Why have I choosen Radio over MovableType?  It's a question I've asked myself recently.

I think MT looks like an excellent blogging system.  In a few years time I think that MT (or son-of-MT) is likely to be the choice for bloggers who need a little more than Blogger (or son-of-Blogger) will provide.  I don't believe, as much as I love it, that Radio will be that choice.

However I do believe that Radio could be the klogger tool of choice.  Why?

Because Radio has such potential in both a networked (social) and standalone (personal) context.  Because Radio is a general computing platform that has been specialized to handle blogging but could also be specialized for a thousand other applications.

I, along with others, are looking to take it to the next stage with k-log ready tools.  Userland are doing their part with things like Instant Outlining and RCS.

So, that's why Radio.

E-Mail Storage Issues Facing North American Companies

According to a recently-released whitepaper from Osterman Research, 31% of North American companies say the average size of an e-mail mailbox in their message system is between 26 and 50 megabytes (Mb). Additionally, 46% of these companies say that e-mail users in their system send up to 50 messages per day....

There has to be a way for k-logging to help with this for at least a percentage of these people. Luckily, we don't have quotas in place at SLS or else my external email would be a real problem. Here I am with my own blog, I'm trying to move into k-logging, and I really haven't integrated email into that equation yet. How on earth am I going to get my staff to do this?

Are there any guidelines out there yet for how to integrate various information sources (web, email, chat, etc.) into a k-log, or is the format still too young?

[The Shifted Librarian]

» Too many good questions here I'm afraid.

My experience of KM leads me to expect that k-logging will not provide a turn-key answer to managing email.  What it will do is, in all practical terms, to kill email.  That's the solution.

Many of the business contexts for e-mail could be replaced by publish & subscribe RSS feeds and Wiki leaving e-mail purely for private correspondance.  If we could solve this spam thing too then you might see mailboxs drop back to pre-1996 levels again.

I'd be interesting to hear what other people think on this topic.

 

"Blogging is currently a one-way medium. Best you can do is have 2 (ok, 'N') people subscribing to each other's monologues. But with TrackBack you close the loop and notify your conversation partner that it's now her/his turn. Now you can TRULY have interchange. Something that's only hackishly possible at the moment. (Check the userland discussions for the number of times people ask for 'comment notifications'.)" [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

"I agree.  I think TrackBack is a very important technology.  I'm reaching for a metaphor but can't find a good one.  But effectively it's the difference between a broadcast system and a network.  Blogs alone are too much like public broadcasting.  You send and if you're lucky you get back letters and phone calls.  With TrackBack people can be wired in, feedback loops will be established, communities will grow, it'll all come alive." [Curiouser and curiouser!]

TrackBack is a fantastic idea, because I could never manually find all of the posts that might point to mine. So it goes out and harvests them for me, but the problem becomes time to review them. Depending on how popular your posts are, it might be useful to Trackback notifications into your news aggregator. Of course, this could pretty overwhelming for folks like Dave and Doc but then again, it might save them the type of finding the cites manually.

And could you build a master database of these things and organize them by category? Kind of make a Social Sciences Citation Index for your site? Something like that would be extremely useful within the Illinois libraries blogosphere I want to implement.

[The Shifted Librarian]

» The citation index is an interesting idea.  Combining TrackBack with topic maps would enable some interesting analysis of who was citing you.  This could make Trackback both scalable and more usable.

 

 

The TAO of Topic Maps. Steve Pepper has written a succinct introduction to topic maps, titled The TAO of Topic Maps. To quote Steve: Topic [Column Two]

» I finally got a chance to read this paper on the tube going to London today.  A key paragraph that leapt out at me was:

"But knowledge is fundamentally different from information: the difference is that between knowing a thing versus simply having information about it.  And if, as one writer claims, 'knowledge management covers three main knowledge activities: generation, codification, and transfer', then topic maps can be regarded as the standard for codification that is the necessary prerequisite for the development of tools that assist in the generation and transfer of knowledge."

In general the topic maps approach seems very sound to me with very laudible goals.  It also dovetails nicely with a lot of my liveTopics efforts and lends some new and credible directions.

For example I have already implemented code in the liveTopics plugin to export the topical references in the weblog as an XTM topic map.   Additionally my idea for topic themes seems almost identical to the concept of themes in the document.

It also highlights some things I should address.  The idea of synonyms and homynyms are clearly important once people start sharing their topics (via topicRolls).  It may also be useful to allow people to define their own glossaries (maybe integrated with the existing Radio glossary).  And in order to generate occurrence data the permalinks of each posting should be used as topic references to that posting.

All in all a useful guide to the capabilities of topic maps.  What is required now is another work building upon this that details some of the applications that topic maps will enable.

 

Look, there's a simple fact that seems to elude most of the Blogerati, if I may coin a term. Most people (something that has no statistically relevant deviation from EVERYONE) have NO idea that blogs exist. The books about blogging need to be there. We're in a pretty self-congradulatory medium here. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that an inaccurate book is better than no book.

» I think this is a key point.  When I step back and think about it I've had a lot of conversations recently where the subject of blogging came up because people asked me about what I was doing.  There then followed a conversation where I try to get across what it's all about.  In desparation I usually end up with some sort of half-baked: "It's like a web diary" explanation.  This misses so much of value but there you go.  These are people who know what the Internet, use wordprocessors and email, maybe even write web pages.

So the value of the books, even the bad ones, is as Jenny points out:

"Now I find myself in the same situation with blogs. I plan to implement them for every service area at SLS and on a personal level for staff internally and yet, I'd be surprised if even 10% of our staff understand what they are. I covered blogs at our SLS Tech Summit in March, but it was still too confusing and irrelevant for most of the librarians that attended that session. Next time, I'll be able to hold up these books, and they'll take me more seriously. Sorry, but that's how most of the world still works. They'll purchase them for their libraries, too, which means the concept of blogs will officially be cataloged and indexed in our collective memory (not just the memory of those of us who live online)."

People are going to read these books.  Lots of 'em.  I hope Blogger.com have a good relationship with their server suppliers!

Blogging is currently a one-way medium. Best you can do is have 2 (ok, "N") people subscribing to each other's monologues. But with TrackBack you close the loop and notify your conversation partner that it's now her/his turn. Now you can TRULY have interchange. Something that's only hackishly possible at the moment. (Check the userland discussions for the number of times people ask for "comment notifications".)

» I agree.  I think TrackBack is a very important technology.  I'm reaching for a metaphor but can't find a good one.

But effectively it's the difference between a broadcast system and a network.  Blogs alone are too much like public broadcasting.  You send and if you're lucky you get back letters and phone calls.  With TrackBack people can be wired in, feedback loops will be established, communities will grow, it'll all come alive.