Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Microsoft tests dressed up Web software. A preliminary version of Content Management Server 2002, which helps businesses create and maintain Web content, gets a test run on Tuesday. [CNET News.com] 6:08:53 AM

Monday, July 08, 2002

Faseb.  Unravelling the mysteries of protein folding.  Cool.  Nice data on prions (protein fragements that cause mad cow and CWD).   Prions cause proteins in the brain to fold into a prion.  What I didn't know that prions could be produced as a bi-product of transgenic bacteria.  Very scary. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 8:32:17 AM

Monday, July 01, 2002

Identity. Last week, eWeek ran three good articles on the state of single sign-on technologies, products and standards. Covered are both web-services issues and (particularly via case studies) federated identity for existing intranet and extranet applications. The individual articles are: Averting Web Identity Crisis (an overview with case studies) Liberty Alliance or Passport XML Drives ID Management Systems [Blogarithms] 5:59:20 AM

Monday, June 17, 2002

We're Broke: The Economics of a Web Community. I come to you, Kuro5hin community, in an hour of need. Great googly-moogly, could that be any more pompous? Nevertheless, it's true. You see, I found out last week that K5 is out of money. Our last remaining funds just went off to the gub'mint for quarterly taxes. I won't get a paycheck this month. Subscription income will help a little, but in the longer term, the prognosis is bleak. Frankly, I don't know what to do. So I thought I'd take a little time and lay out the structure and workings of the media business in general, and K5 in particular, and ask what you think I should do. [kuro5hin.org] 8:17:55 AM

Thursday, June 13, 2002

How to build an RSS digital dashboard using Manila and Radio (a low tech approach).  The concept is simple.  In addition to getting new posts from news sites and other weblogs, RSS feeds can contain data from corporate systems.  Sales data, financial data, supply data, data from partner systems, etc.  Using this method, employees could get up to the minute data from multiple applications on a single webpage -- a personal digital dashboard. So, for example, I could be a sales manager at a Fortune 500 company.  I want to track information available to me from multiple corporate applications, and I don't want to run the client software for each app on my desktop.  I only want the data.  Here is what the feed could look like: Sale:  Customer name:  Proctor and Gamble,  Date:  June 12, 2002, Amount:  $2.3 m,  Made by:  Tom Durst, E-mail: tdurst@widget.com, K-Log:  http://tdurst.widget.com ,  Product: Widget XYZ So, in order to offer employees better access to data, the IT department creates granular RSS feeds for the main corporate apps (CRM, ERP, financial, etc.).  Using Radio I merely subscribe to the feeds I want to monitor form a list on the Intranet (using the news subscription page).  Every hour I get all the latest data from each of the apps.  Further, I can take any of this data, add an annotation/comment/POV, and publish it to my K-Log.  Sweet.  Further, I could create published views of this data using the Multi-author tool for Radio (this tool lets me select the feeds I want to group and publish them to category specific weblog).  Manila works in a similar fashion.  I can publish feeds I want to subscribe to using a simple macro.  Using Manila, create a new page for your site (a story), place the macro below in the "source view" of the editing box.  Here is the macro: {viewRssBox ("http://www.nanotechnews.com/nano/rdf", boxTitle:"Nanotech News", align:"center", width:200, frameColor:"#000000", titleBarTextColor:"#ADD8E6", titleBarColor:"#FFFFFF", boxFillColor:"#FFFFFF", timeZone:"PST", hspace:0, vspace:0, maxItems:20)} Note:  replace the URL for the RSS feed I have in the above with the feed you want to monitor, change the name, and presto.  You now have a page on your site with the data from the RSS feed.  In fact, using Manila you could build a complete portal of aggregated newsfeeds without much technical knowledge. If I was really motivated, I could use Radio's outliner to build a directory of aggregated feeds. Digital dashboards should be something anybody can create, customize, and control.  Don't let your IT department launch into a multi-million $$ universal application portal when a simple approach like this could be accomplished in days for short dollars. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 6:43:29 AM

Took me a while to find this: the list of feeds from Moreover.com... [rosewater] Thanks Pete! 6:42:55 AM

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

America: Broken As Designed. The most significant test of any system is how it handles unanticipated situations. A well-designed and implemented system is one which can continue to operate correctly (i.e. one which continues to embody its design principles and function according to its specifications) in a situation which was not considered in its creation. A system which does not must be considered flawed, either in design or implementation. While those of here who are scientists and engineers use this principle of evaluation daily in our work, it's likely that few of us (and probably even fewer in the general population) have applied this principle to the State(s) in which we live. Since the United States, in its current form, is over two hundred years old (and one of its designers, Thomas Jefferson himself, advocated such a review every twenty years), a public review of how well it has proceeded is long overdue. [kuro5hin.org] 6:23:20 AM

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

First people injected with ID chips, sales drive kicks off. Round up the couch potatoes... [The Register] [rosewater] 5:52:57 AM

NY Times: 2 Tinkerers Say They've Found a Cheap Way to Broadband. At the core of their plan is the inexpensive wireless data standard known as Wi-Fi or 802.11b, which is already shaking up the communications industry, threatening to undermine the business plans of cellular phone companies by offering a much cheaper method for mobile access to the Internet. [Tomalak's Realm] 5:50:46 AM

Washington Post: Burden of the Board. This article describes how many venture investors are re-thinking their involvement as board members in this post-Enron world. Lew thinks the concern over board seats will push venture capital firms to appoint more "designated hitters" to boards -- that is, people who are affiliated with the firms and act on their behalf, but who aren't full-time venture capitalists. General Atlantic of Stamford, Conn., for example, has asked philanthropist Mario Morino to represent GA on the board of Ai Metrix in Herndon, and Proxicom founder Raul Fernandez to do the same for Critical Path. Fernandez, who recently gave up his day-to-day responsibilities at the Reston office of Dimension Data, the company that bought Proxicom, said he's expecting compensation for outside board members, including venture capitalists, will go up. "You've got to be active in every board because of the increased liability," Fernandez says. "The number of people willing to do it is dropping and the time commitment is increasing." Part of the concern, of course, is with litigation, from shareholders and employees alike. "If you have a distressed company, and the founder is threatening a lawsuit, the shareholders are not feeling the love," says Lew. There will be greater accountability, Lew predicts, whether VCs like it or not. "The era of private clubbiness has moved on to an era of greater transparency," she says. "It's almost like you have a target painted on your back." [Scott Loftesness] [rosewater] 5:45:03 AM

© Copyright 2002 Douglas W. Burke.