Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Bruce Sterling's Contrarian View of Open Source. More required reading here for keeping up with the ongoing dialogue in blogspace. It doesn't surprise me that science fiction writers like Sterling and Cory are playing such a big role in shaping the emerging philosophy of this internetworked world we're building. I've always felt that my hypergeek years of reading sci-fi from Bradbury, Asimov, and Heinlein, to the Niven/Zelazny generation, through the cyberpunk era (everyone still genuflects to William Gibson) and lately the more literary fiction of Iain Banks (not forgetting genre-splitters from Philip Dick to Doris Lessing) gave me a bit of head start into the future or, more importantly, a way to project forward current social and tech trends and imagine where they might lead. I said to one of my writer friends last year "We're all science fiction writers now." That is, unless you're writing historical work, just writing about the present involves narrating an sharp evolving edge of technological and cultural change. Funny now that I often get the same thrill I used to reading sci-fi from reading brilliant reconstructions of earlier time period (so, in fact, historical writing is just as much as way of commenting on humanity-through-time-including-now as futuristic writing), such as the completely realized Aubrey/Maturin world of the late lamented Patrick O'Brian and Alan Furst's brilliant WWII espionage thrillers. Back to open source, here are a few choice quotations to tempt you into reading Sterling's whole talk: Open Source, basically, is about hanging out with the cool guys. It's very tribal, and it's very fraternal. It's all about Eric, and Linus, and RMS, and Tim and Bruce and Tom and Larry. These are guru charisma guys. They're like artists, like guys running an art movement. Guys who dress up with halos and wear wizard hats. (Funny, I pitched a project to my agent last year that would have been a profile of the leading personalities in the open source movement. My working title was Open Sorcerers.) And, here, some choice words about a few industries with which I'm somewhat familiar: Given that there is a ferocious triple dominance of Microsoft on operating systems, Intel in chips and Dell in hardware, the computer industry is finally getting boring. Almost as boring as my own business, the book business. It's still pretending to innovate, but its glamour routine has gotten all ritualized. The machines are slow, the programs are bloated, the changes are cosmetic, just like the heyday of Detroit's Big Three carmakers, so many years ago. [Radio Free Blogistan] 7:27:36 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Great paper!! How to Be a Leader in Your Field: A Guide for Students in Professional Schools http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/leader.html 7:05:59 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Entropy, big-KM, klogging and the wheel. Roland's Natural Klog Progression.. I spoke of four klogging roles last week: catalyst, coach, armorer, practice leader. Matt Mower advocates the the role of "Intranet Editor:" Much as the users of a Wiki should occasionally re-factor pages that are becoming "busy" I think that a good intranet editor should be grooming the klogs in their organization and drawing together useful strangs to form part (or all) of the static intranet. Roland Tanglao builds on this: I think a natural progression for knowledge is: blog breaking news harvest it periodically (say weekly) into an FAQ and/or other knowledge base type of documents Put the link into a a directory that supports transclusion like Manila style directories. K-Log => (FAQ or other knowlegebase article) => directory.   K-Logs need to be periodically (at least once a month) harvested for content that should go into an FAQ or other knowledgebase document and links that that should go into a directory. This is the job of a K-Log editor :-)! I have been trying to do this with VanEats but after a klog gets to a certain size, it really needs to have some time set aside for it. Practice Leader is probably the closest to a dedicated multi-author editor. Summarizing work in a field, showing the aggregate progress and useful threads. Structuring knowledge into FAQs or other KM systems may be a natural progression, especially as klogging tools and KM tools build bridges. Entropy, bad. Fighting entropy, expensive, slow.  Self-review is a powerful tool for learning. Going over my own posts for the past week, month, and quarter has shown patterns I missed, ideas I was skirting but never wrote outright. It reinforced brief social connections, blogs to which I linked to and people with whom I briefly corresponded. It takes concentrated time and effort. It helps me to print out all the pages on my blog for that period; something about shuffling through paper. Folks are trying hard to automate this work. Summarizers. Cluster analysis. Text to Structure converters. Taxonomy systems. But the expert author of the original content is often the best judge of relevance. [a klog apart] » I think one of the things about klogs is that are no better than any other KM system when it comes to entropy.  In fact they are likely to be a hell of a lot worse -- it's just the entropy matters less.  Any information system that isn't properly maintained has the potential to quickly deteriorate into chaos. The fact is that most people don't want to have to find just the right place to put something.  Most people aren't going to review what they have done.   You can force this behaviour, you can encourage it.  But is it really necessary that everyone has to become a librarian in order to function in a knowledge environment? My alternative is that we recognize and promote the value of good editing (and, hence, good editors).  Have an editor/practice leader to head each area whose responsibility it is to aggregate good knowledge.  Then reward them when they do it well.   Example:  Look at the number of search engine queries for specific keywords.  Tie those keywords to projects/areas.  If the number of searches trends downwards something is working.  Okay, too simplistic? Then suggest something better! An area I have been thinking about is how I would integrate the idea of uploading files to a KM system when klogging.  One approach would be to provide some kind of clever dialogue to allow the user to specify where they want the file to end up.  That sounds like hard work for me & for the user. Alternative strategy:  Allow the user to put a file in an enclosure.  Radio will upstream it to the KM server as part of the RSS feed.  The KM server will toss the file into an upload bucket in an area based upon the metadata of the post (ala liveTopics).  It's then up to the practice leader for that area to decide where the document actually belongs and move it there (or indeed if it belongs at all). Is this less efficient?  Maybe so.  Is it more effective?  I think so. Agree? Disagree?  Ideas? [Curiouser and curiouser!] 6:18:06 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

More on licensing, closer to a decision. Okay I've just read the first document that is really convincing.  It's by the guys behind Zope and discusses in detail their reasons for going open source.  This is the first concrete business-plan backed reasoning I've come across and it makes for compelling reading.  Just need to go check that Zope are still in business! Here are the important points: Going open source will increase our user base by a factor of 100 within three months. Wider brand and stronger identity leads to more consulting and increased valuation on our company. Open source gives rock solid, battle-tested, bulletproof software on more platforms and with more capabilities than closed source, thus increasing the value of our consulting. Fostering a community creates an army of messengers, which is pretty effective marketing. This is not the last innovation we'll make. In the status quo, the value of packaging the software as a product would approach zero, as we had zero market penetration. What is the value of a killer product with few users? The cost to enter the established web application server market was going to be prohibitive. The investment grows us into a larger, more profitable company, one that can make a credible push to create a platform via open source. Since our consulting is only on the platform, a strong platform is imperative. Open source makes the value of our ideas more apparent, thus the perceived value of the company is apparent. Our architecture is "safer" for consulting customers. With thousands of people using it, the software is far less marginal. The customer is able to fix things themselves or reasonably find someone to do it for them. Finally, the software will "exist forever". Dramatically increasing the base of users and sites using it gives us a tremendous boost in "legitimacy". The exit plan isn't about the golden eggs (the intellectual property) laid last year. It is about the golden goose and tomorrow's golden eggs. The shelf life of eggs these days is shrinking dramatically, and the value of an egg that no one knows about is tiny. Give the eggs away as a testament to the value of the goose and a prediction of eggs to come. The community can work with us to dramatically increase the pace of innovation and responsiveness to new technical trends, such as XML and WebDAV. Ride the coattails of the nascent Open Source community and its established channels such as RedHat. OSS has a certain buzz that is greater than its real customer-closing value, but this buzz is getting hot. Moving aggressively towards Open Source can make us a category killer for the web application server market segment. We believe like hell in what we're doing. Others believe in us as well. We should follow our instincts. Some of these issues are obviously more important to a company having taken investment with it's eye on a future IPO but I think they are all good, important points.  Those that seem most applicable (and inherently good) to me I've marked in red.   They seem very persuasive. One implication is that the direction of my company will be entirely towards VAR services & consulting.  I shall be abandoning the idea of making money from software licenses (for my own software). Something to think about... [Curiouser and curiouser!] 1:20:53 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Things I Want From Radio An improved word processor, better remote access, and clear instructions. Radio (the software used to create this weblog) is a good product, cheap and reliable and easy to use for the very basic jobs of publishing directly onto the Web. These are some ways I as a user think it could be better. Beefed-up word processing would be nice. One missing essential is a spell-checker. Another thing I'd like is better control over fonts--I have trouble matching my blog text with common fonts and sizes that appear in Windows and email apps. In terms of remote access, the current email system requires the user to be running Radio on another computer. This has severe limitations for people without an always-on Internet connection. I would be willing to pay for an add-on service that let me update from any computer at any time. And I would really appreciate instructions that were in much plainer English. There is a lot of stuff that I just don't understand, and I'm probably ahead of the mass-market curve in terms of comfort with geekspeak. The folks at UserLand, the maker of Radio, know about some and probably all of these issues. No doubt there are technical tradeoffs and other reasons some of the stuff I want isn't here yet--for one thing, we are still in the early days of this medium. But that's my wish list for today. Summer's End The kids go back to school tomorrow. We are all bitter. As the morning cook, it's not getting up early that bugs me; I tend to get up earlier in the summer so I can run before it's too hot. It's the hurry, the mad dash to meet someone else's schedule. I composed a poem for the children this morning: The end of summer/such a bummer/you could load a truck/with how much this sucks. LOTR Revisited We rented Fellowship of the Ring last night. First time Lisa and Syd had seen it, fourth for Elijah and me. Syd liked it and so, to my mild surprise, did Lisa. Frodo is still 20 years too young, and the Balrog on the bridge is still not as good on film as it always was in my head, but it still rocked. I am looking forward to The Two Towers. [EdCone.com] 1:19:59 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Something Unexpected: Scotts Radio. Something Unexpected: Scott's Radio    As the author of the O'Reilly Essential Blogging chapters on Radio, I clearly have a commercial interest in Radio.  You'd think that I'd want people to just buy the Essential Blogging book and NOT give content about Radio for free.  You'd think that but you'd be wrong.  I really want to see Radio do well along with great people like Jake and Lawrence.  And more documentation is pretty much always a frothy good thing for products. So... Inspiration struck me yesterday when I was digging through the 240 gigabytes of digital bile that I call a hard drive(s): O'Reilly cut a lot of my text on the Essential Blogging book.  (these are all labeled as "Missing")  Why not aggregate that content along with my previous writings on Radio and release it as a free book under the GNU Free Documentation License?  This content still gets tons of hits from Google so it's clearly useful.  A quick demand (ok gentle request) to my partner, Gretchen, for "A really cool cover" and within about an hour, she IM'd me the graphic at left.  And I've been in hard core content massage since 3:37 am on this oh so soggy Boston day.  I won't tell you that this content is perfect -- there are clearly some broken links and other editing style things that need to get done.  But there is a lot of content and it's useful.  It'll get improved more over time but following the Open Source mantra of "Release Early and Release Often", I give you: Scott's Radio ==> Read Stories <== [The FuzzyBlog!] 12:34:50 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

liveTopics "Google Jazz". One of the things I really enjoy is learning completely new technology by just trying to make it work. (This is what Dave calls "bootstrapping".) I'm not a programmer, but I can meddle just enough to learn as I go. I have a feeling I'll be doing a lot of exploring with liveTopics. After seeing an explanation of how Marc Barrot added a new macro to his weblog, I added the same template - the result being that you can now see "related" reading for each post I make to this site. (Note: after seeing the initial results, I'm a little disappointed in Google's ability to relate items in its collection to these posts. But that's Google's issue.) This is a great example of how complementary technologies (Radio, activeRenderer, liveTopics) can combine to present a powerful knowledge sharing and distribution platform. Ask yourself this: two years ago, would you have thought it even remotely possible that a desktop application could automatically publish and archive web content, seemlessly integrate API-level calls to the world's most popular search engine, separate presentation from content - all for $40? Radio has some rough edges, but to see this kind of stuff in action is exciting. As I write this, I'm in the midst of a conference where vendors are selling comparable systems for much more money. What separates them from Radio at this point more than anything else is domain expertise. The vendors here know their market (and their users) far better than Userland does. As a result, things that are important in the legal market - security models (including ethical wall security), document profiling, document management, meta data, Outlook integration, etc. - get the most attention. But the difference between Radio as a content management platform and many of the high-end portal platform players is one of degree, not magnitude. Question: is there an opportunity for someone to take Radio as a development platform and build new applications? I'm completely ignorant of Frontier and Manila, but I think that's what they are. I'll have to learn more about them. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 12:19:56 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Just before the blogging inflection point.... MSNBC via Scripting News via Roland Tanglao: 490, 000 blogs and a new blog every 40 seconds! Wow! But the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see. Two thousand new blogs every day is a a grave responsibility and public trust. We are at a tricky stage in a product category's life cycle. The average user's skill level falls as the accellerating newbie influx makes the population grow younger. Now is the: Time for blog usability. Time for localization. Time to work out every big and noticeable bug. Time for measurement and watching the unintended ways people use your tools. Time to wrap dangerous code in GUI so tinkering is only on purpose and  out of accidental reach. This is for all the vendors in this space. The folks who make Radio, Blogger, and the other great tools. And the bold tweakers who make those products better. We have the juice, let's put it in a clean glass with a little parasol. [aka Blue Sky Radio] [Phil Wolff: Blue Sky Radio] 12:00:48 PM    trackback []     Articulate []