Well it’s official. This winter we broke the 100+ year record for the most snowfall in the Washington, DC Metro region.  The record was set back in 1888-89.  The Fairfax County schools have been closed since Friday, February 5, 2010. Our CIO had everyone perform a “telework” exercise last Friday, so I’ve been home since that time as the Federal Government has been officially “closed”.

Jan poses in front of our house

On Sunday, February 7th after the snow stopped we had in excess of two feet of snow. I measured between 25 and 28 inches of snow on my property in Fairfax, Virginia. Here is a link to my “Snowmageddon 2010” photos from that day. Let me know what you think of them.Here’s a video of me cleaning off two feet of snow from my car. 

Yesterday was the beginning of “Snowmageddon 2: The Blizzard” which dropped 10 more inches and counting in Fairfax. Here’s a short video of me this afternoon between major blizzard blasts of snow and wind.

Are we having fun yet? I think for Spring Break this year I’m going someplace warm. How about you?

Photo credit: Matt Callow.

I have been mulling about whether or not I should renew my subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Don’t get me wrong, I think the WSJ is the best newspaper produced today. So, my dilemma has nothing to do with the quality of their product, my dilemma has to do with the cost. Get this: for me to renew daily delivery and online access, the cost is $441 per year. Granted the demographic for WSJ subscribers is affluence, but come-on, I’m not an AIG executive.

Information should be priced using open contracts.

This got me thinking about a creative music label that I’ve recently discovered: Magnatune. (Stick with me; I’ll circle back to the WSJ in a moment). Magnatune’s tagline and business philosophy is, “We are not evil”. All of their music catalog can be played in their entirety (no lame 30 second samples) at 128 Kbps, contains no DRM, 50% of the cost of their music goes directly to the artist, and most importantly they use an open contract or variable pricing model for the music. Users are allowed to pay what they feel is a fair price for the album as long as the payment is within a given price range.

The suggested price of each album in the 700 album catalog for Magnatune is $8. Users can choose to pay as little as $5 or as much as $18. Without peeking below, can you guess the average sale price of an album?

Tobias Regner and Javier A. Barria studied 18 months worth of transactions on the Magnatune website and found that the average payment was $8.20 per album, much more than the $5 minimum payment and higher than the $8 suggested payment. Surprised? Regner and Barria explain:

Information goods are experience goods. Consumers do not know what they are worth to them until they experience them (Shapiro and Varian (1999)). Their exact value to the consumer is quite unknown ex ante. The valuation rather develops until the good has been experienced often enough and the true worth has been established.

When customers have full pre-purchase access to songs they are interested in, they can experience the information good long enough to determine how much it is worth to them and decide whether they really want to buy it.

Regner and Barria’s conclusion is that “social preferences are the likely motivation of the customers that make voluntary payments.”

I suspect that they would make far more money than they do with their fixed subscription model.

And that brings us back to the Wall Street Journal specifically and newspapers in general. It seems that many newspapers around the country have severe financial problems. Rather than rely on either a fixed subscription price, ala the WSJ, or an online advertising model, ala the WashingtonPost.com; they should allow their readers to pay via a variable pricing model for subscriptions.

If the Wall Street Journal offered me a range of prices based on my perceived value of their information, they would undoubtedly receive my renewal. In fact, I suspect that they would make far more money than they do with their fixed subscription model.

The world is changing. Information is valued differently by each consumer. If information providers were flexible in their content pricing they would find that social preferences are the motivation of customers that make voluntary payments. Reciprocity is the source of social preferences in the model of information content valuation.

I love the WordPress Open Source content management blog publishing system. I’ve been using and configuring WordPress systems for several years and the number of plug-ins and add-ons to the extensible platform is truly amazing.

The iPhone is really a powerful computer that fits into your pocket.

About seven months ago I gave up my ancient Motorola Razor for a new iPhone 3GS. As I’ve told others, I believe the iPhone is a “game changer”. What makes it so is that the iPhone is really a powerful computer that fits into your pocket. Oh, and it’s also a phone. But that is almost besides the point.

If you use WordPress and own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, there are three applications that you should consider using to make running your blog easier.

WordPress blog as viewed on iPhone

1. The first is a WordPress Plugin called, WPTouch which allows your blog to look like an iPhone App when viewed on an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Google Android phone. You can see how it looks in the screenshot compared to the way it looks in a traditional web browser.

WPTouch optimizes the blog for small screen sizes which use a finger as the primary interface “device”. With the rapid increase in the use of mobile devices to surf the web, there is no reason not to use the WPTouch template if you run a WordPress blog. It makes it very easy for your users to view and comment on your posts.

2. If you administer a WordPress blog and you own an iPhone, how great would it be for you to update your blog, moderate comments and make posts anytime you want directly from your iPhone? Wish no more; the official WordPress 2.0 iPhone app is available as a free download from the iTunes App Store.

Get notified on your iPhone anytime someone leaves a comment on your blog.

3. Wouldn’t it be great if you could be automatically notified anytime someone posts a comment (or trackback) to your blog? The Prowl service is the implementation of “Growl” for the iPhone OS. To automatically be notified anytime someone posts a comment on your blog, first sign-up for a free account on Prowl. Then log into Prowl and generate a unique API key. Once you do that head over to the iTunes App Store and purchase the $2.99 Prowl iPhone App. Install Prowl on your iPhone and configure it using the username and password you used on the Prowl website.

Once you do this, configure the WPTouch WordPress plugin mentioned above to use the unique API key that you generated on the Prowl website. Once the API key is entered into your WordPress blog, you will automatically be notified anytime someone posts to your blog.

Let me know if you have tips to share on WordPress and iPhone integration that you use.

The White House recently announced that it has moved to Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS) to power the WhiteHouse.gov website. This is great news as it legitimizes the use of open source within the federal space. Federal CIOs should realize that most of the web is powered by open source software including premier web properties such as Google and Facebook.

WhiteHouse.gov is now powered by Drupal.

The new White House system runs on what is called a LAMP technology stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). The LAMP stack is all open source. It is widely considered secure, offers high performance and is stable.  The White House chose Red Hat Linux as their supported distribution, and for enterprise search they are using Apache Solr. After the story was announced via the AP, Tim O’Reilly blogged the details of the technology choices and the reasons for making the switch.

More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support. In many ways, this is the complement to the Government as Platform mantra I’ve been chanting in Washington. When you build a vibrant, extensible platform, others add value to the foundation you establish; when you join such a platform, you get the benefit of all those features you didn’t have to develop yourself.

Interestingly, Chris Wilson writing for Slate, has a different take:

I wish Drupal and the White House nothing but happiness. But I have a feeling this story ends badly. If the administration had conducted a few polls among the swing demographic of Web site administrators, it would have realized that Drupal is pocked with political landmines. To wit: Drupal represents everything the Obama team does not want to project.

Unfortunately, Wilson doesn’t offer any alternatives. The only real open source choices in my mind are Drupal, WordPress, Joomla! or Alfresco.

Many large organizations use WordPress MU to engage with their audience.

WordPress started strictly as blog software but has evolved nicely into a Web CMS. Many large organizations use WordPress MU such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN and 10 (UK Prime Ministers site) to name only a few examples. My feeling is that for something as complex as the WhiteHouse.gov, WordPress does not have the robust features needed for enterprise-class CMS. Although it should be noted that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) runs on WordPress.

Joomla! Is popular but has the reputation of not being secure enough. Which leaves us with Alfresco, an enterprise CMS that is used by the likes of FOX to power Fox.com.  Alfresco uses J2EE and Java instead of Apache and PHP. Alfresco is built by a team of original leading members from Documentum® and Vignette with 15 years experience in Enterprise Content Management (ECM).  Alfresco could have been a real viable alternative although the number of qualified developer partners is rather limited compared to Drupal.

My take on all of this is that the White House made a solid decision in choosing Drupal. What I would love to see is for GSA to offer Drupal as a platform for agencies that need a robust CMS but don’t want to manage their own LAMP infrastructure. Along with Drupal if GSA would offer WordPress as a platform (with agencies having their own unique URL), that would be heaven.  Hopefully, GSA CIO Casey Coleman is working on this platform as a services (PAAS).