Robert Scoble has written a couple of posts recently about Microsoft products being a platform: 1. Robert quoting Kevin Warbach: “The Internet companies that have thrived while AOL faltered — Microsoft, Amazon.com, eBay, Google — have two things in commons. They are deeply technology-driven, but they see technology not as an end in itself but … Read more

A lot of people are getting pretty excited about “social software”. Bloggers like Joi Ito and Marc Canter are writing with gusto about social software. I’m hearing lots of trendy new acronyms and phrases – FOAF, MetaBlogs, Reputation systems, “web of trust”, “moblogging”, “micro-content”, etc etc. It’s all getting to be a blur. But these are heady times … Read more

Tim O’Reilly writes in Dan Gillmor’s comments: “Simplicity and extensibility should not be orthogonal. And any technology that sets them up as opposed, instead of complements, has clearly done something wrong.” Note: orthogonal means “independent or well separated”. Tim O’Reilly is talking about RSS2.0 (simple) and RSS1.0 (extensible). Lately I’ve been thinking and reading about weblog topics. There … Read more

I’m not usually one to quote long passages of other people’s writing, but I can’t resist quoting Scoble’s post today about ants. In Robert’s vision, the ants represent Microsoft employees and the bees are third-party developers like Marc Canter. I love it when people use literary devices, such as metaphor, in a technical or business context. It encourages … Read more

The subject of topics for weblogs is getting some traction in the blogosphere. There are some promising apps for topics, including k-collector and Topic Exchange. Recently I wrote a post, in response to one by Clay Shirky, to say that weblog posts should be organized by topics in the blogosphere rather than organized by author. Clay Shirky pointed back to … Read more

Don Park reckons that weblogs and websites will converge within the next 2 years time: “People [will] take it for granted that webpages can be edited using their browser. People will also take it for granted that any webpages can be subscribed to with a single-click. Web browsers will be changed to support all this … Read more

Robert Scoble: “…at Microsoft we call Internet apps that aren’t in the browser ‘Smart Clients’”. The web browser is at a crossroads. Microsoft announced in 2003 that it would not release any further “standalone” versions of Internet Explorer – instead it will be embedded in the Operating System (codenamed Longhorn). But along with obsoleting the web browser as … Read more

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