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Tuesday, March 02, 2004 |
Another Perfect Use for RSS. RSS for RFPs
"Utah's Division of Purchasing has an RSS feed of current solicitations. This is an RSS version of the current bids page.
Of course, the good news is that if you're interested in following Utah
RFPs and know how to use an aggregator, they'll just show up on your
desktop without having to remember to go and check the page. I wish
they had a 'what's this?' link next to the RSS link to tell people
about how to use RSS. If more states had RSS feeds of their
solicitations, you could do some nice work with a filtering aggregator
to deliver customized solicitation notices for multiple jurisdictions.
Since solicitations frequently have addendums and updates, there's a
need for extensions that consistently render the solicitation number or
some other correlating information so that addendums can be linked to
the original solicitations." [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] [The Shifted Librarian] 
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Cool Tool Alert. Cogitum Co-Citer
" 'There's a stone cold freebie (no ads, spyware, etc) called 'Cogitum Co-Citer', available for download here.
Once installed, when you're at a site where you want to save some
text, you simply highlight the desired text, right-click to get the
pop-up context menu, then select 'Grab the selected text'. Co-Citer
then auto-opens its screen, allowing you to add comments, organize by
selecting/creating a category, etc. To get to the info later, you hit
the start menu and choose Co-Citer, which includes print, find and
other goodies.
This app is incredibly feature-packed, and an absolute stable/smooth
joy to use. Sure has cut back substantially on the 'paper-notes'
syndrome which used to surround my laptop!...' " [PDA 24/7]
Nice freebie that could help with personal knowledge management.
Unfortunately, it only runs on Windows and requires Internet Explorer
5+. [The Shifted Librarian]
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.NET report card.
Every couple of years Microsoft wraps a marketing label around all the
major initiatives in the company. In 2000, the label was .NET; in 2003,
Longhorn. As developers and IT managers ponder what the "Longhorn wave"
might mean to them, InfoWorld decided to assess the current .NET wave.
Its goals were many and ambitious. At the core of .NET, the Common
Language Runtime (CLR) and its associated Framework (class library)
would usher Microsoft developers into the world of managed code, whose
benefits were already well-known to their Java counterparts. In
parallel, Web services would become the pivotal integration technology,
and XML the lingua franca of data representation. These were, and still
are, the central themes. Don Box, architect of Longhorn's Indigo
communication subsystem, put it plainly on his weblog: "We're betting
that the future is managed code and XML." [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
This story, which began thirty weblog items ago, is (at least for me) a compelling demonstration of weblog/journalism synergy. I first tried this approach in 1996, for a BYTE cover story.
In the pre-blog era, NNTP newsgroups were the venue, but it's the same
principle. When you're dealing with an evergreen topic, and you're not
worried about getting scooped by the competition, why not go ahead and
outline your ideas in advance? The ensuing conversation will clarify
them, and put you in touch with people who can share interest and
expertise that you otherwise wouldn't have been able to find. ... [Jon's Radio]
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The one thing your business needs to grow. Want to grow your business? Harvard Business Review's Frederick Reichheld says
there's one thing that's dramatically more important than anything
else: are your customers willing to recommend your product or service
to a friend? If they are, he contends, your business will grow. If they
aren't, it won't.
Williams Moore's "Brand Autopsy" weblog for that link and commentary on that article.
This rule even applies to Microsoft. Expensive marketing can attempt
to overcome this trend, but in this day of word-of-mouth networks that
are very strong, if you don't have the best product in a category, word
will get out very quickly. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Jarvis says to get rid of word "consumer" in corporate talk. Jeff Jarvis is right.
The word "consumer" is a nasty word and should be removed from
corporate dictionaries. Our customers are really more like partners
anyway. Think about it. It's why we focus so much on building
"platforms" here. We only succeed if you build stuff on top of our
platforms. That's what makes the complete product.
Look at the Pistachio factory I visited. Yeah, it's run on Microsoft
platforms (Windows is all over the place there) but if our customers
didn't build software to run the factory (we didn't do that) then we
wouldn't be there at all.
It's a partnership. Not a one-way push channel.
The faster we can figure that out, and enable our partners to build
cool stuff, the better off we'll both be. That's why I like .NET so
much. It helps our partners build cool stuff (like the NewsGator news aggregator that has completely changed my life). [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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XBox Live turns into a new business networking tool. Jeff
is all over the blogosphere tonight. Jeff Sandquist's idea to have
networking sessions on a virtual golf course (the good old boys'
network is back, just online) is gaining some strength. Greg Reinacker says "A
friendly game of golf, between folks from Microsoft and ISV's. Friendly
banter. Competition on the course. Relationships are made, which are
the foundation of a successful business. I wish I had thought of it.
Count me in."
Amanda Murphy joined
in the fun too. She says it's a good way for her to participate in the
geek community since she gets left out of all the fun geek dinners. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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cocoa.mamasam donation.
The best Cocoa programming resource that I know of—I use it pretty much
every single day—is the searchable mailing list archives at cocoa.mamasam.com.
I hadn’t noticed until today that they take donations, so I donated
$30. It’s easily worth it—this site has saved me many hours of
head-scratching. It’s a very nearly indispensable part of my
programmer’s toolkit. [inessential.com]
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Aunt Tillie's OS X adventure. 
In a pair of recent essays,
Eric Raymond tears into the open source community -- rightly so -- for
its failure to deliver software that Aunt Tillie can use. He's spot on.
One of his comments got me wondering, though:
If
the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows
programmers) they'd probe the local network neighborhood and omit the
impossible entries. If they were really smart (like, say, Mac
programmers) they'd leave the impossible choices in but gray them out,
signifying that if your system were configured a bit differently you
really could print on a Windows machine, assuming you were unfortunate
enough to own one. [Eric Raymond: An Open-Source Horror Story]
As it happens, I'd never tried printing to a Windows XP queue on my
home network from my Mac, and I wondered how well those Mac programmers
Eric talks about handled that case. So here, for your Flash viewing
pleasure, is Aunt Tillie's OS X Adventure.
... [Jon's Radio]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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