I’ve noticed clients recoil at the phrase “Rockstar Developers”. The image of a drink, drugs and - gulp - sex-crazed development team smashing up their dressing room is problematic for many reasons. I kind of recoil from it too. It’s yucky. Nevertheless, ReadWriteWeb has published a list of the ‘Top Ten Traits of the Rockstar Software Engineer‘. It makes fascinating reading, especially if you work closely with one. The official list goes up to 10, but I’ve added a few of my own, and shuffled. See if you can guess which ones are true. Please feel free to suggest some yourself.

1. Loves To Code
2. Gets Things Done
3. Is Rubbish At Table Footie
4. Continuously Refactors Code
5. Uses Design Patterns
6. Wants To Be a Creative
7. Writes Tests
8. Wears Black T-Shirt 
   
9. Has Hairy Arse
10. Leverages Existing Code
11. Collects Something
12. Focuses on Usability
13. Writes Maintainable Code
14. Reads 52 Books Per Year
15. Can Code in Any Language
16. Knows Basic Computer Science
17. Follows Alternative Fashion System

Here’s a reminder of what we’re up against.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE

The Swedish monitoring service Pingdom has published a couple of graphs of the Web’s growth from zero websites to 162 million. I’ve added my own commentary to the one below. This post is brilliantly, economically, unemotionally, frankly Swedish.

According to the latest numbers, there are more than 162 million websites on the internet today. We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the World Wide Web. Back in January of 1996 we had 100,000 websites, and if we go back to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 websites. Not much need for Google in those days…

I was watching TV last night when the Berocca ad came onto the box.

It’s an ‘homage’ to the ‘Ok Go’ YouTube video (below) and involves some boring-looking generic ’suits’ going all oddball on some gym equipment that’s (inexplicably) been left in the street in response to someone nearby preparing a super-dose of the orange fizzy stuff. It’s a pale imitation of the original and caused me to reflect on how much ad creative is already effectively sourced (in terms of inspiration) from community and media sharing sites. Some traditional ad creatives you meet (by no means all of them) can be a little snooty about the wisdom of the crowds. However, just like the journalists who you sometimes hear slagging off social news and blogging sites only to find they routinely start a new assignment with a visit to Wikipedia, it seems that many are taking inspiration from folk-media.

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I find it hard to imagine a scenario when it would be appropriate - other than in a totally ironic way - to use any of the templates provided at Template Central.

Honestly, the site is hilarious. There’s at least 20 7 minutes of laughter to be had.

Here are some choice examples:

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We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.

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Adweek published a great article this week by Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group. It it, he challenges the ad industry to stop being scared, embarrassed and confused by “Web 2.0″ and to start exploiting crowd-sourced creativity from within as well as radically new ways of working together. He urges both advertising creative and television commissioning people to learn from the way ideas are generated and developed in a Web 2.0 world.

Web 2.0 is more than just user-generated content. It is, in short, rich media applications (AJAX), folksonomies (like tags), new development approaches (”fail fast, fail cheap” and agile development), interoperability (RSS) and, yes, user-generated content. And since this is also the world of publishing 2.0, you should totally look up those terms on Wikipedia.

It’s definitely our experience over the past 18 months that there are two types of web project:

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