Here's the top ten shows on IT Conversations for last month. I'm a little late because I had to modify the program that produces these slightly due to some backend changes that Doug made. All's good again!
- Dick Hardt - Sxipper (Rating: 4.00)
Sxipper is a free Firefox add-on that saves you time by keeping track of an unlimited number of usernames and passwords as well as the personal data you share every day over the web. Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip, joins Phil, Scott, and Ben, to discuss the product, as well as the entire issue of privacy and identity on the web, as well as how to market plug-ins as products.
- Episode Seventeen - StackOverflow (Rating: 2.00)
In this special "developer edition" podcast, Jeff and the Stack Overflow development team discuss the development processes and decisions that go into building a public community web site for programmers.
- Episode 18 - StackOverflow (Rating: 2.50)
In the eighteenth episode of Stack Overflow, we finally meet Michael Pryor, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software -- and discuss the progress of the Stack Overflow beta in some depth.
- Episode Sixteen - StackOverflow (Rating: 4.50)
Joel and Jeff discuss the perils of programmer design, the purpose of a private beta, the importance of quality chairs for programmers, and the mysterious cone of uncertainty on software projects.
- Episode 19 - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.00)
Joel and Jeff discuss scaling and social effects in Stack Overflow, how to handle growth and the launch in a controlled way, and answer listener questions about backups, database design, and maintenance programming.
- Kent Beck - Test Driven Development, Patterns and Extreme Programming (Rating: 4.89)
Relating anecdotes from the past, Kent Beck, the father of Extreme Programming and JUnit, reflects back on the impact his ideas have had in the last 20 years, especially with respect to the history of Test Driven Development (TDD), Design Patterns, and Extreme Programming (XP). According to him, good ideas take about that much time to mature and come to fruition.
- Kaliya Hamlin, Reid Hoffman, John Clippinger - Do You Know Where Your Identity Is? (Rating: 4.00)
As our lives increasingly straddle the physical and the virtual worlds, the management of identity becomes increasingly crucial from both a business and a social standpoint. John Clippinger, Kaliya Hamlin, and Reid Hoffman examine how online identity can foster relationships and deepen value creation. They discuss OpenID, including how America Online has chosen to adopt it, and answer questions related to such issues as anonymity and restricting information.
- Evan Prodromou - Identi.ca (Rating: 4.33)
Identi.ca is an open microblogging service. Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web. The product's developer, Evan Prodromou, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the project, including its open source license.
- David Huynh - Parallax: Searching Freebase (Rating: 3.25)
For MIT's Project SIMILE, David Huynh built an amazing series of web tools for exploring and organizing structured information. Two months into his new gig at Metaweb, he's done it again. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Huynh about his Parallax prototype, which creates a powerful new way for users to click their way through related sets of information in Freebase. In essence, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation.
- Maurice Franklin - The Space Elevator (Rating: 4.00)
Maurice Franklin, a Microsoft software engineer who is passionate about the space elevator, recently organized and hosted a conference on that topic at Microsoft's Redmond conference center. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, Franklin discusses the reasons to build a space elevator, and describes how the concept, first proposed by Arthur C. Clarke, is evolving toward a practical implementation.
