Monday, January 13, 2003

First, Jon Udell of Infoworld writes about The disruptive web: "Thus a new service, potentially useful to millions of people, was deployed by blogging a Web page containing 900 links. The meme spread quickly in the petri dish that is the interconnected blog network. My published RSS feed spread the news to my subscribers, who passed it along to their subscribers, and soon the blog indexes picked it up and spread it even more widely. By the end of the day, the technique was verified to work with many libraries in the United States." [InfoWorld] Then, I run across Clay Shirky's (O'Reilly) LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too?: "There is evidence that this two-step process applies to features as well, in a pattern Matt Jones has dubbed the LazyWeb. The original formulation was 'If you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about.' But it is coming to mean 'I describe a feature I think should exist in hopes that someone else will code it.'" [O'Reilly's OpenP2P] Both of these stories exemplify how weblogging (and its technical underpinnings) have become the poor man's "knowledge management" system. If one agrees with Thomas Edision that "The value of an idea lies in the using of it," then Jon's story is a personal testimonial of experiencing a revelation and turning it into reality through the vehicle of the loosely-coupled weblog pub-sub network. So too, Clay Shirky cites two examples of situations where one mind delivered the "idea," and another mind delivered the "using of it," again through the magic of weblogs, RSS, and web-based pub-sub. Certainly, ideas are often highly valued in today's society; however, as recent economic events seem to bear out, not every idea, even when used, can produce economic value. I think I'd revise Edison's quote to read "The value of an idea lies in the effective using of it," drawing on Merriam-Webster's first definition of effective: "1 a : producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect." The "desired effect," of course, is sustained economic growth (not the short-term gains of the late '90s that vaporized so quickly). One of the opportunities of the web as demonstrated in the Udell and Shirky articles is the low cost of R & D for a certain domain of ideas (we'll call them "web services"). Experiments can yield success or failure in hours, and learning from those experiences occurs at a similarly frenzied pace. The time-to-market for Jon Udell's idea was simply his development time. His time-to-volume (Internet-scale usage) was less than 24 hours. Granted, he's not generating revenue or profit from this usage, but substantial numbers of users derive value, resulting in additional growth in eyeballs to Jon's writing, making him a more-marketable writer, and ultimately delivering added compensation to his bank account. 12:05:44 AM

	Friday, January 10, 2003

New Architect: - A Question of Identity - Passport, Liberty, and the single sign-on race "The Liberty Alliance argues that the problem with using Kerberos for interoperability is that it requires a middleman?a Kerberos Distribution Center server?to hand out "ticket-generating tickets." Kerberos also doesn't allow for the distinction between authentication tickets and authorization tickets?in other words, the difference between verifying your identity and verifying what actions your identity can perform. Rather than Kerberos, Liberty relies on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an OASIS specification for exchanging authentication and authorization data using XML." [new architect] Clearly, unless an application can determine what permissions to grant any user agent (web browser or other), the potential for security breaches and fraudulent transactions is unacceptable for all but the most low-value activities. Another point made in the article is the fact that the WS Security spec moves the responsibility for web services security into the application layer instead of the transmission layer, putting more power and flexibility into the hands of application developers (but, as Spidey's uncle Ben says in Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility."). 2:39:27 AM

	Thursday, December 19, 2002

non-GNU Savannah - RSS Channel to Mail - The goal of the project is to provide a way of "mirroring" a RSS news feed as daily mail batch. [non-GNU Savannah] One more piece of the RSS->knowledge management puzzle. Mailing a daily summary of an RSS channel provides an additional (and more common) way to subscribe to knowledge developing in RSS. Not every user will want an RSS aggregator on his/her desktop. 7:00:02 AM

	Saturday, December 14, 2002

Mac OS X Hints: Use the myodbc driver with Excel v.X via MS Query [Brian Jepson's Radio Weblog] And Mac OS X takes yet another step closer to the business mainstream... 10:58:08 PM

	Friday, December 13, 2002

Ease-of-use principle:If there's only one "right" way to do something, make that way unmistakably intuitive.  If you're unable to create a single, unmistakably intuitive "right" way, make every possible way a "right" way. 9:48:24 AM

Novell URLs I dug up: eDirectory Promotion  Novell eDirectory vs. Sun ONE Directory Server:Competitive Guide Novell iChain 2.1 iChain Demo (Flash) NDK API Documentation JNDI Providers (NJCL) -- Clientless NJCL and JNDI Tasks How to create a JNDI Shell Getting aquainted with Novell's various identity management infrastructure and how to manipulate it programmatically.  So much to learn, so little time... 6:41:19 AM

	Thursday, December 12, 2002

Getting into practice. KM as Both Practice and Theory. Ton Zijlstra uses his weblog to share self-directed learning experiences and think out loud about how to address issues in his company. [b.cognosco] Terry points to a good article about the perils of being a thinker and also the problems of getting your message across.  This: This prospect viewed us a software company as the only product information he saw from us was one having to do with some software we happen to sell as a tool. This tool is part of a larger product that is in the area of consulting. So I talked with this prospect about what it is we actually do. Now how is it that this prospect got the wrong impression? Is our productinformation not clear enough? These are the sort of things my colleague and I want to talk about when meeting the other accountmanageing researchers. struck a chord with me.   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 8:19:12 AM

Locus for action. Who Needs an Intranet?. Martin White has an interesting answer for managers of small companies wondering about intranets -- you probably don't need one! I concur, companies under about 50 employees, with everyone located in the same facility, can likely forego the expense and ha [b.cognosco] I think this is where I begin to diverge from mainstream thinking on Intranets.  My thinking here is along the same lines as my previous post on whether an Intranet is a factory or a gallery.  I agree with Martin that a 50-man organisation doesn't need a gallery intranet to reflect upon work done or to showcase the HR policy set.  But who does?  More often than not I think these sites are built with an eye on senior management approval.  Hence: glossy, bright colours, simple headlines and little substance. However if an intranet is living work, an embodyment of the spinning flywheels and turning cogs of the organisation, then why is it any less relevant to a 50-man, or even 5-man organisation?  To me it's just as relevant.  In a small organsiation there are less people doing the work, everyone needs to be that bit more focused on it (and I don't I know that).  In a large organisation there are more cracks for things to fall through, but the idea is the same. An intranet should help to collect things together and provide a locus for action.  The intranet should be part of the process, embedded in the work not separate to it.  As Terry says in response to the gallery post: In "The 21st-Century Intranet" Jennifer Gonzalez describes four types of intranets ranging from the asynchronous broadcast model to the symmetrical interactive model. Almost none of the later exist and I belive it is becasue of the point you make -- there is almost no room for people. Even the idea of adding people to the intranet draws gap-mouthed stares from executives in many companies. I don't think a change in workflow alone will do it. As numerous k-log threads have discussed, the cultural and personal barriers are greater than a simple change in workflow can address. But a comprehensive approach, will solid management support, could drastically change the nature of intra-company communication. The basic point is this: If the Intranet is about the people, and their work, then why does the number of people matter? [Curiouser and curiouser!] 8:18:15 AM

	Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Novell rolls out UDDI server. eDirectory-based offering aims to secure and manage registered Web services [InfoWorld: Top News] 8:38:43 PM

Mono trudges on with .Net alternative. Complete release of open source version is put on hold [InfoWorld: Top News] 8:34:53 PM

Tagless editor by i4i. Saw the demo of the Tagless Editor by i4i this week. The tagless is a plugin for MS Word that lets you create DTD based XML content. The tool is pretty powerful, and has lots features. You can define your own custom DTDs and use them with this tool. They ... [XML XHTML WebLog] 8:29:04 PM

BitFlux XHTML. I was looking for a Flash/Shockwave based WYSISYG XHTML editor, but instead found this JavaScript based very cool product - Bitflux Editor. Seems like a nice tool. If you are looking for Fat Client XHTML editor, beta test Contribute by Macromedia More details about Contribute in future posts. [XML XHTML WebLog] 8:28:29 PM

Quick Review of Contribute. Contribute is a WYSIWYG XHTML/HTML editor by Macromedia. Here is a are pros and cons I saw in the product: Pros: 1) Strictly conforms to the site CSS 2) You can prevent the content contributor from changing the scripts (PHP, ASP, etc). This is a problem we had with using Dreamweaver. We don't ... [XML XHTML WebLog] 8:27:51 PM

Authentic 5 by Altova. I downloaded the eval copy of Authentic 5 by Altova this week. Looks like a very powerful application. I was looking for WYSIWYG DocBook editor, and I think Authentic 5 is one of the best one. The eval version is not provide full functionality, but you will be able to ... [XML XHTML WebLog] 8:26:50 PM

OpenOffice Filter. AxKit provide a XML content pulishing framework. They released a OpenOffice filter (XSLT) that can directly publish OpenOffice DTD based documents to the web in HTML. AxKit framework, combined with WebDAV can provide a solution where the user Saves a file to a WebDAV folder, and AxKit publishes the Document ... [XML XHTML WebLog] 8:26:15 PM

Mozilla + CSS + XML = Structured + Formatted Content. Publishing XML content on the web requires some heavy processing on the server. There are many publishing framework (AxKit, Cocoon, etc) available in the market. However they are very CPU intensive. Apple's Internet Developer has a article on how to use CSS along with your XML content to render ... [XML XHTML WebLog] Interesting article on the Apple dev site.  The example app processes an RSS feed from a Weblog into a nicely formatted XHTML view of the blog content, clearly demonstrating the concept of dynamically multi-purposing content (RSS feeding both syndication, e.g., machine-to-machine, and live viewing, e.g., machine-to-human). 8:23:56 PM

DMG Tool 3.0. DMG Tool is an AppleScript Studio GUI front end for the command line tool hdiutil. It was created to simplify the process of quickly creating compressed disk images in Mac OS X. Version 3, which requires OS X 10.2, is a complete rewrite which offers a smaller file size, less code duplication and various improvements and enhancements. A previous version of DMG Tool is still available for users who haven't upgraded to Jaguar. [AppleScript Info] 9:09:00 AM