Peter Harbeson: Klogging and Blogging

IBM on Bad Behavior [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] Make your own comment here.

I'm seeing more "instant outlines" (or whatever you call them) on Radio blogs. Sean Gallagher and John Robb have posted them, and I could have sworn Dave Winer posted one too, but I can't find it again (see why we need RDF metadata in blogs?). I don't know about you, but I find these annoying and useless. An outline is missing all sorts of contextual information, semantic connotations, and any number of other dimensions of meaning that language has evolved to convey. Sure, use outlines as a writing tool if it works for you, but don't publish your outlines; try to put a little effort into it whydontcha? I sincerely hope attempting to communicate via outline doesn't catch on; we already have to suffer through interminable and excruciating PowerPoint presentations.

Well, I just popped a bunch more subscriptions into the list; we'll see if using more "quick scan" items in a subscription list is sufficient compared to actually visiting sites and reading what they have to say. Yes, I know I can click the links and still read the articles, but there's a certain context that's abandoned in the process. It feels different to me; I'm going to try it fairly intensively and see what I can find out.

Productivity

I can't figure out how Dave puts out the number of posts he does. Guy must be a genius reading-writing machine. I can usually manage one post a day, and he's churning out commentary on ten things, each of which took some concentrated time to read, absorb, and comment on. Doc can do this, too, and so can Jenny. I may just be more of a long-form blogger, of course. Where the heck did that term come from?

Hey, this could be great
Monday morning I'm back at my Manila system, and this is the first thing I'm going to check out: Manila Envelope 1.0.3 Released. Tim Jarrett’s Manila Envelope is an external editor for Manila weblogs. This release adds a couple new features and fixes some bugs. [mac.scripting.com]

Semantic web from on high
Eric Hanson posted this brief overview of the Semantic Web. Excellent piece; it makes the Semantic Web simple, which it really is, at the bottom. One of the things that makes the Semantic Web seem complex is that RDF, its "language", is defined in not one but two specification documents, the Model and Syntax spec and the RDF Schema spec. Each spec is harder to follow than it should be because essential information is contained in the other. Instead of reading one, then the other, you really have to read them at the same time, sort of. But imagine this: think about a set of blogs that use the Semantic Web approach.

Referers indeed
Here's an odd thing. My Referers page displays the (hopelessly short) list of other sites that refer back to mine. The subtitle of the page is "Statistics and information about your community of Radio users." But I just noticed on the list another site I run -- a site that has nothing to do with Radio. That site does refer here, but how did it get into the referer log without being in "my community of Radio users"?

From The Shifted Librarian:
Movabletype v 2.0 is out...
This is another blogging tool I'd like to try. My current reviews:

Blogger: simple, easy, fast. Doesn't get in your way.
Radio: very powerful, user interface designed on some other planet.
text editor and ftp client: still my favorite; I write more and better in that environment.

Radio and RDF
Tomorrow morning I present my proposal for a knowledge management and collaboration system based on Radio, Radio Community Server (RCS), and RDF (a Semantic Web technology). I think this has great potential. There are only a couple of key problems to solve, since Radio and RCS take care of everything else. The toughest problem is in the organizational behavior arena; how do you convince people to use blogging tools in a work environment? Years ago I was a consultant to large insurance companies, and some of what we did fell into the organizational behavior realm; it's not easy to get people to use new things, especially when you don't have the desire or ability to order them around.

Behind the productivity curve
I'm getting more comfortable with Radio, but I'm still not as productive in this environment as I am in either BBEdit or Blogger. I can't see ever even coming close to the amount of posting that some people are capable of.

Rewriting history
Now I'm faced with a dilemma; do I go back and edit my previous entries to reflect what I've learned about formatting and titling? That would make them easier to read. But it would also erase the "historical record"; some of the entries address the formatting problems I react to in later entries. I guess I'll leave them as-is. Mostly because I'm lazy.

Titles considered helpful
Yikes, I just scanned this page as it appears in the blog itself (as opposed to this slightly different desktop page). My interface shows much better discrimination between individual posts; the blog interface runs everything together into one long gray column. Titles are clearly called for, as well as (maybe) some changes to the template applied to each post. And my categories don't seem to have any effect on my blog itself; can they just be for outgoing syndication? I want to offer category views on the blog home page. There must be a way... I wonder if this is a problem with the template I chose? Boy, Blogger is sure easier to set up, and the templates are easier to manipulate. (I know, I know, Radio has ten times the features. But I find I prefer simple interfaces. Heck, I even prefer vi to emacs.)

That wasn't too bad; I managed to post from a newsfeed, and enter my own reply. Apparently I'll need to apply some formatting manually, though; the default doesn't distinguish a quote from commentary.

From WriteTheWeb comes this question: What is a k-log?. Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging ("knowledge-logging"). But will it catch on - will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps? [WriteTheWeb] I think the answer is no -- Lotus Notes and its ilk are still going to be used, but they'll gather different kinds of information. K-logs will have to learn how to fit into the info-environment of large organizations.

Aha -- I found the "top 100" list of channels to subscribe to. But still, where is the canonical list of available channels, if there is such a thing?

Here's a puzzle. How do I "run" the news aggregator manually so it will scan when I want it to scan? And how do I find the URL of a new "channel"? How do I know what I want to subscribe to without being able to see what's available? Hmmm...there must be some way to do these things.

I've set up six categories, but I'd like to use a richer ontology of metadata to talk about what I'm talking about. This will be quite the work in progress; developing an ontology is not necessarily trivial, and I'm interested enough in it that I know I'll be poking around in all the dark little corners I find. The more fun I'm having, the slower I go. As Dorothy Parker said, "Curiousity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiousity."