You have most likely heard of the microblogging site, Twitter.com. Twitter allows you to create short (160 char limit) frequent posts. Any Twitter user who chooses to “follow” you will see the messages you post. Twitter now has over a million users. In October, 2008, Yammer launched a Twitter-like microblogging site targeted at internal corporate use. Yammer allows you to create a microblogging site that only employees from your company can access. There are more build-your-own microblogging sites springing up now as well. A new service that allows you to easily create group specific microblogging sites is shout’em.
For those who want to host their own microblogging application, there is an excellent open source option Laconica.

What is microblogging?
I like to describe these microblogging sites as a cross between instant messaging, email, and blogging. Microblogging has features of each of these collaboration tools. Like email, you can send messages to users and groups of users and reply to messages. Unlike with email, your microblogging messages or posts are typically one to many, as opposed to one-to-one email messaging. Although you can send targeted messages to specific users, most of your posts will be more like broadcasts to anyone who is following you. As with a blog, there is a persistent searchable history created of everything that is posted. You can view all of the messages posted, or you can choose to follow a subset of users and filter the posts you see to those from that set of users. This concept is similar to an IM buddy list. Microblogging posts usualy have more of a real-time context than emails, again making it similar to instant messaging. Microblog posts are also short like instant messages. Most systems in fact limit them to around 160 characters.

Using microblogging in your organization
Most of these microblogging services implement a common core set of features that includes content tagging, direct messages, replies and the ability to search through all of the posts. These tools can be used effectively to capture information knowledge and information across your organization. By giving your organization a platform for communicating with each other in a very open manner, you will uncover new ideas, encourage more innovation, and discover alot of ways towards improvement. It is usually easier to get your company to participate in microblogging as it does not require the same time commitment and writing skills that might be required to maintain a regular blog.


You might use microblogging to reach out to find expertise within your company, or to advertise new opportunities within the company. You might want to use it for organizational announcements within your company or group, or to get feedback on your ideas. You can also use a microblogging tool within a project team to facilitate project communication, such as letting the team know what your working on, and to provide status updates related to the project. Unlike with email, or instant messaging, all of this history is persisted and searchable which builds of a knowledge base of tacit knowledge for your organization.

If your company wants to improve the way you collaborate and share knowledge I strongly encourage you to give microblogging a try.

For those who Twitter, the Ruby on Rails Bible book now has a Twitter feed of its own.
You can follow Ruby on Rails Bible for content updates and corrections, new content, discussion about the book and its contents, and Rails knowledge sharing.

You can follow Ruby on Rails Bible here: http://www.twitter.com/rorbible

With all the hype that the iPhone and the new Google G1 phone are getting, I’d like to talk about a device that I think is probably the most underrated electronic gadget that is available today. This device is the Amazon Kindle .
I’ve had my Kindle for about 2 months now, and I have to say I absolutely love it. Like most people, I am someone who always preferred reading actual books and hardcopy over computer screens. However, reading on the Kindle is a completely different experience than reading a computer screen. What you see on a Kindle screen looks more like words on paper than words on a computer screen. There is no backlighting on the screen. The technology used is something called E-Ink. If you are someone who reads a lot of books, articles, papers, etc. you will love the Amazon Kindle.

The selection of books available through Amazon on the Kindle is at over 190,000 and growing weekly. You’ll save money on the books you read also. Most Kindle books are priced at $9.99. This includes new releases and best sellers. Compare that with the $25-$30 that you would typically spend for a new physical book. Unfortunately, most computer and technical books even in Kindle form do tend to cost more than the standard $9.99, but they are still discounted from the physical book price. However, the books available for the Kindle are only a small segment of what you can read on your Kindle. Other content that you can subscribe to through Amazon includes popular magazines, newspapers, and blogs.

I actually have more free content on my Kindle than content that I’ve paid for. You can find free books compatible with the Kindle at sites such as manybooks.net and feedbooks.com. It is also very easy to transfer your own documents to the Kindle. Kindle accepts most common document type formats. The Kindle support for PDF is officially considered to be experimental; however, I’ve transferred many PDF documents to my Kindle and have never had any issues with their display. Documents can be transferred to the Kindle through a USB connection, or by emailing documents to an email address that every Kindle owner is given. Documents sent to that email address are sent to your Kindle.

So far I’ve talked about the e-reader features of the Kindle only. However, the Kindle has much more capability than only as an e-reader. What I think is a hugely overlooked feature of the Kindle and under-marketed by Amazon is the fact that with the Kindle you are given absolutely FREE high-speed wireless Internet access. Every Kindle has access to the WhisperNet network which is an EVDO cellular network that Amazon provides through the Sprint cellular network at no charge to Kindle owners. Compare this to the $50.00 monthly fee you normally pay for a wireless data plan on your cell phone. The Kindle has a browser built-in that allows you to read GMail, access Google, Wikipedia, and other websites. You also have access to the Kindle Store which allows you to search for, read reviews, and purchase Kindle books and have them sent to your Kindle in a few seconds. Here’s another great feature; You can get a free chapter sent to your Kindle of any Kindle book that is available. I find myself taking advantage of this feature quite often to sample books before I purchase them.

I’ve always been an avid reader, but since getting my Kindle I have probably doubled the amount of content that I read. If you’re an avid reader, I highly recommend that you check out the Amazon Kindle.

A good blog to check out that is dedicated to the Kindle is The Book of Kindle.

Generation Y includes those in the age range 13 to 31. This is the largest generation ever, even surpassing the population of the Baby Boomers. In total their are about 80 million “GenYers”. This is a generation that has been brought up on technology. They have always had computers, cell phones, email, and instant messaging. They are now very familiar with Web 2.0 and social networking. This is also the next generation of employees that companies will be hiring over the next decade. This generation will come into your company with the expectation of Web 2.0 technologies, just as the previous generations expected email. Using social networks is as natural to GenYers as email is to GenXers.

GenYers have seen how Web 2.0 technology can be used extremely effectively in their social life and will expect nothing less in their professional life. They will wonder why a large company is not using a social network to enable and connect employees. They will wonder why their company is not using blogs to spread their message and respond to thier customers in a very transparent manner. Blogs and social networks allow GenYers to build networks of friends and associates. The good news is that these are all questions that should be asked because they have the power to transform your business, and if you are not asking those questions internally now, your company will soon be left behind in this new I.T. revolution. This new revolution is one that brings Web 2.0 technology and culture into the enterprise and it is often referred to as Enterprise 2.0.

Even as Enterprise 2.0 takes hold in many large corporations, there are still many other corporations that remain ignorant of this revolution. Some mistakenly think that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is just about technology. They are the companies that are adverse to taking risks on new technology, so they quietly ignore the Web/Enterpise 2.0 revolution. The truth is that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are not about technology. They are more about culture, social interaction, new ways of uniting your employee base, and new ways of effectively marketing your brand.
Enterprise 2.0 brings with it a massive change in culture that many companies are not ready or able to deal with. Companies that rely on strict top-down hierarchical organizations have the most to fear from the GenYers and the Enterprise 2.0 revolution. Enterprise 2.0 expands the power of the masses in your company at the expense of the power of the senior management and executives. When individuals act together socially, whether it is for personal projects or business related projects, their power becomes much greater than what they could have achieved working as an individual. GenYers expect their thoughts and ideas to be listened to and acted upon if they are good ones. They are not willing to sit back passively and follow the direction of someone simply because they are higher up on the “corporate ladder.” Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow a company to harvest ideas and innovations throughout the company rather than from a select few that sit on the top floors of their headquarters. Authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff refer to this inversion of power and influence as the Groundswell in a new book titled Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, published by Forrester Research.

Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow a company to open up a bidirectional communication path between itself and its customers. Any single company is limited in terms of their internal resources and the amount of innovation and creativity that can be sourced from them. However, a company that can effectively use a much larger global community of social networkers can expand its abilty to innovate on a massive scale. If your company is not taking advantage of this ability to collaborate globally, your competitors are, and they will quickly surpass you with their ability to innovate.

Social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn allow individuals to meet more people, expand their social networks, and get more and better information faster and easier. Used inside of a company, social networking communities can energize an employee base and build a massively linked platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration. This platform will be a vehicle to capture tacit knowledge in ways never before possible. IBM has an internal social network called Beehive that has over 30,000 employees on it. A social network like this used internally will not only help your company share knowledge but you will find developers collaborating on innovative uses of technology, sales people mining new leads and exploring new sales opportunities, and management with a tool to monitor the pulse of the company.

A social network can also be used very effectively to create buzz around your brand and to increase your brand visibility. The book Groundwell describes how a company can make use of Web 2.0 technologies to get great benefits in marketing, product development, and customer support. Enterprise 2.0 is also where you will need to turn to find the best and brightest employees amongst the GenYers. More people, especially the younger ones, are moving away from large job boards like Monster and Dice as sources of jobs and instead finding jobs through their online social networks. Are employees at your company blogging? Does your company have any presence in the Web 2.0 world? If the answer is no, your company very well may be left out of the employer pool considered by the best and the brightest employees.

Large I.T. companies including IBM, Dell, Salesforce.com and even retailer Best Buy are already using Web 2.0 technologies both internally and externally to communicate with their customers, enhance their brand message, enable broad collaboration, and leverage the power of the global community to speed up the process of innovation.

I recently finished reading two excellent books that I believe should be required reading for anyone in a leadership position in any company today. These books are Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and one the other one I’ve already mentioned, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. These books show how your company can thrive thorugh Enterprise 2.0 culture and technology.
They are both filled with case studies of how existing companies are embracing Enterprise 2.0 as well.

Read more…
Beyond Blogs, Business Week, May 22, 2008
The “Millennials” Are Coming, CBS News, May 23, 2008
Groundswell
Wikinomics

Today, social networking, and user-generated content web sites are among the most popular sites on the Internet getting millions of hits every day. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and Google Apps allow users to share user-generated content and collaborate with each other like never before. Smart organizations, enterprises, and product vendors are now realizing the potential for Web 2.0 technologies inside the enterprise.

There are some fantastic web applications on the Internet that would provide tremendous value inside of an organization. I’ve spent the last several years working for large professional services organizations. These large service organizations have perhaps the most to gain from harnessing the concepts of Web 2.0 internally. Consider for example an internal Intranet version of an application like LinkedIn, allowing employees to keep current resume and profile information online that can be easily updated by each employee. This would provide a huge value to professional service organizations whom are always looking to staff the next project or fill a clients staffing requirements.

For the developers of a large organization, think how useful an internal Code Snippets site would be. Public snippets sites such as DZone Snippets, allow contributors to share small snippets of code that solve commonly occurring problems. The value of such a repository is even greater inside of an organization where different teams often encounter similar problems. Essentially, a snippets site provides another outlet for code reuse.

In a development group, every project should be maintaining a wiki site. A wiki can be updated by every member of the team to include links to the latest documentation, schedules, and technical data related to the project.

Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us also provide examples of a technology that could be very useful internally. If you are in a large development organization, every developer will usually have his or her favorites sites for researching and looking up technical information. A social bookmarking site would allow your organization to harness collectively those favorites and categorize them with a content tagging system. Content tagging has become the preferred way or organizing large amounts of information in the Web 2.0 world.

Even some of the fringe social sharing sites such as Shelfari and LibraryThing implement concepts that would fit well inside an organization. These sites allow users to share information about their personal library of books. Users can contribute book reviews, book ratings, and comments about the books. Software developers are some of the largest purchasers and readers of technical books. Some organizations will even reimburse employees for technical book purchases. A social site allowing employees to share reviews and comments about technical books could be a very useful addition to an Intranet. These types of value-added applications that allow employees to actively contribute content to Intranets will encourage employees to view your Intranet and participate in sharing knowledge and information. This is much better than the centralized content controlled sites that most Intranets are today.

One of IBM’s newest products targeted at the enterprise is Lotus Connections. This is a product that aims to bring Web 2.0 and social networking into the enterprise. The product includes blogging, social bookmarking, wikis, communities, user profiles, and social networking features. IBM is not alone in thinking about the value that these products have. Smaller vendors in this space include HiveLive, SocialText, and Thought Farmer.

There are new and different types of Web 2.0 and social networking sites coming online nearly everyday. Every time I come across a new site, I always imagine how much that site could contribute to the collaboration and knowledge sharing environment and ultimately to the productivity of teams inside of a company. I believe that we are on the brink of seeing more and more Web 2.0 technologies entering the Enterprise. These applications can allow an enterprise to capture more of the ad-hoc and tacit knowledge that typically is not well managed in a large organization. If you are in a position of influence, you should start thinking now about how these technologies can make your own organization more productive. If you are interested in learning more about Web 2.0 in the enterprise, an excellent blog to follow is the Enterprise 2.0 blog from Dion Hinchliffe.

Heroku is a web application that provides a complete environment for writing Ruby on Rails powered web applications. With Heroku you get both a development environment and a hosting platform. Each application that you create with Heroku is also assigned a unique URL that you can use to access it.

Heroku has plenty of gems and Rails plugins pre-installed and available to any Rails application. However, if you want to use a gem or plugin that is not already installed, you can do that also. It is simple to install any gem or plugin into your Heroku Rails application. You can also upload a complete Rails application that you developed locally, into the Heroku environment. The opposite is also possible. You can export an application that you developed inside of Heroku and download its source to your local computer. As you write migrations, they are automatically detected and run without any manual intervention. You also get a built-in console for running any rake tasks that your application has. A built-in Rails console is also provided in a browser window.

Heroku also recently added an API that allows you to develop your Rails application locally on your computer and deploy to Heroku remotely through the Heroku API. The source code version control system that Heroku uses to store your source code is also exposed. The version control system used is GIT. If you have GIT installed locally you can directly access your application’s source code and make commits against it. When you want to deploy back to the Heroku servers, you do that through the Heroku API.

Heroku is probably not the host you’d select for deploying a production Rails application, but it can be a satisfactory development environment, and an excellent platform for learning. In a training environment, students would be able to develop a complete Rails application using only the Heroku web application without having to install any software on their computers. It is also easy to collaborate on an application using Heroku. Once you create an application, it is easy to add other users as collaboratorsruby who also have access to the application’s source code. Overall, I think this is a great tool that can help more people get exposure to the Rails platform.

I tend to read a lot of technical books. My current passion is with the Ruby programming language and the Rails web application framework which is built on top of the Ruby language. I’m also a published technical author myself. The book that I am currently writing is the Ruby on Rails Bible which will be published by Wiley this spring. However, since that is a few months away still, I thought I’d share some reviews of some current Rails books that I find to be excellent learning and reference resources. The three books that are reviewed here are:

• RailsSpace
• The Rails Way
• Practical Rails Projects

Two of the books RailsSpaces, and The Rails Way, are in the Professional Ruby series. Obie Fernandez, author of The Rails Way is the lead editor for that series.

Rails Space

This is a book that walks through the complete implementation of a social networking web application developed with the Rails framework. A hosted version of the application developed throughout this book is available online at www.railsspace.com. The authors of this book are Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka.

This book is essentially an extended tutorial that is developed throughout the book. Some of the topics touched on while developing the Rails Space application are user authentication, image uploading, geo data, email integration, Ajax, and Restful development. As the application is written, tests are also written as each component of the application is finished. This provides excellent practical material on writing tests for your own Rails applications. You’ll find many of the techniques that the authors show you for creating tests and testing various pieces of the code to be very useful in your own projects.

Overall, I found this to be probably the best book available of its type, that is a book which serves as a tutorial focusing on the development of a large sample application. I highly recommend this book to any developer getting started with Rails. Even experienced Rails developers will enjoy this book.

The Rails Way

This book provides probably the most complete coverage of the Rails framework of any book currently out. This book is also the first book that I am aware to provide coverage of Rails 2.0. The author of this book is Obie Fernandez whom is one of the most respected Rails developers in the industry. Obie recently started his own Rails consulting firm, Hash Rocket.

The book provides excellent in-depth coverage of a wide range of technologies related to Rails development including Rails core technologies like Controllers, ActiveRecord, ActionView, the Rails routing system, Helpers, REST, Ajax, Session Management, Authentication, ActionMailer, ActiveResource, Rails Plugins and Testing. Technologies that are complementary to Rails are also covered in-depth including: testing with RSpec, Capistrano, background processing, plugins, and production configurations. The chapter on production configurations provides an excellent overview of what is necessary to get a Rails application running in a production environment. It includes example configurations for Mongrel and Nginx for serving your application and Monit for monitoring your application.

Unlike some other Rails books, this book assumes a knowledge of Ruby and does not waste pages with a long Ruby introduction. In my opinion, that is a good thing. If you are interested in learning Ruby, this book is not the best choice for you.

The book’s afterword is titled What is the Rails Way (To You)? Be sure not to skip that if you read the book. This chapter provides a collection of thoughts from a bunch of Ruby and Rails developers, quite a few of whom you will have probably heard of if you keep up with the Rails community. I found it to be a very interesting and insightful chapter.

The Rails Way is also a nominee as Best Technical Book in the Jolt Awards competition. Overall, if I could buy only one book about Rails, this would be the book.

Practical Rails Projects

This book takes the reader through several practical examples of web applications that showcase the features of Rails. The book provides a very practical way of extending your Rails development knowledge once you’ve mastered the basics of Rails development. The author of this book is Eldon Alameda. The applications that you will build over the course of the book are:

• To-Do list manager
• Exercise/Fitness tracking application
• Blog
• Gaming community site

Like the other books I’ve included in this review, no pages are wasted on a Ruby introduction chapter. Instead this book assumes a knowledge of Ruby and jumps right into building each of the sample projects. Throughout the course of implementing these applications, you’ll use several popular Rails plugins as well as some features from popular JavaScript frameworks, YUI, and ExtJS. These JavaScript frameworks are excellent compliments to the Rails framework. The book is best read from start to finish, as in some cases each of the projects builds on functionality or features developed for an earlier project.

This book does include unit testing as well, though it does not emphasize it as much as the Rails Space book does. Some of the technologies that you’ll see in this book are: developing web services, Restful development, graphing, caching, and file upload. Some of the plugins that you’ll use throughout the course of the book include: acts_as_authenticated, calendar_helper, restful_authentication, css_graphs, ziya graphs, will_paginate, and attachment_fu.

Overall, I found this to be another excellent book that can be read from cover to cover. Both new and experienced developers will learn something from this book.

• The Basics
• Interacting with the Environment
• Manipulating Strings
• Working with Data Structures
• Dates and Times
• Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions
• Numbers
• Input and Output
• Working with Directories and Files
• Network Clients
• Network Servers
• Sending and Receiving Email
• Database Access
• Using XML
• Using Threads
• Dynamic Programming Through Reflection
• Packaging and Documenting Classes

Over the weekend I finished reading the book The Rails Way. I actually enjoyed this book so much that I took the time to read it cover to cover. As good as this book was, it is not specifically the topic of this post. The last chapter of the book contains a series of statements by a bunch of developers who have grown to love Rails. They explain what it is they like about Rails. Each of the statements is interesting, some more so than others. One of the very last statements, written by Nola Stowe, talks about the lack of community across languages and using the right tool for the job. This is what I want to talk about with this post.

Developers who speak extremely highly of a single language while criticizing other languages are being very closed-minded and are shutting themselves off to some great learning opportunities. Once you’ve mastered any given language, and even before you’ve mastered a language, one of the best ways to continue to grow your expertise of that language is to learn and study a new language. You may look at how something is done in a different language and that may inspire you to rethink how you are doing things in the language that you love. The Ruby on Rails framework is a great example of how implementation ideas in one language can influence many other languages. The Rails framework is one of the most innovative web applications to come along in any language. Rails introduced a simple way of building web applications using DSLs, convention over configuration, code generators, and a robust object relational mapping layer. Much of the core architecture of Rails has since been implemented in almost every other language that is used to build web applications. Frameworks in other languages such as Grails, Cake, Django and others all have borrowed ideas from Rails. Also, this borrowing of ideas is not a one way street. Rails was not designed in a vacuum either. While it is true that Rails did alot of new things, it too borrowed ideas from other frameworks and languages.

Consider PHP, this is a language that is routinely criticized as a language that creates some really awful applications that are full of spaghetti code. Is this the fault of the language? Of course not. PHP brought web application development to the masses and I’d venture to say that those developers that create spaghetti code applications with PHP would do no better in a different language. PHP5 actually introduced a pretty good object implemenation to the language and a good developer can write very good applications in PHP, just as a good developer can write good application ins Ruby, Java, or C#. Are there things that a Java developer can learn from PHP? I think so. I believe that each and every new language learned can teach you something.

Too often when you look for language comparisons you come across alot of articles, posts, and other content that praises one language and attacks other languages. If your a Ruby or Railis developer, you’ve probablyl seen the photo of the stack of books that someone put online a couple years ago. The photo shows a large stack of Java books sitting next to a stack of two Ruby and Rails books. The idea behind the photo being that Java is so complicated it requires tens of books to fully understand, while with Ruby and Rails you can get all you need with 2 books. Such a picture wouldn’t fare so well today. I’d venture to say that today Ruby and Rails related books are coming out at an equal or faster pace than Java books. Having alot of books out about a language and its various frameworks and libraries is in my opinion a positive thing. Java has a huge open source following and there are libraries available for Java that do almost everything you want. Having books available about these frameworks and libraries is not a bad thing and does not in and of itself make developing with the language more complex. With the surge in popularity that Rails brought to Ruby, the libraries are gettin better for Ruby but they still can not compare with what Java offers. In a similar vein, more recently there have been a series of videos that promote Ruby while mocking another language. These types of language hype may be entertaining but they are detrimental to the software development community at large in that they usually only breed more distrust and negative feelings across specific language communities. I believe that anything that discourages a young developer from learning a new language is a bad thing.

In the enterprise consulting world, you often hear that comment that such and such company is a Java shop, or a .Net shop, meaning that everything they do is in that language. I think that being characterized as a Java shop or a .Net shop, or a Ruby shop is not something a company should be proud of. For example, Rails has shown tremendous productivity improvements over other languages when developing database-backed web applications. A company that traditionally builds all of their applications in Java or .Net would be foolish to simply ignore this fact because they are a Java shop or a .Net shop. Similarly, Ruby is one of the coolest languages to be using right now. It has a dynamic and rapidly growing community, and the hottest framework on the planet in Rails. However, a project may come along for which there is an existing library implemented in Java which would allow you to complete the project quickly using Java, whereas in Ruby you would have to write this same library. Don’t choose to use Ruby because it is cool or the funnest language to use right now. Use a language because it makes sense for the projects your team is working on. JRuby brings even more interesting twists and scenarios. With JRuby it becomes easy to combine Java and Ruby on the same platform and within the same application. You could use the wonderful Java libraries while writing your new code in Ruby.

Neal Ford speaks of something he calls Polyglot programming. Polyglot programming is the concept of using many different language together even on a single project. The idea is that you should always be focused on using the best tool for the job. Today it is actually rare to write a web application using a single langauge. Your business logic may be written in Java, but consider other languages that you probably use without a second thought, JavaScript, SQL, perhaps a Perl script or too for maintenance tasks. The two primary platforms of today, the Java platform and the .Net platform, are both able to support a growing number of languages. For example the Java platform today supports Java, Ruby, Groovy, Scala and probably a bunch of lesser known languages. Each language may have strengths in a given area. Don’t be afraid to mix and match your languages even on a single project. Use the best tool for the job at hand. We should all be Polyglot programmers. Every good developer should expand their knowledge of languages beyond the one or two that they feel comfortable using. Even if you continue to use a single language, you may find a whole new way of thinking about that language when you’ve studied other languages.

Don’t let positive or negative hype turn you off from learning a programming language that may be outside of your comfort zone. I know that at first glance Ruby can seem very different to Java programmers. It is a dynamic, scripted language and that is a different world to many Java developers. I had been doing Java development for nearly 10 years before I learned Ruby. Now I advocate for Ruby every chance I get. I have not met too many developers who have given Ruby a real trial and have not come away with a positive experience, even if they choose not to use Ruby going forward. So in summary, don’t choose a language simply because thats what your company has always done or because thats the only language you know. I agree that those may in fact be important factors in what is the best choice for your team, but evaluate your optioins and use the right tool for the job.

Last week I attended a conference in Ohio called CodeMash. The theme of this conference is to bring together developers with different programming language backgrounds and have them learn from each other. I think the concept of the conference is wonderful. This is the second year that I’ve attended it and I will continue to do so in the future. We need more community across languages as opposed to just single language user groups and conferences. It would be great to see more user groups of different languages hold combined meetings with topics that are common to multiple languages. I think both groups can learn alot from each other.