Thursday, June 20, 2002

You can't be a serious innovator unless and until you are ready, willing and able to seriously play. "Serious play" is not an oxymoron; it is the essence of innovation.                                               Michael Schrage, Serious Play 1:00:31 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Related according to the Google API. Doc Searls, Sam Ruby, and Jonathan Peterson are all pointing at Dave Sifry's Google API hack for Moveable Type. Sifry writes: "Look down at the bottom of this blog entry. You'll see a line that starts, 'Related Stories:' followed by 10 links. These links are created by a google search on the words in the title of this blog entry." It turns out that this is pretty easy to do in Radio as well. As a test, I created a macro called googleTitleSearch, which you can drop in your Macros folder. With the addition of a snippet of code to my item template, I now have the top 10 Google results for the title of my weblog posts. If you want to try it out, here's how: Note: You must first create an account with Google, and configure Radio to use the key associated with your account. Follow steps 3 and 4a on this page to get your key. If you want something simpler that doesn't require signing up with Google, you might try out the googleIt macro. 1) Download googleTitleSearch.txt to your Macros folder. (It's a sub-folder of your Radio UserLand program folder.) 2) Edit your item template, adding the following macro to the template, where you want the search results to appear: <%local (adrpost = @weblogData.posts.["<%paddedItemNum%>"]); return (googleTitleSearch (adrpost))%> (Be careful to make sure that the macro appears on a single line in your template. Line-breaks in the macro will cause an error on your page.) 3) Make sure that the preference for Item-level Title and Link is checked. 4) Create a new post, with a title. Click the Post button. That's it. For any posts that have a title, you'll get a Google search result for the words in the title, along with your post. [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 11:52:46 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Take Your Own Advice Scott, Take Your Own Advice!. Take Your Own Advice Scott, Take Your Own Advice! A few weeks ago, I write this piece: Researching a New Client.  Dewayne pushed me to write this and he was so correct.  I wish I had thought to apply it to my choice of hosting vendors.  My misery in this area continues.  It's the reason why things are late -- we still don't feel comfortable with reliability yet.  So here's my suggestion before you start business with a new vendor: Read this Follow Technique #4, Step 2.  If I had just done this I would have saved more than 1 week's worth of effort.  Sigh.  I never was good at taking my own advice.  And, I can promise you this -- you haven't heard the end of this approach to reputation checking.  More soon.  I'm so frustrated with myself now I can't even see straight. [The FuzzyBlog!] 11:44:14 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Right on the money. John Robb. How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator. [klogs] A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday.  That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand.  Applied across a company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year.  The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department.  Accurate K-Logging of current activities:  status, thinking, plans, projects, etc. Online presentations, to-do lists, project plans via outlines.  K-Log personal portals that integrate all connection info (e-mail, IM, phone, address, bio, resume, picture). Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] » John Robb's right on the money again.  I'm really starting to love reading John's blogging (via my aggregator of course) I'm looking at everything I do now in terms of whether it can be output as OPML for instant outlining, or as RSS for aggregation, or both.   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 11:01:53 AM    trackback []     Articulate []