Friday, September 05, 2003

Writing for skimmers. You might have noticed this annoying John-Dvorak-Like way of writing with key words and phrases bolded. I thought I might want to explain why the heck I do that. It's something I've used often in the past when writing important emails that are more than a couple of sentences. I understand that people read a ton of emails and end up skimming much of it. So, I developed this way of formatting hopefully to get people to slow down and at least grasping the key points I am trying to make. The same thing applies I think to blog postings. If people are like me they skim like crazy. I try to come up with catchy, provocative titles for my postings to slow people down enough to read, and then bold out the key take aways in the hope that people will stay around to get my point. 10:05:06 PM  >  trackback []   comment []

Blogging is open source writing. Did you ever think of that? (Yeah, maybe everyone but me has talked about it, but it just occurred to me as I was writing the preceding post.) The amazing thing about bloggers is all the energy they put into something which has no measurable payback. I get close to a majority of the latest technical, computer industry and even political information from blogs. I am benefitting from someone else's labor of love. It's an odd dynamic. And I think it is analogous to Open Source coding. 10:01:33 PM  >  trackback []   comment []

Blog Bridge is Open Source. I am building Blog Bridge on top of an Open Source RSS library called Informa, which I found when I was first starting the project a few months ago. It is a nicely designed, yet still somewhat new library. But it works, it supports a variety of flavors of RSS, and the price is right! As I was benefiting so much from the library and from Open Source, I was motivated to look into the world of open source: What was available? What was the quality of what was available, what are the dynamics and sociology of open source? Wow! You know everyone talks about open source, and so did I, but I had never really understood the wealth of stuff that is out there. Yes SourceForge has a gazillion dead projects, but there are a bunch of really high quality, robust, well designed (, so-so documented) bodies of code out there. An amazing resource. So I decided to make Blog Bridge open source as well. If you happen to know me you know that I come from a thoroughly commercial software development background, where while you want to build great software, it is more important to build software that sells. So the notion of open sourcing Blog Bridge was, at best, counter-intuitive. In fact this is the first time that I mention in any sort of public forum that in fact it is and that the source code is out there for all to see and use. For now it's parked as a sub-project under Informa. You can find the sources here. There isn't yet a home page for it, nor any real announcement on the Informa home page. I think that the likely direction is for Blog Bridge to become a project in its own right at SourceForge but for now that's not at all a priority for me, so I will keep it buried there for now. I am curious where this path will lead! 9:57:04 PM  >  trackback []   comment []