October, 2008

Yesterday, I attended the first CloudCamp in Belgium, which was held in Brussels. It was at a very nice venue, and the attending and presenting crowd was of very high quality.

There was much to be seen and more to be learnt. However… it wasn’t an unconference at all. Yes, at the end of the schedule there was a piece left “unscheduled”, but that time was wholly consumed at the bar.

Oh, wait… so maybe it was an unconference after all then… :-)

I especially enjoyed the talk of Raphaël in which he stressed the need for openness in the cloud, as that is exactly what made the Internet such a success. If the “cloud” is willing to turn into this next layer on top of the Internet, it indeed will have to make sure that it’s as open as can be. Otherwise, all we’ll get is another useless network like we have today with the mobile phone network and it’s few übermasters.

By the way… MyOwnDB is as open as can be! ;-)

Dag,

In follow-up to your PS, I would like to refer to a statement I did in the past about blog comments (4^th paragraph). Please also mind the spam notice.

I’m sure you knew already, however. :-p

I must agree with Philip that Usenet remains the best platform for online non-real-time discussions. May we welcome you at be.comp.os.linux?

Dag,

Thank you for follow-up.

I recognised the difference between automated spam and normal people trying to advertise commercial websites through on-topic comments. But from the point of view of my original post, they are the same. They both consist out of normal, plain <insert a language here> text with more or less correct grammar and spelling. When manually put into the SPAM marked auto-learning queue or self-learning spam filters, they both result in too strict scanning, as the distinguishing line between unsolicited email and genuine messages gets blurred more and more.

In Mollom speak, this results in the widening of the “unsure” strip in between the “spam” and “ham” extremes.