Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Spanish flu epidemic. This time capsule was found in the corner stone of a building constructed in 1918-19. It will be opened on Wednesday. The building was the Children's Hospital and it was the season of the Spanish flu epidemic....one of the most deadly epidemics in history. Xrays show three books including a loose leaf album. A good, persistent medium for both message and virus? Stay tuned.... [future of the book news] 2:33:43 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Using the Law Against Innovation Never Works. A strategic management paper [registration required] by a Wharton School legal studies professor says suing your customers is a less... [Blogcritics] 2:32:59 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Weblog tools list. Weblog tools. Here is a much bigger list of Weblog tools. [owrede_log] I seem to be on a run of resources to know about tonight [McGee's Musings] 2:31:28 PM  comment []  Trackback []     New Radio theme. a weblog of post-its. Now, I'm not a Radio user but this theme for Radio that Cristian has just released makes me wish for a moment that I was just to try it. Looks really cool. I probably wouldn't use it directly, but there are many elements in it that I find intriguing. Ahh if only I had some time to do a full set of CSS options for d2r... [d2r] I've been thinking of shifting to a new theme. Certainly, Cristian's is well worth looking at. [McGee's Musings] 2:30:55 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Communities don't practice.. The obvious, well said and needing reinforcement: With rare exceptions it is individuals who practice, not communities. By Skyrme via Vinson via Efimova. [a klog apart] [a klog apart] 2:30:41 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Okay, so I did a complete re-install of Radio after a some serious hard drive issues, and after much frustration managed to get back to some sense of normalcy. (For those of you who, as I did, back up your Radio folder to a CD, remember to remove the "Read Only" attribute from the folder and all its contents when you restore it to a new installation, or it won't work.) I did lose the posts in two categories, Cubicle Dweller and Homebody. (The content is in the folders...it just won't show on the category pages.) So the heck with it...I've erased those categories and recreated them. I'll try and repost some of the older material when I get a chance. I also don't seem to be able to use TrackBack anymore - I get an error message instead of a TrackBack page in Preferences.  All in all, though, not as bad as the last time I tried re-installing (lost ALL the posts that time, although they remain on the Userland site.) WILL SOMEONE PLEASE WRITE A BOOK EXPLAINING ALL THIS IN GRIM DETAIL???!!! By the way, my money goes to Seagate from now on...excellent tech support helped me rescue a drive I thought was damaged. I had to reinstall everything on it, but I didn't have to throw it away. 2:01:16 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Community Services for Enterprise Blognets. Community Services for Enterprise Blognets While your firewall protects you from intrusion, it also cripples the community software that keeps the blogosphere hopping. Here's are some of the services you might want to bring inside to help your blognets grow and prosper. The list grows, changes, and is not complete.   I've grouped these services, arbitrarily, into three categories: Discovery, Reading, and Writing. Discovery services help you find stuff and navigate, and understand blognets and the blogosphere as a whole. Reading services help you keep up with relevant information. Writing helps you author and publish. Basic blogging service is extra.  In your workplace: Which 3 are mandatory for a blognet pilot? What risks do you assume if you don't provide these services? Which services might you be better off operating in support of public employee and customer weblogs, even though they are the open blogosphere's services? What policy and IT operations issues do these services raise? Service Description Discovery Intranet search Covering the intranet and DMZ, your private search engine must update its index frequently. Best is if they re-index within a few minutes of fan update server being pinged. Engines which work well in public, because they use hypertext links to establish relevance, may not work as well in the intranet, where there are fewer links or other cues. For example, the Google appliance. Location tagging and search service Find blogs physically near me; find posts related to a location or system. For example, Geourl.org. Referral logs Who's sending traffic to me? It's sometimes useful to understand your readership. Other times you discover people with similar interests. Weblog neighborhood Who is like me? Who writes about things like me? Who else is cited like me? For example, Technorati link cosmos. Topic service Find posts related to this one within my weblog, across the intranet, and perhaps across a collection of partner blognets. See K-collector and Easy News Topics. Realspace Generate live meetings using information from blogspace. For example, Meetup or Evite. Random walk Manufacture serendipity. Sample the intranet, get a bigger picture. See also wanderlust. Directory So you have an employee directory, maybe even a yellow pages for services and departments. How about extending the yellow pages to people, by topic, updated automatically? For example, see blogarama, Eatonweb, Oblix. Advertising Text ads for internal announcements. Think of it as the new bulletin board. Cemetery A directory of abandoned weblogs, because of personnel actions, lack of interest, or because their focus or relationship is completed. See Fucked Weblog. Product or object watch Analyze weblogs for well-understood references, store and analyze the results, and notify subscribers. For example, seeing what books people mention in their weblogs. Or people. Or competitor products. Peopleroll and social network I'm sharing some of my friends, and friends of friends. See FOAF, Friendster, Ryze. Reading RSS portals server side directories of RSS feeds, aggregation and browser presentation of those feeds Updates What's new? A central service that writing tools notify when a blog is updated. Sometimes called a "ping service". Like weblogs.com and blo.gs. Blogroll & WebRing services May be linked to enterprise directory services, the better to provide automatic maintenance of blogrolls that match the formal org chart. Of more value, giving users the ability to create their own blogrolls. This reveals informal and temporary social networks. Blogrolling.com is an example. Blog distribution gateway Distributes blog posts by email, SMS or other channels. Buzz watcher What's hot on the intranet? What's hot in my circle? Services that answer this include Blogpulse, DayPop News Burst, Popdex, and Blogdex News Readers and Aggregators Aggregators collect a user's selection of RSS feeds, keeping them current, formating them for reading, and making them available for users to cross-post. News readers do the same thing, except from a user's desktop. Server side aggregators have the effect of concentrating traffic (they pick an RSS feed only once, instead of each user picking it up) so publishers don't experience "slashdot effects". They also hide the level of attention from publishers, useful if the publisher is a competitor or industry insider. Syndic8 is an example. Re-aggregation service These services combine content from multiple sources into a more focused feed. This can be fully automated or humans may approve contributions to a feed. Moreover is an example. Machine translation Do you span countries? Machine translations of posts and RSS feeds helps people get the gist of what their colleagues write. Systrans is an example. Writing Posting Gateways Use these services to write to your weblog using non-browser devices or software. Post from voicemail, your phone's SMS/MMS, email, calendar, or IM. Comment Service Manages posted comments like the blog server manages weblog posts. Conversation Threading Tracks the flow of conversation across weblogs using methods like trackback and link analysis. Render Services These convert blog posts to RSS, and to document formats like PowerPoint .ppt, Flash .swf, Adobe Acrobat .pdf, or Microsoft Word .doc. Template Farm, Widget Library Stores styles, templates, graphics and other ways to customize the look and feel of your blog. Weblog Medic Checks your blog for dead links, broken images, speed, accessibility, valid RSS and html, language encoding, etc. For example, BlogCheckup. Blog Fodder Actively provoke blogging by suggesting themes or topics. For example, blogfodder and The Friday Five. I'll be updating this page for a while. [a klog apart] [a klog apart] 9:07:52 AM  comment []  Trackback []     More Play for the Heavenly Jukebox. The Heavenly Jukebox Cont'd "Tonight I went to a dinner party at some friend's house, and in between the cold dry sake and an obscene amount of yellow tail and hamachi, there was more music than we knew what to do with. These are friends that until six months ago, had been sampling all sorts of free stuff on P2P networks. Not all of it was good or complete, but they buy a lot of CD's and wanted to try stuff out first, and they wanted the convenience of mixing up thousands of songs for days of play, or a few seconds as the case may be. Anyway, tonight, we played around with Rhapsody which was totally great and lots of fun. And my friends are proving my point that if you make it easy, cool, give decent information about the music and make it cheap, people will abandon the free stuff for something much more professional. Sorting by artist, title, genre, album, play lists we made up, we streamed Thievery Corp, Gotan and Ladytron through the first course, and then went from cool jazz, to Chopin and Mozart for the second, and then we veered into Bah-bra and Barry Gibb, the GoGo's (who can resist skidmarks on my heart!), Supertramp, Artie Shaw, Radiohead, Elton John, Frank, Ben Folds Five (Kate!), Jon Cutler, the Replacements, for about three hours of dancing, everybody was in on it, clicking and sampling. There is also stuff you can't search for or directly stream, like the Beatles, on their 'radio stations.' " [bIPlog] Heh - it's not just me and Kailee grooving with Rhapsody. I still think the service could leapfrog to the front of the pack if it would just start offering single downloads without requiring the user to burn a full CD first and without using Windows Media Player to do it. The weird thing is that Rhapsody trusts you to burn the CD - I haven't found any invasive DRM yet, so if they'd just trust me (and the rest of their customers) with the single downloads, I'd go back to purchasing music. The Heavenly Jukebox is indeed on the doorstep.... [The Shifted Librarian] 8:41:07 AM  comment []  Trackback []     Images: Tech gods of BloggerCon. In the picture above the God of Technical Innovation swoops in from stage right, bringing new possibilities for work and play to Technically Challenged Humanity. Support for God has been provided by BloggerCon Angels including, left to right, Dave Winer, Chris Lydon, Dan Bricklin, and Bob Doyle. Ready to take over when any gods get tired, the cool guy in a hot shirt is Feedster's Scott Johnson. I'd like to thank the Spirit of the Gift Economy, Dan Bricklin for all the headshots and--er, excuse me, Michelangelo's lawyers seem to have buzzed my cellphone... Actual tech news from BloggerCon: Scott Johnson is prototyping a multi-blog feed that lets you look at, say, 5 candidate blogs in parallel. Erin Clerico (Weblogger) announced new virtual hosting for multiple blogs. Adam Curry--even cuter in person than his blog pix--created a Syncpod channel to put web audio into your iPod. He and Markserman--er, I mean, Kevin Marks--plan to do more with it. Chris Lydon and Bob Doyle just launched BlogRadio--check it out! [Betsy Devine: Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar?] 8:36:38 AM  comment []  Trackback []     Overstock.com Adds Travel to Its Wares. Overstock.com, an Internet retailer that sells surplus merchandise from other companies, will add travel to its list of products. [New York Times: Business] 8:33:37 AM  comment []  Trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Gail Marsella. Last update: 6/27/2004; 7:17:51 PM.

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