Data Portals Become Fashionable: Time to Worry?

Yesterday I mentioned Nigel Shadbolt, who has played a leading role in the opening up of government data in the UK. By chance, I've just come across a report [.pdf] he wrote for the EU about doing much the same, but on a larger scale. Curiously, this is dated 15 December 2010, but this is the first I've seen it. Either it's been buried deep within the Brussels system, or I've been remiss in catching it. Either way, it's still well worth reading.

On Open Enterprise blog.

In Praise of Open Source Diversity

One of the great strengths of open source is that it offers users choice. You don't like one solution? Choose another. You don't like any solution, write your own (or pay for someone else to do it). Thus it is that many categories have several alternative offerings, all of them admirable applications, and all of them with passionate supporters.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Shock! Horror! Not!

This looks bad:

Open source software names such as Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and Linux are now alongside large proprietary software firms including IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Cisco, and Oracle in the IBM Internet Security Systems ‘Midyear Trend Statistics’ report.

But wait, there's more:

It is the first time that community-developed open source software such as the Drupal and Joomla! content-management software packages for the web also showed up on the list. Tom Cross, X-Force researcher at IBM ISS, said Drupal and Joomla! are open source packages that "have both been vulnerable to SQL injection attacks".

Er, this would be Microsoft SQL Server injection attacks, running on Windows, yes? And that's an open source vulnerability? I think not....

Drupal: Big in Afghanistan?

I love statisitcs about open source - not least because they are still quite thin on the ground. Here's some fascinating stuff from Drupal, the free content management system: statistics on user demographics, including each country's current rank and percentage market share. Here are the main figures:

United States 1 (33.12%)
India 2 (5.68%)
United Kingdom 3 (5.14%)
Afghanistan 4 (4.64%)

Now, India as a growing market I can understand, but Afghanistan about to overtake the UK? Hmm, interesting....

The VC Floodgates Open for Drupal and Acquia

On Open Enterprise blog.

World Bank 2.0

Signs of the times:

As explained on BuzzMonitor's "about page" -- "Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it."

The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them.