Wednesday, June 4, 2003

More examples of micro-content iComic. For the record, iComic rocks extremely hard indeed.... [Ben Hammersley.com] I wonder if Anil Dash had comics in mind - when he expostulated on the future of micro-content. But comics are indeed - yet another kind of micro-content. I still wanna be able to flow micro-content through distribution systems like blogrolling.com! Reviews are coming, so are conversations. And in the future - everyone will have digital lifestyle aggregators - which will feature ALL of their favorite and personal micro-content - right at theior fingertips. [Marc's Voice] Gosh, I was just thinking this myself. These comic readers (there are 3 on Mac OS X) are aggregators of a specific kind of content. So, can a more general aggregator be built to include both weblogs and comic strips? How does that generalize into all kinds of micro-content? Or are we really just describing an RSS feed for the various comic strips websites? 8:19:34 PM

Adapting Blog Technologies to Corporate e-Newsletters reviews blogging as a disruptive technology an Adapting Blog Technologies to Corporate e-Newsletters reviews blogging as a disruptive technology and how to take advantage of it for corporate e-newsletters.... [Blogging News] Bingo! 8:08:26 PM

Walking the Virtual Halls I can't say that I agree with Don Park on this one. In every organization in which I've been a manager, hierarchy becomes unavoidable because of course it's essential to utilize organizational network forms to cope with complexity. But hierarchy by its very nature causes filtering and interpretation, and in order to truly keep a continuous "feel" for what's going on in the organization and in the market, I strive for more sophisticated network forms that inject more than a bit of the "edge" into my thinking. Don says that "the CEO is not likely to know about, let alone subscribe to, a lowly QA engineer's blog." Perhaps. But I seek out and truly relish interaction with people at the edge of my organization. When I find a hairy bug (e.g. a deadlock, or a comms or memory issue in the product), I love having the developer come in and debug it face-to-face. It gives me a chance not only to understand more about the product's internals, but also you have NO idea what I learn while chit-chatting while waiting for debug files to copy, etc. Design & implementation issues, stuff that people have been building off to the side, things about the organization, rumors, etc. And of course they also milk me for what's going on in my travels, in my official role as Overhead at the organization. I love listening to an individual sales rep or SE when we're on a sales call, because I get a better feel for what's actually going on with customers or prospects. I try to pattern-match across reps so that I can see what might be improved in the sales process, rather than just listening to my VP of Sales. I love interacting with designers and developers when doing my Thursday detailed feature design reviews. I suppose this is just classic "walking the halls", etc., but I feel as though without this kind of direct nonhierarchical contact I would lose touch with my organization, and people throughout would know I was disconnected and would lose respect for me. With regard to blogs, I do agree that we need to figure out some kind of structure, but I don't think it should be strictly hierarchical. I've got nearly 150 feeds that I monitor in one way or another - some employee, some not - and of course it's way too much to consume everything. I've asked myself "if you could only read 10, which would you read?" But I've found that this is the wrong question. Reading those 10 would be like only having meetings with my direct reports. I look to blogs for serendipity, and I won't truly understand what's going on "out there" unless I mix it up a bit. So rather than hierarchical blogs, maybe the answer is a mix of some close (recurring) and some far (random)? Maybe I should constantly read my 10 favorite feeds, and have the reader spit a bunch of randomness at me from the remaining 140? All I know is that I need to mix some "practice" with the "process", to force some chaos into the system rather than just treating it as merely complex and manageable - which it most certainly is not. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] So, organizational blogs allows you to walk the virtual halls regularly, thus increasing your orgs information exchange rate. 8:02:00 PM

Synderilla I posted a new drop of Synderilla that's based on Dimtry's May 9 release, and adds support for gzip/deflate compression, xhtml:body based items and multiple plugins (both IBlogThis and IBlogExtension). [Simon Fell] Well, here's the beauty of open source projects. Someone can start it, get tired or whatever, and someone else just takes over. Kudos to Simon for taking the reigns, but maybe Dmitry was right to put it aside... with all the RSS aggregators out there, what will Synderilla offer above and beyond the field? 7:58:29 PM

Are you an isoblogger? Blogging thoughts and philosophies is a neat rant that proposes a taxonomy of bloggers according to their linking behaviors. (via Stuart) [Seb's Open Research] ug. 7:55:33 PM

ENT as a RSS2.0 extension Let's get ready, now. One of the things we talked about at dinner last night was the stupidity of forking RSS among the little guys. In the future we're going to look back at that as the most bone-headed thing since Marc Andreessen called Windows a bunch of device drivers. Here's how Microsoft is going to fuck all of us. Their blogging tool will support RSS 2.0. Basic stuff like title, link, description, and maybe to be nice, a few extras like guid, category, and generator. Then they're going to define a namespace with poorly documented stuff the rest of us don't understand. Some of us will support Microsoft's extensions, others won't. Either way it won't matter. They'll be able to say they're supporting the standard and we won't be able to say they're not. And they'll add and subtract features unpredictably until users get the idea that it's safer just to stay with MS, and they'll own yet another market. Now get this -- it doesn't have to be that way. We could establish a profile of RSS 2.0 and implement strict compliance with that profile in the major blogging tools. We could give that profile a name, and jointly market it to users. Then when MS comes in, the users would know what to insist on. It would make history, it would be the first time a market anticipated Microsoft tactics, and took effective, preventive measures against it. Re-inventing RSS was a bad thing to do. I forgive you. Now fix it, quickly and let's get ready to survive the onslaught. [Scripting News] OK - so Paolo and Matt have extended RSS 2.0 - staying within the structure of the namespaces feature. So what's wrong with that? Is that what Dave calls "strict complaince within the profile"? If not - how would it be different? How would he embed topics into an RSS feed? [Marc's Voice] I think Dave has a point: who cares about the standards, as long as the user experience is good. And taking that a step further, who says it has to be MS that wins that war? 7:52:53 PM

Blogging Internally A few folks have asked me whether Macromedia uses blogs internally. I haven't seen too many in operation but the subject came up again this morning so I set up Movable Type on my team's server and created a team... [An Architect's View] I hope we'll hear more about his experiences, particularly in terms of tools for maintaining the weblog by all of its contributors (pun not intended...?). 7:50:24 PM