Older Writings
A growing collection of articles and white papers I have written on and around the subject of convergent technology, including visions for the impact of technology on life, work and business.
Back in 1999 I wrote an article The Golden Rules of Stress-Free Programming. This was very popular at the time. Its main significance is that it pre-dated and predicted the rise of “agile” processes such as extreme programming and scrum, probably the most significant thing to happen to the technology business in recent years. In my opinion, any company which produces, integrates or maintains software and does not make use of agile techniques is in grave danger.
A litte later, I became engaged with the idea of wiki technology, writing both a successful implementation and a series of articles for an on-line journal. At the time, public perception of wiki implementations verged on ridicule. Popular opinion was largely that allowing editing of pages on a web site would lead to disaster, a laughable idea now that wikis form the backbone of the “read/write web“. Wikipedia alone now ranks as the eighth most visited web property by US visitors and routinely tops the search results for most common phrases.
In 2005 I was invited to present a session at the Vlog Europe conference in Amsterdam. I chose to speak on the subject of “Long Term Videoblogging”. At the time, most individually-produced web video was hosted on rented servers with little or no backup facilities, and no provision for continued availability in the event of the originator failing to pay the hosting bills. It was, and still is, frighteningly easy for important media records to simply vanish. And yet, each time anyone views such web media, a copy is transferred to the viewing device. If the original is lost, there are potentially many copies from which it could be retrieved. The problem lies in associating scattered copies with original media; a problem which is compounded by the reliance on storage location rather than anything about the content as the way to find media. A 40MB MP3 audio recording of the presentation and accompanying discussion is available on my personal video site.
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
