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Tuesday, March 19, 2002

The recent release of Radio Community Server 1.0 by UserLand Software begs the question: Which is the better collaboration tool, a weblog or a forum? I think weblogs and forums are at two ends of a collaboration spectrum and they each have interesting properties. A weblog allows somebody to narrate a task, which could be very useful as a tutorial or as a way to identify problems in work flow. A forum allows people to discuss a task before, during, and after it is accomplished. I find that weblogs do not make a good direct discussion tool. But I don't like open and anonymous forums very much. I never contribute to those. I'd rather have my "own space" to say what I want. I direct attention to other sites using links, and comments allow people a kind of discussion. But a forum is a lousy way to narrate or an idea. So, which is more useful in a close community of people working together. I guess we'll find out. comment ()  1:36:58 PM  #   How to Place Pictures in Your Weblog [via Scripting News]: You can also include <img> tags right in your post. That's what I do for my TheBeard™ pictures. The advantage to that is that you aren't taking up valuable cloud space with pictures. Of course, this only works if you have your pictures on a server somewhere already. comment ()  12:56:06 PM  #   By the way, here is an example XML-RPC method call using the MetaWeblog API. This is a newPost method call. The last parameter for the method is "publish". I'm not quite sure what that does but I'm guessing it tells Radio whether or not to go ahead and publish this post immediately. I'm not sure what values it wants, but I tried "true" and it seemed to work. <?xml version="1.0" ?> <methodCall>metaWeblog.newPost</methodName> <params> <param><value>home</value></param> <param><value>myname</value></param> <param><value>mypassword</value></param> <param> <value> <struct> <member> <name>description</name> <value>this is a cool post</value> </member> </struct> </value> </param> <param><value>true</value></param> </params> </methodCall> comment ()  8:43:43 AM  #

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