An article in the Seattle Times on how companies can use blogs for marketing and promotion.

"Blog speed" offers immediate feedback from the "blogosphere": the blog-aware Web community. Web logs also have the advantage of near-instant indexing by Google, which recognizes them as a source of edgy info on the Web. And blogs create automatic ongoing archives.

Another potential plus for blogs: Companies can get out of users' mailboxes. Instead of spamming with so-called product news and consumer updates, they can "blog" the stuff and let users who really want the information come on their own volition.

Recently, four Linux companies decided to combine their versions of Linux into a common distribution called UnitedLinux. One of them is Caldera. News.com has a QA with Caldera's CEO. His view: "There are two major reasons as to why Linux is not being more widely adopted in the enterprise: certification of business applications and fragmentation of the code base. We believe that with this announcement we have solved both of these. With the four Linux companies involved, we get a global perspective, we have a strong global network, but more importantly, we have a single product that can be certified one time. "

I think one of the confusing things about Linux is definitely the multiplicity of versions. As developers, one has to make a bet, because there are constant upgrades and its difficult to keep up with versions of multiple vendors. That said, the companies should have just adopted Red Hat's base as the standard: Red Hat has over 50% of the market and has won. No point trying to make one more distribution. United, taken to the extreme. The enemy is Windows, not Red Hat.

The opportunity for Linux is on the desktop in the emerging markets of the world. Few US or Europe based companies seem to get this. Its the new users who can easily adopy Linux -- migration of Windows users is not easy. Forget the first 500 million, focus on the next billion who cannot afford to pay for Microsoft Windows and Office.

An article in Salon on a new methodology in programming -- XP, or extreme programming:

Designed to overcome the endemic problem of programmers promising one thing and delivering something totally different, the XP methodology is built around putting the face-to-face interaction between developers and customers -- not to mention developers and developers -- over the keyboard instead of over the conference table. XP's underlying article of faith is that if programmers and customers just communicate better, quality software will be the natural result.