Even though I spent over 20 years consulting to corporate America, I would rather write Radio book(s) for a non-biz audience. Just seems like more fun.

Nevertheless.

Radio (not to mention Frontier/Manila) deserve to be used by every business - and every school - everywhere. Even granting that BigCo's judge UserLand a heavy counter-cultural risk (as if being slaveboys to BigSoftware is safe), that leaves a million or ten other candidates.

It's time to demystify the what-where-why-when-who of Radio for a computer literate, professional but non-technical audience. The paradigm for that audience is the friend of Jon Udell's (don't have the link) whom Jon stepped through a Radio installation. It was just way hard and the jargon way confusing.

To some degree, this is unavoidable. It doesn't mean Radio is hard to use. Given what you can do with it, hard to use compared with ... ?

Still, Radio/RCS embeds a decade of design and lore covering the entire history of the Internet:

Web servers.
Browsers.
Scripting languages.
Authoring products.
Web design tools.
Desktop clients.
Interoperability.
Publish-and-subscribe.
... and the acronymns that support them and more: HTTP. FTP. HTML. XML. XML-RPC. SOAP. RSS. OPML.

Nor are these mere jargon-y acronymns (yeah, we have plenty others of those). The ones above support entire worlds of functionality over which Radio is layered. Layered well or poorly? Well. Very well. But not so well that weblogging/K-logging isn't still terribly confusing to millions of people who are as smart (and often smarter) than 'our kind of people'.

So, my audience will be:

Technical management - decision-makers for determining corporate standards.

Project leaders - administer collaborative weblogs.

Professional end-users - journalists, marketers, sales, lawyers, doctors, teachers, scientists et al.

The goal will be to show how Radio can be interwoven across a given organization or project team through specific use(s) to support a hierarchy of shared spaces that mediate identity and knowledge. Profound mouthful.

No, this ain't gonna be a mere white paper-ish book. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't focus on Radio (and, behind Radio ... Frontier/Manila). I'd keep it vaguely generic.

Au contraire, I'm betting on these specific products, which means: how to think about them (sure) but also and emphatically how to USE THEM. With weblogging, 'philosophy' and 'use' converge entirely.

On Wednesday, some thoughts about the theme I will emphasize to this audience. Can you find it signalled above?

What do you think? Right audience? Wrong audience? Who cares?

feedback:   2:42:07 PM