The IT Garage

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“.

Which is exactly how our projects tend to slot together. There’s two sides to them - either it’s putting together something for corporates that would be impossible to achieve because of the sheer inertia of making internal IT functions dance to the tune that needs to be played; or it’s building solutions that would previously have been too costly to achieve using monolithic products from the established vendors. It’s interesting to see how the big vendors are reacting to merging new technologies like syndication with RSS - all the exciting developments seem to taking place in the small, nimble organisations; while the corporate giants of Microsoft struggle to adapt their product development timescales to cope.

So the IT Garage is timely, and not just from the point of view of talking about interesting uses of novel technology that we wouldn’t otherwise get to hear about. Part of the remit is also to take advantage of the way blogs give a voice to a much wider range of opinions than could ever be the case previously - as Doc puts it, “This is a journal, and it’s not just mine. The way I see it right now, I’m kinda like the bandleader.”

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