In 2006 Drupal was the runner up for the precious Webware CMS Award. And last year our beloved CMS even was the overall winner. By winning the competition, the Drupal Association got 5000 Dollars that was used for amongst others funding Drupal Conferences and to buy hardware for hosting the Drupal infrastructure. But even better then the money, Drupal got more airtime and more and more people recognized the power of Drupal.

This year, Drupal was once again nominated in the category "Publishing" and you are encouraged to vote on Drupal to make sure we win again this year. Please help by spreading the word and vote, you deserve it!

DrupalCon Boston is comming up! And from what I have read, it is by far the biggest DrupalCon so far and the best organized!

Looking back at 2005 (only 2.5 years ago!) I brought by own WiFi 802.11b access point, borrowed a beamer from my work and layed down some powercables. A -semi- anonymous client of Bryght paid for the venue, coffee, lunch and opening drinks. Things surely changed since then, 20 people have been busy for months to raise the money needed to hire the venue, have a logo contest (vote!) and do everything that is needed to make sure 600+ people can have the time of their life. And they have done a great job so far and I am sure it will the "even more best-er DrupalCon ever".

You can find some old snaps of Amsterdam 2005 on Flickr. I got only one question: what did Gaele saw on the desktop of Dries? Either way, we have come a long way.

If you want to become a sponsor of the DrupalCon Boston, look at the direct benefits you gain from becoming so. The indirect benefits are far bigger though, both for the community as for your own business. The community profits by making sure a lot of people can get together to talk about Drupal, plan roadmaps, exchange ideas, shake hands and even code! And when you use the code of "the community", you will gain as well. Your company also gets a better alignment with the community that really pays; prospects will find you! Looking back at 2005 Amsterdam, we have come a long way baby!

I recall a very good talk from Rasmus with an AJAX-ified XSS exploit searcher and a good talk as well from David. The slogan "Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Be Lazy and 'the greatest inefficiency comes from solving problems you will never have'" is the best description of agility I have come across and has become my mantra. Looking forward to Boston I think we have grown in numbers but most of all in quality. Boston looks great!

So please make sure that you go to Boston and sponsor it if you can!

On freelanceswitch.com you can find a good read on hw to charge your client for the services you deliver (got it via a friend who is a free entrepeneur and a PhD as of yesterday). While all that is said in the posting is true, the best remark came from Michael Martine:

Slap the client in the face as hard as you can, then tell him your rate. If he’s shocked that you slapped him, you’re not charging enough.

(from Anil Dash. Sounds like fun, happy slapping!

I have worked for Pink Elephant, that was bought by Roccade making PinkRoccade and worked for AT&T. I have worked for Unisource that was insourced in KPN. I have worked for PinkRoccade (again) that was bought by Getronics (the worst thing that could happen, but that is another story). And Getronics-PinkRoccade was recently bought by KPN, as I predicted. And now KPN will be bought by ...

...AT&T!

Speculation of a takeover bid for Royal KPN NV from AT&T Inc have been quickly dismissed, and although the Dutch telecoms operator will remain at the heart of takeover talk for the time being, an offer for the company is not expected in the short-term, analysts said.

...or maybe not.

But is weird to see, so many employers and it all comes together. See my linkedin profile for details and My Life in Business Cards. I think I will go to a company that will not be bought by AT&T but will buy the big T!

Weird. I always thought there was a shift in advertising from pageviews (3 years ago), towards Clicks per Thousends (CPM, now) towards Signups (Referrals, actually buying a product, 1 year from now) and Google and Amazon both had these kind of affiliate program's. Now Google is partly stopping with this ,a href="https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/Referrals.html">referral

This is the case for referral units directing visitors to sign up for AdSense. After experimenting with this program over the past year, we've concluded that there are other products that are of higher value than this program to publishers in your region. As a result, referral units for the AdSense program will be retired in the coming weeks. Referrals to other products and services remain unaffected.

So they are only stopping the "adsense for adsense signup program" but still weird to see. The costs of running this service are next to nill (they already have accounting and billing in place) so why stop?