Tuesday, November 19, 2002

There is a beautiful diagram below, but it is one dimensional ... in reality many of the visions on the periphery will be interconnected.  There is also a beautiful vision in the architecture described, but in reality there are many players with other visions, and what we get is chaos, difficult to predict where the future might take us. [Phil Wolff: Blue Sky Radio] shares interesting perspectives from [a klog apart klogging] From .blog to converged client.. Blogging is a form in transition. Personally, I think blogging as a form will merge with all the other forms of digital expression. With email and IM first. With voice/video conferencing, streaming videos, browsing, and PowerPointing later. Watch it change: as more people blog from their foto-mobiles as devices start to blog ("My car's day") as audiobloggers create radio shows and videobloggers create televsion programming as Sims characters start to blog. Moving forward, see a convergent software client emerge. Source: evanwolf group, 2002. The surfaces presented to a user will adapt to each medium and form. Perhaps I need a storyboard for planning a video; maybe it can also be used for planning a presentation, an extended blog post, an interaction with a customer. Are you presenting on a computer projector, a video stream, or paper? The software should understand how to adjust. The converged client should also adapt to people. A person's culture, experience, goals, interests, and skills. This is hard as adamantium, but it is what allows robust tools to work for most people in many situations. Some people need help and wizards and automatic spelling correction (think Microsoft Office), others need directly manipulable affordances (think Kai's Power Tools). Small children need different environments (Power Puff Girls) than teens than adults. Grokking world cultures and subcultures, and reflecting those in software, is a fine art.   Contrast this with Anil Dash's microcontent client. I'm seeing the converged client as a conceptual superset or framework for building microcontent clients. Can you imagine the plumbing? You'd want to design for: Flexibility Interoperability Extensibility Scalability Polylingual Your architecture would need: Shared services. A common chassis.  Open APIs. So third party's can connect, communicate, and interact with the client. Plug-in sockets. So tool makers can add their own features and extend the client's abilities. Standards support. To increase interoperability. Heavy transcoding. Transcoding is a fancy term for converting content from one platform to others. The converged client will have to handle a wider range of content than most. From story outlines to storyboards. From audio tracks to text subtitles. From IM threads to blog posts. So what? We're on our way. Blogging tools are starting to interact with email and sounds. PIMs are managing contact information across multiple applications. Community and collaboration features are as critical to games as traditional gameplay. I'm calling it: 2003-2005 will see many clients converge, weblogs among them. The challenges? Immense. The rewards? Many and rich. The fun? Deep and lasting. [a klog apart klogging] [Phil Wolff: Blue Sky Radio] 1:27:23 AM

Sunday, November 17, 2002

[McGee's Musings] QUOTE Wicked problems. Amy Lee is a work colleague and very patient wife of Mike (look at him now...he's acquired a light on... [IDblog] Pointer to a site of Jeff Conklin's.  This is good for two reasons. One is that the work Jeff has done on applying technology tools to http://www.cognexus.org/id42.htm is important. Jeff was one of the early researchers to work in the broad area of hypertext that was the precursor to much of what we take for granted today on the web and elsewhere. Second because I had lost track of Jeff after having a chance to meet him back in about 1992 when I was with CGEY's Center for Business Innovation. Here's the definition of a wicked problem: A wicked problem is one for which each attempt to create a solution changes the understanding of the problem.  Wicked problems cannot be solved in a traditional linear fashion, because the problem definition evolves as new possible solutions are considered and/or implemented.   Wicked problems always occur in a social context -- the wickedness of the problem reflects the diversity among the stakeholders in the problem.  Most projects in organizations -- and virtually all technology-related projects these days -- are about wicked problems.  Indeed, it is the social complexity of these problems, not their technical complexity, that overwhelms most current problem solving and project management approaches. Go read the rest of the material for yourself. It's worth the time. UNQUOTE [McGee's Musings] 2:54:28 PM

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

John Hiler has a dynamite overview of Blog Software Types, from the perspectrive of what might be deisrable to an end user, which I am just summarizing here.  I have added a bit to his conclusions.  This post has stuff in the format ... if you are THIS-GOAL then the best weblog software tools for you mght be one of the following.  This does not neccessarily imply that if you are NOT that goal that you should steer away from those suggestions. If you want to run a community discussion group blog similar to Kuro5hin or Slashdot, then the best Weblog software for you might be: LiveJournal, Manila, pMachine, Scoop, or Slash. If you are a programmer who loves to play around with open source software, then perhaps the best for you would be Bloxsom, Moveable Type, or Radio Userland. If you are an end user who just wants to publish your own web pages with a minimum of hassle, then perhaps good weblog software for you would be Blogger or Moveable Type. I am still sufficiently a beginner at all this to see what if anything is incomplete about this picture. 2:21:20 AM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.