Friday, December 19, 2003

Gazing at the online news horizon. In OJR Mark Glaser looks at what's on the horizon for the online news universe, and at the top developments of 2003, with blogging topping the list. I even get quoted, indirectly: Participatory journalism "I think more and more non-journalists... [JD's New Media Musings] 3:11:25 PM    Trackback []

blosxoms, bryars and blikis.... Huh, you say? Well, blosxom is a lightweight weblog implementation, created by Rael Dornfest, that describes itself as "the zen of blogging." Simon Cosens' Bryar is a modular, extensible weblog tool - more complex than 'blosxom' - primarily in its extensibility. A Bliki, according to the 'Wikipedia' is quite simply, a weblog with wiki support. If you are still saying 'Huh', then skip Simon's article and just read his conclusion excerpted below. Otherwise, in O'Reilly's Perl.com, Simon Cozens writes about 'Blosxoms, Bryars and Blikis.' - a worthy read for the 'Perl' and 'CGI' savvy. Simon concludes with: "I consider the emergence of interest in social software to be one of the most fascinating trends in software engineering this year. Two of the most powerful and popular aspects of this, wikis and blogs, are particularly well-suited for extension and embedding, and Perl is a particularly well-suited language for achieving this. Although part of the point of this article was to demonstrate Bryar, there were several other important points. First, that there are plenty of Perl implementations of both wikis and blogs that you can choose from; second, that Perl makes it really easy to create your own blog or wiki and customize to your own purposes, including embedding them in an existing application. But finally, the point was to encourage you to think about good design and the power of extensible applications; if you can create a tool that is both powerful and generalizable -- just like Perl itself -- it may end up doing wildly different things to what you initially intended!" [judith meskill's knowledge notes...] 12:03:22 PM    Trackback []