Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Tubular Blogging There's a new feature from Sarah Lane on Tech TV's The Screen Savers: "Welcome to the Blog Report." [Bag and Baggage] Nice! 12:33:11 PM

Corante Goes RSS! I'm going to have to find a new site to pick on because the Corante posse has hopped on the RSS bandwagon! Full feeds for all of their great blogs, which I will now actually read! Thanks, Corante!! "In news we hope you'll appreciate: Corante now offers RSS for its blogs! Ad Hominem Amateur Hour The Bottom Line Brain Waves Connected Copyfight Corante on Blogging Got Game IdeaFlow In the Pipeline Living Code Many-to-Many Moore's Lore Open Mind We'll be adding links to them from the respective pages over the course of the day - please alert me to any hiccups you encounter. Huge thanks to the WebCrimson crew!" [The Shifted Librarian] About friggin time! For someone who blazed a trail with online microcontent, Corante was far too slow to accept the absolute necessity of RSS, fighting it really. Glad that struggle is over... and hopefully they don't feel like they lost, because in reality we have all won here! 12:29:39 PM

Blogging On Microsoft's Radar Says Bill Gates Blogging's on BillG's Radar Screen. Blogging's on BillG's Radar Screen Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates noted at yesterday's Newspaper Association of America Annual Convention that Microsoft is very interested in making sure blogging tools are there to support folks doing "bottom-up publishing." [via Microsoft Watch from... [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] [John Lawlor: blogs4business] This tidbit caused quite a stir in the weblog community over the weekend, as various affects wondered which standard, if any, MS would follow. Too bad the state of standards for RSS and weblogs are already in disarray... prime time for a huge player to come in a "restore order". Ug. 12:24:35 PM

Local Government Goes RSS RSS and eGovernment "Brian Sweeting runs the Spanish Fork City web portal. He announced today that RSS feeds are available for city news and upcoming events. This is a great application of XML to eGovernment. I don't know of another government using RSS in this way, but its surprising that they all aren't since its so easy to do. Brian used an RSS generator from Stargeek. If you want the whole calendar, I recommend PHPiCalendar since it does the calendar and the RSS feed all in one." [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] My home library is helping build a community web site that will include blogging and (hopefully) RSS, so I definitely want to look over what Spanish Fork is doing. Very nicely done! [The Shifted Librarian] Governments across the country continue to march forward with RSS. This is great news for our democracy. 12:08:34 PM

ThreadsML.org ThreadsML. Yay, David Weinberger has put up the ThreadsML web site. Discussions around ThreadsML, and hard work on getting QT Pro... [Blur Circle] If you're into the future of conversations - then come on over and check out the posts, Wiki and on-going development of a new data structure for interchangeable threads and APIs to go along with it. It's fun! [Marc's Voice] This looks very good. More than a year ago, my bro Steve was quick to tackle the issue of threading weblog entries across weblogs, since he wanted to see how our entries intertwined. ThreadsML might offer a solution that everyone can work with. 12:06:57 PM

It's not the End of Email, But Watch RSS Grow EmailSherpa: Exclusive Michael Wexler Interview Part II: The Future of Email Marketing & Publishing e-Dialog's Michael Wexler has been researching email metrics and use ever since he worked for then-start-up Hotmail. Now, in Part II of our exclusive interview he shares insights on: The problem with requiring confirmed subscriptions Landing pages that convert more clicks Why does Hotmail kill your hotlinks at five minutes? The future of email - retro-Pointcast? [marketingfix] I wonder what TonyG thinks of the constant references to PointCast when people try to grok RSS and weblogs... 12:05:07 PM

Macromedia Press Release RSS Feed A new RSS feed went live today - http://www.macromedia.com/go/news_rss - this provides an outline of the current news items from the ticker on the home page of macromedia.com. Feel free to provide feedback as comments here.... [An Architect's View] Excellent! How soon before most major tech companies add an RSS feed to their PR sites? 12:02:53 PM

RSS and CSS From News Reader Clients : "One of my concerns about using an aggregator is that I like visiting folk's blogs. The variety of designs complement the actual words of the blog. The plain text, rendered in a soul-less, consistently bland format as viewed using a newsreader is really not the same thing. With newzreader it appears I can easily view the actual page, not just the summary, either using the built-in browser or in my browser of choice." It would be nice to find a way to combine CSS with RSS output. Working on a specification would be very hard though and I don't expect to see anything anytime soon. Since NewsMonster has CSS2 support from Mozilla it would be easy to support this. ... [peerfear.org - Don't fear the peer!] My view is that news aggregators should be very rich indeed. blog entries should look just like their web counter-parts. Someday, i want to aggregate not only news (text) but music, TV ads, TV shows, and movies, too! 11:57:58 AM

What Is Knowledge Continuity Management? The answer is provided by Anne Field in this HBSWK article, Thanks for the (Corporate) Memories. Knowledge continuity management is an offshoot of the field of knowledge management. Where knowledge management concerns capturing and sharing know-how valuable to colleagues performing similar jobs throughout a company, knowledge continuity management focuses on passing critical knowledge from exiting employees to their replacements. And why is it critical to practice it? Essentially for two reasons: first, downsizings; but more importantly because baby boomers are going to retire in droves in the coming years. So what to do to keep your expertise alive inside your company when workers leave? Field guides you step by step to a detailed plan. Here are the seven steps of her plan. Create a knowledge profile Foster mentoring relationships Encourage communities of practice Ensure that passing knowledge on is rewarded Protect people's privacy Decide whether you're interested in recorded knowledge as well And don' forget: Start small Please read the full article for more details. And if you are involved in the field, you might want to read Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave, from Hamilton Beazley, Jeremiah Boenisch and David Harden, published by Wiley. Source: Anne Field, for Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, May 12, 2003 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends] Gosh, I've been using the term "knowledge management" and meaning "knowledge continuity" all along. I think about all the people who have worked at Apple, all the research and prototypes built, all gone to waste when those people walked out the door for (greener) pastures. Yet, somehow, Apple is mining their knowledge base to resurrect old projects like Piles. Ah, it was the patent application that kept it alive. 11:55:35 AM

RSS and News aggregators I've totally been disabused of my enthusiasm with RSS and news aggregators. This is after trying a variety of products, one paid for some time. I've come to the conclusion, at least for now, that whilst RSS is a great syndication format and the idea of a news aggregator is very much something I'd like to use, it just isn't there yet for my purposes. The major problem for me comes down to the following: Too many sources. When I hit over 100 different sources of information, the products become unusable. Too little time. Desktop news aggregators punish you for not being fanatical about keeping up with the latest. If you stop reading for a few days, you have a huge number of unread posts which simply get marked as read. Anything useful from that source gets skipped. Lack of emergent categorisation. Folders are a great metaphor but they are over-used. All the aggregators want me to tell them what a pariticular source is about and want me to make sure that's the place for them in future. Never mind most sources are rarely about a single-topic and I usually want to read about some area at a time. Lack of emergent prioritisation. There's no way for me to know what's worth reading and what's not. A combination of the author's own prioritisation (like email) plus a network indicator of importance would help me filter out the important items when in a rush or with an excessive backlog. Lack of a decent outliner, archiver and integration with other communication tools. Reading news is not a one-way process for me. I need to make notes, shuffle things for later consideration, pass them on to friends, integrate them with email, blog them, code them and scribble little stick men on them. For the most part, aggregators are very poor at most of these tasks and require a third-party app for what they do provide which is usually just email forwarding. Lack of clarity of RSS usage. Each source provides something different which is fine for the source but annoying for me. Some provide full posts (or provide a full post feed). Some comments. Some images and full markup. Some just text. All this is fine except my usage of a news aggregator has to be continually supplemented with a browser. Yet another desktop programme. I've got too many apps which are trying to wire me up with the network, allow me to do programming or just keeping my system usable. So I routinely clean out anything from my system or my daily usage which doesn't add value to my life. That is after a good period of geeky playing with it. Now, news aggregators just don't add more value than a browser and blogroll. I need a browser. My aggregator usually makes me use it. Google makes me use it and Google is my friend (sometimes my best friend). My documentation for various technologies make me use it. Anything with decent media makes me use it. By comparison the news aggregator is less than essential. So that's my rant about news aggregators. I hope some day I'll get what I'm looking for but I'm not really going to adopt this new information pull mechanism in preference to the browser. [MonkeyX - Hairy Thoughts] A very nice summary of the problems with the current crop of news aggregators. I completely agree. Interesting that he implies that a news aggregator should replace his web browser, and I've been thinking along similar lines. The first incarnation of the web involved "browsing" which was novel in and of itself. The next generation must be much more productive, and should be focused on automated and intelligent information retrieval. 11:46:39 AM