As Abhijit Nadgouda says in "Benefits of Online Repositories", it only takes a simple command or two in Linux to download and install or upgrade a package. If necessary, even dependencies will be downloaded and installed and you don't have to know anything about these new packages to make it all work in a matter of seconds. And you don't have to use a browser or any kind of GUI to make this all happen.

When I saw this quote in twitter from Michael Chilson, I had to laugh: 

This year at JavaOne was the first time since 1999 that I actually got to attend a bunch of sessions, thanks to not having to man an OpenLogic booth.  Overall, it was quite good.  There were quite a few parallel tracks and always something interesting in at least one of them.

Yesterday Sandro Groganz wrote about his experience helping a customer get started with blogging to promote their open source products, and towards the end of the post he offers some good tips for common questions companies have as they enter the world of blogging. While I agree with Sandro that organizations should adhere to some basic blogging guidelines—like ensuring that different bloggers “are in line with the main marketing message(s)”—I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules around things like how often to post and whether to respond to comments via additional comments or a new post. The best rule of thumb is to do what feels right to the individual blogger and fits with the corporate culture. Bloggers in an organization often handle some of the blogging details a little differently, and that’s ok.

• We'll show how to use a free open source tool, OSS Discovery, to find and inventory the open source used in your company.

• You'll learn how to roll out and enforcing your open source policy and approval process.

• You'll learn how to uncover and comply with open source license obligations.

I've been trying new presentation and communication techniques. I've started twittering, I've moved to Presentation Zen model slides, I've given talks to small groups, given keynotes to rooms of 700 and been on a panel in front of 3000 people. Now I'm going to try a live text chat - I think it's seriously going to challenge my typing skills but I invite you to come join me! (Maybe some of you could help answer questions in your questions like you do at talks ...)

You can build communities but first you have to understand them, enjoy them and play in them and one of the key things is to listen at least as much as you talk. The transition from traditional business and marketing to Web 2.0 is a tough one. This cartoon shows the confusion some companies have with social networking. I'm going to add it to my Would you do it again for free? talk.

I had a great day at CommunityOne yesterday - Sun did a great job of putting on a good community conference. It started out with the community panel - I was a bit nervous as not only was Matt Asay moderating (and he likes to stir the pot) but it was in front of 3000 people!