Jeff Whatcott at Acquia has published a great page that shows Drupal economic indicators. It brings up an interesting question as to how you judge the health and success of open source software projects. More importantly to business, is there a connection to long term viability of the project.

Keene is going through a community visioning process right now to update the city's master plan. This is great and I'm thrilled that a)our municipal government would be this forward thinking and b) that so many constituent groups would get actively involved. For our part, the Chamber of Commerce is getting heavily involved with the businesses in the region to discuss what we really need.

With the news this morning of the Microsoft pulling back from the Yahoo deal, I'm thinking a bit more about where we're headed in terms of desktop vs. "cloud" computing. While pulling back from Yahoo may have been the right move, Microsoft is in trouble.

Every month my wife gets together with her friends for book club. Appropriately named, "Between the Wines", they have a great evening talking about the book (some) and life (a lot). In the end, it's as much an excuse to share life stories as it is to discuss the book. I think it's great.

We need ubiquitous broadband to every household in New Hampshire. I'm not certain that FairPoint is the company that can get it done. That remains to be seen. However, I am certain that the economics of rural broadband didn't make sense to Verizon.
We need ubiquitous broadband for several reasons:

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch has appointed Neil Giarratana of Lucidus Corporation to a task force charged with developing a strategic plan for retaining young, skilled workers in the state New Hampshire. Mr. Giarratana was appointed as the Greater Keene Chamber of Commerce and Keene YPN representative to this task force.

We had a great lunch conversation with a couple guys from a political advocacy organization based in Northern Virginia. I'm finding MANY companies who are actively supporting political advocacy groups here. It seems weird to me that the majority of folks fall into two categories, political advocacy and news. Interestingly in terms of the industry meetup sessions from last night, there was none for corporate or business. Shame on me for not suggesting.

Sitting in on the Popular Science Case Study session at Drupalcon. Discovered a very cool module for displaying arbitrary lists of nodes as teasers developed by the folks at PingVision. It's called Node Queue and it could be a great way of offering a rotating billboard page, list of specific press releases, etc.

So I'm thrilled to be at Drupalcon this week. It started disastrously as I was slated to speak on Monday morning with my "PROFITABLE Web Development Process" presentation. However, a ride that normally takes me under two hours took me more than three and a half! I could not have been more embarrassed; they had to cancel my presentation. ugh! (Note to self: no matter how close, never "commute" to deliver a presentation).

Jon Udell is a widely known "uber-geek" who was a columnist for InfoWorld until early last year and a chief architect for O'Reilly's Safari online book service. He lives right here in Keene so we've bumped into each other a few times over the seven years I've been here. In one of my previous blogs, he read about my vision of an eKeene and we found that we had a shared interest.