I remember, several years ago, having a conversation about MySpace with the teenage daughter of a co-worker. This was before Facebook captured the market and MySpace was still the place to be for teenagers, GenXers and early tech wave adopters. Even though I had an account with MySpace, I never got past the ugly design and the horrible things that the platform allowed you to do to your profile page and the pages of others. From bright, glittery backgrounds to animated jpegs and the like, it was like the web in 1997, but with fewer pages dedicated to Simpson’s Wav files and Spaceballs quotes, and more pages dedicated to Jay-Z, Brittney Spears and quizzes that map your personality to a character from Friends.

My friend’s daughter, however, loved MySpace. And the thing I hated the most about it, was the thing she loved the most about it. The fact that she had a place on the web that was hers, paid nothing for, and could customize every inch of was the steal of the century. She had a digital home that she could adapt to fit her persona, and she owned it, down to the font used to spell out her name.

The thing that was the most fascinating to me about all of this, at the time, was not that she liked something about MySpace that I hated, or even that she represented a trend in social computing that we now take a a given fact, several years later.

What fascinated me the most was the she controlled her MySpace page by hand-editing HTML.

It sounds passé now, right? Maybe, maybe not. This wasn’t a future CS student. This was your average, everyday teenage girl who wanted to bling-out her MySpace page. She had a problem to solve, found that editing HTML by hand would solve it, and went to figure it out.

Fast-forward seven years, and in the intervening time, non-programmers (I dare not call them non-technical as that term is starting to lose it’s meaning) have learned to edit HTML in their MySpace pages, to add widgets to their Blogger sites, and even tinker with PHP inside of WordPress. Consumers don’t just use sites, they build them, sometimes by customizing pages (MySpace and Blogger), sometimes by customizing sites (WordPress, et al.).

In addition, a class of technical designers has emerged, providing much-needed design and interaction chops, and these talented individuals have learned web development in the process. They can take a WordPress, Drupal or Joomla site, add their brilliant design, and make a site that makes this one look like the inside of a New York taxi cab. They start with a complete framework, and end with a rich site, and they can do it affordably, something that individuals and small businesses have begun to notice.

In the midst of this, guess who’s been missing from the conversation? In the space of Web Applications (the real of professional developers), Microsoft has rich tooling, web development stacks and a story to tell.

In the space of web pages and web sites, we’ve been mostly silent. Sure, there are countless frameworks, built on .NET, available for consumer use (BlogEngine.NET, DasBlog, Umbraco, to name a few), but as far as I can tell, these are still niche for a couple of reasons:

1. .NET hosting isn’t cheap enough
2. SQL Server isn’t free
3. The development experience, even in the frameworks listed above, tends to favor professional developers.

WebMatrix, released yesterday in Beta form, is Microsoft’s attempt to make getting started with ASP.NET sites and pages easier, while also providing a set of tools for designers and developers working with PHP and MySql.

Just so you don’t skim over the latter, don’t miss the point that WebMatrix is not a ASP.NET only tool. If you have a WordPress site today, you can open it in WebMatrix, edit PHP pages, view your MySql database and deploy changes to your host, all within the tool. I have a WordPress site myself, and I’m exited to finally have something I can use to easily manage and maintain that site, even if I never move it to another platform or framework.

On the ASP.NET side, WebMatrix introduces along with it a Web Gallery for pulling in open-source frameworks, a new syntax for ASP.NET pages (called “Razor”), a developer version of IIS, and a file-based, free version of SQL Server Compact Edition.Pair that with a bevy of of .NET hosters starting to offer dirt-cheap hosting, and I believe Microsoft is onto something that could really have broad appeal.

Microsoft has watched and listened to Amateur developers, tinkerers and professional designers, and I believe WebMatrix is proof of that. I’d suggest you check out the WebMatrix site, download the beta and start tinkering. And if you have a teenager who likes to tinker with HTML or PHP, have them check out WebMatrix, and let us know what you think. We need the feedback during the beta to make sure that the final release is something that will really serve the everyday user.

We’ve come a long way in the last decade, and the web ecosystem is a big place with a lot of different audiences. I’m exited that Microsoft now has a story to better serve those audiences.

Photo courtesy of zenobia_joy

Part of what I've been doing since changing jobs back in October 2008 is helping my boss move forward with a non-profit that he's been working on for the last few years. The name of the organization is Brilliant Life, and the goal of the organization is to improve lives and change technology by providing technology training and careers to individuals who aren't being given a chance to pursue those careers today. That includes juvenile and adult offenders, the homeless, displaced workers, etc. It's a great organization and I'm excited for the vision and what we know will come of it.

We're a young organization, but we've had success in CO already. In July, I moved to Austin with my family to both open the Texas branch of the consulting company at which I work (Thought Ascent) and to expand Brilliant Life into Texas. Part of that expansion is a push to get the word out, which is where South By Southwest (SXSW) and this post come in. SXSW is a music, film and interactive festival that takes place in Austin each year. The Interactive portion of the festival draws thousands of tech professionals to hear about subjects from social media to emerging technology to how technology is being used to make the world a better place (that’s us).

What's more, the public is given a role in helping to select the sessions that will be offered for each track.

This is where you come in. We need your vote. We have submitted a session for SXSW under the title: "Turning Criminals into Coders: The Brilliant Life Story." Here's the abstract:

"Can coding literally save someone's life? Can it change America's broken prison system? The non-profit, Brilliant Life, will discuss how they're teaching juvenile delinquents to code, how to work on a software development team, as well as how they’re providing opportunities to work after their prison time ends."

Voting is open to the public, and we've had a pretty good response so far. But we need your vote as well. So, please take a moment to go to the link below and vote for our session. You will have to register, but SXSW doesn't spam, so sign right up.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/4435

And leave a comment for us if you can.

Thanks for your support!

P.S. If you're interested in knowing more about Brilliant Life and what you can do to help, email me a brandon.satrom AT brilliantlife DOT org.

So I'm not going to say much about the fact that I haven't written anything since January. Suffice it to say that enough has been going on to keep me from taking time to post thoughts from the swirling maelstrom in my head. For the two readers that have managed to hang on, let's hope I can get more consistent again. (Unless I write crap, of course. No one wants that) With that out of the way, I wanted to write a bit about a new experience. After a six year reprieve, I have returned to academia to pursue my Masters Degree. Two weeks ago, I started the Library and Information Science program at the University of Denver and will pursue the Knowledge Management concentration. Three weeks ago, I had my orientation for the program. Since this is a Library Science degree, a good deal of the content in the orientation was library-specific (jobs, internships, other foci of the program). I must admit that as a software developer and IT person, I wanted to distance myself from this kind of talk because I wasn't there to learn how to be a librarian (condescending and conceited, I know). But at one point in the conversation, the director of the program said this:

As Librarians, our job is to connect people with information

And I thought this:

Wait a minute, that sounds like my job as an IT person...

Or not. I realized at that moment that Librarians have a better handle on what Information Technology is all about than most IT people do. Think about it: Librarians do connect people with information. The format, presentation, color and flavor are simply a means to an end. Librarians will argue at length about how the architecture, structure and layout of a particular library is pitiful, passable or peculiar, but only in the context of how it hinders or enables the goal of a connecting people with information. In theory, we should be about the same thing in IT. But as a software developer, I know that that is often not the case. IT has unfortunately morphed into a group of professionals connecting people with technology, not information. I say this because we spend the majority of our time talking in technology terms, rather than information terms. We rave about frameworks and widgets and architectures and IDEs and all the clever things that we can make an application do, and in the shuffle, we neglect the people and their need for the information that our applications are in existence to work with. It's high time that we get back to our information roots. And thus, I remembered why I wanted to pursue this degree in the first place. And I felt good about saying "I'm in graduate school to become a librarian." Chances are, I will never work in a library, nor leave technology. But the Information Technology world (and the web in particular) needs more librarians. And that's why I am there.