Daniel's Weblog Experiment

Bill visits Ray

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 19:12:56 GMT

Here is an interesting development, Bill visits Ray, which I found on SB Chatterjee’s Weblog

SB writes… "I picked this up from CRN 09.15.03 - 'A little bird tells us that earlier this month, Bill Gates took a tour of Groove Networks' facilities and shared some face time with Groove founder and Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie. Microsoft has been a big-time financial backer of Groove, so the meeting isn't a total surprise. But neither of these men gives away their time for free, so let the speculation begin'."

It makes sense for Microsoft and Groove AND for their respective customers to see Groove Powered Applications of every sort continue to roll out.

Currently, applications like MS Word and PowerPoint are integrated into Groove in some clever ways. Groove 2.5 coupled with Word 2002's has a real-time co-editing mode, and Document Review Workflow mode. They make each other remarkably more useful: together they save days and frustration in group writing / editing projects.

Groove 2.5 enables sending invitations to a "meeting" so folks anywhere in the world can give round-robin presentations of their PowerPoint decks and discuss any slide in real time, using voice over IP and/or chat sessions. People who could not "attend" in real-time can catch up later. And all of this happens with DOD-type security over ubiquitous internet connections, without needing Virtual Private Networks, big central servers or IT expenses. In other words, what you probably thought personal computing would deliver many years ago.

And there is more to see in the Groove <-> Microsoft Office pipeline. We can see the promise of real-time Excel collaboration today, in GXcel; Real time discussion of budgets, forecasts, and results over Excel spreadsheets that are alive on each person's screen, with chat etc. The long-ago foreshadowed collaboration capabilities of Xerox PARC’s “Collab” are now available for widespread use.

We will see even more powerful Groove enabling of MS Office applications with the commercial release of Microsoft Office 2003 and a Groove 2.5x maintenance release, which will leverage MS Office 2003; I am particularly taken by Hugh Pyle and company's work at Groove to make MS Sharepoint 2003 and InfoPath dance and sing in Groove 2.5

I think this development foreshadows future synergies between Windows, Applications and Groove Collaboration features; Features like presence, activity and the creation and synchronization of XML forms and data that are stored in SQL accessible data stores can now become commonplace. What a long strange trip it has been.

One need only look at what you have expected personal computers and modern operating systems to deliver, to anticipate what will show up as Groove exposes more and more of its central functions as Groove Web Services, and Microsoft et al. use Groove to leverage their applications.

Better Interface for your News Feed and for your Photos ++

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 04:32:03 GMT

NewsDesk released version 1.0, and it is very cool sez Leo Laporte on Tech TV's Screen Savers today.

Picasa is fine program for viewing your photos. It won an award at Demo. It automatically generates albums of your photos and places these albums on a Timeline. You have to see the Timeline view. Very cool use of a Graphical interface.

Of course now I would like to see an album and Timeline view of the NewsFeeds I clip. I would like to see an album and Timeline view of my .Docs.

Hello Hugh, what about a album and Timeline view for Groove.

A World Where the Ends Meet

Sat, 08 Mar 2003 02:34:45 GMT

Go see how "Dr. Weinberger and Doc Searls sum up a whole bunch of stuff in one big site: World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to stop Mistaking It for Something Else."

Their joint site is the best example of 'team webblogging' I have seen. What an awkward expression, 'team weblog' -- it may prove to be the "horseless carriage" of our time. Quick, someone say... How shall we call this kind of thinking and writing together??

Whatever we call it, we can see a quality of thought, and perspective that their 'team blogging' (brrrrrr) produces. Yes, of course, each author is individually a great writer... but isn't the writing in their co-written pieces somehow, uhhh...'more better' thinking and expression?

We can see another 'hallmark' of their weblog-cum-site: It is being done recursively over time, in the context of communities and discourses; Doc Searls points out, "Where Cluetrain was the work of four authors, World of Ends gathers the wisdom of many more: Reed, Burton and Isenberg, to name just three."

'A World of Ends' even features a 'version number', or actually a 'date of last update'.

Does the excellence of these pieces foreshadow a way we will accomplish work together?

A customer appreciates a custom fit, by definition: at least I do. As producers, can we now shape our work over 'lasts-of-ideas': Like the lasts over which shoes have been crafted for customers throughout history?

'A World of Ends' is sufficiently excellent to be spawning conversation and thought, at the Ends of the World, from where it continues to spring. /D

The Future is Easy to Predict -- because the Future is NOT uniformly distributed

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 22:46:41 GMT

Uhh oh, my hidden weblog experiment has been outted by my friend Hugh Pyle. I guess it is time to learn how to do a weblog right.

In the meantime, for those who do not know of Hugh Pyle, he is an extraordinarly insightful observer of the world of people, computers and resulting cultures.

Hugh coded up some amazingly prescient and useful pieces of code for Groove as an independent developer. He wrote the popular PinBoard tool, which makes a Groove space feel less like a Lotus Notes discussion -- brrrrrrrr -- and more like the kitchen in your favorite home, with scraps of "what's happening" pinned up on the refrigerator. The beginnings of Cultureware, indeed.

The folks at Groove were smart enough to read the writing on the "fridge", hired Hugh and moved him from England to Beverly MA, where he did work on the MS Sharepoint - Groove 2.5 integration, among other projects. Thank you, Hugh!

While independent, Hugh also coded up a forward-looking, WebCam tool (alpha) for Groove. Geez, I would love to see a robust version of this visionary code come out of Groove's HQ or from one of their skilled Third Party Developers. MS NetMeeting is frought with Firewall traversal problems.

Hugh wrote another bit of prescient code: a NewsReader tool (alpha) for Groove. But, with Hugh now deep within Groove, how will this get bumped up to the priority I want? Like, I want a great NewsReader for Groove, NOW.

Well, the good news is that Tim Knip is doing all sorts of exciting work on Groove Interop tools. Tim has even written a Blogging Tool (alpha) for Groove.

Similarly good news: there is now an awesome beta of a NewsReader with a lovely three pane UI, written in .NET Framework: NewsDesk. While NewsDesk is still under developement, it shows wonderful promise: good features and good graphics. Give it a try.

Who knows, maybe we can look forward to David Peckham of NewsDesk and Tim Knip of GrooveInterop tool fame putting their heads together and coming up with a native GrooveTool NewsDesk.

How cool when people working on a project, effected by the news of markets, customers and competitors, have instant access to their colleagues' best thinking and progress, not bounded by location or time zones, even at 30,000 feet.

Best of all, the news, developments and thinking that impact you can show up in the CONTEXT of the shared spaces and project work you are doing with colleagues, 'now and up-to-date', securely: NOT like shrapnel embedded across the giga-acre of 'lost and found' we call "my e-mail inbox + my favorites + my documents + some random news reader + sent mail + MS Project ++"

Any application that can provide unifying 'points-of-view' on my work (and my world) will be real evidence of Jon Udell's notion that Groove 2.5 and it's Web Services are delivering, what O/Ses of the future promise.

As friend Paul Saffo, of the Institute for the Future says. "The future is easy to predict, because the future is not uniformly distributed."

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 02:11:06 GMT

Dolphins roll in and out of the blue ocean, playing as they parallel the shore, punctuating the horizon like commas.

It is amazing to be at rest, in one quiet-place for so long that you fall into rhythm with the sunset, the tides and phases of the moon.

These nights the moon waxes so full that it dusts everything in moonlight: Our decks and the sand down to the ocean look as if they are covered in a silvery-powder of snow. I stepped out on the deck, expecting the cold of snow. But it is no-thing, save the silver-light of the moon: illusion.

Four days after the full-moon, the foreshadowed snow did fall, covering the decks, the dunes and the beach all the way down to the Atlantic rolling in: white. I step out onto the deck to see the moon. Whoa, cold snow, wet and making that soft noise underfoot.

Maybe the foreshadowed promises of computing will be fulfilled in our lifetimes after all.

Fri, 17 Jan 2003 21:59:36 GMT

Oak Island, North Carolina.

Bonnie and I are enjoying the sun glimmering-silver on the Atlantic this cold, clear day.

Bonnie was able to walk 1.5 miles along the beach last week: quite a recovery from her chemotherapy and subsequent ordeal. Here is a partial log of Bonnie's hero's journey through the terra incognito of 'modern medicine'.

During the time Bonnie was in the hospital, my Sony VIAO suffered a complete meltdown: losing it's motherboard and harddrive and all data. Do computers experience sympathy pains?

In any event, as I recover my software and laptop setup, I am returning to my weblog experiment. We shall see if weblogging is a good way share what is up, and being learned in our lives here.

as ever Daniel