The Iron Man Competition announced by mst really made me wonder about why the Perl community, which I believe to be one of the strongest in the Free Open Source Software ecosystem, is so disconnected with the latest trends of the web.

Then I realized that this was assuming the perl community was following some older trends of the web, but then I realized that perlmonks.org is trully what today is called "Web 2.0", It's all about the community and how to make that community to get more and more integrated, with one difference, perlmonks was around even before the "Web 1.0" dotcom bubble burst.

This was an important realization to me, because several "statistics" about programming languages doesn't even notice perlmonks.org, nor use.perl.org and not even jobs.perl.org. The Perl community predates the Web as we know today, and is not going to follow every trend just because it's new.

What's the point? Well, I guess it just tells me while the Perl community not following the latest trends is not that much of a problem, it also tells me that we could look on new ways of getting the community closer.

What could be done, besides what we already do?

Well, I guess I'll just publicize mst's competition, because the "blogosphere" is indeed a very important aspect on how the people (outside the perl community) understand the world.

but maybe, just maybe, we could think about building a collaboration infra-estructure that would allow content from several different sources to collaborate with each other... I still have just a rough idea about how that could work, rough to the point I still don't know how to explain... but I think you might see what I mean...

If the Perl community built a "Web 2.0" site before the "web 1.0" bubble burst, maybe we can build a "Web 4.0" infra-structure before people get to "Web 3.0"...