An online notebook
My tag cloud (on the right of the screen on my blog’s homepage) is a complete mess. I need to edit the font sizes used, and maybe limit the cloud to tags which are used more than once, say.
I can’t find anything in the widget options – I am using the default one which comes as core in WordPress.
Any ideas, anyone?
Simon Dickson muses on the advantages of using open source platforms, as opposed to proprietary ones, in the light of the Interesource debacle.
It’s funny. Not so long ago, the question was ‘why should I be using open source?’ Increasingly, I’m left wondering why anyone would use anything other than open source.
True. As Simon points out, one of the Interesource developers has mentioned the fact that none of their clients had escrow agreements in place to mitigate against this sort of risk. But when you are providing a service like a community based web platform, which people are wanting to access 24/7 escrows don’t supply the solution in an adequate time-frame, in my view. They may make managers feel happier, but don’t really give you the protection you need.
With open source, there’s bound to be someone in the office who knows about the innards of your system. Failing that, there are experts a-plenty out there on the web, easily accessible through blogs, forums and mailing lists. WordPress, the favourite of both Simon and myself, is a great example of the wonderful support communities that exist for open source systems.
So here’s a challenge: why not use open source? Well, recently Telligent – a company providing a great (if proprietary, and (worse) .NET based) community portal system called Community Server – released some information about a blogging/lightweight CMS platform they are developing. WordPress is the clear competition, which they make clear on their landing page:
Finally, a WordPress Alternative
Install and setup is easier…You don’t need to know PHP…Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform…
Hmmm. I, for one, am not convinced!
The Newsgator family of desktop RSS applications are now available for download free of charge! This is great news, and I would heartily recommend that anyone who hasn’t tried it before gives the Windows application, FeedDemon, a try. I have been using it for three years now, and while I have flirted with online services like Bloglines and Google Reader, I also come crawling back to FeedDemon. There are other products in the range too, like a plugin for Outlook and NetNewsWire, which is the desktop reader for the Mac.
They are still charging for TopStyle though – boo, hiss. It’s a great CSS editor. If you are thinking that’s a strange app for an RSS company to be selling, you’re right. The story behind it is that when Newsgator bought Nick Bradbury, the guy behind FeedDemon, he brought his other project with with, which was TopStyle.
Here’s a nice post explaining why FeedDemon is so great.
When I was at the Online Information conference last year I had an interesting chat with the guys from NewsGator. They have some cool enterprise products, which focus on making SharePoint actually useful, all through the magic of RSS.
Steve Rubel has posted about "The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging".
Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted – at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again, often with very little value add. It’s almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.
So is this true? Is there really less value in the blogging that’s going on right now? I’m not so sure.
One issue is that the level of noise has increased – there are more bloggers. Therefore, there are more rubbish bloggers, and more crappy blogs. After all, 98% of everything is pretty crud. So that’s a factor. Attention loggers like TechMeme are bound to display large numbers of bloggers regurgitating news, because that is what a lot of bloggers do. That doesn’t mean to say, though, that the quality bloggers aren’t out there, nor that they are in decreasing numbers in real terms.
The other is that many of the best bloggers like to be on the bleeding edge – they like to be early adopters, especially those who blog about tech and web innovation. Quite rightly so: if they weren’t engaging in new technology, we’d be questioning why we bother reading them. Now, one of the trends of recent developments is that stuff is getting smaller, shorter. Twitter is blogging, reduced. Seesmic is YouTube, reduced. If people are playing with these toys, then their output is bound to be reduced. That’s not being lazy, it’s just taking part.
Jeremy Gould has been hard at work getting the barcamp for UK Government web types sorted out. We’ve got a venue – the Google offices in London. Cool. All the details are on the wiki and Jeremy’s blog.
The Google Group mailing list has also seen quite a lot of action. One thread I started was on bringing together the conversation. In other words, people are going to be blogging, tweeting, adding photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube before, during and after the event, and it would be good to have one place where they are all brought together. It would also be really useful for people who can’t attend, but would like to interact from their desks, say.
I was going to cobble a quick web page together using MagpieRSS to parse the various feeds. I then had a rethink and realised it would be so much easier to use a public start page. For no reason other than it was the first one I thought of, I chose PageFlakes. And it did the job perfectly.
You can find the site at http://www.pageflakes.com/barcampukgovweb/