Tuesday, September 10, 2002

FROM [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] Tyranny, Terror, and Technology.  Some thoughts about the intersection between the challenges confronting business, and those confronting government and society. UNQUOTE Ray Ozzie's Weblog] This is a dynamite thought provoking essay - I highly recommend it - my words of wisdom pale in comparison. I believe that beaurocracy, and inter-communications within an organization, is like glue. Too much and the enterprise is all gummed up with rules that get in the way of doing the job. Too little and everyone is flying off in different directions, counter productive. The challenge is to get it just right, so that you have an agile team effort. This is further complicated by the organization fluctuating in size, so you need different strategies for different scales of operation.  Also there is a spread of individual skills of participants in the organization, so until you get everyone up to speed on something, there has to be another way of getting the job done.  Any time things are changed, there will be transitional confusion. Organizations can be too large and unwieldy. Remember the book The Mythical Man Month, which I consider to be one of the classics on software engineering? Basically the permutations of all the different people who need to intercommunicate can bog down some things so that nothing can get done. Thus it is essential to organize focus teams and have a hierarchy such that there is no wasted baggage in your structure that gets in the way of a lean and mean team. An excess of organizations focused on different tasks is good in business. Competition leads to better Quality, Features, Economies. An excess of organizations with overlapping responsibilities is bad in government. They can have turf wars that get in the way of them doing what they are supposed to be doing. [Al Macintyre's Radio Weblog] 7:06:30 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Another improvement to Radio as a blogging tool. Thanks for another useful improvement to Radio.  This took me about 4 minutes to install, including time for adding short names to a handful of categories that needed it. Now I can see all the categories I've posted a particular item to. Get Your Permalinks Here, They're Lovely. With regard to my last post about making backlinking easier, I've modified UserLand's code to make it easy to see a particular post's categories and get at the matching permalink. Grab and import workspace.weblogRecentPosts.ftsc, then change your #desktopWebsiteTemplate.txt so that the call to weblogRecentPosts now reads: <%workspace.weblogRecentPosts ()%>* You'll get a checkmark for the home page and any categories to which the item has been posted, with each checkmark linked to the permament location for the item within that category (unless it's not being rendered, in which case you'll be told). If you wade into weblogData.categories and set a shortName for the category, that'll be used instead of the full name, saving a lot of space. Enjoy! * If you can't read that in your news aggregator, follow the link to the item itself. It'll all be fixed in RSS 2.0, with any luck. [Deadly Bloody Serious] [McGee's Musings] 7:02:23 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Microsoft MSWeb case study. Over the last couple of years I have seen some impressive demonstrations of the Microsoft intranet MSWeb. However it has not been well documented (least of all on the Microsoft site) so I was very pleased to be alerted by James Robertson to a case study of MSWeb by Peter... [Intranet Focus Blog] 6:58:47 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Getting more professions into the blogosphere.... Dane Carlson recently sent me this email: Your "Weblogs By Profession" page is very interesting.  Thank you for building it. You're right in describing webloggers as those people who: "must interface to ordinary people, are pattern explainers, have little to hide and more to share and are not afraid of writing." As more people begin to understand that every occupation that deals with the public should display these characteristics, maybe more professions will be represented in the blogosphere. I certainly hope so. But many organizations (the larger ones in particular) hire people precisely to *hide* stuff from the public, not to explain and share. Things will only change for these organizations when they slowly die down because customers are getting smarter and better educated (from reading blogs or surfing sites like epinions, for example), causing a decline in their revenue streams. Expect smaller organizations to get a clue much more quickly. Blogspace is already tremendously exciting because of its diversity. It can only get better as more people drop by. [Seb's Open Research] 6:51:39 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

For the new webmaster: Newcomer's Guide from Webmaster World. [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson] 11:11:19 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Sir Winston Churchill. "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." [Quotes of the Day] [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 11:10:21 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Good Question! I too have recently come through (I may still be going through a mourning process). I have certainly cried more during this experience than I have in the rest of my life. Some people refuse to be seen in public crying and will wait until they are alone to cry making it difficult to know if they cry or not. My question this morning concerns crying. Is a certain amount of crying necessary to complete the process of mourning, and if so, does the crying need to be spread out over time or can you do it marathon-style? When I learned how to type, I ignored the instructions that came with the program, which said to practice just an hour a day, and instead typed three weeks straight, eight hours a day. No doubt it took longer this way in terms of total hours, but I also reach proficiency much faster in terms of days. When I work out, I sometimes wonder what I’d do if you could distill the pain of an hour-long session into a single minute. Which would I choose — one minute of super intense pain, or one hour of on-again, off-again discomfort? I realize there are people who don’t cry at all, or very little. How does that work? What happens when they get sad? Or do they simply not get sad? Perhaps they get sad a little, then immediately do something to stop feeling sad. I know I’ve been avoiding certain songs on the CDs I’ve been listening to while packing. I’ll hear three notes, feeling a wave of heaviness flood my chest, and rush over and hit the NEXT button. It’s not that I’m afraid of crying; I welcome it, actually; it’s just that not every moment is a convenient moment to lose it. Two days ago in the gym, some damn song came on the radio about giving love one more chance, so I had to walk of the room and quietly weep on the stairs. I was nervous the whole time that someone would come up behind me. 9:37:20 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

UK weblogs with RSS feeds. Mo Morgan has a list of UK weblogs which have RSS feeds, another useful offshoot from the GBLogs. posted by Jim Hughes at [Feet Up!] 9:26:10 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Passport to the pub. An instructive guide to the British cultural icon, the public house. Passport to the pub is almost essential for visitors to the UK, and wryly amusing for locals. Snippet: Another baffled visitor asked What is it with you British? Why do you have to play all these silly games? Why can't you just go to a bar and have a drink and talk like the rest of the world?Thanks to moof for the link, his original post is here. posted by Jim Hughes at [Feet Up!] 9:25:08 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Very Cool idea from Russell Beattie. Around the World Game. I was thinking last night before I went to bed that you can make a sort of game from leaving messages for people on your blog. Let's call it the Around the World game. I leave a message for someone - probably one of my referrers, that person then copies that message and puts it on their blog for someone else to read - purposefully choosing someone I don't know. The messages always has a link to the blog it's meant for and the blog it's from. Now, this continues for a while, and suddenly I see a message for me on another blog I read a lot. Cool. Now I should be able to back-track, following the links to the original source (maybe me). It's like a combination of a chain-letter and a doubly-linked list. There's always a pointer to and from. Let's try it out... it's a recursive post, so I need to submit this and then edit it for the full effect, but you'll see what I'm doing in a second. To: Jim Hughes From: Russell Beattie This is an Around the World Message. Copy this text onto your blog and leave this message for someone else. Eventually you'll read a blog someday and there will be a message for you and you might be able to "follow" the links back around the world! Cool hey? Let's see how this works... -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] 9:14:52 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Hey Gregor - Thanks for the link. I think I may be able to get behind the Texans, I really liked the stuff I saw about David Carr. He seems to have his head on his shoulders. I am looking forward to seeing more of him and the Texans. I really wish the Steelers would have won last night. And this would be another good example of schadenfreude. Dewayne blogs someone who viewed last night's game with what I suspect to be a similar sense of glee (alright, schadenfreude) as moi. It was the first time an NFL expansion team won their opener since the Vikings did it in 1961. And for Houston to drub Dallas so badly on their way to doing it, too. Loved it. Just loved every last bit of it. the Texans won... heh.... Let me make this very clear. I hate the Dallas Cowboys. I grew up in Houston, and was a 'Luv Ya Blue'... [inluminent/weblog] I just wish Steve Sobol and the kids at NFL Films were still following the weirdness that was the Cowboys training camp (HBO's Hard Knocks series -- I won't blink it because of their Flash stupidity and the insane number of cookies they'll try to feed your browser. If you want it, you can find it.) all the way thru the season. Watching Jerry break the news that someone wasn't gonna be "part of the 53" was positively creepy. An episode showing Jerry Jones' reaction to this loss would have been just delicious. Gotta go home now, and prepare to cheer for Antwan Randle El and da resta dem Stillers. Dey's playin' tonite, don'tcha know? [gRadio] 9:12:00 AM    trackback []     Articulate []