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Tuesday, March 23, 2004 |
Blog/print synergy: my strategies.
For almost a decade I've used the Web -- and most recently my blog --
to research, develop, and enhance the articles I write for magazines.
When I ran into Dan Gillmor
at SXSW we discussed some of my strategies, and Dan asked me to write
them up. Seems worth doing, so here goes. Much of this concerns the IT
trade pub ecosystem specifically, but I think the principles will
generalize. The basic pattern is simple: a story gestates in blogspace,
appears in print and online, and then matures in blogspace. ... [Jon's Radio] 
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Comparative advantage vs. competitive advantage. Marc Andreessen sent me some clarification on comparative advantage vs. competitive advantage re: my post on Ricardo (thanks Marc). This is counter-intuitive so follow it closely. He says:
Ricardo's theory of
comparative advantage holds even in the case where one country does
*everything* better than another country. That's why free trade has worked so well over such a long period of time across such a large set of countries.
An
analogy that works is the following: a lawyer and a secretary. Say the
lawyer is a better lawyer AND a better typist than the secretary. It
still makes sense for the lawyer to hire the secretary and pay the
secretary for typing services -- despite the fact that the lawyer is
actually a better typist than the secretary. Obviously this is because
the lawyer is better off spending all of his time being a lawyer (the
thing he is "most best" at) vs taking part of his time to type, whereas
the secretary is obviously way better off spending all of his time
typing as opposed to trying to be a really bad lawyer. Both sides
benefit from the exchange. That's comparative advantage, and that's why
Ricardo's theory applies just as much today as ever.
Here is more elaboration
on comparative advantage. The key is opportunity cost. However, this
brings me back to my original problem: what should the US specialize
in? [John Robb's Weblog]
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Andrew's
BitTorrent test is going well. I was able to download the 2 Mb file in
24 seconds (including initialization). Now to the good part:
- An interface for publishing Torrent files to your weblog via enclosures.
- An easy to use interface for managing downloaded files in your newsreader.
- A plug-in architecture for BitTorrent that simplifies the
installation and upgrade process (like Quicktime or Flash) -- or -- at
least a snazzy installer (like the PDF installer).
- A java downloader for those that don't or can't download the client may be something worth building.
I don't necessarily want a separate interface for BitTorrent but
rather support for it built into existing tools. P2P tools should be as
invisible as plumbing. [John Robb's Weblog]
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More leverage for terrorists via technology. NS. The next generation of terrorist bombs will likely be something antipated on this weblog: fuel-air.
Designs for a fuel-air device were also acquired by the CIA from three alleged IRA members on trial in Colombia. The three are said to have been developing the bomb in conjunction with the country's FARC guerrilla group. "Although an IRA/Al-Qaida collaboration seems unlikely, the bottom line is that their respective manuals are probably in circulation," says David Ritzel, an explosives expert working for the DRDC.
Fuel-air explosives, while difficult to build, are much more effective than traditional bombs. They work by igniting a cloud of finely atomized fuel. The result is a high degree of "overpressure" which kills people and collapses buildings. This radically increases the distance at which bombs can have impact (the overpressure can travel a great distance). It can also kill people within protected structures. [John Robb's Weblog]
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The reactions to the assassination of Yassin from London and the EU
is more than a little hypocritical. All of the global nation-state
players use (or condone) assassination as a tool of policy against
non-state actors (and even state actors in the case of Saddam -- which
all the coalition members during GWI and GW2 were complicit in). Once
you start down the road to assassination, there is no case that can be
made for discretion in targetting if a clear link to national preservation can be made. The US response
seems to be cognizant of this. Of course, this policy will likely bite
us in the ass in the future when a similar line of reasoning is used
against us. [John Robb's Weblog]
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NYT.
The founder and leader of Hamas was assassinated by Israel yesterday.
Unfortunately, decapitation strikes -- while they might confer moral
and propoganda benefits (of course, even that can be disputed)
-- do not provide any lasting disruption of distributed terrorist
networks. For a deeper analysis of the impact of decapitation strikes,
visit "Global Guerrillas." [John Robb's Weblog]
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Son of Bride of Robolympics Photos, part umptybillion. callum prentice says, "Our team entered a combat robot in the robolympics
this weekend. I'm in the process of collecting images - more will
appear here over the next few days - the heavyweight & super
heavyweight battles were simply the most awe inspiring, violent
mechanical event i've ever seen - these shots don't even come close to
describing the screech of titanium armour being ripped off, the crash
of a 6" spike smashing into steel plating or the staccato vibration of
shrapnel crashing into the bullet proof windows of the arena." Link
VonGuard says, "Robolympics pictures -- about 300 of them." Link
Link to previous BB Robolympics photos post. Thanks, robogeeks! [Boing Boing]
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Awesome anime ferry. 
Kudos to the crafty operators of this Japanese ferry service, who
commissioned manga legend Leiji Matsumoto to design it "to appeal to
the younger generation." As Gizmodo's Joel Johnson put it, "It does
this by being awesome."
Link
(via Gizmodo)
[Boing Boing]
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TypeKey FAQ. Kudos to Six Apart for addressing the concerns of the community with an excellent FAQ. If only other companies would respond so well to feedback.
From the TypeKey FAQ:
QUOTE With Movable Type comment
registration, we've provided a great deal of options for weblog owners.
At release (remember, we're still in Alpha), we plan to provide a
detailed user's guide to comment registration and comment management
options. But, for now, we want to provide a glimpse of the commenting
options.
With Movable Type 3.0 you have options. You can:
- Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments where the commenter sends an email address
- Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments
- Accept TypeKey-authenticated and moderated comments
- Accept TypeKey-authenticated and regular comments
- Accept moderated comments
- Accept unmoderated comments
- Accept anonymous comments
Currently in Movable Type, 6 and 7 are the only two options. 1 through
5 have been added to create a varying degree of accountability.
While comment registration is not the right answer for every weblog,
Movable Type 3.0 and TypeKey provide a flexible system that we feel
will work for the majority of Movable Type users." UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Markdown - a more frictionless way to enter HTML and XHTML for blog posts. Markdown
sounds like exactly what I am looking for. Very cool! Must check this
out. Writing HTML without a WYSIWYG editor, using the broken code from
Mozilla and IE's WYSIWG editors and using an HTML text area with a
preview mode is for the birds. Hopefully this will alleviate the pain
of doing this
From Daring Fireball: Markdown:
QUOTE Markdown is a text-to-HTML
conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an
easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to
structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax;
and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text
formatting to HTML. See the Syntax page for details pertaining to
Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the
online Dingus.
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to
make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted
document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking
like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While
Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML
filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax
is the format of plain text email. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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3 FREE RSS Technorati searches. Awesome, thanks! Now if you could only do wild card URL searches like PubSub's referenced URI
feature e.g. give me an RSS feed of all blogs that have links with
rolandtanglao.com in them. That way I can see if anybody links anywhere
on a site rather than to just a single URL i.e. anybody who links to a
page anywhere on rolandtanglao.com
From Sifry's Alerts:
QUOTE I'm proud to announce the
new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com.
Some highlights of the new design:
Three free email or RSS watchlists for individuals - all you have to
do is sign up as a member. Of course, people who have paid for
watchlists are grandfathered in as well. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Illustrated MT templates. Oldie but goodie that I must re-read now that I have a MovableType blog hence the re-post. The CSS and JavaScript and HTML stuff apply to Blogware
blogs too. Only the template stuff differs. But once you have figured
out one templating system, the second and third and fourth :-) (I think
this is the about the 5th or 6th blog templating system that I have
learned) comes easier.
From mediatinker.com:
QUOTE Tackling Movable Type
templates and CSS for the first time can be daunting. The MT default
templates contain four kinds of code: CSS, HTML, MT tags, and
Javascript.
If you're new to all this, you're about to learn that it pays to
make a careful study of the code. Once you understand the way it works
together, it's pretty easy to modify your MT templates to display
almost any design you want. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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RSS for TiVO. RSS for TiVo. RSS for TiVo
This is the right idea but now it needs to be implemented for mere mortals to use. Only when RSS hits functionality for the masses and not for the digerati will it take off. I'm looking at some stuff that does just that and it will change the way you think of RSS (and more importantly, you won't need to think of RSS) when released.
I agree with Michael - but hey, at least we're getting there. It's not like TiVO would ever dream this up! [Marc's Voice]
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TypeKey + FOAF. Idly.Org defends Six Apart from yours truly. Anyway, if TypeKey is anything new it's a breakthrough. I've been puzzling about this stuff for years. Some people say there's something brilliant here. If so, that's great, but until I understand how it works, I'm from Missouri. [Scripting News]
I just left this comment at this excellent post/analysis about TypeKey......
Just one word: FOAF.
It will solve all the complaints, be the right thing to do technically - and help an overall movement which - oh yah - the Trotts and Typepad are already participating in.
:-)
[Marc's Voice]
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103 words why Open Source will rise. Andreesssen: Why Open Source Will Boom - in 103 Words [Slashdot]
- "The Internet is powered by open source."
- "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
- "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
- "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
- "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
- "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
- "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
- "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
- "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
- "There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
- "Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
- "It's free."
[Marc's Voice]
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Toshiba Debuts New DVD Writers.
Toshiba's Storage Device Division (SDD) announced a half-height
recordable DVD drive for desktop PCs on Monday, as well as two slimline
drives for notebook PCs. [Extremetech]
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Reverberations in the Echo Chamber. I love it when EVERYBODY blogs the same dam thing. Talk about Echo chamber!
Congrats to Dave, Kevin and the rest at Technorati!
New Technorati beta launches.
I'm proud to announce the new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com. Some highlights of the new design:
- Three free email or RSS watchlists
for individuals - all you have to do is sign up as a member. Of course,
people who have paid for watchlists are grandfathered in as well.
- Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you
who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a
step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize
the language as well - using words like "conversations" and
"references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati
does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more
improvements we can make. Help us.
- Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection
capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can
search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS
feeds.
- Better explanations and interfaces for Current Events and
NewsTalk (formerly called Breaking News). Click on the arrows to expand
or compress blogger commentary, to allow a "quick view" or a more
context-rich, deeper view into the data.
- Improved features for weblog authors: First, a more robust, reliable "Claim Your Blog"
codebase. Once you, as an author, have claimed your weblog, you get a
bunch of new features, including the blog rank for your blog. (Find out
how far off of the top 100 you are...) We're also working on a number
of other "Author Dashboard" type features coming soon.
- Caching, speedups, and bug fixes. Almost too many to mention.
A few points to note:
- Response time of the searches is still not reliably fast enough.
Some searches are fast, some take a long time. We know this is
unacceptable, and we are working on this. Site reliability and faster
response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve
the user experience.
- We're working on providing RSS and email watchlists for
keyword searches as well, but it wasn't ready for the cut, so it'll go
out as soon as it is ready, which should be quite soon. In the
meantime, you can do keyword searches on the site, but can't get RSS or
email subscriptions yet.
Send us feedback! Use feedback@technorati.com to send feedback to the Technorati team, or send comments directly to me at david-blog@sifry.com. Your thoughts and comments are extremely important to us.
Thanks again for all your support.
[Sifry's Alerts]
New Technorati is Live.
The latest version of Technorati, a blog search engine, has launched. You can read details on what's new from Dave Sifry.
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Technorati's New Look.
I love it. Technorati is updating it's page design and I am watching it as it happens at 2AM.
A note to Dave Sifry: I
like the alternate background coloring, Dave. I also like the
conversation thingy except I don't want to click on all the
conversations. Reflect the LOUDNESS of the conversation behind each
entry with some visual hint (i.e. icon count, color, size) so I can
zero in on the center of the noise.
 [Don Park's Daily Habit]
New Technorati beta launches. New looks, new features. Go to www.technorati.com to give it a whirl. [Joi Ito's Web]
Very cool.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
New Technorati Beta. Blog search update. Not sure what's new, aside from an improved UI. Technorati PS. Sifry lists the new stuff.... [Raw]
Search wider.
Technorati has gone live with a raft of improvements that David Sifry explains here.
I'm on the company's advisory board, and it's nice to see so many good
ideas and suggestions by so many people show up in the (continuously
un)finished product.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
New Technorati beta. Technorati has launched a new public beta with a bunch of really exciting features, including:
# Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of
you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a
step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize
the language as well - using words like "conversations" and
"references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati
does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more
improvements we can make. Help us. # Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection
capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can
search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS
feeds.
Link [Boing Boing]
AND FINALLY FROM THE BRAND NEW VP of INternational Sales at Technorati - the GODHEAD himself.....
New Technorati beta launches.
New Technorati beta launches. New looks, new features. Go to www.technorati.com to give it a whirl.
[Joi Ito's Web] [Marc's Voice]
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Don Norman is my hero!. Don Norman: Emotional Design [ETCON2004].
[Full title: Emotional Design: The Principles] Don Norman used to be
known as a critic of unusable things but now, he says, he has changed.
He has transformed himself into an advocate for pleasurable, enjoyable
products. Beauty is good, says Norman. Successful products should a
pleasure to use, and convey a positive sense of self, of
accomplishment, and pride of ownership. In this keynote address, Norman
shares work from his latest book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or
Hate) Everyday Things. Do you believe it? Is there really more to life
than whether something works well? Does you car really drive better
after you have washed and polished it? Listen in. This was a keynote
presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, February 12, 2004. Recording courtesy of O'Reilly & Associates and IT Conversations. A complete transcript of this and other keynote sessions is available on the IT Conversations web site. [Internet Archive]
Don Norman is one of the few people I really look up to today.
His visions picks up right where mine leaves off. We're a perfect complement to each other.
Here we are debating at PopTech 2002 together. [Marc's Voice]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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London graffiti writer Banksy is a true stencil genius. His site --
frustrating to navigate -- is still a stunning walk through some of the
finest art you'll see on the street or in a gallery.
Dan
Mushrush sez: "A company is selling homes made of shipping containers
for $76k -the lot -the installation. Luxury appointments are
available." 
