Christian Crumlish (xian): knowhow

Last post at blogs.salon.com

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 06:12:21 GMT

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/.

Moving Day

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 20:59:17 GMT

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into the subcategories that I didn't want coming over to radiofreeblogistan.com but that somehow resulted in a strange out-of-date rendering of the home page.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.

2003 Waterside Conference to be in Berkeley

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 16:58:03 GMT

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!

Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 17:28:21 GMT

Sébastien Paquet has written an article about the rise of personal knowledge publishing.

'One million dollars!'

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 20:31:40 GMT

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.

(On an entirely unrelated note, I like the way MT's page-per-entry archiving method enables you to put the post title in the title field of the archive page, making any bookmark or web search result item infinitely more useful.)

Because I'm an insane idiot

Fri, 04 Oct 2002 17:04:02 GMT

I'm downloading pMachine today and I'm going to see if it's really as easy to install as they say. It seems clear that pMachine is positioning itself as a competitor to Movable Type (it has import scripts for MT and GreyMatter), angling for those who prefer PHP over perl. 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.

Seeing the future of CM

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 22:26:01 GMT

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.

It's Cory's world, we just live in it

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 19:17:36 GMT

I was rereading http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/network/2002/03/08/cory_google.html by Cory Doctorow (after following Scott Rosenberg's link to Andrew Googman on the death of metatags. 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.

Blog for hogs?

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 01:18:45 GMT

Would this give blogs street cred?:

Marketing Magazine. Jim Carroll. Corporate weblogs.
It likely won't be too long before we see an official Harley-Davidson blog that features ongoing commentary, news and updates from an "evangelist" within the Harley organization. Featured within the main Harley-Davidson site, the effort will emerge as a powerful means by which the company can further cement its digital relationship with its customers. Harley has a new model coming out? It's reported directly to Harley fans through the blog. Someone is doing a cross-country bike ride on a Harley with the monies collected going to a charity? Write it into the blog. A new Harley ad is released? Link it in the blog, and viewers will follow.

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Tweney: Google should index blog RSS feeds

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 22:31:08 GMT

Google loves blogs. Blogs loves Google. But is there trouble in paradise? When items slip of the front page of most blogs, there is an anecdotal two- to three-week delay before archived items are reindexed. As Dylan Tweney points out this is an artifact of the fact that Google's basic unit of indexing is the web page URL and blogs are more fine-grained: the post as the basic unit, usually multiple posts on a single page. Permalinks arose to address this same issue, allowing post-level targetting of links to web posts. This is generally implemented with named anchors within pages, although it's also possible to assign each entry its own page in the archives, even if several entries are aggregated at any one time on the blog's index page. Dylan has a suggestion, though, to help the Googlesphere catch up with the blogosphere:

As it turns out, we do have a couple of data formats that understand the difference between a post and a page, include useful summary data, and even include handy pointers back to the exact archive location of a post. They're called RSS and RDF.

These syndication formats are used to aggregate news, but they could be useful indexing tools too. What if Google (or Daypop, once they can afford to buy a few new hard drives) collected RSS and RDF feeds — and then archived them in a searchable index?

Instead of news stories scrolling off into oblivion when they get to the bottom of a feed, they'd enter a permanent index where they could be used for information retrieval later.

It seems that the same approach would work when indexing an intranet or enterprise portal. Maybe part of the solution for turning k-logs into a true knowledge sharing system is to make sure the search implementation indexes RSS feeds from k-logs, making knowledge retrieval possible without discontinuities.

Sample code for focused custom Google search

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 17:45:07 GMT

The site search feature of Google's free custom search offering works by default only for sites whose addresses are root-level URLs (so, for example, you can use it out-of-the-box to search jrobb.userland.com or blogs.salon.com but not blogs.salon.com/0001111/). With the help of Ian Landsman and a few other readers over the weekend, I've come up with code that produces a custom Google search of just this blog. I've in fact replaced my calendar with it (well, I've moved the calendar to the bottom of my masthead column anyway, on the theory that robots may still find it useful). I want to offer the code to anyone to copy and tweak, but I've learned that posting code (even escaped-out code) to a blog entry tends to upset news aggregators, so instead I've written up the learning process with a few code samples as a story.

One solution to Google site search

Sun, 29 Sep 2002 22:49:14 GMT

Have I mentioned lately that I love the Internet? Cast a question on the waters and the answer (or an answer) generally comes back within 24 hours. Ian Landsman sent me a solution in the comments to my previous post. I'd paste the code in here but even when escaped out it will cause problems for at least some aggregators, so look at the comment if you're interested. Basically, Ian's solution passes the inurl:0001111 specification that limits the search to just my site on this server, including it in the query as a hidden text value by including a name="q" attribute. The only drawback I can see to this solution is that, by avoiding the custom Google search, it doesn't permit cobranding (not that big a deal to me as a private individual but perhaps an issue for more commercial enterprises) and it doesn't offer site-specific search option on the results page. I'm playing around with a hybrid solution on an experimental page (experimental meaning undesigned, no navigation, etc.). Basically, it involves using as much of the custom code as possible but still trying to pass the hidden text values per Ian's solution. It seems to work just fine, but I'll keep banging away at it for a while to see if I've screwed it up. If it does work, I'm going to replace my calendar with a search box and then probably write up a story with the code so it won't break aggregators but so I can distribute it to anyone who isn't blogging from the root of their domain. (This entry x-posted to knowhow category because making blogs—or k-logs alike—searchable addresses a key question regarding the usefulness of logging as a KM or knowledge sharing instrument.)

The dirty little secret of content management

Fri, 27 Sep 2002 16:13:46 GMT

Dylan Tweney's latest Business 2.0 column advises businesses to steer carefully between the six-figure CMS overkill solutions that thrived during the dotcom boom and the other end of the spectrum, reinventing the CMS wheel yourself in-house. I've been doing content management-related consulting for the last five years and there's a big hole in the middle of the market for CMS framework software that will handle 80% of the needs of most clients. There's no need, most of the time, to spend half a million dollars implementing a universal document management, record-keeping type system. I wonder how many businesses could manage their web and intranet content just fine with affordable tools such as powerful blog systems (for example, pMachine or Movable Type) or more full-featured but still affordable-bordering-on-free CMS tools (for example, Manila and PostNuke).

Blogs a half-baked KM solution?

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 00:45:26 GMT

In Network Computing's BuzzCut column, Mike DeMaria talks about blogs as an improvement over e-mail for project updating but as an imperfect solution, at best, for archiving and retrieving links:

Until blog developers address the issues of archive classification and sorting, blogs can't possibly live up to their potential.

Business blogs in the news again

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 21:03:39 GMT

Enterpreneur.com publishes a light article called Who Let the Blogs Out?:

With a blog, you can answer questions, post business updates, link to similar sites and receive commentary from users. A collaborative company blog could give your employees one place to go to keep up on business happenings, memos and announcements.

Turning data into information

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 18:00:41 GMT

Charly Z also hepped me to Daniel Danilov's Reflections, where he recently posted a think-piece about how blogs help impose a mental grid on raw data, part of the process the mind uses to turn that data into relevant information:

Anyone who complains about blogs being a waste of space or anything of the sort is probably completely non-discriminating in their approach to reading this vast store of material, or is completely dense, or both.

New (to me) blog tool: Nucleus CMS

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 17:40:13 GMT

Strangest of places department: Megan Morrone's LJ blog talks about her move to Movable Type, and her comments there discuss this move as a trend, recapitulate the "it's hard too install" meme (Megan's last post is that she has MT up and running but hasn't had time to customize the look and feel yet, so it's still not public), move on to talking about her radio appearance and other fan matters. In the midst of that, some de facto sales rep posts something derogatory about Movable Type and recomends Nucleus CMS instead. Naturally, I checked out the website:

Nucleus allows you to easily maintain your own weblog(s) on your own server. It offers a system that is easy to install, but still offers maximum flexibility.

Looks like one more product I'll have to learn and test as this market sorts itself out. Great shortcut: Would any current Nucleus CMS users care to explain its pros and cons?

Contrarian view on corporate blogs from InformationWeek's Secret CIO

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 16:00:40 GMT

(via Unsere Kleine Digitale Welt) InformationWeek warns CIO's about the risks of blogging in the corporate sphere:

If you think your staff spends inordinate amounts of time designing PowerPoint presentations now, just imagine what these would-be artists and authors will do to productivity when their creative powers are unleashed on the world of computerized diaries and ever-expanding hyperlinks.

Finally, and perhaps most compelling, is the litigation issue. With the exception of research labs, where you write down everything to fight for patent protection and government certification, the last thing you want are uncontrolled and ever-expanding records of individual activities and opinions. As Microsoft has learned from keeping old E-mail too long, in this age of writs of discovery, what you've said way back when may really hurt you. Before you embark on a company blog initiative, best have a chat with your chief counsel.

On the other hand, I do see real opportunities in the world of the blogosphere, even if the acceptance of blogs doesn't quite pan out the way their proponents envision. We surely can expect to see the emergence of new business ventures for anti-blog filtering and tracking software. Maybe we can even provide employment for lawyers who can teach seminars on what you can, and can't, put on your personal company blog. If you come up with other entrepreneurship ideas, be sure to blog them for sharing with the rest of us.

Worth pondering.

Allaire's New Blog

Thu, 12 Sep 2002 20:04:30 GMT

Jeremy Allaire has joined "the ranks of what Jon Udell calls CXO Blogs" with a mixed personal and professional blog "about media, communications and applications over the Internet." According to one of his first entries:

Over the past six-months, like many other netizens, I've become addicted to browsing and subscribing to blogs. My company has also started using blogspace as a crucial customer and community engagement mechanism. It's been amazing to see the number of Macromedia MX related blogs spring up.

He also posts a view of a cross-browser WYSIWYG editor widget, which doesn't seem to behave for me, but sounds like a step in the right direction. Even minimal coding of links and HTML remains as a barrier to the next wave of webloggers, and Allaire is looking at the bigger picture: getting beyond the browser-interface bottleneck.

Two Links from the Virtual Chase

Thu, 05 Sep 2002 17:09:00 GMT

From explodedlibrarian.info (via Research News: The Virtual Chase) come two good blog-related links:

On the Net's The Blog Realm about blogs as a source of information for librarians, and as a content-management solution.(Basic stuff for any experienced blogger but good introa and a reminder that this stuff still requires explaining on a daily basis.)
SearchEngineBlog, a new blog covering search-engine developments. (I like these "beat-covering" blogs. Speaking of which, the Corante article on the new media ecosystem and blogging's role in it is worth a thousand snippies from celebrity blogger outboxes.

"But do not turn your back on the world of Weblogs completely until you also consider the content management angle." No, do not turn your back lest you miss the action taking place.

Your Resume as a Blog

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 18:01:10 GMT

Krzysztof Kowalczyk (I love his motto: "Blog or you'll be blogged.") suggests that a focused, balanced blog (or k-log, or blog category, or RSS feed, etc.) could be used as a dynamic resume, one that will be much more impressive in retrospect than a dry recitation of skills in a tradition flat resume:

Keep a log of all the stuff you're learning and doing. e.g. if today you wrote a 5k lines perl script that spiders the web and extracts interesting info, you would add to your log a dated entry:

Finished 5k line Perl script to spider the web. Used LWP::Simple module

...

Of course you should start now, the day you're out of work is probably a few years late.

Think I'll set up a resume category today.

Left-Brain Blogging

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 16:36:27 GMT

The Raven talks about the impression he gets from a long blogroll:

I don't know about you, but when I visit a blog that has 395 navigation links running down the side I get a funny feeling. Is this clown trying to tell me, "Look at all my friends!" Or am I supposed to check the list and see if I know anyone. Either way, the eyes tend to glaze over and you say to yourself, "Yeah yeah yeah, a bunch of links. Bully for you, pal." In my case, I'm trying to keep the list short ... real short. In my grouchy world, this is called "utility value," and in today's hypernet bitstream it's called, "Guess he doesn't have any friends."

Raven goes on to explain his categories. This got me thinking that logging (journaling, blogging, k-logging) has solved the problem of "how do I keep my website fresh?" by making it trivially easy to refresh the content. That's great for the right-brain—I'm stereotyping here—free-associative, creative part of the brain. I like the guilt-free lack of structure, being the chaotic type myself, and left-handed and kinda red-headed to boot. But I think we also, as users, want to see organized links. There's a reason why some people like drilling down into the Yahoo!/directory model of information indexing. I know others will say, "That's so 1999. Just Google it." But that I believe has more to do with the speaker's personality and personal preferences. Here in Radio, I should probably be learning more about OPML so I could build a hierarchical or otherwise relational set of links that might be output as a blogroll but also browsable in other ways. What I'd really like to see is a tool that tentatively organizes all the links I embed in this blog, stored in some way so that i can reorganize, overrule filing choices, etc. Ideally it would even suggest reorganizations eventually. Because, face it, you can't design the perfect filing system in advance, unless you are replicating a perfectly worked-out process, and even then I'd doubt it. You need to start with some system, but as long as you can split big files and eliminate or merge small ones, you're golden. I know I've covered this ground before, but it's probably one of my central knowledge management insights, along with the idea of just-in-time organizing. For example, I had trouble selecting the quotation above on Raven's page. IEMac5.1/OSX kept wanting to select from his links panel instead of in the blog copy where I was clicking. (I wonder if the CSS div for the side panel comes before the one for the main entry in the markup? I didn't look, but if so, then it makes the page much harder to read for Lynx users. Checking in Lynx is a useful little canary-in-a-coalmine proxy for having every assistive browser on hand.) The ad hoc, just-in-time approach is for me to e-mail Sosnoski, or tap his comments board, or see if he reads this. Then I've reported a potential bug and he can deal with it then if he wants, log it for later if need be, or decide it's not worth worrying about. Not every project has a project manager with a KM database in tow. Sometimes we're just one person trying to manage one complicated third millennial life. I'm starting to learn that keeping the house clean works that way too. There's no way to avoid the big dusting/vacuuming/bathroom/whatever cleaning days sometimes. Because I have the ability to ignore things so that they become part of the unnoticed background distraction of my life until I'm working in a corner surrounded by piles of books, receipts, post-its, computer equipment, CDs, cassette tapes, and bills, I'm only now finally learning that when you see something that needs putting away or cleaning, you just do it.

Jeremy Zawodny Dreams of the Perfect RSS Aggregator

Sun, 01 Sep 2002 20:43:23 GMT

He may be giving Radio's aggregator short shrift, but Jeremy has done a good job of breaking down several approaches to RSS aggregation and providing his own wishlist:

I'm on a quest to find the perfect RSS aggregator.... I'm thinking of a server-based process that can gather all the data and give it to me in one of several ways. Maybe I can just point my browser at it and catch up on the news—just like AmphetaDesk. That's great for when I'm on-line and in a surfing mood. I'd like it to do RSS auto-discovery. I'd like the option of having updates sent to me via e-mail and possibly instant-messenger. Heck, I'd like to be able to subscribe via e-mail or IM as well.... Anyone know of such a beast? Sounds like it'd be a fun project to build.

Log Everything

Fri, 30 Aug 2002 18:37:16 GMT

I'm starting to wonder if there's anything I shouldn't be logging. So much of my personal knowledge management problems (read: disorganization) involve forgetting, losing track of, and worrying about issues as they come up an afterward until they are resolved. Sure, some things are private or proprietary. Not every log (blog, k-log, or any kind of log) needs to be published on the unsecured public Internet byways. Not everything needs to go out over TCP/IP. Not everything, for that matter needs to be entered into a computer or even written in a notebook, if you want ot take the thought to its conclusion. But it seems to me that just about everything that passes through my computer (and a number of things that sit on post-its around my desk) should be logged somewhere. One big place or some small specific place. I need to keep track of what I just finished, what I didn't have time to get to, what new items have just occurred to me. Every to do list grows and drifts (for me). Instead of fear of a growing list of shoulds, I'd rather relax knowing that nothing is being lost or forgot, and everything is findable when I need it, or when I make it a priority, or when external circumstances make it a priority.

Tweney Understanding Weblogs

Thu, 29 Aug 2002 02:14:56 GMT

Dylan Tweney has summarized some of the recent thinking on weblogs (overlapping with many of the recent links posted here) in an article in which he also discusses realizing the personal knowledge-management benefits of keeping a weblog:

In other words, I realized that a weblog could be a useful tool for personal knowledge management as well as for public communication. Because it's so easy to create and update a weblog — the characteristic that has made blogging boom in the past year — it's an ideal information capture device. Whenever you come across something interesting online, you can easily drop a link, a quote, and/or a comment into your weblog, and move on. You may never return to it, but it's there if you ever want to look it up again. Same with passing thoughts: Just jot them in the weblog.

I agree that we need to see better forms of archival, retrieval, and organization. Either searching needs to get really smart, or some aiding for of taxonomy building has to help organize weblog entries by relationship. Just capturing knowledge or references is only half the battle.