Wednesday, February 19, 2003

New Homeland Security Website "Terrorism Forces Us to Make a Choice, Don't Be Afraid, Be Ready." This is the introduction to the new website launched today by the Homeland Security Department, called Ready.gov. The site provides information in three main areas: Make a Kit of Emergency Supplies, Make a Plan, and Be Informed, which covers how to respond to threats from biological, chemical, explosions, nuclear blast and radiation. Ok, are you scared yet! [beSpacific] The government is making lots of websites these days... I wonder when the first elected official will start a weblog. 6:00:17 PM

Megnut - Beware the false blog software So it isn't a market category yet? With the news of Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs, watch software makers scramble to include a blogging feature in their products. Microsoft-Watch reports that Microsoft Tests the Blogging-Tool Waters with their Community Starter Kit. The article quotes Microsoft developer division product manager Shawn Nandi, "You could use this (Kit) to build a Weblog." You can also use Microsoft Notepad and an FTP client to build a weblog, but that doesn't mean they were designed for that, or that it's easy to do. Ask yourself when looking at "blogging" software: Was it designed with weblogging in mind (i.e. easy updating through simple posting interface, archives for posts, permalinks, templating control, comments, RSS output, etc.) or has the label "blogging" been slapped onto an existing publishing system designed around outputing web pages? She's right. 4:05:03 PM

Enterprise Blogs Perhaps Jeremy will get his new VC company to invest in weblog tools space... Jon Udell has a bit about Groove 2.5 and what it does for "team blogs", making distributed news reading and conversation a more natural act for teams. One thought sparked something for me: "From an enterprise IT perspective, I realize, the term "team blog" sounds a little vague. So let's nail it down. Those inbound RSS feeds needn't be only internal or external weblogs. They can also deliver customer feedback, system status reports, business intelligence -- you name it. And the output needn't be a weblog that you hope will make the Daypop Top 40. Think of it, instead, as an internal "k-log" that selectively exposes team activity to the larger organization." What I love about blogging infrastructure is how simple and standards-based it is, that you can really morph anything to work within it. All of a sudden the world of weblogs is colliding with other established team collaboration and work productivity spaces such as content mangement, knowledge management and enterprise portals. To what degree will Blog Readers become a natural client software category; will they be part of browsers; of communications/messaging apps (Outlook/Notes); standalone? As RSS 2.0 gains traction and the content moves from being simple text content to richly tagged meta-data and more or less structured content (like 'system status reports', 'bi data', as Jon suggests), what's the proper productivity interface for digesting and regurgitating all that data. Tough problem. I came across an interesting software company, Traction Software, trying to do exactly some of these things with 'team blogging' software focused on knowledge/intelligence gathering inside companies. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] News readers will be dime a dozen for a while, but that's like having an email reader where you can't reply. Weblog writing tools (where someone both consumes and produces RSS streams) will be much more professional. And I can imagine RSS render plugins, which could take pieces of an RSS feed item and render them in interesting ways. Isn't that what a web browser does? Yes. So much overlap, and yet this slight reconfiguration brings a whole new world into existence. 3:59:31 PM

Time - Coming Ashore Charles Krauthammer had an interesting piece in Time magazine a week or so ago, about how the U.S. must fully engage the Arab and African worlds if it is going to reduce the threats within it. Neglect, it turned out, had a price, a terrible price. After World War II, America pressed for democratic reform in Germany and Japan and throughout Western Europe and Asia. It succeeded. Democracy put down roots. Yet two regions remained exempt from this democratizing impulse: Africa, because of its chaos and lack of strategic assets; and the Middle East, because of its oil and apparent benignity. This neglect, in part, led us to the awful events of 9-11. Are we up to the challenge? Hence the awful realization: preventing the next Sept. 11 will require America to engage the Arab world the way it engaged Europe and Asia a half-century ago. Totally. We have long recoiled from such an undertaking. For decades, we tried a far more modest approach to the Arab world. It had three parts: • Pacification: buying off and subsidizing corrupt governments. • Policing: dealing with terrorism as a form of crime, not war. • Patrolling: maintaining a balance of power in the region principally through an offshore naval presence. After Sept. 11, the old offshore, hands-off, see-no-evil policy will not suffice. We now understand the cost of that abdication. It leaves a critical part of the world insulated and isolated — and incubating terrible enemies and terrible weapons. I want peace as much as anyone else, especially now that I'm a father. i don't want my child(ren) to grow up in a world of constant threats from enslavement or annihilation. But pacifism isn't the answer. We must act to spread the seeds of freedom and democracy. My hope is that grassroots-efforts will catalyze change from within before top-down forces are exerted. 1:50:02 PM

Weinberger keynote at Blogtalk Damn, wish I could go to this one! David Weinberger is one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Blogtalk conference on "Weblogs: Web-based publishing, communication and collaboration tools for professional and private use"(Vienna, May 23-24). Hurry up if you want to submit a paper - deadline's February 28th. [Seb's Open Research] 10:18:03 AM

Mary Jo: Microsoft releases Blogging-Tools Is blogging tools officially a market now? Whether we like it or not, I think the answer is YES. Mary Jo: Microsoft Tests the Blogging-Tool Waters. [Scripting News] Here's some of the juicier quotes... It will come as a surprise to many that, with little fanfare, Microsoft officially entered the blogging-tool space last week. At the VSLive! developer conference, Microsoft unveiled five new sample applications built on top of its ASP.Net scripting environment. One of these five — the ASP.Net Community Starter Kit — is a blog builder. The kit provides a module for creating polls, for adding user comments to the site and for rating content. It allows you to expose the content of any Community Starter Kit section as a Web service and/or to display the content of an RSS news feed. AOL has said it is building new community and blogging tools for its membership. Officials with Microsoft's MSN division are on record as saying they are considering providing similar tools. The key is in the RSS feeds. The market is mature for tools that build websites. The next twist will be tools that build websites that stream (aka weblogs). 10:17:04 AM

The three stages of blog-awareness... This is so true. My friends look at me like I'm crazy whenever I try to explain the potential for weblogs and RSS feeds. They'll get it soon enough. They just need a better experience than what's currently being offered! The three stages of blog-awareness - one of my lawyer friends who is tech-savvy and runs a cool website has recently been made aware of blogs. After a few weeks of studying the blog phenomenon he sends me an E-mail and reports the following: "OK, a couple of weeks ago I knew nada about the subject of blogs. Here is my take on the 3 stages of blogging: 1) There must be something to blogs because so many people are into it, but I don't have a clue. 2) OK, it does seem kind of cool and there is much, much more to it then I expected. I just don't see any really practical applications. 3) Oh my God, the things I can do with this are coming to me faster than I can keep up with." Well, looks like another one has been assimilated. We who have already been assimilated know that resistance is futile. Apparently, he's working hard in his laboratory on some new fangled way of doing things that will revolutionize the world. Man, I love it when the complete absence of a plan comes together. [Ernie the Attorney] 10:10:33 AM

Danger Beta SDK coming I bet my bro Steve is all over this! Danger has announced that it will ship a beta version of its SDK to developers in one week. This has been long-promised, and would allow hackers to roll their own tools and apps for the T-Mobile SideKick (and other HipTop devices as they are licensed) -- I'm hoping that we get the kind of cambrian explosion of software for these devices that vaulted the PalmPilot to success over the Newton. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, David!) [Boing Boing] 10:04:33 AM

Track new eBay auctions over RSS The ultimate classified ads website finally has an RSS feed! But I'll just wait until eBay ads to their site proper, so that I can subscribe to a feed directly from them. eBayTools is a little perl script that takes some search terms, feeds them to eBay and returns the resulting auctions as an RSS feed. LinkDiscuss (via The Shifted Librarian) [Boing Boing] 10:02:17 AM

BlogStreet - visualize your blog neighborhood Too bad it doesn't appear to work on Mac OS X in Safari with Java 1.4.1dp10 This is amazing. More from Joi, Dave and Veer, who developed it. [Doc Searls] 9:57:59 AM

Kevin Lynch - Blog brainstorming Wow, how's this for synchronicity. I just found Kevin's weblog earlier this week and was asking my friend David G. about him. I'm hoping to meet Kevin soon, and convince him that weblogs will be consumed more and more within desktop news aggregator apps, NOT in web browsers, and to consider the ramifications of that. I've been brainstorming with some teams here at Macromedia about how we might help with software for the blog world, and I'm interested in what you all think. Are there things you wish were easier to do? Are there things you can't do but wish you could? Is everything just fine as is? For example, I know from designing this blog that it's pretty difficult to create a blog design visually, since Dreamweaver doesn't recognize the special MovableType tags (or the templates from other systems like Blogger). Also, Contribute makes it easy to edit content on HTML pages, but it might be useful to also post content to blogs with it. ColdFusion could better support assembly of microcontent. Flash has been used to enable some experiments in audio and videoblogs, but are there other rich interfaces we should explore with it? If you have thoughts about this topic please post a comment or send me a note, and we'll see what might be possible. Thanks! [Kevin Lynch] 9:54:01 AM