Radio Demystified

Radio Userland is an easy product to use and understand.

Radio Userland is a difficult product to use and understand.

Yes. Then again, computers are easy to use and understand but hard to use and understand.

Ever since the recent controversy over Radio as a centralized or decentralized blogging tool (which is it?), I have felt the time was ripe for a reflective look at the product. This fits nicely with the upcoming six-month marker since Radio's initial release. Also, having just spend a bit of time away from Radio on holiday, I am reflecting personally on my use of the product and my intentions for this weblog.

Over the next two weeks, this short essay will grow into something resembling a white paper on Radio but (appropriately) a white paper as narrative. As I go, I will not only add new sections but revise existing ones.  Today's episode is a family story, though it only covers three of my five children and myself ... so far. Here we go.

Why Radio for Zach?

My 12-year old son, Zach, maintains his own Radio weblog. It's simple. He posts his thoughts on baseball and hockey with a few excursions into movies. But it isn't just his weblog that's simple but the way he uses Radio.

He writes and edits his posts in my version of Radio, making sure to deselect the 'home' checkbox and select the checkbox for the 'Zachary' category. He knows how to copy URL links into Radio's editor. When he is done, he publishes his posts. Radio automatically upstreams them to his weblog on a free Internet hosting service.

Naturally, he is pestering me about creating original designs for his page. So far, I haven't let him because I don't want him to become needlessly confused. Weblogs are about writing first of all. I'm delighted he is writing - he loves math and hates to write.

Still, as part of his home-schooling, we are including a course on HTML. He is working through Dave Raggett's Getting Started With HTML and I see no reason why he can't take on Userland's Scripting Tutorial next.

If weblogging is the goal (that is, if we are blogging because we have something to say), learning Radio is perhaps a one-day task .... if that.

Why Radio for James?

James is a musician and song writer in Austin, Texas as well as a budding video editor in the independent film community there. Don't miscast him as an artiste only. He is an all-around smart guy who took calculus in high school and tracked towards journalism in college. He cut his teeth on PC computer games and has always been comfortable on the Net. Of course.

He can't figure out why I am so high on Radio and why it would be useful for him.

I tell him that Radio is just a next-generation tool for developing web sites. Just. But that is no small thing. Radio fits into the huge niche between roll-your-own HTML authoring tools and vastly expensive content management environments. It isn't the final word on web site development but it is today's word for an environment that makes mainly reasonable compromises between power and simplicity.

So, I make the point to James that Radio separates content (writing) from structure (design). Our writing is poured through a series of templates to produce what we see on our weblogs.

But why the stupid calendar ... he asks?

The Radio calendar is a simple, useful device for organizing, archiving and retrieving our writing. Nothing more, nothing less. While it can't touch the need for global keyword searches (which can be addressed by adding a search engine), the calendar allows readers to watch our thinking and writing evolve over time.

Who have we been? What are we now? Where might we be going? Time-based threading of our posts helps to answer these questions and build trust. Trust is the common coin of a successful weblog.

I am arguing to James - he loves to write and writes beautifully - that Radio is made-to-order for Slowtrain's website. Why not a weblog that features his daily musings about the Austin film and music scene, drafts and edits of his new songs, comments on the wildly chaotic business of music from the perspective of an emerging band? Authentic music journalism authored by a band on the run and in the middle of it all?

Why Radio for Josh?

My oldest son worked with me on a wildly fun and doomed-to-fail Internet startup that did its best to return value on our investor's 1M plus investment. For the curious, we pioneered some advanced usage of Domino/Notes, rolling our own ecommerce software and publishing a complete electronic magazine.

Golf.

Ever since I got into Frontier and then Manila, I have been hounding Josh about how cool these products, and Userland, are. He has never disputed that. He has wondered how he could ever earn any money with them or, now, with Radio. Fair question, especially for someone whose Lotus Notes development and admin skills were opening doors.

Within the last two months, the light has turned on. As a small sample, he tried to do a few simple things in Frontier that would not have been nearly so easy in Notes. Ah! While Josh may well correct my analysis (and I will reflect that here), my sense is that he has tired of Notes, is terminally fed-up with Microsoft and is ready to be excited again about the possibilities of the Internet.

(It wasn't only the big guys who exited the Internet bubble with some battle fatigue).

Since Josh not only develops but designs, I have urged him to consider the large hole that exists in the Userland community for top-notch graphical design. He is thinking about it. He reports feeling somewhat constrained to date by the 'shape' of Radio's existing template structure. I remind him that most of the elements can not only be rearranged but ignored. Even the Radio calendar is, after all, optional.

Interestingly, Josh has just been given a short consulting assignment (XML data conversion for a publication) that will take him away from his experimentation. Why interesting? Because the lack of robust consulting opportunities for Frontier/Radio can be a barrier for folks like Josh who need to earn their own support right now. Slowtrain isn't - yet - paying his way anymore than it is paying James' way.

Why Radio for Russ?

In 1974, never having touched a computer, I handed my father-in-law (a heavy-hitter in mainframe software development for IBM) a set of paper pages that linked topics to one another in a web. I asked him whether computers could do that because this is how I wanted to write?

He said it was possible but he didn't know when or where it would be done.

Almost three decades have passed. After numerous subsequent forays into such disparate as well as related areas as expert systems, multimedia, hypertext and, of course, the Web, weblogging simply feels natural to me. Isn't this what writing is?

But I know very well that products like Radio seem a bizarre, complex, mystical and frustrating black box to hundreds of thousands - millions - of bright people who sense that there is a 'there there' but don't know how to get from here to .... there.

I also know that what distinguishes Radio from its blogging competitors (and may a thousand competitors bloom) is the quality of its underlying development environment. Entirely tuned for online writing and publishing, Radio's engine offers the possibility for Userland (and you or me) to extend the tools in a host of exciting directions.

Indeed, Radio itself was once just such a promising 'direction'. The beta version, like many Userland projects, mixed the cool and the merely weird in ways that did not easily predict today's actual product. Some of what excites Userland today (Google, directories, instant outlines) do not easily predict tomorrow's Radio or, it may be, an entirely different product. But they (that is, the development environment) make it possible.

It is no secret that I believe mass usage of Radio waits far more on top-notch documentation than new features. Or, for another take on that, it may wait on more intelligently wired-together community documentation - K-logging, if you prefer.

Radio is easy. Well-crafted written communication is hard. Inter-connected communities of human beings sharing their knowledge conveniently is extraordinarily difficult. But not impossible.

Nice, But ...

... who cares about me and a few of my sons' experience with Radio?

I think if you read between the lines, you may discover that these real people and their real questions, experiences and discoveries about Radio track rather neatly with very large groups of current or prospective Radio users.

On the 'up' side, Lipton family usage has exploded from one of us to three of us ... so far. On the 'down' side, there is lots of tire-kicking going on but not a heck of a lot of hard driving. Is this so very unlike what is happening in the Radio community at large?

By demystifying Radio for Zach (simple weblogging), James (music journalism), Josh (design and development consulting) and myself (is K-logging for real or what?), I may perhaps demystify Radio for others too.

Even you.

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