I’m a product of my upbringing, and (using the term loosely) I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. It was the time of Star Trek and a real-world space program, both of which had tremendous influence in shaping my belief that the pursuit of scientific knowledge leads to good things.

The voyagers of the starship Enterprise had an excellent situation. They simply had to do whatever it was they were good at doing, and somehow resources were available to do keep doing it continuously and with little regard for cost. It’s a model that appeals to the closet utopian in me, but it’s pretty far from the day-to-day economic reality most of us live in.

Today, I listened to Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk where he urges us all to open up our data, all data, and make it available for linked use. I love the idea of “raw data now”, but it scares me. It happens that DZone is floating on an ocean of data. In our three years online we have tracked how millions and millions of developers have used hundreds of thousands of links from tens of thousands of domains. I imagine that intriguing insights about developer trends could be drawn from this data. It might be even more intriguing if it could be correlated to open source project activity and commit rates or some similar data pool that someone else possesses. Sir Tim’s idea of exposing “raw data now” challenges us to engage in a broad experiment and find out what happens.

I’m close to taking up Sir Tim’s challenge, really I am. My desire to see what we might learn confronts my business training, which suggests that possessing information exclusively is my competitive advantage. My instincts, however, tell me not to sweat it and that things will be alright.

Your input matters a lot, and I’d like to hear your ideas about how you would want to leverage DZone’s data if we opened it up (of course, no personal data would be shared!) What new and interesting possibilities would this create? Are there steps we could take in this direction without throwing the doors wide open and inviting the world into our databases? What would you do?

I’m going to give this serious thought, and I would genuinely like to hear from you. Thanks!

Matt and I went to a few stores today to check out the latest in mobile phones. First we stopped by our local Best Buy, where we got some hands-on time with the new Instinct phone that Sprint hopes to position as an iPhone killer. The active feedback feature on the touchscreen was unusual, and possibly cool, but overall I was not impressed by the Instinct. The browser was poor, and the other built-in apps were mediocre. This device may have a future, but the first version is not good enough to win me over.

Next we stopped at the ATT store, which is just a stone’s throw from the Best Buy, to check out the much-hyped iPhone 3G. The demo phones had no third-party apps installed, so it was only possible to check out the pre-installed apps. The new iPhone 3G is a little slimmer and wider than its predecessor, but the differences are minor. The 3G network speed is definitely better than what I normally get from the Edge network on my current iPhone, and the built-in GPS seemed to work reasonably well even inside the store. The ATT pricing plans are really expensive, however, and I simply cannot bring myself to shell out even more money every month to them. No iPhone 3G for me, at least not for the moment.

Finally, we stopped by the Sprint store across the parking lot from the ATT store, and we took a look at the other devices they are selling. The Sprint store was better than Best Buy for reviewing the options because it had real, working phones to try out. The Best Buy had only those useless dummy devices (except for the Instinct the department manager had for demoing.)

I was surprised that the device I was most impressed by was the compact and affordable Palm Centro. The keys are a bit close together, but the basics are all there, and the Sprint EV-DO network speed was brisk and usable. With so many options to use a tethered Centro as a wireless modem for your laptop, this thing seems to be a great device to have high-speed internet on the go without paying an arm and a leg for it. Curiously, I thought the Sprint TV was a cool service, but until I saw it I would not have imagined myself to be willing to pay for it.

Anyway, that was our meander through the mobile marketplace at the mall. I’m hard-pressed to say any of these devices is a “must-have”, but I can definitely say that my first hands-on use of an iPhone 3G did not overwhelm. It was ok, but not much more. IMO, the really killer feature of iPhone 2.0 is the App Store and the implied transition of iPhone from being a device to being a platform with an accompanying marketplace. 3G network speeds and GPS are fine and well, but the opening of new commercial opportunities for software developers is something I can get excited about!

I’ll bet every developer I know has uttered the words, “keep it simple,” but the truth is it’s just not that easy. Simplicity is not the default state of information and processes. More often the opposite holds true, and chaos is the natural order of things, so to speak. Information and processes are made simple only by thoughtful, effective organization and filtering. It can be surprisingly difficult to distill simplicity out of the information slag most of us have to wallow in and manage. Matthew Broderick doesn’t really save the world from imminent destruction by playing tic-tac-toe with an ornery computer, and Chloe from “24″ doesn’t really hack into DoD databases on her lunch break to reposition satellites and “patch the information through” to Jack Bauer’s PDA. (What kind of PDA is that, anyway?) Getting a computer to perform any task well can be a grueling challenge. It’s a lot harder than uttering overused admonitions like “keep it simple.”

Of course, while we are struggling to design easy and effective computer solutions, we often have well-wishing friends and colleagues offer helpful suggestions that begin with “Can’t you just…” Occasionally these lead us to a Eureka moment in which the fog slips away, and we suddenly attain clarity. Typically, however, despite the speaker’s good intentions, these “can’t you just…” suggestions will never get us where we’re trying to go. Good solutions to difficult problems, especially new solutions, can be painfully, maddeningly elusive. The general public seems to operate under a widespread illusion that anyone who can successfully plug in and turn on a computer is just a hop, skip and a jump away from being the next Matthew Broderick or Chloe from “24.” You and I know it’s not so simple. It’s complicated to make things easy.

I’m saying all this because for the past several days I have been working on making it easier for you to vote for links at dzone.com. Actually it hasn’t been just the past several days. If I’m being plainly honest I have to admit it has taken much longer than that. It has probably been more like several weeks since I began sketching out new possibilities, but I think I have finally reached a point where it is tolerable, if not easy. The new DZone voting widget should be online by the time next week’s newsletter reaches you. I hope you’ll like it. Participation is the lifeblood of DZone’s “social filtering,” so we’d like to make it really, really easy for you to participate.

I’ve been active in online developer communities throughout the past 10 years, so I’ve seen lots of changes (and caused a few of them.) There’s no question in my mind that the online world makes it radically easier for developers to locate and interact with others who share their highly focused and sometimes unusual interests. If it weren’t for the internet, then I doubt I’d ever have met even 10% of the many developers I have gotten to know over the years.

One of my personal hopes for the DZone Network is that our communities will help ever increasing numbers of developers locate one another and enjoy a friendly environment of knowledge-sharing among peers. That would make DZone a big success in my book.