Here's a link for a summary of information from a recent Nielsen report on Internet usage and specifically use of social networking. Report.

This is tremendous news, and something that should be referenced early on in any justification you have to give for investing in a social networking site. The time is now. People are spending huge amounts of time online, and even more time online with social networking sites than with email.

I recently spoke with someone interested in starting out in Drupal. He saw Drupal's potential, asked about what it wasn't good for, and was receptive to pointers to getting going.

One big thing I suggested was don't try, at least initially, to learn everything there is to know about Drupal. Get the basics down, read stuff on Drupal.org and other Drupal sites, listen to podcasts, lurk in the support IRC channel, follow the RSS feed of the search results of Drupal on Twitter.

There's a lot of talk in Drupal circles on the Drupal usability tests (Formal usability testing of Drupal 7 at the University of Baltimore, February 2009, and on James Walker's Drupalcon talk "Why Drupal Sucks" (Bivings Report).

Last night Dries posted on the Acquia site on their release of a Mac & Windows installer of a Drupal environment.

The installer includes "...Acquia Drupal, Apache, MySQL, PHP, PhpMyAdmin, and an Acquia Drupal Control Panel." I downloaded and installed it on a Vista system, and quickly had a fully functional localhost Drupal environment with PhpMyAdmin easily accessible.

One of the more common types of quality assurance testing we do is browser compatibility testing, where we make sure that a site looks the same or at least very similar across browsers.

In order to perform this type of testing, you need to come up with a list of browsers to test against. Ideally someone would have this in mind before they made a site, but most often quality assurance is brought in at the end of a project and answers to questions like these are open.

So where do you get the information you need to make a list like this?

One of the primary features of an open source project you need to check is how well it's maintained. A poorly maintained project has all the downsides that an in house developed solution has - you have to debug and update it yourself.

Drupal provides a lot of functionality out of the box. Sometimes a better implementation can be found with contributed modules. And sometimes it's not just a question of something better - the stock functionality is just not up to par with what users have come to expect.

InteractiveQA is implementing a new look before your eyes! We're taking advantage of the adding a new offering (information architecture) upgrading to Drupal 6 to roll out a new look, based on the publicly available LiteJazz theme (http://drupal.org/project/litejazz).