Patrick Chanezon: Collaboration

Link: Google's Exponential Returns. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 09:28:13 GMT

Google's Exponential Returns. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

About Google's use of wiki equivalent and weblogs.

Lazyweb idea: Mozilla XUL based tool to generate Canoo's WebTest Httpunit XML based on an interactive testing session in the browser

Wed, 15 Jan 2003 16:33:59 GMT

Matt Raible likes my idea of building a Mozilla XUL based tool to generate Canoo's WebTest Httpunit XML based on an interactive testing session in the browser.

I'll just invoke the LazyWeb for this one.

Ben Hammersely's Guardian piece, FOAF [Eclectic]

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 11:16:48 GMT

Ben Hammersely's Guardian piece, FOAF [Eclectic]

Personal Proxies and Weblog Software features will percolate to Portal software

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 09:07:34 GMT

Personal Proxy doomed ? [meltsner]

Melstner is a Portal guy like me. He expresses doubts about the Personal Proxy chances of success. I agree with the fact that the requirement to configure it yourself is a drawback for wide adoption. But I nevertheless think this is an important trend that will unfold in 2 directions:

for power users, Personal Proxies and Weblog Software (such as Radio) will continue to expand in terms of features and give their users ever more control in their information management and filtering practices.
These features will percolate in Portal products: I'm thinking about how to integrate some of them in the Portal product I work on. In this case these kind of features will be available to regular users on a preconfigured basis, maybe with a less fine grained level control.

I intend to write a paper about this for BlogTalk - A European Conference on Weblogs in Vienna 23-24 May 2003, if I ever find the time to do it !

Crossing the bridge of weak ties. [Jon's Radio]

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 08:50:32 GMT

Crossing the bridge of weak ties. [Jon's Radio]

Jon compares the writing of his 1999 book with the experience writing his blog last year. Very interesting insights.... as usual :-)

Network Navigation Widget. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 08:46:20 GMT

Network Navigation Widget. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

An interesting visualization tool. Too bad it's not online so that i can test it with my own weblog.

Touchgraph [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 13:46:20 GMT

Touchgraph [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

What is interesting are the links to the different TouchGraph applications. I had played with the GoogleBrowser, but others popped up since then.

Sam Ruby about LazyWeb LazyWebs Trackback: Fun recursion

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 19:08:36 GMT

WIBNI Trackback 2.0.... [Sam Ruby] Sam adds details about Trackback used in LazyWeb, and while at it LazyWebs Trackback itself: fun recursion :-)

PS: I wonder if the LazyWeb noun will take off as a verb. I love the english language for this ability.

Clay Shirky about LazyWeb and RSS, and thoughts about the decline of Portals

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 13:30:00 GMT

LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too? by Clay Shirky

About LazyWeb, the current tendency in weblogs where one person describes a feature he wishes to be implemented, and another one, reading the description, implements it.

In order to structure this practice around a tool, Ben Hammersley has designed a version of a LazyWeb RSS feed. You post your LazyWeb descriptions to your blog, with a trackback url to Ben's site. Then Ben aggregates them through the trackback in an RSS feed that people can then subscribe to.

Simple and elegant design.

The part that interested me the most is about the limitation of portals to act as tools for aggregation, compared to RSS feeds:

However, nearly a decade of experimentation with single-purpose portals shows that most of them fail. As an alternative to making a LazyWeb portal, creating an RSS feed of LazyWeb descriptions has several potential advantages

There's a paradigm shift happening in collaborative software land these days thanks to blogs and all development activity around them, where centralized portals will be replaced by RSS feeds and decentralized tools.

I'm curious to see how a portal software product such as the one I develop for a living can add value in this new chain, or get value from it. One things that Portals have for them is a centralized identity, group and preferences management. How can we take advantage of this compared to decentralized systems such as RSS feeds from blogs ? That is the question.

Thanks for this article Clay, and Ben for this new initiative. This is very good food for thought for a closed source Portal developer such as myself :-)

Great experiment in social network analysis and group forming through weblogs

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 00:21:07 GMT

Blog Tribe Social Network Mapping and Technicolor Blogmap

Here is the initial social network analysis of the Blog Tribe at Ryze -- which maps the Friendship networks and Blogrolls of Tribe members

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Great experiment in social network analysis and group forming through weblogs. I'm curious to see where this will lead. More specifically I hope he will provide a movie based on the evolution of the social network map with time, allowing you to see the transformation of the map with time.

GeoURL and Local communities of bloggers

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 18:07:53 GMT

GeoURL ICBM Address Server

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.

I stepped upon this through Ascription is an anathema to any enthusiasm's entry ICBM

I now have my entry there: I used Yahoo maps to get the exact long/lat of my address in Paris, then added these 2 lines in the HEADER section of my Radio HomePage template:

Then I used the ping form , and I was registered in 5 minutes.

Here is my neighborhood.

It seems like L'oeil de Mouche is the only one from Paris to have registered yet. Incidentally she was at the FrogLog meeting in december but I did not talk to her.

This is an excellent idea: the web is about connecting people, regardless of location, but I just started recently to discover its potential to also connect with people near me.

My old Netscape friend Tristan sent me a mail in december about a physical meeting of french webloggers in a restaurant in Paris. I registered on the Froglog wiki, went and met with all these passionate french webloggers with whom I could talk to my heart's content about the potential of weblogs and the different uses they made of it.

I met with [Manur] , [Karl], [Stephane] , and ChristopheDucamp who co-organized this meeting.

It's been 3 weeks already and I still have some catchup to do to read their blogs old posts !

Comment enabled weblog is vastly underrated agent for engineering social awareness

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 09:52:34 GMT

Just do it.

...

As Shelley points out, this is beyond the means and abilities of many. More importantly however, she demonstrates that a comment enabled weblog is vastly underrated agent for engineering social awareness... a precursor to social change.
[Sam Ruby]

Script locally, publish globally

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 16:38:20 GMT

Script locally, publish globally. Groove Web Services holds promise

Wear your duct tape proudly. It's getting more useful all the time.

[InfoWorld: Web Services]

about Jon's use of the Groove Web Services APIs.

The Go Game: San Francisco Urban Wireless Adventure

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 16:33:39 GMT

The Go Game: San Francisco Urban Wireless Adventure. [Smart Mobs]

I did not understand what the game is based on this post and i wonder how it relates with the game of Go, that I used to pratice, in a mediocre way, a few years ago.

Need to find some links about this.

All your documents are belong to Google

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 13:29:09 GMT

All your documents are belong to Google.

...

It turns out that all this is explained in the release notes. Which aren't searchable. So, as continues to amaze me, stuff out there in the cloud is easier to find than stuff right here on my own hard disk. Moral: it's fine to ship HTML docs, but give them to Google too.

[Jon's Radio]

I used to maintain this massive "manuals" directory in my UNIX home, at Netscape and Sun, with a web server softlinked to it, to share with my colleagues.

I kept there all the manuals for the tools we were using, for easy reference.

Now I still have the directory but I seldom use it anymore, and don't maintain it anymore: when I need something I use the Google toolbar in my browser.

same thing for my browser bookmarks: I used to maintain this huge sophisticated categorised browser hierarchy. Now I only use it for often used sites and internal sites.

Sometimes it's even quicker to think up 2 good keywords for Google to find me the doc I want than searching for the right bookmark in my toolbar !

how open can you be in a weblog ?

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 18:55:07 GMT

Bravery, Honesty or Stupidity?. [Russell Beattie Notebook]

Russ asks himself questions about how open he can be in his weblog.

The issue has already been discussed by Ray Ozzie in a post a few months ago, when he started weblogging.

Russ is too open, Ray very restrained.

I'm still trying to find the right balance, but that's not easy.

I guess it all has to do with your imaginary readership: when writing you always have some sort of internal representation of your readership, wether it is conscious or not.

With weblogs, this representation is problematic.

They are accessible right away to everyone, like a web page could you say.

Add to that the dynamic group forming begavior allowed by RSS syndication and the picture changes: the shape of your readership becomes much more dynamic.

Add to that Google and potentially /.

Evaluating who will read a specific post becomes problematic.

I need to dig this further.

I don't have this problem anyway: I don't know who reads my weblog ;-)

As for Russ: good luck finding the right balance, but don't become to corporate. i take a great deal of pleasure reading your ramblings because they have a fresh tone, even if I find sometimes that you go too far or are too vocal.

OneNote + Office + SharePoint = MS new collaboration architecture

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 10:01:20 GMT

OneNote sings Office tune. Microsoft's road map calls for deep XML-based Office, SharePoint integration [InfoWorld: Top News]

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 17:09:01 GMT

Digital intelligence.

This hilarious article about TiVo is a good illustration of the power of Digital Video Recorders, and it explains why I think that in one or two lusters, they will have totally replaced VCR's in our living rooms.

Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.

This is typical TiVo behavior. Note that there is actually no real harm since shows taped by TiVo on its own initiative have the lowest priorities, and they will be the first deleted if space is needed for your own shows. But this anecdote brings up an interesting point that is very relevant to our digital lives: adaptive scoring.

As I mentioned in a past column, I used to use a very smart Usenet reader called Gnus which was one of the first to introduce the notion of dynamic scoring. In short, this program monitored which articles you read and assigned weights to several criteria. For example, ten points for the author and two points for the subject. If a new article is posted with that same subject, it automatically gets a score of 2. If the same author posts another article (not necessarily in the same thread), this article automatically gets a score of 10.

Dynamic scoring associated with static scoring (where you are the one assigning scores) gives amazingly good results. The only scheme that can top it is the recommendation algorithm used by Amazon or Netflix, which simply uses the choices of people with similar tastes to make recommendations. You can't beat that.

I have recently seen a similar attempt for weblogs, where you type in the URL of your own weblog (or of one that you like) and it gives you a list of recommended logs. Nowhere near the beauty of adaptive scoring, but we are getting there.

[Otaku, Cedric's weblog]

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 17:16:46 GMT

Books and blogs. A while back I mentioned Erik Benson's All Consuming site. It continues to intrigue me, and I've now signed up for the weekly RSS feed. Inspired by Weblog BookWatch, Erik's service makes books, as well as people, an organizing principle of blogspace. So here's a little experiment. I'm going to cite some books I've read recently, and have been thinking about, in order to see what kind of discussion is reflected back through All Consuming. ... [Jon's Radio]

Groove Webservices WSDL available.

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 17:16:09 GMT

Groove Webservices WSDL available.

Great news : The WSDL and XSD files for the eagerly awaited Groove Webservices are available through Groove's Devzone

Groove Web Services provide programmatic access to Groove tools and objects through SOAP interfaces, available for Groove Workspace's most popular components, including Files, Discussion, Calendar, Contacts, Members, and Awareness. Further, Groove Web Services infrastructure supports 3rd party developers' ability to expose their custom Groove tools as web services.

Congratulations to John Burkhardt and Matt Pope and the rest of the GWS team for this milestone. You're right John, it just keeps getting better :-) [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Soon time for me to play with this stuff.

Groove 2.5 and Sharepoint 2.0

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 17:15:36 GMT

Groove 2.5 and Sharepoint 2.0. Commweb : Getting out of isolated-workspace ruts

Dana Gardner, an analyst with Aberdeen Group, says there's no other product on the market that can combine a powerful centralized collaboration tool such as Sharepoint with the decentralized, offline capabilities of Groove. "There's nothing this comprehensive for the user and easy for an IT department," Gardner says. "You get the best of an intranet combined with the best of an extranet." [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

MS is getting in the Portal space through collaboration: with Groove they have a killer combination !

Hoarding is for the weak

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 16:47:14 GMT

Hoarding is for the weak. Xerox has apparently proven what all knowledge workers intrinsically knew anyway; that knowledge hoarding is detrimental. Via Column Two

A recent Xerox research report has found that high-performing employees don't tend to hoard information. According to the news summary: The idea that knowledge is power has been knocked on the head by researchers who claim that high-performing employees are more likely to be ones who proactively share information with their colleagues.

My own experience agrees 100%. I am personally more powerful in what I do when I collaborate and openly share with others. They provide essential critique, support and grounding for my thoughts. [thought?horizon]

I think there are exceptions to this "hoarding is for the weak" rule. When an organization is in decline you might see good people who for some reason can't or won't leave for greener pastures trying to save their butt by hoarding knowledge, in an attempt to make themselves irreplaceable.

[Seb's Open Research] [Jon Schull's Weblog]

Best guys share has been my experience as well.

I've been in organizations in decline but usually good people usually leave or continue to share knowledge. But my experience not that vast.

Speakeasy promotes DSL connection sharing through WiFi

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 17:12:35 GMT

Speakeasy promotes sharing.

Speakeasy promotes sharing..

[Jon Schull's Weblog]

I used speakeasy when I still lived in California: with my Linksys router I had 4 machines connected and the service was excellent.

The fact that they officially endorse WiFi is a great news !

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 22:30:02 GMT

Wikis are good for communication!. The WebWork Cookbook is really firing up, great community contributions! Also there is a link to an Eclipse + Resin + WebWork + Hibernate tutorial on the WebWork page of the OpenSymphony wiki. [rebelutionary]

I like wikis.

I have tried to introduce Twiki in Sun but it did not catch up :-)

Some of my friends at a french startup have standardized on it for their engineering group.

Blogging mailing lists: an idea about the implementation

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 11:17:02 GMT

Blogging Mailing Lists. I wish there were better tools for blogging mailing lists, so that these two types of conversations could cross over more often. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Excellent idea.

I think userland has that feature, send a mail to your blog, but what would be truly valuable would be to link automatically to the archived web version of the mail, in its thread context.

In order to do this we would need 2 things:

a standard WSDL for web archive of mailing list searching, something like MailArchiveSearch.wsdl:

It could allow different modes of searching: date + author, or full text
it returns the url of the mail in the archive

An index somewhere, that could be decentralized using RSS, that would include the following informations:

mailing list name: the key for lookup
mailing list archive web site
url of the entry point for the service that implements MailArchiveSearch.wsdl for that site (it could be implemented at a remote site, for example one that would aggregate search for different archives. a Google front end could do most of the archives I guess)

Then when you forward the mail you are interested in, with your comments, to your favorite blogging tool, it would:

extract the mailing list name
lookup the mailing list search service, using an RSS aggregator like Merkaat
invoke the search service
if something is found, add a permalink to your post, to the archived email
else, if no search service is found or if the mail is not found, just add your blog entry as is

I may have a stab at implementing this for Radio, with the jakarta mailing lists, and maybe Google API... if I can free up some time for a personal project :-)