b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
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Focused Performance Business Blog
IFPI Sings Piracy Blues
Windows Data Session Toolkit
CMS Tools for SMB Market
SuperWhat? Not My Weekend
Wikis and Collaborative Writing
What is RSS?
Demand-driven Print
Bangkok -- US Copyright a Mockery
Book Promotion Via Weblog
GuerrillaKM and Communities of Practice
Printing the Web
Paige Davis -- the Hottie Hostess
GraphicBrain.com Vertical Search Engine
Tyler, TX -- An Indifference to Life
Winter in Atlanta
Monday, January 20, 2003
SBC Communications Patents Web Links
Dying telco resorts to extortion as survival tactic -- sues small company for using links in frames. Honestly, someone should <strike>kill the f***ing lawyers that come up with this crap</strike> conscientiously object to such legalistic acrobatics.
US company claims millions over site-nav patent.
ZDNet Jan 20 2003 11:47AM ETEvery Web site that uses a common form of site navigation could be hit for thousands or millions of dollars in licence fees, claims a US company holding a patent on the idea. SBC Communications, a major American telco and ISP, says that it owns the right to links that stay visible on the page during navigation -- and wants up to 5 percent of company revenue annually as a licence fee. [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Focused Performance Business Blog
Frank Patrick's Focused Performance weblog is a source of management ideas and problem-solving strategies based the Theory of Constraints. TOC is a management methodology based on the principle that in reality any system has very few constraints, and that correctly identifying and eliminating those constraints is the key to superior performance. TOC methods are applied in manufacturing, project management, operations, product development, and marketing.I found Frank via the Ryze Network. Here are a few excerpts from his weblog:
Eight P's of Project Integrity -- Today seems to be a day to catch up with some of the other blogs I read regularly (several of which are highlighted in the "Blogroll" you'll find on the right side of this page). In Reforming Project Management, Hal Macomber's got an interesting endeavor going, which he calls "Project Integrity Day." In a later post, Hal talks about integrity in these terms... [Link]Management -- For Their Own Good -- The following essay was written by a particularly articulate friend and competitor of mine on a TOC-oriented discussion list. I?ve often said that he should get into blogging. Since Tony allows, in his "Copyleft" statement, copying and dissemination of it, here it is.
The subject is management responsibility for and involvement in creating and maintaining an effective multi-project organization.[Link]
...the answer to this question impacts directly an executive's ability to delegate successfully.
SYSTEM VERSUS LOCAL
Smart executives know when they need to take charge.
Tony Rizzo
tocguy@pdinstitute.com
One obstacle has blocked me for a rather long time, in my quest to bring sanity to multi-project organizations. It has been my inability to convince key decision-makers that they need to take action personally, to make certain improvements to the performance of their organizations. Now, that longstanding obstacle is showing serious cracks. Soon, with some effort, it may just tumble and vanish. [...]Learning Blocked by Rules -- At one of my favorite email discussion lists, on the topic of group facilitation, I've come across the valuable contributions of Ned Reute -- contributions that I never fail to read when I see his name in the "From:" list. One of his recent posts laments on the fact that...
"Everyone in an organization can know something, but the organization can still be unable to learn it..."[Link] [Focused Performance Business Blog]
IFPI Sings Piracy Blues
More denial, misdrection, and scapegoating from the music industry as they avoid examing the issues any competent business exec would study -- changing demographics, slowing economy, poor product quality, and outmoded business practices. Following the lead of the US, Euros will seek laws to make their customers into criminals.
Online piracy costs jobs: music industry.
Economictimes Jan 20 2003 2:01AM ETCANNES: In its harshest indictment yet of Internet piracy, a top official of the music industry said on Sunday Europe's 600,000 music professionals risk losing their jobs unless the industry fights back.
"They are all potential victims of online music piracy," Jay Berman, the CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) told music executives in his annual address at the Midem music conference in southern France. [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Windows Data Session Toolkit
We'll have to see just how user-hostile this Microsoft DRM offering is in practice, but anyone want to bet it somehow prevents MP3 files in favor of Windoze&trade Media Player formats?Microsoft joins music piracy fight. Silicon.com Jan 20 2003 7:30AM ET[...] Microsoft claims its latest software will protect CDs from being copied while avoiding some of the unfortunate side-effects of previous attempts, which saw some CDs become unplayable on a number of devices - from Macs and PCs to car stereos and portable 'Discmans'.
Companies using the software will be able to lay down tracks on a copy-controlled CD, safe in the knowledge that it can't be copied and burned by anybody with a CD re-writer. [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Sunday, January 19, 2003
CMS Tools for SMB Market
Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd. provides a brief summary of CMS solutions suitable for Small and Medium Business. In this article he provides resource links for several Zope variants, and some info resources for tracking the evolving low-end CMS space.Martin doesn't mention any of the PHP and Perl products, such as postNuke, Slashcode, or Drupal. For more on those you can see Al Delgado's Disruptive Technology blog.
Content Management: Low end CMS productsOver the last few weeks I have become increasingly aware of the emergence of low-end CMS products, either open source or at prices below $5k for a reasonable implementation. It is important to appreciate that a low (or zero) license fee does not mean that the overall implementation will be significantly lower. It may be, but that depends on how much effort has been put into effect content management before the implementation of the CMS product, and the amount of customisation that is required to meet specific organisation requirements. [...] [Intranet Focus Blog]
SuperWhat? Not My Weekend
Damn! I'm a two-time loser. I really wanted to see Tennessee make it to the SuperBowl. They had a great season and I was hoping they could go all the way. I knew it was a long shot, but I had hope.I truly did not expect Tampa to dominate Philly. I hold a deep and abiding animosity for the loud-mouthed jackasses that work for John Gruden (even if I do like Ronde Barber.) I really thought Philly was the better team and would take the game.
Pete Rozell must be ecstatic, wherever he is. The margin of victory in the NFL is now so thin that predicting any given game is a crapshoot.
I don't think I'll even watch the game next week... Maybe I'll just watch an anti-male movie marathon on the Professional Victims Network.
Wikis and Collaborative Writing
I don't know that wikis are ever going to be mainstream -- they're just a little too cryptic and seem more geek-toy than serious tool. Still, there is something here worth investigating and it's about time I tried one. Here are two more entries on wikis -- the first an academic paper, the other a blog discussion.
"Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website".One of the first serious articles on wikis that isn't on a wiki (a previous one was The Reengineering Wiki (pdf)). , by susning.nu founder Lars Aronsson. Abstract:
A Wiki website is a hypertext on steroids. Any user can create or edit any page on the site using a simple web browser, and all information processing is done on the server side. Wiki sites are powerful tools for collaboration in closed work groups, but can also be used for the general public on the open Internet. This paper summarizes the experience from the first nine months of operation of Sweden's biggest Wiki website susning.nu, including its usefulness in non-profit and commercial applications, in hobby and professional, projects, its social and legal aspects, its relation to geographic information systems, subject information gateways, the establishment of a controlled vocabulary, and its implications on learning, free speech, the price of information, licensing, and copyright. Relevant comparisons to similar projects in other countries are also presented. (via Peter Suber)[Seb's Open Research]
This post notes the odd syntax used by wikis as a barrier, and that's what I mean by geek-toy. The syntax is the main reason I've never tried a wiki. Once you put up a language barrier for users it really doesn't matter how big the barrier is. Even if wiki syntax is 80% compatible with HTML (I don't know), that remaining 20% is more than most people want to deal with.
What is the most interesting collaborative writing project?.Poll and illuminating (if a little wiki-centric) discussion by Erik Moeller, Sunir Shah, and others over at infoAnarchy. Eric highlights the effect of usability, citing as an example wikis' weird CamelCaseSyntax as an obstacle to growth. I entirely agree - Wikipedia would not be inching towards 100,000 articles if it hadn't switched to free links.
My vote would have gone to the Web itself, but short of that, the 'pedia wins hands-down in my book.
By the way, infoAnarchy has created an action mailing list to oppose insane copyright terms. (via the group-forming community blog)
[Seb's Open Research]
What is RSS?
Mark Pilgrim, perhaps best known for his 30 Days to a more accessible weblog, has recently begun writing for O'Reilly and this may be his first piece. Mark is a talented coder (he provided the CSS expertise for my site templates) and writer. This XML.com article is oriented toward content owners and programmers rather than web surfers, but it does provide a quick overview of general RSS usability.
What is RSS?. Mark Pilgrim (well known in the blogging community) has just written an introductory article on RSS. This walks through the various different versions of RSS, and provides XML examples. To quote:
RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way. [...] [XML.com][Column Two]
Demand-driven Print
CafePress announces entry into demand-driven publishing arena; if you publish, print, distribute, or sell books you better pay attention. This will affect you. Not that CafePress will be a major book publishing player, but it represents another step toward general acceptance of the demand-driven model, and another opportunity to hone the process.What separates CafePress from all the other Internet-based demand-driven publishers (Xlibris, iUniverse, 1stBooks, BookSurge, etc.) is their focus on the general promotional market. They sell promotional items. And books, CDs, DVDs, etc. are great promo items in media- and knowledge-based markets.
I'm curious to learn just who will manage the production for CafePress, as there are only a handful of companies in the US who can actually manufacture on demand (as opposed to short-run or micro-inventory) for a reasonable price. And none of them are on the west coast. (But given CafePress is in San Leandro, I can hazard a guess...)
CafePress to do books. CafePress is branching out into print-on-demand books, CDs and DVDs.
He does, however, tell me CafePress has exciting plans to expand into publishing in early 2003: The company's media-services division will offer print-on-demand books, audio CDs and DVDs. Using the same general principle, it'll produce, to order, your novel, album or film with glossy covers and jewel-box inserts, a move that has revolutionary possibilities. And though self-publishing already exists on the Web, CafePress has honed the production-and-fulfillment process to make it far more viable.(Thanks, Derryl) [Boing Boing Blog]
Bangkok -- US Copyright a Mockery
The Commerce Dept has been pressuring Thailand to adopt US copyright standards. The Bangkok Post takes a dim view of this, and makes a case against the Sonny Bono act.
Making a mockery out of copyright. Bangkok Post Jan 19 2003 1:31PM ET[...] The court decision in Washington now puts US copyright policy wildly out of sync with Thai legal efforts.
[...] The current US law is masked as another "extension" of copyright, but in fact it seeks to protect everything produced in the 20th century.
[...] Pushed by Disney and the big media-friendly late congressman Sonny Bono, the US legislature added 20 years to all copyright laws. This is a travesty of copyright law, and will cost the US public billions of dollars in payments and law enforcement threats. More to the point, it puts Thai and international copyright law, once again, in contrast to that of the United States.
[...] It is necessary to do the right thing in protecting intellectual property _ movies and software included. But the principle that a big company can own intellectual property until the end of time must be opposed. After all, if some Roman company had copyright the "Western" alphabet, there wouldn't be enough books worth protecting. [Bangkok Post] via [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Book Promotion Via Weblog
Another intersection between weblogs and traditional publishing: The affordability, usability, and approachability of weblogs make them a perfect vehicle for authors who want a better connection with their audience. Weblogs are not only publishing tools, they are publishing promotion tools. If you're an author, the value of connections you can make this way should be incentive enough to give weblogging a try. If you're a publisher you should be encouraging your authors to promote their books this way. It's far more human than a corporate website.
Blogomancer: Buy My Sci-FiIt marks a cultural moment of some sort that William Gibson's new novel commands the cover of the Times Book Review. Noncoincidentally, Gibson just started a weblog that would seem to represent a next step in the use of weblogs as marketing tools. All of which makes me want to reread Neuromancer. [EdCone.com]
GuerrillaKM and Communities of Practice
Greg Searles' GuerrillaKM weblog continues to be a great source of article summaries and tidbits for those interested in Communities of Practice, edBlogging and XKM (eXtreme Knowledge Mgmt.) Greg has revamped the color scheme since my last visit, and it's much easier on the eyes. Here's a recent post:
Denham Grey's fun Wiki project KM guru Denham Grey has a very interesting website on KM (with a terrific sub-page on CoPs). What's wiki? Invented by the prodigious Ward Cunningham, it's a webpage that any reader can modify to add their knowledge to; a collaboration concept that is so elegantly simple, it actually works. Perhaps the coolest wiki ever is the Wikipedia, a kind of a monstrous encyclopedia/dictionary that is collaboratively- authored. Wikipedia and sites like Denham's make me think that Wikis have a role to play in the future of online CoPs. [GuerrillaKM]
Greg is unique in providing a relevancy ranking for many of the articles on his site -- a valuable aid to visitors. Much of what he tracks is applicable across education, enterprise, and personal knowledge sharing environments. Greg builds his site with software from his company -- Tomoye Simplify 3.0.
Printing the Web
"Consider how extraordinary paper is: lightweight and flexible, it supports thousands of typefaces, as well as black-and-white and color illustrations, and its high-resolution and high contrast facilitates reading." -- and so begins an excellent Boxes and Arrows article on one of the most important topics in publishing.Print isn't going away -- not in our lifetime, if ever. But we are only beginning to grasp the importance of integrating the physical and digital forms of information, or understand how to do so. This article opens with some good background and references supporting this concept, then moves on to more practical aspects of the problems and current solutions for integrating the web and print -- in particular, the use of CSS and XSL-FO to avoid maintaining separate versions of data. Well-written and with excellent resources, this article is well worth reading.
Thanks to James Robertson at Column Two:
Printing the web. James Kalbach talks about designing websites that can be printed, either by making the one page work on paper, or by providing an alternate "printable version". Sounds pretty mundane, but there's a lot of good tips in this article. [Column Two]
Saturday, January 18, 2003
Paige Davis -- the Hottie Hostess
Saturday nights at my house are pretty dull. We only have one TV, so I get to sit around and watch three consecutive episodes of Trading Spaces on The Learning Channel. But it's not all bad. At least there's Paige Davis...
GraphicBrain.com Vertical Search Engine
Interesting idea -- a vertical industry search engine for the graphic arts. There may be similar tools in other industries but this is the first I've come across.I couldn't find a complete list of sources anywhere on the site, and a couple of quick query results showed a lot of repetition within relatively few sources. But the service does have some nice features, including the ability to save queries, define agents to update queries, sort results, and specify types of content for constraining the search. Registration is required for full access. I didn't see any mention of fees for registering to use the search engine.
I'd be more skeptical (downright cynical, actually) if this were an American venture, but it's run by VIGC, a private initiative backed by the Flemish government and the European Regional Development Fund. VIGC has about a dozen Euro graphic arts mfgs as members, but appears to be mostly trying to sell consulting services.
GraphicBrain.com adds daily updated overview of articles with links[...] GraphicBrain.com visits over 30 news sites on a daily basis, all dedicated to the industry. The overview is freely accessible to all users.
"This is of course a major improvement of our service", says Eddy Hagen, manager GraphicBrain.com. Until recently, most of the information in GraphicBrain.com came from vendor websites and from on-line magazines. The GraphicBrain.com 'web spiders' visit vendor sites on a monthly basis and on-line magazine on a weekly basis. So it could take some time before information on new products was retrievable via the GraphicBrain.com search engine. With the addition of this 'news' section, new information is added to its database every day." [...] [WhatTheyThink]
Tyler, TX -- An Indifference to Life
A sad, gruesome tale of carelessness and greed from my home town. About once a decade Tyler makes national headlines for some bit of corruption, crime, or avarice. Usually it's about drugs, this time it's for being home to "...one of the most dangerous employers in America," according to a nine-month examination by The New York Times, the PBS television program "Frontline" and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.You have to have lived in Tyler to understand it. It's a weird, self-important little town -- 85,000 people and all the grocery stores (save one) are owned by the same company. Not one Kroger, Publix, Winn-Dixie, Piggly-Wiggly, or Aldi. Smith County -- Tyler is the only city in the county -- is dry, but they have high-speed, 4-lane expressways to the nearest county line with liquor, and the road is so packed on Friday afternoons it looks like the 405 out of LA.
Tyler has three country clubs, but they all have the same members. The biggest industries are hospitals and Baptist churches. It's one of the most class-conscious cities in America, with only two classes -- doctors/lawyers/oilmen, and everyone else. Like I said -- weird.
Frank Boosman does a good job of capturing the strange cultural dichotomy that is Tyler, TX. But I remember when Tyler Pipe was a community asset -- a genuine blue collar jewel in the cheap pewter crown of a cloistered, 2nd-generation oil money community. I don't think the foundry was unionized until the late '80s. They paid really well, had great benefits, and I knew a lot of people whose parents made a good living and retired from there. This story is really sad. If you can't get to the article on the NYT site let me know and I'll e-mail it to you.
Less downtime that way. Frank Boosman writes about the recent New York Times/Frontline/CBC series on the dangerous Tyler Pipe and McWane plants. One of the NYT stories is At a Texas Foundry, an Indifference to Life. It?s much more grisly than the discussion I heard on Talk of the Nation with one of the reporters and the head of OSHA. The kind of thing you got in the appropriate part of Fast Food Nation.
[...] Less downtime that way, the men said. Now it was about 4 a.m., and Mr. Hoskin was alone in the cramped, dark pit. The din was deafening, the footing treacherous under heavy drifts of black sand.He was found on his knees. His left arm had been crushed first, the skin torn off. His head had been pulled between belt and rollers. [...]
Remember the danger of focusing on one metric Joel Spolsky writes about?
Throughout the plant, in supervisors? offices and on bulletin boards, next to production charts and union memos, is posted in big orange letters: REDUCE MAN HOURS PER TON. [markpasc.org]
Winter in Atlanta
It's cold here -- 15 degrees F last night.
Winter deals Atlanta a freezing hand. AccessAtlanta Jan 18 2003 7:08AM ET[...] There's a reason lifelong Georgians like Kim Floyd of Smyrna don't waste closet space on thickly insulated coats. As is typical for metro Atlanta, this cold spell isn't expected to last.
"It's usually not this cold and if it is, it's only for a few days," said Floyd, walking downtown Friday afternoon in a basic gray wool overcoat, jeans and a scarf. The forecast calls for temperatures to begin rising slowly on Sunday, reaching highs in the mid-50s by Thursday, according to the weather service. [...] [Moreover - Atlanta news]
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