Month: October 2003

Technology Review weblog

Technology Review launches weblog.

The folks at MIT Technology Review (to which I subscribe) have started a weblog, including posts from folks like Simson Garfinkel, who I've been reading for a long time (if you've never owned Simson's PGP book from O'Reilly, where have you been?)   In one of the first posts, Simson notes my recent switch to Mac OS X, writing: “The Mac is offering a really interesting niche to the technological elite.”  I actually just installed X11 on my Mac this weekend.  For fun.

My only polite request to the Technology Review folks would be to add an RSS feed and permalinks to the individual posts, but having tangled with content management systems too many times, I'm not going to get too preachy on how easy that might be, because maybe it isn't.

[Chad Dickerson]

Technology Review is one of the few print sources I both subscribe to and read regularly. A weblog from them should be well worth following. Let's hope the RSS feed follows soon.

One more example of Sturgeon's Law – Perseus study on weblogs

Everyone seems to be getting their shorts in a knot over the recent Perseus study on weblogs. Among comments I’ve seen in my aggregator are those from:

MarketingWonk
Many to Many
Mathemagenic
The Register (Andrew Orlowski in one of his usual blogs are stupid rants; what is his problem?)
Scripting News

So, where’s the news here?

This is a perfect application of Sturgeon’s Law – “90% of everything is crud.” I suppose it sells papers and marketing studies to focus on failure, but the important message is that the failure has to occur if you want to see the successes. The more experiments you can run and the easier it is to run an experiment, the more likely you are to see successful results.

Blogrolls as obsolete concept

Roll away.

Great party tonight here in Boston on the eve of BloggerCon. Met Betsy, Werner (whose birthday is today) and Glenn for the first times. Did the same earlier at lunch with Ed and Adam.

One conversation, repeated several times with different combinations of bloggers, comes down to this: old blogrolls have become a pain in the ass. All of us who have been blogging for awhile have lots of dead links in our ‘rolls, and frankly don’t even look at the things very much. Did once, maybe, but not any more.

So our ‘rolls are legacies. We maintain them for readers more than ourselves. Interesting, no?

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Seems to me that blogrolls made sense in a time before RSS aggregators. If you use other blogs and sites as triggers for your own writing, then a blogroll serves as a useful way to organize your surfing. When you shift to an aggregator driven strategy, your subscriptions file becomes the equivalent of your blogroll. Of course, your subscriptions file is invisible while your blogroll was public.

Windley on Event Driven Business

Event Driven Business. In an event driven business, products are built to order, not built to stock, reducing inventory carrying costs and allowing greater customer satisfaction as a result of customization. This article from ebizQ has a great analogy: [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

If you want the train to move over one foot, you have to do an immense amount of work tearing up and re-laying tracks. On the other hand, all you need to do to turn the more agile truck is move the steering wheel.

This is a useful analogy. I also agree with Phil that the following observation provides a very useful classification of data in organizational information systems:

[E]vent-driven, service-oriented architectures integrate three kinds of data: reference data, such as the number of trucks in a fleet; state data, such as the number of trucks under repair; and event data, such as a delivery being completed.

Worth checking out the full article.

Waiting eagerly for Roland Tanglao's LinkFest to ship

Sign me up! I’ve been looking for something just like this to get more leverage out of the material I find coming into my aggregator. Roland, put me on the list for this.

Roland Tanglao and I and a couple of colleagues are working on a new blogging, content-publishing tool that we’re calling LinkFest for now.

LinkFest is – for now – a client application that works in conjunction with a Browser. It functions as an interactive visual and textual workspace that allows for:

  • the rapid assembly of links, files, data, images and other relevant items of interest,
  • subsequent easy manipulation of the collected data and text,
  • simple addition of annotations and commentary, and finally
  • quick one-click publishing.

The main elements of LinkFest s functionality (drag-and-drop content that automatically creates linked clusters of related, annotatable material that is saveable, sendable, re-usable, formattable) allows end-users to use RSS feeds better, to connect and combine them (along with other content) any way they want to or need to, to build a story, themes, briefings, and so on. They can build and publish their knowledge, their content, and their services their own way. [wirearchy News]

Comments Feed for McGee's Musings

I've been hosting comments here for the past few months, largely at the urging and encouragement of Denham Gray. While I don't get tons of comments, the ones that I do get are generally very high quality.

As you might suspect, given my enthusiastic support for RSS as a tool to make my life as a knowledge worker easier, there is an RSS feed for my comments. I host it at a “Manila” site, provided by the great folks at Weblogger, which is a site I'm holding for a future development project. Anyway, please feel free to subscribe to that comments feed in addition to my regular RSS feed.