Phil Wolff: Radio Q

Wishlist: The Standalone RSS Autodetective Client

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 19:43:05 GMT

I really want a standalone autodetection tool. As I surf, it will:

live in the Windows system tray
parse pages for urls pointing to syndication formats like RSS and Atom
verify those feeds exist and collect their metadata
write a log file of the detection and verification info, in OPML
display the number of new discoveries when hovering over the system tray icon
push the file to a server, periodically and optionally.

By being a separate application from the RSS newsreader, the autodetective will be:

Smaller, consuming fewer system resources than a newsreader
Focused on the craft of detection, becoming smarter about finding things on the pages I read
Independent of a newsreader, so I can have more than one newsreader (including browser-based ones) without having every page I read parsed for each tool.
Diverse, detecting tidbits in my emails, chats, IRC sessions, etc.

If we wanted to get fatter about the client, it could spider to discover deeper (crawl this site) or discover wider (crawl the blogrolls you see). Less relevance than pages you've actually seen, but more context - especially as you revisit favorite blogs and services.

I'd also like the detective to discover more kinds of things and make sense of them:

Contact information (emails, phone numbers, postal addresses)
Physical locations (postal addresses, city names, geocoding)
Calendar events (dates, times, durations, descriptions)
Rich media (sound, video, flash files)

so I can review and bring them into other software.

There should be programming specs, so they know how to find the detective's journals, and check if they've been updated with fresh discoveries. I didn't include a "new headlines" balloon or ticker in the detective's features. The detective isn't a newsreader.

The detective should listen to your newsreaders too. Your newsreaders should also push the locations of your subscription lists ("you can find what Phil is reading at http://...") to the detective. This way the detective can optimize its reports by checking your subscriptions, then excluding them from discoveries.

Let me browse and edit my discoveries in a human-usable form. I may want to delete items from my history before sharing them with a newsreader.

I have an identity that lives across multiple computers and cell phones. I'll have detectives on each. My detectives should be able to confer and harmonize their discoveries. I may have multiple users on any computer, so detection prefs and journals should be aware of user profiles.

What's the business case?

Strategy: Environmental Awareness. What's the cost of missing that a trusted feed has moved? That a key customer/competitor/regulator has a new feed? What if we made our collective surfing of the Internet into a competitive analysis tool, each person contributing their view of the world? With detectives on everyone's desk, we're less likely to be surprised, more likely to catch new opportunities, and be smarter as a group than our competitors.
IT: Enterprise System Integration with Newsreaders. We're creating feeds of all sorts of information, including RSS of our SAP transactions. Many of these feeds will be customized for a specific context ("here's the RSS for orders Mary should approve.") The detective does away with error-prone cutting and pasting, automating the process of "I want to follow up on this". These feeds will drive attention to workflow and process. Some of the feeds will trigger people to write about specific items in team and project weblogs, improving communication.

I'll pay $20 retail for this.

Assuming you have an intranet blog server and either a server based news aggregator or desktop newsreaders, what would you pay for a 100 user site license?

Do you want one?

Photo Blog from your Palm Zire.

Wed, 15 Oct 2003 01:10:44 GMT

A commercial service using the ForPhotos Palm program. PDA to blog. "akasig"

Community Services for Enterprise Blognets

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 19:19:49 GMT

Community Services for Enterprise Blognets

While your firewall protects you from intrusion, it also cripples the community software that keeps the blogosphere hopping. Here's are some of the services you might want to bring inside to help your blognets grow and prosper. The list grows, changes, and is not complete.

I've grouped these services, arbitrarily, into three categories: Discovery, Reading, and Writing. Discovery services help you find stuff and navigate, and understand blognets and the blogosphere as a whole. Reading services help you keep up with relevant information. Writing helps you author and publish. Basic blogging service is extra.

In your workplace:

Which 3 are mandatory for a blognet pilot?
What risks do you assume if you don't provide these services?
Which services might you be better off operating in support of public employee and customer weblogs, even though they are the open blogosphere's services?
What policy and IT operations issues do these services raise?

Service	Description
Discovery
Intranet search	Covering the intranet and DMZ, your private search engine must update its index frequently. Best is if they re-index within a few minutes of fan update server being pinged. Engines which work well in public, because they use hypertext links to establish relevance, may not work as well in the intranet, where there are fewer links or other cues. For example, the Google appliance.
Location tagging and search service	Find blogs physically near me; find posts related to a location or system. For example, Geourl.org.
Referral logs	Who's sending traffic to me? It's sometimes useful to understand your readership. Other times you discover people with similar interests.
Weblog neighborhood	Who is like me? Who writes about things like me? Who else is cited like me? For example, Technorati link cosmos.
Topic service	Find posts related to this one within my weblog, across the intranet, and perhaps across a collection of partner blognets. See K-collector and Easy News Topics.
Realspace	Generate live meetings using information from blogspace. For example, Meetup or Evite.
Random walk	Manufacture serendipity. Sample the intranet, get a bigger picture. See also wanderlust.
Directory	So you have an employee directory, maybe even a yellow pages for services and departments. How about extending the yellow pages to people, by topic, updated automatically? For example, see blogarama, Eatonweb, Oblix.
Advertising	Text ads for internal announcements. Think of it as the new bulletin board.
Cemetery	A directory of abandoned weblogs, because of personnel actions, lack of interest, or because their focus or relationship is completed. See Fucked Weblog.
Product or object watch	Analyze weblogs for well-understood references, store and analyze the results, and notify subscribers. For example, seeing what books people mention in their weblogs. Or people. Or competitor products.
Peopleroll and social network	I'm sharing some of my friends, and friends of friends. See FOAF, Friendster, Ryze.
Reading
RSS portals	server side directories of RSS feeds, aggregation and browser presentation of those feeds
Updates	What's new? A central service that writing tools notify when a blog is updated. Sometimes called a "ping service". Like weblogs.com and blo.gs.
Blogroll & WebRing services	May be linked to enterprise directory services, the better to provide automatic maintenance of blogrolls that match the formal org chart. Of more value, giving users the ability to create their own blogrolls. This reveals informal and temporary social networks. Blogrolling.com is an example.
Blog distribution gateway	Distributes blog posts by email, SMS or other channels.
Buzz watcher	What's hot on the intranet? What's hot in my circle? Services that answer this include Blogpulse, DayPop News Burst, Popdex, and Blogdex
News Readers and Aggregators	Aggregators collect a user's selection of RSS feeds, keeping them current, formating them for reading, and making them available for users to cross-post. News readers do the same thing, except from a user's desktop. Server side aggregators have the effect of concentrating traffic (they pick an RSS feed only once, instead of each user picking it up) so publishers don't experience "slashdot effects". They also hide the level of attention from publishers, useful if the publisher is a competitor or industry insider. Syndic8 is an example.
Re-aggregation service	These services combine content from multiple sources into a more focused feed. This can be fully automated or humans may approve contributions to a feed. Moreover is an example.
Machine translation	Do you span countries? Machine translations of posts and RSS feeds helps people get the gist of what their colleagues write. Systrans is an example.
Writing
Posting Gateways	Use these services to write to your weblog using non-browser devices or software. Post from voicemail, your phone's SMS/MMS, email, calendar, or IM.
Comment Service	Manages posted comments like the blog server manages weblog posts.
Conversation Threading	Tracks the flow of conversation across weblogs using methods like trackback and link analysis.
Render Services	These convert blog posts to RSS, and to document formats like PowerPoint .ppt, Flash .swf, Adobe Acrobat .pdf, or Microsoft Word .doc.
Template Farm, Widget Library	Stores styles, templates, graphics and other ways to customize the look and feel of your blog.
Weblog Medic	Checks your blog for dead links, broken images, speed, accessibility, valid RSS and html, language encoding, etc. For example, BlogCheckup.
Blog Fodder	Actively provoke blogging by suggesting themes or topics. For example, blogfodder and The Friday Five.

I'll be updating this page for a while. "akasig"

From Japan via Hamburg: Karaokeblogging.

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 00:09:38 GMT

Checking in with Nico Lumma of noch'n blogg and a fellow survivor of the Blogtalk conference. A few items:

He and his wife have their first baby. Congratulations!

Thinking about what blogging's official theme song should be

recognize that blogging ring tone
stop a blogger on the street
to play at awards ceremonies

Nominees:

Abba, just because they capture the spirit so well
Johnny Cash, whose death was widely blogged
No fleetwood mac
The Greatful Dead, but hard to blog to

The new rage in Germany: Karaoke Blogging. The site, Karaokeblogging.de, has been climbing the blogg.de and blogcensus charts in the last month. Building on the richness and immediacy of audioblogging, karaoke blogging is a higher form of social software (unless you don't like karaoke). The first time I heard a fully karaoked blog, I was blown away by the sonified experience. Update: Now in English at Karaokeblogging.com.

I'm a fan of 1-click karaoke blogging, great usability. But they should not file for a patent. The backlash might stifle karaokeblogging in its infancy.

A few technical concerns:

I am hoping for ENT 1.0 support soon, the better to navigate both the songbook libraries and karaokebloggers' mp3 recordings.
They must add Atom support to exploit integration and syndication of the Karaoke midi xml format with the blog item data model.
Move from their poorly formed RSS feed to a valid RSS 2.0 feed, to support the KAI xml namespace. How are we supposed to adjust our newsreaders to support the feeds if they aren't well formed? Also, RSS enclosures would help stream new karaoke, midi and mp3 files in the background, so I can wake up to a newsreader full of the latest from my favorite performers.
There is some debate over whether you should permit more than song per blog post. I support Nico's idea that more karaoke is better.
Not sure if it works in Opera.

The business applications are obvious. So I'll be covering them in my BloggerCon session next weekend. See you there.

- phil

Atom WeblogLifeCycleAPI?

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 06:23:33 GMT

Should there be blog lifecycle capability built into the Atom API?

For example,

Create a new weblog
Freeze, retire, suspend a weblog
Merge weblogs x, y, and z
Delete a weblog
Copy or move an entire weblog from this server to that server
Create a new weblog by extracting some content from weblog x

This would enable programmatic control over a weblog by an authorized system or person.

For instance, you may want your HR system to automatically generate a weblog for each new employee, and freeze it when the employee leaves the company. Or to manage multiple blog servers (made by different vendors) using one admin tool. [PhilWolff]

John Robb to Google: Match ads to the post, not the page.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:07:11 GMT

This would allow the inclusion of ads within RSS (not ad boxes, but simple text with the label advertisement). I really don't want to see ads in my RSS, but it is inevitable. For qualified content, like what I am working on with the Weblog Network, it is a must.

Won't you have greater matching precision by looking at all the posts in a given feed? "akasig"

The web can know me.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:43:57 GMT

Steve Kirks reimagines the future of blogging. It is a beautiful, elegant vision. I want the drugs he's taking.

Create a different kind of aggregator, one that's a browser first and RSS reader second.

Read the rest...

Scaling Echo: P2P and Cached Feeds, and Ping Servers.

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 16:06:23 GMT

About four weeks' ago I wrote about Scaling Echo: P2P and Cached Feeds. I drew a few conclusions:

The syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds in 3 years
Feed payloads will grow 100 to 10,000 times
Each reader may consume 1000 feeds
Syndication Growth = Denial Of Service
Two architectures will support this scale:
- Peer-To-Peer (P2P)
- Caching by intermediaries (communal aggregators)

Jevon wrote about scaling new post pinging.

We need to have aggregators that send their subscriptions into a cloud and get pings back that have gone in to that cloud at any other point. It could be called a "peer to peer subscription and message delivery system", or "distributed redundant notification network", or whatever. But as soon as we can build a message network layer, Microcontent will really be ready for the next level: integration into our active lives.

Phrases like "community ping relay servers", "supernode", and "ping cloud" make my day.

[a klog apart klogs]

An interview with RSSJobs creator, Steve Rose.

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 23:26:30 GMT

I've been following two things very closely for many years: content syndication and labor markets. Last week RSSJobs was announced, bringing the two together. Here's my interview with Steve Rose who built RSSJobs.

What inspired or provoked you to create RSSJobs?

It was a combination of things. First was the frustration with my own job hunt. Like many IT professionals, I was unemployed for 6 months. When I did finally find a job, it was for half my previous pay, and in a environment I never would have considered otherwise. Even after starting that job, I was still job hunting. Every morning I was greeted with emails from Monster, and Dice, and several others with the results of my saved search agents. They were pretty useless. Monster only allowed 5 agents, and the emails only had up to 5 jobs per agent. I had to go to Monster's web site to see all the results. Then there was Dice. It gave me up to 50 jobs for each agent every day. Most of them were the same as the previous day's results! They were supposed to be just the new ones. I was spending all my morning time before work weeding through these, and I rarely had time to check any other sites that I didn't get emails from. Sites that didn't get updated every day went un-checked for weeks or months. Who knows how many potential jobs I missed out on because I didn't have time to check all the sites I wanted to check for updates.

Second was exposure to "RSS". I started reading all my web based news using NetNewsWire earlier this year, and was amazed at how much easier it was to keep up. So I stared playing with the RSS format, creating some feeds for my own personal use, and I thought this would be useful for checking a local University's job board. I wrote a quick java servlet to parse the new job listing and return the results as RSS. It was so cool! Not long after that, I added Dice and Monster to the mix.

At this point, it was all just for my own use. About 2 weeks later, I went on a job interview, and when asked what kind of personal projects I had, I mentioned this and described the benefits of RSS. One of the developers interviewing me knew about RSS, and thought it was very good idea. He said I should market it. So I came up with a simple business plan, adapted my servlets to a subscription-based model, and built a web site around it.

How would you describe what RSSJobs does?

RSSJobs is simply a search agent for other job boards. It takes search parameters from the user, searches the job boards they want, and returns the results to them in RSS.

Who is it for?

Ideally, RSSJobs is for anyone looking for a job on the internet. It is well suited to individuals who have jobs, but want to keep their eyes open to other positions, and don't have the time to do an exhaustive search every day.

That being said, the average person out there doesn't know about RSS yet, and has a hard time understanding the benefits. It's a paradigm shift for most people, making adoption of RSS more difficult. Web browsers are comfortable, and people don't want to give them up, despite their limitations.

So at this point, I don't expect most job hunters out there to "get" the benefits of using RSSJobs, so I am not targeting them just yet. Right now I am focusing on those who are already using RSS. As RSS use becomes more widespread, the target audience will expand.

When did it go live?

The official live date was August 1, 2003. The site has been up for a few weeks, but only myself and a few friends knew about it.

What's your day job? What's your technical background?

I am a Software Engineer. As a Software Engineer, I have done a little bit of everything. My strongest language is Java, but I also work in C/C++, as well as various 4GL type languages. I've done application, database, web, and multimedia development, sometimes all on the same project.

What programming tools did you use to construct RSSJobs? What platform are you running the apps on?

It was developed using Java 1.4.1, and currently hosted on Mac OS X Server 10.2.

What version(s) of RSS do you produce?

RSS 2.0

What do you think of the Echo project? Will you be supporting the new syndication formats?

I don't know much about the Echo project, but I plan to closely follow the market for RSS content. If other formats gain popularity, I will consider supporting them as well.

Most of the job boards bar "reverse engineering" and other screen scraping, concerned over theft of data by rivals and disintermediation. How does your design work around or through these concerns?

I have considered this, and I don't expect there to be an issue. The site clearly states that the user is searching other job sites. The job listings from the various boards are accessed on demand, and nothing is cached by RSSJobs. There is no attempt to mask the origin of the content. If the user wants more information about the job, they are sent to the job board, where they can apply for the job if they like. Users should still register and upload their resumes to the job boards being searched for maximum efficiency.

I liken what RSSJobs does to a personal assistant or agent who does the research requested by a client, and presents the results. For example, say my friend doesn't have internet access, but wants to use Monster.com in his job search. He asks me to search for jobs for him. Is there anything wrong with me typing in his keywords, downloading the results, and putting a summary of the listings in an Excel spreadsheet on a floppy disk for my friend to look through? It seems perfectly reasonable to me. RSSJobs does essentially the same thing.

Many employers use HR information systems that output job listings in an HR-XML format for bulk uploading to Monster and most of the big job boards. What kind of information is lost between employer and candidate?

I have no idea.

What's on your wishlist for news reader features?

I would like to see an RSS Reader that could manage the items from an RSS feed as individual items. A user could archive specific items for viewing later after it is no longer included in the feed. Adding locally-stored comments to an item would be a nice feature too.

Is there anything employers could do to make your job easier when searching jobs.Acme.com?

Yes, when they post jobs, keep the content simple. No embedded HTML tags, or other things that RSSJobs has to filter to keep the XML valid.

Where do you think the other bottlenecks are in getting work to workers?

I think the biggest problem is getting the word out about available jobs. There are so many different ways jobs get announced, between Job Boards, classifieds, and company web sites, it is hard to keep track of them all. RSSJobs is trying to help with that.

Where do you see RSSJobs going?

For now, RSSJobs is just a part-time endeavor. If it helps people out, and provides enough revenue to cover the hosting costs, I will be happy. It will expand slowly, adding new features and more search sites on an ongoing basis. Ideally, I'd like to grow it large enough to become a full time job, and maybe even provide a few jobs as well. But this is not going to be another .com flame-out, trying to become too big too fast. I've been part of that already. If the demand for RSSjobs is there, it will grow to meet that demand. If not, no-one is going to loose money over it.

What kind of feedback have you been getting from new users? What have you been learning from the RSSJobs experience?

Surprisingly, I have received very little direct feedback about it. What I have received has been positive, even excited, with a few requests for features I have already considered for the future. But the loudest statement has also been the quietest one. People are using the site! The site is still in its early stages, and I don't want more volume than I can handle, so I haven't done much to promote it yet. The little bit I have done has drawn more traffic than I could have expected, and people are actually using the site as it was intended. that says everything.

What have I learned? I'm not sure I have learned anything yet. It is all happening so fast, and things have gone remarkably well, almost too well. It's when things go wrong, particularly very wrong, when you learn the most. I'm sure that will come. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

###

I Want Something New .

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:37:38 GMT

Brad Wilson's I Want Something New thread.

I want new blog software.

Now, there's nothing wrong with the crop of blog software out there, but it all pretty much works the same. I'm not even sure what I want different... I just want something different. What I want, really, is something so radically different that it's hard to even call it "blog software".

My contribution to the thread...

Blog anything.

On request, blog more richly structured things (like sports scores, recipes, SAP transaction approvals). [xml packages, schema for structure, css for formatting, xul for edit layouts]

Syndicate anything.
Make it easy to define new kinds of things. And share them by blogging them.
Have your blogging tools discover and learn to use new kinds of things. On the fly.

MachineBlogging: Post to eBay.

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:31:50 GMT

An interaction designer shared this idea at Saturday's Santa Clara Blogger Pizza dinner. Simple, really.

Post to eBay from your weblog.

He imagines using the blog author's UI to compose your basic data. Stick in your pictures, your descriptions, etc. There would be a few extra fields needed, elements like eBay ID, product metadata, offer types; three more minutes, tops.

When you post to your blog, you also publish to the eBay API.

How about using one of your blogs to drive off-eBay traffic to your eBayed products? Good for you, good for eBay.

It takes a long time to add a new product using eBay's normal UI, as much as 40-50 minutes. Huge value in saving users time and simplifying the experience. More products posted more frequently by more people.

"ManMachineLogo"So, that's from blogger to machine. How about eBay writing to the blogosphere? (This is me, not the eBayer.)

Are you one of the millions who spend hours every week with blogs, blog newsreaders, and blogging tools? Would you like it if eBay created private feeds for you?

New eBay categories
Confirming items you list for sale - notification
New items in categories you follow
Bids and bidder information for items you are selling
Lists of items you're selling through eBay (an eBayroll?)
lists of items you bid on

From eBay's view, this looks like:

an auxilliary way to alert customers, sharpening the sense of immediacy and urgency around current transactions
a 1-to-1 marketing tool to draw customers back
putting more marketing tools in seller hands, the better to exploit the growing blogosphere

From a blogger's view, custom eBay feeds feel like:

responsive customer service
control
alerts for trading behavior
triggers for blogging behavior

eBay can do more to leverage the blogosphere, of course.

Start with permalinks everywhere: every comment, bid, product, seller, buyer, category, etc.
Eliminate financial friction. eBay charges to connect via XML and their API.

["aka" "klogs"]

Machine Blogging: Programmers sought for project: CVS to weblog/RSS, and back.

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 07:02:33 GMT

CVS as Blogger. Bill Lazar seeks programmers interested in bootstrapping a new system. Improve project communication by having your codebase blog.

Yes, blog.

You're all busy doing your own thing, coding here, checking stuff in there, testing this, trying that. Common point of reality? The code. Keeper of the reality? Your configuration management system.

Bill's solution: Wrap common events in plain english and post them to a weblog. Syndicate the results if you like. Add your project CVS to your blogroll. Comment on your CVS's posts in your own blog.

Wanted: Programmers and QA folks interested in making a tool that will extend the five most popular code management systems with a blogging interface. Contact Product Manager Bill. Bill is an alum of both Sun and Pyra, has a Rutgers MBA, and is polishing his C# in his spare time.

p.s. Bill pays attention to movies in the works. Very cool. He's interested in syndicating this content while preserving its structure. Any suggestions?

Merging IM With Blogging.

Sat, 12 Jul 2003 03:36:28 GMT

Christopher Saunders writes a great roundup of the integration and convergence of instant messaging and blogging for IM Planet. IM is used for posting to blogs, update notification, and reading blogs. With AOL offering their Journal products, expect all the blogging vendors to emphasize blending blogs with messaging media: IM, SMS, MMS, voice mail, and email.

Thanks to Bill Vick for the link.

Is your email program the ultimate microcontent manager?

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 11:51:24 GMT

Lilia wrote:

One of the questions from the audience was about number of technologies that one can cope. I share this concern given the number of communication/discussion tools I use.

Everything becomes email, according to some theories. Usenet, for example, was blended into mail clients, treating the usenet post like an email message. Completely hiding the plumbing from users, the differences ceased to matter. The usenet post became just another email message.

Perhaps blogging tools will also blend into mail clients.

Posting from your mail client (your blogs are just special email addresses) and IM/irc/SMS.
Read your RSS feeds with Outlook or Eudora or whatever Macheads use these days.
Configure your weblog with a properties dialog your mail client.

If so, there are some bonuses.

Safety and Comfort

Exploit mail's ability to block spam and advertising (you're expecting RSS advertising in your feeds, aren't you?)
Scan RSS posts for active or hostile organisms (viruses, worms, etc.)

Filtering, Search and Notification

Organize incoming posts by content (not just point of origin or date) into folders.
Search your archive across email and RSS archives, one big database.
Alert the user to very interesting posts, using filters.
Apply family filters.

Workflow and Collaboration.

Perhaps everything on a project gets cc'd to a project weblog
Trigger user action from enterprise systems

you have an invoice to approve
you have a meeting to summarize

RSS as transport for distributed calendaring and scheduling.

Subscribe to my public calendar via RSS.
Request meetings via email.

Manage my groups of people. One tool (my Address Book) to manage:

blogrolls
friend of a friend
LDAP directories
personal distribution lists lists
blogosphere neighborhoods, and
externally managed memberships (egroups, social networks).

Servers conflate also:

Mail servers cache and aggregate RSS feeds, just like usenet.
Servers following the IMAP model can hold backups of your email/blogging databases and address books.
Server managed access control to private feeds.

Microsoft, for one, believes users want all variations in microcontent to be manageable from one place, with one interface. Their standalone task-reporting tools for project members went nowhere until they blended them into the email clients. Now your Things To Do Lists work with the MS Project servers, communicating by specially formatted emails.

The upside?

Blogging as we know it becomes a feature. And everyone has it.
One user experience means lower learning curve.
As email clients become smarter, blogging benefits too.

The downside?

Blogging becomes boring, routine, work-like.
The browser interface becomes less important.
Newsreading must compete for time with your inbox.
It starts to feel employer-managed vs. personally controlled, just like your at work email.

A prediction:

The vendors who dominate messaging will shape blogging. AOL and Microsoft have fat clients, web clients, and chat clients. Watch them:

Bring blogging into their messaging family.

Absorb blogging user and group digital IDs into their identity mechanisms.

Offer faceted blogs (everyone sees just what they're intended to see and not what they don't want to see) using digital ID. You're not part of their ID world? No facets.

Push blogging into all their customer touch points (voice, SMS/iMode, handhelds, desktop software, etc.)

Fold blogging community servers (the Technoratis and Popdexes) into email and search servers.

Offer tools for good citizenship (i.e. censorship, filtering) via community servers.

I'm not recommending this, mind you. I just have a hard time imagining a sustainable alternative scenario.

[a klog apart klogs]

Microcontent is not homogenous. Think atoms, molecules, and systems.

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 02:08:34 GMT

Posts are atoms, says Anil..

Metaphor hell...

Atoms come in various shapes and weights and have varied components. For a periodic table of elements: The Component Blog.

Microcontent in many forms.

Molecules are atoms combined. Their properties vary with their elements, organization, and how everything is glued together.

Think of this as a subset of a weblog. Maybe a channel, or posts with inferred mutual relevance.

Throw enough atoms or molecules together, and you get complex things. Organisms, crystals, buildings.

Newsreaders, journals, blogs, photoblogs, wikiblogs, email clients, calendars, collaborative blogs, vending machine blogs.

That's why the not-Echo project must provide a framework for:

A rapidly growing Periodic Table of Elements [not just the RSS .92 post structure],
Attributes and protocols that permit more kinds of interconnection among various forms of microcontent, and
A basis for creating new systems and structures from the many microntent flavors and structures.

This is the path to the Adaptive Blogosphere.

The Semantic Weblog.

Sat, 21 Jun 2003 05:52:30 GMT

A first draft of my contribution to Sam Ruby's Well Formed Weblog wiki.

1 Summary

Packages of structured data are becoming post components. [PhilWolff]

2 Description

The virtue of blogs has been their simplicity. Each post only needs one field, and maybe a title and url.

Not everyone is served well by this lowest common denominator. Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time.

When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form. The form will have its own metadata and its own data model.

Consider a school soccer coach. An after game report typically includes:

which teams played,
where and when,
officials, and
a list of game events
- who scored (and when and how),
- who received penalties (when and for what), etc.

Wouldn't it be handy for your blogging tool to:

understand this structure,
present an editing form,
render the form in html to your blog, and
render the post (including the form) to your rss feed?

News aggregators and news readers should be able to:

Autodiscover an unknown schema.
Notify the user that a new schema is available.
Learn the schema, including entry forms, pick list sources, rendering guidance, and default style sheets.
Make it available when the blogger is ready to write.

"The Semantic Weblog" will create a happy blend of natural, human unstructured words, pictures, sounds, and video with machine readable and highly comparable more-structured data.

3 Use Cases and Potential Applications

I don't want to put a cap on this. It's like saying "web pages will be used for..."

3.1 Recipes and Golf Scores

You should be able to define your own structure. The most common use of Microsoft Excel is making lists of things. No reason blogs can't give similar freedom to define a new package. Build from scratch or on the shoulders of other package definitions. Just for diversity sake:

What I'm listening to now. (with enough info that a newsreader could find and play that tune, when the package comes in via RSS.)
Concert review. (3 points for lighting, 2 for sound, 4 for audience involvement, ...)
Strange things in my referral log. (A real blog)
Beer reviews. (A real blog)
Dating reports. (6 stars on manners, 9 on heat, 2 on wardrobe, ...)

Companies that make personal planners (filofax, Day Timer, Day Runner) sell paper forms. These help you:

plan projects,
manage your to do lists,
control your diabetes,
remember birthdays,
record expenses, mileage,
plan parties,
take phone messages,
take meeting minutes,
prioritize goals.

This behavior should translate nicely to blogging, especially as blogging tools support faceted presentation (you see what you're intended to see).

3.2 Work related blogging

Organizations have been using forms since the Ottoman Empire. Forms help:

standardize routine communication,
shorten the time people take to report information,
make it easier for human readers to parse familiar formats,
improve completeness of information (blanks stand out),
and other wonderful things that make organizations work smoothly.

And that's when people fill out forms.

By having machines deliver transaction notes and reports to a blogger's news reader, you can provoke commentary about those transactions in the blog.

3.3 Interop with enterprise applications

So I define a "new customer bio" structure. My customer relationship management system writes RSS for me that includes new customer info. Not only can I cite that post in my blog, but:

my blog can notify the CRM via trackback
the CRM can take note of the permalink of my post (for CRM users), and
the CRM can append changes to data I made with my blogging tool ("He's not really the decision maker.").

Along the way...

information locked inside an enterprise system become visible to our intranet search engine via my blog.
more useful content finds its way into enterprise systems.
transactional data takes on context.

4 Architecture

4.1 Packages

Envelope
- Descriptive stuff about contents (names, how many packages, etc.)
- URL of structure definition
- Version/Release/Modification Date of structure definition
Package(s)
- URL of structure definition

4.2 Package Syndication

Blogging tools should be able to wrap each structure in RSS, RDF or whatever we're using for syndication.

4.3 Package Discovery

I'm thinking we could follow the example of:

Little orange XML links (on pages and with rendered packages)
the RSS Autodiscovery metatag form

4.4 Package Aggregation and Analysis

4.4.1 Aggregation

Why should anything be different?

4.4.2 Analysis

We now have comparable data! I subscribe to all the local soccer RSS feeds in my league. An aggregator can show trends, averages, rankings, etc.

4.5 Rendering

4.5.1 Edit Form

Didn't Mozilla put out a protocol for defining simple UIs?

4.5.2 HTML

Templates?

4.5.3 RSS

RSS namespaces?

5 Live Examples

5.1 Qlogger

Qlogger is a blog application and hosting service. Sub-schemas describe activities (golfing, commuting) and reviews (movies, marijuana). You can see how this creates more comparable data (show me all the movie reviews by warbloggers rated 4 out of 5 stars). Read trend charts so you can see if you golf game is getting better or getting worse, or if you commute times are better on some days.

5.2 JemBlog

The Jena Semantic Web Server.

Development Diary, Notes, Download, Mailing List, SourceForge.

6 Discussion

* [PhilWolff] This extension may be out of scope per Sam's blog post

I'll take feedback in the comments to this post or, even better, on the wiki page.

The Don't Blog Weblog.

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 00:53:15 GMT

Every project needs a weblog. Even the ...

Don't Blog weblog.

Blogging the growing backlash.

What happens when blogging becomes mainstream? What bad things will we face? Other technologies experienced a public backlash after a hype cycle. This blog attempts to chronicle that coming backlash.

New expanded slide show.

In Browser
In PowerPoint
Windows Fonts for the PowerPoint show
The blog's XML RSS feed

Recent headlines from the future:

Microsoft gains 87% share of Enterprise Blogging Market.
Wife Wins Joint Weblog In Divorce Court.
Spammers Tailor Mail Using Blog Data.
Trackbacker Worm Shuts Down Blog Community For 3rd Day.
Google deletes 23,000 weblogs under PRC pressure; Terra closes division deletes 150,000 blogs.

Be sure to post your suggestions, related links, or discuss the risks.

Speed Up Your Site.

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 16:45:46 GMT

from meryl's notes:

I had forgotten to post a review of Speed Up Your Site because I ended up in the hospital about the same time it was published. It's a must-have for every designer and webmaster's library. There isn't anything out there like it and it's important because our attention spans are short thanks to information overload.

I agree enthusiastically. Imagine if all the blog hosting services doubled the speed at which blog pages load. What might this do to readership? To adoption and abandonment rates? To cost of operation? Support costs? Satisfaction? Word of mouth?

Speed is a reason many corporate career sites suck. The company may be zippy but the jobs@ site makes you look like slothful, sluggish, lazy beasts. Hey, it's your reputation. Buy a dozen of King's book and leave them as brazen hints on your CIO's desk. More people find jobs and complete applications accurately when pages load fast.

Speed rocks.

Just a reminder: Don't Blog.

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 18:45:13 GMT

In your browser in html (searchable).

Or as a PowerPoint file. Windows fonts.

4.9 - South Of Fiji Islands

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 08:36:14 GMT

Get U.S.G.S. earthquake alerts piped to your desktop from around the world via "RSS".

4.9 - South Of Fiji Islands TIMESTAMP (UTC) LAT LONG DEPTH MAG COMMENT 2003-03-06 18:47:03 -24.72 179.8 500.4 4.9 SOUTH OF FIJI ISLANDS

Good use of technology.

Next steps...

News readers to filter incoming items. While you could do full text, like most email clients, it's more useful to compare against structured data. This assumes the RSS feed is an envelope for a more structured description. In this case, an earthquake with lattitude and longitude marked up.

Selectively alert me. For example, earthquakes near a city or state where my family lives. And if you can do it for quakes, why not for your supply chain? You daily calendar? For whatever?

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 06:51:35 GMT

Google dating.

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 00:02:00 GMT

Biz Stone, Genius, is tapping into the collective subconcious...

Last night I had a dream that Google launched a Personals service and this was the logo. Then I realized I could fly and started a whole new thing. But I remembered the Google part. Weird.

Seth Godin, has been thinking about online dating too.

In the last twenty-four hours, I've read about the big services launching huge ad campaigns, I've seen stickers on store windows and heard about people using services like Match.com. Must be a trend. [...]

What's this all about? And why should we care?

Well, if we add to this phenomenon the huge growth of monster.com (and the death of the newspaper classifieds) its seems as if personal marketing is now officially important.

You market yourself to get a job (not wait to find a classified for a job you're qualified for and actually want.) You market yourself to find a mate (not wait until someone finds you in a singles bar or adores your cute little dog in the park). What used to be the exclusive province of Coca Cola or Amway is now at the heart of just about everyone's life.

Marketing, after all, is about putting a product out there and finding an audience for it.

So...

When you market yourself, are you boring? Invisible? Easy to pass up?

Just as companies have no choice but to depend on the Purple Cow, on remarkable products and on word of mouth, I think the lesson of all this personal advertising is NOT that you can advertise yourself to a happy home and job, but that it's ultimately word of mouth that's going to make it work. It's word of mouth that points people to your singles page or word of mouth that forwards your resume to the right guy. The difference now is that this digital word of mouth (call it an ideavirus if you want) is aided by a personal web site with your religion and desires on it, or a hotjobs website with your Linux skills outlined. [more...]

So let me bring this back to a few of my themes:

Weblogs are handy for branding. For work. And for life. Casting your self upon the marketplace of ideas.
A blog's links show, build, and exercise social networks. Google likes this.
Matching engines scoring compatibility of every combination in an n-n space. Zippy, where Oracle grinds to a halt. ELISE, iXmatch, NCorp, Triplehop, Burning Glass. But they need at least partially structured data.
RSS 2.0 supports adding structure.
- Personal profiles: I want [love, romance, security, walks in the park], I offer [conversation, laughs, cuddling].
- Professional profiles: I want [work near me, comp plan X, benefits Y], I offer [ability A, experience B, skills C, reputation D]. Traditionally packaged as "resumes", CVs, and career profiles.

So if you want love and money, build tools that add structure to blogs, RSS, and RSS readers.

mini-d: Rumor: el asesino del MS Word, hecho por Apple

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 10:07:35 GMT

mini-d reports that Apple may have a Microsoft Word-killer coming.

Parece ser que Apple tiene en la butaca un nuevo software según MacWhispers, un procesador de textos profesional que supuestamente sería el "asesino del MS Word", esto es un rumor que está bien caliente, y rondando por los sitios de rumores de Apple.

El tema es que todavia éste no llega a ser "Beta Release" (versión beta). La pregunta que yo me hago en este momento es... ¿Será otro lanzamiento basado en un software open-source? Mmm....

But will it blog?

We need a census of blogspace.

Sun, 10 Nov 2002 21:58:38 GMT

A friend of mine asked: how many webloggers are there? This is like "How big is the Internet?"

I searched through Nua and a dozen other internet sites and haven't seen any research on the size of the blogosphere.

I ask you:

Do you have an educated guess?
Do you know of any prior work in this area?
Can you think of a methodology or two to create useful measures of the number of bloggers and the number of weblogs?
What related questions would you want answered?
How might you use this information?
Pitfalls to avoid?
Would you join a BlogCensus.org to provide and share stats?

My wild stabs:

Do you have an educated guess?

Not yet.

Do you know of any prior work in this area?

No. I've looked.

Can you think of a methodology or two to create useful measures of the number of bloggers and the number of weblogs?

Some vendors host weblogs and have relevant stats. We could add those up.
We could look at download and registrations from the top 5 vendors, and add fudge factors to cover other tools and disadoption rates

What related questions would you want answered?

LiveJournal.com, has a statistics page: (numbers as of 10 November 2002)

Total users: 770910

Users that have ever updated: 635168
Users updating in last 30 days: 280213
Users updating in last 7 days: 200543
Users updating in past 24 hours: 72587

Gender:

Male: 201452 (36.3%)
Female: 354085 (63.7%)
Unspecified: 131153

Account Type

Free Account: 718109 (93.2%)
Early Adopter: 14282 (1.9%)
Paid Account: 36718 (4.8%)
Permanent Account: 1218 (0.2%)

Country of origin (Mostly English-speaking)
US state of origin (California, New York, Florida, Michigan lead)
Age distribution (mode=17)
Client usage (90% web)
Activity: posts by day overall (147k posts last Wednesday) Per-person would be interesting too.
New accounts per day (eyeballing a chart it looks like 900-1400 new LJ users per day, averaging about 1100)

I'd love to know:

How many entries have ever been blogged? (the cumulative number of posts).
How many links in posts? (excluding blogrolls and navigation)
What blogging tool or service they're using?
Blog lifecycles:

How long to bloggers of various stripes blog?
How many change hosts? Change tools?
Why do people abandon blogging?
Is there a critical mass, a minimum number of posts per day/week/month that separates those that blog from those that fail?
Of people who take a break, how many start again?

Number originating within a company or operating behind a firewall
Connection speed (does broadband make it easier to blog?)
Payload distribution. How many people include pictures, sounds, flash games, or movies? How many bytes are home pages?
Syndication. What percentage syndicate their sites?
Duplication/Overlap:

How many blogs per person?
Do you post to them equally? How many are updated daily/weekly/monthly?
How many tools do you use?

What ancillary tools do you use?

Graphics and other media
News readers
HTML editors
email clients
blog-specific search (daypop, google)
blogosphere navigation (blogdex, blogtree)

How might you use this information?

As a blogger.

Always good to know where I stand in relation to the pack.
Trends might tip me to new capabilities

As a consultant or IT leader.

Make better choices about deploying blogging and community tools
Use the "bandwagon" sell when appropriate

As a blog tool maker.

Understand the markets I serve vs. the ones I don't

Pitfalls to avoid?

Hype
Irreproducible results
Bias - vendor, country

Would you join an BlogCensus.org to provide and share stats?

As a user, with anonymity.
As a vendor, sure.

What say you?

Exploding Dog blogs new drawings every day.

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 17:18:46 GMT

hi my name is sam,
i draw pictures, from your titles. send me a title, or any thing else you want to talk to me about to: sambrown@explodingdog.com

Some drawings are silly, others profound. All delightful.

Sam is building conversations in a unique way.

No reason you can't apply this to other media, other work.

CAD drawings. Caricatures.

Singing a song. Narrating a voice over.

Copy editing. Headline writing.

Writing lyrics to a song title. Shooting a video to a song.

Problem assessment. Library reference. Tech support (we've seen stuff like that).

Sam's conversation is short: title and response. Some of his conversations seem to be recursive: new titles that result from earlier drawings.

That's fun. Simple. Like his drawings.

But there's room for more.

Can you see a blog that puts 60 seconds of music to each Exploding Dog drawing?

Another that builds a poem on top of that?

Someone else that finds three news stories that complement the rest?

Another that migrates these to Flash animation?

Make it easy to migrate all sorts of work product into blogs.

To be aware and sensitive to ripples of presence in my social fabric.

[a klog apart klogs]