Off to Geneva

I’m off to Geneva for LIFT08. See you there…

Technorati Tags: blogging, geek

Getting passworded RSS feeds in Mail.app working

Password-protected RSS feeds in Mail are a royal PITA to set up - basically Mail.app doesn’t support password authentication natively (or at least it doesn’t support entering the uid/passwords natively.) Here’s a sneaky work-around:

* Add the feed into Mail.app as normal, and let it whinge about not having a password
* Go to Safari, and set it to be the default RSS reader if it isn’t already
* Drop the feed URL into the address field, and respond to the authentication challenge - and allow the details to be saved into your Keychain
* Go back to Mail, where the feed will have automagically updated using the Keychain settings.

Apparently the “make Safari the default reader” step is optional, but your 1.609344 kilometerage may vary.

Technorati Tags: mac, osx

A taxonomy of Facebook scepticism

A couple of interesting Facebook-related items cropped up in my feeds this morning:

JP Rangaswami has come up with a taxonomy of Facebook sceptics:

Hrrumph Steak: This is the type of person who goes red in the face when you ask him whether he’s actually used Facebook at all, and remains embarrassedly silent. Dead meat in more ways than one.

Billy Slow-Mates: This guy is actually nothing more than a shy late adopter, waiting to see what his friends do. In the meantime he hopes he keeps his street cred by claiming complete ignorance. Usually a true fanatic once converted.

IM I Said: This is the guy who’s taken this long to discover instant messaging and texting, and doesn’t feel he needs another mode of communication. Often seen buying LaserDiscs and, occasionally, Betamax tapes.

Time Lord: This person just considers Facebook to be a waste of time and that’s that. Probably because it interferes with his Word Search and Sudoku.

The Jobcentred: The sort of guy who thinks you’re slacking on the job if you talked about the cricket or the weather while waiting for the lift to arrive.

Then the ubiqitious Robert Scoble:

Anyway, back to the idea of a Facebook Hotel.

Think about how a business would change if it knew every one of its customers had a Facebook account.

I was thinking of a hotel/casino where when I walked in the iPod in the room was playing the music that I had set as my favorite on my Facebook profile. The digital screens in my room had all my photos and some random photos from my friends. My favorite movies and TV shows were on the video device. The bar knew my favorite drink and how I liked it made.

That got me thinking about how I’d change my business after I knew everything about my customers.

It’s a neat idea, but you just know that the execution would be let down - like the hotels that programme their TVs to display a “Welcome, MR J SMIThh” message, incorrectly spelt and meaning that the TV has been left on belching carbon all day long. A nice idea, but better in the minds of marketers than can actually be delivered.

Management != Control

Over on the Fast Forward blog there’s the best skewering I’ve read for a long while of what I’ve come to think of as the military-industrial knowledge management industry:

Knowledge Management is and has always been a misnomer: knowledge cannot be managed.

Have you ever used something identified as a ‘Knowledge Management’ technology? Did it increase your ability to think or act? How much effort was required on your part? How much did you have to know in order to ‘discover’ what it was that you needed? Was the exchange of value equitable? Did any of that provide any more ‘knowledge’ to you than the collection of stuff on your desktop or accessible to you via the lone search box on the global internet?

The more I read, see and talk about knowledge management the more convinced I become that what most mainstream KM vendors are pushing is not knowledge management but knowledge control.   And most KM system-buying corporates are only too willing to swallow this.

This was after an email I got a couple of days ago (bits redacted to protect the innocent etc):

… we felt going [with an] external system would be ideal, as people are already paranoid that everything they say and do is being monitored by us.  It’ll be run according to our rules, monitored by those running it and branded in our style.  We will have constant access so will be able to gauge what is being said.  

See what I mean?

An alternative to lorem ipsum

I’ve got the Lorum Ipsum generator bookmarked as a quick way of creating nonsense content , but this makes an entertaining change from cod Latin:

The Post-Modernism generator

With the bonus that you actually have to read it quite closely to realise that it’s bullshit…

Invisible Blogger feeds

Warning - incoming rant.

Why, oh why, oh why does the standard template for Blogger not include a syndication link. There’s nothing - not an orange RSS blob, a ’subscribe to this blog’ link, or even some cryptic ‘Atom 0.1′ text somewhere.

There is a feed for every Blogger blog - append ‘atom.xml’ to the end of the blog’s URL and it’ll automagically appear, but the default Blogger settings don’t have the syndication feed publicised by default. Instead it has to be selected as a configuration option - and a significant proportion of Blogger blogs haven’t had it switched on.

I’m daft enough to go Googling for a solution, but there must be countless others who don’t bother - so if you are using Blogger as your platform and you haven’t switched this on, you stand to lose many of your potential subscribers from the off.

Blogging minister worries Whitehall

David Milliband, the politician tipped as a future Labour leader, is to become the first member of the cabinet to set up a web log in which he will publish views that go beyond his ministerial brief.

Sunday Times, March 7th 2006

Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it.   I predict it’ll have the dead hand of ministerial spindoctoring all over it…

Fixing a 2% problem

Two (independent) articles that point to a cause-and-effect:

WebWatch - RSS: 98 per cent of surfers shun it

A report from Forrester Research has found that just two per cent of US internet users are making use of RSS feeds.

7Nights: Fixing (RSS/Atom) Newsfeed Subscription
There has been a whole bunch of talk about how unusable the blogging subscription/syndication model is. The problem is that it’s not an easy thing to explain, and many developers and designers have gone and made it harder by spreading around terms and conventions that don’t really work.

I don’t find either conclusion particularly suprising - you have to consider that for most people, the cutting edge of IT usage is what they experience in the workplace, and the majority of workplaces have yet to progress much beyond basic email and file storage in the way they (fail to) exploit the potential of the systems they are using. And home computing is still dominated by a virus-and-spyware ridden AOL paradigm.

So perhaps the surprise is that RSS usage is as high as 2%?

[UPDATE: here's the original source from Forrester, and an interesting comment from The RSS Weblog - far from lack of knowledge being a problem, it could actually be a symptom of a successful shielding of the technology from those who don't know (or care) about it...]

MIT Media Lab survey

The MIT Media Lab are conducting an online survey of the “greater weblog community” (their phrase), looking at the way blogs are used to communicate:

Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

Six Sigma blog

If you’re a fan or a user of Six Sigma, it’s worth taking a look at the imaginatively-titled Six Sigma Blog. It would appear to do exactly what it says on the tin (not something you could ever accuse this blog of doing) - not too much in the way of background on who they are and what they do, but some interesting content nonetheless.