I’ve become very interested in the “Universal Canvas”, a term popularized by Microsoft and subsequently analyzed by Jon Udell. First of all, here are two definitions of the Universal Canvas: a) From a Microsoft White Paper dated June 2000, entitled Microsoft .NET: Realizing the Next Generation Internet: “The universal canvas builds upon XML…
Asterisk: “…the one thing every Web professional needs, regardless of their main job function, be that IA, Design, Development, what-have-you is adaptability. You know, the ability to wing it.” In New Zealand we have a similar concept called No. 8 Wire mentality, or “kiwi ingenuity” – based on the architypal New Zealand farmer…
RWW Word of the Day: triangulation Dave Winer (via Denise Howell’s weblog): “…Question about journalism always having to be the sophisticated big stuff? Dave says know (sic), importance of triangulation, getting news on an event from many sources.”
Ever listen to The Velvet Underground’s 9 minute live version of ‘What goes on’, from their 1969 Live album Volume 1? The first couple of minutes feature Lou Reed singing verse and chorus. The rest of the song is an extended instrumental and this is where it gets interesting. Each of the 4 instruments has a unique voice, but by…
I read with interest Jon Udell’s OSCOM keynote slides. The main subject is how to write the web “in a rich way” – and by “rich” he means semantic. Udell talks about there being a lack of easy-to-use XML writing tools for the Web. Weblog tools are user-friendly and they are the killer app for web writing, but they lack the ability to create…
I’ve installed the W3C web browser/editor, Amaya, onto my PC. I’ve only just begun to test it. But with all this talk about Microsoft abandoning its IE browser, it may pay to actively look at alternative browsers. This article at freshmeat.net has a good write-up on lightweight browsers, including Amaya.
My first post to k-collector!
A hot topic in the blogging world recently has been: is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser dead? Ironically, most of the good stuff to read has been via “Comments” forms – ie readers writing back to a weblog post. Robert Scoble from Microsoft said “The right question is: ‘is the Web dead in Longhorn?’ ” and he got over 30…
After a few late nights, I’ve successfully implemented Easy News Topics (ENT) tags to my Radio Userland RSS feed. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. It involved rooting around in the Radio.root file of my weblog and upskilling myself in UserTalk, Radio Userland’s scripting language. But mostly I stood on the shoulders of giants to get this…
D. Keith Robinson has written an interesting article about the future of Intranets. He writes: “…a company’s Intranet would be better served as more of an enterprise-wide, network-enabled application than anything resembling a Web site or Web application.” It seems likely that content management systems will over time integrate with office…
I posted a question onto the Radio Userland discussion list. I asked why updates to my OPML blogroll don’t automatically update my weblog menu. Nobody had an answer. A Google search came up empty too. But from my own checks it does seem that when you update your blogroll.opml file in your Gems folder, the ompl file itself…
I’ve been re-reading Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. As inventer of the World Wide Web in 1990 and current director of the W3C, Berners-Lee is a visionary and innovator. His current obsession, the Semantic Web, is not yet widely understood or appreciated. Just like the Web 10 years ago. Indeed one of Berners-Lee’s…
There appears to be a problem upstreaming changes to my opml blogroll. The XML file updates, but the blogroll on my menu doesn’t. I got around this by manually deleting the blogroll from my homepage template, publishing, then adding the blogroll back in – i.e. in a roundabout way I re-published the blogroll in my menu.
Wouldn’t you know it, I came across a Userland macro today that lists recent titled blog posts. Where was this macro when I needed it yesterday? 🙂 Anyway, I’m playing around with this macro now. Still getting used to Radio Userland’s dev environment… …Got this working OK and I now have my 10 most recent entries displayed in my menu…
Tonight I added an OPML blogroll to my menu – easy thanks to Jake Savin’s instructions. Then I set about trying to implement a “Last 10 Entries” script into my weblog menu. Because I tend to write long-ish articles, I’d like to have a dynamic menu that lists my 10 most recent articles. I looked around the web for a feature like this, but found that…
In his article “Google Aggregation Strategy”, Elwyn Jenkins from Microdot News reviews three Google “information aggregations” and asks which one will be moved from beta to live first – Blogger, Froogle or Google News. Microdot News argues that aggregation is at the heart of Google’s business and…
Dave Winer: “Much weblog writing is functional, not artistic. Jon Udell…writes about SpiderPhone because he wants to tell you about a piece of technology that interests him. The writing helps him sort it out, even if no one were to read it.” One of my goals in my weblog is to write original articles, rather than simply link to lots of other…
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you listen to. Either way RSS has become the poster child for the Publish-Subscribe protocol. RSS allows weblog and website owners to syndicate their content to anyone who wishes to subscribe to it. Usually people subscribe to “RSS feeds” via an aggregator. Some…
I discovered today a site called WriteTheWeb, which is “a community news site dedicated to encouraging the development of the read/write web”. Like me they believe the Read/Write Web “doesn’t just mean writing words, it means any time the web experience becomes two-way.” This is an important point, because a lot of people have no desire…
The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it. The web was never just supposed to be a one-way publishing system, but the first decade of the web has been dominated by a tool which has been read-only – the web browser. The goal now is to convert the…
