Tuesday, September 03, 2002

Thanks to [Richard Chlopan] who apparently enjoyed my Aug 27 Cat Physics humor, and passes this along from [Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE Dewie the Internet Safety Turtle: Give a hoot, don't look at Internet porn!. The FTC has launched "Dewie," the cartoon Internet Safety Turtle, companion to Smokey the Bear and Woodsy the Owl. Ah, nothing connotes the lightspeed changes on the Internet like a turtle in a sportscar. Officials said the Dewie campaign is part of the federal government’s broad effort to promote a “culture of security” and the view that every person who uses computers and networks, such as the Internet, has a role in keeping cyberspace safe. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan) [Boing Boing Blog]  10:55:45 PM

Latest Wow! added to my Radio Doc Sources: Emmanuel  Decarie This guy is offering an e-commerce Inventory Application using Frontier and Radio Userland.  Documentation is in French and in English.  He also has an early warning system.  If your Frontier Server goes down, it will still manage to call home via e-mail, which presumably some people can convert to notify people via pager or IM or some other communication method.  You can read his DocServer2Man via Unix.  He has Frontier documentation.  He has instructions how to do Manila in Chinese.  Do you believe this guy?  Wow! How do I find these people?    I hope some of my referers, who are checking out the links that I am finding, will be doing reviews on some of these services, and are contacting these people and inviting them into the dws.Radio.FAQ community etc. Well some of them because someone else with Radio documentation has recommended links, and when I visit to verify the url is still valid, sometimes I stick around at that person site trying to Grok what it is all about, which can lead me to other links.  A lot of my referers are due to people finding my site through one of the search engines, so I was wondering what might turn up if I used one to look for Radio Documentation.  Different search engines turn up different interesting patterns.  I really like the Expert drill-down options of  www.teoma.com for example. 10:41:56 PM

Latest major addition to my Radio Doc Sources: Scott Loftesness Notes on Customizing Radio with links to the various tools he found, and links to Radio Userland documentation that he found to be particularly helpful, and other people like I have listed here. Do I really have 35 different sources there or am I miscounting?  Wow, they really beginning to add up since I started this. 4:04:23 PM

I'm available for hire to analyze K-Log requirements, design solutions, facilitate deployment and ongoing evolution.  ~  dws. Radio Dreams: From Seb's Open Research to Alison Fish's Blogfish to Al Macintyre to Phil Wolff's a klog apart to [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] (Al may have mixed up the precise path, by accident):  Alison Fish of Blogfish: I suspect that beginning bloggers and kloggers are often inhibited.. If we set up a k-logging community for our company intranet, I suspect there will be an initial _hump_ of hesitation among the employees. Maybe having a few designated posters at the beginning would ease the transition. Must think on this. Seb's Open Research: Lessons learned from a large scale K-logging implementation. Most people don't like to write. We've had a difficult time designing interfaces that encourage adding information instead of just reading. There's no substitute for good, accessible writing. We have several people who write consistently for the system. The logs show that postings from one writer get far more attention and prompt far more linking than those from the other writers. Al Macintyre's suggestions for preparing for a company intranet were posted Aug 26, and I can see that someone downstream has enhanced my ideas with links to additional aids. Why don't people write? Fear. Fear of failure. Fear of criticism. Fear of reprisal. Fear of looking stupid. Fear of being stupid. Fear of permanence. Fear of strangers. Fear of invaded privacy. Fear of falling behind. Fear of the blank page.   Motive.  I'm thinking a lot about folks who haven't written a paragraph since high school. Folks who never got more than a C in English. Paralyzed by a blank sheet of paper. By permanence. UNQUOTE [a klog apart] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] To the list of fears I would add uncertainty about job security.  The style of my writing might antagonize management sufficiently that they will start looking around for someone to replace me.  We can be in a company in which with turnover a lot of relevant education and training in how to make the enterprise a success, just walked out the door in the head of the departing co-worker.  However, if that knowledge could be captured in a k-log, the employee, doing the transplant from their brain to the k-log, might feel that the company has less need of having their brain around, so it might impair raises, and they not feel so bad about the person leaving. In other forums I have suggested that we would all be much better off in the future if more youngsters were encouraged to have pen pals in other cultures.  Start with the New Democracies that came about because of the end of the Cold War.  The connection has to be through whatever mediums work over there, where they not have good infrastructure like we do, the phone connections are intermittent.  I think News Aggregation is better than e-mail. What this does for the next generation is that they will write more coherently, and better understand the problems around the world, and why some solutions fail.  Awareness of how much worse off other people are, but for the Grace of God where we were born could be us there, means that we may be less materialistic, less subject to temptation, more appreciative of what we have.  What this does for the next generation in other lands that our kids are pen palling with, they have a better understanding of our values, how capitalism can work. Now can this concept also be promoted at the adult level to fill out the Sister Cities concept?  Our city wants to encourage more trade, and educational exchanges with the people of the cities we have partnered with.  I think Radio Categories, for people in enterprises that support the Sister Cities movement, is an ideal way to develop relationships that will be to the benefit of that e-trade growth.  Have the school systems host weblogs by the students, in which they can interconnect with the youngsters at the schools of the Sister Cities. Helping get something like this operational will also educate Radio developers as to what is needed in the area of Radio documentation so that this software can be used by any person, regardless of past computer experience, thus opening up Radio to the mass market. 3:06:00 PM

This e-organization challenge shared by [Radio Free Blogistan]  how to best utilize what Radio can do for our Knowledge Management, inspires another Radio Wish: Think of a plug in tool which: uses a resource like [Organica] to capture all the urls we have linked to, except also have it link to the anchor story or item post where they found our url links, Also show info about each url similar to what we see in News Aggregation Radio Channel Subscriptions. In addition to capturing urls we have linked to, also link to each item post to which we have assigned a subject title. This is something I have not yet figured out how to work it. Let us optionally populate a small data base, associated with each entry, similar to the concept that Eaton Web has. in which we have several columns of info that we can key into, relating to our subject descriptions. Let us then sort the entries by those subject descriptions we have assigned, Incorporate this stuff in the search engines. People can then see what a particular person has written on a particular subject. Ask the Search Engines if they would be willing to host web site pages where people would go to download this tool, and engage in discussions how best to utilize it. [Radio Free Blogistan] QUOTE Left-Brain Blogging. The Raven talks about the impression he gets from a long blogroll: I don't know about you, but when I visit a blog that has 395 navigation links running down the side I get a funny feeling. Is this clown trying to tell me, "Look at all my friends!" Or am I supposed to check the list and see if I know anyone. Either way, the eyes tend to glaze over and you say to yourself, "Yeah yeah yeah, a bunch of links. Bully for you, pal." In my case, I'm trying to keep the list short ... real short. In my grouchy world, this is called "utility value," and in today's hypernet bitstream it's called, "Guess he doesn't have any friends." Raven goes on to explain his categories. This got me thinking that logging (journaling, blogging, k-logging) has solved the problem of "how do I keep my website fresh?" by making it trivially easy to refresh the content. That's great for the right-brain—I'm stereotyping here—free-associative, creative part of the brain. I like the guilt-free lack of structure, being the chaotic type myself, and left-handed and kinda red-headed to boot. But I think we also, as users, want to see organized links. There's a reason why some people like drilling down into the Yahoo!/directory model of information indexing. I know others will say, "That's so 1999. Just Google it." But that I believe has more to do with the speaker's personality and personal preferences. Here in Radio, I should probably be learning more about OPML so I could build a hierarchical or otherwise relational set of links that might be output as a blogroll but also browsable in other ways. What I'd really like to see is a tool that tentatively organizes all the links I embed in this blog, stored in some way so that i can reorganize, overrule filing choices, etc. Ideally it would even suggest reorganizations eventually. Because, face it, you can't design the perfect filing system in advance, unless you are replicating a perfectly worked-out process, and even then I'd doubt it. You need to start with some system, but as long as you can split big files and eliminate or merge small ones, you're golden. Not every project has a project manager with a KM database in tow. Sometimes we're just one person trying to manage one complicated third millennial life. I'm starting to learn that keeping the house clean works that way too. UNQUOTE [Radio Free Blogistan] 2:20:54 PM

My Radio public site disk space consumption just went another percentage point to 95% available. Space used:    2.2MB Space remaining:    40.0MB 5:42:50 AM

I just made some additions to my Radio Doc Sources, thanks to suggestions from various people. Tools to upgrade our Radio from Paolo Valdemarin; Radio Userland; Unknown; Mark Paschal; Doug Kaye; Andy Fragen; David Davies; Marc Barrot. Documentation aimed at Beginners Radio Userland; Jon Udell; Dws.Radio.FAQ; Steve Outing; O'Reilly; Al Macintyre; Russ Lipton; Scott Johnson; Discussion Groups; Since I am barely out of the Beginner stage myself, it is difficult to judge what the next stage should be called. Just over 30 different sources I do not want to provide an exhaustive list of all documention by each individual, rather I want to have a good list of initial links to each person, and an idea of the scope of what they have done. If you print it out for use as a check list of where you want to explore, it is now 5 pages. 5:39:18 AM

Monday Topics: Copyright and Freedom subtopics Computer Crime; Consumer Rights; Copyright; Cyber Citizenship; Entertainment; Government Beaurocracy; Hollywood; Intellectual Property; Journalism; Judiciary; Law Enforcement; Law Suits; Links; Music; Publishing; Quality; Quests for Truth and Accuracy NOT; Special Interests; Steve Jackson Case; e-Learning subtopics Documentation; e-mail vagaries; Fonts; Links; me and my pals; News Aggregator and RSS Enhancements; Radio Education; Referrer Links; Miscelaneous other Biology; Chemistry; Humor; Links; Medical Engineering; Science and Technology; 3:14:06 AM

My Radio Education Notes turn out to be a big help to other people on parallel learning curves, such as [Alvin Borromeo].  But lots of other people are supplying useful documentation that I need to incorporate into my reference sources, as I check them out.  [Lisa L. Spangenberg] shares info on the help she got in moving her stuff from another Weblog software vendor to Radio.  [Radio Free Blogistan] just added a Tutorial on TSS, and my first question is What is TSS?  I never heard that acronym before.  There's also a continuing flow of tips on the various discussion groups. Earlier this year my AOL had a melt down, thanks to a collision with some Microsoft flaws when I was trying to reinstall my computer security after my mother board had a melt down.  I lost a month of favorite bookmarks and e-mail addresses, learning that recovery is not as simple as restoring from a backup.  I have 1,000 bookmarks in my AOL archives that can be moved elsewhere by the simple expedient of cut and paste two times each - url and description, but lazy me wants to stay on the look out for an alternate solution.  Putting them some place in Radio is one possible target.  I thinking of doing something like my Radio Education Notes and Computer Security stuff (Aug 29 for example) to package my url archives by general subject essays. When first learning any software, a newbie worries about making a nuisance of self, in the community of people who are struggling to figure out how best to use the same stuff, and when I first got started with contributions to [dws.Radio.FAQ], I felt a bit self conscious that perhaps I was dominating the discussion, for a few days, with an expression of what might be an excessive volume of dumb ideas that might improve the quality of the product.  I have been at IBM conferences submitting suggestions for product improvements only to be told that most all of my ideas were invented long ago and I just managed to somehow miss out on seeing them.  How embarrassing.  However, I have been gratified to see that several people thought enough of my recent Radio Wishes to repost them on their sites, with credit to me.  I wonder how much I missing by not checking Radio Referers more often.  Perhaps I should search Google, or some other search engine, for combination of my name and stuff I have written about.  Apparently another Search Engine crawler found my weblog this weekend. [Organica] reports that if found 4 sites linking to me (I am sure there are more}, with me linking to 434 which it lists. [Terry Frazier's Blunt Force Trauma] writes Al Macintyre meet [Rick Klau] and, in combination with Phil Wollf's [A Klog Apart] and [Seb's Open Research] , they like the way I have organized my Radio Doc Sources directory.  As time permits I want to cross-reference this stuff several ways, such as where to go to find info on a particular topic, or mega area like Manila, like I have done with Categories and News Aggregation, but I did this one that way because when I need to look up something, I vaguely remember that so & so had something on such and such a topic.  I want to strengthen that mental association and periodically return to those people documentation sites to see what they have added since the last time I was there, that is relevant to what I want to be learning, and also alternative sources relevant to those areas where I had trouble learning Radio.  Also, down the road I hope for a search engine in which I can say to search these guys sites first.  If you like my style, use my radio url number system figuring out to access the stories and categories I have populated so far. 1:51:33 AM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.