UPDATE: Dr. Wood’s article has been published.

Lauren Wood, well-known Vancouver-based technology author and co-organizer of the XML Conference and Northern Voice Weblog Conference, visited Navarik last week as part of her research for an article on weblogs and wikis inside companies.

We began by talking to Dr. Wood about our blog-based systems for running this website and our intranet, as well as similar systems we have encouraged our customers—including the Chamber of Shipping of B.C. and Pacific Basin Shipping of Hong Kong—to use.

But we eventually moved on to talk about:

• Other web-based applications—both blog- and wiki-like, and otherwise, from various suppliers—that we use internally.
• The software we build for our own customers.
• Why the open data storage, exchange, and browser standards we advocate both make sense for businesses who want to maintain control of their own data, and are helping formerly disparate IT systems communicate more easily with one another.

Lauren’s article, which includes information from a number of other interviewees working with web-based applications, will be published in the Gilbane Report, a long-running publication about digital content management that recently made its entire archive (back to 1993) available online for free.

In the long-running Risks Digest online newsletter, Paul Robinson writes: “For some reason it’s perfectly acceptable for a trucking company to build an accounts receivable application from scratch but nobody in their right mind would expect them to build their own trucks. […] Software as it is currently being developed provides so much value relative to its costs that we as practitioners of this medieval-class craft […] can get away with practices that would not be tolerated by a Taiwanese manufacturer of toasters.”

In addition to bringing several new staff members to Navarik recently, we’re also pleased to welcome back two of our longer-term employees, and note some activities of others:

• Managing Director Martin Ertl has just returned to Vancouver after spending two months in Honduras learning Spanish.
• Program Manager Hina Wafai also came back to town after spending the past few months in Norway helping our customer Western Bulk Shipping deploy new software systems.
• Dave Shea, who was Navarik’s Creative Director in 2004, will soon release his long awaited web design book.
• Senior Program Manager Derek Miller appears on a panel at the Northern Voice weblog conference in Vancouver on Saturday, February 19.

In addition, Navarik’s President Bill Dobie recently attended the Business in Vancouver “40 Under 40” ceremony to receive his award.

Wired magazine quotes representatives of the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office that “Precision surveys only exist for less than 10 percent of the world’s [seafloor], usually well-traveled commercial routes.” […] “Most of the world’s oceans are imprecisely mapped, and depths from Captain Cook using lead lines are still used on some charts.”