You can read the press release announcing the award here.

A picture of Brian and Pat with the award is here.

Maybe some powerful customer built a fire under them, maybe somebody won an internal battle. Who knows? I suspect many of the Producer users (after enduring more than a year of Microsoft not doing anything visible) have moved to Articulate, Acrobat Breeze or some other similar tool.

From a personal point of view I like Twitter (and to a lesser extent Pownce -- a nicer implementation of microblogging but with fewer users) much better than Facebook -- whose "application" addons are mostly childish but I can see where something like Facebook (maybe not Facebook itself) would function much easier in the corporate milieu -- it could be a sort of corporate portal site.

In terms of capturing and distributing Vital Knowledge within an organization though I am not sure about any of them. Potential but translating that to reality? They all require enthusiastic users across the board (or at least a seed of enthusiastic users). I am not sure how you would initiate that within an organization. It would require for most organizations a seachange of corporate culture -- and selling that or exciting such a change is akin to "herding cats".

In a more recent ruling the Patent Office is proposing to invalidate all of Blackboard's patents in this area.

Stay tuned... this is not over yet.

I am not totally sure what this means -- will audio/video content be supported? Will AICC, SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 packages be created? The initial information does not make it obvious. I am guessing "no" to the first question, "yes" to the second.

I will certainly be watching the activity.

What would be a straightforward production of a prerecorded presentation in Producer becomes a massive job in Articulate.