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Saturday, August 31, 2002 |
O'Reilly: "With the release of Mozilla 1.0, the world now has a browser that supports SOAP natively." [Scripting News] 
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Note to Radio users. If you haven't started using shortcuts yet, give it a try. It is really powerful feature. With Radio running go to this page. This page allows you to create shortcuts to pictures, bookmarks, files, stories, etc that you can name and include in your daily posts. To include a shortcut, just type the name into the editing area and put it in double quotes ("...."). For example, I did this with a bomb graphic that I use for mindbombs. When I type bomb in double quotes I get this:  Shortcuts should be used for things you use a lot and couldn't be bothered to remember or type in the link. Here is one for Dave: Dave Winer
Note to developers. This is even more powerful if the shortcut is connected to a Web service like stock quotes, sports scores, supply data, etc. So if I was working in a company and wanted to point out that we were short on the supply of Ethernet cards, it would be a very powerful thing to be able to type in "Ethernet Cards" and get the most recent supply stats that I could annotate with a request to purchase more and add to my K-log.
It would also be a great way to build a digital dashboard in a way that was natural for users. A preloaded set of shortcuts that connect to Web services would allow me to populate and edit my digital dashboard in a very simple way. All I would need to do is type in the item I want to watch in double quotes (selecting them from a prefabed list). When I want to remove it, I just delete the word.
As long as I am riffing on this, I would think that this would also be a simple way to add business logic to a digital dashboard. A simple process that would send me an alert via IM or e-mail on a drop of supplies below a certain level could be built into a tool on Radio. To select the item to watch, I would type the name of the item in double quotes into the form. Radio would get the data from a Web service, process it against my business rule, and send me an alert when it dropped below a certain level. How easy is that? It would also be easy to post the alerts to a category specific weblog for general consumption automatically.
It all starts with a very simple step DIY web services. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
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BTW: If you are looking for developers you can hire to reinvent your Intranet with Manila and Radio (a very wise move that many companies are opting to do), here is a list. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
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It has been my hard-won experience (either building or working with companies that have built centralized systems) that the costs of complex centralized systems don't scale linearly, rather they scale exponentially (like this graph). Slight flaws in the architecture become massive money pits as they are magnified. Also, as you press the limits of the hardware and software, you start to pay for bleeding edge technology. This technology tends to cost a lot more than off-the-rack technology and usually fails more often. Finally, complexity and bleeding edge technology, requires expensive people to manage it. Centralization = complexity = exponential cost structures. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
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Just to point out the disparity of costs between decentralized publishing and centralized publishing. Say you have 100,000 people that you want to enable to publish a weblog. Given that these are weblogs and not simple homepages (like GeoCities) that are published once and forgotten, a couple of things change. People use the functionality daily, if not several times a day. They also build massive sites. Compared to a one or two page "designed" personal home page on the last generations site builders, the user of a weblog system will quickly find themselves publishing sites with hundreds if not thousands of pages. They get big fast.
If done centrally, you could probably put a thousand or two weblogs on a single server. That would take 50-100 servers, extensive rack space, and a huge budget for admin of those servers given that there is complex functionality on the server. In a decentralized model, you could put 10-20 k weblogs on a single static server. That would require only 5-10 servers (a single rack) and a very low admin budget. Nice.
It was never that you couldn't generate revenue online, it was that the cost structures most firms adopted drove them into the ground. Even the classic one to many publishing model could be improved using this approach if a desktop content management system like Radio was used in conjunction with a P2P distribution system. This combination would enable a "media" rich desktop website that would cost little to provide. However, it's unlikely that anyone will abondon their excessive investments in their current architectures to do this. Let's hope the next round of systems built for two way publishing are built in a way that allow firms to make a profit. Let's learn from the past. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
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Megnut: "For those of us that are self-employed, and for those that are unemployed, health insurance continues to be a big expense, and an even bigger pain in the neck." Amen. [Scripting News]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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