I have been looking for Al-Jazeera's site for a week. Last week the English language site was hacked. Now it seems to be up. It presents an interesting view of the conflict.
Why blogging isn't a fad. Arnold Kling offers one of the best explanations I've seen of the value of blogging as a distributed information filtering mechanism.
"This filtering process makes all of us more efficient. Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold. Everyone tends to receive information with a high value to them, and they avoid having to read information that has low value to them."
Gradually working off the backlog of items lurking in my news aggregator. This is, indeed, an excellent explanation of the value of weblogs in organizational settings and in communities of practice. I might have gotten to it earlier, but it's from another of those Corante blogs that continue to refuse to offer RSS feeds. I have yet to hear the argument about why RSS feeds are a bad thing from Corante's point of view. But until I have time to scrape these blogs into my aggregator I just don't have time to track them, no matter how excellent the content may be.
A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio]
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The next version of Microsoft Office is, among other things, a family of XML editors. I have discussed the XML modes of Word and Excel (see "XML for the rest of us" and "Exploring XML in Office 11"), and described the newest member of this family, InfoPath 2003, a tool for gathering XML data (see "Ten things to know about Xdocs"). Now that I've had a chance to work with InfoPath, its role and value are becoming clearer. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio]
I have begun to explore Infopath as well and I think I will use it in a publishing project. I will report on its functionality.