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Wednesday, November 06, 2002 |
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Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |
This is so good I'm quoting the whole thing:
LOTS of cool ideas here!.
It seems that Phil Wolff thinks Radio can be improved. Though he does get fairly verbos e- he certainly makes several good points. See my comments inserted into his prose.
My Top Five Blue Sky Radio Wishes..
The top 5 really big improvements I'd like to see in UserLand's Radio.
- Support the blogging of other objects besides a post.
- Calendar events, resumes, forms, etc. This includes making it easy to:
- Define, add, and share definitions of new types of objects (e.g. events), and
- Create, store, publish, permalink, annotate/comment, syndicate, and aggregate instances of those objects (e.g., my birthday).
- Radio's support for RSS 2.0 is a good step in this direction.
- This also implies the ability to group and sort the posts in a category by attributes other than post date. Calendar events need to be grouped into present and future, sorted by the date of the event instead of the post date. Book listings might be sorted by Dewey Decimal. résumés by occupational category. Travel notes by region.
- A note on this to Garth. News Item templates. vCalendar and Radio. Calendar standards and Radio. Keyless klogging for the rest of us. Multi-payload klogging: a world of content. Macromedia audioblog object.
 Click here to add this event to your Outlook or Netscape calendar.
[Phil seems so hung up on PIM stuff and K-logs - I think he's forgetting lots of other really basic human stuff. He does mention LiveJournal - so he's GOT to know about Moods and Friends. But THIS request for new types of posts - should include: Reviews, Family album entries, and just plain old 'pages' and needless to say 'Multimedia Conversations'. But just to let you know I DO think about business - there's also 'employee records', 'meetings', 'work spaces' and plain old 'pages' too! But these 'pages' can have all sorts of attributes besides plain old stories.]
- Better news reading for scale, efficiency, and smarts.
- The current design is practical for only 20-30 active feeds.
- Help me read thousands of news feeds. RSS subscriptions are like active bookmarking; a stronger link. I'm subscribed to about 500 feeds after 9 months of using Radio, about 8,000kb of fresh html news daily, about 200 pages to read. Multiply by 10.
- MyRadio, Kit, and other add ins help a lot and illustrate various ways to tackle the problem. But this should be core functionality and more natural.
- Meme tracking. You have all the data and the spare cycles: give me more intelligence about what I'm reading.
- Show me posts that are related, across sources.
- Posts that cite each other.
- Posts that cite the same source.
- Trackback/Threading. Here are posts that cite the one you are reading.
[I highly recommend Phil check out MyRadio - and create a bunch of pages - and have just certain news channels go onto specific pages. I have one page for Photos, one for Famous Bloggers, Friends and Technology. Check it out - it's created by Mikel Maron.]
- Double User Success on Top 100 Tasks.
- Too many opportunities for a first time computer user to muck things up. Calendar navigation sucks.
- Start from scratch without an outside usability team. Rethink the metaphors and core behaviors.
- Specifics. LiveJournal screenshots.
[Isn't this the same complaint as #5? Isn't Phil just bitching about Radio's UE in general? Well he's right - but he doesn't have to assign TWO different major bitchs to the same gripe! But while he's bitching he should ALSO admit that Radio is the lesser of all evils - and that it's allot easier to use than all the other blogging tools. That doesn't make it better or right - it's just the truth. We have all sorts of solutions to this conundrum - but I can't reveal it here NOW or else I'd have to kill you. No! Just kidding! But needless to say SOME OF US aren't ignoring the 'challenges' that are apparent - or shall I say 'opportunities?' :-) But at least Phil hs checked out LJ.]
- Config and Theme subscriptions.
[Hasn't Phil heard of Paolo's Theme Tool? But he's right. Not only should this feature be built into Radio (I like the subscription idea for Themes) - but Radio should have a weblink editor in it - as well!]
- Rework the Radio Outliner's user experience from scratch.
- I love the outliner, but this is an outliner only a nerd could love.
- The command surfaces are not intuitive, I found it awkward and error prone (its behavior not conforming to my mental model) and very hard to learn. Hard to get information out easily without learning ideas like "rendering" and "html" and "rules" and XML. I should be able to edit as smoothly and naively in the outline as I do in Word or in the IE edit box control. I want to be able to drag and drop things between open outlines (like dropping a Manila post into a Manila site structure). I want autosave and spellcheck and for it not to break html when pasted from RTF. I want more http://dijest.com/aka/categories/blueSkyRadio/2002/09/10.html#a1998 on the Prefs page.
- It needs serious user experience analysis and redesign. Target the person who just knows basic Windows/Mac, email, and MS Office.
[This is the smartest thing Phil has to say. I agree with him. I think we have an answer to this 'challenge'.]
Those are the big ones. Heavy lifting. Big impact.
Here are 30 lighter ones, in on particular order:
[I'm going to quickly rank these requests - 10 is important, great idea and important - 1 is a waste of time.]
- A Radio toolbar for IE like the ones from Google and Yahoo! 5
- Give every new Radio site its own domain, so Google works on a per-site basis. 6
- Keep new themes coming: pretty counts and differentiates. 9
- The portal idea: keep working on it. 10
- klognet in a box (radio, manila, RCS, RadioComments, a search engine) Yah! Whatever happened to the Search? I canot comment on this request - as it may incriminate me.
- Federate RCS: I should be able to both run my own stats and choose to share them with other aggregators. You can't now. 9
- Run selective RSS feeds through Google's API for the translation. Let me read an Italian feed in machine translated English. 1 - it'll never work Send Paolo a Babelfish translated anything - he gets a good laugh out of it - every time!
- Improve the post-to-email features. A checklist. 10 - Whatever happened to notification?
- Include permalinks in syndicated body 7
- Linkrot spider, reporter, and healer. 6
- mailThisItem macro. 4
- More than one multi-authored synthetic category per Radio. 4
- Geocode posts and RSS feeds. Blogmapper. 9 - I like Bloggmapper.
- Backlinking. 10 - This is what I mean by 'new types' of interaconnections.
- Can Radio detect Astroturfing (fake grassroots blogging) in feeds it reads? 2
- Re-Publish Commands from the browser UI 6
- Outlook calendar to OPML and RSS. 8 - Outlook is king. Anything connecting to Outlook is good.
- browser bookmarks to OMPL and back 4
- Show and let me manage the publishing queue. (like a print queue) 4
- Declare fiction. When I post, let me checkbox if I don't intend this post as truthful reportage. It is an intentional fiction. I've seen several situations where someone is blogging in character, is writing satirically, or is just blowing off steam. Useful to keep memes straight. :-) This should be a flag or special icon. BUt don't stop there! What about sexual inuendos? Or politically fascist statements?
- Secure blogs. Enterprise grade blog security. 9
- Localization. 10
- Measure and watch the unintended ways people use your tools. 10 - This falls under the category (ooops sorry, I mean topic or should I call it interesting subject matter) - of malleable user interfaces. We consider that a sub-set of Multimedia Personalization. UE's should adapt to who the user is.......
- UserLand jargon file. 1
- RCS Referers as an RSS feed. 3 - How 'bout explaining how they work and why they don;t seem to effectively list ALL referers?
- Referrers in a rolling 24 hours. How is it done now?
- Let me float my Radio RSS news as a Windows screen saver. Make it fun. 1
- Finish cleaning up the archives. 3
- Do more for attachments, including more formats and format conversions. Details. 3
- Continuous writing (autosave to web) 3
[a klog apart Blue Sky Radio] [a klog apart] [Marc's Voice]
8:59:01 PM 
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Sunday, October 06, 2002 |
Keeping your intranet healthy and effective. A month goes by so quickly, and already it is time to publish the next article in my regular KM Column series: Keeping your intranet healthy and effectiveThe real challenge is to maintain the quality, consistency and value of an... [Column Two]
6:12:25 PM
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Making improvemnts in tough times. Ray Luoma has written an article on what to do if you can't afford a CMS. In this, he explores the many other non-technical activities that can be conducted in preparation for a CMS, focusing on people & processes. To... [Column Two]
6:11:47 PM
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Portals and intranets?. Martin White writes about a case study presented at Intracom 2002, which explored putting a portal on top of an existing intranet, and other information sources. To quote: The main objective of a portal is usually to provide an employee... [Column Two]
6:11:01 PM
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Tuesday, September 24, 2002 |
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Friday, September 20, 2002 |
Personal contact data aggregators?. John Robb writes: "Wouldn't it be interesting to have an RSS variant (new name obviously) for subscribing to personal contact data off of weblogs?" I read that DJ Adams was just playing with FOAF not too long ago, and at the time it made me want to dig into RDF more. But, work got busy and I promptly got distracted away. If anything, though, I could see something like FOAF being really nice as a... [0xDECAFBAD]
6:35:19 PM
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Take a ~$200 computer off of this list, slap Linux on it , add a personal publishing/digital dashboard/webapp system (CMS/Database/web server/development environment), add connections to corporate apps via webservices, a browser, and open source e-mail/office software. What do you get? A $300 PC that does 90% of what most people use their PCs for at work. This isn't a dumb client or terminal. It is a powerful workstation with 400 MHz of processor power and 10 Gbs of storage space. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:34:27 PM
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XML Scripting, data manipulation, and RDF.
I've just read Jon's latest post on XML Scripting, which mentions Adam Bosworth's thoughts about an XML scripting language that could natively support XML.
While the advent of XML scripting sounds fascinating, I've also been wondering about RDF enabling us to "gracefully integrate with the world of objects" and enhance the "self-describing nature of XML". Yes, it's my current area of interest (read: I'm vacuuming as much information as I can about it right now), and this by itself is likely to taint my vision somewhat. But reading what was quoted from Adam immediately made me think of some of RDF's features (or should I say 'nature', I guess I'm not trying to sell it):
- in it's XML incarnation, RDF can describe the XML data it ornaments
- it's core nature (and through association the nature of the XML described by it) is object-orientated: things in RDF are either (instances of) classes, properties, or values of properties
- the concept and use of namespaces is a key strength of RDF and one on which it relies. Shared semantics, and the classes and properties by which such semantics are conveyed, are surely important when attempting to "convert from one XML format to another" and "synthesize complex XML documents for [from?] multiple sources"
Now it's clear that XML is not RDF. There's the bootstrapping issue with RDF applications of which we're all aware. There's no magic wand, but there are ways (such as transformations to wring out RDF essence from 'flat' XML) to get going. And in the context where REST, web services, business data, and the focus on resources (URIs) intersect, RDF - as a technology for describing, sharing and linking business data - seems too significant to ignore.
Going back to Adam's quote that sparked this post, I am curious about the 'native support' of XML as a data type; my limited imagination cannot see how that might happen without some sort of serialization/deserialisation (will a term like 'serdes' be this decade's equivalent of 'modem'?). I am ready and willing to be enlightened :-) The great thing about RDF is that there is already a bounty of software (storage mechanisms, model and query tools, serializers and deserialisers) that can work with RDF in many existing programming languages.
Anyway, plenty to ponder. Life is good. [DJ's Weblog]
6:32:32 PM
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Wednesday, September 18, 2002 |
John Robb. My public K-Log is my global business card [klogs]
11:38:01 PM
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Thursday, September 12, 2002 |
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Tuesday, September 10, 2002 |
Microsoft MSWeb case study. Over the last couple of years I have seen some impressive demonstrations of the Microsoft intranet MSWeb. However it has not been well documented (least of all on the Microsoft site) so I was very pleased to be alerted by James Robertson to a case study of MSWeb by Peter... [Intranet Focus Blog]
10:53:15 PM
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Saturday, September 07, 2002 |
Zauri, BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities. A strange little idea I had on the way home today: Movable Type on a Sharp Zaurus equipped with wireless ethernet? Or maybe Bloxsom if/when it has static publishing? Just use =rsync= to publish whenever the thing finds itself on a network, wireless or otherwise. Maybe that happens while you're... [0xDECAFBAD]
10:34:09 AM
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Friday, September 06, 2002 |
How to rework your Intranet with Manila and Radio. Lot's of people are asking me how they can provide a facelift to their Intranet and/or build an internal K-Log network (with Radio and/or Manila). I thought I would provide some of the information that I get asked often:
Manila ($899 a server -- there aren't any per seat or per domain charges) ($299 Academic)
1) Manila can be used to manage a standard informational website on an Intranet. These pages are easily managed through a browser-based WYSIWYG editing tool and management system. So, it is possible to enable authorized content owners with little to no technical training the ability to edit pages they have responsibility for (edit and add text, upload pictures and files, and much more). Additionally, Manila provides out of the box discussion groups, e-mail bulletins, easy theme management, and much more.
2) Manila can also serve an existing site as a static site through its integrated webserver. All you need to do is drop the files into a folder and tell Manila to serve them. Manila can also render pages it creates as static files that are served via the webserver. It is possible to run Apache and Manila on the same server and have Manila send static files to Apache to be served.
3) Manila can serve as a weblog server. Users can easily create personal weblogs using Manila. It can support hundreds of weblogs.
4) Manila can also run a Radio community server and serve those sites statically through its integrated webserver. The Radio community server provides community stats and management functionality that makes running a Radio community easy.
Radio ($39.95 a desktop)
1) Radio provides a way for individuals to publish a personal weblog to a Radio community server running Manila or via FTP to an account on a standard webserver. It also allows individuals to both syndicate their site and subscribe to news.
2) Radio can be used to create directories of resources on a Manila server. It is a very easy process using Radio's outliner. These directories can be linked together easily to create a master directory of resources with subsections managed by different individuals.
Basically, with Manila and Radio it is possible to build a large full featured Intranet on a single server that meets the needs of hundreds of individuals. The two can also be used in concert to quickly build a K-Log network. There is so much more, but this covers the basics. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
10:43:44 PM
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Blog your Flash Reports for communicating project status up..
Reporting a project's status upward shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. The technique is to boil everything down to a well structured, bullet-heavy, one-pager you can forward weekly or monthly.
Be sure you can back up what you report with more detail.
Flash reports, if timely and shared electronically, can eliminate a program management round-table meeting every week. Attendees x payrate x meeting length x 52; you do the math. Even with meetings, you get faster, more focused meetings.
Flash Reporting Tips:
- Create a channel or category for each project's upward communication. This should be an access controlled web site: you'll be reporting personnel issues and bad news on occasion. Not necessarily for the whole team's eyes.
- Email a copy of your flash report to your project sponsors, including a permalink.
- Use a post title when you blog your report, making it easier to find. "Project Name - Flash Report - Week Starting 7/7/2004" lets you organize different reports
- You rarely fit everything on one page, but force yourself. Prioritizing your messages assures sponsor attention to things that matter most to you.
Copy and paste my two Project Flash Report html templates into your blog.
See also:
[diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology]
10:35:33 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Bill Futreal.
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