[Curiouser and curiouser!]

I've gotta say I really love watching this process.

One point of potential revenue could very well be 'corporate consulting' i.e. installation and integration. People aren't going to know what to do with liveTopics (or blogging directories, topic-maps, XTM & visualization for that matter) without being pitched and well trained, and even then it's going to be difficult for them to wrap their head around the concept enough to drop it into their IT culture effectively. It's much easier from that perspective to hire the people who wrote it to come in, train IT in the installation process (or actually provide the service) and talk with the user base to bring them up to speed and show them some of the possibilities and how it "affects their day."

If liveTopics is (or is going to be) that robust I think you should have no particular difficulty generating a revenue stream through such ancillary services.

[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

» Thanks for the perspective.  That's kinda what I'm looking for right now.  Well either that or "You're mad!  Mad! Mad! Mad!"

I guess this will become one of those experiments that my life has now become.

Exciting!

I've was speaking with Mike O'Reilly about liveTopics, Radio, open source and what to call klogging.   He very kindly reminded me that I am old enough to be considered an anachronism by some people.  My love of "Personal Knowledge Publishing" comes from it's link to the DTP revolution.  But Mike made it clear that most people today didn't go through that.  To them DTP means Word and it's not exciting, it doesn't harken back to a revolution.  Oh well, drop that idea then.

We then went through collaborative, professional, business, and didn't like any of them enough to agree on it.

Then it occurred to me to cut to the chase:

klogging = Tacit Knowledge Publishing

This captures both the personal element that I think is so important, and the collaborative element. It also supports the storytelling metaphor which I am coming around to in a big way.

KartOO is a new meta search engine with a graphical interface. It's based on a technology developed for 3 years by Laurent Baleydier and his team. KartOO is programmed in Flash although you have an optional traditional HTML interface. What makes KartOO interesting is that it elaborates the so called semantic links between results. Those links are represented by sinuous lines that link the balls. Amidst said lines you find a word that is the one the algorithm considers that links both results semantically. By hovering on top of it you can highlight the related balls. When hovering over the ball you can see all its related semantic links highlighted.

http://www.kartoo.com/

[Jon Alsbury's Radio Weblog]

» Good find by Jon, this looks interesting.

I can't quite work out what it's doing as the results appear on a number of "maps" which don't appear to be connected.  Is it arbitrary as to what appears on each individual map?  Do the size of the result "balls" indicate relevance?  And what do the colours signify.

It looks pretty amazing, and I get the feeling there is something powerful going on.  But I need help with this one...

This is about a piece in the Observer news paper at the weekend that reported how Blair was trying to get Bush to give UK companies an exemption to the Sarbanes-Oxley bill.  This is the new regulation of federal securities bill that has everyone hopping up and down.  I'm hoping Bush says 'get lost' because I'm not a believer that we are any better off here, fraud wise.

What caught my eye in the article was the posturing about the effect the new regulations would have on non-executive directors.  Quoting from the Business & Media from Page from the Observer, Sunday 11th August 2002:

"A number of leading City organisations are worried that the law raises the prospect of criminal proceedings being taken against innocent directors who fail to detect frauds perpetrated by their colleagues."

and

"At a time when we want the best-quality people to be non-executive directors, the threat of still penal and legal consequences is a major deterrent to the very people we're trying to attract.  They'll just say it's not worth the risk." -- Peter Wyman, President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants

To me this is just proof, from the horses mouth, that the whole idea of non-execs regulating companies doesn't work.  If the good ones are afraid they can't spot fraud what's the point in having them there?

It's Official -- I'm Self-Employed. Hmm, it feels odd. [Blunt Force Trauma]

» I know that feeling :-)

Okay so I've been dreaming about having the money to put Wi-Fi in the house.  The problem is that I know I'm gonna need several base stations to cover the entire house and garden, maybe as many as 6 in order to get good signal everywhere.  That's expensive and, worse still, I have to run cable somehow to connect them all up.

Bob Cringely has been writing about HomePlug which is a networking standard that uses the power sockets as connectors and the electrical wiring in your house to give you a 14Mbps broadband connection around your home.  14Mbps may not be that great, but it's surely good enough and the best part is: no wiring.

Now, like Bob, I tend to have my laptop plugged in to the mains most of the time.  HomePlug would mean I could dispense with most of the wireless access points in the house.  Maybe just having one for the conservatory and garden.

Now where on earth can I get this in the UK?

"It's easy for a non-Movable Type weblog to send trackback pings. They use a REST interface:
http://foo.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?tb_id=ID&;;title=TITLE&url=URL
So you can write a bookmarklet that 'does the right thing' if you know the site's base URL.

Trackback supports a few more parameters in the URL so you can send a summary of the reply, and the name of the site sending the ping."
Over at Hit-or-Miss, they've been building their own Trackback server in PHP and MySQL."

[Dog News: radio questions]  [From DWS Radio FAQ]

» Can someone explain to me what the tb_id part of the URL is?

I'm still not convinced by MT TrackBack.  But I shall certainly try and support the current interface in my own TrackBack server implementation.

I took the GNU GPL and LGPL Licensing Quiz and only got 4 out of 9 correct. I don't know if this quiz is such a great idea, after doing so poorly on the test and reading my mis-interpretations of the licenses I'm pretty leary of using the GPL or LGPL for any project. [Found via diveintomark]

[BitWorking]

» I too got 4 out of 9.  I'm not too unhappy though, if not for yesterdays research I would have gotten 0 out of 9.

It does mean I need to go back and re-read the FAQ's before I make final decisions about GPL'ing liveTopics.

More on licensing for liveTopics. (SOURCE:Curiouser and curiouser)-Good luck! I am trying to do the same thing. Making a living through blogging. This also reminds me that I need to installl LiveTopics as well as add the blogrolling macro, ...So I think it's real values to me are: * reputation * a lead-in to other services * the vision The other services could be support, as well as more general KM/klogging consultancy or integration work. Am I making sense? I guess we'll know if I end up starving and homeless in 6 months time! [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

» It feels good to know that I'm not alone.  Roland Tanglao is also walking around wearing a sign reading "Will Blog for Food."  In a sense I guess he's lucky, he has partners.  At least he won't starve alone!

 

 

Here's how I'm leaning:

I make liveTopics free software issued under the GPL. 

I can see the arguments for and against commercial licenses for the software.  But like the Zope guys I have weigh up how much license revenue I'm actually likely to generate versus the inertia that having to pay could generate.  I'm hoping to build a reputation in the KM/klogging space and liveTopics if widely accepted could be a part of that.  I also want to take liveTopics into corporate blogging directories, topic-maps, XTM, and visualization.  I want to take it into group/shared-blogging.  I want lots of you to come along for the ride.

So I think it's real values to me are:

• reputation
• a lead-in to other services
• the vision

The other services could be support, as well as more general KM/klogging consultancy or integration work.

Am I making sense?  I guess we'll know if I end up starving and homeless in 6 months time!