San Diego Update

If you are jealous of me being in San Diego - Don't be. It's been rainy and windy most of the time I've been here, I was rained straight out of the hot tub last night, it was like being back in Indonesia again, downpoor. I'm hoping things will calm down before I fly out tomorrow or else I'm in for a rough ride.

Today I attended sessions on the oh-so-motivating topics of Taxonomy (how to stuff and hang web sites that you have shot in the wild) and User Interface design (yeah!!! Something that speaks to my heart) and Knowledge Management and oh, another session on... Taxonomy.

There was also a mid-day panel discussion between the vendors, one of which was a Microsoft rep who straight up stated that the open source community tends to be followers not leaders. Um... who's been following who for the last few years?

Another vendor stated that it costs so much to support open source - of course his company's product ONLY costs $1500 per seat, plus yearly maintenance contract costs. (To be fair he said that the cost goes down when you buy a large number of seats, say like McDonalds who has over a million seats licensed.)

To help you feel included in my learning experience, here are some of the terms I have heard today - feel free to look these up on WikiPedia:

• KM - Knowledge Management
  
• Taxonomy
  
• B2B, B2E, B2C
  
• The Happy Path
  
• Mental Model
  
• Findability
  
• Instantive
  
• Parentive
  
• Equivalency
  
• Associative
  
• Hierarchical
  
• Master Data, Transactional Data, Meta Data, Reference Data, Setup Data
  

And finally, the phrase of today: "Welcome to the firehose, please take a sip" - This was from the session on interface design, a very applicable quote to many interfaces that I have seen.

And now I'm off to visit Cafe 1134 as recommended by Brian in his comment on my last post!