Doc Searls has been blogging since before anyone came up with the term ‘blogging’. He’s a journalist and an author with a background in technology marketing, and is the the senior editor of Linux Journal as well as being one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the definitive guide to how the internet and networks are affecting the markets and the relationships between buyers and sellers. You may not necessarily agree with all the conclusions that he and his fellow-authors make, but it’s pretty much required reading if you want to understand how to operate in today’s markets.
As well as being perhaps the most prolific blogger out there (a dozen posts a day to his blog counts as a quiet one!) he’s also recently set up the IT Garage. The premise of this blog is that open-source software is changing the IT marketplace, and that isn’t necessarily reflected in the way that the IT marketplace is reported. The mainstream trade press is funded by-and-large by the major vendors, which inevitably skews the kind of information that’s available about what’s really going on – as Doc puts it, it’s “vendor sports coverage”. There’s an ever-increasing amount of solutions being put together using the open-source building blocks of LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP – but because there aren’t the same kind of mega-bucks marketing budgets behind the open-source and LAMP products, these are projects that we tend to hear less about. What the IT Garage is about is “do-it-yourself IT“.
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