picture(11)

Seeing if posting to the blog works…

Webfeeds for (not quite) everything

There’s an interesting post from David Sklar over at the O’Reilly Weblogs on how he wants to replace email with webfeeds - in particular situations where a company is communicating with him on a regular basis, for example in a billing scenario.

Inevitably there’s a counter-argument - ‘RSS is not the cure for everything‘, for example. And there are also situations where webfeeds simply don’t work.

Tribe.net is one of many YASNS, albeit one of the more popular ones, and in the last week or so it’s launched a redesign of it’s site together with a bunch of new features remixed with some old ones. One of the most popular areas on the site are the discussion forums for each ‘tribe’, so these have been extensively overhauled. Included in the new features are webfeed subscriptions to each forum, so you can now track the conversations in a newsreader.

In principle, it’s a great idea - bring the conversations to the client, rather than the other way around. In practice, it’s virtually useless. Each separate post becomes a separate webfeed item - so instead of a timelined threaded view which allows you to track the conversation from start to finish in the order that the interactions were made, the webfeed delivers the conversation as a series of disjointed messages as and when they’re uttered. It’s like standing in the middle of a room at a party, listening to a number of conversations, but only being able to hear one voice at a time. Instead of following the flow of the conversation back and forward between participants, you’re constantly hopping from conversation to conversation, trying to figure out what’s been said so far and whether you’ve missed the previous interaction that would put the current one into context.

Contrast that with the way in which blogging software such as Wordpress delivers comments as webfeeds - here the entire conversation becomes a single feed rather than interweaving numerous interactions into one. Alternatively the comments become part of the updated post itself, so there is always the context available to refer to. To pick up the thread of the conversation so far, just read from top to bottom and all becomes clear.

To go back to the billing scenario - as it’s not a backward-and-forward conversation, and each iteration or transaction has a consistent syntax, I could see it working quite well as a webfeed. But interactions that require context to be understood don’t lend themselves to a feed situation nearly as well - you can’t break a conversation down to it’s atomic level and still understand it without that context being provided somehow.

It’ll be interesting to see how Tribe takes their experiment forward, but personally I unsubscribed from the forum webfeeds pretty quickly.

Geek tours

Must. Find. Reason. To. Get. To. Santa. Clara. In. October…

Crisis at business support agency: no news there, then…

I can’t say that I’m even remotely surprised by this story from the BBC:

Crisis at business support agency: Scores of people in Gwynedd owed money by an enterprise agency set up to support local business are waiting to find out more about its future.

The story is referring to Antur Dwyryd Llŷn - and although I’m no Welsh linguist, I rather suspect that this is the Welsh for ‘Business Link‘. If you’ve got a room full of small business owners and entrepeneurs, then the quickest way I know of getting them to present a united front is to ask the room of the opinion of Business Link. Almost without exception, you’ll hear a chorus of tales about incompetence, poor advice, missed opportunities and wasted money.

When we first had the misfortune to deal with them, I initially wondered if we were dealing with a one-off - but sadly, the barely-literate 22-year-old fresh graduate who was assigned to ‘advise’ on our business plan wasn’t a one-off. Quite what value he was going to add to a firm with people who’d been working in the industry since before he was born was unclear - but then that was far from the only thing that was unclear. We gave up trying to decipher his letters.

That’s not to say that Business Links aren’t good at anything - they excel at self-publicity and ensuring a steady flow of public funding, usually European. Although it’s difficult not to be too cynical when you realise that there’s often revolving doors between the various organisations that dole out the money and those that receive it - after you’ve dealt with the various development agencies for a while, you quickly realise that there’s a pool of individuals who seem to spend their (semi) professional lives flitting from organisation to organisation.

Crisis at business support agency: no news there, then…

I can’t say that I’m even remotely surprised by this story from the BBC:

Crisis at business support agency: Scores of people in Gwynedd owed money by an enterprise agency set up to support local business are waiting to find out more about its future.

The story is referring to Antur Dwyryd Llŷn - and although I’m no Welsh linguist, I rather suspect that this is the Welsh for ‘Business Link‘. If you’ve got a room full of small business owners and entrepeneurs, then the quickest way I know of getting them to present a united front is to ask the room of the opinion of Business Link. Almost without exception, you’ll hear a chorus of tales about incompetence, poor advice, missed opportunities and wasted money.

When we first had the misfortune to deal with them, I initially wondered if we were dealing with a one-off - but sadly, the barely-literate 22-year-old fresh graduate who was assigned to ‘advise’ on our business plan wasn’t a one-off. Quite what value he was going to add to a firm with people who’d been working in the industry since before he was born was unclear - but then that was far from the only thing that was unclear. We gave up trying to decipher his letters.

That’s not to say that Business Links aren’t good at anything - they excel at self-publicity and ensuring a steady flow of public funding, usually European. Although it’s difficult not to be too cynical when you realise that there’s often revolving doors between the various organisations that dole out the money and those that receive it - after you’ve dealt with the various development agencies for a while, you quickly realise that there’s a pool of individuals who seem to spend their (semi) professional lives flitting from organisation to organisation.

Banning spamming bastards

I suppose it’s a sign that someone, somewhere thinks that your blog is worth something when the comment spam starts rolling in, but to be honest it’s attention I could do without. The frustrating part is that because I’m running Wordpress and I’ve set the comment moderation to ‘all’, the spam doesn’t actually get as far as the blog pages themselves. As soon as I get the email, I’m deleting the comments, so they never actually appear at all.

Not that it’s stopping someone spamming for various highly dodgy pharmaceuticals. This afternoon I got pissed off with it, so a quick trawl through the server logs led to one particular IP address - 220.93.120.39. So it’s now gone into a ‘deny all’ line in the .htaccess file, and one comment spammer is now battering their XMLRPC interface against an electronic brick wall.

So if you’ve got the option of banning specific IP addresses, can I suggest you try 220.93.120.93…

“Trusted” computing?

It’s intriguing how you can use terminology to make one idea seem like something else entirely. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft is in London at the moment, and one of the wares that he’s touting at the moment is “isolation”:

In corporates the number one way people get viruses is in fact with machines that are on their networks sometime and off the network other times. How do you check before you re-introduce someone to the network? It’s a form of isolation

The idea being that the network checks that any device trying to connect has all the latest operating system patches and is virus-free before the connection is allowed.

Although it’s being sold as part of Microsoft’s belated efforts to put the security genie back in the bottle, this is actually something that forms part of a larger project - Palladium, or Trusted Computing as the “cuddly” name would have it. In the Palladium world, devices would be secured from the hardware components upward, so forget about connecting anything that doesn’t have a Palladium-compliant motherboard for example.

All well and good in a “trusted computing” mindset, but of course what Ballmer isn’t saying here is that the side effect of isolation - and trusted computing more generally - is that it shuts out anything that isn’t Microsoft. Not only that, but it shuts out anything that isn’t the latest Palladium-supporting / “trusted” version of Microsoft - neatly closing off interoperability with older versions of Windows (cue need to upgrade) and non-Microsoft platforms such as Linux and Apple.

Only to be expected of a convicted predatory monopolist, of course, but it’s an interesting course to be taking when it seems that the computing world is increasingly about interoperability rather than isolation. It’s not entirely clear where the burgeoning use of web services - and therefore the lessening of the need for a fat client such as Windows - is becoming one of the dominant themes in the industry.

A very clever wiki

Here’s one of those ideas that has you slapping your head and exclaiming “why didn’t I think of that?”

TiddlyWiki is a “reusable non-linear personal web notebook”, which is a rather long-winded way of saying it’s a standalone wiki. That’s right - you read that correctly. It’s a wiki-in-a-file - there’s no server software, no need to be online, no software to install. One file is all you need, and it gives you more-or-less everything you’d expect in a wiki. You simply open it in your browser and edit away.

Why this is such an incredibly cool idea (forgive the superlatives, but I think this is genius) is that once you’ve created your TiddlyWiki file, you can then email it as a file attachment to anyone - and so long as they’ve got a browser they will be able to see and use the wiki in exactly the same way as you did. They don’t need to be able to access your server as they would with an online wiki, or have the same software as you as if you were using something like Groove. Effectively, it’s a blend of collaboration by wiki and file attachments - removing the synchronicity from a wiki, if you like.

At the moment, it’s very experimental, and actually saving content is rather awkward (in fact, the instructions page is titled ‘Ouch’). But software problems like that seldom stay problems for long once they’re known, so this is something that we’re going to see more of.

Original thoughts

The problem with having the internet at your fingertips is that you very quickly come to the conclusion that whatever original idea you’ve ever had in your life, someone somewhere else has had that original thought first.

The benefit of having the internet at your fingertips is that you’ll never need to have another original thought, because someone somewhere else has had it first and you can find it…

Webfeeds, and other TLAs

One of our current hobbyhorses is the terminology that’s used to describe RSS feeds - specifically, the fact that the term ‘RSS feed’ is used to describe them. While it’s a fine TLA, it’s not something that’s particularly PHB-friendly - and these days it’s PHB’s that need educating about RSS and what it can do.

The phrase we’ve been using for a while is ‘webfeed’, and it’s good to see that no less an organisation than The Guardian agrees with us - having revamped their layout recently, this page now displays the term in a snazzy link button. It’s a real improvement on the current ‘industry standard’ orange XML button, and one that we will be shamelessly copying…

[Update: Amy Gahran of Contentious is claiming authorship of the term 'webfeed' (perhaps a contentious claim in itself? ) and is tracking the adoption of the term. It's becoming more popular according to her figures, so perhaps we can look forward to a slightly-less jargon-filled future...?]

[Update2: I mistakenly attributed authorship of 'webfeed' to Amy Grahan - the term was actually selected by a panel from options suggested by her readers, and may well pre-date this as well. So she's the webfeed maven rather than the originator of the idea itself. But no matter, it's still a great term...]