Wed, 23 Oct 2002 01:59:01 GMT

This is so good I'm quoting the whole thing:

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.

It would be interesting if I could access my newsreader from anywhere on the net.
More specific suggestions. Rick Klau's May 2002 requests. Jenny's wish. Bryce Yeh's tuning of new aggregation intervals up and down.

[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.

Tweaking look and feel, tools, macros, etc. is too error prone and time consuming for newbies and kloggers.
Let me subscribe to a trusted source (perhaps the IT or marketing department in my organization) for ever-fresh, well-tested, and enterprise-standard Radio setups. Radio configuration themes. Themes with Code.

[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]

Bill Futreal's Radio

Support the blogging of other objects besides a post.

Better news reading for scale, efficiency, and smarts.

Double User Success on Top 100 Tasks.

Config and Theme subscriptions.

Rework the Radio Outliner's user experience from scratch.