Wednesday, April 10, 2002

I'm seeing more "instant outlines" (or whatever you call them) on Radio blogs. Sean Gallagher and John Robb have posted them, and I could have sworn Dave Winer posted one too, but I can't find it again (see why we need RDF metadata in blogs?). I don't know about you, but I find these annoying and useless. An outline is missing all sorts of contextual information, semantic connotations, and any number of other dimensions of meaning that language has evolved to convey. Sure, use outlines as a writing tool if it works for you, but don't publish your outlines; try to put a little effort into it whydontcha? I sincerely hope attempting to communicate via outline doesn't catch on; we already have to suffer through interminable and excruciating PowerPoint presentations. 9:08:49 PM

Monday, April 8, 2002

Well, I just popped a bunch more subscriptions into the list; we'll see if using more "quick scan" items in a subscription list is sufficient compared to actually visiting sites and reading what they have to say. Yes, I know I can click the links and still read the articles, but there's a certain context that's abandoned in the process. It feels different to me; I'm going to try it fairly intensively and see what I can find out. 9:43:44 PM

Saturday, April 6, 2002

Productivity I can't figure out how Dave puts out the number of posts he does. Guy must be a genius reading-writing machine. I can usually manage one post a day, and he's churning out commentary on ten things, each of which took some concentrated time to read, absorb, and comment on. Doc can do this, too, and so can Jenny. I may just be more of a long-form blogger, of course. Where the heck did that term come from? 11:24:34 PM

Saturday, March 23, 2002

Hey, this could be great Monday morning I'm back at my Manila system, and this is the first thing I'm going to check out: Manila Envelope 1.0.3 Released. Tim Jarrett’s Manila Envelope is an external editor for Manila weblogs. This release adds a couple new features and fixes some bugs. [mac.scripting.com] 10:16:15 PM

Semantic web from on high Eric Hanson posted this brief overview of the Semantic Web. Excellent piece; it makes the Semantic Web simple, which it really is, at the bottom. One of the things that makes the Semantic Web seem complex is that RDF, its "language", is defined in not one but two specification documents, the Model and Syntax spec and the RDF Schema spec. Each spec is harder to follow than it should be because essential information is contained in the other. Instead of reading one, then the other, you really have to read them at the same time, sort of. But imagine this: think about a set of blogs that use the Semantic Web approach. 10:13:23 PM

Friday, March 22, 2002

Referers indeed Here's an odd thing. My Referers page displays the (hopelessly short) list of other sites that refer back to mine. The subtitle of the page is "Statistics and information about your community of Radio users." But I just noticed on the list another site I run -- a site that has nothing to do with Radio. That site does refer here, but how did it get into the referer log without being in "my community of Radio users"? 2:10:56 PM

Thursday, March 21, 2002

From The Shifted Librarian: Movabletype v 2.0 is out... This is another blogging tool I'd like to try. My current reviews: Blogger: simple, easy, fast. Doesn't get in your way. Radio: very powerful, user interface designed on some other planet. text editor and ftp client: still my favorite; I write more and better in that environment. 1:40:26 PM

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

Radio and RDF Tomorrow morning I present my proposal for a knowledge management and collaboration system based on Radio, Radio Community Server (RCS), and RDF (a Semantic Web technology). I think this has great potential. There are only a couple of key problems to solve, since Radio and RCS take care of everything else. The toughest problem is in the organizational behavior arena; how do you convince people to use blogging tools in a work environment? Years ago I was a consultant to large insurance companies, and some of what we did fell into the organizational behavior realm; it's not easy to get people to use new things, especially when you don't have the desire or ability to order them around. 8:26:42 PM

Behind the productivity curve I'm getting more comfortable with Radio, but I'm still not as productive in this environment as I am in either BBEdit or Blogger. I can't see ever even coming close to the amount of posting that some people are capable of. 8:21:54 PM

© Copyright 2002 Peter Harbeson.