Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

Cause $20 Million ain't chump change. God Bless the USA! How wild is it that three guys throw their disparate apps into a pot and four years later are recognized with $20 million in funding by Intel Capital. While each of us may have different ideas of what constitutes true success in life, this fu... [More]

Trying to get past "Escape from Suburbia." I haven't been moved as much by a film for a long time as I have by "Escape from Suburbia."  Maybe it hit me so hard because Hot, Flat, and Crowded is currently on my Nordic Track reading rack, but for the first time I faced "Peak Oil" and all of its... [More]

What is a Community of Practice? I don't want to sound like a name dropper, but Nancy White is a friend of mine. Really. Nancy travels around the world facilitating the creation of communities, both online and off.  I never really understood what she does as a Communities of Practice expert, b... [More]

Physiologically, I think I know what a donut top is, but what's a muffin top? I should probably not lead with this Everyman bit, but this series is all about the joy of shared discovery, after all.  Fun washingtonpost.com article on Facebook using profile information for advertising wit... [More]

US Chief Technology Officer? I consider myself pretty plugged-in to current political chatter, but this Scoble post was the first I learned about a US CTO office being considered in an Obama Administration. Scoble went with Larry Lessig and threw out several other names.  Lessig is a great cho... [More]

Get your Thomas Friedman feed here.  Thomas Friedman is the impressive New York Times columnist and author of "The World Is Flat," a book worth every rupee of its hype. I wanted to see if I could obtain a feed of Friedman's NY Times work that didn't include all columnists as well.  Done!&... [More]

Living and dying by the billable hour. I tweeted this morning that I "was feeling very 'work, death and taxes,'" and that I needed "to get away from earning a living by the hour." That's pretty heavy for 140 characters, I guess. Still getting the hang of the whole Twitter vibe... I'm a blessed free... [More]

Who would have guessed Mads is into performance optimization? Mads Kristensen is speaking at the Copenhagen .NET User Group on advanced ASP.NET performance optimizations.  (Inside BlogEngine.NET user joke.  HEE! HEE!) New England Code Camp 10 has a name! I was SO worried tha... [More]

Jeff was not a happy twitterer. Jeff Jarvis, famed blogger who kicked the crap out of Dell, is one of the 40 people I follow on Twitter.  Jeff wasn't a happy Twitterer yesterday, tweeting, "Fucking Starbucks. What's so hard about keeping a pot of coffee full in a COFFEE STORE? I had 2 min. to ... [More]

Some light-weight Steve Jobs humor. The drama of Steve Jobs' emaciated physique seems to get weirder and weirder. Dan Lyons' "Imagine if any other CEO pulled bullshit like this" certainly got some feedback today.  A commenter responded to, "Imagine if Ballmer appeared in public having lost an ... [More]