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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.

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Thursday, August 8, 2002

liveTopics, TrackBack, and Other Radio Enhancements

Let's see what's on the slab....

Well in the last couple of days I have been working hard on the liveTopics 1.0 release.  It's so close I can almost feel it.  We're testing and hopefully will have the kinks worked out in the next couple of days then I can finally get this sucka out the door.

Also I'm really besotted with TrackBack but haven't seen it work the way I would like yet.  So I've rolled a TrackBack server in Frontier that comes with a Radio client.  The two communicate with a simple XML-RPC interface that would allow any klogging system to join in.

At the moment the Radio client automatically harvests each posting for links (when you submit it) and automagically pings each one.  The ping contains the permalink for the post, the Url of your weblog, the title of the post, your name & email address.  But you can drop most of this information you don't want to pass it.  I guess some people will also want fine-grained control over what they ping.  That shouldn't be too hard.

Along with this are some macros to show your TrackBack information against each item.

At the moment the server is hosted on my laptop which isn't ideal but is good enough for testing.  The next job is to find a better host and then look at adding a simple federation mechanism.  That would allow lots of different people to provide TrackBack servers and share the results.

More on this later. [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 9:23 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and Klogs

K-logs, knowledge sharing, and social capital.

Blogging Alone.

Stephen Dulaney applies Indicators of Social Capital to Web Logs.

1. Levels of giving (blog ecossystem) reflects people's propensity to give to others when they themselves may not directly benefit. The economy of giving links.
2. Participation and engagement (What we do when we blog Meg Hourihan) gauge of people's involvement in a range of groups and associations, both formal and informal. Ray Ozzie adds a nice contribution to "Why we Blog"
3. Reciprocity within the community (everybodyblogit) is the measure to which people can rely on their community to help in times of need. How to Start a Weblog (For Professinal Journalists)
4. Generalized trust that people have in other individuals and groups, and how safe they feel in their daily interactions with others.
5. Trust towards public officials and institutions or the measure of people's confidence in the institutions of society.
6. Social Norms (Lessig) the rules, belief, morals and habits that regulate behaviour.
7. Attitudinal variables (blogtree) important to social capital or individuals' belief about themselves, their place, and their tolerance of others, levels of acceptance, motivations and sense of connectedness.
8. Confidence in the continuation of social and political relationships for the future.

This list is from the work titled Framework for the measurment of Social Capital in New Zealand which was prepared by Anne Spellerberg and assisted by the social capital programme team. page 16 of the (link to pdf found here)

Do these apply to an Intranet klogging cluster?

I'm sure they do, with a few differences.

1. More klogger than blogger. Kloggers are also members of the large, amorphous population of blogspace. As people are socialized first into a local klogspace, this outside affiliation may be lessened.
    
2. Colleagues first. Second, you define your focus of attention by your work more than your passions and curiousity. Your formal affilliations (your chain of command, your team, your stakeholders) and informal ones (your office network, ad hoc teams) fill your days, and your klogs.  
    
3. Work cultures. Social capital within an enterprise is strongly flavored by personality, policy, institutional memory (institutional rumor?), regional culture, and occupational culture.
    
4. Personal fences. Do you keep your social circles apart? Many people take care about mixing work, family, friends, politics, and faith. Do you want your bondage master, your bowling team, and your quality circle to know about each other through you? when people at work see your personal blogs, how does that affect your working relationships? This visibility biases what people write.  
    
5. Intellectual property. Work is more a Free Agent Nation than ever. Portability of knowledge and experience is a career asset. Most employers claim that everything employees write using company IT gear is the employer's property. This creates a conflict of interest.  

[a klog apart]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 9:19 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

The Failure of Transcopyright

[...]Ted Nelson's concepts of transclusion and transcopyright belong to a similar paradigm where content is value and links are mere mechanics, an outside vehicle for the transmittal of content rather than the item of value itself. In its fully implemented state, transcopyright sees a link from A to B as A using something owned by B, which readers should pay for in the form of a micropayment. This makes perfect sense in a traditional, product oriented economy where content is king. B manufactured a product which As readers consumed and should therefore pay for. After Google, it makes no sense at all. The economy of links is not product oriented. It is service oriented, and the service is the link. The link is an action rather than an item; an event, rather than a metaphor [...]

This puts things in a perspective I never considered. I suspect the treatise will fall on a lot of deaf ears (the Danish Newspaper Association?) but with the rise of more google-like entities it is only a matter of time before online resources that refuse links become isolated and rarely-traveled bypasses on the web.

The value of linking.

Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web. (SOURCE:a klog apart)-Where does Phil get this articles? Thanks!<QUOTE>Search engines like Google interpret links to a web page as objective, peer-endorsed and machine-readable signs of value. Links have become the currency of the Web. With this economic value they also have power, affecting accessibility and knowledge on the Web.</QUOTE> [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Looks as though I missed this the first time round. Thank you Roland for catching it this time. [McGee's Musings]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 9:07 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

More Flexible News Scanning Needed

Radio Wishlist - Tune news aggregation intervals up and down..

Bryce Yehl tossed a coin in the fountain:

Radio Wish: Finer configuration of aggregation frequency.

One thing that sucks about falling behind in Radio's news aggregator: new items will continue to flow in while you're still dealing with the old ones. The "sticky" checkboxes in myRadio help to cope with this problem, but that only goes so far (especially when you have a serious backlog).

I'd like to configure Radio so that it automatically runs the news scan less frequently, perhaps once per day. Coupled with that, I want buttons in the browser to scan immediately and temporarily disable automatic scans.

Why make news collection a quiet background activity? Resources, for one: you don't want syndication confused with denial of service.

klogging calls for more frequent updating of select partner/colleague feeds. Sometimes polling every three minutes is the right thing to do.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 8:54 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Friday, August 2, 2002

August Print Industry Roundup

I've been traveling quite a bit this week and haven't had time to post but I have been keeping up with the news. Several interesting things have happened while I was on the road.

National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL) reported business in the commercial print sector has hit a five-month low at 45.5. This is the second consecutive decline and the second consecutive sub-50 month. NAPL cautions this is not an indication the industry is going back into recession. NAPL tracks a lot of industry statistics, and I need to check into this because I don't know what they saw that indicated the industry was ever coming out of recession.

ImageX licensed three of their patents to printChannel. This is an interesting move in the overall landscape of printing process patents. I have written about this before and have serious doubts about the viability and enforceability of many of the recently-issued process patents for online printing companies. At best these patents are a stretch. At worst they're outright fraud.

I have reviewed the printChannel offering and met previously with the management team there. It's difficult to believe they would gain anything useful from this license, so the motive is likely defensive -- to avoid wasting vital capital in useless legal wrangling. Virtually all the print e-procurement companies are struggling, and wasteful patent litigation is the last thing any of them they need.

But printChannel's signing with Imagex could establish precedent that there is market value to the patent and allow the company to take its lawsuit business model to larger players. This is something to watch. (Editor's note: Soon after this piece was written printChannel announced they would cease operations and in November 2002 was acquired by Printcafe. In May 2003 ImageX, teetering on its own bankruptcy, was acquired by Kinko's for $15 million -- Ed.)

Kinko's is rebuilding in Dallas. The company continues to rebuild itself in the DFW area after installing a new CEO and shuttering its SoCal HQ. Gary Kusin, the new CEO, came from the office furniture industry. Sue Parks, recently named exec-VP of Ops, came from Gateway Computers and USWest. I'm told there are lots of ads in the DFW papers for programmers, engineers, etc at Kinko's. Should be interesting to see what happens there over the next year. It is not easy to rebuild an entire company in a new city.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 2:25 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Future of Print

Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Blue Domino and the Weblog Transfer Blues

I just had a similar experience with BlueDomino.com. BD is a new hosting outfit run by the guys at CoffeeCup Software. It's appealing becasue it is so affordable -- starting at $8.95 per month. Unfortunately, their tech support sucks like a Hoover and they have no interest in supporting Radio users.

I think the problem lies in BD's use of the ProFTPd ftp server. I was never able to get Radio to upstream files to the BD site. Lawrence Lee of Userland was quite helpful, and he was able to get a successful upstream to the site. I never could and neither could another new Radio user who was also testing BD, but using a completely different computer and network.

Despite several attempts by Lawrence Lee of UserLand to gather ftp session data and help me debug the process we were ultimately unsuccessful. Thankfully, I was only trying to upstream a category -- and it was just a test category, at that. No harm done.

But Blue Domino is not a place that Radio users should consider. They made no effort to help or provide any useful information. I'm not even sure they looked into the problem, although I did get a blow-off answer from one off their tech support reps.

What does this have to do with Steve? Well, I was considering trying ProHosting next. I know several people who use ProHosting successfully, and CRM Association (an industry group I work with) has used ProHosting for two years without a hitch. But I am leery now of trying them with Radio.

I guess the point is that, for a reason I can't fathom, Radio may exhibit some issues with certain ftp servers or host systems and we need to be careful where we plan to move Radio-based weblogs. I successfully upstream ftp to Interland and Mindspring, but failed at BlueDomino.

If you're going to move your weblog be sure you start out slow and test the waters with a simple Category upstream first. Check with others to see if they have used that hosting company successfully. If not, see if you can get the host company to give you a test directory for testing before you move your domain. But try to validate your ability to upstream successfully before you commit.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 1:02 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

XCOPY and myFixFilePaths Don't Synch For Me

In a recent post on Radio Supports XCOPY Deployment and Synching I used a piece from Jon Udell's weblog on how to use XCOPY to synchronize Radio on multiple computers. I thought this was pretty useful but thought it would likely need Andy Fragen's myFixFilePathsAndAddresses script.

Tonight I tried both. I've been using XCOPY (actually XXCOPY) to backup my Radio folder to another drive, but I haven't tried to run Radio from there. Tonight I XXCOPY'd the Radio folder over to my laptop, then started it up and ran the file paths script.

The XCOPY and the script both ran as expected, but Radio didn't work corectly afterwards -- I had some errors when I tried to change a couple of Prefs settings.

I didn't spend much time on it yet. I may spend more another day. Tomorrow I have 15 hours of road time ahead of me and I don't feel up to the challenge.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:44 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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