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  • 1 min read

Learning about Open Source

MoldavePeter Moldave, a friend of mine who has helped me immensely with BlogBridge has (gulp) started blogging! Yup, another one bites the dust 🙂 Peter is a lawyer (at Gesmer Updegrove LLP), expert in intellectual property, patents, licensing, open source, and other legal matters of great interest to us computer folk. He also has a comprehensive site on all matters relating to open source, Check out his site and blog, it's very informative! Technorati Tags: blogbridge, opensource

  • 1 min read

Swallowing an umbrella

"The sword passes within millimetres of the heart, aorta, and other vitals but, surprisingly, few deaths related to sword swallowing have been described. A Canadian sword swallower did die, but that was after swallowing an umbrella." (from BMJ.com, the General Medical Journal, online, via MetaFilter.)

You do learn the darndest things on the web, don't you? Technorati Tags: funny

  • 1 min read

Wiki as in Wikipedia

I assume you know about Wikis and the Wikipedia. If not, click on the links to the left and you'll both find out and experience it, in one fell swoop. On BlogBridge we use a Wiki as a very lightweight project collaboration tool. Minimalist eRoom if you like. That's the kind that most often occurs to me. But if you think about Wikipedia articles work, they are actually meant to properly describe or define something that exists and has a name. In other words, they specifically are meant to be objective and timely. I've worked at more than one company where we, the CEO, or whoever was trying to write down , invent, or discover, for example, a company value statement , or a company strategy statement. It's a painful process on a lot of levels and when you are all done, it's not even clear that you've accomplished anything. What if you pretended that you were writing an entry in Wikipedia, for example of the company value statement. As a Wiki page, anyone in the organization could read, write, correct, update, clarify and append to the statement. It would be an interesting experiment if you could get it to work. If you did, you might have a better chance of getting some kind of common understanding and alignment, let alone buy in and agreement, than with other more top-down approaches. [inspired by a talk at the BlogOn conference, unfortunately, I can't remember which one.] Technorati Tags: blogon2005

  • 1 min read

For advanced nerds only: How the deathstar works

From How Stuff Works :

"There is no question that the last few years of world history have seen a fair share of chaos and disorder. With so much global unrest, governments worldwide are struggling to devise new methods to maintain order. The Galactic Empire's solution to order is the Death Star."

Read the whole thing! How Stuff Works has come a long way, with sections on Science, Health, Entertainment etc. Check it out!

Technorati Tags: cool

  • 1 min read

Google API -> Open Standard

I really like this idea that Dave Winer has put forward: "Let's make the Google API an open standard", where he says, among other things:

"We've asked for a plug-in architecture for search engines, and if we can't have that, a solid easy-to-program API is a pretty good alternative."

Read the whole thing - there are some really good insights there. Think of it, you could build a "search powered" application. Ok you can do that now, but you are limited to powering your API with Google and no-one else. What if you could let the user select which search engine to use? Google? Yahoo? Or some upstart whipper-snapper? If you are familiar with the various utilities that exist to make it easy to post to your blog (BlogJet, Ecto, and so on - there are several but those two are my favorites,) this is analogous. A general utility, allowing the user to choose from several back ends with different strengths and weaknesses. Isn't that cool? I get a nice graphical UI to post to my blog, whatever blog service I use. Powerful. And not coincidentally, also enabled by an API (the Meta weblog API) that Dave put forward some years ago. Nice! Technorati Tags: API, blog, google

  • 2 min read

[GEEK] OPML Validator

I just came across Dave Winer's new, beta, OPML Validator, which is a welcome development. While there is an OPML spec, having a validator too is a great, pragmatic , concrete way to give a big thumbs up or down to a particular piece of XML From the very start BlogBridge has supported OPML for import and export, as well as for various internal representations and communications. We obviously have done our best to write valid OPML, as best as we understood what that was. Still, what trumps every theoretical position on OPML validity are user cries of: "Hey, I can't import your OPML into XXX", or "Hey, you fail to import my OPML, but YYY has no problem with it." Our approach to this situation has been to follow what has been called "Postel's Law" (which I also learned from Dave Winer, ages ago): "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." And this has worked well so far, although there have been some sticky wickets that we've had to deal with. You end up feeling like you are chasing your tail trying to accommodate all the odd dialects. So, it's great that Dave has now put forward the OPML validator. Running our stuff through it, we do quite well. Click here to see the results of running the validator against a pretty big example of our opml. There are just two errors, each repeated multiple times:

  1. _" An element with more than just a "text" attribute should have a "type" attribute indicating how the other attributes are to be interpreted." _

  2. _" An element should only have known attributes." _

__ In each case we have specified additional attributes beyond the basic ones. Specifically they are: rating, queryParam, queryType, tags, tagsDescription, tagsExtended and icon. Some of those probably deserve to become part of the core set, while others somehow will have to become part of an extensibility model. We'll participate in the discussions as they develop. More to come! Technorati Tags: blogbridge, OPML

  • 1 min read

One more little meme

Here's another cute one I came across, at BlogOn 2005: " Trojan Mouse Strategy" - when you try to develop grass roots adoption of your software, bypassing IT. Technorati Tags: meme

  • 1 min read

Ease of use?

I recently had to buy a new cell phone, and learning how to use it reminded me again about how complicated these things are. How many out there have not bothered to learn something as simple even as programming in some commonly called numbers? I know I probably use only 30% of the features. A buddy of mine had the idea that what the cell phone makers should do is to design a cell phone specifically for the elderly.What would it look like? Probably exactly like the phone they use at home. Big buttons and hardly any functions. While we are modifying cell phones, who is going to be the first build a pedometer into a cell phone. Perfect for aging baby boomers suddenly worrying about their health! Technorati Tags: cellphone, babyboomers

  • 2 min read

Thinking about business models

Inquisitor is a really cool program that augments the search box in Safari (which for you heathens out there is the default Mac OS X web browser.) It's kind of hard to explain just what it does - it's kind of a magical word completion thingie that guesses, based on other searches and who knows what else , what you are going to search for. But I am not writing about Inquisitor, although I recommend it highly. Here's a post by it's author, Dave, who is trying to figure out how or whether he can make some money with his creation.

"Why am I considering pay-per-download? Well, one advantage is that it's far easier to do than a full-blown registration system. While the levy is very small, if everyone gives a little then everyone benefits. It seems more equitable that way. Alas, it is true that there's no solid way to enforce the levy. The software could be traded easily between friends or posted on an unauthorized website. The former I view as a form of viral marketing and the latter is traceable and can be dealt with as a clear-cut breach of license." (from David Watanabe's blog)

The question of when and how and how much to begin charging users of BlogBridge occupies me from time to time. Our core objective right now is to get BlogBridge into everybody's hands - everybody in our target market that is - so called "Infojunkies" or "Professionals." But this won't be forever. The beauty of a project such as this is that we can be clever, innovative or at least experimental so all new and different ideas are worth thinking about. Technorati Tags: blogbridge, businessmodel