It’s the beginning of 2010 and there are  a ton of lists making the rounds for the best of 2009 and the best of the decade. Here’s some that I thought were interesting:

• The 10 Best Books of 2009 – The New York Times
• Full List – 25 Best Blogs 2009 – TIME – I am partial to Lifehacker, BoingBoing, Mashable and Seth Godin here.
• The Best Free Software of 2009 – Features by PC Magazine - Lots of open source like WordPress, Camino, Flock 2, Firefox, Thunderbird and others but I can’t say that I agree with a lot of the pics. The list includes a lot of SaaS offerings like Mint and Gmail which are excellent but not necessarily software.
• Five Best Linux Distributions – Linux – Lifehacker - Ubuntu wins with 10,901 votes. Was surprised to see SUSE and Fedora neck and neck in the voting.
• The Best iPhone Apps Of 2009 (Appvee Edition) - The best iPhone apps of 2009 according to TechCrunch. I have to agree on TweetDeck, Fandango and Facebook.
• Ten gadgets that defined the decade — Engadget - Best gadgets of the decade according to Engadget.
• MarketingSherpa: EmailSherpa 2009 in Review: Social Sharing, Segmentation, Optimizing Autoresponders, and More
• The 2009 Cloudies Awards (Best of Cloud Computing)

• Open Source Proves Elusive as a Business Model – NYTimes.com – Whether open-source firms are practical as long-term businesses, however, is a much murkier question.
  The best-known open-source company is Red Hat, which produces a variant of the Linux operating system for server computers. Like most of its peers, Red Hat offers a free version of its base product and relies on selling support services and extra tools for revenue. In its last fiscal year, which ended in March, the company’s revenue rose 25 percent to $653 million, and it reported net income of $79 million.
• Open-Source Business Models Aren’t Dead-End Streets – GigaOM – This year, open-source platforms and applications have shown how truly disruptive and influential they can be. However, The New York Times is getting lots of attention with a story that says successful open-source business models remain elusive.
• If You’re Looking For The Open Source Business Model, You’re Looking For The Wrong Thing | Techdirt – But that misses the point. Open source software, by itself, shouldn’t be much of a business. Just as music isn’t much of a business by itself, but it can be a huge component of a larger business, open source software is part of what helps many other businesses.

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• Open source business models? (startups.com)

Technorati Tags: Business, Open Source

No theme just a bunch of cool links:

• The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing | cxpartners – As web professionals, we all know that the concept of the page fold being an impenetrable barrier for users is a myth. Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us and on only 3 occasions have we seen the page fold as a barrier to users getting to the content they want. (via @RandFish on Twitter)
• Future of Web Apps – At the Future of Web Apps conference Kevin Rose (Digg, Pownce, Wefollow) gave a cool presentation on the top 10 down and dirty ways you can grow your web app. He took the questions he’s most often asked and turned it into a very informative talk.
• List of Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing Examples – Best practices – Open innovation and crowdsourcing – Examples of crowdsourcing and online collaboration.
• How Do Innovators Think? – HBR Editors’ Blog – Harvard Business Review – What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Ebay’s Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, and P&G’s A.G. Lafley tick? In a question-and-answer session with HBR contributing editor Bronwyn Fryer, Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead explain how the “Innovators’ DNA” works.
• MarketingSherpa: MarketingSherpa’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame 2009: Top 7 Campaigns – See how seven marketers planned and executed campaigns that built their own buzz and pushed KPIs higher and higher. Includes screenshots, campaign summaries, and Sherpa analysis on seven campaigns from companies such as Disney, Microsoft and Atlassian.
• 21 Untapped Traffic Sources – Nice set of ideas for driving web traffic
• Mentoring in Open Source Communities: What Works? What Doesn’t? | ITworld – Ubuntu’s Bacon sums up the benefits when he urges open source projects to make use of mentoring. “It is a powerful method of sharing skills and ideas, but start simple. Define some relationships and check in to see how things are progressing. Mentoring is not about hooking two people together and then forgetting about it. Check in with them to see how they are doing, how they are progressing and what help they may need.”
• Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Neflix community challenge improves their suggestion system and nets the winning team $1 million.
• Top CMOs on Twitter
• Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media ROI – Thanks to Gia for this link
• Open Source: The Way, Not The Goal – Open Source Blog – InformationWeek – I love it, open source is not a business model it’s a software development methodology. It’s a means to an end.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, commmunity, crowdsourcing, entrepreneurs, Innovation, open, SEO, socialmedia, source, Syndication, usability, web

Some really good posts and information for Social Media and WordPress integration

• Beyond TweetBacks: Introducing TweetSuite | Dan Zarrella – Nice plug-in for integrating Twitter and WordPress.
• SocioFluid – another social bookmarking plugin for wordpress | ImproveSeo.info – A good looking plugin for WordPress to display the social bookmarking buttons for digg, reddit, … I like the buttons because they are not too small and not too big.
• 10 Tools for the Social Media Marketer | Traffikd – If you are an avid user of social media and you are working to build traffic for your own website or blog with SMM, here are 10 tools to help make your work easier.
• SociBook Plugin For WordPress – Nice WordPress plugin to share your posts on a ton of social bookmarking sites.
• 5 Essential Steps to Make Your Site Search & Social Media Friendly – The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results requires that website owners and content publishers make their websites both search and social media friendly.( via Jeff Cohen @dgtlpapercuts on Twitter)
• Is Everything You Know About SEO Wrong? » aimClear Search Marketing Blog – “Do those old H1 tags still work? Actually word’s out, they don’t really count much anymore for SEO. Does quantity, power or diversity of inbound links take the hill for search engines ranking pages algorithmically for keywords? Actually, correlation data indicates that link diversity is a factor which has become more important.”
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online | Lateral Action – Breaks down the steps from acquiring web visitors to engaging them. Really awesome graph.

Technorati Tags: Content, Online, Online Content, SEO, SocBook, Social Media, SocioFluid, TweetSuite, WordPress

• tecosystems » Earth Class Mail: Still Open for Business? – Stephen’s review of Earth Class Mail a snail mail handling service. Looks intriguing.
• Amazon.com: Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code: Van Lindberg: Books – from Amazon’s description: “Clear, correct, and deep, this is a welcome addition to discussions of law and computing for anyone — even lawyers!” — Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society If you work in information technology, intellectual property is central to your job — but dealing with the complexities of the legal system can be mind-boggling.  [via Matt]
• Walking With Elephants: Taking on a new challenge -Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that the pilot program for PeerToPatent is being extended for a second year and that the areas of innovation it covers is being broadened to include e-commerce and business methods.
• Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops- Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. [via Savio]
• Compiere Appoints Chief Marketing Officer to Lead Continued Global Expansion Initiatives – Open Source ERP vendor Compiere, Inc., announced that software industry veteran, John Cingari, has joined the company as chief marketing officer.
• Mindtouch: Deki, OSS and Windows – Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft- I am fascinated by the fact that Deki is open source, is written in C# and uses the Mono framework and now runs on Windowws. It’s truly an OSS egnima. And it’s wicked cool stuff.

Technorati Tags: Compiere, DekiWiki, Earth Class Mail, MindTouch, Open Source

• SourceForge.net: ICEcore – ICEcore collaboration software is the July 2008 SF.net project of the month.
• GNOME hires Stormy Peters as Executive Director – Open Logic’s Stormy Peters leaves OpenLogic for the GNOME Foundation interesting job.
  (Via Savio)
• SnapLogic Blog » Connecting Clouds – Integration and Cloud Computing – Mikeyp gets it right, “…cloud computing will not happen overnight – it will be a gradual transition and, current hype aside, that transition is ongoing in all of these areas.”
• tecosystems » Differentiating from Twitter: Open Source and Identi.ca – “Identi.ca is likely to make an excellent personal trainer for Twitter. More so, even, than Jaiku, Pownce and friends. Why? Because the biggest community wins.”
• Linux Today – From the Middle English Phrase “God Be With Ye” – Congratulations to my good friend Brian Proffitt for becoming the community manager for the Linux Foundation’s Developer Network.
• 451 CAOS Theory » What we talk about when we talk about community – Matt Aslett talks mulls over the definition of community.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, GNOME, Identi.ca, Open Source, Twitter

• Removing Barriers to the Community – MySQL Moves to Bazaar – Jay Pipes

  It is the role of a community manager to remove the barriers — both technical and ideological — between the user/developer community and the company or group of individuals which produces the open source software

• Linux.com :: Lessons learned from NCSU FOSS class

  As textbooks, Cohen used Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software, supplemented by Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Lawrence Rosen’s Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. All, appropriately enough, are available in free online versions. Cohen also made extensive use of other Web pages throughout the course.\n\nThe midterm and the final exams were based on material covered in the lectures and the textbooks. However, two-thirds of each student’s grade was based on their involvement with a FOSS project.

• Open Thoughts: Freshmeat: PostgreSQL is More Popular than MySQL

  Surprising that PosgresSQL ranks higher than MySQL here. However, I think it’s a good sign that there are two very active open source SQL databases.

• EeeUser ASUS Eee PC Forum / Verizon EVDO Data connection on Eee PC via USB phone link

  Instuctions for getting an Asus Eee to connect over a Verizon EVDO card.

• SourceForge.net: Wine 1.0 released

  Open source implementation of Windows API on top of X And Unix turns version 1.0.

• Social Networking Trends | IDC

  Social Networking Applications in the U.S. Take Hold and Market Experiences 191% Growth in 2007, IDC Finds

• RMS & Clipperz offer freedom in the cloud « rand($thoughts);

  To summarize, Clipperz has technology for “zero-knowledge web applications” which they have applied to an online password manager as a proof of concept.

• Over 12 Top, Free Tools For Web Development Projects | OStatic

  Some free, some open source tools and services that are used to develop and maintain websites. New ones for me are Piwik (http://piwik.org/) and Open Designs (http://www.opendesigns.org/).

• blog.reddit — what’s new on reddit: reddit goes open source

  The open source components in Reddit – Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached.

• Where Now With Patent Reform

  Given the failure of pending patent reform legislation (S. 1145) to make it out of committee in the U.S. Senate this spring, it is unlikely that we will see any form of comprehensive patent reform legislation this year. This should not be surprising given that this is a major election year and the fact that there are a few other issues on the table (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Middle East peace, soaring gasoline prices, soaring food prices, housing market in the ditch, Midwest flooding – shall I go on?).

• Open-source Asterisk appliance takes on Nortel

  Media processing vendor Pika Technologies Inc. recently announced that its Warp appliance line is customer-ready and ready to slay the Nortels and Ciscos of the world in a bid for the small to midsize corporate telespace.

• tecosystems » Open Source: Thinking Outside the Glass Box

  Stephen O’Grady sums up the current debate, begun by Savio, continued by the 451’s Matthew Aslett, and back to Savio. The question being asked is one that’s made the rounds before, and one that I’ve asked myself: are there artificial limits to the revenue potential of open source firms? As Aslett puts it, a glass ceiling?

• The Beekeeper – Pentaho Wiki

  How commercial works by Pentaho CTO James Dixon.

• Over 8 million — way to go! :: The Mozilla Blog

  8 million downloads in a 24 hour period. The judges at the Guinness World Records are working to validate thevrecord attempt.

• Red Hat chief: We are hard to do business with – ZDNet.co.uk

  Red Hat’s new chief executive Jim Whitehurst has admitted his company needs to improve its approach to its customers and partners.

• Black Duck Software Marks the One-Year Anniversary of GPLv3 with an Examination of Trends in Use | Black Duck Software

  Black Duck analyzes progress of GPLv3 since it’s release last year. 2,345 open source projects have addoped the license. One trend was the increase of dual licensing.

• Acquia commercializing Drupal open-source publishing platform | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone – CNET

  The company will make money from support contracts (various fees for various levels of support) and pre-installation consulting. It will also offer some online services for Drupal setups, like a “heartbeat” or monitoring service, and an anti-spam solution

• Virtualization and Linux: Red Hat unveils new vision

  The Red Hat move that will catch the eye of most users is the Embedded Linux Hypervisor, oVirt. \n\nAt this point, followers and users of Red Hat Linux may be asking, “What about Xen?” (the best-known open-source hypervisor technology to date.) Red Hat, according to Red Hat executive VP Paul Cormier, will continue to support both Xen and KVM. But, because “KVM is now baked in to the Linux kernel, it’s very easy for both Red Hat and other developers to work with it,” Cormier says. For the time being, Xen will continue to be important, but, as time goes by, Red Hat sees KVM becoming the dominant virtualization technology, he says.

I started linkrolling my bookmarks during during this weekend’s U.S. Open but soon became obsessed by Rocco and Tiger. So here’s my marketing, SEO, and social media links for last week.

• The Marketing of Fear – “The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand.” My first “real job” out of college was working in financial services. Fear marketing worked, it also made me feel dirty, that’s why I switched career paths.
• Marketing Sherpa: How to Grow an Email List From Nothing to 2 Million Loyal Fans in 2 Years (Hint: Give Them Something They Enjoy) – I like the example of ice cream on your birthday. My wife always wants to go get her birthday club freebie on hers.
• Copy Blogger: How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% – The power of carefully choosing your words to elicit responses.
• Official Google Blog: Fresher Related Search Suggestions: “Recently, we improved our algorithms to process new information faster, and the result is quite tangible — you should now see fresher suggestions for queries on current topics of interest.” [via Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim]
• Poynter Online: Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Managers – Good list of traits for community management superstars [via Connie Bensen]
• How to Build a Useful Site @ chrisg.com – “Track where your visitors come from and what they are after, and if you can actually talk to them. If you know why visitors arrive you will be in a better position to make them happy.”
• Web Ink Now: Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy – David makes a good point, easy to find crap is still crap. Starting with good content and then optimizing for that content is the key. See my post at Marketing Piligrim thinking like a reader, a marketer, AND a search engine. Otherwise you have a one-legged stool.
• Google Trends Adds Cool New Statistical Weighting Features : SEO Book.com – Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords. Aaron Wall riffs on the new Google Trends features.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. The supreme irony about this article is its length.
• SEO Tools. Link Checker. Check Backlinks for PR, Anchor & Nofollow – Tools for checking backlinks and their quality [via Chris Brogan]
• SEM Check – Service that provides an audit of your website from an SEO standpoint. (via Marketing Pilgrim)
• Andy Beard: Never Underestimate The Power Of The Dark Side of Search – If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient in response to Tim O’Reilly’s post.
• Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal – O’Reilly Radar – Great Quote from Tim O’Reilly : “Create more value than you capture” the most succint and sage advice I could ever give a commerical open source company [via Aaron Wall on SEOBBook]
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced – Suggestions for dealing with duplicate site content including sitemap specifications and robots.txt.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deftly dealing with duplicate content – How to deal with duplication of content as seen by Google.
• Google: we don’t know how to make money from YouTube – Times Online – Google has said that it is still unsure how to make money from YouTube, the enormously popular video-sharing website it owns, but hopes to be able to do so soon.
• Micro Persuasion: Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing -Amazing stats for how much credence we put in the opinions of people like ourselves — 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me,” according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.This has been growing steadily since 2003. People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Links, marketing, SEO

• Red Hat News | RHX: Lessons Learned – RHX is different now. The team is smaller and the target market is different; but, fundamentally, RHX is smarter. It’s very much alive and is undergoing its third iteration.
• The Real Firefox-Killer | Linux Journal – This new competitor to Firefox is called Maxthon, and, significantly, come from China. This is relevant because the Chinese computer sector has tended to evolve according to its own rules.
• Linux News: Business: Open Source Development Is Smart Business – To succeed and truly benefit the open source community, companies need to find a balance between maintaining their competitive advantage and working closely with customers and developers.
• Would the baddest Roadrunner please step forward – IBM’s supercomputer called Roadrunner is now the fastest in the world.
  It is capable of sustaining 1,000 trillion operations per second, which is a lot.
• Cloudy Saturday: Roll Your Own Cloud with Enomalism | OStatic – Enomalism uses the XMPP protocol to manage clusters of Ruby applications and helps with scaling them – a novel take from the application layer, instead of the system layer.
• OpenPanel.com | Open Source Server control panel – OpenPanel is a completely modular open source control panel for Internet Service Providers.
• Announcing the MindTouch Developer Center | MindTouch, Inc Blog – A few months ago, we made the decision to start phasing out OpenGarden – we finally took the first huge step towards completing that task today.
• Standalone OSS revenue to reach $4.83 billion by 2012 | Negative Approach – CNET News.com – –IDC expects worldwide revenue from standalone OSS to grow at a 23 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $4.83 billion by 2012.
  –Worldwide revenue from standalone OSS in 2007 was $1.73 billion.
• Interchange Open Source Commerce Server – Interchange is an open source commerce server and application server/component application, written in the Perl programming language.
• Red Hat looks out for OSS community with patent settlement – Red Hat announced today that it has settled a patent dispute with Firestar and DataTern over two patents, including one that covers object-relational database mapping—a technique that is used in Hibernate
• Dimdim: Free Live Meeting, Web Conferencing Software – DimDim free web meeting software. Open source edition available.
• Linux.com :: openSUSE’s Brockmeier sees distro coming into its own – After two and a half years, the distro is not only still working out details about how its community operates — including how its governing board is elected — but also struggling to come out of the shadow of its corporate parent Novell
• Open Source Business Models: let’s start from the production of code | Commercial Open Source Software – It is useful to recap what is an open source business model. Researchers, tech writers and consultants often taxonomize open source business models mentioning just the license scheme and what is sold the most.
• The OSC’s open letter to Becta – Communication Breakdown – David Meyer’s Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Community – “Becta awarded their ‘Open Source Schools’ project to establishment insiders and cronies, with no Open Source credentials or capabilities, rather than organisations who could and would make the project work.”
• Web Browsers: Speed Testing the Latest Web Browsers – No clear winner in the browser bake-off but IE does surprisingly well, Firefox performs well in memory usage. IE is faster than expected.
• Linux.com :: Linux in education: Open Source provides a better solution for schools – Linux has been making inroads into K-12 education for years, but Microsoft’s move to require an audit of 300 school districts nationwide has brought Open Source into the educational limelight. As schools analyze alternatives to hefty licensing fees.
• Specter: Immunity for journalists, not eavesdropping telecoms – Senator Arlen Specter with a panel of journalists at the American Civil Liberties Union’s annual convention earlier this week to urge support for a federal shield law that would protect journalists from being compelled to disclose confidential sources.
• BusinessWeek – Nokia: Linux Needs to Learn Business – At the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Dr Ari Jaaksi told delegates that the open-source community needed to be ‘educated’ in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.
• Leaving Yahoo! (by Jeremy Zawodny) – Technical evangelist Jeremy Zawodny leave Yahoo!

Technorati Tags: Bookmarks, Links, Open Source

ZDNet: Stallman comments on Oyster

Richard’s not happy about the  London’s Oyster system which does use an open source operating system and other OSS it has a “freedom flaw”.  Due to the unique ID of each card makes it very easy to be used as surveillance tool, I like Richard’s remedy…

To protect yourself from surveillance, you must pay cash. It is also a good idea to swap empty Oyster cards with other people from time to time. That way, even if Big Brother finds out which card you have today, he can’t use its number to look up all your movements for the past N years. And keep the card in aluminum foil whenever you are not using it — that way it can’t be scanned when it shouldn’t be.

[via Glynn Moody]

Linux.com: Portrait Pia Waugh

I am on the board of Software Freedom Day for 2008, and enjoyed doing serving with Pia in 2007. It’s a good awareness event.

Pia Waugh is a leading advocate for FLOSS in her home country, Australia, and all over the world. In addition to running a consultancy in partnership with her husband, she is the vice president of Linux Australia, the president of Software Freedom International (sponsor of the annual Software Freedom Day events), and on the board of directors of the OLPC Australia program.

OStatic: Look Out Asus: Acer Joins the Linux Laptop Fray

If you’ve followed our recent coverage of Asus’ success with its (primarily Linux-based) low-cost Eee PC laptops, and Hewlett Packard’s Mini-Note, you know that Linux-based portables are seeing surprising success. Now, Acer–traditionally more of a hardware titan overseas than in the U.S.–is joining the fray with its new Aspire One Linux-based subnotebooks. Because of its distribution might, this could represent major competition for Asus, HP, and the OLPC project.

The Economist: Open Sesame

Consumer devices: Revealing the underlying technical details of electronic gadgets can have many benefits, for both users and manufacturers

[via the Linux and Open Source Blog]

Technorati Tags: Bookmarks, Links, Open Source