Colleague.biz

I started this weblog as an experiment. I thought it would be a good way to collect information regarding some of the major changes happening in the printing, publishing, and media distribution areas. My intent is to look at things from a business/production perspective, weaving in technology and other items as appropriate. I still intend to do that.

But along the way I have found myself going down the rabbit hole. The revolution in personal publishing being wrought by the weblog is astounding. I think it has enormous implications for the publishing industry's future. And I realize that to meet my objectives for this weblog I need to really, truly understand both the technology and methodolgy of blogging.

I also need to understand the implications for sharing what I learn and what I'm learning. I have a deep-rooted interest in collaborative computing, knowledge sharing, and the impact it can have on a company, a small business, or a project.

I have my own small business in mind -- one that addresses some of the gaps I see forming in the print/publishing industry. To make it work I need to understand how to bring a geographically dispersed team together, to keep them focused, and to keep them all moving full-speed ahead in the right direction.

I've been party to too many failed virtual efforts. I've seen companies stagnate, and even come completely apart because they couldn't manage a virtual business. I must learn how to do that if I am to succeed. So forgive my digressions into blogging, klogging, and intranet design.

My primary point, and I do have one, will become apparent once I have mastered the basics. Right now the information regarding my topics of interest -- new publishing distribution models, new print production models, new consumer models -- is widely dispersed, disconnected, and hard to find.

Publishers don't like what's happening becasue it will force them to change. Printers don't like what's happening for the same reason. Consumers don't like it because the benefits are still just a gleam in the eye of a few visionary people. But it will happen. I plan to be a part of it. I plan to share much of that ride with you.

In the mean time, I'm thinking out loud, trying to share what I learn along the way. I will get back to the point when the time comes. I hope you still find this weblog useful in the interim. Thanks for hanging with me.

Down the Rabbit Hole

5:36:26 PM

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David Gammel's post on Yahoo! Groups: K-Log lead me to High Context, where David had blogged a post from fellow Atlantan Paul Holbrook. Paul and I have traded a couple of e-mails before becasue I saw a couple of posts in the Userland forum. Paul has a very interesting background -- even doing some work at PARC -- and I wanted to talk to him about possible intranet design. But I haven't been tracking his site. I am now.

Among others, Paul had this interesting post on what happens when you start to research something via blogs:

Down the rabbit hole of blogging .... Sometimes following other people's blogs is like talking to someone who won't shut up: you ask one question, and you're in for a 15 minute answer. Well, it's a little like that, except it's not: it's a lot more interesting. Case in point: I pulled a little piece out of my news aggregator this morning on a k-log pilot experiment, and many hours later, I'm left with a pile on interesting pages scattered around my screen that I'm trying to make sense of. (I can't even remember where I found the reference to the k-log item; it's already gone from my aggregator.)

[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]

BTW Paul, I got my RSS feed truncated. I've added you to my Aggregator and my blogroll. This k-log stuff is getting really interesting.

Cool Tool: Summarizer Free Form Page Summaries

2:34:48 PM

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Wouldn't it be handy to generate high-quality, impromptu summaries of longer stories or posts that you find while doing web research? Today Jenny Levine at TSL pointed me to Matt Mower, who is working on an interesting Radio tool called liveTopics.

On Matt's home page I saw a review of Copernic Summarizer:

[...] Often when I am browsing I come across a long article that I'm not sure I want to read. If I have it in front of me I can click the summarizer button on the IE toolbar and let it go to work. If it's a link on a page I'm on I choose "Summarize target" from the context menu. Summarizer also has a live in- browser summary option.
Summarizer opens and downloads the page. It does a statistical analysis of the text to determine the key concepts. Then it works backwards to identify the sentences that are most important in the document based on those key concepts. It presents this as a summary list. At this point I can read the summary, email it or print it. I can also save it as an XML document (using Copernic's summary XSD scheme). [...]

This looks like a very nice tool for researchers, quite configurable, and probably something worth looking at if you write longer, expository posts on your weblog (Hmm. Wonder who that could be?)