1. Traffic congestion, both in NYC and Rome, is still unpredictable, and can still make you wonder whether you’re going to miss your flight completely. I left my apartment 3 hours before the flight this time, but it took almost two hours to reach JFK. Once upon a time, you could show up at the airport 20 or 30 minutes before the flight, and still have a chance to getting on the plane; in the post-9/11 days, the airlines have a strict rule that if you’re checkin baggage, you need to arrive a full hour before the flight. I made it with only minutes to spare this time.
2. But now you can check in, online, up to 24 hours before the flight. That’s been available for a year or two, of course, but I never saw the reason for bothering. This time, I decided to accept Delta’s email invitation to do an online checkin, and even told them I’d be checking one bag. That turned out to be a huge benefit, because it allowed me to get in a shorter checkin line when I got to JFK — i.e., the “baggage drop” line. And a gate agent whispered to me that, because of the online checking process I had gone through, they would even have given me a few minutes “grace period” if I arrived within the one-hour checkin deadline. They sure didn’t do that last year, when unexpected traffic congestion resulted in my arriving at JFK 55 minutes before my flight — and being told, in no uncertain terms, that I absolutely, positively could not get on the plane.
3. When the iPad first came out a month ago, airport security did not consider it to be a “computer” — so you didn’t have to take it out of your briefcase when going through the security line. Now, a month later, it is a computer, and it has to be put in a separate bin of its own. I wonder when they’ll decide that an iPhone is a computer.
4. I flew coach class to Rome this time — just like the last several flights. I don’t know if business-class tickets were ever really affordable, but when they hit $7,000 they certainly left most of us mortals behind. But for a while, I could still travel business-class with my frequent-flyer points. Now it’s 250,000 miles … which is enough for half a dozen free domestic flights.
5. But the “back of the plane” isn’t so bad, if you can select a reasonable seat. I don’t know who gets stuck with middle seats these days, but I got an aisle bulkhead seat right by the airplane door. Once they closed the door, I had about ten feet of leg-room. Of course, the food was pretty bad; but I’m sure not going to spend $7,000 (or 250,000 miles) to get a decent meal on a flight that mostly involves sleeping across the Atlantic.
6. Having an iPad with 30 books on it is really a great way to travel. Having a Kindle on last year’s flight was pretty cool, too, but the iPad is way cooler. But nobody else on the plane wanted to look at it….
7. As we took off from JFK, the pilot reassured us that even though the Iceland volcano was somewhat active again, it wouldn’t affect us; since we were flying to southern Italy instead of northern Europe, I guess we could give Iceland a wide berth. But what interested me most was that there was no reaction from anyone else on the plane. It’s amazing how everyone just assumes that everything about the flight will be safe.

So that’s it. The flight arrived on time, my suitcase was on the baggage carousel before I even got through customs, and the ride to the downtown hotel was uneventful. It’s been raining all day, so I’m not going even attempt a photographic excursion right now; there will still be plenty to photograph tomorrow. Or the next day. Or next year. The Eternal City will always be here…

I’m here in Rome this week, presenting a two-day seminar on  “Managing Death-March Projects” for Technology Transfer Institute. You should be there so you can hear whatever clever jokes may occur to me while I’m presenting my material, as well as the comments and questions from the other participants. But if you’re stuck in some other part of the world, or you couldn’t persuade your boss to send you to Rome, you can click here to download the (17MB) PDF version of the presentation, which has a whole  bunch of embedded links to other presentations, publications, books, articles, websites, etc.

 But after a week of watching a gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride on the New York stock market, and reading various gloom-and-doom predictions of bad economic times ahead, I thought it would be more appropriate to replace that talk with a presentation on “Death-March 3: Software Processes in the New Hard Times”:

If you click on either icon, you’ll download a 12.2-megabyte PDF file that actually contains both presentations. So you can look at either one of them, depending on whether you’re feeling optimistic or pessimistic. Enjoy … or don’t.  

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.

I don’t know how (or if) the other speakers’ presentations will be available; but if you’d like to download the 1.9MB PDF version of my presentation, click here, or on the image below…