Marketing Technician

A business partner who helps a Connecticut real estate firm told me her client wanted "virtual tours" for their website.

Now, "virtual tours" can mean two things. First, those wizzy 360-degree pictures, with tiny counterintuitive pan-and-scan controls and that need a web browser plugin. To get those done, you need an "interactive agency" with a special camera.

I hate those.

Not long ago I built an extranet for a client, which was a secure repository of documents. The client wanted to know which files were being downloaded by which users, but Drupal didn't offer that out-of-the-box. So, I had this very modest module written by a nice fellow in the UK.

download_statistics.tar.gz

Untar, upload and install as usual. Then you'll be able to see something like this: 

Movable Type was my content management system (CMS) of choice in 2004. Installation and configuration was easy enough for a non-developer like me to handle, and I had a couple of reliable business partners for coding and design projects.

However, the open-source movement captured interest and attention of the development community, and Movable Type began an inexorable slide into comparative irrelevance. (Evidence at Google Trends.)

For the marketer at a medium-sized company, the development of web-based apps has made some tasks obsolete. With some effort and startup costs, by 2009 you can stop:

The attack on paid software and services continues.

In general, free and open-source software isn't yet robust enough to stop the corporate dollars flowing to Redmond. Nor are shallow-pocketed companies likely to try, since the development effort to match feature for feature is just too much. Heck, most of these companies may be gone in a few years if they don't make the transition to an ad-supported or paid-tier model. Or get bought for their codebase and user list, like Writely. But for now, it's a good time for entrepreneurs, consultants and startups.