Worker.digital.info

Riff on the Digital Dashboard. I don't usually quote a post in its entirety, but John Robb's riff on making Web Services easily accessible through Radio Shortcuts is good and needs to be read in full.

I've been looking at how RSS and weblogs can be used to make operational systems more accessible, and therefore more useful. The idea of preloading sets of shortcuts for simple web services could give tech averse users an easy way to get job-critical info and make their life easier. I like it.

Note to Radio users. If you haven't started using shortcuts yet, give it a try. It is really powerful feature. With Radio running go to this page. This page allows you to create shortcuts to pictures, bookmarks, files, stories, etc that you can name and include in your daily posts. To include a shortcut, just type the name into the editing area and put it in double quotes ("...."). For example, I did this with a bomb graphic that I use for mindbombs. When I type bomb in double quotes I get this: Shortcuts should be used for things you use a lot and couldn't be bothered to remember or type in the link. Here is one for Dave: Dave Winer
Note to developers. This is even more powerful if the shortcut is connected to a Web service like stock quotes, sports scores, supply data, etc. So if I was working in a company and wanted to point out that we were short on the supply of Ethernet cards, it would be a very powerful thing to be able to type in "Ethernet Cards" and get the most recent supply stats that I could annotate with a request to purchase more and add to my K-log.

It would also be a great way to build a digital dashboard in a way that was natural for users. A preloaded set of shortcuts that connect to Web services would allow me to populate and edit my digital dashboard in a very simple way. All I would need to do is type in the item I want to watch in double quotes (selecting them from a prefabed list). When I want to remove it, I just delete the word.
As long as I am riffing on this, I would think that this would also be a simple way to add business logic to a digital dashboard. A simple process that would send me an alert via IM or e-mail on a drop of supplies below a certain level could be built into a tool on Radio. To select the item to watch, I would type the name of the item in double quotes into the form. Radio would get the data from a Web service, process it against my business rule, and send me an alert when it dropped below a certain level. How easy is that? It would also be easy to post the alerts to a category specific weblog for general consumption automatically.
It all starts with a very simple step DIY web services. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]