Some of my most interesting referrers are the ones from Google.  Here's some topics that have come up in the past couple weeks:

1. Weblogic vs. Websphere - I've used both, but I don't remember talking much about either here.
2. SOAP - This one came from Google's Italian site.  I looked at the first page of results and didn't see the link, whoever was searching must have been down on like page 60.  I'd think there would be lots of sites out there ahead of me.  Must be my visit to Italy last October rubbing off!
3. XmlResolver - I mentioned this somewhere, in a passing comment, I think.  I woke up at 3 AM today and started thinking about the hit I got from Google and thought about how whoever followed the link must have been disappointed.  I decided I needed to fill in that content and had an idea for a code sample.  After about 45 minutes, I decided XmlResolver really isn't that interesting a topic.  Funny what's interesting at 3AM.
4. Qwest XP - I mentioned that I heard Qwest was using XP company wide.  If you want to know more about this, I'd recommend contacting Software Architects.  I hear they're mentoring Qwest in this effort. Another plug: Jenny Parker from Software Architects has been working with my team at work, helping with project management.  This is a work in progress, but I'll say this: since Jenny arrived, our relationship with marketing has gotten about 1000 times better.

A pretty well-written Salon article on eXtreme Programming. As an aside, I've been on a couple of projects that used (or tried to use) XP. When you can get the buy-in of customer and programmers, and you're not scared to fix the bits of it that don't work for you personally, XP works really well. Just, whatever you do, don't try to do XP without the full involvement of the customer. If you do that, you're doomed.[The Desktop Fishbowl]

Maybe this is why you hear analyses of XP that say it works best with internal projects, because the customer and the programmer ultimately have the same boss.  The article says "Communication is certainly the key component of any XP project", but I'd argue that it's the key component of any project.  It's just that different projects have different modes.  Alistair Cockburn describes this well in his Agile Development book.  For example, the defense industry relies heavily on written communications, and RUP shares this reliance.  Prose is subject to misreading and lack of specificity, so people develop things like UML to make communications specific and less prone to interpretation.  XP says that this is an unnattural method of communication and goes the other direction towards communication channels that even laypeople can understand.

I've worked with people who insisted on either entirely verbal or entirely written communication.  Either mode is maddening; with the "talkers", everything's in the air and nothing gets nailed down.  With the "writers", communication is agonizingly slow.  "Writers" are often "drawers" as well, and with the "drawers", there's the additional overhead of negotiating the language.  Even with UML, people understand different dialects, the language is constantly evolving, and furthermore, people have different levels of understanding of the language.  I've had situations where I've wanted to work with a "drawer" and tried to express a design idea where neither of us knew the UML notation to express it.  Thankfully, we both spoke English!  So when you have two people who communicate expertly using, say, English, yet have less facility with UML, why struggle with UML when you could be talking?