blogkathleen reports on an article that talks about weblogs vs. email discussion. The first part of the quote below are Matt Kirschenbaum's followup comments from the article. Second paragraph are Kathleen's comments:

Couple of reasons I think: one, like all the rest of us, my students now get a lot more email than they used to. Course-related mail gets mixed in with the usual jumble of spam and whatever else. All too easy just to hit the delete key. Two, the blog allows them to see their ideas instantly published on the Web. Email is a closed world, a self-contained loop between the instructor and the other students. With the blog, the fourth wall is always open. Best, Matt

I think that what Matt says about "the blog allows them to see their ideas instantly published on the web" is key. One of my earlier posts talks about the role of identity building as a critical motivating factor in weblogging. Matt hits on a key difference in the motivation behind weblogging and email discussion: reputation building.

...via elearningpost

Here's an article about new laptops with built-in VoIP:

Manufacturers plan to start selling notebooks with integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) this year and plan later to offer notebooks with built-in cell phone capabilities, Anand Chandrasekher, vice president and general manager of the Intel Mobile Platforms Group, said in an interview. The phone module will also let people review incoming e-mail and calendar information while the notebook remains in sleep state. Thematically, these additional communications features are termed Extended Mobile Access (EMA).

Life on the support line:

Loni is a great guy. Like me, he keeps track of Ken's more outrageous meltdowns and we compare notes over lunch. We have a good time. I like him. But Loni is a punter. I don't condone it, but I understand. Since hitting the floor we've all learned the sad truth. Actually solving problems is by far the slowest way to handle a call. We've each got 12 minutes from the moment we say hello to find a way to say goodbye, and after two weeks of trying to fix computers he knew nothing about and racking up average call times north of half an hour, Loni decided that if he was going to survive, he was going to have to change his approach. So he became a punter.

Karen is part of a growing group called givers. Like punters, they don't really solve any problems, but instead of just asking you to call someone else, givers want you to have a parting gift. They'll listen to your problem and then randomly choose a piece of hardware to send you. Of course it won't solve anything, but givers have discovered that people usually calm down and start agreeing as soon as they think you're sending them something to fix the problem. And by the time they get the new part and discover it has no effect, they'll call back and someone else will have to figure out how to deal with them. Givers are really just punters with style, and they find their tactic very satisfying. Karen and her ilk get to spend all day playing Santa.

Ted is someone I don't speak to. Ted is a formatter. Ted, and those like him, have only one solution to their customers' problems. Erase everything on the computer's hard drive and start over from scratch. While this can be effective for solving all sorts of software troubles, it's like amputating someone's leg to fix an ingrown toenail. The solution is usually worse than the problem. Most times Ted doesn't actually follow through with his plan. The entire strategy is just a bluff. Most people will balk at the proposition of losing everything and decide they can live with whatever problem they've called to complain about. At the very least they'll decide to hang up, back up their data, and call back -- at which point they'll become someone else's problem.

Searchenginewatch reports on Yahoo's new search capability:

Yahoo is rolling out a brand new search engine today, with its own index and ranking mechanisms, casting aside its long-standing use of Google-powered search results. The move is bound to roil the industry and sets in motion a new race for the claim of web search champion.

I've read a couple of things lately (don't have the references right to hand--sorry, but I'll get them up here eventually) that people don't use shared workspaces even when they're available. I'm planning to write something longer about shared workspaces and why they don't get used like we think they should or wish they would, but here are some interesting thoughts from a presentation by Sam Ruby at ETCON about working on the !Echo Wiki and mailing list and other discussion areas:

If you have a coherently aligned and focused community, a wiki can be a very powerful thing, allowing collaboration to proceed at an astounding pace.

If you have a community in imperfect alignment, a wiki will accurately reflect this state. Given a group with a genuine desire to align, a wiki can provide a powerful and positive feedback loop.

But what happens when you have an unbounded community with divergent goals?

In particular, he talks about issues with mailing lists, wikis and weblogs. Each have strengths and weaknesses (and everything he mentions isn't listed here--these are just things I thought were particularly interesting):

Mailing lists seem very prone to flamebait: statements which may very much be true but are expressed in a provocative way. Some people seem to just have an inborn ability to attract flames.

What's worse, is that most flamebaiters don't seem to realize what they are doing.

On a wiki, emotionally charged words tend to be quickly replaced with ones that more effectively make the point that is trying to be made without the distracting histrionics.

Mailing lists can discuss a topic without coming to a firm conclusion. Even when a conclusion is reached, it seemingly can be reopened at any time. This can be frustrating.

On a wiki, time is collapsed. By necessity, contributions have to focus on some new point of view that has not been previously expressed.

Weblogs have much of the same benefits as mailing lists, with a few additions:

* Weblog authors act as filters/valves. Updates can be as seldom as a few times a week versus literally hundreds per day.
* Posts contain a dramatic increase in contextual information in the form of personal relevance and hypertext links
* It is much easier to route around flamebaiters

In the end, he suggests a mix of strategies and also notes that much of the issue (as in meatspace) is getting contributors to contribute in ways that help the process and lead to a conclusion.

Here's a good piece on why plain text is better than formatted in email messages and it lists a ton of email packages and how to set them up for sending plain text messages:

Plain text is how your messages should be formatted when sending E-mail to mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups or to any other recipient. Though this rule is not yet cast in "Netiquette" stone, it is a good policy to follow if you want quick and informative responses to your questions and wish to avoid being "flamed" as a clueless newbie.

HTML is meant for the WWW; not for mailing lists, Usenet newsgroups postings, proper business E-mail correspondence and preferably not for personal E-mail unless the recipient is expecting it.

Reasons plain text is better, include:

• Plain text is smaller
• Plain text is safer (embedded HTML or MIME attachments spread viruses, worms, and trojans
• Plain text is more portable

I figure getting people to send their messages in plain text is a losing battle, but it makes your message simpler, safer and more readable so it's still something to think about at least.

Spy has an interesting article on the limits of usability as a primary design component:

Usability--and the cautious thinking it embodies--has come to dominate thinking about the design process. As Robert Brunner, a partner at in the San Francisco office of the celebrated design firm Pentagram, will argue at the HITS conference in Chicago this week: "it really doesn't matter if something is usable. What matters is that it is in fact, useful. And even better if it is desirable" [vii]. This possibility of making someone's experience of a product both successful and satisfying is more likely to be achieved in more mature areas of design, such as newspapers, where complex patterns of communication have been established with which elements that produce an overall 'quality of experience' can be incorporated. If usability becomes the focus too early in the development of a product it is likely that a more ingenious and ambitious way of solving the problem will be missed, and a less useful and desirable solution will be polished to perfection.

One of the areas where users are almost always not our best critics is when disruptive ideas emerge:

Too much user focus may be a barrier to innovation. Research with users is likely to tell us that they desire an improvement on something they already know and understand – faster calculators rather than spreadsheets. Ask them if they would use a proposed innovation and they will say No – and then adopt it when they have seen its utility demonstrated in the real world.

eLearn Magazine has a column on e-learning predictions for 2004 (there doesn't seem to bea permalink to this column; it's currently on the front page):

“In 2004 colleges and universities will finally stop thinking about using information technology (IT) and start thinking seriously about how IT can be used to improve student learning, increase student retention and serve students more cost effectively. IT will be viewed as a vital institutional investment rather than an operating expense.” —Carol A. Twigg, Executive Director, Center for Academic Transformation

“I see things coming together that have been operating separately, for example, knowledge management practices integrated with structured learning events such as courses; Web-based technology used in the classroom; formal and informal learning integrated in the same overall activity or course; and learning objects found or created by the learners themselves as the results of learning activities. Should any of these be called "e-learning" Or all of them? We need a new name for these sorts of synergies.” —Betty Collis, Shell Professor of Networked Learning, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

This fits right in with stuff we've been talking about at work for the last week or so:

...Cory Doctorow's notes from Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks from ETCON...

JWZ: Every program expands until it can read mail.

Danny's Corralary: Every program that can read mail ends up
getting used for everything else.

Sysadmins get thousands of emails from automated processes, "My
HDD is full, My HDD is full, etc"

--

Everyone, including Alpha Geeks, use only one app:

People complain about how their work wants them to use
organizers...

Joel Splosky uses Excel for everything.

HR person sends website designs in PPT.

Don Lancaster sees the world in Postscript.

...via (naturally) BoingBoing

Phil Windley talks about whether companies whould develop their own or outsource development for new business applications:

Company IT departments don't build general ledger packages anymore for a good reason: your accounting software won't add to your competitive advantage. We do, however, see organizations trying to significantly modify ERP systems to change how paydays are handled, etc. In Utah for example, we modified SAP's payroll system to handle a special way the Highway Patrol had of paying troopers because they couldn't be convinced to follow a standard business convention. The end result will be a system that's more prone to problems now and more expensive to upgrade later.

Of course, Utah isn't a business, but if it were, they'd be deriving no special competitive advantage from the way troopers receive their paycheck. These kinds of system should be bought and business processes should be changed to ensure that the system requires as few modifications as possible.

One tricky part, of course, is convincing people that the way they've done things could change to a more standard practice and it wouldn't hurt the business.

BoingBoing (which is just full of good stuff today) provides a pointer to the first Human-Computer Interface Rap at OK/Cancel:

After that generate a lot of designs
run them by some users even just 2 at a time
iterate and iterate and soon you'll oblitherate
any interfaces which are wack or inconsiderate

that will help you mitigate support costs or generate
website hit rates and orders. So check it:
you'll be taking profits instead of mounting losses
'Cause you brought us in at-the front of the process

But you should really listen to it to get the full effect.

In December on this very blog, I mentioned that Amy Gahran of the Weblog CONTENTIOUS, was running a contest to rename RSS.

Yesterday, Amy left an update in the comments section:

Thanks so much for linking to my contest! I just wanted to update your readers that I've just opened public voting on this contest.

Anyone can vote, through the end of February. The more votes we get, the more likely it is that a worthwhile consensus will emerge. Voters select their favorite out of the 273 new names for "RSS feed" proposed by contest entrants.

Contest info and FAQ, with link to voting page: http://blog.contentious.com/contest.html

- Amy Gahran

So, go ye forth and vote!

From ETCON, Cory Doctorow provides some tantalizing notes on Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content Delivery:

Had to transition go.com from an expensive portal to a free-to-maintain portal by pulling in newsfeeds over RSS and XSLT-transitioning them to decorated web pages -- made it easy to add new partners to the portal. Made it easy to wpit out to WML for mobiles, and to re-syndicate to the rest of the world.

It took a while to show the powers that giving stuff away didn't mean a net reduction in eyeballs-on-ads.

I also think this is pretty cool:

Internally, we are also leveraging RSS as a means of collaboration and communication for our software engineering teams. All engineers maintain blogs and use NewsAggregators to track tasks, projects, and new technology. In addition, we are tracking changes on our Wiki via RSS.

David Sifry has put together a Technorati hack that shows the top Amazon products people are talking about.

...via BoingBoing

at Auburn University has started Extension Daily, "A Weblog of News and Opinion."

Recent entries include:

• Thrips Threaten Onions
• Closing a Chapter on BSE
• Living Longer by Eating Less?

Brian Alvey at A List Apart says Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz:

Learn to thrive within constraints The first thing new web designers usually figure out is that the web is all about compromise.

If they are coming from a print design background, they are handed a box of 216 crayons, a list of a half dozen available typefaces and a 72 dpi limit on image resolution. When the shock wears off and they get used to working within these web limitations, they encounter page weights, arbitrary standards support and CSS hacks.

...

Don’t get too attached to anyone because they might not be around next week
I learned this one when I was working as a CTO in the twilight of the dot com years and our vendor contacts were changing almost daily.

When business was good, web developers would jump from company to company getting raise after raise. When business was bad, they would be pushed.

Luckily in Oz — and in real life — there has been a core group of characters that were all considered too important to be killed off

At O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, Joe Trippi gave a talk yesterday about the Dean campaign and the Internet. Howard Rheingold and Ross Mayfield blogged it live. Reuters' news article .

Techdirt looks at blogs versus Reuters:

The notes from the blogging attendees say Trippi called the campaign a "dot com miracle", and yet Reuters claims Trippi said the internet "hobbled" the campaign. These differing accounts of the same exact speech don't match at all - and it certainly looks like Reuters is the one doing the spinning here, taking a few quotes here and there out of context to make their point. With the bloggers' notes, you can see the context of what's being spoken about, and the Reuters report gives none of that. I'm not one who believes that bloggers are a "threat" to journalism, but the contrast here shows a perfect (if a bit scary) example of just how easy it is for the press to spin things to make their point.

Boxes and Arrows has an article on Managing the Complexity of Content Management:

...the issues are many, spanning strategy, design, content, technology, training and several others. One conclusion we can make is that content management has become a very large category—attempting to include content authoring, metadata authoring, database-backed websites, workflow management, and even thesaurus management—and instead of making CMS a goal you might start by focusing on which of these functions you need. Otherwise, the general complexity becomes the central problem facing any content management project.

The article goes on to list some things that can help make the process manageable, including:

• Keep the team small
• Don't try to fix everything at once
• Build only what you need
• Buy the right size

The World Wide Web Consortium has issued RDF and OWL Recommendations:

Today, the World Wide Web Consortium announced final approval of two key Semantic Web technologies, the revised Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). RDF and OWL are Semantic Web standards that provide a framework for asset management, enterprise integration and the sharing and reuse of data on the Web. These standard formats for data sharing span application, enterprise, and community boundaries - all of these different types of "user" can share the same information, even if they don't share the same software.

...via Floyd (who almost never finds anything before I do, but I was out sick yesterday....)

Chances are if you do much online searching, you've visited a Wikipedia entry once or twice. Dan Gillmor has a good article on the wikipedia is and how it's done.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), an encyclopedia created and operated by volunteers, is one of the most fascinating developments of the Digital Age. In just over three years of existence, it has become a valuable resource and an example of how the grass roots in today's interconnected world can do extraordinary things.

Google Guide provides tutorials for making more effective use of the Google search engine to find what you're looking for on the Web.

Edward Felten has an interesting post on why Google isn't broken, as some people fear, but actually a demonstration of democracy in action.