Monday, February 3, 2003

RSS feeds for Lawyers... Many of Ernie's complaints, regarding email abuse and the adoption issues for RSS, are application to the general audience, not just the legal field. RSS feeds for Lawyers - Michael Wasylik over at WOIFM is pondering the many potential uses that RSS feeds might have for lawyers. Of course, this is sure to draw comments from Rory. Michael considers that lawyers might like to receive feeds that include court opinions (already happening at Rory's court), jury instructions, new regulations, etc. As one who has been doing the news aggregating thing for about a year now, I see tremendous potential for RSS feeds. E-mail alerts are okay, but for an increasing payload of legal information they just don't cut it. What's bad about using emails to get legal news? process of subscribing or unsubscribing is controlled by sender's server sorting emails into categories is possible in an E-mail program, but requires use of "rules" and at this point the system starts to get unwieldy many "feeds have links, but browsing in an E-mail client is less than satisfactory E-mail is better for direct communications that I might have to "respond to" and browsers are better for information that streams to me because I'm interested in following a story Spam makes it harder for me to use my E-mail system to gather news RSS feeds have the potential to do things that E-mail doesn't, but there is a chicken & egg problem. Until there are a sufficient number of speciality legal feeds lawyers won't be enticed to use news aggregators, which require learning a new way (albeit a clearly more efficient one) of dealing with information. And without an audience of eagerly awaiting lawyers it's hard to get courts and government agencies interested in putting their information into RSS feeds. So the blawgosphere will have to carry the ball for awhile. But, I'm glad that lawyers like Michael are starting to perk up to the possibilities, which are staggering if you really think about it. [Ernie the Attorney] 10:52:35 AM

College professors blog Another market for weblog products and services. College professors across the nation join the latest internet phenomenon: Weblogs Quote: "Web logs — blogs for short — are... [elearnspace blog] 10:46:18 AM

KM Metrics for Business Some good thoughts on how to measure the effectiveness of knowledge management systems in organizations. Metrics cannot exist in isolation of business objectives. The first step is therefore to determine the goals for the project. These should focus on business, not technical objectives. In a hospital, a content management system may be setup to deliver policy and procedure information to clinical staff. At first, it might seem that the goal would be to "improve the dissemination of information". In this case, a much more meaningful goal would be to "reduce adverse outcomes for patients, including patient death". The CMS can then be seen as assisting in saving lives. 10:44:56 AM

NewsQuakes NewsQuakes is a visual map of where hot news stories are happening in the world... interesting. 10:35:26 AM

Secure Blogging by Email Digital Identities will be pushed forward via weblogs (and before e-commerce!), both in editing weblogs remotely and in linking to and commenting on other people's weblogs. Ben Hammersley: Being able to prove ownership, or at least definitive origination, would be an excellent ability to have. And once again, it's the blogging world who are getting up and actually doing it, small piece by small piece. I actually think the sweet spot is in comments. How I chose to update my weblog is of an academic interest to most, but the ability to author new content is of a much wider interest. At the moment, the best I can say is that a given comment is purported to be by Ben or Mark or Shelley or whoever. But I would prefer to start this much more incrementally. The most basic thing comments by email provide is the ability to download various RSS feeds, hit the road, and respond while disconnected. If you want to try this, you can do it on this blog entry. The next thing people will want is the ability to specify a URL of their homepage to be displayed instead of their e-mail address. Much discussion will ensue as to whether this should be a MIME header or in the body. If defacto standards emerge in this area, I will simply support both. Signing is the next step, particularly given that e-mail clients already tend to have built in support for this. Ultimately, when the spam starts arriving, only signed e-mails will be accepted. Services are the next step. If I can validate a signature against some data located via a link from your home page, I would be comfortable with providing Jabber messages whenever additional comments are made to a blog entry that you have commented on. Or on processing signed requests to update or delete weblog entries that you originated. Update: I've changed the address to be blog-1172 instead of blog:1172 so that email clients need not quote the address per RFC 822 [Sam Ruby ] 10:31:10 AM

Interview with Brent Simmons Check out this great interview with Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire [Keith's Weblog] News is so general, that any person or business can create and distribute it... A newbie might think that RSS had been developed purely for the benefit of the blogging community. What do you think are the brightest future directions for it to go in? One direction I see RSS going in is, simply, wider adoption. I was happy to see Apple add RSS feeds recently, for instance. I think the number of personal CMS systems (weblogging servers) is only going to proliferate, and weblog reader/writers are will need to support them all. How to abstract this out, I'm not sure... I wonder of Brent is thinking along these lines? What's been the biggest headache you've had to deal with during the development of the app? Weblog editing. Apple's XML-RPC framework has a very nasty crashing bug that I've been working around. (I hear that the bug will be fixed in 10.2.4, though I don't know that for sure. Consider it rumor.) The XML-RPC framework is how NetNewsWire communicates with weblogs to post items and get recent posts. Another problem is that every weblog system is a bit different from every other, even when they support the same API or APIs. Movable Type in particular has a bunch of additional options -- and people are quite right to ask for NetNewsWire to support those options. But that means extra work for Movable Type. Not a big deal, but then other systems have unique features too. It all adds up to quite a few special cases. Another headache has been the HTML renderer built into OS X. It's very basic. I get lots of bug reports that NetNewsWire's HTML pane doesn't handle right-aligned images or play QuickTime movies or whatever, since Apple's HTML renderer doesn't handle these things. The good news is that I plan to move to either Safari's renderer or Gecko, and so this will improve. It's going to be a headache to do this, but I expect it will be very nice once it's done. And of course, by leveraging all of Apple's technologies, NNW is Mac only. We'll need to find/create core engines for cross platforms, and Java might be the answer. The question I have is, can we burn a JavaVM on a CD with the rest of the product, and integrate it into an installer? 10:20:14 AM

Blojsom Debuts YEAH! I've been waiting for a java-based bloxsom for a while now, and David is the first to come thru! Congrats! David Czarnecki, a great guy that I met on a Geek Cruise in 2001, has pushed out his Java based take on the simple but elegant approach to blogging started by Rael Dornfest's blosxom. David calls it blojsom and it's hosted at SourceForge. It can work with both JSP and Velocity templates and looks to be the way to go if you want to set up a blog and use all the Java tools. Posted: 2003/02/02 18:59 [James Duncan Davidson] 10:00:03 AM

iBlog 1.0 released iBlog looks pretty good, visually, and I remember being impressed with their first public release. From the website, it appears they have responded to many user requests before going final. I like that they're charging for it, good for them! Mac only, but great integration with .Mac 9:53:05 AM