b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Recently
Gaining Parity with e-Mail
Readerware -- Fan-freaking-tastic!
Recycling Does Not Improve Government
User-centered Software Design
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
Saturday, July 20, 2002
LinkBack to List Referrers Locally -- More Ways to Weave the Blog
Looks similar in concept to TrackBack and kmPings (you guys will correct me if I'm wrong), but based on specific referral pages. I'd sure like to see someone do a write up on just what all these things do, and how they relate/interact with each other.
Linkback Referrers.I spotted Stephen Downes Referral System via www.davidwatson.org.
Very cool little script. I have added it to my templates here on high context. It will display the referrers to each individual page. So if you link to anything on this site your page will be listed on the sidebar as people follow the link.
One small bug I've discovered with Mozilla is that a local referral within the same site creates an unexpected value for document.location in the javascript code. No problems in IE so it must just be Mozilla. [High Context]
Gaining Parity with e-Mail
This posting from Jon Udell on collaboration technologies that have caught the eye of Esther Dyson. I note among them is Parity -- a venture I believe is being headed by graphic arts visionary Paul Trevithick. Seems Paul is, as usual, on the leading edge and drawing attention from some big names.
What if being non-communicative weren't an option?This Fortune article on Esther Dyson was cited on a private mailing list. It's interesting to see where she is placing bets:
A big challenge for managers will be encouraging employees to share information instead of hoarding it. Dyson has made investments in several companies that help employees communicate with one another continuously and effectively, especially by e-mail. One, called Tacit Knowledge Systems, has software that (with user permission) reads and categorizes e-mail sent within an organization. Anyone needing information about a topic can turn to Tacit to find an expert and forward a request to get in touch. Another company, Parity, has a so-called "commitment-management tool" that lets the sender specify the action an e-mail requires. The software helps the recipient meet deadlines--like responding to a customer by tomorrow afternoon.I think I can see the handwriting on the wall. Groupware has failed forever because people by and large don't want to communicate continuously and effectively. Opting out of that flow may cease to be an option. If so, jumping on the weblog bandwagon for internal corporate communication looks like the offense that is the best defense. If your flow is a corporate asset that's going to be managed anyway, wouldn't you rather control it yourself? [Jon's Radio]
Readerware -- Fan-freaking-tastic!
How could I have missed this? If I die tomorrow the blogosphere will have made my life complete with this response from Jim McGee. Well, ok. Maybe that's a little dramatic. But I have wanted something like this a long time.Now excuse me, I have to go scrounge on e-Bay for CueCat.
Readerware - personal library app.[McGee's Musings]How About a Personal Library App. Maybe it's just me, but I never saw any way Amazon was going to be profitable until they took over the e-Commerce and web operations for Borders. [Blunt Force Trauma]Terry is looking for a program that will let him build and maintain a database of his personal library using the data available from Amazon and elsewhere on the web. It already exists and it's called Readerware. I now have over 3,000 books catalogued using it. It also supports CD and video libraries. Recommended. Less than $100.
Recycling Does Not Improve Government
I was terribly unhappy about the bumper crop of experience-free children the Clinton Administration ushered into the White House in 1992. Now I'm equally unhappy about the seemingly endless stream of political retreads being rounded up by the Bush Administration.Sometimes I just want to opt out...
Thanks (I think) to Dan Rosenbaum for this one.
Fool Me Once, Shame on Me. Fool Me Twice.....Semi's gonna have a ball with this one.
There's a new director of the Pentagon's new Information Awareness Office, part of the DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (It was DARPA's organizational predecessor that gave the world the Internet. But I digress...) This new director is one John M. Poindexter.
Yes, that John Poindexter. Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor. The one who was convicted in the Iran-Contra affair. Remember? He sold weapons (illegally) to Iran, and used the cash to (also illegally) fund the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua. Ollie North's buddy. It was in all the papers.
Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying documents. The convictions were overturned; Poindexter had been given immunity before Congress (after invoking his Fifth Amendment rights). His testimony, though public and nationally broadcast, was inadmissible, courts said.
So here he comes sliming his way back into public service, this time running an office that is supposed to:
"create a new intelligence infrastructure to allow ... agencies to share information and collaborate effectively, and new information technology aimed at exposing terrorists and their activities and support systems.... The key to fighting terrorism is information. Elements of the solution include gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently, discovering information from elements of the data, creating models of hypotheses, and analyzing these models in a collaborative environment to determine the most probable current or future scenario."To me, this sounds a lot like what the NSA is supposed to be doing. If you read the IOS's page closely -- and there's no way to read it casually -- it looks like IOS is developing ways to massage and pass around raw data that the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office and all that crew develops.Which is not a bad thing. And it's surely a comedown for a past National Security Advisor to have an office that's probably deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, far from corridors of power. And it speaks well of the man that he still wants to be in public service.
But still. John Poindexter should be in jail, not in the Pentagon. He waged a private war that was contrary to the policy of the government he swore to serve. He should not be pulling a government paycheck -- much less with a high security clearance. Here's a ton of links about Poindexter and Iran-Contra. Thanks to bOing-bOing for the original link. [Over the Edge]
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.
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