OK, let's try this again:
Radio Free Blogistan has moved. The last entries posted to the old address are the ones you see here dated October 25, 2002.
For current entries, please go to the new address: http://radiofreeblogistan.com/.
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
11:12:21 PM 
say what []
If my upstreaming changes today work correctly, then this may be the final post to Radio Free Blogistan at the http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/ address, in which case, I want to make it very easy for any future readers directed here by old links (sorry, everybody!) to get to the new home page at radiofreeblogistan.com.
If I were really cool, I'd redesign this page so that it contained the moving message and then loaded the new page at http://radiofreeblogistan.com/ automatically, or immediately redirected to that page, or something cool like that. Instead people ending up here will have to follow a link like this one or the one in the title of this entry.
If the move fails, then this message will seem kind of lame and embarassing in retrospect.
For the technically minded, I will continue to use the Salon hosting and address for my salonika category, and possibly for hosting images and other large files within my storage quota.
The blog-related categories (knowhow, metablog, radioactive, syllabus), along with a few knew ones (uh, i don't know... bloggerz, stereomovabletype?) will also be upstreamed to sections of radiofreeblogistan.com.
The others will be squirted off to more appropriate hosts (for completists: fireweaver will show up at Dreamweaver Savvy once I get the templating integrated, memewatch will migrate to memewatch.com, outspoken will fold back into Bite Media, and x-pollen will go to x-pollen.com).
I'm starting another new category today, unrelated to blogs. It's called "Agent7," it's about my clients and colleagues in the worlds of technology and publishing, and especially their instersection, and it will end up at waterside.com once we get the server-side includes inserted into the appropriate page.
Update: The first try failed. I tried to copy the old #upstream.xml file into the subcategories that I didn't want coming over to radiofreeblogistan.com but that somehow resulted in a strange out-of-date rendering of the home page.
To fix that I'm editing this file and reposting after throwing away the bad upstream files and restoring Radio to community upstreaming. If things get back to normal, I'll try the FTP approach, possibly by publishing yet another change to this cross-category entry.
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
1:59:17 PM say what []
From my literary agency comes this announcement:
The 13th Annual Waterside Publishing Conference will be held April 10, 11, & 12, 2003 in Berkeley, CA. For more information or to register please log onto: http://www.waterside.com/conference.html.
We hope to see you there!
categories: knowhow
9:58:03 AM say what []
Sébastien Paquet has written an article about the rise of personal knowledge publishing.
categories: knowhow
10:28:21 AM say what []
Dylan Tweney hails The Death of the $1 Million Software Package in his latest Business 2.0 column:
Back in the late 1990s, a software salesman could look you in the eye and say with a straight face that his company's enterprise system would cost you $1 million. Mercifully, those days are over.
...
"Companies are looking around and saying, 'OK, I bought all this stuff, how do I make it work together?'" says Yankee's Dominy. If companies are still buying from ERP and SCM vendors, they're more likely to purchase smaller applications that have a clear, quick return on investment, such as software for managing a fleet of delivery vehicles, rather than full-blown, end-to-end systems. "Money is going into IT administration and management (including data center integration) and application integration," agrees George Zachary, a general partner at venture capital firm Mohr Davidow. "Money is going very slowly into business-process-oriented IT (such as CRM)."Tweney has already responded to an accusation of heartlessness (and, worse, callow youth!) in the comments area of his blog.
categories: knowhow
1:31:40 PM say what []
The implied architecture is impressive. The design seems to account for a broad range of content-management, community, calendar, and mail features on a common model. Some of it goes beyond what I'm interested in as a writer, but I did suddenly start imagining myself running all my sites with one single tool.
As someone who is still wrestling with httpd.conf and MT installation and RSS Monkey, the RSS parser feature in pMachine caught my eye. It doesn't come with the free version of the software, but the pro version is feature-complete and $45/noncommercial $125/commercial (very close to MT's "soft" price points). I'll report on this, amidst all my other jugglings.
I may have to try migrating a blog, because I don't think I can deal with starting any more just to explore software. The trickiest part is jumping from one interface to another, remembering "where did I put that?"
Final thought after touring pMachine's interface through screen shots: it appears to do just about everything I've ever been asked to spec out when gathering requirements for a custom CMS implementation. For $125, this could finally realign the CMS market along more rational lines.
10:04:02 AM say what []
Mediasavvy says the future of content management is open source (after attending the Open Source Content Management Conference, that is):
As the computer industry moves in the direction of selling services, instead of hardware and software, open source begins to look like a great way to improve the value you deliver to customers. Meanwhile the Web has created a tremendous demand for quality content management among the geeks themselves, who can't afford to buy software, but can contribute to its development.
categories: knowhow
3:26:01 PM say what []
As I mentioned in Scott's comments, it's keyword metatags that have the least efficacy and the most potential for gaming of indexers, although I agree with another commenter who suggested that they have a valid use in providing synonyms for words actually present in a document, especially in an intranet context.
Cory's essay talks about how Google's "who's linking to it?" formulae are more effective than the process of manually indexing a repository based on metadata and human editorial judgement.
While I believe in trying to solve the problem from both directions (make it easy for people to add metadata when contributing content and also don't expect metadata to be there when you are searching), I do think that meta tags make sense most of all in closed system, as when indexing an intranet, in which you can control what meta data is applied and then do specific parameter-matching searches.
categories: knowhow
12:17:36 PM say what []
