Peter Galli: Your passion for both open source communities and the open source approach to making software is something you discussed while speaking on "The Web is the Platform" panel at the recent OSBC. Can you elaborate not only on your passion, but also on how you've seen changes in Microsoft's overall approach to open source?

Brian Goldfarb: Microsoft's change in how it approaches open source began pretty significantly about seven years ago when I joined the company. One of my primary focuses was on helping bring a strong shift in the way Microsoft thinks about, participates in, and works with open source communities.

Today, this takes the shape of open source projects, code contributions, financial contributions, and other ways with a strong focus on being compatible with existing open source communities. From my team alone, we've made a number of investments in open source in the last year: These include contributions to the jQuery JavaScript Library, the Silverlight Media Framework (SMF), the Silverlight Analytics Framework (SAF), the Silverlight Control Toolkit, the AJAX Control Toolkit, and Project Orchard. 

In addition to projects and code, we also worked closely with open source application communities like DotNetNuke, Drupal, WordPress and others via our work on the Windows Web App Gallery. Microsoft is delivering advertising to help increase the size of the ecosystem for these applications on Windows Server and IIS.  This is great because it drives more opportunities for the ecosystems around these applications to service customers and monetize and it helps drive increased use of Windows - this effort has driven over 1.5-million application installations!

Peter Galli: Just how committed is Microsoft to Open Source?

Brian Goldfarb: Open Source is one of many business models that surround the creation of software. At Microsoft, while not always clear in the past, we are completely committed to open source as one way to address the needs of our customers, while advancing both the broader ecosystem of partners and developers and our business.

Peter Galli: You were just at MIX10. Tell me about some of the news there.

Brian Goldfarb: Well, Silverlight now brings a common infrastructure for plugins across a variety of devices. As a company we also announced an increasing commitment to HTML5 with IE9, implementing standards in a consistent way. Silverlight and HTML5 are complementary and symbiotic technologies serving distinct needs.  At Microsoft, we are committed to playing a major role with both and delivering the experiences consumers increasingly demand.

HTML5 is a great iteration on the already popular AJAX technologies in market (we even created the X in Ajax J) and Microosft has great investments in tools (Visual Studio, Expression Web) and platforms (ASP.NET) to build HTMl5 sites.  Silverlight pushes the envelope on what is possible, going beyond HTMl5 to enable scenarios not covered by standards in a consistent way across different devices.  Also, we announced Microsoft is dedicating developers to actively contribute to the jQuery JavaScript Library and be active participants in the broader jQuery community.

Peter Galli: So how is Silverlight moving the Web forward?

Brian Goldfarb: Silverlight is focused on driving the bleeding edge of what is possible on the Web.  We help enable companies to best design, develop, and deliver the engaging interactive experiences that their customers demand.  With a single runtime, we span both the web, the desktop, and mobile devices making it easy for developers to write once and optimize the best user experience on each form factor. 

We also focus on enabling a wide variety of applications -the highest-quality media experiences in 1080P HD,  to business applications and enable them to run both in and out of the browser, on or offline - with a single runtime installation.  Silverlight is helping drive new innovation for what can be accomplished through Web delivered content, whether it's IIS Smooth Streaming for Media, Pivot for data visualization and exploration, Deep Zoom for super-high resolution imagery and more.

Peter Galli: So, are there now two different groups of developers, mobile developers and Web developers?

Brian Goldfarb: No, as we announced at MIX this week, for Silverlight, there is no difference. More than 500,000 Silverlight developers are now mobile developers.

Peter Galli:  With the proliferation of the Web and mobile devices, people are swimming in data. We are all suffering from data overload. Is data now the business model?

Brian Goldfarb:  Not really - it's more of a trend to enable business opportunities - a trend more about enhancing consumer experiences, where the data is pervasive, and where you can connect to it from anywhere. With the growing availability of Web data you can easily create new richer front ends to existing websites (for instance the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook, or the work being enabled by the Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform) and it opens up a new world of possibilities to businesses to change the way we interact with data that already exists. We've done a lot of work with our partners around all this that puts a pretty face on data consumption.

OData is an example of how we are making it easier to share and consume data. With OData we are extending simple standards (AtomPub) to make it easier to build services that can be consumed by any front end.

Peter Galli:  As we move towards a reality where the Web is the platform, the need for large scale enterprise frameworks is diminished. How do you reconcile that with the existing large frameworks?

Brian Goldfarb: Well, I think you have to have both. There needs to be room for comprehensive frameworks like Java as well as for agile frameworks. You have to do both, because you're serving very different customers.

When we talk to enterprise IT, they tell us to ship slower, while the OS community wants us to ship faster.  We're able to deliver on both of these seemingly conflicting demands with steady releases of the .NET Framework and agile releases of software like Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC. We've done a ton of work to make Windows and IIS a great resource for running PHP apps. We're investing in Drupal, Word Press with the Windows App Gallery, and we're driving business to open source apps, creating energy and usage in these communities.

This benefits everybody and grows the pie for everyone. For example, we recently open sourced ASP.NET MVC 2, and Miguel de Icaza has it up and running on Mono already.

Apple hasn't been too willing in letting app developers create programs that directly compete with functions already provided by Apple, but Opera is testing the waters to see if the company may have loosened up in its stance with this application.

Unlike proper browsers that retrieve and display web pages all on their own, Opera Mini has the help of Opera's servers, which re-compress web content for optimal viewing and transfer times to mobile devices. While you might not be interested in a service that degrades image quality, for instance, on a desktop PC, the idea makes a lot of sense for smartphones. Why waste your bandwidth downloading a large JPEG when you phone's only going to have to scale it down to a fraction of its size for display a moment later? Opera claims that its processing increases browsing speed up to six times.

Opera is counting the seconds since it made its application to the App Store, calling Apple out to face a challenger for best iPhone browser. There's no word on how long a decision will take, nor what Opera will charge for Opera Mini, would it to be approved.

I got excited about his panel because it seemed to speak to me specifically, and sure enough, it really delivered. The panel concentrated on two aspects of web writing, first is to explore writing web content, and secondly how to write web content for a living. For the purposes of this post, I'll be concentrating on the first aspect because it is a little more applicaple to our audience.

Webwriting vs. Copywriting

I'm a "copywriter," but today I learned what I really might be is a web writer. Web writing and copywriting are different things. A web writer is responsible for ongoing content. Web writers are also responsible for determining the best vessel to disseminate content. It is important to know your audience, and to pick the right vehicle to show your content.

Thinking in terms of the anatomy of the writing itself, its about who you are communicating with and how you are communicating it with. Web writing is not just blocks of text. All things have to work in harmony together in webwriting. You're writing for an audience that is thinking about the next thing they are going to do, and you have to guide them to the next step. They are looking to you as a guide. You are a tour guide as well as a sprinter. You're racing ahead to anticipate the selection the audience will make. When you are writing for the web, you are collaborating, and all the design elements-- including copy-- must be in harmony.

Web writing is changing the way we write in general. Writing for the web is more immediate, there is less room for error. It forces one to become a more organized thinker. You can take the way you present information and communication from the web to almost every other concept. Web writing is a new(er) form of communication, but the message is still the same: you must communicate with your auduience the things you want them to know. You are an informer.

Journalism is different than web writing, too, but they both involve research. You want to give people an explanation what has happened.

A lot of content going up is meant for trust building, but never asks for a call to action. Ian Alexander of Eat Media noted that, "Most things are way too much [in the way of] sales, or way too much information." For most content  You don't need much text, you just need the right text. As long as everything is doing its job, people will stay with you.

Web writing is a user experience "area of opportunity."

• Where does it go? What is the context? You miss an opportunity when you don't examine the user experience.
• Ian: "Content is expensive to make, and it is a pain in the ass."
• You don't have to be a designer to be a good content producer. But, you have to know good when you see it.
• A killer content strategist knows which CMS is right, etc. You need to know what questions to ask.

Web Writing as an Element of Content Strategy

• Content strategy is the creation and governance of content.
• What are you putting up, where is going to go? Who is it for?
• Thinking big picture for content that is sustainable.
• Everything has a purpose and everything has a place.
• Everything you communicate is your brand.

Panelists -

Erin Anderson - Brain Traffic
Tiffani Jones - thingsthatarebrown LLC
Ian Alexander - Eat Media
Dan Maccarone - HardCandyShell

There's a big difference between being a web writer and being a content strategist, according to Christina Halvorson, the CEO of Brain Traffic and author of "Content Strategy for the Web", whose company does nothing but content strategy. She hosted the session, "Content Strategy FTW" at SxSWi.

The problem, as she sees it, is that the web writer is often disconnected from the rest of the web development team. Where there should be content strategy and SEO strategy, we're often on projects where we're focused much more on target audience personas, design standards and project management charts, instead of content. The web writer is then brought in, given the creative brief, the wireframe and two weeks to "crank out the content." 

Why? Agencies and clients tell themselves little lies to make themselves comfortable that the content is not a big project. Lies like:

• "We've already got the content, we just need to pull it in;"
• "Everyone knows what they want to say, we just need to write it down;"
• "We're the agency, we're not the content experts, we'll let the client take care of it later."

The problem though, is that we have been conditioned to believe that copywriting is the same as content strategy.  But content is much more than that. Ideally, we'll follow seven steps to content creation. After all, information architecture means much more than figuring out the primary and secondary navigation of a website. It includes the words, the navigation, the imagery and more of a complete user experience. Content requirements need to happen near the beginning of a web development process, right when we think about functional specifications.  The challenge there is that, when it's considered at all, content requirements are often being looked at from a content management system level, instead of an overall content strategy that talks about what our content will look like, sound like and be like in the next 2-4 years.

Content is not a feature

"Late conent is consistenly one of the reason for project delays. The task itself and resources needed to complete the task are seriously underestimated. Accept it. Plan for it. Charge for it." Halvorson rejects this quote because it diminishes the power of content. She instead argues for a content strategy model.

"Content strategy plans for the creation, publication and governnance of useful, usable content. And strategy is a plan for obtaining a specific goals or result," according to Halvorson. This includes text and data, graphics, video and animation and audio that are considered as ways to drive business goals. It factors in not only the website, but what the social media marketers are doing, and where they are sharing content well beyond the website.

Text is more than marketing copy it is page copy, articles, links, labels, flash elements, alt tags, error messages, task instructions and much more. (I can picture the copywriters at our firm cheering right now.)

Content is king

"Content is king." Everyone loves to say that, but our web development processes don't seem to respect it. Search is important. And whether your content ranks today is in part a function of the response to your content. So it's more than keyword stacking. If you can get sharing, you can get backlinks and thereby get more traffic. So search matters.

But, in an era where Facebook drives more web traffic than Google for many sites, resonance also matters. Halvorson compared Quicken's home page (lots of pictures of Quicken boxes and an offer to buy the software) with Mint's home page (promises to help you solve your financial problems). Someone in the market for Quicken is seeking solutions for their financial problems, but Quicken isn't offering it on the home page.

All in all, the message was this: If content matters (and more than ever it does), don't build a workflow that gives two weeks for a copywriter to crank it out. And don't abandon old content that may poorly represent you. It was a good reminder that if you use the same web development strategy that we've always used, we're very likely to fall short in 2010.

What do you do?

Here are the steps:

1. Conduct a content audit. Yes, Halvorson said, it's a terribly boring exercise, but it's critical. You have to map that terrain. If your website is too massive, pick a section that's important and audit that.
2. Ask. Ask why, what, how, for whom, by whom, with waht, when, where, how often and what's next? You'll annoy folks, but you'll get to a strategy if you answer them eventually.
3. Analyze. Take a qualitative look at your content (is it any good?), but take a close look at the content ecosystems, including external sources (users, competitors, regulators) that impact your content and how it's perceived. You also need to think about how people are getting to your content (from search, from Twitter, from Facebook?) and the expectations the users bring with them because of it.
4. Align. This is one of the most difficult things a content strategist does. They figure out the various needs of the stakeholders toward a content lifecycle. They have to think about launching the content, and knowing when it needs to be updated and/or deleted.
5. Assume responsibility. The minute we put content online, we assumed the role and responsibility of a publisher. And publishers have to think about those questions in #2 and the plan for having a content lifecycle management process.

Do all this, and you'll see better user experiences, better branding, improved SEO and analytics and much more effective personalization.

It sounds hard, but in an era when "content is king," it could not be more important. Good session. There are lots of us that should be thinking carefully about her messages.

One of the more interesting panels I was able to attend at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival was called "Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized?" As status updates (via Twitter, via Facebook, via Foursquare) become increasingly important, the ability to figure out what's happening increases. As long as we can organize that data.

But beyond that searching for products to buy, and being able to see if it's in stock near you, up to the minute, would be equally important (particularly around Christmas, when this year's version of "Tickle Me Elmo" is being fought over.)

The panelists all have a stake in the game. They include:

• Scott Raymond, Gowalla
• Brett Slatkin, Google
• Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft
• Marshall Kilpatrick, ReadWriteWeb (moderator)
• Jack Moffett, Collecta, a real-time search engine

Data Formats

To get this to work to maximum effect, you need to have uniform data streams. Moffett pointed out that some formats, like Atom, RSS and even PubSubHubbub (Push) are good starts, but they have limitations. We need to push toward uniform data sources that can deal with scale.

Interoperability

Brett Slatkin pointed out the issues today with cross platform compatibility. Remember when you had to pay extra to call someone on another cell phone network? Remember when you could only text message or instant message with people on your same network? We're seeing that now, where Buzz doesn't communicate (directly) with Twitter or Identica. Gowalla and Foursquare are different platforms that don't talk. Ideally, you could use the platform that worked best for you and the data would work together.

But Which Specifications?

Obasanjo pointed out that developing 6-7 different specifications sounds like "a lot of work for a whole lot of people." What we need instead is a series of protocols that are not proprietary, but allow the data to flow. The end user doesn't care what platform they are in, they only care if it took a Twitter update took 2 hours to get into their system.

How Does Business Match Common Ground?

Raymond of Gowalla noted that "there's a whole lot of work that needs to be done" on the balance between the individual incentive of the company (Gowalla has an interest in attracting users at the expense of Foursquare right now, for example), but the community has an interest in open platforms. When a company has only so much effort they can apply to growth, how much do they apply to their network and standards, or how much do they put into building their closed gardens? I'm paraphrasing him, but that was the main point.

What If You Want to Delete Something that's Been Shared?

Moffitt wondered about the issue of deleting something if it's already been shared all around the web. For example, if you upload a Flickr photo which then goes out to Google, Bing, and Collecta search engines, but you then decide to delete it, what happens? Currently the streams picked up by these other platforms don't include a "delete this if you have a copy of it." So once it's out there, it's out there. Slatkin of Google felt that dealing with deleting is technically simple, while dealing with much larger issues of access control need a lot of work. In other words, who gets to see your data, and can you segment that (easily) by each piece of content?

With 400m on Facebook, Are We Already There?

Kilpatrick asked if the public, at least 400m of them, have already voted by becoming Facebook users? But others, including Obasanjo said we're doing "a horrible job" balancing Facebook's goal (pushing out widely shared content for an active network) and the end user's goal of throttling their data down to only those they want to see it. Moffitt noted that he doesn't want to share his Amazon purchases online, but they use it for recommendations anyway. And he pointed out that Netflix shared a very small, "anonymized" dataset of users, but smart people realized that if they could decode the person who gave a review, they could follow that data to figure out who many of the users were. Once you know that, you know the movies they like to watch, ostensibly private data. That led the FTC to step in and pressure Netflix to cancel the second round of their effort to improve their recommendation engine with crowdsourcing.

Away from Data Silos, Focus on People

Obasanjo made an excellent point that anyone at SxSW can relate to: To figure out what your friends are doing here, you need to check Foursquare, and Gowalla and Twitter. The ideal situation would be for a person to be able to look in one place about their friend, and get a picture of all their doing. A people hub. Slatkin, however, wondered how you monetize that data if you can't serve ads up next to it (he's been taught well at Google). Obasanjo noted the conflict, but figured the person who does the best focusing on the person first will do well for their brands. Good point. One of the challenges, however, is getting the end user to think about who they want to share each piece of content with. Today, nobody wants to do that.

As you can see, we may be able to realize the real-time web, but there's a lot of work yet to do.

Amazon's Kindle, with its free cellular data connection, may sound like the perfect way to browse the web, but the limited-functionality browser has always had a long way to go to measure up to the web experience we expect from full-fledged PCs. Now Amazon is looking to correct that oversight, hiring a developer to re-craft the tablet's web component.

The new Kindle browser is still a long ways off, but it's clear that the overhaul has become one of the company's priorities. This goal was revealed through a job posting for Amazon's Lab126 division, the team that designed the Kindle. Without saying outright "Kindle programmer wanted", they're looking to hire a developer for adding features to their embedded browser product; not much uncertainty in just what product they mean.

Right now the Kindle browser handles basic sites without too much fuss, but anything image-heavy or with lots of scripted interactions won't play nice. Flash or video are right out of consideration, considering the Kindle's slow screen refresh rate. It will take some clever programing to turn the Kindle into a reliable, compatible browser, but that's one upgrade we're willing to wait for.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

3G is yesterday's news, and all the major cell providers are experimenting with getting their networks ready for the high-speed data protocols we'll be using in the near future. Sprint's well on its way to 4G deployment, and today we got word of T-Mobile's latest efforts, a not-quite-4G HSPA+ implementation it's calling "Very Fast Mobile Web".

Don't let the fact that it isn't quite proper 4G scare you away, as HSPA+ is no slouch; T-Mobile claims that it can squeeze over 2.5MB/s to a device on its HSPA+ network. The company already has the network deployed in Philadelphia, and is now expanding to Chicago, LA, Dallas, and Miami.

The first "Very Fast Mobile Web" device T-Mobile users will have the chance to play with is a USB modem - the webConnect Rocket. Sometime later this year you should also be able to get an HSPA+ smartphone, likely running Android, on your T-Mobile account.

Details haven't been published yet on what "Very Fast Mobile Web" service will add to your T-Mobile bill, but if we can gleam anything from current and past data rates, expect to pay dearly for broadband speed on the go. With speeds this fast, though, it just might be worth it.

Website visitors are doing much more than just visiting site pages today. On every successful website, users are interacting with content and coming away with a more satisfying experience. Using interactive selectors to choose products that best fit their needs, watching and commenting on videos and browsing dynamic photo albums, site visitors are being propelled into user-centric experiences. These experiences are the hallmark of today’s successful websites and it is rapidly becoming clear that this is what users want and expect.

These expectations are that websites function and behave like applications, rather than static repositories of information. Rich internet applications (RIAs) are at the center of supplying this experience, providing intuitive and engaging access between site users and the website’s information. RIAs let users input and manipulate data directly, changing their choices without losing other important information. With instantaneous response, change is visible immediately and the fields in forms can be validated before submission, resulting in faster processing. RIAs can contain whole processes, rather than spreading a process over several different pages, adding a level of immersion and interaction that static sites cannot provide. Beyond the benefits to site visitors, companies that leverage RIAs have seen substantial increases in revenue (upwards of 25% in some cases). Conversion rate increases of more than 60% are not uncommon.

Product selectors, photo galleries, video and audio players and other RIAs are all built on flexible frameworks such as Adobe Flex, Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and HTML5. Utilizing these technologies, websites are able to deliver the information and experience that site users are looking for quickly and efficiently.

But RIAs are only as good as the content they are delivering. And unmanaged content will doom an RIA to failure.

RIAs are extremely content dependent and, in order to stay relevant, the data they consume needs to be kept up to date and flexible. Structured data, such as XML, is preferable over HTML entered content. It can be consumed free of formatting conflicts and is reusable across the website. Like other content on the website, structured data needs to be managed easily and efficiently.

Web content management (WCM) platforms that are able to manage structured content as easily as they handle standard HTML content are the solution to managing RIAs and their content. To do this, a WCM platform must be able to produce XML data without requiring the direct involvement of developers. This will enable non-technical website contributors to manage the RIA’s data. Subject matter experts and marketing professionals, by managing the structured content, are also able to manage the RIAs themselves. These are the people who are making the decisions about what should be in the RIAs and when that information should be changed; the RIA content should be dependent on them, not on developers.

With a WCM capable of managing RIAs, content can be entered as structured data via a form, streamlining the process by which data is added, edited or updated in the RIA. Using a form for input ensures that all of the correct data is entered for the RIA to use and content contributors do not need to be familiar with XML. Subject matter experts and marketing professionals can update content on the fly (just as they do content for the other parts of the website) as messaging changes, new products are introduced, new videos are available or other content updates are necessary. The messaging and structure that is used by the RIA can also be applied across the rest of the site. Updates are more efficient; rather than adding content to the site’s static pages and then to the RIAs, content is updated only once and all changes are applied to every instance that the content is presented.

WCM platforms that allow a true separation of content from presentation are ideal for managing RIAs. While developers create new, more immersive and more interactive functionality for RIAs, they should not have to be concerned with entering content or even how the content is being inputted by subject matter experts. The editing environment of the WCM platform can offer a familiar environment for content authors and contributors to add, edit and manage the data that is consumed by RIAs on the site.

The era of static websites is over and user-centric experiences are becoming the norm. Leveraging RIAs and WCM platforms will produce the immersive, interactive websites that site visitors prefer and expect, and make maintaining and updating these rich experiences more efficient and effective.

About the Author: Bill Rogers is the CEO and founder of Ektron Inc., a Web Solutions company that provides a platform for web content management, marketing optimization and social software. Ektron’s helps customers realize operational efficiency, increased revenue and improved customer loyalty through a combination of software and services.

State and local governments are really feeling the impact of the recession and are losing valuable resources. Many of the "easy" cuts have already been made, and tough decisions like layoffs, delayed projects, and reduced services are being implemented across the country. Yet even in this somewhat grim picture, there are people finding ways to improve government, providing services 24 hour a day, more efficiently and with greater impact.

As Microsoft's National Technology Officer for U.S. State and Local government's, I get the unique opportunity to work with a broad array of our customers, and see some of the creative approaches they are taking to solving very hard problems.  So when I see someone doing it well, it really sticks with me

Last week, Microsoft hosted our annual Public Sector CIO Summit. More than 300 CIO's from across the US federal, state, local, and education leaders spent two days learning and listening to one other and discussing how Microsoft's technology strategy and roadmap helps them solve hard problems.  There were several great stories, but there is one in particular I want to call out.

Like a number of cities, the City of Miami had implemented a 311 system. It started out as a phone based system allowing Miami's residents to report non-emergency issues around the City. Citizens could dial 311 to report issues such as potholes, street light outages, or missed trash pickup.

Of course those same citizens wanted to know that progress was being made, and started calling the call center to inquire about their issues. Since this can decrease efficiency, the city took a big step and decided to put it all online. Now, people can view the status of the request and monitor the progress of the request resolution. In addition, citizens have full visibility into the progress of other issues being resolved around the city. 

Here's the really stunning part. The City of Miami, two people actually, was able to build a new system in less than eight days over the holidays, with no up-front costs - from inception to running. By deploying it in the cloud, they not only sped up development, but eliminated the need for costly infrastructure.

The solution takes advantage of virtually unlimited storage and processing power, provides the ability to quickly address service requests and implement updates even during peak times such as hurricane season. If things change, the City can bring the solution on site or move to a physical facility, all based on  need and cost-effectiveness.

As a result, residents logging on to Miami 311 can see on average 4,500 issues in progress - not represented as a ‘list', but located on a map in relation to other projects in their neighborhood .  A simple click on the map allows them to easily drill down to more and more specific details if they want.

In short, they have turned what used to be represented by a meaningless list of data into useful information, and created  actionable and consumable knowledge that is relevant to the citizens of Miami. For Miami, their ‘service call to the city' becomes an interactive process they can follow - and the City has a new tool to manage and deliver outcomes.

Anyone who has ever built a public facing, enterprise-level application, knows how spectacular that is. Everyone who wonders how their government is doing can appreciate the value.

When the city made the move to the web, they chose tools they knew and software they trust. The Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform made it easy to do, and they used both Bing mapping and Silverlight to build a user friendly front end.

They took advantage of the technology roadmap we have built, which lets them decide what belongs in the cloud and what belongs on premise - in effect, they put our annual $9-billion R&D investment to work for citizens of Miami, right now. 

No delay. Lower costs. Great use of existing talent. Better citizen services. Fantastic.

Our customers have made decisions about how their enterprise technology infrastructure needs to meet their business requirements. We've built the platform that helps them deliver on those choices across a broad set of technologies, and not just those that have our name on it.

In fact, our customers get to choose which data center their data lives in; the technology they want to write applications to access that data; and the developer tools they use to write the code. The Microsoft cloud today supports open source technologies such as Eclipse, PHP, Ruby, Python and PERL running on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform in our data centers.

In doing so, our customers have choice and avoid the problem of creating a new silo of complexity. Instead, they are able to extend their on-premises environment to fit their goals in ways they are comfortable with. Turns out, it is OK to use a broad range of technologies, including Open Source software, with Microsoft solutions.

Now, something that is really cool: Miami is making their solution available to other jurisdictions (no surprise, most cities deal with similar challenges). I can't wait to see what the next iteration of contributions will be, as more thought leaders across the country engage.

Miami really is taking a lead, in very hard circumstances, and we're proud that our technology is part of that solution. But, as I said, it's about people solving problems.

There has been a lot written about the business side of the real time web. Many internet companies have entered the space and established websites have implemented the real time web into their offerings. Also, millions of internet users have joined social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in an effort to connect with people and share pictures and experiences with friends. However, there are a ton of tools available to all internet users allowing anyone to take advantage of, and learn from the real time web. And, the great aspect of these tools is that they are free and anyone can use them regardless of whether or not you are a member of any social networking site.

The most basic way to navigate the real time web is through search. On the real time web, people talk about whatever is on their minds. By using a real time web search engine, you are able to get a window into people’s thoughts about any given topic in real time. Plus, since real time results are ranked with the most recent result coming first, a search today will reveal different information than a search tomorrow. So, real time search results can give you new information each day - even if you are searching for the same topic.

There are several real time search engines to choose from. A good place to start would be with Twitter’s engine. On the Twitter homepage, you can enter a search for any topic and instantly read the current chatter on that subject. Another search engine to check out is Sency (editors note: authors company). While Twitter displays both links and comments within each real time result, Sency separates this information so that you can easily sort through either what’s being said right now or today’s most popular links for any given keyword.

Another interesting aspect of the real time web is the ability to identify current trends. Since people are posting updates each minute, real time websites are able to highlight which topics are being mentioned the most right now. Many sites publish the top 10 or top 20 topics being mentioned this instant or over the past day. Often, these trends can clue you into breaking news before it becomes mainstream because often the internet community will be in the know about a story or event before major media outlets. You can see the current trends on the homepage of Twitter. Twitter shows you what is hot right now, today, and this week. For more detailed information about trends, you can visit What The Trend. (http://whatthetrend.com/) This website will list the current trends, and in a format similar to Wikipedia – it also allows any of its visitors to provide feedback as to why a particular topic is trending right now. So, this can be a great resource to learn about the reasons behind the hot topics on the web.

In addition to trends, certain stories become popular on the real time web very quickly. TweetMeme allows you to view the hottest stories right now that are being shared on Twitter. When you visit the homepage, you will see the most recent stories which are popular along with how many times each story has been shared. Many other websites and blogs, you’ll notice will display how many times an article you are reading has been shared on the real time web as well. The reason behind this is that it promotes the sharing of the article, and also, it lets users which stories on a given website or blog are attracting the most eyeballs. Also, in this vein, another interesting resource to check out is Daily RT. One of the most popular functions of Twitter is the retweet function. When someone retweets they are taking what someone else posted on Twitter and they then rebroadcast it to their Twitter page. So, the more a particular message gets retweeted, the more popular it is. Daily RT allows you to search and view the most popular retweeted messages on the web. This can be a very interesting way to stay on top of the most important topics being discussed.

As you can see, all of these tools allow you to learn from the real time web without signing up to participate in any of the services. Each of these tools are free to use, and due to the real time nature of each, you can learn something new each time you utilize them. As more and more users flock to social networks, and as these tools do an even better job of implementing and displaying the real time information – these tools will turn out to be even better resources for internet users. So, by familiarizing yourself with these resources and learning how to use them, you will become more informed and you will be able to take better advantage of the internet in the future.

About the Author: Evan Britton is the founder of real time search engine Sency.