Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V53; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52:

1. On page 6, I noted that the Michael Wesch “The Machine Is (Us)ing Us” video has now been viewed 5.6 million times, as of Jun 8, 2008.
2. On page 8, I added a bullet point indicating that while the “long tail” is not one of the main “Web 2.0 tools,” it is a “related concept”
3. On page 15, in the discussion of “risks of Web 2.0″ platform, I noted that the comparison between the Keynote/PDF version of this presentation, against the Google Apps version, was so bad that I recently deleted the Google Apps version altogether.
4. On page 17, I added a note to indicate that the chart showing usage of various technologies — including the Internet and Web 2.0 — was taken from a 2006 survey that had been cited on the previous page.
5. On page 20, I updated the Twitter example with a screen shot from my Twitter home page as of this morning.
6. On page 24, I updated the count of Twitter users to 1,811,515 as of Jun 8, 2008. I also added a new bullet point citing a Business Week article indicating that Obama and Clinton each had approximately 30,000 Twitter followers during their primary campaigns, but Obama used his more effectively.
7. On page 26, I changed the first bullet point to indicate that Zappos is a shoe-selling company, not a shoe-manufacturing company.
8. On pages 29-30, I updated the Dopplr example with screen shots from my Dopplr home page as of this morning, which shows that I’m in Rome, along with various other details about who’s in Rome, who’s in my home town of New York, etc.
9. On page 35, I added a couple of sub-bullet points about MySpace, indicating (a) that it’s larger than every other nation except China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia; and (b) that I had written a blog posting about this issue, titled “A United Nations Seat for Myspace?“
10. On page 37, I updated a note about Obama’s “Yes, We Can” video, indicating that as of Jun 8, 2008 it has now been viewed 8.0 million times.
11. On page 75, I added a citation to a blog posting entitled “Did Rails Sink Twitter?“
12. On page 80, I updated the first bullet point to indicate that the book Web 20 Design Patterns is no longer “forthcoming”; it has now been published.
13. On page 85, I updated a bullet point to indicate that, as of Jun 8, 2008, it was still unclear whether Yahoo would continue as an independent company, be acquired by Microsoft, or consummate some kind of marketing/advertising arrangement with Google.
14. On page 87, which discusses IBM’s activities in the Web 2.0 world, I added a note that IBM now has a Vice President of Social Engineering.
15. On page 88, I added a “placeholder” bullet point for the iPhone 2.0 that is scheduled to be announced/released on June 9th; and I also modified a bullet point to reflect my belief that Apple’s distribution of iPhone software apps via iTunes will represent an interesting example of the “long tail” concept.
16. On page 123, which discusses technology trends, I added a note to the bullet point asking whether computers might someday exceed human intelligence — noting that the June 2008 IEEE Spectrum journal has a special report, entitled “The Rapture of the Geeks: separating science from fiction in the technological singularity”
17. On page 127, I added a bullet point indicating that senior executives’ acceptance/non-acceptance of social networks & Web 2.0 will become a more and more significant differentiator; I also included a citation to a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Clay Shirky.
18. On page 130, I added a bullet point with a citation to another paper discussing the use of Web 2.0 in educational environments.
19. On page 134, I added a bullet point with the publishing details of Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations.

As usual, you can download the 33-megabyte PDF version of this presentation by clicking here, or on the icon below; you can also download it as a 34-megabyte Powerpoint file by clicking here. It’s published under the GNU Free Documentation license (GFDL), so you’re welcome to modify the material and reuse it any way you want, free of charge; the second page of the presentation provides the usual caveat emptor disclaimers. The material is also available/downloadable as a Powerpoint file from my Slideshare page; but because Google limits the size of uploaded presentations to 10 megabytes (along with several other annoying limitations), it’s no longer available on Google Docs. If you’d like me to make the material available in some other format, or on some other hosting site, please drop me an email note and let me know.

Here’s a summary of the material that I’ve added since the last version

1. On page 5, I updated the count of YouTube downloads of Michael Wesch’s “The Machine is (us)ing Us“; it’s now up to 5.5 million downloads.
2. Also on page 5, I added a bullet point with a link to a YouTube video that provides an audiovisual explanation/definition of Web 2.0, based on the Wikipedia article.
3. Also on page 5, I added a bullet point with a link to a sarcastic YouTube spoof, entitled Restaurant 2.0.
4. On page 18, I added a bullet point with a link to a Business Week article on “Beyond Blogs“.
5. On pages 19-25, I added several new pages of material to show the Twitter website (for those who have no idea what Twitter is all about), the Twhirl client-side tweet-reader (which runs on both Windows and Mac computers), Tweetstats. and several other aspects of Twitter.
6. On page 19, I added a description of Twitter that I got via a “tweet” from a Twitter user: “IM is real-time, person-to-person communication while Twitter is baby email with everyone where you get to pick whose msgs to read.”
7. Also on page 19, I added a bullet point with a link to a case study showing how a small business is using Twitter.
8. On page 22, I added a new page to show an example of Tweetwheel.
9. On page 23, I added a bullet point with a link to a slide show that describes the difference between email, IM, blogging, and Twittering.
10. Also on page 23: I added a bullet point with a link to a St. Louis newspaper article about using Twitter to provide real-time information about the traffic impact of a repair-shutdown of a busy highway in the area. I added the same information to an existing link on page 100, which discusses the use of Web 2.0 in government.
11. On page 24, I updated the statistics about Twitter to show that it had 1,752,793 subscribers as of May 30, 2008 (which, by the way, represents almost twice as many as the 952,517 subscribers that existed on March 29th); I also added a link to this chart, which shows Twitter’s recent exponential growth. I think Twitter is going mainstream, and will really begin to scale up at this point (if its architecture can handle it, which is very much an open question at this point. If you’re interested in keeping up with the statistics about Twitter’s growth, consult Twitstats whenever you want.
12. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to GroupTweet.
13. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point link to my blog article about “Twitter in Plain English“.
14. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to Dan Farber’s May 18, 2008 blog discussing some interesting statistics about the ratio of followers to following that one sees on Twitter.
15. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point link to a blog posting on “What is Twitter Used For? The Message is the Medium“; also, from the same author, “What is Twitter For?“
16. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to an online store that now carries “Eat. Sleep. Tweet.” t-shirts.
17. On page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Dan Farber’s Apr 28, 2008 blog posting on “What Twitter Brings to the Party“.
18. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to a new service called Tweetcube, which supports file-sharing of files, via Twitter, of up to 10 megabytes.
19. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to an article about “tweetjects” and “blogjects” (i.e., objects that tweet and blog); and I provided some examples, including the twittering London Tower Bridge, and a twittering house (see also this article from Wired).
20. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Tweetclouds, which lets you see which words you use most frequently in your twitter messages.
21. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Twitterphone.
22. On (new) page 26, I displayed part of the Zappos Twitter page, as well as a link to a Harvard Business Publishing article entitled “Why Zappos Pays New Employees To Quit — and You Should Too“.
23. On page 28, I eliminated the “private beta” description of Dopplr. It’s now open to the public.
24. Also on page 28: I added a bullet point to indicate that Dopplr is now integrated with LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, and Flickr in order to help build a larger network of one’s “fellow travelers”.
25. On pages 29-31, I added more detailed slides to explain what Dopplr is all about.
26. On page 37, I updated the bullet point about Obama’s “1984″ YouTube spoof; as of May 28, 2008, it now has 5.2 million downloads.
27. Also on page 37: I added a bullet point with a link to the Obama “Yes, We Can” YouTube video — and indicated that as of May 28, 2008 it had 7.7 million downloads.
28. On pages 32-33, I added two new pages of material about special-purpose social-networking sites, and a screen shot of interesting YouTube presentations.
29. On page 46, I added a bullet point with a link to a recent CIO article indicating that enterprise mashups are on the rise.
30. On page 47, I added a bullet point with a link to the “ultimate Yahoo Pipes mashup list“. I also added a bullet point with a link to the Yahoo Pipes Twitter link monitor, which provides a stream of Twitter tweets that contain URL’s.
31. On page 62, I added a bullet point with a link to a mini-wiki tool called Backboard.
32. On page 76, I added a bullet point with a link to an article discussing rumors that Twitter may abandon its use of Ruby on Rails.
33. On page 85, I added a bullet point with a link to an Aprill 30, 2008 Information Week article summarizing Oracle’s plans to build a Web 2.0-friendly version of its enterprise apps.
34. On page 87, which lists several Web 2.0-related things going on at IBM, I added a bullet point with a link to IBM Rocks; and I added a bullet point with a link to a recent article about IBM’s Web 2.0 tools and plans; and I also added a bullet point with a link to a Business Week article about IBM’s use of social networking.
35. On page 88, I added a bullet point with a link to the Wikipedia article summarizing the basics of Microsoft’s Sharepoint product for blogs and wikis.
36. On page 99, I added a bullet point link to David Pogue’s March 27, 2008 New York Times column on “Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?” And I also added a bullet point with a link to a May 6, 2008 CIO Australia article entitled “Enterprise 2.0: what is it good for?“
37. Page 99, with a list of “trends in large companies” got so crowded and busy that I broke it in half, and put the second half on a (new) page 98.
38. On page 103, I added a bullet point with a link to an interesting example of a “laggard” culture: 20% of the U.S. population has never used e-mail.
39. On page 105, I added a bullet point with a link to a Harvard Business School podcast on strategies for succeeding with social networking technologies in the enterprise.
40. On page 126 about ubiquitous/pervasive computing, I added a bullet point with a link to the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing.
41. On page 128, I added a new page about future UI paradigms, suggesting that (based on examples like Tweetwheel, Digg’s UI research, and IBM Rocks) some of them are likely to come from Web 2.0 vendors, startups, and inspired individuals. I also added a bullet point, with a link to Cisco’s recently-announced holographic video-conferencing technology (and I added a link to the Cisco announcement on page 90, which summarizes Cisco’s other Web 2.0 initiatives).
42. On page 99, I added a bullet point with a link to a recent McKinsey survey, summarizing usage of Web 2.0 in businesses.
43. On page 104, I added a bullet point with a link to the transparentgovt website, which has a list of about half a dozen countries whose governments are doing interesting things with Web 2.0
44. On page 126, I added a bullet point with a link to a blog posting indicating that Colombia has recently ordered 65,000 of the $100 OLPC computers, for distribution to its children. I also added a bullet point summarizing plans for a 2010-release of the 2nd-generation OLPC computer, with a link to a press release with more details.
45. Also on page 126: courtesy of Tim O’Reilly, who brought my attention to a May 31, 2008 New York Times article that I skimmed this morning but ignored, I’ve now added a bullet point on the page about ubiquitous computing to the article, which discusses billboards that are connected to the Internet, and which watch consumer reactions as they walk by.
46. On page 135, I deleted a bunch of Web 2.0 conferences that have already taken place, and added a June 25, 2008 event: International Conference on Enterprise 2.0, in Varese, Italy. I also added bullet points for upcoming Web 2.0 conferences such as SuperNova 2008 in San Francisco (June 16-18); Social Networking Conference in San Francisco (Jul 10-11); FOWA in London (Oct 8-10); Web 2.0 Expo in New York City (Sep 16-19); and the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco (Nov 5-7) . I also updated the details for the Wikimania 2008 conference in beautiful downtown Alexandria, Egypt.
47. On page 136, I added a parenthetical note to indicate that The ClueTrain Manifesto is now ten years old! (which simply demonstrates how easy it is for some companies to ignore major trends for a decade…) I also added a new book to the list: Social Networks Around The World: How is Web 2.0 Changing Your Daily Life?

I also tried to add a visual/graphic image to each page, so you wouldn’t be forced to stare at nothing but a page full of text (actually, I’m not so worried about the impact on people who look at the material on their computer screen; I’m more concerned about audiences falling asleep when I present the material in my seminar). But you should be aware that virtuall every image/graphic that you see is hyperlinked to some non-trivial material — e.g., a Website, an article, a YouTube video, etc. So don’t be fooled by pretty pictures; there’s content behind it.

I’ll probably be making some minor updates to the material during the seminar presentation in Rome next week, so check back from time to time to see if there is a new “V53″ version available.

As usual, the new version is available to you in several different formats. If you’d like to see it as an (ugly Betty) Google Docs presentation, click here. And if you’d like to make additions, corrections, improvements, or enhancements to this collaborative document, please sent me an email (“ed” at “yourdon”-dot-com); there about about a dozen registered collaborators now, though it doesn’t look like anyone has been brave enough to edit the material yet.

If you’d like to download the 22.7-megabyte PDF file, which looks much prettier and now has more than 500 embedded URL links to various Web 2.0 books, conferences, articles, blog postings, and other resources, click here.

The same PDF document can be viewed and downloaded from my page on Slideshare; to access that, click here.

Here are the additions, changes, corrections, and refinements that I’ve added to this version:

1. On page 20 of the material, I corrected a reference to the spring 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. I had incorrectly listed it as “UVA” (i.e., University of Virginia, which ain’t the same school at VA Tech; sorry about that). To compound the problem, the link to Wikipedia was broken. Oh, well …
2. On page 74, I added a sub-bullet noting that Microsoft Windows Live was released from beta on November 6th. Civilization didn’t grind to a halt, but I assume it was significant news to at least a few people …
3. On page 38, I provided an example of the “long tail” recommendation of making at least a portion of one’s product line free — the example being the proposal (in Europe) to provide “free cars.” Sounds crazy until you contemplate this intriguing factoid: he cost of the average used car in Europe is now cheaper than the cost of gasoline to drive it for a year.
4. On page 19, I added a sub-bullet, noting Brady Forest’s blog on the “coincidence feed” feature of Dopplr, announced 11/7/07, and the related concept of REDUCING amount of information in a feed
5. On page 51, I added a sub-bullet point, noting that a “pilot project” to experiment with external wikis doesn’t have to be a massive, high-risk effort. The example is an “emergent collaboration” effort involving SAP, Oracle, and others to develop a Twitter-based tool called “eventtrack.”
6. On page 85, I added a bullet point with a blog summarizing IBM’s experience with social software, and its impact on knowledge management.
7. On page 33, I added the wonderful mashup example of Google Maps’ “interactive transit map” for New York City. But I also deleted the bullet point listing the Google Maps mashup showing the location of the Southern California wildfires in Oct 2007 … because they’re all gone now, and there’s nothing to show.
8. On page 116, I added a sub-bullet point entitled “Web 2.0 Manages to Sober Up“
9. On page 62, I added a bullet point listing Hungry Machine as an example of Ruby on Rails … actually, it’s not an example of a product per se, but rather the name of a company that develops Ruby-on-Rails apps for Facebook.
10. On page 98, I added a bullet point listing a Nov 11, 2007 blog posting describing the recent activity by Nigerian scammers to use Facebook for phishing attacks. The fact that anyone falls for this stuff is mind-boggling, but even if their success rate is only one in a million, Facebook (and Myspace) are big enough now that a few scammers might be able to make a decent living…
11. On page 47, I added some details to indicate that as of Nov 13, 2007, Flickr acquired its 2-billionth photograph. That’s a lot of pictures!
12. On page 114, I added a bullet point with a link to a wonderful Internet love song, entitled “ROFLOMGLOLROFLMFAO“

That’s it for now … I’ll start collecting items for version 50, which will probably take place sometime next week, in between bouts of Thanksgiving turkey-gobbling …

Based on a suggestion from someone attending my Web 2.0 seminar in Rome a couple weeks ago, I’ve also made the “native” mind-map document available; it’s about 21.4 megabytes in size, and you can download it by clicking here. You’re welcome to add, delete, or modify anything you want; but to do that, you’ll need the mind-mapping tool that I used to create the document: it’s called ConceptDraw MindMap, and it’s available for both Windows and Macintosh by clicking here (disclosures: it costs a couple hundred dollars, and I have no business relationship of any kind with the company that makes it). Alternatively, if you’re content to view the mind-map in a read-only format, you can download a free copy of ConceptDraw Viewer (in either WIndows or Mac format) by clicking here. I found the “viewer” program to be extremely slow and clumsy (though it might be speedier when dealing with a small mind-map), but it does give you the ability to expand and collapse the outline-hierarchy of mind-map branches, as well as navigating from page to page. For more straightforward uses of the mind-map, I think the PDF document is probably adequate, but the choice is yours.

The primary change in this version of the mind-map is a reorganization of subordinate topics (or sub-branches) into separate pages; the whole thing had gotten so complex that several of the pages were almost impossible to read, with tiny font-sizes required in order to cram everything onto a single page. As a result, what was previously a 16-page mind-map has now grown to a 32-page mind-map; everything is now simpler, larger, and easier to read. Unfortunately, it has also doubled the size of the PDF document from what it used to be; I hope that won’t be too much of an inconvenience.

I may need to make some additional refinements in future versions; among other things, on the PDF export (and with the ConceptDraw Viewer program) the hyper-linked navigation paths from various branches in high-level pages to the lower-level details on subordinate pages are not visually obvious. This is annoying, because the page-to-page hyperlinks do have a visual annotation in the native ConceptDraw mind-map document; but that won’t be of any use to you unless you decide to invest in a full-blown copy of the ConceptDraw mind-mapping tool itself.

For now, I recommend that you take a look at the names I’ve given to each page in the mind-map, which should help indicate which pages are “high-level” and which ones are “subordinate.” Also, roll your mouse slowly over any terminating branches in a high-level page, and see if a little pop-up message appears that says “go to page n.” If it’s an “external” hyperlink (i.e., a link to something outside the mind-map itself, somewhere on the Internet), the text will have the familiar blue, underlined format; but if it’s an “internal” hyperlink (i.e., to some other page of the mind-map), the text won’t show any special formatting, but when you roll your mouse slowly over the text, the cursor should change from a pointy-arrow to a pointy-finger (at least that’s what it does on my Mac; I don’t know how it behaves on other platforms). Also, remember that all of the subordinate pages are hyper-linked back to their parent-page; all you need to do is click in the central, yellow-colored “topic” bubble in the middle of each such subordinate page.

Meanwhile, here’s a summary of the changes and revisions that I’ve made in this version:

1. Several of the branches that had been highlighted in a red color, for the benefit of people attending my recent Web 2.0 seminar in Rome, have now been changed back to the original black (or blue) text format.
2. On the “Introduction – Society” page, on the branch labeled “Blogs”, I updated a link to a page describing current statistics about the state of the blogosphere — indicating that there are now 71 million blogs, with 175,000 new blogs being added every day.
3. On the “Conferences” branch of the “References” page, I’ve updated the link to last year’s WIkimania 2006 conference, and the link now points to the Web page for Wikimania 2007 in Taiwan.
4. On the “Trends – New UI” page, I’ve added a link to Apple’s web page for the forthcoming iPhone — having looked at it again yesterday while writing my blog posting titled “Waiting for Apple’s Leopard,” I really do think this is one example of a new UI trend.
5. On the “Trends – Social/Cultural” page, I’ve added a new link to the video clip entitled “Shift happens,” which I summarized in this recent blog posting.
6. On the “tools” branch of the “Themes – Mashups” page, I’ve added a link to a MacWorld article by Google’s MyMaps mashup.
7. On the branch labeled “Ed’s list of corporate blogging policies” on the “Business – Large Companies” page, I’ve added a new link to a blog article I wrote a couple months ago, entitled “What A Company’s Blogging Policy Says To Its Employees.”
8. On the branch labeled “Blurring of (some) political boundaries” on the “Trends – Social/Cultural” page, I’ve added a new link to the “Shift Happens” video clip mentioned above, which (among other things) points out that the 106 million registered MySpace users represent a “network nation” that ranks 11th in the world, between Japan and Mexico.
9. On the “References” page, I removed the branch (and link) to the “Dead Web 2.0″ site; it’s no longer functioning, though it promises to come back at some point in the future.

That’s it for now. I may add a few more odds and ends before I head up to Boston on Tuesday, but this should keep you occupied for a while…

I don’t have time to provide a detailed list of the individual changes and additions; however, they are all marked in red text, so they’ll be easy for you to spot.

Enjoy!

Basically, Chapter 3 discusses the evolution of Chandler’s vision, purpose, and software architecture. It’s written in a sufficiently non-geeky fashion that any reasonably intelligent person above the age of 13 should be able to understand it. Whether they’ll want to read it is an entirely different question; I found the discussion interesting, but that’s because I’ve spent my entire adult life doing this stuff. As my family diplomatically reminds me from time to time, there are several billion people on the planet who really don’t care about the nuances of object-oriented programming, or the reasons why one programming language is better than another. But as I’ve suggested in earlier blog postings, the pervasive influence of computers in today’s society — in our iPods, our cellphones, our digital televisions, in literally every product and service we use in day-to-day life — means that the non-geeks should be interested, if only for a brief time, in how all of this software stuff gets put together.

This is not a new theme; it’s a modern variant of the “two cultures” theme espoused by the late British scientist C.P. Snow back in 1959. At Snow said at the time,

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

“I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”

Well, the issue here is not the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but rather how a bunch of savvy, experienced software developers could organize their thoughts, and their technical strategy, into a plan for building a better PIM — maybe not a Microsoft Outlook-killer, but maybe that would elicit the same gasp of delight that most of us felt when we first began using Web browsers 10-12 years ago, or when we first began interacting with Google 5-6 years ago, or (more recently) when we first had the pleasure of using Google Maps. Whether you’re an experienced programmer or a technophobic Luddite, you simply cannot use Google Maps without muttering to yourself, “Wow! How do they do that?”, followed by gasps of delight as you move the map around, zoom in, and zoom out. (And if you think that’s fun, check out the Earth Sandwich project, as explained in this hilarious zefrank video, and assisted with the Find The Opposite tool)

As Rosenberg describes it, OSAF founder Mitch Kapor “had a clear picture of the program he wanted to build. Like Agenda, it would be a PIM, or personal information manager, a tool for managing email, appointments, addresses, tasks, and notes. … And it would be explicitly designed so that any developer could add new capabilities to it. Open source programmers could code new modules or ‘parcels’ for, say, managing digital photos or music collections. And nontechnical users would be able to add new categories and labels to the program on the fly.”

While the “vision thing” is obviously a crucial part of any software development effort, so is the architecture and choice of implementation technology. To explain how the Chandler project made its decisions in this area, Rosenberg takes us on a historical tour of programming languages, ranging from binary code to assembler, to FORTRAN, and ultimately to the two languages that the Chandler team seriously considered: not Java and C++, but rather Python and Perl. It’s a fairly lengthy discussion, but I enjoyed it … and you will too. I command you to enjoy it; resistance is futile!

Finally, Rosenberg gives us a brief history of the unveiling of the Chandler project — to the world at large, especially as it hadn’t even been built, but to the Silicon Valley geek community. I must admit that I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but that’s probably because I don’t live in Silicon Valley; but apparently it began with an October 20, 2002 article in the San Jose Mercury News by respected technology journalist Dan Gillmor (whose website is here, and whose current reporting efforts are largely focused on the Center for Citizen Media blog).

Rosenberg tells us that “Gillmor’s October 20 column reported: ‘An early version of the calendar part of the software should be posted on the Web by the end of this year, and version 1.0 of the whole thing is slated for the end of 2003 or early 2004.’”

And, as Rosenberg tells us in the final sentence of the chapter, “The guesses proved more than a tad optimistic.”

Stay tuned…

Reviews of earlier chapters of “Dreaming in Code”
Preface
Chapter 0: Software Time
Chapter 1: Doomed
Chapter 2: The Soul of Agenda
Endnotes

Most people understand the subject matter of the book without any explanation, but in case you’re puzzled: a death march project is one whose schedule (deadline), budget, resource allocation (people), and other constraints are so aggressive that the only possible way to succeed is to have every member of the team work 14-16 hours a day, seven days a week, until the project is finished or everyone collapses from exhaustion. Sound familiar?

A few months after I finished the manuscript, my good friend Tom DeMarco wrote a passionate objection to the very concept of death-march projects (See “No Means No!” in the April 1997 issue of American Programmer, which was subsequently transformed into the Cutter IT Journal). Tom argued that death march projects typically have three characteristics: a culture of fear, an absence of justification, and a virtual certainty of failure.

I respect Tom’s opinions, and I agree that project managers and IT professionals should run away as fast as possible if they find themselves being sucked into a project with those three characteristics. But I think there are counterexamples: I’ve seen death march projects that were exhilarating and sufficiently exciting that you’d sign up for another one just like it; death march projects utterly devoid of the “culture of fear”; death march projects that had justifications like making oodles of money, or saving a segment of the population from disaster; and death march projects that, albeit risky, did have a reasonable probability of success.

However, this is primarily a philosophical argument: whether you like them or not, death march projects do exist. Indeed, they’ve always existed, at least throughout my career of 40+ years in the computer field. They became much more commonplace toward the end of the 1990s for two reasons: the dot-com bubble, and Y2K projects that absolutely, positively had to be finished before the January 1, 2000 “rollover.”

Of course, both of those phenomena came to an abrupt end, though for very different reasons. And in terms of death-march projects, things were relatively quiet from early 2000 until recently. I think that’s primarily because IT spending dropped during the post-Y2K/post-dot-com era, and companies were less inclined to embark upon ambitious development efforts with aggressive schedules. Death march projects didn’t disappear, but they weren’t as pervasive as before.

But in the past few months, I’ve noticed a resurgence of interest in the topic. A revised edition of the book was published in the fall of 2003, and the Japanese translation was finally published in the spring of this year. It’s gone through two printings, sold a respectable number of copies, and a Japanese computer magazine is coming to New York next month to interview me about death march projects. And I’ll be giving keynote addresses on death march projects at five different venues of the 2006 Software Best Practices conference this fall; click here for a schedule of events, and let me know if you’re coming.

What’s going on? Quite simply, I think IT spending is up, companies are getting more adventurous, and they’re embarking on more aggressive development initiatives once again. Or maybe it’s an instance of the “generational amnesia” phenomenon: we’ve got a new crop of project managers and IT executives (and/or business managers, senior executives, and end-users) who weren’t here ten years ago, when the previous generation learned a lot of hard lessons about death march projects. Or maybe people are being seduced, once again, by the siren song of advanced technology — “yes, this time we really can succeed with this impossibly large development effort, because we’re using Ruby on Rails!”

For whatever it’s worth, technology-based solutions are at the bottom of my list of recommendations for surviving and succeeding with death march projects. At the top of my list is politics — e.g., figuring out who the key stakeholders and decision-makers really are, figuring out why the death march project has been initiated in the first place, and who will be allowed to define “success.” That’s followed by negotiation and estimation techniques, followed by “peopleware” practices, followed by “processes” (e.g., agile processes, SEI-CMM/ISO-9000 processes, risk management processes, etc.). All of these are things we should be doing for any software development project, but they are the key differentiators between success and failure in a death march project.

So, welcome back to the world of death march projects. You can love ‘em or hate ‘em, but I think they’re here to stay.

P.S. If you’d like to get a sense of what Polson, Montana is like, take a look at my July 4, 1996 road-warrior posting entitled, “The Polson Parade.” It also gives you a sense of what “blogging” was like in the days before we had today’s sexy new blogging tools. That whole entry, HTML tags and all, had to be typed into a simple-minded text editor, and then uploaded via FTP to my web side. So we may still have death-march projects, but some things have definitely improved!

I’ve added another ten items to the previous version of the mind-map:

1. I added a blog posting that describes a “Web 2.0 bookshelf” in the “miscellaneous books” branch of the “References” section of the mind-map.
2. I added a link to the StumbleUpon site to the “reputation economy” branch of the “basic themes” page of the mind-map. This one is addictive: when you click on the “Stumble!” icon that gets installed in your Firefox browser, it pulls up random “recommended” web pages, according to topics of interest you’ve chosen. Photography is one of my favorite hobbies, and Stumbleupon has shown me some absolutely stunning websites of photographers I had never heard of. There are simple and convenient mechanisms for saving your favorite stumbled-upon pages, sharing them with stumble-friends (yes, it’s another networking site; I was invited to join this whole thing by someone in Albuquerque that I don’t even know), and emailing the URL’s to your non-stumble friends and family members.
3. I added a link to Timeline in the “examples” sub-branch of the “Ajax” branch on the “Technology” page of the mind-map. Timeline is an Ajax widget for visualizing time-based events. Quite cool!
4. I added a link to the “truth laid bear” blogsite, as another example of a GoogleMaps mashup. This one provides pushpin locations of current news events and local blogsites associated with the current Israel-Lebanon conflict.
5. I added a link to a recent Pew survey describing the demographics of bloggers to the society/blogs sub-branch, within the “Introduction” page of the mind-map.
6. I also added a link to the Technorati site in the seame society/blogs sub-branch, so people could go there and find out how many blogs there are at the present time (49.7 million at the moment this is being written).
7. I added a link to Swarm, as a sub-branch of Digg, as one of the new startups in the Product/Vendors page of the mind-map. I’m not sure whether Swarm will survive or prosper, but it’s definitely different than all the other stuff out there. It’s … it’s… well, you’d better go there and see for yourself.
8. I added a link to pbWiki to the “tools” branch of the “Wiki phenomenon” page, which is actually a sub-page of the top-level “Basic Themes” page. It joins JotSpot and Twiki as examples of Wiki tools.
9. I added a link to a blog posting about the forthcoming arrival of an interface between Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 IDE, and the Ruby/Ruby-on-Rails development environment. You’ll find it in a new “tools” branch on Ruby, wh ich is part of th e “Technology” page of the overall mind-map.
10. I added a link to a recent posting in Scobleizer’s blog, which contains good advice for Web 2.0 entrpreneurs who want to avoid the misery experienced by Web 1.0 startups at the end of the “bubble.” This has been placed in a new branch on strategies for startup companies, in the “Business Issues” page of the mind-map.

Yes, there’s still a lot more stuff to add, and new articles, product announcements, conferences, and blog postings are appearing every day on my Internet-wide scans for Web 2.0-related material … but, little by little, the mind-map is beginning to look more respectable. If nothing else, there are now a little over a hundred hyperlinks to various Web 2.0 resources, articles, and companies.