elemental links

Moving to a New Blogging Platform & Host

Over the course of the weekend, I'm moving elemental links blog and business sites to a shiny, new, combined platform.  Since I'm remapping URLs, results will be unpredictable for a bit.

Back with an update in a day or two.  Wish me luck!

Zephyr on "Cloud Watch"

Zephyr doing his part for the family business...

Posted via email from brenda's posterous

[Note: This was a test of the Posterous Service for use with my to be launched (redacted) project.]

A small action on Blog Action Day 2008 - Poverty

As I considered what to write for today’s blog action day on poverty, I couldn’t help but think of how fortunate I am to be contemplating ‘poverty as an issue’ from behind a keyboard as opposed to as a life circumstance. Going down that path for a minute, I’m grateful my grandparents had the foresight and fortitude to reach Ellis Island and that my parents instilled in me the importance of education, working hard and living within means (savings good, debt bad). Essentially, my family provided me the circumstance and tools to reach towards success. 

At this point, it became clear to me what my blog action day ‘action’ should be. Give others an opportunity to create their own success. This led me straight to Kiva.org, a micro-lending site that brokers loans between individuals and (working poor) entrepreneurs in the developed world. 

I just made my first loans, one for bigger fishing nets and another to transport a child to school. Check it out, do what makes sense for you.

elemental links spring blog clean-up

As I've been waiting for the grass to get dry enough to mow, I did some spring clean-up here at elemental links.  The two things that will be noticeable to blog visitors (not feed subscribers) are a long-overdue category consolidation -- it was as tedious as it sounds -- and the posting of my delicious links on the site.  Hopefully the link-post job will work, because I removed all duplicate link splices - Feedburner and FriendFeed.

In addition to the clean-up activities, I also pulled some posts over from my Business-Driven Architect blog.  You could say I'm working on my 'source of record'.  I don't think those posts will show up in the feed, because I posted them here using the original post date.  The new old posts are:

• Tammy Erickson: Taking the offensive in recessionary times
• Six Sure Fire Ways to Sink your Enterprise Architecture
• Business-IT Integration Continued: IT Geeks on the Front Lines of Innovation
• Enterprise Architects, Professional Escalation, and City Planning
• From the Archives: IT Fundamental Truths

I think that's it for now.  If you are curious how the lawn mowing went, follow me on Twitter.  I do tweet (converse) about business and IT as well.

My Time Between Airports

Obviously, I've been remiss in my blogging.  I spent the majority of May and June on the road.  During that period, my writing was limited to the specific engagement, or email to business associates and friends of the following pattern: "Delayed at [airport code] waiting on [crew, plane, weather, parts]".  My favorite was Cincinnati when we couldn't take off because of a hole in the runway.  A hole that "mysteriously appeared" in the time between boarding and pulling away from the gate...

Between airports, I attended InformaticaWorld and IBM's Impact, delivered SOA training and workshops in Ohio with my friend Beth Gold Bernstein, facilitated a roundtable discussion on business architecture and SOA at ArchitectureGov, and ran the SOA Consortium's Inaugural European events in Brussels.

Yes, I've been busy.  At the moment, I'm heading to San Francisco, to represent the SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank.  My upcoming events include:

Agile2007 in Washington D.C. - I'm still looking for perspectives, practices and stories of Agile and SOA

New England BEA User Group in Cambridge, MA - I'm excited to hear my friend Annie Shum's latest thinking on IT, Innovation and the (messy) Human Factor.

SOA Consortium meeting in Jacksonville - As SOA-C Program Director, I plan and facilitate these meetings

Enterprise Architecture Conference in Las Vegas - I'm speaking on SOA and Business Architecture

OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal - I'm participating in a panel discussion on the Future of SOA

Of course, it's not my intent to attend these events and then hoard the knowledge.  I've been meaning to share insights from each of my travels, amongst other things.  But, I can't seem to find the time, or perhaps focus.  Two factors to blame there.  One, the Maine summer.  When I am home, I find myself drawn to outdoor activities.  Two, I tend to scribble my ideas on paper, note cards, etc, which doesn't lend itself to quick posts.  As for the latter, I'm experimenting with TiddlyWiki as a way to capture and organize (through tags) my field notes and random thoughts.  Hopefully, this will lend some much needed structure to my process, and result in more frequent and timely posts.  It certainly can't make it worse!

In the meantime, I do plan on looking back, and sharing insights from the last couple of months.  You can also find some SOA related writing from me at the SOA Consortium blog.  As well, the SOA Consortium's first Executive Summit whitepaper is now publicly available.

If you are going to any of the future events I've listed and want to connect, email me - bmichelson at elementallinks dot com.

Oh, I picked TiddlyWiki because I wanted something simple that I could install locally.  If you are evaluating Wikis, I recommend this comparison site.