr. Safe: Mr. Gartner, what's this RSS thing I'm hearing about?

Mr. Gartner: Just a moment, Mr. Safe.  [types a search for "RSS" into gartner.com and pauses].   Ah.  So you're looking for a tape backup solution?  I can dig up some information on Seagate's Removable Storage Solutions, or RSS, line of products.  You might know that they changed their name to Certance back in April.

Mr. Safe:  I don't think that's it.  I thought it had something to do with XML.   Got anything on this Echo business Jon Udell was telling me about?

Mr. Gartner: [searches for "Echo" on gartner.com] Looking for a VoIP solution, Mr.Safe?  Network switching gear? 

Mr. Safe: Hmm.  We must not be talking about the same thing.  Oh well, never mind.  If you guys don't have anything about it in your research, it must not be that important.  Hey, can you put me down for the Gartner Symposium in Orlando in October?   Are you up for a round of golf while I'm down there?

Mr. Gartner: Sure thing.  Talk to you soon.  Bye.

Gartner is not alone among analyst firms in ignoring RSS.  Mr. Safe wouldn't find much searching for RSS at Forrester other than how to "boost margins with merchandise optimization."  Nothing at Giga (which owns Forrester) either (you'll have to search yourself since they chose POST over GET).   [Correction 07/14/03: Forrester owns Giga.]  Call it whatever you want, it's invisible to these guys at this point.  That doesn't mean that it's not important (it is!), just that a lot of people have zero visibility on it right now.  Maybe that means it's a good time to make some changes while no one is looking.

(I do have to hand it to Gartner for having some form of weblogs on their site, though it would be nice to have RSS feeds associated with them.)