Broken, but working

There’s an awful lot of rubbish being spouted presently about the semantic web, classification, tagging and folksonomies - from both sides of the argument. Euan Semple works in the field for the BBC, and has come up with one of the more intelligent summaries of the situation that I’ve read:

The web works because it is broken and not owned.

Yes, there is rubbish on the web but the availability of relevant, accurate information at your fingertips has exploded in ways that even ten years ago most people couldn’t have imagined and which have never ever been delivered by “conventional” means.

There were nay-sayers then, and indeed there still are, but I would be cautious about assuming that the collective, applied intelligence of millions of people is more fallible than a small group of experts with the power to confer meaning.

Using weblogs to manage project change

It’s probably not too far an exaggeration to say that it’s changes that kill projects. Whether it’s because requirements were incorrectly specified at the start, or the business environment has changed - moving the goalposts mid-way through the game can really screw things up.

So it’s no suprise that most methodologies have a lot to say on the subject of capturing and managing requests for change (RFCs). And a well-run project environment will have some kind of formal process for dealing with requests as they arise.

Some of the problems

But often a project environment won’t have a process - and what processes exist are actually irrelevant in day-to-day use. Do any of these situations sound familiar?
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Strangeness from Blogger bloggers

I’ve noticed a number of interesting blogs over the past couple of weeks that are hosted on Blogger - mostly because there are comments or trackbacks to postings here. As a rule, I’ll go and read a few posts on the blog that’s linking, and more often than not I’ll subscribe to it - but that’s almost impossible to do if it’s a Blogger blog.

Why? They don’t have RSS feeds.

Apparently (after digging through the Blogger FAQs) RSS feeds are a Blogger Pro feature. The standard service doesn’t provide any kind of syndication - instead they recommend you go to Feedburner

Which strikes me as quite frankly daft. What’s the point of offering any kind of blog service - free or paid for - that doesn’t provide syndication? Surely that’s an integral part of what blogs are about - it’s a bit like a rental company offering their cars without steering wheels unless you upgrade to their premium rates. I can understand wanting to hold back some features as an incentive to upgrade to a higher revenue service - but surely syndication is a fundamental?

UPDATE: Commenters have commented, and I stand corrected: standard Blogger does have syndication - Atom 0.3 to be precise - but it’s not necessarily obvious if the blogger (this could get complicated - “I’m a Blogger blogger”) uses custom templates and doesn’t push their feed.

Which is just as bizarre as a blogging service not having feeds in the first place if you think about it - why would you want to have a blog without a feed? It’s a bit like hiring a rental car, but then declining the rear offside wheel along with the collision damage waiver…

Shhh - don’t disturb the librarian, you’ll only annoy him

Filed under ‘reactionary old farts’:

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

That’s the president-elect of the American Library Association, reacting to some criticism of his article in the Los Angeles Times which suggested that Google digitizing texts and making them available for search might not be such a good idea.

Which actually illustrates rather neatly the intersection of two rather 20th century viewpoints - on the one hand, you’ve got Mr Gorman who seems to view bloggers in much the same light as he no doubt views people who chew gum in his library. Information, it seems, isn’t for everyone - instead it’s to be handed down piece by carefully-selected piece to the great unwashed masses by those who have made it their lives’ work to mediate, filter and carefully shelve it.

And on the other, you’ve got the Los Angeles Times, who have locked the original article away behind their paywall, neatly removing it - and them - from any relevance as far as the web is concerned. I could have linked to them, sending a few visitors their way perhaps, or used my fair use rights and quoted a line or two.

The irony given the subject of Mr Gorman’s rant is that rather than hand over $5 or so to the LA Times, his article was available for free after a few minute’s Googling…

Don’t panic - the government will keep us safe

If you’re not in the mood to read a rant, now might be the time to hit the ‘back’ button. If you are, bear with me while I get something off my chest.

If you follow the news in the UK and you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of days, then you’ll have found it difficult to miss the announcement of the UK Government’s new initiative to make the net safe for us all - IT Safe. I quote:

ITsafe is designed to provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack.    It consists of both the Advice on this website, and a low-volume Alerting Service.

All laudable enough, you’d think, so why the rant?

THERE’S NO *&$£@*& RSS FEED!!!

I’m not going to foam at the mouth about how the front page is less to do with securing you against electronic attack than it is a pre-election publicity stunt for headline-grabbing lobby-fodder responsible for the biggest assault on civil rights since the ink dried on the Magna Carta.. Or that they’ve launched the site to provide ‘alerts’ without actually providing any. Or that they specifically disclaim “responsibility for the accuracy, availability, completeness or usefulness of any of the information which is available on, or via, the website or our e-mails.” Or that the site itself looks like it’s been knocked up in a 12-year old’s lunch hour using Frontpage.

But launching a site where the only means of communicating with the target audience is email is cluelessness writ large. Fantastically useful that will be, as the emails pile up in Outlook Express inboxes surrounded by viruses, spam and phishing attempts.

And I don’t care about the argument that says ‘RSS is for geeks, and no-one will know what an RSS feed is’. This is a site (allegedly) put together by people who know enough about IT and technology to at least have heard of RSS. The effort of creating an RSS feed would have been trivial in the scale of the no-doubt six-figure sum that has been spent on creating this. It was an opportunity to show that there IS an alternative to email as a means of distributing this kind of information, and it’s been wasted.

I predict that this site will be updated spasmodically until after May 5th, and will then decay quietly as it collects digital tumbleweed like the pre-election stunt it is.

There, I feel better now. Rant over.

The Archers RSS Feed

You’ve probably got to be British to understand, but The Archers is a radio-based soap opera produced by the BBC that enjoys cult status in the UK and further afield. So much so, that the fan club is called Archers Addicts - and the name is not an understatement. They make Trekkies look positively amateur.

For a long while, it’s been possible to get a synopsis of the previous episode by email every day (and in fact you can also listen to it online as well). While that’s great, it’s annoyed me in a niggling low-grade way for a long time that there’s no equivalent RSS feed - email’s just so, well, 20th century.

Well, now there is. In a coding frenzy (alright, configuring a Wordpress blog) I have created The Archers RSS Feed - available in a news aggregator right now. It’s probably going to get me a cease-and-desist from the BBC, but hey - seek not permission, seek forgiveness - as the old saying goes.

Technically it’s a bit ropey, scraping the email and converting it into a blog post; but it works, and I’ll no doubt get around to making it a bit more funky in the next few days. A tip of the hat to John Blade, who coded an enhanced email-to-Wordpress module which I’ve ripped off mercilessly.

Comcast rants fill a vacuum

One of the insights that came from the recent podcast interview by GM was their finding that the comments on their blogs were being used by customers as forums to vent their frustrations about what GM were doing. In particular, a somewhat self-congratulatory posting about GM’s fuel economy triggered a number of “oh no you’re not”-style comments, which was feedback of a kind that GM would never otherwise hear about.

Then today I came across a rant from a dissatisfied customer of Comcast (is there any other kind of Comcast customer?) - who just happens to run a high-traffic blog with great Google juice. The net result is that her post was picked up and commented on by another blog (more Google juice), now I’m doing the same (yet more…) and so the process goes on. Comcast’s good name is being comprehensively slandered and there’s nothing that they can do about it.

It just feels so good knowing that with a single diatribe, I can inform potentially thousands of potential Comcast customers that they’d be better off finding an alternative for their cable TV service.

I find it fascinating that companies are still burying their heads in the digital sand over this. There’s an old saying that “nature abhors a vacuum”, and it’s never more true than online. It seems that if you’re not being proactive about managing your reputation - whether you’re employing a Robert Scoble or running GM-style blogs - then your dissatisfied customers are going to be doing it for you.

The coolest thing we’ve done so far with a blog, a webfeed and an iPod Shuffle

Ok, we’re quite very pleased with this - we think it’s a cool use of blogs, webfeeds, podcasting and an iPod Shuffle in a real live business scenario. We’d be interested to know what people think - comments welcome.

The scenario:

Our client is the classic Type-A personality, time-poor, stressed executive with too much to do and too little time to do it - he spends most of his life on planes in transit between meetings. He needs to keep up with the key developments in competitor intelligence, but gets very little opportunity to sit in front of a screen to browse through reports. Neither does he want to drag a large pile of paper around with him.

The solution:
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Conversations with GM

I’ve mentioned GM and their blogs a couple of times in the last week or so - now there’s another first from them. The Director of New Media from GM Communications has been interviewed for a podcast, conducted over Skype. How’s that for innovative?

It’s an interesting insight into how GM have gone about using blogs as part of their communications strategy, but there are a couple of exchanges in particular which are worth seeing / hearing:

Neville: Who are the commenters? customers, employees, dealers? Are you happy and pleased with the spread of commenting?

Michael: I was completely blown away by the level of comments and the thought that goes into those comments. We didn’t know what to expect and in many cases you feel that people have been waiting for years and years to be able to vent their feelings to General Motors, so even the negative ones aren’t sniping, they’re just giving us their sincere feelings and thoughts on what we can do to create better products. We’re appreciating most of them!

There are no shortage of ‘company X sucks’ sites around on the web - and it struck me that providing a comments forum as part of a corporate blog could well be a way of short-circuiting that. If you’ve got a forum on which to vent your spleen - and you can pretty much guarantee that someone in the organisation is going to see what you write - the incentive to create or contribute to an independent ‘anti’ site may be reduced.

Shel: Was there any resistance from your legal staff when the concept was first proposed?

Michael: They had some concerns, but since its Bob Lutz primarily, and at an elevated level in the company, they had confidence that we wouldn’t do anything that would be a problem.

This definitely fits with our experience - you’ve got to have a salesman. If there was a comment that sums up the decision making process in large organisations, this is it. It’ll be interesting to see if GM’s lead is something that other corporates will follow.

We’ve gone 1.5!

If you can read this (and you should be able to) we’ve upgraded the software running this blog from Wordpress 1.2 to Wordpress 1.5.

Thanks to an excellent guide, the process was pretty much flawless - and if you’re currently using Wordpress 1.2, then upgrading to 1.5 comes highly recommended.