If you’re coming to this URL for the first time in awhile, you may think you’re in the wrong place… Nope, we’ve just finally soft-launched our new website. The old one was largely hard-coded (as was common back in 1998 when it was launched). It got to be too hard to maintain, as many of you noticed. Many thanks to our volunteer webmaster, Steve Mallett, for putting up this new Drupal-based site that we can edit and contribute to more easily.

I am continuing to process Made To Stick, a Guns, Germs, and Steel-quality treatment about why some ideas survive and others die. I heard the authors interviewed courtesy of our local National Public Radio affiliate WUNC (which does their share of great content generation, btw), and to fit the ultra-dense format of radio, they said “there are six success factors for making an idea stick, but the first three, Simple, Unexpected, and Concrete, are the most important.” As the authors tell it, experts suffer from The Curse of Knowledge, and the nature of the curse is such that it is almost impossible for those so cursed to keep things simple or, for that matter, concrete. Complexity is fun, and abstraction is what gives theories their power. It also makes them notoriously transient in people’s minds.

Nat Torkington asked recently Is “Open Source” Now Completely Meaningless. Certainly not; in fact, there are several reasons this label is still valid and important. I’m a pragmatist, so I’m not going to wave any flags or sing any anthems to argue this, just point out what has worked and continues to work.

First of all, let’s be clear about what “open source” means. Software is ‘open source’ when it is issued under a license compliant with the Open Source Definition. Nothing any clueless or malevolant corporate marketeer does can change that, because the term originated in the open-source developer community and only we have the authority to redefine it.

That seems to be the opinion of Stephen Walli in this blog posting. I just finished reading Made To Stick, a book recommended to me by my trendspotting wife Amy, and it’s quite obvious that Brent has both a command of the facts, an understanding of the context, and a gift for relating them in ways that are simple, unexpected, concrete, and other ways that make the ideas stick. It is wonderful (and refreshing) to see a presentation that is at once so right on the facts and so complete in its explanation. Great work, Brent!

For some time, the term “Open Standard” has been gaining in market popularity. Unlike Open Source, which has had a…