This story start with a one dollar bill I found the last day during the DrupalCon Szeged 2008.

A dollar, I thought! This must be my lucky day! So I took it with me and decided it was my lucky Dollar. Little did I know.

We took the train from Szeged to Budapest at 10 a clock, 2 hours later we were at the airport and went for a small snack. We had plenty of time, yet - I am not going in details here - it was very frustrating to see the plane leave, to see the gate getting closed, with you at the wrong side of it. It became a very expensive snack, a bit more then a dollar.

We tried to get the next plane towards Amsterdam, it was fully booked. The next one was overbooked. So we got a flight to Vienna and then to Amsterdam. After checking in, going through customs again, waiting 2 hours, we found out it was cancelled. We got rerouted towards Muchen and then to Amsterdam. After 3 hours waiting the plane actually left the ground, one hour late. We missed our connection to Amsterdam and slept at an 4 star hotel nearby. Not that we enjoyed the hotel because we had to get up at 5 AM to catch the next flight. Only to find out ...

...it was cancelled. 28 hours after we left Szeged, we were at home. Most west coast Americans attending the DrupalCon were probably already in bed. It thought me however a couple of lessons. One of them I wanted to share. There was no single airline that was responsible for the chain of events or knew about it. Sabre (the independent computer network that all airlines use) is great, they can realtime reroute any passenger over any airline towards any destination. Yet, it is not in use a trouble-ticketing system, airline B knew nothing about my history and when failing to deliver they happily transferred me to airline C. Nobody saw my complete chain of events, from A-Z.

This is a lesson I need to pickup; whenever you fail to deliver a service to a customer, try to place it in the chain of events the customer already experienced. It will not make the delivery better, but you will understand the feelings of the customer better.

Now regarding DrupalCon. Here is a small update. I really REALLY liked the conference. I talked to lots of people, attended more sessions then I planned, got active in a couple of BoF's and co-presented one with Larry and Dries. So here is a small update on stuff I found.

It is great to see that the -on the spot during DrupalCon Barcelona- made up number of 7% female is broken!

With 10% of XX chromosomes during the Con we do represent the number of females on Drupal.org versus the number of males. Sure, it should have been 50%, but as the great

Today I had some time to arrange a ticket and an hotel for the DrupalCon Szegged 2008, pftttt! Just in time. Then I had some time to nerd around so I created a Y! pipe for All Things DrupalConSzeged2008 related (assuming that that would be the tag?). Feel free to run, edit, copy, change my pipe over at pipes, Yahoo! ID !required! You can see geolocated Flickr images, tweets, delicious links and much more in many formats (for example an RSS feed. feedback in the comments please, I'll update the pipe to reflect your thoughts.

And yes, that is the reason I do not program, even the pipe! looks bad and is not that smart build

When web pages become web applications. Then page reloads are history and you interact with your webapplicationin your browser in the page and with AJAX/AHAH you will get the data in and out of the page. Nothing new, that is what the marketeers label web 2.0.

But when users interact with pages without having to reload ... when pages become application .. this also means that traditional ways of measuring user activity that are hosted and used as a service, such as Google Analytics, will not be able to tell you what a user has done on a pageapplication.

There used to be a time when the success of a website was measured in "hits", way back in the nineties. Then -due to the fact webpages consisted of many HTML elements like Cascading Style Sheets- the success was measured in pageviews. For the last couple of years, the success is measured in unique visitors since advertisers are not that interested in serving the same ad for the 10th times to the same person. And now, due to AJAX, we have to find a new way of measuring the success of webapplication.

Yahoo! understands this and has been offering Yahoo! User Interface services for some time now for free that can be used by a webmaster to give a more rich feeling towards the user. This way, Yahoo still gets to see who is doing what on a website and can offer this as a Analytics competitor as well as use the data for having a better advertising offering with behavioral targeting. The downside is however that to make your pages application, you do more then some icing on the cake; User Interface gadgets are nice. But the real deal is in enriching your data for webapplication use, not just your user interface.

AJAX-As-A-Service (as a new way of Server Based Computing) suffers the same problems as the old way of doing Server based Computing like Citrix has; looking to the world through a straw. Local data and terminal screens from remote do not mix well; a document that is saved on a local harddisk and accessed via a terminal service application still need lots of bandwidth and leads to high latency. The same kind of poblems you encounter when you use hosted AJAX service that are not integrated with your site; the (meta)data of the user is on the webserver and the AJAX application is served from another webserver not able to access all rich metadata.

Therefor only websites that are based on a Content Management Systems that is old will use these kind of services, modern CMS-es like Drupal ship with their own plug-able extend-able AJAX library. And if that CMS enables you to turn a web-page into a webapplication, you have two options to have the right statistics based on the right data; logging from the CMS or raw logging from your website. Drupal never has been good in providing logging analyses; it is good for technical webmasters but the analyses is not usefull at all for marketeers and managers. Analysing raw logging yourself is IMHO still the best way; you also get to see those firefox users that block urchin or have the best firefox plugin aivalble installed. However, it takes time and most of the reporting is by far not as fancy as Google Analytics.

So we will see how AJAX will influence web-analytics, maybe CMS-es will provide better statistics?

The short story:
I will join Dutch Open Projects, DOP.nu. A 20 person PHP shop that offers SugarCRM, Joomla!, Symphony, Zend … and Drupal in the Netherlands!

The long story:
I started working in 1996 at PinkElephant, a student founded IT company in the Netherlands, hence the name. My first job was as a contractor to help out at one of the Global Network Management Centre’s of AT&T in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I think my first GNU/Linux slackware installs date back from that time. I learned a lot about Unixes, Cisco’s IOS, TCP/IP and managing firewalls. Remember that back in the mid 90-ies, the concept of "firewalls" was still catching on, it was for sure not a widespread best practice. I even remembered a funny trick back then, SGI (for the youngsters, think a hip machine like a Mac) was still a widespread used Unix and running many websites. You could use telnet (yes, unencrypted telnet!) towards such a box and login as the line printer daemon (lpt) that had default no password and a shell! All you had to do was use your favorite search engine, atltavista back in those days, and "google" for "powered by SGI" and you were in.

After my contract at AT&T, I worked internally at Pink’s emerging internet division. However, there was not much internet there, mostly managing Novell boxes. I disliked office automation in general and Novell in particularly so while I liked the young creative people, I went over to UniSource somewhere around 1998. Unisource was part of KPN. KPN just made the shift of a governmental owned telecom provider that had a monopoly on landlines towards a "commercial" company and UniSource was the datacommunication’s department. We managed dial in connections for nearly all ISP’s, managed the backbone of the Internet in the Netherlands. Like all providers UniSource was building a new network and when we rolled the network out, AS21286 was the fastest internetwork cloud in the world, using Packet over Sonnet with 2.5 Gbs per second in the core over Cisco 12016’s. Such a record was in those days beaten in a week, since everybody was rolling out "the new network". While I was in the networking team, the Unix team was only 5 meters away and I learned a lot about for example scaling transparent proxy’s as well.

Around 2000 I rejoined PinkElephant again, now part of Roccade and called PinkRoccade. I designed the new Internet infrastructure for them and was project lead for implementing it. I created a new AS and made the internet connections resilient via BGP4 and two independent upstream providers. After implementing this, my chief was smart enough to make me the manager of the network group and the Unix group. While I started managing the groups existed of only a dozen people, one year later I managed 30 people. During this time, around 2000/2001 I played around with PHPnuke and very soon after I stopped using that spaghetti code, I came across the drop.org website. Ever since that moment, I am more or less "active" in the Drupal community as a non coder. I had several functions after that moment, lead architect for a huge (20k plus seats) Server Based Computing environment, overpaid Business Consultant, speaker and for example active in (pre)sales. And during all these functions, I kept aligned to Drupal but never did anything with it professionally. I tried multiple times to introduce Drupal in my company and some customers. But the timing was wrong and the tool didn’t fit my employer at that time, who is one of the biggest Microsoft implementers in the world.

A year or so ago, I was fed up with my employer. I will not go in to details about why I wanted to leave the company since that would be very unprofessional but two things were most important and I would like to point out. PinkRoccade was bought by Getronics and Getronics lacks any kind of vision; the people in charge are basically there because of a bet gone wrong I presume since they must have been one of the most empty heads I ever met. I like to think / act that all people I meet are smarter then me but that was not the case at all when I spend some time at the headquarters of Getronics. The other reason is that the lack of vision of Getronics shows most when it comes to the IT; they focus completely on Office Automation, the desktop and hence on Microsoft products. In a world that is changing to services instead of clients, de jeure standards in stead of de facto standards and open instead of close, a wrong vision were I don’t want o be part of anymore. Luckily my network (see linkedin is after more then a decade in ICT with lots of contacts with customers and vendors good and –not to brag- I get a call from a headhunter every week or so. So when a small company that is implementing exclusively Open Source solutions came across my path, I decided to go there; I am joining Dutch Open Projects (dop.nu)! Nu btw is "now" in Dutch so it was a popular TLD some years ago in the Netherlands.

DOP is a 20+ person company, specialized in PHP. We do frontend (Joomla!, Drupal), midoffice (Drupal, Zend) and backend (SugarCRM, Symphony) implementations. I will be evangelizing Drupal for customers, working on sales, doing consultancy and leading projects. And hopefully, have a good time.

I always worked for employers with a couple of thousands employees, PinkElephant 1.500, PinkRoccade 10k, Getronics-PinkRoccade 20k and now Getronics-PinkRoccade is part of KPN that has some 30k employees. I am really looking forward to working over at DOP with only 20 people. No more making business plans in powerpoint (we use OO.org and don’t plan that way) but doing and making business in a more agile.

Now –after some 6 or 7 years of helping the community- it will sure be different to make money with Drupal. I hope that I will be able to keep the same independent attitude I had in the past as a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association. Please correct me anytime in the future if you think that I am mixing the community and business, slap me, hit me and correct me. I need you to do that. Ooh, and thanks to all of you who SMS-ed me, send me postcards and mail to congratulate me. I really appreciated that. And I sure will miss my nice colleagues over at Getronics-PinkRoccade, Dr John and Alessio to name two.

I was planning on making a videocast but the amount of post production was too much, kudos to everyone investing so much time in them!

Frankmeeuwsen zei dat hij een stukje van de NRC over "downloadgeneratie" in een keer kon vinden in google als eerste hit op twitter:

rechtsmenuklikt op "downloadgeneratie">search google>eerste hit>pats raak. Ongelooflijk...

ging ik de uitdaging aan.

aan de hand van iemand die gisteren googlede naar downloadgeneratie

en poste zelf een stuk over de downloadgeneratie op mijn site.

Zou ik het winnen? Zou ik met mijn blog entry boven die van de NRC komen? Drupal -het CMS onder deze site- is super SEO dus na een dag stond ik al op de 4de plaats. En vandaag even kijken en wat blijkt? Op google.COM sta ik nu op nummer 1. Eet je hart uit NRC en het CMS dat er onder ligt. :-)

En de title? Downloadgeneratie 2.0? Wel dat is een mooie naam die de huidige download generatie aan de volgende generatie kan geven. Een download generatie die niet enkel download maar ook weet wat de juridische gevolgen zijn, gebruik maakt van torrents maar wel CC licenties in acht neemt. Maar dat is voor later.