Friday, April 26, 2002

I spent some time using Groove today with a friend of mine. Though the idea is very appealing to me, I was not overly impressed by the reality. Groove does a good job at giving you access to the tools you need, but I felt constrained by the environment. You are forced to work within the Groove window. Each tool is confined to a fixed space and cannot be moved. To make a tool like this usable, it needs to be less in your face. I would like to see a tool that allows me to use any application I want to, but handles file synchronization in the background. For instance, instead of handling files within the Groove file manager tool, I would prefer to use Windows Explorer. This would make using Groove a seamless experience. Yes, Groove has many of the elements I would like to see in a collaboration product, but it doesn't have the integration with the desktop that I think is necessary to make it a usable product. 6:41:38 PM     Dave's Scripting News gives us one model for running a weblog. There is very little annotation to most posts there. Most of the time you find a simple link and a headline or blurb from the article. This type of news aggregation is nice, but it seems to be almost recreating the news aggregation feature already built into Radio UserLand. Now, since Dave is a respected pillar of the weblogging community, I can see the appeal of such a site. Everyone wants to know what is on Dave's mind. On the other hand, I have seen a number of other sites that are following this prescription and they tend to simply regurgitate the same articles over and over. Doug Kaye's Web Services Strategies gives us another, and I think, more compelling model for the average weblogger. Instead of simply aggregating news headlines, Doug adds a personalized spin to the articles he posts. This type of annotated weblog allows the weblogger to project his or her personality onto the story. Now, there is a place for both types of weblogs. A weblog as news aggregator can be especially useful if it is focused on an issue. Scripting News is focused on web services and web logging. It is a centerpiece of the weblogging community. However, hearing the comments of intelligent people in regards to news stories can help you put those stories in perspective for yourself. The question that comes to mind is "where is the value in a weblog?" and I think it can be in aggregation if the weblogger is diligent in finding hidden news jewels. But for most bloggers, I think the value is in their own personal perspective. 6:03:03 PM     Over the past week, I have been surfing through the top ranked weblogs on Radio UserLand [here]. Now, there is a seemingly high proportion of them that are run by a) Macintosh wizards and b) web services gurus. For weblogging to reach the masses, there needs to be more non-tech content available. There will also need to be a better way to find blogs of interest to an individual. Viewing topped ranked weblogs says more about the demographic using Radio than it does about what weblogs are interesting to an individual. 5:28:22 PM     Nothing terribly insiteful today. I'm still unemployed, which is a major drag. I don't know, maybe there are people in the world that would love to be sitting at home on their computer all day. I'm not one of them. According to the Washington State Employment Security department, Washington's seasonally adjusted unemployement rate fell in March and is now at 6.8% [here]. Of that, 8,700 jobs were lost in computer and data processing. Well, one of those was me :) 4:55:11 PM

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