Thursday, July 25, 2002

The Blogroll Works. Played with activeRenderer last night to make the blogroll behave. Check out the results - I'm pretty happy with the end result. (If you're reading this in a news aggregator, just visit the home page. If you aren't sure what a news aggregator is, it's safe to assume you're reading this on the web site itself. Look over there. No, there. See where it says "Worthwhile links?" That's what I'm talking about.) I documented the steps necessary to make this work - keep in mind that this requires a bit of extra effort. This wasn't really an intended implementation of activeRenderer, but Marc Barrot (the tool's author) was intrigued enough to say that he's going to look at making it easier down the road. No promises (by him, that is), but the fact that it does this well out of the box is a good sign. Those who are following this thread know that I was trying to make this work using Userland's macros. Ultimately, I preferred activeRenderer's more complete functionality - I have more control over the presentation. And the directoryFrame macro is dependent on some code running at Userland's servers - which often dramatically slowed down page loads. Overall, I think this is a better answer. Let me know what you think. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 10:36:51 AM    Trackback []

Smart mobs. Rheingold on Smart Mobs. Amazing article by Howard Rheingold on "smart mobs." The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests? Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] Rheingold has a pretty good track record of noticing important technology/people intersections early. Definitely on my short list of people to pay attention to. [McGee's Musings] 10:23:32 AM    Trackback []

Design for knowledge work. Designs for Working. Quote: "But when employees sit chained to their desks, quietly and industriously going about their business, an office is not functioning as it should. That's because innovation--the heart of the knowledge economy--is fundamentally social. Ideas arise as much out of casual conversations as they do out of formal meetings. More precisely, as one study after another has demonstrated, the best ideas in any workplace arise out of casual contacts among different groups within the same company." Comment: via this elearningpost article on a space designed for conversations. [Serious Instructional Technology] Worth a look - a topic that hasn't gotten enough attention. [McGee's Musings] 10:21:10 AM    Trackback []

David Watson: Moving to Klogs will require massive culture shift and integration into existing tools. This is true! But organizations that bite the bullet and introduce klogs and the "annotation culture" and take the corresponding pain sooner rather than later will have a competitive advantage.But are organizations ready to swallow this bitter pill on a large scale? I don't think so. John's got some interesting ideas that I largely agree with on a small scale. However, the 200 people example is not as simple as it sounds. The underlying problem is not one that software can easily solve. That is, the sociological change required by most organizations to implement a technology such as news aggregators or blogging is fairly massive. Just because some of us really enjoy documenting everything doesn't mean that the passion or skill is widely distributed amongst the population. If the 200 people being referred to are all enthusiastic technology professionals, then you might succeed, but this still assumes that they have great communication skills - not a valid assumption from my experience. I would estimate that the training costs of such a migration could be far greater than the cost of the software. Further, the support and maintenance costs could be even greater than that. I don't mean to rain on John's parade since I like Radio; however, right now, I don't believe Userland is set up to handle the support burden that volumes of naive users entail. And if you think a company will deal with the operational mistakes from Userland that some individuals have tolerated, you're sadly mistaken, no matter the price. In time, the kind of organizational software adoption that John describes will be possible and profitable for some organizations but a large number of organizations will remain unable or unwilling to adapt (see Geoffrey Moore). I would expect the rate of adoption for RSS news aggregators to happen more quickly when they are integrated in tools that already have broad penetration such as email clients (see Ximian Evolution for an example). Broad adoption of weblog tools is likely to be slower. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 10:16:06 AM    Trackback []

Chapter 8 of BlogRoot - Using Blogs in Business. (SOURCE:Scripting News)-An excellent summary of how to use a blog in business! This chapter alone makes the book worth buying.Where are the benefits of using K-Logs in the enterprise? Where does the potential lie? Lots of benefits emerge. Here are a few: * Better documentation of process-shorter audit cycles. * An archive of contributions-when an employee leaves, an archive of their contributions still remains. * Shorter training time-a team could easily ramp up a new team member or new employee by saying, "read our K-Logs, all the documents, thinking, important e-mails, discussions, and process are there." * Better responsiveness to customer inquiries-help desks can easily find answers to customer questions by searching an intranet K-Log network. * Easier management of decentralized employees-K-Logs make it easy to find out what a specific employee in a remote office is doing right now. * Shorter decision cycles-need an answer to a problem, find an expert that can answer it for you. How? Search for people that write about the keywords you are interested in, read what they have written to qualify their expertise, and contact them directly. Remember, a K-Log is a horizontal tool. It isn't limited to specific functions. Like a word processor, what you do with it is limited by your creativity. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 10:15:27 AM    Trackback []

Web Services Adoption Timeline. From a white paper by IDC on "IBM and the Strategic Potential of Web Services": 2002: Within the Firewall - simplified application integration - increased developer productivity 2004: Contained External Users - simplified business partner connectivity - richer application functionality - subscription-based services 2006: Fully Dynamic Search and Use - [E M E R G I C . o r g] 10:12:57 AM    Trackback []