b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Recently
Triangulating on Shared Knowledge
Migrating Weblog to Different Server, Fixing Links
Making Companies Human
Building Business Relationships via the Blog
Military Intelligence and Photoshop
Printcafe Scheduler
Radio vs. Traction -- A Personal View
How Does This Differ From Just Posting a Link to an Article
Is FBI Behind BN.com Security Hole
Multi-Author Weblog Tool Description and Discussion
Author Names in Multi-Weblog Author Tool
Radio and Ampersand in RSS Readers
Display Preformatted Text With Radio
Patent Extortion
Manila vs Conversant: Website Mgmt or Groupware
e-Publishing and POD TidBits from 'Cites and Insights'
Why Freight Management and Logistics Are Important to Small Publishers
e-Book News and Views
Will FTC Investigate Congress
More Technology Moving East
Anticipation...
Update: googleBox How-to
How About a Personal Library App
Crawling Before Walking with KM
Uh-Oh, Our Idiots Meet Their Idiots -- This Can't Be Good
A Choice Paul Shouldn't Have to Make
Rebuild The World Trade Center
I Hate Typos -- Radio Blogging from MSWord
Friday, July 19, 2002
User-centered Software Design
I've been looking for an Information Architect/Information Retrieval specialist to help me better understand the basics of good information systems design. I'm amazed at the wealth of knowledge available to us all via the weblog community and how some of the people in it make complex things so comprehensible.James Robertson at Column Two posted this helpful example created by Donna Maurer, showing how user stories clarify and enhance requirements documents.
It is an interesting approach and one that I, being neither an engineer nor designer, like quite a lot. It gives the software designer a human goal to achieve.
I thought the accessibility series over at dive into mark used this pretty well, too.
Personas and scenarios. Donna Maurer has written a very practical blog entry on using personas and scenarios. To quote Donna: These were so powerful! It is amazing how much extra information stories can give.[Column Two]
Triangulating on Shared Knowledge
Today John Robb made a thought-provoking post on Yahoo! Groups: K-Log and it should be passed along. The essay he refers to really hit home given some of the research and study I'm currently doing, and it is well worth reading. There is much good thought taking place right now on how to bring people within a business together on both emotional and intellectual levels. I think the scandals rocking corporate America have a lot to do with that. [...more]Migrating Weblog to Different Server, Fixing Links
This thread in the discussion group covers setting up a Meta redirect tag in pages on the Radio Communty Server so that calls to that server will be sent to the new one.
Also see this thread:
http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$16813?mode=topic&y=2002&m=7&d=19
Making Companies Human
A nice complement to today's thoughts on klogging and business strategy.
Weblog as the interface to a person.Time for people. Paolo Valdemarin: Time for people. "Time for anonymous companies is over, we have all had enough, it really looks like it's time for people, time for weblogs." [Jake's Radio 'Blog]Also this comment by Paolo:I have had a company web site for about the last 7 years, but I have never received much feedback from it. Since I have opened my blog I'm receiving lots of messages from people all over the world. This is happening because they perceive the weblog as the interface to a person, while the company site belongs to a faceless entity, even if for some of those 7 years, behind that company web site there was only one person: me. [emphasis added]If you start connecting the dots between the weblogs and k-logs space with the recent books such as Free Agent Nation , Bobos in Paradise, and The Rise of the Creative Class you can see the acceleration of a fundamental shift in the relation between employer and employed.
Pay attention; it will affect you. [McGee's Musings]
Building Business Relationships via the Blog
If you read only one post today, make it this one. This post from Rick came across my aggregator and triggered my thinking. When I put it with the post from Jim and the essay from John I wound up triangulating on The Power of Shared Knowledge.
Put Your Business Where Your Blog Is.Just put together a few thoughts on how blogs serve as business relationship-builders. I now have a couple examples of this blog leading directly to business relationships that are playing a significant role in sales opportunities. Those relationships would not have existed but for the blog.
While leads me to a new mantra: put your business where your blog is.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Military Intelligence and Photoshop
Military mathematicians have uncovered new pixel manipulation techniques with potential to automate complex photo-retouching tasks.
Is this the next killer Photoshop plug-in?.Oh, this is TOO easy. If this becomes a commercial product, retouchers are either gonna love this or, if they charge by the hour, go broke overnight.
from the news article...
[...] While working on ways to improve surveillance images, the U.S. Navy discovered an innovative technique to restore damaged photographs and works of art, according to a press release issued last week by the Office of Naval Research.The new method promises to eliminate much of the hand labor and guesswork currently involved in art restoration, since a computer now can handle much of the process. [...]
Printcafe Scheduler
I believe this refers to the latest release of what used to be Kerens, a print scheduling system based on Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.
Printcafe Shows New PrintFlow, PrinterSite Internal & Logic Upgrade at Conference
"PrintFlow is an amazing new technology," said Doug Ehmann, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of The Sheridan Group, a large publication printer. "It?s fast and can consider many more constraints and options than is humanly possible. We investigated other technologies to help us with scheduling, but none could manage in real-time our complex and critical processes." [WhatTheyThink]
While this product is not particularly suited to digital or demand-driven print operations, it is encouraging to see Theory of Constraints being applied in printing. TOC principles, along with such ideas as single-unit-flow and cellular manufacturing, are critical to efficient demand-driven operations.
Radio vs. Traction -- A Personal View
Jim McGee asked, so I thought I'd try to find an answer.Jim McGee asks:
Traction? How about Radio?. What more do you get than buying individual licenses for Radio which you can get for about 1/10 the cost of Traction? [ McGee's Musings]
Jim is referring to the review (quoted below) of Traction Server by Jon Udell in InfoWorld, and since I'm trying to get a little traction of my own -- developing a strategy for small to mid-size business information/KM infrastructure -- I decided to investigate it from a business perspective.
Here are the areas I thought important to consider in comparing Traction to Radio: [more...]
How Does This Differ From Just Posting a Link to an Article
How does this differ from just posting a link to an article? If you post a link to a web-published article doesn't it get a new version of itself everytime you open it up (barring cacheing, of course)? Some of these PDF breakthroughs just leave me wondering "Why..."
Company releases software that syncs PDFs to update them as new releases come available, calling the documents SmartPDFs.
Is FBI Behind BN.com Security Hole
With federal agents now surfing the web, monitoring your TV habits via the cable guy, and issuing warrants to bookstores for your purchase records, could this be just another hidden attempt by DOJ and America's favorite jack-booted teddy bear to let agents spy on the average American citizen and see what we're reading?Nah, of course not. That's silly. Only an unpatriotic, paranoid, conspiracy theorist could think such a thing.
This is a breach, but a fairly minor one since credit card numbers are not exposed. It's a little eerie to have your purchase records available, but no reason for real concern. After all, if you're not guilty of anything why should you worry about people knowing what books you buy. We're all just one big, happy family. (Oh, Mom -- that book on lesbian women's studies I bought last year was a gift. I certainly don't read such things...)
BN.com: The Hole Story. It's a minor flaw compared to others in the e-commerce privacy-breach annals, but a hole found in BarnesandNoble.com's site again raises the question: Why do they take so long to fix? By Danit Lidor.[Wired News]
Multi-Author Weblog Tool Description and Discussion
Radio discussion thread describing install and use, and discussing initial reactions to the Multi-Weblog Author tool. This looks like a very cool thing. AFIK, it takes a group of RSS feeds from individual weblogs and aggregates them into posts on a single page or category.I can see this being very useful for group journaling as described in "In the Same Room Does Not Mean on the Same Page", for tracking software development projects (when combined with threaded discussion, doc mgmt, RCS, etc.), and for lending a sense of coherence to a group of company weblogs across departments or even the entire enterprise.
A scenario: (I need to draw a picture of this) I can see a sort of pyramid structure -- each individual has a weblog where they narrate their work and record important insights, experiences, or problems. Each has a category for Team, Department, Division, Company, etc. where they post items relevant to a specific audience. The Team Leader runs a Multi-Weblog Author Tool, aggregating the "Team" feeds from each employee. Someone at Department, Division, and Company levels do the same.
These aggregate weblogs generate their own RSS feeds and could, again, be subscribed by any individual in the company -- leading back to each employee and providing the opportunity to comment and contribute at all levels of the organization.
This is real transparency. Combined with a culture that doesn't penalize people for saying what they think, this could be a powerful way to keep employees informed and to let employees inform the company.
Author Names in Multi-Weblog Author Tool
Thomas Burg is using Radio as a multi-author k-log and an internal reporting tool. He is looking to automatically add the author's name to each post. This thread in the discussion group cover a source macro and customizing the RSS file.Radio and Ampersand in RSS Readers
Broken news feed, AmphetaDesk error, ampersands, white space, and XML. I didn't realize it, but Radio does something improper with ampersand characters -- some non-conformaing XML thing. By using & in my post I create an RSS feed that some XML-compliant readers can't read.The problem isn't permanent -- it happens only as long as the &-item remains in the feed. As son as Radio has aged the item enough (I guess) it falls out. So the problem isn't permanent and Radio feeds appear to break randomly. As Morbus Iff says:
- for XML to be considered valid, all &'s need to be turned into /&. Radio doesn't currently do this, and Radio feeds break all the time.
I'll have to be more careful in the future.
Display Preformatted Text With Radio
This thread in the Radio discussion group covers forcing Radio to include external text files, code segments, and other preformatted text without modifying each occurence. Addresses path issues, the file.readWholeFile verb, and Macintosh path idiosyncracies.Thursday, July 18, 2002
Patent Extortion
There is something flawed in an intellectual property system that lets corporate leeches, who had nothing whatsoever to do with development, purchase unenforced patents and try to retroactively extort revenue from them. I do not speak as a patent attorney, and my opinion on the matter is worth what you pay for it. But this looks like the old CompuServe GIF fiasco (I think it was GIF, correct me if I'm wrong) and could be a real PIA for graphic arts firms and anyone who runs a web site.
Formerly known as VTEL, Forgent Networks acquired Compression Labs in 1997, acquiring this patent into the bargain. The patent claim was filed in 1986 but Compression Labs never pursued royalties.[The Register]Forgent last week declared that it has "the sole and exclusive right to use and license all the claims" under the patent and is seeking a deal wherever JPEGs are transmitted, with the exception of satellite broadcasting.
JPEGs are not free: Patent holder pursues IP grab. And Sony's already coughed up
I mean, exactly what consitutes a broadcast? If I publish a JPG file on my blog have I "broadcast" it? This sort of thing seems wrong.
I'll be interested to see if it gets any mention from Martin Schwimmer. I'm certainly ok with inventors getting their due, and I'm even ok with companies buying up patents that have prior enforcement. But the idea of patent scroungers digging through rubbish bins looking for some way to make a buck without adding any value if repulsive.
Manila vs Conversant: Website Mgmt or Groupware
Is Conversant the Same as Userland's Manila?By: Sean McMains on 3/14/2002; 12:17 PM
Since both Manila and Conversant are built on Userland Frontier, and since they have some overlap in functionality, it would be easy to assume that they are the same product. That is, however, not the case!Manila is an excellent tool for getting websites up quickly and managing them easily. It's very user-friendly, and even relative novices find it straightforward to use. Conversant has a steeper learning curve, but also has a lot of features that Manila lacks, including full email support and NNTP support. While Manila is really geared toward a single publisher per site and excels in that role, Conversant is a groupware platform, and is designed to facilitate interaction among group members, including arbitrary numbers of publishers.
In short, they're very different products once you get past their basics, and it's worth examining both when making a decision as to what you'll use.
Wednesday, July 17, 2002
e-Publishing and POD TidBits from 'Cites and Insights'
Here are just a few of the useful tidibits I pulled from my reading of Cites & Insights courtesy of future of the book news. The first three items originated in M.J. Rose' column in Wired News, the
- Xlibris now offers color print-on-demand (PoD) publishing, but it isn?t cheap: Setup takes a few months, the book length is limited to 24 to 60 pages, and the author pays $999 to $2,499 before the first PoD "book" appears.
- The column ends with a striking number for the healthiest (and least "e") part of digital book distribution: Xerox printed 20 million b&w PoD books last year? and is demonstrating a $200,000 full-color PoD system. Twenty million in 2001: that?s a real business.
- Also, Bowker wants to do PoD as a form of test marketing for outof-print books?and Powell?s Books is getting into the PoD business with the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, using Lightning Press for fulfillment.
- It?s always fun to see market forecasters "distancing themselves" from their earlier forecasts. A Reuters piece posted May 8, 2002 includes the following from David Card of Jupiter Media Metrix: "We haven?t issued forecasts for the [ebook] industry in two years, because the market?s going nowhere. E-books were a dumb idea. I am very negative on this market." And a Simon & Schuster VP says "everyone who works in this industry did not really think" that the aggressive sales forecasts were "what the future held." Naturally enough, S&S won?t disclose ebook sales but says that they?re "meeting its own internal forecasts, with year over year growth in the double digit percentage range."
Why Freight Management and Logistics Are Important to Small Publishers
I continue to believe effective freight management -- rate shopping, aggregation, multi-carrier options just like the "Big Boys" -- is an important competitve advantage to small- and medium-sized publishers.From M.J. Rose' column in Wired News?
Summer means discounts: Free shipping and discounted books are heating up at online bookstores.[Wired News]Amazon.com is offering free shipping on all orders of $49 or more (down from the usual $99), and discounting almost all titles usually listed over $15 by 35 percent.
Some Buy.com bestsellers are 50 percent off. Free shipping is also available on some of these books. And orders of $99 or more that weigh less than 20 pounds are shipped for free.
Barnes&Noble.com is offering free shipping when two or more items are purchased.
How can a small publisher break through when shipping a $15 book costs the buyer $4-$7?
Today, the vast majority of POD books are shipped from print facilities that have little to no experience in handling advanced logistics. They may have enough volume to get a UPS discount, but it's unlikely they can even come close to the rates that an Amazon or B&N.com achieves by using a mail consolidator such as http://www.dropshipexpress.com">DropShipExpress. Besides low rates, DSE can provide tracking numbers and certified delivery via USPS -- just like UPS or FedEx.
Granted, major shippers get significant discounts from UPS and FedEx, but they get significant advantage by aggregating thier shipments with consolidators and optimizing shipping with low-cost carriers. A POD provider who can do the same can offer e-Publishers a direct-ship model with similar benefits, while bypassing the inventory and discounts required by the major distributors and wholesalers.
Such sales will not supplant the in-store sales of the major retailers or the big on-line merchants, but it does give the independent a better shot at competing.
e-Book News and Views
Gary Frost tracks trends and changes in the book industry at Future of the Book. I've only begun browsing his site, but he seems to stay pretty much on-topic (is there a lesson for me there?) and both provides and points to some excellent resources.The piece below points to a PDF file that is really good reading. If you're interested in what is happening in the e-book/e-publishing/POD arena you should check pp. 10-13 of ...
Cites & Insights. Walt Crawford picks up a number of items in the August Cites & Insights ebook column indicating the quiet realignment of the ebook revolution as it shifts toward a Print on Demand (and future of the print book)agenda.[future of the book news]
Will FTC Investigate Congress
Hmm, while Congressmen hide away crafting all manner of ill-advised legislation for the precise purpose of protecting Hollywood and the recording industry from competition, FTC chairman Muris says that's a no-no for states. Do ya think?!
Muris said he formed a task force to study the matter and found that "there are many regulations that, although adopted ostensibly for one purpose, had the effect of protecting existing brick-and-mortar businesses from new competition in the Internet."FTC: E-biz curbed by some state laws. ZDNet Jul 17 2002 5:20PM ET [Moreover - Online legal issues news]
More Technology Moving East
Internet router moving headquarters from Seattle to Atlanta. AP via New Jersey Online Jul 17 2002 6:06PM ET [Moreover - Atlanta news]
Anticipation...
Now waiting with baited breath for Release 1.0...
liveTopics 1.0 release iminent.Okay I've said it before, but barring major incident liveTopics should be released before the end of the week. My current target is thursday since I move house on Friday and I'm not sure what my connectivity is after that. Or, maybe that's not a good time to release... :)
Oh well, damn the torpedo's, full steam ahead! [Curiouser and curiouser!]
Update: googleBox How-to
3. You do need to create an account with Google to get the key that's required by the Radio and Frontier glue They have a limit of 1000 calls to their server per day per user. For the applications we have in mind this should not be an important limit. And it's good that they've put the limit there, so that they can at some point make this a commercial for-pay service, which we believe it should be.4a. Radio 8 users: Update Radio.root. Bring the Radio app to the front and choose Quick Script from the Developers sub-menu of the Tools menu. Enter google.init () and press Enter. Then choose Jump from the Developers sub-menu of the Tools menu and enter user.google. You should see an item called key. Click in the second column, enter the key you received from the Google website.
First, the instructions for Radio.
<%google.macros.box ("your name here")%>
This renders as a box, like the one you see on Weblogs.Com in the right margin, or on my Radio weblog, here.
Here's a list of parameters to google.macros.box:
1. searchterm is the only required parameter. It's the search string you would enter through Google's HTML interface.
2. ctResults, a number, default 10, indicates the number of results you want to see in the box.
3. tableWidth, a number, default 191, says how wide the box is.
4. frameColor, a string, default #000000, it's the color that the box frame is drawn in.
5. boxColor, a string, default #FFFFFF, the color of the inside of the box.
6. helpLink, a string, is the url of a page that explains what the box is about. Default is a page on the Radio site that doesn't exist yet.
7. textClass, a string, default the empty string, is the CSS class for all text in the box. If it's the emtpy string we enclose all text in a element with a size="-1" attribute.
Update: I found this thread on googleBox parameter examples along with a note from Phil Wolff on passing the name of a category to the macro. Neat idea. No resolution shown.
How About a Personal Library App
Maybe it's just me, but I never understood how Amazon was going to be profitable until they took over the e-Commerce and web operations for Borders. When I saw that it dawned on me that Amazon's Path-to-Profitability may well lie in its excellent web and infrastructure services.This latest web services API and SDK seem to fit that vision, and I think it is a very smart thing the company does in stirring up the developer community this way. How it turns out is anyone's guess, but it's an interesting approach to leveraging their infrastructure superiority.
What I want to know is this:
Can someone use this SDK to write a personal library application?
I want to buy an inexpensive, hand-held barcode scanner, plug it into my PC, scan the ISBN codes on my hundreds of books, and let some software package run about the web building a database of all the critical info about the book.
I have thousands of dollars worth of books and if my house burned tomorrow I'd have no hope of recovering even part of it from the insurer. But a personal library program could sure help.
Any of you software mavens out there want to write such an app?
Search Amazon from Python. DiveIntoMark has written a piece of software that combines two things I love: Amazon and Python. (Makes sense, right? You expected to find Pe(a)rls in the Amazon?)[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]Mark has written PyAmazon, a Python wrapper for the just announced Amazon web API. [...]
Crawling Before Walking with KM
Another good post from James, and comments from Denham, with key highlights for starting slow and growing up strong.
Walking before running. I've just spent the day in Canberra, doing some consultancy work for one of the government departments. With the plane[Column Two]
Uh-Oh, Our Idiots Meet Their Idiots -- This Can't Be Good
I realize our representative republic form of government is the best of the multitude of flawed governing systems, and I know I should try to show a little respect. But, well... Damn! they are just absolute idiots when it comes to the Internet, privacy, copyright, commerce, or anything else that is remotely related to technolgy. And getting the Euro-idiots together with our idiots just doesn't strike me as a good thing. But I guess it has to happen...
Euro lawmakers discuss Net issues with Congress. U.S. officials, European Parliament meet to align on Internet security, privacy[InfoWorld: Top News]
A Choice Paul Shouldn't Have to Make
Paul Holbrook, who figured out how to shorten the RSS feeds in Limiting RSS Summaries to First Paragrah, has found his solution wanting and gone back to allowing full stories in his feed. I don't blame Paul. He doesn't like writing like a journalist -- head, deck, story -- and finds that sometimes his readers miss an important point.Or maybe even Paul doesn't know what the one most important point will be to his readers, and by filtering to his first paragraph he risks focusing on the wrong one and failing to get his readers all the way through.
I know. It happened to me.
But that doesn't mean I want to view Paul's entire story in my News Aggregator. And I should have the choice of how I want to get Paul's feed. The only way I can get through all the feeds I track is to do a quick scan. I currently have 60 news sources (I know, that's overkill) and I add a couple a week. Using "Mark Paschal"'s Kit News Aggregator keeps the display filtered down to a reasonable size, but if all my feeds included full stories it would still be too much.
The beauty of News Aggregators is the ability to provide a quick scan summary of the day's news, and I enjoy being able to scroll quickly through the list to see what I should pursue. I know that even if I miss something, someone else in the blogplex will pick it up. With full stories I can't get that quick scan, and I lose the spontaneity that is important to me.
But what is right for me isn't right for everyone. As Jon Udell says in RSS Truncation Shouldn't Be An Either/Or Choice, the reader should be able to choose how to get the feed. Paul shouldn't have to make an either/or decision about what his readers want.
There should be a simple mechanism for allowing readers the choice of having a full or truncated feed. "Jenny Levine" has accomplished this using some server-side scripting, but it's over my head until I can learn something about cgi and php. Paul also suggests a mechanism where the author could choose what to place in the feed on an item basis. Either of these is better than the situation now.
Until Paul gets his item-by-item feature, I hope he'll consider offering a dual feed, ala The Shifted Librarian.
I'm not going to truncate this feed anymore.After championing truncating your RSS feed to the first paragraph, I'm going back to an untruncated RSS feed. Truncation works very well if you write like a reporter. If you get everything important into that first paragraph, folks can decide if they want to click further. But sometimes I feel more like telling stories than reporting the news. And in that case, it's very hard to get everything you want to say into that first 'graph.[...] [Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
Rebuild The World Trade Center
A nice website showing the six concepts currently under consideration for the World Trade Center Area. I guess there are a few who just want a memorial built there, no buildings.I disagree. We rebuild. A memorial to the dead is appropriate, and maybe we don't reproduce the Trade Center towers, but we rebuild. We're human and that's what we do.
"Direct Link to Info on the 6 Concepts Being Considered" [Daypop Top 40]
I Hate Typos -- Radio Blogging from MSWord
Using LiveTopics to beat typos. I hate typos, and I haven't the time or the inclination to figure out little accesso-checkers like MicroSpell. I'm sure it's great, and all, but I just don't have the time.So I was looking at |Matt|'s blog today, checking out the TopicRoll, and saw a link to Radio Blogging from Word (there's a Mac version, too.)
It is pretty technical for a pseudo-geek wannabee like me, and I have almost no tolerance for stupid MSWord tricks (I can't even make it do a decent outline) but if I can make this work, reliably, this will be a good thing.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Update: Well, this does work. It runs a little slow on my PIII 733 machine, but it does carry over links, colors, and basic styling just like Simon Fell said it would. Neat. Now we'll have to see just how useful.
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