Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a mayor’s Conference and posted this request:

"Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the buck” and identify those that are old school “pork coming out of Congress”. We can do this through good clean fun crowdsourcing. Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each …

This week I'm attending the second of two developer conferences on my schedule for this month. I noticed an interesting trend that I hadn't seen discussed anywhere else before. Nearly every presenter is using some kind of virtualization technology to give their talks.

This is a terrific idea -- it's awesome to have a more or less pristine copy of your development environment that you can put into cold storage and spin up right before your talk is slated to begin.

I'm not sure why it's taken until 2007 for this kind of virtualization to reach a tipping point, although it might have something to do with the success of Parallels on the Mac -- as well as the fact that Microsoft released Virtual PC as a free product last year. (Although I should mention that I overheard more than one conversation at VSLive two weeks ago from presenters who were slagging Virtual PC's performance.)

I'd be willing to bet that this trend will work …