The Fellowship Church, the fifth-largest church in the USA, recently switched its Web sites from Microsoft technology to Linux, PHP, PostgreSQL, and Apache.

Brian Bailey just laid out the reasons on his blog.

Why am I linking to something negative to Microsoft?

Well, for one, to challenge my coworkers. I'm hearing more and more of these kinds of switches and Brian Bailey's reasons match what I'm hearing from other developers. We need to make sure our products and services solve the business issues that are out there today, not the ones that existed in 1995.

I'm also linking to Brian's blog because I'm an optimist. I belive we can win him (and other shops who have switched) back. But, it'll take work and changes to our business models, our products, our approach, to win him back.

No, being fired (which really is what just happened) doesn't feel good. And, if it continues, I'll be out on the street. That's business. And it can happen at Microsoft just like it happened at UserLand where I had to lay myself off. History teaches us that.

So, back to work.

Brent Ashley does a great job of explaining what AJAX is.

It just hit me why AJAX has become the talk of developers everywhere (you should hear all the AJAX discussions debates in the hallways at Microsoft and MSN now): we need better ways to tell stories about what we do and that's why we come up with names like these.

I am having my own experience in this realm. I'm trying to explain to people a new market I see opening up. I call it the Internet Content Creation Tool Suite. Marc Canter calls it the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator. I think both names suck.

AJAX is great cause any developer who has heard of it knows instantly what you're talking about.

I'll work on a separate post soon about the ICCTS. Hopefully I'll find a better name for it.

Chandu Thota, the guy working on the blogmap, is asking how should he make the blogmap more open?

My friend Larry Larsen did this page: the NPPA 2005 Best of Television Photojournalism.

NPPA is the National Press Photographers Association. Good stuff, lots of videos.

Brian Kennemer says that Intelliseek's new Watson is a pretty cool new KM/Search application. Watson is a background search app that monitors what you are typing in Word or PowerPoint (or browsing in IE) and does a background search across a wide variety of sources (Yahoo, NY Times, DogPile, etc).

My book co-author, Shel Israel, says that there's a group working to get a blogging conference going in Singapore. Wish I could go!

Steve Mallett started up a new linkblog kind of thing. I love the URL:

http://de.lirio.us/

OK, I have lots of friends bragging to me that they got the new Sony Portable Play Station that shipped today. I'm so jealous. Everyone who has gotten it so far say that the machine is inspiring.

Oh, and it ships with white headphones (although the unit itself is black).

Ahh, the effect the iPod has had...

Jeff Sandquist points at the new PDC RSS feeds.

Glad to see they have an RSS feed. I'm subscribed so that I can keep on top of what will be happening there.

Dare Obasanjo has an interesting post: SOA, AJAX, and REST: The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry.

There's an interesting discussion about Visual Studio pricing and packaging over on Eric Bowen's weblog.

Wharton's Managing Technology: Blogs, Everyone? Weblogs Are Here to Stay, but Where Are They Headed?

"Scoble is so credible as a Microsoft blogger that he is viewed as the voice of the company across the globe. When Ted Demopoulos, principal of Demopoulos Associates, an information technology consulting company, was traveling in Russia recently, he stopped in Surgut, Siberia, where he was surprised to find Scoble fans. "I'm out in the middle of nowhere and they ask me about Scoble," says Demopoulos. "To them, Scoble is the voice of Microsoft."

I'm waving to my friends in Russia! That's really an honor.

Thanks to Peter Dawson for sending that to me.

By the way, I play a small part in that article, which is one of the better ones on the topic of corporate blogging.