I'm very pleased to announce that Level OS has officially become an Acquia Silver Partner.  Acquia is a fairly new commercial company started by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson.  It aims to expand the reach of Drupal by providing a fully supported distribution of Drupal made up of the latest versions of the core platform along with select contributed modules.  It does this via the Acquia Network, an operations portal to deliver technical support and site monitoring services to maintain trouble-free Acquia Drupal websites.

For anyone familiar with RedHat in the Linux space, this is an analogous concept.  One of the main barriers to the adoption of open source software in the enterprise space is a lack of support; who do you call at 2 am when your mission critical application is experiencing trouble?  Well, if you're using Drupal, Acquia provides an answer to that question.  Acquia doens't aim to provide consulting and development services, which is where their partner network comes in.  It's a mutually beneficial relationship, where Acquia provides qualified leads along with training and access to support and reference materials to its partners.  In exchange, they encourage their clients to use Acquia Drupal and enroll in the Acquia Network when applicable.  I am honored to be accepted into this program and look forward to the exciting opportunities it will bring.

Collaboration Is At The Heart Of Open Source Content Management -- Open Source Content Management

Drupal was built from the beginning to let site builders include social software components, such as profiles, single and multiuser blogging, and social networks. And Drupal is winning converts. Sony BMG and Warner Bros. use Drupal to create sites for artists on their labels. The Onion, a satirical news site, also runs on Drupal. The New York City School system is using Drupal as part of a massive data-mining effort, letting 80,000 teachers and administrators share ideas on how to use testing and other data to spot lagging student performance and improve teaching.

I stumbled across what I think is a great software tool for quickly creating mockups, or wireframes, of web pages, software, or anything else you can think of. It really recreates the whiteboard / sketchpad feel in a piece of software, and is just as fast and easy to use. It's created by Peldi Guilizzoni, and he has followed through on his promise of being completely transparent with his startup and disclosing revenue, profits, etc.

Founded in March 2008, Balsamiq Studios creates rich, elegant, high quality plugins for Web Office applications. Our first product, Balsamiq Mockups, netted over $100,000 in less than 5 months and is gathering rave reviews.

In case there were lingering questions about President-Elect Obama's intentions as he forms his administration and policies, he has kindly put up a website about the changes taking place, documenting and explaining every step with complete transparency. He is even taking our suggestions on how to best implement his, or rather our, policy agenda, along with taking job applications online.

As a web geek, it is amazing to see the use of the Internet spread to governance in this manner, and executed so well.  As a citizen, it much more amazing to have a transparent window into the workings of our government which, after all, is "for and by the people".

Yes we can.

Former Planet Bike GM launches Portland Design Works

The former general manager of Wisconsin-based accessory company Planet Bike has moved to Portland and plans to offer a new line of products under the Portland Design Works banner.

We're just kicking off the project, but look for a new e-commerce enabled site in the weeks to come.  In the mean time, you can read a little about Portland Design Works and buy a great looking t-shirt.