I’m *still* amazed by the Internet.

You’d think that after having used it for 20 years, and having been at the center of the Internet boom at Inktomi, I’d lose just a little of my fascination.  But once again, I feel like the guys from “Tin Men” who marvel at the fact that their everyday salad ingredients come out of the ground.

Why?  Because I’ve gotten lots of email from around the world this week after posting 1 file on 1 site. 

I sometimes forget the international scale of the Internet; I also forget how odd jargon like “Longhorn Evangelist” might sound.  In fact, one email asked me what I meant when, at the end of the demo video, I said “I want you to be a Longhorn Evangelist.”  Even in the USA, I get questions about the “Evangelism” title on my business card.  It makes me wonder whether the term is just too overloaded with religious zealot connotations – especially in today’s climate – for use in a job description.  So let me explain what I meant.  

Longhorn Evangelism is all about helping developers see and exploit the opportunities for their business – to be excited about building on Longhorn’s new platform technologies.  No one can be excited about something they don’t understand; so job #1 is to “grok” Longhorn.  That means going deep on the technologies and re-emerging with a clear picture of the salient features of the platform.   If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a demo is worth a thousand pictures.  A concise demo that cuts through the noise, showing Longhorn’s value in your specific application scenarios, does wonders.  So far, I’ve simply described someone that’s good at evaluating and applying technology.  The transition to “evangelist” comes when you see the opportunities with such enthusiasm that you can’t stop telling everyone you know about Longhorn J  Have fun.