In the 24 hours since Google released Chrome, its browser share has reached 2.6%, at least amongst the 45,000 sites tracked by browser stats tool GetClicky.
UbuntuLive is live!
My talk isn’t until this afternoon, but I want attendees to be able to have access to my slides to take notes on, without having to wait until after the talk.
Like many slides, they don’t totally stand on their own without the verbal “filler.” I’m making a “prose” version of this presentation at some point to address that 
(ideally this cat pidgin will be charming, hilarious, and familiar to readers of i can has cheezburger and Anil Dash)
(original screenshot snagged from Drupal.org’s 5.0 screenshot page)
What’s Drupal? Drupal is open source software. Drupal can be used to manage blogs, communities, newspapers, magazines, forums, wikis, on-line video channels, and other kinds of content. You’ve probably visited a site powered by Drupal, and not even realized it! (’Da Drupes is humble like that.)
A new version of Drupal, Drupal 5.0 was released last week. What’s new since Drupal 4.7, its last major revision?
If you want to check out some sites that use Drupal, the video below shows some famous ones, like MTV UK, This Week in Technology, and SpreadFirefox.com.
While it’s easy to find out that software like Drupal is being used when it’s running a famous public website, it’s a little harder to know when it’s being used internally, in corporate, community, and organizational intranets. As it turns out, Yahoo! uses Drupal internally, and outlined the process. Based on this awesome Drupal case study from IBM, one can only assume they use it for collaboration stuff as well.
Related links:
We now have a decent Flash version on Linux.
quick notes:
Adobe’s Linux Flash player has been stuck at version 7 for ages, while Windows XP and Mac OS X sat pretty with Flash 9 for six months. (Let alone version 8, which was totally skipped for Linux)
Less than two years ago, being a couple of versions back with your Flash player wouldn’t have been the end of the world. This is as much about Flash’s totally reinvented usage, as it is about Linux. Previously, not having Flash didn’t make you feel totally left out. Maybe you’d miss some animated banner ads (but they’d probably still work). With the increasing importance of search engine optimization (Flash isn’t so easy to index for Google), and social bookmarking (Flash isn’t so great with the unique URL’s), and people’s patience (Flash can get people kinda mad when they have to renavigate 6 steps after hitting the “back” button), web sites managed by Flash were getting less popular.
But then the YouTube/Vimeo/Google Video/Blip.tv/Revver embeddable video storm happened.
(original photos via Chris Pirillo’s video experiment)
And Flash was actually really great for video inside of an otherwise non-Flash page. And then people started using it even as an embeddable mp3 player.
(a screengrab of a del.icio.us page set to browse mp3’s and podcasts)
You didn’t have to download podcasts and other mp3’s. You could cleanly play audio and video in a browser page. (Yes, other specialized players/ plugins could previously do it, but way more clumsily than Flash).
With the newly realized ease of embedding video and audio (aided not just by Flash, but by the excellent players being made by the likes of YouTube and del.icio.us), audio and video was being used a lot more not just for entertainment stuff, but for delivering technical, business, and basic communications stuff. (For example, here I have an embedded demo of VMware Fusion Beta. In Flash!)
In any case, the huge wave of new Flash content really stung when you were on Linux, because all over the web, almost any embedded video was a reminder that you were a second-class citizen.
Ideally in the future the web won’t be dominated by closed players, and users won’t be held hostage by any single company. But given how much better Flash performs these basic multimedia functions at the moment, it’s a good day for Linux.
related: