Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: PKM

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Writing the living web

I just read a very nicely crafted article describing 10 tips for writing the Living Web.  Essentially its about writing blogs.  As I progressed I wondered increasingly who could have put together such an article and what motivated them to put in the effort.  When I got to then end I found it was Mark Bernstein who is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, publishers of Tinderbox, a personal content management assistant.  I went straight there to have a look, (so its good advertising Mark!), but unfortunarely its for the Mac only, but they are working on a Windows version.

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More integration between WinFS and XML

Jon Udell of Infoworld says in his blog:

Meanwhile I’ve been working on a story about Longhorn, for which I had long and an extremely interesting interview with Quentin Clark, the architect of director of program management for WinFS. I’d like to transcribe the whole thing to post along with the story, when it runs, but the upshot is that Microsoft is planning more and better integration between WinFS and XML — both in terms of data definition and query — than I’d previously heard, which is welcome news

I’m pleased too because it means we are one step closer to the vision of WinFS that I have been talking about in my blog.  Complementary and not competetive to the web.

He then goes on to talk about the different types of search experience:

It seems clear, though, that whatever can be accomplished by means of what I’ve come to call “managed metadata,” we’ll always want that Google effect to be happening in parallel. When asked about the Semantic Web and RDF at InfoWorld’s 2002 CTO Forum, Sergey Brin said:

Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I’d rather make progress by having computers understand …

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Calendar Feeds

In this blog, I started to talk about the evolution of subscription beyond news.  Here is a great example of how this might work.  This site describes the RDF Calendar format.  It provides a few examples, (I have added a few as well), of why you migt want to subscribe to a calendar, and includes ToDo list examples:

  1. Subscribe to you travel itinery and have the events automatically added to your calendar, flight times etc, and automatically updated

  2. Subscribe to a list of bugs which flow into your todo list

  3. Subscribe to an event schedule, for example football matches

  4. Subscribe to a favorite TV show

More information is available here

Some of the scenarios are listed below:

One more example of the Personal Information Disaster that is the web today!

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Personal Information Disaster!

I wrote this post then lost it!  So this is just a place holder to remind me to get around to writing it again.

links I need are

http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/index.html

http://esw.w3.org/topic/PersonalInformationDisaster

http://www.kde.org/

http://oopm.openoffice.org/

 

http://news.com.com/2009-1016-5103226.html?tag=nl

 

http://www.adambosworth.net/archives/000021.html

 

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/office2004/office2004.aspx?pid=highlights

 

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/06/17.html#a1025

 

http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween11.html

and my own blog entries

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Which Office Suite?

Which Office Suite? Is shaping up to be a fascinating decision making process.  I am not ready to expose all of my thinking on this topic but it goes something like this:

 

  1. Some people think its easy, MS Office alternatives are cheaper and most people don’t use the bells and whistles in Office so people will migrate provided the alternatives meet peoples core needs.

  2. I think its more complex than this and as a minimum the costs of migration, lost productivity, and compatibility and rework need to be factored in

  3. Intertia is a big one in Microsofts favour, for a business that has SW Assurance or an EA, the decision is deferred probably for at least 2-3 years after their EA expires and probably longer if they do a lot of data interchange.  That probably means 4-5 years from now!

  4. But this is the trivial stuff.  Sure direct and indirect cost comparison is important but I want to consider:

    1. How do people really use Office and is it really true that people only use a small amount of the functionality, and if they do, do they all use a different small amount?

    2. I also want to consider …

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Another short article that describes whats important about RSS

This site has just appeared http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com it includes the following bullet list of things that make up RSS.

RSS is…

1. A format.

2. Content management tools that generate feeds in the format.

3. Aggregators and readers that subscribe to the feeds.

4. Search engines and utilities that crunch the information and ideas.

5. Services from technology companies like Microsoft and Apple.

6. Authoritative publications like the BBC, The New York Times, CNET, InfoWorld, PC World, Time, Wired, Salon, Yahoo, Reuters — that distribute news and opinion in RSS.

7. Many thousands of weblogs covering virtually every aspect of life on this planet.

8. A vast and growing community of thinkers, writers, educators, public servants, and technologists.

The revolution of RSS is what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available.

RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It’s big. A lot bigger than a format.

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My personal information processing pipeline!

In this blog I talked about a generic concept of operations associated with a conceptual information lifecycle. 

however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and  subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved

In this article talk about my personal application of tools and techniques to that lifecycle.

  1. Publishing, I used to use radio for all of my web publishing, either directly through the Radio Userland Web UI, or through MailEdit which provides an email interface which I can use through my BlackBerry.  MailEdit uses a number of directives to define for example the title for the entry and the categories that it belongs to.  I use autotext on the BlackBerry to make entering these easier.  I now use Blogmedia that uses the BlogWare SW.  I tend to write the entries in Word though because the screen area is bigger and because of the spell checking, and then just paste and post.  You can read my blog here

  2. Location, like most people I locate RSS feeds …

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Information Bridge Framework

My first thought when I cam across IBF, (who could miss it!), was that it was another Microsoft thick client solution.  I am still not sure but it looks like it might be a bit more creative than that for the following reasons:

  1. I have always been a big advocate of standardizing the infrastructure capability layer and integrating it with the line of business layer.  That way an enterprise has its infrastructure in common, regardless of which process or division of the company you work in.  IBF looks like it addresses that need pretty well

  2. I have also felt that the ad-hoc processes and information and collaborative processes are under emphasized in businesses that have a lot of formal mega processes that they like to optimize.  I talked about this in another blog entry.  IBF allows you to integrate ad-hoc and formal business processes.

  3. It seems that a lot of thought has gone into making the maintenance of the IBF client environment as ‘thin’ as possible.  It still requires a client component to get started though.  I need to look into this more to be sure but it looks hopeful.

  4. Its all about consuming web services, caching them …

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Longhorn Search

Chris Sherman at SearchEngineWatch talks a bit about Longhorn search and links to a Channel 9 video clip where you get some glimpses of how search is going to be implemented in Longhorn.  What’s clear right now is that they are:   1.     Planning for a search experience that operates...

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RSS and its role in Information Management

The Problem

 

Internet users have largely given up trying to keep up to date with the vast amount of content being published on their ‘favourite’ web sites, let alone the slow moving sites that they need to track but are not motivated to visit ‘just in case’.  Portal vendors have tried to help by allowing users to aggregate bits of many web sites together, to minimise the number of web sites a person needs to access, particularly in a process context.

 

Proprietary approaches to Syndication, or the publish and subscribe model to information access has been tried several times on the internet, taking the form of for example Internet Explorer channels, and PointCast personalised news feeds.  Avantgo continues to find a niche publishing channels to PDA’s.

 

Email has become flooded with newsletters, status updates, just in case cc emails, and application specific notifications.

 

RSS to the rescue

 

Recently however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and  subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved…