B. Mann Consulting

And the core Drupal team wonder why they don't get more help from all the Drupal contractors out there.

via drupaler.co.uk

This was a comment in a thread on Greg Harvey's blog about duplicate issues. I see similar sentiments a lot. Here's the comment I left:

There is no core team. That's the myth. There are people who do more work, and there are version maintainers ... but other than that, it's whoever pitches in.

So, try not to think about "them" or "the core team" -- because it's simply a group of people that have decided to put more time in. The exact people grow and shrink depending on time and interest level, and usually per core version.

The New Year is kicking off with a bang. Bootup Labs moved into our new offices on Sunday (Cambie at Hastings, the Flack Block - come visit!) On Monday morning Danny was in the Financial Post (actually, @trevoro from @layerboom has much longer quotes on page 2).

Then on Tuesday (technically yesterday as I'm posting this), I got a call from @lalondetcbc and ended up with a short CBC TV segment talking about whether bloggers should be legally required to disclose payments and other bonuses they receive. I was "opposite" Rebecca / Miss 604. That is, it was supposed to be opposing view points.

Rebecca is an excellent blogger. She is a professional blogger (i.e. makes her living from her blogging activities). It's great that she's decided to use CMP.ly to indicate her disclosures: it shows the kind of honesty and transparency that makes her a great blogger. Do we need a law for it? Well, the FTC in the US thinks it does, but the guidelines seem over broad - a $5 discount at a restaurant and a positive review could net you an $11K fine? Of course, they say it will be on a case by case basis. Hmmm ... a law that is hard to enforce and is applied inconsistently? Sounds like trouble to me!

I like John Chow's disclosure policy -- everything he posts he's making money from. This is a pure case of media literacy - people need to learn about the sources they are consuming and make their own decisions.

Of course, journalists aren't covered under these laws at all. Why not? Good question, and quotes like this one in a Reason Magazine article don't inspire confidence: "Yet I don't remember any reviewer in any print publication ever disclosing that the record, the movie, the meal or the vacation was free."

Lastly, it seems like Rebecca and I were set up to have opposing viewpoints, since we seem to be on the same page. Oh well, at least they spelled my name right :P

I have a few quotes bookmarked under the tag FTC Endorsement Guidelines for further reading.

In 2009, Portio Research counted the global value of 'non messaging' premium content (music, gaming, news, etc) downloaded or consumed on phones and sold to them worldwide, to be worth 85 Billion dollars. Yes, 250 times bigger opportunity for any content owner like say a Disney or TimeWarner or Turner etc to make money today, on ALL phones, not those few iPhones that are in pockets of some 4% of Americans and less than half of one percent of the rest of the world. Understand how enormous this number is. Just 'premium' mobile data income (I am excluding messaging) is bigger than ALL internet content revenues, and all internet advertising income - added together! (Morgan Stanley said they totalled 64B dollars in 2009). Mobile content alone, is worth more than all global cinema box office revenues, and all global videogaming industry software income, and all global music industry income - PUT TOGETHER. Again? Mobile data paid content industry is bigger that music, hollywood and videogames, all added together. Its that big. And some crazy journalists count free downloads on App Stores and think this is the mobile data opportunity for the industry. Now in our zoo we are obsessing about the standard field mouse rather than the elephant.

But even this is not the real comparison. I just said, that Portio measured 'non messaging' premium content revenues for mobile. What of the total mobile data industry? It is now worth over 284 BILLION dollars globally, including messaging income (says Morgan Stanley). Thats 825 times bigger in value than all apps stores. Its not mouse to an elephant in our zoo, it is focusing on the ant and ignoring the elephant.

via communities-dominate.blogs.com

I kept trying to figure out different parts of Tomi's article to quote, and realized I was selecting the whole thing. You really do need to read the whole thing to understand where the mobile industry is *today* (and it is gigantic).

*However*, I think Tomi (who is fantastically smart and knowledgeable about the _global_ mobile telecoms industry) is missing where this is all heading. I saw the same thing happen at Nortel when the bitheads (me and other people in the IP everywhere camp - death of scarcity) bumped into the bellheads (telecoms thinking, more similarities to railroads, supply & demand).

So, that's a wrap: BarCamp Vancouver 2009 is "in the can". I really enjoyed this year's event -- I even went to and gave some sessions! (yes, that's worthy of note - as an organizer, it can be hard to relax and get into the flow)

I attended a great talk by Dustin Sacks on the 10 principles of Burning Man and how they compare / contrast with BarCamp. It was great, and made me think about a ton of things.

One thing that stood out for me is that I think that BarCamp has "moved on" from its original core focus on making code -- in part because of the principle of "radical inclusion". We kept making it more inclusive until lots of people that weren't at the same "level" started coming (in tech, in background, etc. etc.). It's not a problem, per se, it's just evolution.