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Saturday, July 06, 2002
Weblog by e-Mail
As for me, well, it just creates on more way to be ignored...
Blogging by email. Radio wishlist > Post to email..[Curiouser and curiouser!]Dale Pike writes:
I want to be able to designate a category and have that post sent as an email message to a pre-determined address. This would allow me to further consolidate my communications and have a more streamlined "write once" approach to my messaging.
» I need exactly the same thing to keep legacy people in the loop. I'm trying to knock up something very quickly as a tool in Radio.
Basic features:
- preferences per- subscriber email
- filter by category & by liveTopic
- immediately, hourly or daily feedings
- send either complete post or permalink+title
I had originally thought about making it a program that subscribed to an RSS feed and emailed it out. However this seemed like a lot of work and a way of re-inventing my.userland. I'm trying to KISS!
A Solid Intranet in Eight Steps
"Paul Holbrook" points us to another good intranet article from New Architect on intranet design. I really like points:
4. Put usability before consistency.
5. Start small and grow iteratively.
7. Evaluate against measurable objectives and criteria.
8. Make your intranet accessible.
Thanks Paul!
Article: A solid intranet in eight steps. I've never built a built a full-corporate intranet site, though I've been in a few efforts to build group sites. Even those efforts could have used the information in the article Theo Mandel has written: A solid intranet in eight steps"[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
Business Requirements for Classifying Content
Reference material for content classification.A couple of articles from KMConnection I found from Paul's site:
Can't get enough Classification. I picked a reference to something called faceted classification from High Context. The back credits on where this comes from are getting a little deep for more (more on that later), so I'll just quote the item:[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
Feedback from a K-Log Experiment
David Gammel reports on his first K-Log experiment. It's a quick post and a useful read.
[...] My own experience returning from a week of vacation really illustrates the benefits it has had within our own team. The first thing I did yesterday was fire up our team klog and read what had been going on while I was out last week. I immediately saw a couple items that needed my attention (which I dealt with in a few minutes each) and got up to speed on what the rest of the team had been focusing. All before I had finished my first cup of coffee and long before I had made it through my backlog of 200 e-mails and a few voice mail messages. (See John Robb's comments on the communication efficiency of klogs.) [...][High Context]
David has lots of other good KM and Usability items, too.
What We're Doing When We Blog
This Meg Hourihan article on the essence of weblogs is good background for K-Log experimenters. Another example of great info brought to us by "John Robb" via Yahoo! Groups: K-Log.
As bloggers, we're in the middle of, and enjoying, an evolution of communication. The traits of weblogs mentioned above will likely change and advance as our tools improve and our technology matures. What's important is that we've embraced a medium free of the physical limitations of pages, intrusions of editors, and delays of tedious publishing systems. As with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it.[O'Reilly]
Requirements for K-Log Home Page
From one of "John Robb"'s recent posts to Yahoo! Groups: K-Log:
[...] Here is what should be on a K-Log home page (it is easy to set up the K-Log install process to ask for this info and insert it into the template):1) E-mail link (or spam free e-mail link if it is publicly accessible).
2) IM link. IM status (online, busy, be right back, away, on the phone, etc.).
3) Phone number.
4) Address.
5) Bio. Including current position and responsibilities.
6) Picture.
7) Extranet weblog implemented as a category. As much or as little data on what you are currently working on as warranted. [...]
Maybe Scott can see what's required to get a live Jabber status icon going as part of his Jabber research.
Cool Tool: Summarizer Free Form Page Summaries
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?)
Searching for ZCB -- Zero Contribution Barrier
My intranet/groupware philosophy can be summed up in three words -- Zero Contribution Barrier. Any barrier to effective, convenient contribution should be eliminated where possible, minimized if not eliminated. If you want people to expose what they are thinking -- in order to both capture the best they have to offer and to improve their understanding -- you have to make it EASY for them to contribute and use the system. In simple terms this means give them as many ways into and out of the system as possible.Thinking about this got me to thinking again about finding the maximum number of ways to get info into and out of an intranet. A search for NNTP in Yahoo! Groups: K-Log lead me to "Duncan Smeed", a university professor in Glascow. Duncan uses "Conversant", a Radio-compatible groupware product from Macrobyte Resources. Here's what he said:
[...]Fourthly, Conversant provides subscribers to the site to create, and respond to, messages via (i) a web interface (HTTP), (ii) an e-mail interface (SMTP), (iii) a newsgroup interface (NNTP), and also to a certain extent (iv) a remote procedure call interface (XML-RPC) which allows other forms of interaction to be built; for example using Userland's Radio . This richness and variety of interface means that I, and my subscribers, get to use the interface that we find most convenient. In my experience the easier something is to do the more likely you are to do it. For example, posting a quote from a page on the web is, in my case, a simple matter of highlighting the text of the quote, then clicking twice - once to invoke the javascript bookmarklet I use to capture the text and the URL from the page which is then used to prime a textarea form in a new window, and the other to submit the form to my weblog. Two clicks. Two seconds. [...]
Macrobyte makes several products to support Radio Community Servers so I suspect there is some synergy here, and it looks like part of the Macrobyte site is created in Radio (similar look and feel, don't you know). I don't see anything about RSS syndication in Conversant, maybe that's a Radio thing.
Macrobyte software is affordable and they offer a hosted service. They also offer system design and consulting. Maybe someone to talk to for triangulation...
Big Business Pressures for Palladium
Lawrence Lessig was the first (AFIK) to point out the unholy collusion between government and business for bulding the digital surveillance state. Here Robert Scoble makes a bit more plain just where the pressure for such architectures is coming from and why there is almost no chance of stopping them.
What do you think your corporate IT department says to Microsoft when they come calling? I can just imagine it goes something like this:[Scobelizer]1) "We want the ability to know what our employees are doing with our computers."
2) "We want to know who they sent email to (even if it's on a Hotmail site)."
3) "We want to know what files they send via Instant Messaging."
4) "We want to know what Web sites they both looked at and published to."
5) "We want to be able to search any employees' hard drive for any piece of information and get it fast."
Business has legitimate productivity, competitive, and liability motivations for wanting this kind of info. Our litigious society has made BigBiz liable for virtually anything the employees do, whether the business knows about it or not. BigBiz simply has too many employees. They can't know them all, they sure can't trust them all, yet the courts hold them accountable for the actions of each. This kind of response is only natural.
I'd like to blame the lawyers, but that misses the point. Lawyers don't file suits if they can't find plaintiffs. I'd like to blame the courts but typically these things get jury trials. I'd like to blame the goverment, but we voted for them. Who does that leave?
Denmark Case on Linking Counter to Internet Principles
My friend Tyrone the Attorney says the courts will resolve most of the issues with stupid Internet law. That doesn't seem to be the case in Denmark (but it is Denmark, for pete's sake.) I hope he's right about what happens here.via [Ernie the Attorney]
Dave Winer's thoughts on deep linking decision from Denmark
"In Denmark today, a judge rules against a search engine that respects the robots.txt convention, and stops it from "deep linking" into sites run by the Danish newspaper association. All these court cases are as stupid as dirt. Several good technical preventatives exist...[so] save the lawyer's fees. ... We know for sure that when a company goes to court for "deep linking" that they aren't talking to, or listening to, their technical people. BTW, deep linking is an oxymoron. There's only one kind of linking on the Web. Why would you ever point to the home page of a news oriented site." via [Scripting News]
Amen Brother! The law shouldn't help those who don't want to help themselves. Of course, the site operators may not know about the technical solution. One thing's for sure: most lawyers have zero incentive to figure it out on the client's behalf because it deprives them of the opportunity to file a lawsuit that, while not frivolous, won't win any Academy Awards either. But lawyers file suits to make money, not to collect awards.
RIAA Goes After Corporate P2P
I have reservations about posting this, since it just helps spread the public scare tactics of BigContent. But it's important in as much as I think P2P can play an important role in corporate information exchange and it points out the need for som epolicies about just how and what can go on a P2P server.
BigContent strikes $1 million deal with Arizona corporation over an internal P2P server with illegal MP3s.
Peer-to-Peer Web Sites Grow 535 Percent. Lawsuit Settlement Finds Corporations Liable for Allowing Access to P2P Apps[Content Wire - Digital Copyright]
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This Page was last updated: 11/28/2002; 6:50:59 PM
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