Richard MacManus

News today that Userland CEO John Robb has left the company. Dave Winer says about Userland’s future direction: “We’re going to try to do something fun, unique, and powerful with UserLand’s position in the weblog and content tools market, and we’re going to try to include the community in the business, i.e. people will make money.” Sounds … Read more

Couple of interesting comments to my last post. Harvey Kirkpatrick from itopik wrote: “I would argue that all the efforts are complementary and can be automated by some and humanified by others. We are choosing to humanify a bit the process hoping to be a bit more intelligent in our organization as Yahoo was in … Read more

My post in response to Clay Shirky’s article on Corante generated some interesting discussion. The time is ripe to discuss weblog topics, thanks to innovative new tools such as k-collector, Phillip Pearson’s Topic Exchange, and itopik. I want to address a few points about organizing weblog posts by topic. 1) I still believe authorship is important. I have favourite … Read more

Clay Shirky (via Ross Mayfield): “The weblog world has taken the 4 elements of organization from mailing lists and usenet — overall topic, time of post, post title, author — and rearranged them in order of importance as author, time, and title, dispensing with topics altogether.” This is something that makes me a little queezy … Read more

Some quotes on the theme of content management (CM)… Gerry McGovern: “The Web may have been the almost exclusive domain of techies. Today, it is increasingly the domain of communicators.” Bill Gates: “Whether it’s handling a classified ad or handling editorials, the authoring tools for these things no longer require an IT department to be … Read more

I’ve been following all the hullaballoo about the Echo Project. Unfortunately there’s been more flaming than at a dragons convention. But one of the few calm voices amongst all the hot air is Jon Udell, who today wrote a brilliant essay that got right to the heart of what RSS means.  Jon reminded us that technologies such as RSS are all … Read more

One thing that is definitely “funky” is the blogroll in Radio Userland. I updated my blogroll.opml file last night but – no matter what trickery I do – the changes won’t publish. That is why my external links look a bit odd right now. John Robb recently announced that Radio will soon release a new version, which is exciting … Read more

Jon Udell on RSS: “It’s about a new way of communicating, one that’s defined by personal publishing and subscribing, and that empowers writers and readers as never before.” Amen to that, brother. People are trying to change RSS into something called Echo. If you want to know why, then I recommend you check out Jon Udell’s conversation with … Read more

I admit it. I regularly check my stats at Technorati and Blogshares, plus I do some search engine checks now and then. Everyone does it. I have to say I’m not exactly setting the world on fire in terms of popularity. I’m probably a ‘C List’ blogger at most 🙂 But I am noticing my … Read more

In my recent articles I’ve explored the concept of the Universal Canvas, a term made popular by Microsoft when it launched .NET in 2000. But things just got interesting, with the news that Microsoft will phase out its Internet Explorer browser as a standalone product. Internet Explorer will be integrated it into Microsoft’s next-generation Operating System codenamed Longhorn. But what does … Read more

Mark Pilgrim: “I take in a lot of raw data, synthesize it, and spit it back out in ways that many people can understand.” Mark Pilgrim and Neil Deakin are two very smart web developers, but more importantly they both have the ability to document complex web technology in laymans language – so that wannabes can learn it too. This is … Read more

Dave Winer posts a link to a DaveNet from 2 years ago: “If it were not possible to read my words without annotation, we’d have to invent a medium that allowed that. But in 2001 we already have such a medium, it’s called the Web. We have tools and servers and all kinds of runtimes on … Read more

Micah Alpern asked via my Comments form: “Wasn’t this term [universal canvas] first popularized by Apple with their failed OpenDoc program?” Only one way to find out and that’s pay a visit to Google. I found a definition of OpenDoc, but I didn’t see anything that had OpenDoc and Universal Canvas in the same sentence. Anyone know of … Read more

Last night I wrote about the Universal Canvas. Today in my RSS newsreader, what should appear but a great post from Steve Gillmor on the same topic. Of course being a pro, Steve made his point way better than me. Microsoft has all the pieces, says Steve, to “create a browser-hosted read-write tool for sharing … Read more

I’ve been Scobleized. Now I really am part of the blogosphere…yay 🙂 Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)