Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Our politicians are at it again, bickering over dead soldiers.  This time around it’s  whether or not flags should be flown at half mast on Parliament Hill when soldiers are killed abroad, and whether the media should be permitted to be present at the repatriation of soldiers remains.  The Globe and Mail covered the story, this morning, about the Government’s decision not to permit reporters to be present when the bodies of the four soldiers killed this weekend in Afghanistan arrive at CFB Trenton today. 

Stephen Harper is playing with fire on this issue.  By needlessly copying the American protocol for the return of the dead, which is widely criticized as a way to control the media, he is opening his government up to the same criticisms.  Apparently, none of the families of the soldiers have objected to the presence of the media.  Until there is such an objection, Harper should let reporters be present.  To do otherwise is to risk the Liberals painting him as a George Bush clone.

More importantly, how about sending more equipment and money to the men and women still on the battlefield?  Honour the memory of the fallen, not with flags and ceremonies, but with a real commitment to provide the tools that are needed to get the job done and safely bring our soldiers home.

Skype’s Developer Blog has an interesting post this morning from Peeter Mõtsküla asking for comment on a proposal to separate the Skype GUI from the underlying Skype engine.  Cool! 

As I have said many times in the past, softphones are platforms.  The future role of the softphone is an integration platform for desktop applications. Skype’s platform strategy, today, is only half there.  It relies on old IPC technologies, and forces developers to always have the Skype GUI front and center. This move would address the deficiencies of their current strategy, and would give developers the ability to create bots, specialized Skype softphones for different classes of users (think business), and potentially native Skype devices rather than the PC attached handsets of today.  It’s a very smart move, and has been a long time coming.

Exposing the Skype engine in this fashion will also be a core part of Skype’s ecosystem strategy.  Everytime a Skype API is embedded into a complementary product from a partner, it increases the longevity of Skype in the market place, and it gives Skype the leverage it needs to negotiate the best deals possible with the market, including the PSTN operators.

Bottom line: when softphones become platforms, the product is no longer the technology itself, but the API.  Success needs to be measured not by the number of Skype branded softphone clients in the market place, but by the number of applications communicating using Skype protocols.

On the Barcamp.org wiki there is a feature which allows you to track all of the changes to the wiki.  I turned it on, accidentally, a couple of days ago, and started seeing the flow of traffic.  Barcamp is clearly a global phenomenon. 

Two which caught my eye are Blogcamp, which bills itself as south east Asia’s biggest blogging event, and DemoCamp 5, which is Toronto’s latest Democamp event (happening tonight, coincidentally).    I’d dearly love to be at the Toronto event tonight, but it’s Tampa/Ottawa Game 3, doncha know! 

The remarkable thing about the Barcamp meme is the way it’s spread.  Unlike a traditional "conference", which is trying to control the brand of the event in order to attract a specific audience, Barcamp created a wiki, laid out a few ground rules for participation and threw the doors open.  Unlike a traditional event, which draws participants from large geographies, and congregates them in a single location, Barcamps are predominantly local events.  Participants number in the hundreds, not thousands.  Events are happening all the time, not just a couple of times annually. 

Is Barcamp the long tail of the conferencing world?