b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
Recently
Right-thinking on Copyright
FileMaker Goes XML
How To Think Out Loud
Success and the Private RSS Feed
Technology Review -- Do Readers Matter and DRM
Udell on Where DRM Fits
Weblogs Are Disruptive Technology
Inter-link for Multi-User Weblogs and Intranets
e-Bay Seeks PayPal Purchase
Taking the Long View on e-Books
Weblog Compendium.
Fixing Broken HTML in Radio News Aggregator
Secure Printing From an IT Perspective
RAVEing Congressional Lunatics
Usability Design
More from Mower on liveTopics
Fragen for Fewer Tags
More IM/KM/intranet Pointers from Matt Mower
Info Tools Compendium
Category ftp, QuickScript Fix, and Progress But No Solution
How Fast Are You
I Do Lots of Stupid Things So You Don't Have To
Incorrect URLs After Changing Upstream Locations
Render Multiple RSS feeds on One Page
ftp Munge
How to publish a category to a different FTP server
Weblog by e-Mail
About This Weblog
A Solid Intranet in Eight Steps
Business Requirements for Classifying Content
Down the Rabbit Hole
Feedback from a K-Log Experiment
What We're Doing When We Blog
Requirements for K-Log Home Page
Cool Tool: Summarizer Free Form Page Summaries
Searching for ZCB -- Zero Contribution Barrier
Big Business Pressures for Palladium
Denmark Case on Linking Counter to Internet Principles
Bill Campbell Your Radio Host
Jobless Rate up to 5.9 Percent
RIAA Goes After Corporate P2P
K-Logs, NNTP, and Knowledge Management
Monday, July 8, 2002
recent Titled Blog Posts macro
Link to instructions for displaying a list of recent posts on a Radio blog
Right-thinking on Copyright
Congressman Rick Boucher is for real and one of the few people in Congress who understand copyright well enough to draft intelligent laws (for unintelligent law see: "Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt.") Boucher is the first sign of Intellectual Property intelligence to show up in DC since 1997. Read on through to the end of Jenny Levine at TSL's post and then contact your Congressman to support this idea.
Boucher To Fight The Good Fight. Rep. Boucher Outlines 'Fair Use' Fight "U.S. Congressman Rick Boucher, moving to strengthen 'fair use' provisions under federal copyright law, said he is introducing a bill that would essentially restrict the record industry from selling copy-protected CDs....During a keynote address to the seventh annual Plug.IN digital music conference sponsored by Internet research firm Jupiter Media Metrix, the Virginia Democrat urged the record industry to reconsider int... [The Shifted Librarian]
FileMaker Goes XML
FileMaker to push universal information exchange. Upgrade focuses on XML data interchange, app integration [InfoWorld: Top News]How To Think Out Loud
In this post "Jon Udell" takes an example of a quality weblog post and, in his typically cogent fashion, points out some of the most useful products of this activity.I don't always agree with Jon -- sometimes he's so far out in front of the technology that I can't connect -- but I believe his points on the value of effective weblog usage are sound. William Zinsser's Writing to Learn is a classic text on how putting ideas to paper -- in an appropraite fashion -- clarifies thinking. (Sadly, I can't tell that such skills are any longer taught in public schools.) What Dave Winer calls narrating the work is a prime example of this. Jon's other points about the impact of a weblog are equally valid.
For any company to succeed at knowledge management -- or have an effective virtual company since they are artifacts of the same process -- there must be an emphasis on getting people to think out loud effectively. Virtual collaboration and knowledge management are not about application training, or technologies, or protocols.
They are about getting people to expose their thoughts to one another, and to do so in a way that is both useful and inviting. This does not come naturally to most people. It takes work. It takes guidance. And it takes some encouragement and support -- along with the right technology. But in the end the technology matters little, be it a weblog, a discussion group, or even e-mail. It is the human factors that are most important in trying to build dialogue.
Jeffrey P Shell thinking out loud about Zope. Here's Jeffrey P Shell thinking out loud about a Zope optimization puzzle: [...]Although Jeffrey reaches no conclusions in this posting, I find his thinking-out-loud process incredibly valuable. Writing is a way to clarify thinking. Doing such writing on a weblog is the primal act of knowledge management. Here are some of the useful outcomes:
- Jeffrey thinks a little harder about this bit of analysis, because he's making it public.
- The fact that Jeffrey is wondering about these issues creates the possibility that, by manufactured serendipity, answers will come to him from people made aware of his interest.
- Now that I know Jeffrey's on the case, I'll remember to check his weblog (or contact him personally) when I next encounter a similar problem.
Thinking out loud isn't always useful, of course. You have to think about interesting things, and articulate them in useful ways, as Jeffrey always does. Dave Winer calls this "narrating the work." Knowledge management is really just about cultivating that habit and that skill. [...] [Jon's Radio]
Success and the Private RSS Feed
Great heaping gobs of success! I love it when a plan comes together. After many niggling errors and fubars -- caused by a loose nut connected to the keyboard -- I have finally succeeded at How to publish a category to a different FTP server, published that Category into a separate password-protected directory, and managed to get my News Aggregator to suscribe to Private RSS with User Authentication in Radio.Woo Hoo! Big day at the races.
This is cool, as it has all sorts of implications for KM apps, client relations, etc. Very nice. Thanks to everyone on the Radio discussion group who helped me over the steep end of the learning curve.
Technology Review -- Do Readers Matter and DRM
This article from TR relates to the Do Readers Matter approach to DRM. Clearly to the networks the answer is "only as much as you watch the commercials." Just as the broadcast industry has come to see viewers as lifeless commodities, we should return the favor -- holding no interest in their survival, profitability, or long-term prospects.No argument can be made that the broadcast industry is critical to any national or social interest and people like Kellner deserve a rude awakening to marketplace realities. Their investments are irrelevant, their history of import only to academics, their job base relevant only to the extent it produces something of actual value to the consumer.
In Kellner's world networks exist only as a delivery vehicle, transporting the sheep of a viewing audience to the slaughterhouse of advertisers. This model is of questionable value to society -- to the extent that Kellner thinks it should drive legislation it is a detriment.
Broadcasters, record companies, and (to a large extent) newspaper and book publishers have grown over enamored with their past success and lost sight of who's in charge. They have lost the sense of serving the customer that all their founders embodied.
There are certain technical advantages to, and justifiable uses for, specific DRM protocols and applications, but we should demand they justify themselves in the open market and not tolerate the subversive use of legislation to sustain outmoded, counter-productive business practices.
MIT's Technology Review - Treating Viewers as Criminals. Networks say watching TV without the ads is theft. Will blipverts be next?The 1980s science fiction series, Max Headroom, depicted a society "twenty minutes into the future" ruled by powerful television networks locked in ruthless competition for viewer eyeballs. Concerned by the growing trend towards channel surfing, the blipvert was developed as a rapid-fire subliminal advertisement which pumped its commercial messages directly into consumers' brains before they had a chance to change the channel.
Unfortunately, the blipvert had the unanticipated side effect of causing spontaneous combustion in a certain number of overweight and chronically inactive couch potatoes. This outcome was viewed as an acceptable risk by the networks, even though it potentially decreased the number of viewers for their programs.
I could not help but think about blipverts the other day when I stumbled across the recent comments of Turner Broadcasting System CEO Jaimie Kellner, who asserted that television viewers who skipped commercials using their digital video recorders were guilty of "stealing" broadcast content. Kellner told an industry trade press reporter that "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." He conceded that there may be a historic loophole allowing us to take short breaks to go to the bathroom but otherwise, we are expected to be at our post, doing our duties, watching every commercial, and presumably, though he never said it, buying every product.
Kellner's intemperate rhetoric is, alas, characteristic of the ways that the media industry increasingly thinks about, talks about, and addresses its consumers in the post-Napster era. Napster may--and I stress, may--have been legitimately labeled piracy, but now all forms of consumerism are being criminalized with ever-decreasing degrees of credibility. Once going to the bathroom or grabbing a snack on a commercial break gets treated as a form of theft, the media conglomerates are going to be hard pressed to get consumer compliance with their expectations, making it impossible to draw legitimate lines about what is and is not appropriate use of media content.
[ ... ]
If the networks stopped at name-calling, that would be one thing, but they didn't. Last fall, the networks sued SONICBlue, the manufacturer of ReplayTV, and convinced a Federal Magistrate to force the company to collect data on thousands of individual consumers: what shows they watch, what commercials they skip, and what--if anything--they forward to their friends. Not content to wait and worry, the networks are now invading our privacy to ensure that we make good on Kellner's imaginary contract. Thankfully, the order was subsequently stayed by a higher court.
Confronting such hostility, consumers are increasingly committing acts of passive resistance (flush often!) and forming organizations, such as DigitalConsumer.org, which is making the case that consumers have rights and interests in the negotiations that occur between media producers, technology companies, and policy-makers. To borrow a line from Network, "we are mad as hell and we aren't going to take it anymore." [Privacy Digest]
Udell on Where DRM Fits
Jon Udell, who worked on O'Reilly's leading-edge Safari digital content store, says ubiquitous DRM is not going to help e-Book sales, or better the market. I have to agree. Continued efforts to create Trusted Computing environments that essentially treat all computer users as criminals will not provide any rational basis for growth, nor will it enhance the computing experience for anyone.To be of value, the e-content has to be as freely usable as a book, not less so. e-Paper is a first step, but one that is still years away...
DRM, active paper, and the future of publishing. Lack of good, ubiquitous DRM is the only thing holding us back from some really cool advances. More than two years ago, Microsoft started making some big bets on e-books... ...[Jon's Radio]
Weblogs Are Disruptive Technology
Another take on Clayton Christensen's disruptive technology spectrum
Weblogs are to CMSes as pcs are to mainframes. I came across a slightly-too-long but ultimately interesting article called Blogs as Disruptive Tech. The thesis: weblogs are to big, expensive content management systems (CMSes) as the PC was to the IBM mainframe. Very interesting read.[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
Inter-link for Multi-User Weblogs and Intranets
Not sure where this fits. It isn't specific to Radio -- I don't think the Moveable Type TrackBack even works in Radio -- but I wanted to capture the thought about automatically linking certain entries to different logs, i.e. a project team working on customer service systems might want to link to the log kept by the CSRs for problem resolution, etc.
Using MT TrackBack for Cross-functional Team Blogs.Just yesterday Glen and I were talking about what balance to strike between multi-author weblogs and individual weblogs on our intranet. I think that eventually we would evolve our blogs on the intranet to single-author but enable some way to port or otherwise indicate certain of their posts for diffferent teams the writer might be on. We use MovableType and had not yet come up with an elegant way to do this that still met our needs (it is partially a taxonomy challenge, of course!).
The new MT TrackBack might fit the bill:
Multiple "authors" without author accountsSay you want to have your readers contribute to your blog, but do not want to add them as an author; either because you want to limit the number of authors or you don't want the work of having to add new people each time someone wants to post something interesting. Or, you may not want their posts to "weigh" as much as your official set of multiple authors.
With TrackBack, you can set up a section of your site to receive pings.
Kristine, one of our beta-testers, used her site, The Red Kitchen, as an example:
"If I had a category named 'Red Kitchen Guests' and allowed pings to it... then anyone with an MT blog could post a recipe on their page and ping my guest category. Then it could automatically list a ping link and excerpt on the Guest category page."With this we could set up team weblogs that just gather TalkBack pings from team members who are writing klog entries. Ideally I would like for individual writers to set one or more of their categories to auto-ping relevant team klogs when a new entry of that category is posted. I'm not sure that TalkBack supports category auto-pinging right now but maybe we could do it somehow via category templates.
I'm looking forward to experimenting with this. [High Context]
e-Bay Seeks PayPal Purchase
Interesting business model -- start out by becoming the world's largest flea market, end up being the world's largest e-commerce banking service. Out of all this may come the only dot.com that belongs in the S&P500.
eBay buys PayPal. $1.5bn in stock[The Register]
Taking the Long View on e-Books
Jenny Levine at TSL certainly understands e-Books. I've seen a lot of money and effort get poured down the e-book drain in the hysterical hope that some paperless book revolution was going to make everybody rich. As usual both the naysayers and zealots are wrong. Jenny has her feet planted firmly in the middle, which is where we all belong.
Ebooks Don't Need To Fly Off Shelves. E-Books Not Exactly Flying Off The Shelves "But a couple of months ago, BookExpo America 2002 in New York was virtually devoid of e-book chatter. The two-year-old International eBook Award Foundation folded this year due to lack of funding -- and interest. About the only time you hear the topic mentioned in publishing circles these days is when this question comes up: Where have all the e-books gone?There are those in the industry who continue to emote about the e-book and prais... [The Shifted Librarian]
Weblog Compendium.
Weblog Compendium. Here's an interesting list of tools and weblog-related stuff: the Weblog Compendium. All kinds of stuff, and you can add your own resources. [Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]Sunday, July 7, 2002
Fixing Broken HTML in Radio News Aggregator
I found this thread in the RUDG this morning. It looks like it may fix some odd rendering Radio does in the Aggregator.Secure Printing From an IT Perspective
Very little attention has been paid to the idea of security in print streams. PDF and PostScript files for books and other printed matter are routinely passed over the open Internet. Some WAN providers like WAMnet provide encryption via their proprietary networks, but far more material is transferred openly.While not about graphic arts printing specifically, this post on Slashdot shows the issues of security are beginning to surface in areas outside the print industry, which means yet one more thing printers are going to have to address.
Slashdot | "Ask Slashdot" - Secure Printing?RiverWolf asks: "As a Systems Administrator (a.k.a. 'paranoid security freak') I spend much of my time tightening down systems, loading patches, and just generally making sure no one does what they're not supposed too. While tools like ssh have become a staple for file transfer and terminal sessions, I recently began looking at all the little print servers we have throughout my offices and wondered "hmm, can those things be sniffed?". Until now, my focus for printing has always been 'just get it working', but if someone can sniff the print jobs (like payroll and other confidential information) as they go across the network, then it doesn't matter how locked down eveything else is. Is there a standard for secure (encrypted transmission) network printing, or does anyone know of a way to do this? I found this document that deals with it in a round about fashion, but with dozens of printers spread throughout multiple locations, I don't see it as an option." [Privacy Digest]
RAVEing Congressional Lunatics
Wow, just when I thought the CBDTPA was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen. This bill has sponsors from both sides of the aisle. Makes you want to opt out of the political system, doesn't it?
RAVE Act: RIP Live Electronic Music. The RAVE Act, whose acronym stands for "Reducing Americans' Vunerability to Ecstacy", would fine people or companies that organize or host events "featuring loud, pounding dance music" up to $2,000,000, and allows promoters to be jailed for up to 20 years, without requiring officials to prove that any of the attendees actually possessed drugs. This law not only is a danger to civil liberties, but also would effectively eliminate live electronic music in the US, given the enormous risks now associated with it.[kuro5hin.org] [Ye Olde Phart]
Usability Design
For reference -- intranet/KM/usability
Extreme Usability.Here is a case study about applying a usability methodology to a short, iterative, design project:
Applying usability techniques to deadline-driven projects (found via Column Two).This piece gives some good questions to ask when starting a project.
Check out the flow-chart. How many boxes in the chart did you hit during the last design project you worked on? [High Context]
More from Mower on liveTopics
I'll have to try this to see where it's going -- a little difficult to visualize. But I can see how the abiltiy to quickly cross-reference topics along project, business function, or interest lines could improve usability.
liveTopics progress.Only a week after I had hoped to release version 1.0 of liveTopics and I'm nearly there.
I've had a lot of good feedback from uber-testers Marc Barrot and Jack Mancilla. This thing should be pretty well shaken out when it arrives.
The basic functionality is now all in place. You can successfully add topics to posts, have them displayed with the post and traverse the weblog using the Topic Table of Contents (TTOC).
The TTOC, for example Curiouser and curiouser! shows every topic defined in the weblog. For each topic it lists the weblog posts associated with that topic, in chronological order. Each of these postings in turn lists the other topics associated with that particular posting. The end result is a very easy way to traverse the weblog following threads of thought.
Things that are in the pipeline just past v1.0:
- Exporting topic information in your RSS stream.
- Clever aggregators will be able to use this topic information to rank & prioritize postings in your news view.
- Topic Mining
- Quickly and easily add topic information to archive postings
- Sharing topics
- Your topics will be published as XTM topic maps.
- Subscript to other users topic rolls and be able to use their topics as well
Please let me know of any other ideas you would like to see implemented. [Curiouser and curiouser!]
Fragen for Fewer Tags
A new Fragen script for testing.
Eliminating those damn multiple paragraph tags. I guess it's time to announce my solution to the problem of Radio inserting multiple paragraph tags into the rendered HTML.My solution is a script called pLessFix. It's available at my Public Scripts.
What it does.
Once the script is installed it needs to be run. Running the script copies the builtin upstreaming scripts for both ftp and xmlStorageSystem into the user.radio.drivers.upstream folder where they are then modified. The modification searches for instances of multiple paragraph tags and replaces them with a single paragraph tag.
It does not change anything in your Radio.root. If you wish to uninstall the changes simply delete the tables from user.radio.drivers.upstream or you can uncomment the bundle in the script that says uninstall.
I hope others find this helpful. Let me know. [Surgical Diversions]
More IM/KM/intranet Pointers from Matt Mower
Another IM/KM/intranet pointer from Matt Mower. For futher investigation.
BlogAgent.Russell Beattie has a new IM-based blog notifier called BlogAgent, written in Java and open source. [Scripting News
» Just started using BlogAgent. The ability to see who else is watching pages you are watching is pretty cool. [Curiouser and curiouser!]
Info Tools Compendium
Information tools reference from Matt Mower.
Software for Information Professionals.I'm on the look out for software that improves my lot as an information producer/consumer. I came across this article by Peter Morville which talks about software for Information Architects.
He identifies the following categories of tool:
- Automated Classification
- Automated Category Generation
- Search Engines
- Thesaurus Management
- Collaborative Filtering
- Portal Solutions
- Content Management
- Analytics
- Database Management
- Information Architecture Productivity
(Note some of the tool urls are now dead. This article was written in 2001)
As an individual I'm more interested in personal solutions than enterprise solutions. This means that I like tools like Copernic Summarizer and Personal Brain which put me in the driving seat. But I hope to have my own servers soon so I'll be interested in bigger solutions too.
Do you have a tool that you swear by? [Curiouser and curiouser!]
More good pointers from Matt Mower.
Category ftp, QuickScript Fix, and Progress But No Solution
Update: This is fixed. It is very important to be sure your path and url elements match in the upstream.xml file.I have restored the main upstream using Lawrence Lee's Quick Script suggestion noted here. I have a Private category now upstreaming to pwd-protected directory on my own web server at tfrazier.org. But the private category isn't quite right just yet. I still have some bugaboos in the page layout.
The posts, blogroll, macros, etc seem to be working fine. But the Theme elements aren't getting called as expected -- i.e. the blue borders along the top and left side of the page are missing from the Private category page.
I have manually copied the contents of my /www/images folder to the images folder on the ftp site. And I have manually copied the #template.txt and #homeTemplate.txt files into the Private category folder. And I have republished the site. But it just doesn't seem to catch on.
I'll see if Lawrence has an answer.
How Fast Are You
This little post from Patrick Blake's Ye Olde Phart caught my eye. I've always wanted a way to keep the telcos honest about my connection speed.
JD's Blog: New Media Musings Scrolll down to find out how to test your broadband connection speeds.[Ye Olde Phart]
I Do Lots of Stupid Things So You Don't Have To
This is Jerry Pournelle's line, not mine. But it fits. So I think I'll adopt it anyway. I know just enough about computers to be really dangerous. Thank God they don't have sharp edges.Incorrect URLs After Changing Upstream Locations
Lawrence Lee to the Rescue! Again. He should consider a career in tech support. ftp Munge is fixed because Lawrence very quickly pointed me to this quick script story that explains just how to fix the ftp muck-up I created while playing secret category publisher boy.Hugh Madison should get get Sue into writing a Radio Blog. With the trouble I get in Sue would have non-stop mysteries to solve.
Update: I did find that I had to refresh my Navigator links in the Prefs. Even after running the Quick script and republishing the entire site my Home Page link in the Navigator Links was still pointing back to the ftp site. Refreshing the Navigator Links in the Prefs and republishing again seems to have fixed the problem.
Time to go build a bookcase...
Render Multiple RSS feeds on One Page
How can you display the headlines of another blog on your own blog page? Use the xml.rss.renderWithTemplate verb built into RU. No, I do'nt know what that means. But the guy who authored this page does. I don't know who he is, either. I'll figure it out later.But I do know it would be cool to be able to display other RSS feeds, maybe news headlines, a project ticker from a k-log, etc. on a page.
Ok, so I didn't go to bed yet. But I saw this in the discussion group and wanted to catch it before it got away.
ftp Munge
Well, this just didn't work at all. Somehow a part of the image folder must have been deleted becasue the theme isn't right, even though it is displaying correctly on my Desktop Home Page.A minor thing, the Cloud Link to my Home Page still reflects the errant url of the ftp site, not my Cloud Home Page. I can't seem to get it to reset.
Ok, I see (sort of) what happened here. In messing with the ftp stuff I incorrectly enabled the general ftp function from Prefs. This is the Big ftp function, the one you use if you want to move your whole weblog to another server.
That wasn't what I was supposed to do. I just wanted to send a single category to a separate server. But in changing the general ftp setting I must have reset the default paths Radio uses to generate its image links and macro settings. I can't get them to reset.
I have Radio upstreaming messages back to the Radio Community Server but it is still trying to pull things like images from paths on the ftp site -- that's why the page looks funny.
I posted a message to the discussion forum. Maybe someone can help me out. I'm going to bed.
Update: Instructions on how to fix this. Don't forget to refresh your Navigator Links in the Prefs after running the script and before re-publishing.
Saturday, July 6, 2002
How to publish a category to a different FTP server
Here are Dave Winer's directions on publishing a Category to a separate ftp server. I don't know if I have to have the main ftp optionturned on or not. We'll see.This post should appear on the Home Page but not in the pwd-protected directory at www.tfrazier.org.
Well, this seems somewhat hosed. Now the Radio server version of the site is munged. And I still can't get anything posted to the ftp site. Bummer.
Weblog by e-Mail
Matt Mower says he is working on a Radio Tool that will let us send categorical posts out via e-mail. This sort of service is a boon to those wishing for as many routes as possible to their audience.As for me, well, it just creates on more way to be ignored...
Blogging by email. Radio wishlist > Post to email..[Curiouser and curiouser!]Dale Pike writes:
I want to be able to designate a category and have that post sent as an email message to a pre-determined address. This would allow me to further consolidate my communications and have a more streamlined "write once" approach to my messaging.
» I need exactly the same thing to keep legacy people in the loop. I'm trying to knock up something very quickly as a tool in Radio.
Basic features:
- preferences per- subscriber email
- filter by category & by liveTopic
- immediately, hourly or daily feedings
- send either complete post or permalink+title
I had originally thought about making it a program that subscribed to an RSS feed and emailed it out. However this seemed like a lot of work and a way of re-inventing my.userland. I'm trying to KISS!
About This Weblog
I started this weblog as an experiment. I thought it would be a good way to collect information regarding some of the major changes happening in the printing, publishing, and media distribution areas. My intent is to look at things from a business/production perspective, weaving in technology and other items as appropriate. I still intend to do that.But along the way I have found myself going down the rabbit hole. The changes in personal publishing being wrought by the weblog are impressive. I think it has serious implications for the publishing industry's future. And I realize that to meet my objectives for this weblog I need to really, truly understand both the technology and methodolgy of blogging.
I also need to understand the implications for sharing what I learn and what I'm learning. I have a deep-rooted interest in collaborative computing, knowledge sharing, and the impact it can have on a company, a small business, or a project.
I have my own small business in mind -- one that addresses some of the gaps I see forming in the print/publishing industry. To make it work I need to understand how to bring a geographically dispersed team together, to keep them focused, and to keep them all moving full-speed ahead in the right direction.
I've been party to too many failed virtual efforts. I've seen companies stagnate, and even come completely apart because they couldn't manage a virtual business. I must learn how to do that if I am to succeed. So forgive my digressions into blogging, klogging, and intranet design.
My primary point, and I do have one, will become apparent once I have mastered the basics. Right now the information regarding my topics of interest -- new publishing distribution models, new print production models, new consumer models -- is widely dispersed, disconnected, and hard to find.
Publishers don't like what's happening becasue it will force them to change. Printers don't like what's happening for the same reason. Consumers don't like it because the benefits are still just a gleam in the eye of a few visionary people. But it will happen. In the mean time, I'm thinking out loud, trying to share what I learn along the way. I will get back to the point when the time comes.
A Solid Intranet in Eight Steps
Paul Holbrook points us to another good intranet article from New Architect on intranet design. I really like points:
4. Put usability before consistency.
5. Start small and grow iteratively.
7. Evaluate against measurable objectives and criteria.
8. Make your intranet accessible.
Thanks Paul!
Article: A solid intranet in eight steps. I've never built a built a full-corporate intranet site, though I've been in a few efforts to build group sites. Even those efforts could have used the information in the article Theo Mandel has written: A solid intranet in eight steps" [Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
Business Requirements for Classifying Content
Reference material for content classification.A couple of articles from KMConnection I found from Paul's site:
Can't get enough Classification. I picked a reference to something called faceted classification from High Context. The back credits on where this comes from are getting a little deep for more (more on that later), so I'll just quote the item:[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
Down the Rabbit Hole
David Gammel's post on Yahoo! Groups: K-Log lead me to High Context, where David had blogged a post from fellow Atlantan Paul Holbrook. Paul and I have traded a couple of e-mails before becasue I saw a couple of posts in the Userland forum. Paul has a very interesting background -- even doing some work at PARC -- and I wanted to talk to him about possible intranet design. But I haven't been tracking his site. I am now.Among others, Paul had this interesting post on what happens when you start to research something via blogs:
Down the rabbit hole of blogging .... Sometimes following other people's blogs is like talking to someone who won't shut up: you ask one question, and you're in for a 15 minute answer. Well, it's a little like that, except it's not: it's a lot more interesting. Case in point: I pulled a little piece out of my news aggregator this morning on a k-log pilot experiment, and many hours later, I'm left with a pile on interesting pages scattered around my screen that I'm trying to make sense of. (I can't even remember where I found the reference to the k-log item; it's already gone from my aggregator.)[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
BTW Paul, I got my RSS feed truncated. I've added you to my Aggregator and my blogroll. This k-log stuff is getting really interesting.
Feedback from a K-Log Experiment
David Gammel reports on his first K-Log experiment. It's a quick post and a useful read.
[...] My own experience returning from a week of vacation really illustrates the benefits it has had within our own team. The first thing I did yesterday was fire up our team klog and read what had been going on while I was out last week. I immediately saw a couple items that needed my attention (which I dealt with in a few minutes each) and got up to speed on what the rest of the team had been focusing. All before I had finished my first cup of coffee and long before I had made it through my backlog of 200 e-mails and a few voice mail messages. (See John Robb's comments on the communication efficiency of klogs.) [...][High Context]
David has lots of other good KM and Usability items, too.
What We're Doing When We Blog
This Meg Hourihan article on the essence of weblogs is good background for K-Log experimenters. Another example of great info brought to us by "John Robb" via Yahoo! Groups: K-Log.
As bloggers, we're in the middle of, and enjoying, an evolution of communication. The traits of weblogs mentioned above will likely change and advance as our tools improve and our technology matures. What's important is that we've embraced a medium free of the physical limitations of pages, intrusions of editors, and delays of tedious publishing systems. As with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it.[O'Reilly]
Requirements for K-Log Home Page
From one of "John Robb"'s recent posts to Yahoo! Groups: K-Log:
[...] Here is what should be on a K-Log home page (it is easy to set up the K-Log install process to ask for this info and insert it into the template):
- E-mail link (or spam free e-mail link if it is publicly accessible).
- IM link. IM status (online, busy, be right back, away, on the phone, etc.).
- Phone number.
- Address.
- Bio. Including current position and responsibilities.
- Picture.
- Extranet weblog implemented as a category. As much or as little data on what you are currently working on as warranted. [...]
Maybe Scott can see what's required to get a live Jabber status icon going as part of his Jabber research.
Cool Tool: Summarizer Free Form Page Summaries
Wouldn't it be handy to generate high-quality, impromptu summaries of longer stories or posts that you find while doing web research? Today Jenny Levine at TSL pointed me to |Matt|, who is working on an interesting Radio tool called liveTopics.On Matt's home page I saw a review of Copernic Summarizer:
[...] Often when I am browsing I come across a long article that I'm not sure I want to read. If I have it in front of me I can click the summarizer button on the IE toolbar and let it go to work. If it's a link on a page I'm on I choose "Summarize target" from the context menu. Summarizer also has a live in- browser summary option.Summarizer opens and downloads the page. It does a statistical analysis of the text to determine the key concepts. Then it works backwards to identify the sentences that are most important in the document based on those key concepts. It presents this as a summary list. At this point I can read the summary, email it or print it. I can also save it as an XML document (using Copernic's summary XSD scheme). [...]
This looks like a very nice tool for researchers, quite configurable, and probably something worth looking at if you write longer, expository posts on your weblog (Hmm. Wonder who that could be?)
Searching for ZCB -- Zero Contribution Barrier
My intranet/groupware philosophy can be summed up in three words -- Zero Contribution Barrier. Any barrier to effective, convenient contribution should be eliminated where possible, minimized if not eliminated. If you want people to expose what they are thinking -- in order to both capture the best they have to offer and to improve their understanding -- you have to make it EASY for them to contribute and use the system. In simple terms this means give them as many ways into and out of the system as possible.Thinking about this got me to thinking again about finding the maximum number of ways to get info into and out of an intranet. A search for NNTP in Yahoo! Groups: K-Log lead me to "Duncan Smeed", a university professor in Glascow. Duncan uses "Conversant", a Radio-compatible groupware product from Macrobyte Resources. Here's what he said:
[...]Fourthly, Conversant provides subscribers to the site to create, and respond to, messages via (i) a web interface (HTTP), (ii) an e-mail interface (SMTP), (iii) a newsgroup interface (NNTP), and also to a certain extent (iv) a remote procedure call interface (XML-RPC) which allows other forms of interaction to be built; for example using Userland's Radio <aside> I'm really looking forward to installing MacOS X 10.1 to use its new AppleScript and XML-RPC features to incorporate my beloved BBEdit into the editorial process </aside>. This richness and variety of interface means that I, and my subscribers, get to use the interface that we find most convenient. In my experience the easier something is to do the more likely you are to do it. For example, posting a quote from a page on the web is, in my case, a simple matter of highlighting the text of the quote, then clicking twice - once to invoke the javascript bookmarklet I use to capture the text and the URL from the page which is then used to prime a textarea form in a new window, and the other to submit the form to my weblog. Two clicks. Two seconds. [...]
Macrobyte makes several products to support Radio Community Servers so I suspect there is some synergy here, and it looks like part of the Macrobyte site is created in Radio (similar look and feel, don't you know). I don't see anything about RSS syndication in Conversant, maybe that's a Radio thing.
Macrobyte software is affordable and they offer a hosted service. They also offer system design and consulting. Maybe someone to talk to for triangulation...
Big Business Pressures for Palladium
Lawrence Lessig was the first (AFIK) to point out the unholy collusion between government and business for building the digital surveillance state. Here Robert Scoble makes a bit more plain just where the pressure for such architectures is coming from and why there is almost no chance of stopping them.
What do you think your corporate IT department says to Microsoft when they come calling? I can just imagine it goes something like this:[Scobelizer]
- "We want the ability to know what our employees are doing with our computers."
- "We want to know who they sent email to (even if it's on a Hotmail site)."
- "We want to know what files they send via Instant Messaging."
- "We want to know what Web sites they both looked at and published to."
- "We want to be able to search any employees' hard drive for any piece of information and get it fast."
Business has legitimate productivity, competitive, and liability motivations for wanting this kind of info. Our litigious society has made BigBiz liable for virtually anything the employees do, whether the business knows about it or not. BigBiz simply has too many employees. They can't know them all, they sure can't trust them all, yet the courts hold them accountable for the actions of each. This kind of response is only natural.
I'd like to blame the lawyers, but that misses the point. Lawyers don't file suits if they can't find plaintiffs. I'd like to blame the courts but typically these things get jury trials. I'd like to blame the government, but we voted for them. Who does that leave?
Denmark Case on Linking Counter to Internet Principles
My friend Tyrone the Attorney says the courts will resolve most of the issues with stupid Internet law. That doesn't seem to be the case in Denmark (but it is Denmark, for pete's sake.) I hope he's right about what happens here.via [Ernie the Attorney]
Dave Winer's thoughts on deep linking decision from Denmark
"In Denmark today, a judge rules against a search engine that respects the robots.txt convention, and stops it from "deep linking" into sites run by the Danish newspaper association. All these court cases are as stupid as dirt. Several good technical preventatives exist...[so] save the lawyer's fees. ... We know for sure that when a company goes to court for "deep linking" that they aren't talking to, or listening to, their technical people. BTW, deep linking is an oxymoron. There's only one kind of linking on the Web. Why would you ever point to the home page of a news oriented site." via [Scripting News]
Amen Brother! The law shouldn't help those who don't want to help themselves. Of course, the site operators may not know about the technical solution. One thing's for sure: most lawyers have zero incentive to figure it out on the client's behalf because it deprives them of the opportunity to file a lawsuit that, while not frivolous, won't win any Academy Awards either. But lawyers file suits to make money, not to collect awards.
Bill Campbell Your Radio Host
A sad day for Atlanta when the Mayor responsible for driving the city to the brink of bankruptcy despite a decade of booming economy gets his own talk show. Too bad it won't be broadcast from the Georgia State Pen.
Ex-mayor gets a radio show. AccessAtlanta Jul 5 2002 12:27PM ET [Moreover - Atlanta news]
Jobless Rate up to 5.9 Percent
The job market doesn't just feel bad, it is bad. According to this NYT article it's not looking to get better any time soon. If you got one, hang onto it. If you don't well, let's go make one.