Roll away.

Great party tonight here in Boston on the eve of BloggerCon. Met Betsy, Werner (whose birthday is today) and Glenn for the first times. Did the same earlier at lunch with Ed and Adam.

One conversation, repeated several times with different combinations of bloggers, comes down to this: old blogrolls have become a pain in the ass. All of us who have been blogging for awhile have lots of dead links in our 'rolls, and frankly don't even look at the things very much. Did once, maybe, but not any more.

So our 'rolls are legacies. We maintain them for readers more than ourselves. Interesting, no?

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Seems to me that blogrolls made sense in a time before RSS aggregators. If you use other blogs and sites as triggers for your own writing, then a blogroll serves as a useful way to organize your surfing. When you shift to an aggregator driven strategy, your subscriptions file becomes the equivalent of your blogroll. Of course, your subscriptions file is invisible while your blogroll was public.

10:04:31 PM •  • comment  

Event Driven Business. In an event driven business, products are built to order, not built to stock, reducing inventory carrying costs and allowing greater customer satisfaction as a result of customization. This article from ebizQ has a great analogy: [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

If you want the train to move over one foot, you have to do an immense amount of work tearing up and re-laying tracks. On the other hand, all you need to do to turn the more agile truck is move the steering wheel.

This is a useful analogy. I also agree with Phil that the following observation provides a very useful classification of data in organizational information systems:

[E]vent-driven, service-oriented architectures integrate three kinds of data: reference data, such as the number of trucks in a fleet; state data, such as the number of trucks under repair; and event data, such as a delivery being completed.

Worth checking out the full article.

9:29:24 PM •  • comment  

Roland Tanglao and I and a couple of colleagues are working on a new blogging, content-publishing tool that we're calling LinkFest for now. 

LinkFest is - for now - a client application that works in conjunction with a Browser.  It functions as an interactive visual and textual workspace that allows for:

• the rapid assembly of links, files, data, images and other relevant items of interest,
• subsequent easy manipulation of the collected data and text,
• simple addition of annotations and commentary,  and finally
• quick one-click publishing.

The main elements of LinkFest’s functionality (drag-and-drop content that automatically creates linked clusters of related, annotatable material that is saveable, sendable, re-usable, formattable) allows end-users to use RSS feeds better, to connect and combine them (along with other content) any way they want to or need to, to build a story, themes, briefings, and so on.  They can build and publish their knowledge, their content, and their services their own way. [wirearchy News]

7:43:17 PM •  • comment