Carol Tucker brought up an interesting scenario (see below for a quote). A
similar thing happened to Jim McGee at Northwestern's Kellogg School of
Management recently:
http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/mcgee/htm/blog/
Luckily Jim was using a desktop K-Log tool. That allowed him to keep posting
even when the publishing conduit (the University's network) was down due to an
attack. When it went back up he could publish everything that he had entered
into the system while disconnected in one easy step. BTW, Jim is a pioneer in
the use of K-Logs, having taught a course at Kellogg this spring (Kellogg is
often ranked the #1 business school in the nation by Business Week) on
knowledge management with Radio on each student desktop.
This scenario could also become a disaster if you are using a K-Logging service
and it either suddenly goes out of business (as we have seen with many Web
companies) or has a catastrophic failure. While the site itself may be saved
if it is published to a third party or safe location, the fact that the data
and logic used to build your K-Log is stored in a database that is now
unavailable would make your work a stranded artifact. The solution is either
to publish from the desktop and keep a back-up of the files on CD, tape, or
back-up drive -- or -- to set up your own hosted solution on a server you own
in order to make sure the database is back-up (this is easy to do). Keep it in
a place you can control.
This also brings up another note I saw recently from Dody Gunawinata. He is
running a K-Logging vertical community for AIESEC (an organization of 50,000
members devoted to cultural exchange through global internships). He is using
a mix of Manila hosted sites -- and -- Radio sites published from the desktop.
This allows people to select the type of tool they feel most comfortable with.
You can see his community here:
http://www.aiesec.ws/
Dody brought up the fact that for 80% of the world, per minute Internet access
is too expensive for extended time online. That means that if you are working
with individuals in countries were cost of Internet connections are expensive
relative to income, the best way to extend K-Log publishing to them is through
an online/offline publishing. This will allow them to keep costs down (I know
there are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there that are looking at this, this
info may help). For example: a person working in the Philippines can work for
hours on several K-Log posts offline and then connect for a couple of minutes
to publish them and collect news items from subscriptions. Dody expands on
this with:
"Any software that allows offline-online usage will do well in this type of
environment. That's why the rest of the world can afford to use email (POP).
Radio will do well."
[John Robb]
I agree with most of the things that are said in this post. John Robb only fails to mention that downloading an entire Manila database is rather quick and simple, thus making it possible to save locally the "data and logic" of your site. What I don't understand is the lack of integration of Manila and Radio. Why can't we really use Radio to feed posts to a Manila site? The Radio tool that was presented a couple of months never got beyond beta and simply didn't do the trick in my point of view. My dream scenario would be a Manila site with all its power of shared content management and design for the more static parts, and Radio managed news feeds where posts can be categorized using shared Manila departments... or something like Matt Mower's liveTopics. [Sebastian Fiedler] via [Seblogging News]
