CACM (Communications of the ACM) is one of my favorite journals – and it is currently in the throes of an editorial upheaval that I think is very positive. In addition to scholarly articles, it is moving in the direction of essays and more generally accessible articles, without loosening the quality criteria. Ever since BYTE disappeared (a victim of the need for targeted advertising) I have missed a general, quite technical yet accessible journal – CACM is now getting closer to what I am looking for.

Here are two articles I found very interesting:

• "Will the Future of Software be Open Source?, a well reasoned reflection by Martin Campbell-Kelly, giving a very terse, yet comprehensive and useful description of the evolution of software markets. Answer: OS is a tempting conclusion if you extrapolate, but extrapolation has not been a very successful prediction technique so far…
• "Searching the Deep Web", by Alex Wright, which explores two different approaches to searching beyond static web pages – the trawling approach, which relies on local storage, and the angling approach, which produces targeted results in real time.