Wednesday, June 04, 2003

Following Joi's Lead and Setting Up A Movable Type Weblog After my mention Monday to duplicate the beauty of Joi Ito's Moblog, Joi quickly added his own Comment[] and set me running towards something I'd been thinking about for a while...a Movable Type weblog. And Joi pointed me to his Moblogging Notes, which indicates that I'm going to somehow need to marry up MT with a mail2entry.py script to get mobile blogging underway. BTW, it looks like the Joi is experimenting, with technology-agnostically beautiful results, with higher-res pictures...something very key to what I'm working on for the Playboy Jazz Festival Weblog. And it just so happens that the Movable Type folks will help with my installation for a nominal fee. So I started that process, which has led me a the pre-requiste of making sure that my web server host, http://WestHost.com, can support Movable Type. I posted something on the WestHost forum asking for verification and looking for WestHost Moveable Type folks to commune with and learn from. As of now, Westhost as verified that my plan supports MT technology and I'm waiting to make sure I've got the mySQL database setup so I can move forward with the MT installers. Maybe we'll finalize our order today and see how quickly we're up and running with Movable Type. More to follow....hopefully more progress to follow... comment []  2:50:48 PM

Friday, May 30, 2003

The Hunt For A Bluetooth Camera Phone I'm always refining in my mind how best to mobile-y weblog...be able to report to the world from anywhere. I bought a new Apple TiBook to have full featured, multi-media capability, with weblog publishing flexibility...my own Personal Broadcast Network (scroll down to Vince Outlaw: Freelance Weblogger). And as I use it as an example in Freelance Weblogger piece, the Playboy Jazz Festival is coming again and I want to really weblog the festival this year. And I'm realizing that toting around the G4 and whipping it out to blog the festival is just not feasible. But this is an event that just begs for real-time weblogging. Here's an idea for doing just that AND having the party that I know I want to have (and always do) when I go up there in June. I need a Bluetooth-enabled Camera Phone (initial salivation). Camera Phone for being able to take pictures anywhere my feet can take me in the festival (and we do go lots of places in the Bowl ), add small captions, and email to the PBJF Weblog, available to the world. Phone for being able to use something like Audblog, like we already are playing with at TNJT Audblog, to post live audio reports from anywhere, from the top of the Bowl where the REAL party is, to the press-room backstage. Oh, the phone also comes in handy for calling in Live to Jazz 88 on what's happening. Bluetooth-enabled so when I need to use the portable, Bluetooth-enabled Apple Tibook for those big nasty computing jobs, the Phone becomes the Modem. Sounds like I've found the must-need device for really covering the festival this year. And taking my own mobile blogging efforts to the next level. Oh...and it would be nice to have Bluetooth-enabled PDA in my other pocket in case I want to do a little more writing about photos or other things as they are happening and post those to the weblog. Again the Bluetooth-enabled Camera Phone would change up and serve as Modem, this time for the PDA. This is another totally mobile solution (I have lots of pockets) that adds quite a bit of capability to the mix. But the Camera Phone is now a must have. Wouldn't it be cool if I could find a camera store, phone store, camera-phone maker to sponsor my efforts by providing the camera-phone and connectivity?! How do I make THAT happen?!! I could supply the weblog and the will. comment []  9:42:53 AM

Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Improvising My Way Out Of Blogging On The G4 (For Now) and My Way InTo Blogging and Jazz A couple more ideas have been brewing in my head as I prepare to dive into a major upheaval: moving my weblog posting / news aggregating main environment from my trusty Windows box over to the new G4. The main reason is to have my main home page posting tool right by my side, moving anywhere I do. But I'm soooo not sure this is the right thing and time to do this. Genuinely internally upheaved. This move has also made me think about all of the past changes that have left major portions of TNJT lying around in places like http://NewJazzThing.EditThisPage.com and http://radio.weblogs.com/0101235/. I do have some plans to possibly resurrect the EditThisPage site to continue experiments in Manila, but that's another story. And I'm further scaling and taking the functionality up another level with a serious move to activeRenderer to enable writing and publishing outlines for New Things like future longer rants, stories, playlists, blogrolls, activeRolls...not to mention the structure and, hopefully, focus that outlining might provide my scattered brain. Furthermore, I have been contemplating the use of LiveTopics to add topic keywords to my posts in order to give some sort of Topic Table of Contents to the site (and to help myself find stuff I've previously posted on the site when needing a reference or forgotten link). This opens up a whole realm of possibilities for experiments in the Knowledge Management aspects of weblogging (aka K-logging), at least on the Radio Userland platform, with XML-based standards like Easy News Topics and standard XML aggregators like k-collector (DoIbeta?) to work help organize and share the information we are learning and blogging every minute every day, connected in every way. Tonight, as I prepared to go ahead and move things (from where this all started), I did a couple of Google searches to see if someone else could talk me out of this Window/Mac/Radio switcheroo. The first one was one I have done more than a couple of times in the last month: 'radio userland move to new computer'. There I found a reason to hesistate, but also, serendipitiously, a link to the old Mathemagenic where I was tantilized enough by the final 'blog is moved' post and K-log linkage to sample the new Mathemagenic where use of activeRenderer (those triangle twisties on the right navigation, alternately revealing and hiding organized link treasures) and hints of LiveTopics and/or k-collector abound. Looks like she's testing something down there in the bottom right navigation (maybe k-collector?). I kind of took all this as a sign that I should plow ahead with the move. Further probing into the Mathemagenic (?) author Lilia Efimova showed a kindred learner, stating so accurately a main tenet of what I feel inside about myself, "I’m addicted to learning. I’m curious to know how this world works. I love the fun of discovery." Lilia is presenting a paper titled Blogs: the stickiness factor this coming Saturday, May 24, at Blogtalk (A European Conference On Weblogs) in Vienna, Austria. What a weblogging thinker!! Curious learners will want to see what it takes to put together a paper for presentation...woa. And I stumbled further into wonderfully exhilerating ideas when I saw Lilia's search options, especially the one for searching 'Weblogs I read'. What a concept. Being able to search across all of the sites that you read, more often than not to find a link or line that you know you read at one time or another but can't quite find right now. That has happened to me A LOT! So I most definitely followed the little orange ? to see what was up with this. Searching the Blogosphere goes farther than that. Utilizing lists of web sites (easily maintained through your news aggregator or outline creating software...another thread tonight), it will limit a search to just those things. So I'm thinking I can make a list of Jazz Web Sites to search across. This would be handy just as a general purpose search, but imagine if another option from my radio show playlist was a search across just Jazz Sites. When I played a tune, you could search Google, or just Jazz sites, or buy the tune from iTunes or the CD from GEMM. A nice feature to the playlist. I've talked many times before about the playlist from the radio station as a whole as a starting point for many on-line conversations. We just need to get more Jazz webloggers. And speaking of Jazz and weblogging, performing a Jazz search across all of the sites that Lilia reads, leads to a final chance linkage of the night, to Stuart Henshall and Jazz-Blogging, summed up as follows, "Jazz-Blogging" as a possible meme for colective collaborative intelligent blogging. What clients want when it comes to thought-leaders is a safe place to engage. My individual blogs are not safe or maybe too public. We need to create safe access environments. Probably as part of a collaborative blogging environment. Perhaps then it more like an extended dinner party in the Hamptons." Isn't funny how it all came back to Jazz? And that's my take on Jazz and Weblogging. Weblogging as a simple tool for providing textual / visual / audio context to links on the web and thoughts in my head, provides me the means to improvisationally follow links and document what I find on those journeys. And as tonight's post shows, there are usually multiple paths that lead to multiple outcomes when taking these journeys. One outcome was to dodge the upheaval of switching machines tonight. Not intentionally, but I found out so many things that people were doing in directions I'm going that I had to document them before I head down this path to my new machine. And in taking that step, another evening has come and gone. Much Love...VO P.S. I eluded to 2 Google searches above and most of the writing tonight stemmed from just one. The other search was for 'radio userland changing file path which does seem to solve a major problem with moving Radio Userland: all of the file paths used by the program (and no easy way to respecify them). Now I just have to see if I can run a script myself after moving the data to the G4...and off we go...hopefully...and not before tomorrow! comment []  12:53:19 AM

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Tweaking Post-From-News-Aggregator For Speed and Consistency I'm looking to do a little tweakage in my news aggregator posting software: "Is there a template that the Post function next to each entry in the News Aggregator uses when it pre-populates my Home page posting text area? I'd like to modify it a bit." Basically, when a news story pops up in my aggregator, I usually make the decision to read the full story based on the title or summary given. So I want to post those items, along with the link to the full story. And my news aggregator software has a simple 'Post' link next to each item that puts the information into my form for posting (kind-of giving me a head start). Well, I want to modify that head-start. I want to be able to use that head-start as the full post, just in case I don't want to add anything to it. And I want it to look good if I decide to add my comments to the story underneath it. I'm not really explaining this very good at the moment, so I'll stop. [Later...] OK, so I didn't stop. Here's a story with pictures to try and illustrate (document) what I'm trying to go for. comment []  9:56:30 AM

Friday, April 18, 2003

Preaching To Convert Organizations Into Weblog Creating Communities Truly inspired by the potential of weblogs already, I found yesterday's piece in the Harvard Gazette: "Weblog pioneer preaches the gospel of blog", enough to push me over the edge and write up how the solution Dave Winer is tweaking for Harvard is totally relevant and implementable in the organizations I'm involved in and want to be more involved in. Here's the payoff quote that I hope will keep those in charge of my organization reading the rest of this post and interested in that potential enough to investing the relatively minimal resources needed to try it. And hire me as a preacher! "It's the bright promise of creating intellectual community among Harvard's discreet "tubs" that launched Weblogs at Harvard Law. The initiative arose, says Palfrey, from a conference the Berkman Center sponsored in November 2002 called "What Is Harvard's Digital Identity?" At that conference, Provost Steven Hyman challenged the assembled deans, faculty members, and technology-forward administrators to harness the Internet to build intellectual bridges that would facilitate the flow of information and ideas between the University's disparate schools and centers. "There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Weblogs are the technology for doing exactly that," Winer says. "It is an incredible medium for sharing ideas and information. There's a big bright promise for the future." Weblogs at Harvard using Userland's Frontier / Manila platform. An example of workgroup, server-based, community weblogging. Easily implementable into any organization wishing to increase communication and knowledge retention. Centrally configured with distributed, personal, web-browser-based content mangement. Drop this solution into an organization (or even more interesting, a would-be organization or on-line community) and see how much more people know about what's going on both inside and outside the organization. Let's take a would-be tour of the Harvard site and try to explain the all-important right-side navigation links. Again, imagine this site in your organization. We'll open the Harvard site in another browser window so you can read here and look at the links below in the new window (you may need/want to adjust the new window size...this is an experiment). The page that pops up is the Home page described below. Setting the Stage and Touring The Right-Side Navigation After installing the Frontier / Manila solution, replace the 'Harvard' with 'Information Technology Services (ITS)' or 'Health Care Sector' or 'San Diego Performing Arts League' or 'San Diego Jazz Artists Guild' and imagine that each person in the ITS group has taken the opportunity to start their own blog at 'ITS Weblogs' (we'll use this example for immediate-self-preservation reasons). Now explain the links on the right-side navigation in terms both generic and relevant: Home: The blogmaster, in this case (by-luck-of-obsession) me (hehe), monitors the ITS blogging community and links, with excerpts, to stand-out blog posts (great meeting minutes, analysis of the vendor news and implications to existing infrastructure) and news of a time-critical nature (requests for expertise, the upcoming birthday celebration (!)). There can be multiple people assuming this Managing Editor role, with access to post the entries to this organization weblog Home page. About: The one written for the Harvard site is well worth reading (and plaguerizing) to get an overview of what they are trying to do. Answers questions like: "What is a weblog?", "Who can create a weblog?", "What are the rules?", and "Who the editors are?". To implement: Replace all Harvard references, in due respect, with ITS references and people, and you're done. New Weblog: The form needed to create a weblog. You launch, point people tot the About page and New Weblog page, and see who does it. It's that easy. Tie it in with an LDAP directory or NT Active Directory if need be. Rankings: Which weblogs in your organization are getting read the most. It quickly becomes those who are posting the most organization-relevant information in the easiest to understand way. Or the blog with the best jokes. Updates: A 'ticker' page of who is posting to their weblog. Updated as the weblogs are updated. Directory: A 'Yahoo-like' link repository put together by your own organization. Or a group list of Favorites / Bookmarks. Links to organization weblogs, key websites in your intranet, key websites of technology news related to your infrastructure, favorite Dilbert-ish sites. And information all-stars can maintain their own directory in their own specialty which can be integrated easily into this Directory. Aggregator: A constantly updating page of latest news from organization-selected sources. Automatically updated (no human intervention) because each news source, including your weblogs, automatically produce RSS, an XML-based news syndication format that your aggregator understands and reads. This is where it gets interesting. Monitor this page for news that you should know. Monitor this page for news that you can comment on using your weblog. The news items you see on this page can be exclusively come from organization-relevant sources outside of your weblog community. For ITS, you'd monitor CNET, ZDNET, News.com, and other relevant process and technology sites. For some organizations you'd monitor vertical or horizontal market sites. For arts organizations, you'd monitor artist, and museum, and other sites (of which I'd like to know more about myself). A Relevant News From External Sources page. OR you use the aggregator as a more comprehensive Updates page. An Updates page on steriods (a term Dave has used before). An Updates page that shows the full text of all the postings from your organizations webloggers in real time, as they happen. An Organization News page. You and your customers get the status on your projects as the status of the projects change (and your project team members blog their project's status'). I'd recommend that you create a couple of Aggregator pages: 1) An Organization News page, 2) A Combined Organization News page and Relevant News for External Sources page. Referrers: Who is linking to the site in general. This is the only page on the Harvard site that I'm not too sure about (or it's relevance). It looks like it's the sites who are linking to the Harvard site. What would be good to see is what weblogs in your organization are getting linked to by others in the organization. Those 'linked-to' weblogs become a list of the most relevant and most authoritative people / projects / technology weblogs in your organization. Maybe someone else can help me out with the importance of this page or important uses of this page (I'm thought-out at the moment..hehe). How This All Gets Used By Your Organization: You supply the weblogs and webloggers. Your webloggers monitor the Combined Organization News page and Relevant News for External Sources aggregator page to know what's going on in the industry and in the organization. Your webloggers write about the meetings they go to, the techniques they are learning, the code they are writing, what fellow organization webloggers are blogging about, the news of the day and how it relates to their projects. They write for themselves (because it's fun) and for their readers: their customers, their organization, and any larger entities in the organization structure (the company, the great arts community, donors). By The Larger Entities: They monitor the Organization News aggregator to see what is happening in the organization as a whole. Hey, they could even have a weblog where they comment on how they think things are going or what's relevant. By Your Customers: They monitor the weblogs of the project team members they are working with. They now know how their projects are going and what other news is relevant to those projects. If they are interested in other projects or the organization as a whole, they monitor the Organization News aggregator page. You could even make another aggregator page of weblogs pertaining to functional areas of your organization (all of the webloggers working on HR projects or Marketing projects, for example). How to implement To implement quickly, use someone who has hosted Frontier / Manila solutions before (like Weblogger.com) to work along side your infrastructure people to get the system up and transfer the administrative knowledge. Then hire someone with experience in designing Manila site themes to create an innovative and unique look for the site or an all-important intranet / extranet integrated theme to go with the rest of your organization / companies website(s). Like Brian Bell, who did the Harvard Blog theme and lots of others. Themes are a centrally controlled set of templates, overall look-and-feel of the site...your bloggers don't need to worry about look and feel at all...just their knowledge. This time, the designer works with your web designers to transfer knowledge on the ins-and-outs of Manila site themes to allow further tweakage down-the-line. And then you hire me to preach like Dave! P.S. If by the end of this, I focused more on an intranet-like organization / workgroup in this post, it's only because that's where my head and obligations currently are. As I elude to above, this could easily be implemented for an organization wanting to show it's members (and their weblogs) to the world...to collaborate and share news and thoughts and art with each other in an open-to-the-web way. comment []  11:15:53 AM

Wednesday, March 05, 2003

What Is Your Website Running? Register: MS aims at Linux with $399 Server. [Scripting News] Interesting article on MS plans to hook you low cost and keep you when you need something bigger. Netcraft runs a nifty little utility to tell what web server (and operating system , etc.) any website is running on. Here's what TheNewJazzThing.com is running. comment []  4:02:44 PM

Like Your Mom Said, Use SOAP In All Your Orifices SOAP author says enough specs already [InfoWorld: Top News] "Specs are like bodily orifices: Everybody has them and they all have certain unique characteristics. But just writing a spec means nothing. If you write a spec that no one implements, did it ever really specify anything?" Don Box, an architect in Microsoft's .Net software group, asked developers at the XML Web Services One conference here." comment []  2:27:48 PM

Tuesday, March 04, 2003

It's a Mad Mad Mad World of Webloggers (at Harvard) Today's Newscan posted feedback from Julian C. Dunn (no weblog) to a previous Newscan post on Dave's Harvard Blogs initiative "...what is Harvard thinking? Someone there has been blinded by the hype of weblogs, and failed to realize that the premise of weblogs is the publication of one's diary entries publicly. To suggest that blogging is a skill as valuable and basic as word processing or e-mail is ludicrous." Obviously Julian doesn't get it. Weblogging is writing just the same as word processing or e-mail is writing. So that makes it as valuable as them. You have to get your point across, whether your point is a personal expression of feelings and emotions or whether your point is a technical assessment of a new technology. The key to weblogs IMHO is that it makes writing for the web as easy as writing an email and more important than a word processing document in that it gets posted to the web for searching and archival. OK, I'll actually say it (and now I'm in the personal emotion publishing mode), Julian probably doesn't have anything interesting to say to anyone outside of those folks that he can see with his own eyes. No desire to get feedback from anyone other than those who already know what he thinks. Not that there's anything wrong with that. comment []  10:14:55 AM