b.cognosco

Phil Wolff categorizing the skills needed to start and maintain a klog effort. His last point, klogging/blogging can improve your marketability, may be the most important in this time of economic stress. Those who put what they know front and center, in a way that is valuable and helpful to the audience, have taken a good first step to positively differentiating themselves from the crowd.

But this changes the nature of the blog -- certainly between personal and professional blogs. I'm not sure yet just how personal is enough, how much is too much, how little is too terse. Something to watch as both the medium and the users mature.

Klogging Roles.. I forsee several klogging roles.

Catalyst. Alpha blogger. Someone who klogs well, leads by example, provokes and inspires others to join a klogging community. If you've used Blogtree, naming your inspirations, you know what I mean.

Coach. The person who helps newbies, builds internal FAQs, nurtures laggards, acknowledges great posts. Soft skills, communication and social skills, are not evenly distributed. The coach helps everyone join and get better. Chief metablogger.

Armorer. Works with IT to develop configs, scripts, integration with enterprise apps and messaging services. Power macros. Engaging templates. Technologist and architect.

Practice leader. Informal leaders of subcultures in larger organizations. The one in legal who drives the whole department to start klogging. The rep in the Cincinatti sales office who gets her colleagues to start customer-specific blogs. Watch for lists of like-minded colleagues. They may also connect to like-minded communities at suppliers, customers, and the wild blogosphere.

Mix and match.

Recruit for excellence in one or more.

Hire ringers if your community is large enough.
One other point: I beleive (without hard numbers) that blogging and klogging can improve your personal marketability. I'm exploring this at Bloggers for Hire. Suggestions welcome. [a klog apart]

BN.com Faced With NASDAQ Delisting

10:56:59 PM

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Interesting note, but I'm not sure it's a meaningful event. BN bookstores aren't going anywhere, and the corporate parent certainly isn't in any danger. They have one of the most smoothly integrated clicks-and-mortar operations anywhere, and their e-commerce is a much a part of the overall business as the retail stores.

Bertelsmann's newfound love of traditional media could open the door for selling back their share in BN.com. That would open the door for Barnes & Noble corporate to sweep the young dot.com back into the fold.

Online bookseller faces Nasdaq exit. BBC Aug 14 2002 5:26PM ET [Moreover - Book publishing news]

Entrepreneurs Need to Know the New PR

8:32:25 PM

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If you're starting, growing, or running a business you need to read Udell's comments on PR in the age of blogs. If you're a PR firm you definitely shoould read them. Clearly, not all (even most) journalists are as blog savvy as Udell, but most in the tech industry soon will be, or they'll be writing about something else.

Contacting me: High-tech PR in the age of blogs. In June I met Mark O'Neill, CTO of Vordel, at the Web Services Edge conference. Today Mark sent me a pointer to his new blog. As you can see by glancing at my channelroll, I've subscribed to Mark's blog. [...]

Udell describes several interesting scenarios, but one of the most compelling is how simple the company/journalist contact becomes once the blog is introduced.

[...]
It happens that I've met Mark, and what Vordel does (web services security) is of interest to me, and although I won't be in SF on Sept 5 for the event Mark mentions in his blog, we'll undoubtedly be in touch. But quite often, I won't know the principal, or the company. What I hoped would start to happen, and am now certain will happen, is something like this:
Hi, I'm XXX, [CTO|Architect|Product Manager] for YYY which does ZZZ. I have started a weblog that describes what we do, how we do it, and why it matters. If this information is useful and relevant, our RSS feed can be found here. Thanks!
... [Jon's Radio]

The RIAA Wouldn't Lie

8:20:50 PM

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CD sales are down and it's all due to wretched hordes of music-stealing, file-sharing, copyright-evading, computer users who don't even have the decency to watch the commercials on TV ... or not.

CD slump, piracy link rebutted.
Boston Globe Aug 14 2002 7:36AM ET -- Forrester Research says Internet piracy was not to blame - as the record labels claim - for a 15 percent drop in music sales in the past two years.
[Moreover - IP and patents news]

Protecting Radio Folders

7:23:15 PM

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A simple Meta tag to keep prying eyes from browsing weblog folders you don't want people to see.

Prevent Directory Browsing in Radio.
I think this should be an option built in to Radio, but it's relatively easy for you to do on your own. Here's the issue: Radio is a web content management system - when you add content to Radio, it automatically uploads that content to your website. For many users, their web site is hosted at http://radio.weblogs.com/. (Others, like me, host it at their own domain.) Radio maintains its content in a hierarchical folder structure. But relatively savvy individuals can type in your URL and add folders they want to "snoop" on - and Radio doesn't prevent this.

There's an easy way to do this: drop a text file into any folder you want to restrict access to. The text file is just a couple lines, and it includes a meta refresh command that forces the browser to load a new page. Here's my file - save it as index.txt, and drop it into any folder other than your "www" folder.

To try this out, try going to someone's Radio weblog and adding /categories after the URL. You'll now see all the categories they've set up. This isn't necessarily snooping, but there may be some private categories they've posted. (There are other examples, but hopefully you get the idea.) If you're the individual maintaining the blog in Radio, adding this text file to the folder will automatically redirect the browser to your site's home page.

Memo to Userland: I'd like this to be an option in the application itself. If I disable directory browsing, Radio should automatically drop this text file into any folder it creates.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

How Does Kinko's Play in the Author and Publishing Business?

6:56:41 PM

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HarperBusiness Leadership in the 21st Century video forum pairs authors with Kinko's/Sprint to promote books.

Sprint and Kinkos Connect Top Authors With Audiences Across The Nation
[...]four of HarperBusiness' top authors (James Collins, Jerry Porras, Geoffrey Moore and Noel Tichy) will discuss their groundbreaking works and today's hottest business topics during a special "Leadership in the 21st Century" forum. Created by HarperBusiness, Sprint and Kinko's, the event will be held live via videoconference on August 20 at 3:00 p.m. EDT. [...]
[WhatTheyThink]

EU -- Racing Toward the Past

10:15:09 AM

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How far back do you want to go today? EU now limits linking, P2P, and soon will likely have some stupid law banning VoIP/IM to protect their telcos. This is great. In another 10 years we won't have anyone to compete against globally but ourselves. The only surprise here is why the French aren't hatching these dumb ideas first.

BT Broadband accuses P2P users of copyright abuse. EU Copyright Directive to spawn wider bans? [The Register]

Next Step -- The Personal VPN

9:19:16 AM

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I'm off into another area I don't know anything about -- VPNs. Now that I have Remote Access working for Radio I want to take the next step -- establishing a personal VPN for connection to my home network when I'm away. Several questions:

What does this require?
Am I right in thinking a VPN would allow secure access to my entire network at home?
Don't I need some sort of VPN or RAS server sitting behind my firewall and acting as a gateway to my other computers?
Does W2K Pro have this built in?
If not, what is the easiest way to do it?
Doesn't W2K Pro have a built-in VPN client?
Is this going to take longer, cost more?

Instructions For ifLocal Macro

9:14:05 AM

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Thanks Paul, I needed that. See this for background.

Blunt Force Trauma: Managing Local and Remote URLs in Radio. "I don't know anything about writing macros for Frontier so how would I create an ifLocal macro? For my reference mainly, as I don't fully understand the fix but I most definitely understand the problem -- it's bitten me a couple of times already." Shouldn't be difficult. Code of the macros was posted already:
on ifLocal (url1="/", url2=radio.macros.weblogUrl()) {
 if radioResponder.flSameMachine {return (url1)} else {return (url2)}
} 
Create file ifLocal.txt in Macros folder of Radio, copy this code there and you're done. Now you can use iflocal() in your templates. [toolbox]

Head for the Hills, We Don't Need No Stinkin' Telco

9:08:23 AM

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Something to keep in mind when I move to my bunker in the mountains. Maybe I don't have to worry about whether or not the telcos serve my remote outpost anymore if I can get a few like-minded neighbors together. I already have a friend in Dallas who's spent the last five years doing high-speed spread-spectrum wireless for commercial networks. He says it isn't that hard or that expensive. Throw in a little Wi-Fi and who knows...

Do It Yourself DSL.
An article from Business 2.0 about a small town who got fed up waiting for the telcos to offer broadband in their community:

Oppedahl and about a dozen of his neighbors bought it last year for approximately $5,000. Then they scooped up cable modems, routers, and other equipment (usually for pennies on the dollar on eBay) and spent the past 10 months setting up the first subscriber-owned DSL co-op in America. While it all might seem unremarkable to outsiders -- it serves 12 homes at average DSL data speeds -- it does offer a compelling script for rural towns that don't want to wait until the next ice age to join the 21st century.

This isn't unlike the UTOPIA project in spirit, although UTOPIA is somewhat larger in scale (500,000 end users). [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]