Digital Web Magazine published an interesting interview with Mena Trott – co-founder and owner of SixApart – about SixApart itself, Movable Type and the blogging tool market. To be read!

DigitalWeb: How do you characterize the nature of the competition between you and Blogger and WordPress, and some of the other folks out there? Is it collaborative, with everyone wanting to grow the whole industry in an effort to get a piece of a bigger pie, or is it becoming more competitive?

Mena Trott: It’s hard. We and Blogger are both very focused on what we’re doing. In terms of knowing people, we talk to the Blogger team a lot and are on very good terms with them. We both have such different markets. When you have a free product and a subscription product in the same market, there is overlap, but it’s not cutthroat. In terms of collaboration, there can be more.

Unfortunately, we’re given a rap because we are so dominant, I guess, in terms of use. People see us as this big guy who they want to bring down, oddly, when we really aren’t—we’re still a small company. That’s frustrating. We’re more than willing to work with people. Being big and corporate completely goes against the things the company is all about.

[via eMarketer]

About 50% of new motor vehicle buyers have had their decisions on make/model and price influenced by information they found on the Internet.

One reason for the rising popularity of manufacturer sites is that they generally provide the most accurate information on the vehicles.

So, as it is clearly a trend, I would like to test myself the AdSense program of Google. I tried to integrate it “smoothly” in my weblog (see right to the title).

First impression: the contextual choice of the ads is really working very well. Impressing…

I’m testing the beta version 7.0 of Perfect Disk from Raxco since yesterday. Already published a review of the version 6.0 of Perfect Disk.

It seems that the guys from Raxco did a good job! New features:

20% less memory consumption

Improved speed on larger drives

Improved user interface

Support for mount points

Network Configuration Management Wizard – Allows you to globally set most of PerfectDisk’s registry keys without using Active Directory.

For chance, Laurent (this URL is crazy!) told me before that I forgot to mention in my last post about our wakeboard experience on the lake of Zürich that I was talking about THE Laurent of the very well-known French site about .NET technology called Tech Head Brothers. To be sure that there is no possible misunderstanding remaining, I publish again the picture of Laurent (you know, this Laurent), trying to initiate a new kind of wakeboard-style called “submarine wakeboard”.

PS: Laurent, I know, there will be some reprisals from your side ;-) Anyway!

Three professors of Wharton tried to find out if it possible to quantify and to measure the quality and efficiency of Corporate Governance.

For chance, the answer is clearly NO. A kind of common sense, I think… Some extracts:

“Lots of people are coming up with governance scorecards […] They’re coming up with best practices and selling this stuff. As far as we can tell, there’s no evidence that those scorecards map into better corporate performance or better behavior by managers.”

[The three professors] do think corporate governance matters, but after puzzling over reams of company numbers, they are not confident that anyone can measure whether one firm’s governance is better than another’s at least, not by using typical metrics.

I specially like this one:

In the absence of effective measurement tools, investors who are trying to assess firms’ governance have to do it the old-fashioned way. That is, they have to do their homework, examining companies one at a time.

Source: Corporate Governance by the Numbers: It Doesn’t Work

Some days ago, I explained that we had some fun in Zürich with some of my colleagues. We began with a McDo, have a look here :-) After the McDo, we did some wakeboard on the Zurich’s lake. Lorenz was really good:

I could start after the third try, somehow still “tense” :-)

Laurent tried a new kind of wakeboard called “submarine wakeboard”, also named “plouf wakeboard” ;-)

[Via vowe]

IBM can be really funny and, in a way, completely ridiculous.

Although IBM is very strongly implemented in the industry I’m working for (insurance), we are using succesfully BEA Weblogic since more than 4 years. I must say I really like the contacts we had with this company and the technology vision they are implementing. A great integrated product!

On the other side, you have IBM with its Websphere product-line, not really integrated (at least ;-), not very convincing to my mind, but quite a good success on the market. Now the following example – how to enable security in a Websphere portal – is really convincing me that we are on the good way ;-) I know, I know, it’s just an example… Do not forget to have a look at the last sentence – These steps are not supported and are provided as is. The cherry on the cake :-)

Installation for LDAP setup:

—————————-

1. Install WebSphere Application Server Developer.

2. Update WebSphere Application Server Developer to Version 5.1.0.1

3. Install interim fixes.

4. Install Portal Toolkit and test environment.

5. Update WebSphere Portal to Version 5.0.2 by installing Fix Pack 2.

6. To set up the test environment (Test1) . perform these steps:

a. Start the workbench.

b. Create a portal through wizards.

c. Deploy that portlet in the test environment without security enabled.

7. Setup the wpconfig.properties file with the following parameters (use defaults for all other parameters):

– WasUserid=uid=wpsbind,cn=users,dc=ibm,dc=com

– WasPassword=wpsbind

– PortalAdminId=uid=wpsadmin,cn=users,dc=ibm,dc=com

– PortalAdminPwd=wpsadmin

– PortalAdminGroupId=cn=wpsadmins,cn=groups,dc=ibm,dc=com

– LTPAPassword=wpsbind

– LDAPHostName=amtam.itso.ral.ibm.com

– LDAPAdminPwd=

– LDAPBindID=uid=wpsbind,cn=users,dc=ibm,dc=com

– LDAPBindPassword=wpsbind

– LDAPSuffix=dc=ibm,dc=com

8. After LDAP configuration, execute the wpsconfig.bat tasks

stop-portal-server, stop-admin-server

9. Start WebSphere Portal by executing wpsconfig.bat task start-portal-server and logon.

10. Stop the portal server again and start the existing server in WebSphere Application

Studio Developer.

11. The server start will fail. (Note: there are no security settings yet. Even if you manually

insert security settings, the server start still fails.

12. Delete the existing test server and create a new one. Security settings will be

automatically inserted. Start the test server.

These steps only work if the wpsadmin password is wpsadmin. If you change the password, you need to update the wps-info.xml file. The userid and password in a server configuration are stored in the following file:

servers\YourServerName.wpc\wps-info.xml

The password is encrypted. If you remove {xor} from the line of password, you can input the password in ASCII directly, such as: wpsadmin.

These steps are not supported and are provided as is.

Very interesting article from Knowledge@Wharton about the future competition between Microsoft and Apple in the field of the online music.

• The overall digital music sales market represents in 2004 about $270 million. By 2009, this market will represent 12% of consumer music spending, i.e. $1.7 billion! (Source: JupiterResearch)
• The current market situation cannot be clearer: Apple holds 70% of the market share with iTunes. It sold 125 million songs since the launch of the Windows version in 2003. Apple offers today a catalogue of about 1 million songs.
• Though this strong strategic starting position, Apple could be confronted with at least two strategic possible issues in the future: first, Apple can repeat the same error as in the past with its OS and the Macintosh, i.e. a closed system which works exclusively with its own Hardware ; second, iTunes is only a download platform, it seems that no streaming functionality is planned…

Some extracts:

Wharton professors say that Apple, by not opening its iTunes format to other music players, could be repeating the mistake it made with its operating systems (OS) for Apple and Macintosh computers back in the 1970s and 1980s. The fact that Apple’s OS software was a closed system that worked only with its own hardware – in contrast to Microsoft, which licensed its operating system software widely and eventually emerged as the industry standard – isolated Apple.

If Microsoft and other services can convince consumers that monthly subscription services are better than downloading songs a la carte, Apple could face problems since it apparently has no plan to offer a streaming music service.

“Microsoft will ultimately be cheaper because it’s not out to sell hardware,” says Clemons. “It usually starts out badly in a new market, but then it either gets better or it terrifies the competition.” Usually it does both.

Outch!

The Firefox v1.0 Preview Release is now available. BE CAREFUL, a lot of themes and extensions from v0.9.3 are not compatible with this one and their updates are not already published!

PS: you can find my review of Firefox here.