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Tuesday, July 9, 2002

More on TrackBack

If Gammel and Mower both think there is something useful in TrackBack who am I to argue? I don't understand it, but I'm open minded about it.

KMpings & Trackback. The KMpings Experiment.

I created a little blog called KMpings that allows any blogger writing about knowledge management to ping their post to a tracking page (if their software supports it). Think of it as a themed www.weblogs.com for the knowledge management community.

I wanted to try out this experiment since I think the TrackBack function created by Movable Type has a lot of potential for aggregating blog posts within communities of practice on the web or an intranet. Please post any feed back you have to this message or shoot me an e-mail. [High Context]

» I really want TrackBack for Radio.

And KMpings sounds like a great idea.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 7:16 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Possible Community Server for Intranet

An announcement from Macrobytes on a server-side security product for Frontier and Radio Userland. I'm looking into Macrobyte's Conversant community server as a framework for Radio-based collaboration.

Macrobyte Resources: TLS 0.3 for Frontier and Radio UserLand. "TLS provides client side tools for making secure HTTPS requests, and server side tools for running a secure web server."[Frontier News]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 7:13 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

From the Department of Redundancy Department

Hey Dude! You read my mind. I was found redundant a month ago (although not redundant enough to be let go immediately) and I came the same conclusion. I still like my future-former employer and wish them well. With their changes I truly am redundant. It's not their fault.

But I'm going to make some changes here. For the first time in my life I am not going to look for a job. I'm going to build one.

Okay so what's next?.

Strangely enough being made redundant on Monday was not the most unnerving that has happened to me this week.

What is more unnerving is my decision not to look immediately for another job.  Instead I have made the decision to see if I can make an adhoc mixture (as I see it now) of blogging, k-logging, knowledge management, intranets, collaboration and communities into a compelling business proposition and make a living from it.

For some time now I have wanted to strike out in my own direction.  To lead rather than be led.  It seems fate just handed me my chance. This is not a risk-free strategy, and I'm just beginning to admit to myself what I'm letting myself in for.

So from here onwards I will happily entertain any offers of work, suggestions about what works (and what doesn't).  Ideas, novel solutions, novel problems.  It's all good.   I've also got an acre of understanding to do, here goes!

Suddenly I feel like I am growing into my weblog title.

Matt [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 7:06 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

TopicRolling Update

I still have trouble visualizing some of these interBlogatary referential rolling efforts, but I'm learning to trust a few of these Radio guys. We'll see where this one goes.

TopicRolling 101.

A feature that I have planned for the next release of liveTopics (the finishing touches go on the 1.0 release this week, for definite) is the topicRoll.

In the same way as a blogroll represents your subscription to other what other people are writing, the topicRoll represents your subscription to what other people are writing about -- their topics.

Whenever you add a topic to a post it is added to your topicRoll and (optionally) published automatically to your weblog.   In turn you can subscribe to as many other topicRolls as you like.  This means that as soon as someone uses a new topic, it is automatically added to the topics that your copy of liveTopics has ready for you to use.  In the same way other users can see & re-use the topics you are using.

When combined with the idea of topicMiner (also due in version 1.5) this will allow you to thread together existing archived discussions in a completely new way.  Mining topics allows you to find existing topics in archived posts.  You will be able to mine other peoples topics from your own posts and vice verca.

I'm hoping this will enable some interesting cross-blog exchanges. [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 7:03 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Best is New CEO at Lightning Source, Inc.

More changes at Lightning Source, Inc.

J. Kirby Best has been named president and CEO of Ingram's Lightning Source subsidiary. Best takes over as CEO from Lightning chairman John Ingram who had been serving as president and CEO since the resignation of Ed Marino this spring. Best will report directly to John Ingram.

Since 1997, Best has been chairman of Publishing Solutions, Inc., a data collection and sales tracking service for the publishing industry. Prior to launching PSI, Best had been president and CEO of Royal Book Manufacturing. [PW NewsLine]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 10:58 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Update on e-Book Industry

A quick update on e-book business that mentions eBook.web, which I wasn't familiar with. I note the growth stats are all quoted in percentages, a sure sign the numbers are really small. Still, it's good to see a little growth.

Promising Chapter in E-Book Story. Wired News Jul 9 2002 5:42AM ET
[Moreover - Book publishing news]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 9:53 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Asian Piracy the Real Threat

This Salon.com treatise on Chinese piracy points out how serious and pervasive the problem is. And it isn't just intellectual property, it's clothing, hard goods -- everything from MacDonalds to Starbucks -- that gets cloned within the Chinese borders.

I used to do some work in Shanghai. Long before DVD burners were widely available here in the states, kids in Shanghai development houses were burning digital copies of new DVDs that came in from the outside. They had the hardware, the software -- an entire infrastructure -- available to them for the sole purpose of copying stuff. And they had the technological wherewithal to supercede any silly copy-protection or encryption scheme the MPAA, RIAA, or DEA can come up with.

This is where the real focus on piracy needs to be. Microsoft knows it. Everyone in the software industry knows it. There are probably people in the RIAA who know it, but it's far easier to treat average Americans like criminals and to dupe (or pay) ignorant Congressmen (see: "Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt" and "Legislation from the Hot-tub Party") into passing ill-conceived, over-arching legislation that criminalizes all sorts of normal, rational activity.

This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. China has been working on it for years, as the article points out. But it is where the real focus on piracy needs to go. Not toward the average customer for music, films, and other media.

posted by Bag Man » July 8 2:16 PM | 10 comments. "Piracy sure beats manual labor" Can China's Piracy industry be stopped? Should it be stopped? Will this be the fate of all copyrighted material? Lisa Movius offers few answers, but gives a pretty good overview of the situation.
[MetaFilter]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 9:37 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Publishers Should Embrace Multi-Modal Publishing

An interesting Q/A quote on multi-modal publishing from Terry Fisher speaking at iLAW last week.

[...]"When you finish writing a book (ILAW casebook), would you consider different models for publishing? The answer is yes. Foundation Press turns out to be reasonable about us releasing a version online, for free. Why is Foundation Press happy about this? As long as we don't make PDF files available in same pagination of the book, law students will be happy to have the book in "real" form. So yes, it's a little bit of experimentation."[...]
[Copyfight]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 1:23 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Using Jabber IM for Weblog Change Notification on System Status

Windley is over my head here, technically, but he makes reference to relevant discussions on the use of IM in the enterprise and points to some experimentation going on with Jabber. Windley thinks Jabber may be the right IM tool for the enterprise and there's more about it on his site.

If we're to have properly automated print manufacturing, then we clearly need easy, simple system notification that can be used in many ways. There is nothing in the industry today that makes reporting, notification, and status updates as ubiquitous or accessible as this simple idea of RSS feeds, weblogs, and a little IM.

IM and REST: First Class Events?.

After posting the previous piece about IM and REST, I happened to see a reference to work http://www.pipetree.com/qmacro/2002/Jul/3#weblogspubsub">DJ Admans is doing with weblog updates and Jabber on Scripting News.  The basic idea, as I understand it, is to use Jabber in lieu of something like MQSeries or JMS to notify people of changes to weblogs.  I see the usefulness of that: remember those discussions in your undergraduate architecture class about polling vs. interrupts? [...]

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 1:07 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Blogs for System Status

Phil Windley is CIO for the state of Utah and this guy is thinking like I'm thinking -- a $40 enterprise reporting system. I found Windley's Enterprise computing Weblog via David Gurteen and Windley has some great stuff.

Blogs for System Status Communications.

My organization operates hundreds of servers in several data centers and a network that connects over 250 separate locations.  One of the problems we have is status communication to various interested parties.  Tonight I decided we should have a system status blog that uses categories with separate RSS feeds for various severity levels and systems.  For the low price of $40/year we could have:

  • One easy spot to post status announcements, which would be ordered in exactly the right way.
  • A web-based record of status.
  • Multiple RSS feeds of the various systems and severity levels.
  • Easy integration into the personalization feature of our intranet;  RSS feeds would show up as gadget boxes for people who want them.
  • The ability to easily subscribe to RSS feeds and digest them in various ways for people with special needs. 

How could you not like that?

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 12:52 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 


Monday, July 8, 2002

recent Titled Blog Posts macro

Link to instructions for displaying a list of recent posts on a Radio blog
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 11:48 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 10:47 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

FileMaker Goes XML

FileMaker to push universal information exchange. Upgrade focuses on XML data interchange, app integration [InfoWorld: Top News]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 8:38 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 7:53 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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.

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 5:10 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 12:41 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 12:26 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 10:28 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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 accounts

Say 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]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 10:25 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 10:05 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 12:43 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Future of Print

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]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 12:20 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 


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.
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 7:52 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 7:38 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Future of Print

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]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 7:31 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 2:57 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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!]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 2:42 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 1:48 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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!]

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 1:44 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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.

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 1:40 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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.

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 11:29 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 11:21 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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.
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 10:22 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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...

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 10:09 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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.

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 1:27 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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.

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 12:37 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
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