Voor de komende DrupalJam, hier alvast een voorproefje dat als backchannel kan dienen gedurende de dag zelf. Embed op je eigen site en spreidt het woord voort.

Ondanks dat elke celeb nu 100.000 volgers heeft op zijn twitter account dat ge spook-vult wordt door een stagiaire en elke krant een rss-to-twitter account heeft met 10.000enden gelovigen, ben ik nog steeds on top :-).

In 2008 top 20 gebruiker in Nederland op Twitter, in 2007, in de top 30. En ook in 2009 was ik in de top25, volgens deze lijst van Jeroen althans. again: kiss my ego, stelletje youpen!

Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better.

Sir Berners-Lee -together with Al Gore- the inventor of the web (not Internet)- knows Drupal, his personal website runs Drupal. And he seems to know a bit about the "Semantic Web" as well ...

It is very good to see that the UK government is opening up its' data sources to the public. And for the Drupal community it is a big win to see that they have chosen the same Content Management System / Framework as Obama and many others did.

I really wished all governments would open up their back-end data like this and hope that the Dutch government will focus on Drupal as well. Note that there is a strong movement under the Dutch for this, combined under the "Hack the Government" mantra. See this older nice presentation / screencast I made about this in Dutch.

So great news for the British and great news as well for Drupal!

On googlesocialweb.blogspot you can read about a nice module that Google made for Drupal, Friendconnect.

Friendconnect is

"... an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications."

(Wiki)

More information about FriendConnect can be found on Google's site and a live demo can be found at globant.

Though this is a nice open standard and a nice module, there are two downers IMHO that show that Google doesn't really get the Drupal community or has another agenda:

1. They house the code on their own servers, with own issue queue at code.google.com. Sure they are free to do so but the strength of Drupal is that all modules are on one place, not all around the web.
2. They have licensed this code under the Apache license. All Drupal code and thereby all Drupal modules -and to some extend themes- are released under the GPLv2 or higher. Read this FAQ about the license on d.o for some background. The Apache License 2.0 is compatible with the GPL v3 (not 2!) and since you can accept version 3 of the GPL when downloading Drupal, legally they are in teh clear but it would have been best if they released this under GPLv2 IMHO

Still, nice work Google!

update
Heine Deelstra (hint: lead Drupal security team) warns NOT to use this module on production site at his blog. Something about the quality of code, tweetsource. See Google, if you would have used GPL and drupal.org we could have solved this issue via the proper channels. Now we have to use the public issue tracker of google.code.

A couple of weeks ago the Dutch Association of Journalists NVJ (125 years old) launched a "community" portal based on Drupal. While it was a soft launch, already 999 users have signed up, showing that the need for a place in this niche.

Registered users can blog, ask questions and provide answers, microblog / twitter messages in the site, be active in forums, create and read wikipages, build a portfolio, be-friend people to network, start or join (organic) groups and search for jobs. Employers can post job openings as well.

Lots of content types / functionality usually leading to bad user experience; where do I do what? However, the site is rather popular and gets lots of hits and people do find what they are looking for in the site.

It was build by my employer DOP.nu using core Drupal, many contrib modules as well as half a dozen own modules. The Crowds did the concept and Xlab the design and User Interface.

It is my opinion that sites like these show Drupal at it's best, a community site where people help each other.