Christian Crumlish (xian): knowhow

Wishlist: autoblogged history breadcrumbs

Sun, 26 Jan 2003 03:17:11 GMT

How hard would it be to automatically post every URL I hit in one browser to a specific category? I could go back and expand on anything that deserved comment and promote it to the mainpage, but I'd also have a running log of positively everywhere I'd been. One for the lazyweb? Something with scripting and the MetaWeblog API?

Textism preparing to release Textpattern

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 19:54:49 GMT

Dean Allen announces that he is almost ready to release Textpattern, his long-promised web writing tool (or, if you prefer, CMS). While I'm afraid it will not enable me to write as well as he does (his predictions for 2003 are microstorytelling at its finest), Textpattern offers a feature set that has me drooling, and I'm the last person on the planet who should be installing yet another blog tool / CMS these days. While clearly blog oriented, Textpattern offers link-categorization features that seem designed to enable the web reader/writer to get a grip on her personal knowledge management. It also includes some enhancements to the standard blogging experience, such as the very smart Textile HTML converter that takes much of the pain out of HTML tagging while delivering optimal typographical elegance, a master page for viewing and responding to comments, built-in referer tracking, and many of the other subtle features exhibited at Textism. I suspect that the choices of stylesheet bundled with the tool will help even the design-challenged, like myself, generate blocks of type pleasing to the eye. I've been meaning to try out the Refer tool that Textism had previously made available to the public but like so many things still have not got around to that. Now I'm going to see if I can get in on the final testing of Textpattern.

Have your tickets out and ready

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 18:17:48 GMT

I'm so out of it. After returning from a week and a half in New York I'm still reading The Gawker but without that same sense of immediacy (not that it matters where you are when you read about New York, and not that that prevents me from reading the Times, the Nation, the New Yorker, and so on).

So it figures I'd stumble on Matt Haughey's latest project, Ticketstubs, a collaborative site designed to collect stories centered around or illustrated with scanned ticketstubs only from catching up at the Gawker.

It immediately succeeds in one of those key measurements of web site liveliness: can you get your readers to contribute the content?

Maybe if I finish my homeland-security blog entry ever I can upload the movie tickets from the Orpheum where my wallet disappeared and then submit the story there.

Matt gibes himself for taking two-and-a-half years to execute on an idea, and credits his friends for their roles helping him refine the idea in what must have been conversations many of us would have enjoyed being flies on the wall for (...which ....that ...whomever ...tweedle ...ee).

I don't think that's a long time at all! Ideas are sweat-free. Doing the thing, that's what really counts. Ability to execute is so much more important than a fecund imagination (sadly for me). I'm encouraged by the groove lazyweb is hoping to lay down to channel some of this wishfulfillment.

One lesson I take from ticketstub is to focus on something specific. I am usually all over the map, when people need a fulcrum, a singularity, to draw them in. The hook of writing about saved ticketstubs, an ideal aid-memoire (I'm afraid we didn't all chomp madeleines in the crib), gives people a reason to participate and a way to do so.

I'm thinking now about how to apply this lesson to some of my own collaborative-media phantasms.

Corollary thought: It's all about the database. People have to be empowered to manage their data.

That may mean we all have to learn more about tables and keys and uid and fourth normal form... or it may mean that we need a solid breakthrough in database building and management software interface design, on tailored much more effectively to how people really need to manage their own personal data in real life.

When do people need to capture information? Are there some familiar patterns that can be offered as templates? How do you capture the information? Do you build a hierarchy or a neural net? Is it easy to reorganize, sort, filter, slice, and dice your data store? Can the backend incorporate accepted practices in an automated-behind the scenes way? Can you search on parameters, keywords, full-text indices, pagerank? When and how will people get at their information? Can the system provide privacy, security, concentric (or not) communities of readers with varying access privileges?

I installed LiveTopics last month but I'm not displaying any of the information in my entry template yet, because I want to give the system time to learn how to suggest topics for me well. (There's another great Monday morning sentence for you.) Marrying an information architecture / shelving and sorting funtion to a blog-journaling interface might provide two pillars of the system I'm envisioning right now, "entry" and "organizing" (yes, I know they are different parts of speech, entry is an event and organizing is an ongoing process). This still leaves the "tell me" part, along with all the other devilish details, from security to device-neutrality to wirelessnosity and so on.

While the idea of a personal network or personal data cloud accessible from anywhere would continue to evolve, the marketplace would still want to see a valuable but affordable product providing enough key elements of this vision to justify its use without getting bogged down in a utopian vaporspace forever. The trick, I suspect, is figuring out what the threshold combination of features that would enable a flooding into personal data self-management the way SLIP and PPP made graphical web browsing suddenly feasible over 28.8 modems and MP3 was just good enough to break the dam on digital music exchange.

Taxonomy primer at Lexonomy

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:54:53 GMT

Lexonomy has published A Taxonomy Primer. Taxonomies are the organizational schemes used to sort the data presented through the information architecture.

(via xBlog)

Collaborative Internet marketing blog

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 22:55:22 GMT

Elizabeth Spiers writes

For Marketing Junkies: Rick, Robert, Olivier, John, and Steve just started a collaborative Internet marketing blog.

I'm not sure what that is, but I'm keen to find out.

Hidden query tip for custom Google search

Sun, 03 Nov 2002 21:25:22 GMT

Rod Kratochwill read my posts about setting up a Google search for your blog when you don't command the entire domain name yourself. I had mentioned that my solution does put the site:blogs.salon.com and inurl:0001111 queries in the text box on the results page, which could confuse the user or even end up getting deleted, changing the scope of subsequent seaches. Rod tells me

Here is the trick for keeping the inurl and site items out of the search input box. Use the "hq" item. I'm guessing it is the hidden query value.

His example code is like so:

<input type=hidden name="hq" value="site:radio.weblogs.com"> <input type=hidden name="hq" value="inurl:0100146">

I will add a note about this to my Fine-Tuning Custom Google Search story when I get a chance. Having moved to my own domain recently, I'll need to augment my current search box soon. Right now it searches the http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/ site, frozen as of October 24, and will find nothing sooner. (I maintained all the old pages so as to make any unupdted old links continue to work.) I'm not even sure Google has indexed http://radiofreeblogistan.com/ yet, but soon I should add an option for searching the new domain. When the index gets deep enough, I'll deprecate and probably eventually remove (or keep on a subpage) the old blogs.salon.com search.

Finally getting around to learning Radio's outliner

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 21:18:47 GMT

I've never been that happy with my blogrolling.com blogrolls. The service is easy enough. Too easy, in a sense, in that it's undermined my motivation to learn more about the best ways to present links and directory information in this weblog context. Also, it relies on Javascript, which makes the links invisible to some crawlers (such as that used by Blogstreet.com last time I checked). So I finally started reading up on Radio's outliner feature, and found Jake Savin's How to create a blogroll with Radio's outliner tutorial to be succinct and easy to follow. If all goes well, my "test.opml" blogroll file should show up near the bottom of my sidebar masthead column. I've also finally downloaded and installed activeRenderer. That was also ridiculously easy. So I'll see about rendering my links that way (as a collapsible outline). My next steps include will be to convert my blogrolling.com blogrolls to OPML, playing around with activeRenderer, importing some of my ancient bookmarks, and making my blogroll.opml file findable to crawlers with the proper LINK syntax in the HEAD of my template. I forget what it is, but I know I bookmarked it somewhere.

Microsoft's killer weblog app?

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 16:19:28 GMT

Thanks to a tip from Rebecca Blood, I read the article by Anil Dash in his cool new magazine. He writes about MS SharePoint Team Services and its "list" feature, which incorporates most or all of the functionality of weblogs for an intranet environment. I remember when the portal brand of SharePoint was supposed to be MS's entry into the enterprise portal market and I'm not sure what really came of that. I would appear that this use of STS, even if split off from the other collaborative, project-management features, would pose a threat mainly to Radio's penetration into the corporate market (if at all—I doubt it competes on price!). It definitely bears watching, since everyone's been looking over their shoulder in this market for a long time. Here's part of Anil's conclusion:

So how serious is the threat? To the overwhelming majority of personal weblog communities existing today, SharePoint is probably not going to have an impact in the short term. It's possible that Microsoft will realize the potential of their bCentral service hosting SharePoint sites, and that the MSN team will seize the opportunity to improve the friendliness of the interface and turn it into a commercial mass-market product. The likelihood of that, however, is completly negligible. On the business side, though, Microsoft has pieces in place that put it a full year ahead of any competitor in the areas of network identity integration, document management, and project management functions. This advantage is probably negated by the significantly higher platform costs of a solution that requires a Windows server, even if there are no per-client costs.

I document my failure

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 20:40:55 GMT

The fact that that metalinker stuff never worked and was causing error messages in IE6/Win browsers like a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe, and the fact that I still haven't been able to get a TrackBack ping-based metablog working, or RSS monkey installed, for that matter. I'm not perfect, and I think that makes me a better explainer of this stuff than someone who groks it all like a genius. I make the mistakes other people are going to make, but I notice them and solve them (or have the solution handed to me by readers) and document that as well. It helps me and it may help other people avoid these same mistakes or recover from them more quickly, that is once I solve them myself. Enjoy my discomfiture. It's my pleasure.

Post-move considerations

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 22:40:21 GMT

Whew! It appears that the move over last night was successful, except in the sense that many people will start missing new posts as they continue to look at or poll the old address. Suddenly I need to learn about the RSS feed redirection stuff Dave was posting about last week. Also, I need to rethink the Google search, which is tuned for blogs.salon.com/0001111/. Since it will take a while for Google to reindex at my new address, I think I need to continue to offer the old search but soon introduce an alternate search box that looks at radiofreeblogistan.com. At some point I'll have to make that latter search box the default and start offering the "old" search as the alternate. No telling how long this transition will take. I've got to keep a running list of things like this that need to be considered during and after a move of address.

First p0st at radiofreeblogistan.com

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 18:32:51 GMT

Well, the non-blog-related categories have now been redirected via FTP to various branded locations, so it's time to start posting new entries to radiofreeblogistan.com. I've just switched the streaming over to FTP, so this post should automatically stream to the new location (and not to the old one). Next, I have to figure out the syntax for the #upstream.xml file in the salonika category so I can redirect it back to blogs.salon.com/0001111/categories/blogsalon/ and then I'll have to start notifying people of the change of address and asking them to change their bookmarks, etc. More complicatedly, I am attempting a gradual rebranding transition here with which I intend to focus RFB on blogging and metablogging matters and use x-pollen.com as my home base personal blog. I won't mind people linking to RFB as "me" because I'll still interweave the navigation so people can find their way to whatever type of content they're interested in—I also intend to start putting little RSS boxes in my Radio page designs to show recent headlines from other feeds of mine as well as from sites by other people that deal with blogging—but I want to start building a distinction between me blogging about whatever I feel like and me (and other people) covering the blogging beat via RFB. We'll see if it works. Inertia is powerful and most people will continue to link to me as RFB and probably at the blogs.salon.com address. Meanwhile, I'll continue to report on the steps I'm taking to try to rationalize these various feeds and streams and develop some more collaborative media.

Last post at blogs.salon.com

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 07:12:21 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 21:59:17 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 17:58:03 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 18:28:21 GMT

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

'One million dollars!'

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 21:31:40 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 18:04:02 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 23:26:01 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 20:17:36 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 02:18:45 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 23:31:08 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 18:45:07 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 23:49:14 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 17:13:46 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 01:45:26 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.