Saturday, May 11, 2002
Multi-Author K-Logs
 
This is another post to the K-Logs list (weblogs for knowledge management and collaboration).  If you like this topic, you are welcome to join (over 400 members!!) 
 
Today, UserLand introduced a new tool for leveraging RSS to produce a weblog with multiple contributors. If you are using Radio, you can download and install it from this page:
 
http://radio.userland.com/multiAuthorWeblogTool
 
There are lots of situations where it is useful to build a K-Log that aggregates the syndicated news from multiple authors (see note below on what an RSS newsfeed is).  This is also a great way to use K-Log categorization (see the note below on was a K-Log category is).
 
So, for example, I want to make a post to my K-Log about a project I am working on.  I can see right away that this post is useful to my main K-Log (which is available corporate-wide on the corporate Intranet), my team category (which I have opted to be just an RSS feed and not a full weblog), and my corporate partner weblog (which is available on a password protected extranet site which partners in other companies read -- I have opted to make this a full HTML K-Log).
 
My team leader can now run a Radio K-Log category that automatically publishes the RSS news from each of the K-Logs on the team.  It aggregates the feeds into a single readable K-Log.  The team now has a single readable repository for all information the team is working with, without pulling content away from their personal K-Logs.  Nice.
 
Note, that you can use Radio to build a team K-Log using its mail-to-weblog feature (see Radio's prefs section).  I have had a couple reports that people have done this and it works great!
 
Here are some notes on RSS newsfeeds and categorization:
________________________________________
 
NOTE(Categories):  For those of you that are new to the discussion, categories are a way to publish content to topic or reader specific K-Logs.  I can easily build categories for groups I am part of, topics that I am interested in, internal vs. external audiences, etc.  Categories can have different templates and generate their own RSS newsfeeds. 
Here is a screen shot of how to create a new category in Radio.
 
NOTE(RSS Newsfeeds):  For those of you that are new to the discussion, RSS newsfeeds are a short format (headline + description) syndication format in xml.  All Radio weblogs automatically create RSS newsfeeds for the main page and all category pages.  This newsfeed allows other people using a news aggregation tool, like Radio, to automatically get anything new that I post to my K-Log.   This makes getting the latest news from a variety of K-Logs and many general news sources (Radio comes bundled with newsfeeds from the NYTimes.com) extremely easy.  All the news gathered is on a single news page for easy scanning.  Here is a screen shot of my news page in Radio.
 
Here is a screen shot of the subscriptions icons/buttons on a Radio site
(A person, with Radio running, can subscribe to you by clicking on the orange xml coffee cup.  It's that easy.)
 
Thanks. 
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]
5:23:58 PM  #  comment []
And to the press and analysts who gave control to Microsoft and other Bigs, your air cover is gone. You should have at least been questioning Microsoft's ability to deliver and looked at alternatives. Now the alternatives are what's left, and it's good stuff. We'll keep moving, shining the light on Indies and individuals, who are creating software for the Two-Way-Web, which is what's really going, by the way. [Scripting News]
5:18:56 PM  #  comment []

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