A very useful utility for the everyday blogger. If you don't use it, you might be a churlish hell-hated nut-hook if not a impertinent doghearted vassal .

Duncan Wilcox: the typical search engine, Google included, doesn't offer enough personalization to help in personal information management.

The content syndication system that Radio provides is so simple that from time to time I forget about it. Finding all my posts on another site was a little weird at first, but of course, it's a feature of this world :-)

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends - You'll all agree with me: technology gives us some fun tools to play with. But having fun is not enough. Your company and yourself need to make money. This is what this article reminds us.

I hoped to be the first to link to the new Marc Canter's blog, but Doc got it first.

After Adam Curry's first audio blog, will we get a singing blog?

Bookmarks Tease.... Take a look at these two screenshots.

The path name for the browser's bookmarks file is initialized automatically, clicking the Browse buttons launches file chooser dialogs.

Quizz: how did I manage this ?

Hint: No Java code necessary [read more] [s l a m]

...

I really didn't expect weblogs to change the way I met with people.  This was a surprise. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

I totally agree! I did meet in person a few people I knew from their weblogs, and it's kind of weird. What I find amazing is that somehow you already know these people, to the point that I almost interrupt them saying "oh, you have already told me that" when what really happened is that I read that sometime on their weblogs.

I have just got off the phone with Jean-Yves (alson known as the first JY of google ;-) after about one hour discussing Radio, Frontier, IdeaTools, markets and life in general. Hopefully we'll meet some time, but even this conversation was very very interesting.

Weblogs not only changed the way I meet with people, they also improved the quality of the people I meet!

You can read Adam's today's post here or you can listento it here.

It's very interesting... some random thoughts.

First, it makes it much more personal, since you are hearing the voice of the author, so in a way you are using one more of your senses to understand a person. I've never heard Adam's voice (well, I might have heard it from back on MTV, but I can't remember it).

Second: you notice how voice... doesn't support hyperlinks. Listening to a weblog post makes you want to click on some words... which you can do when you are reading the written version of the post.

This would probably make sense if more users would start doing it. I mean, I can easily upload this post on my iPod to listen to it when I'm driving, but I would hardly get our from my garage before it's over.

Maybe, audio blogging is more suitable for essays than for daily posts.

Last, I would never do this. Mostly because I'm shy, my English is not very good (I would have to re-record many times to get it nice), I don't particulary like the sound of my recorded voice (yes, I know that it's what everybody hears).

Anyway, I'm looking into auto uploading rss mp3 attachements to my iPod right now .

Doc thinks "corporate blogging" is an oxymoron.   I disagree.  A weblog (K-Log) is a powerful publishing tool.  It takes desktop publishing to a new level by adding instant one-to-many distribution, powerful organization (time-based and by individual), and connectivity (via blogrolls, subscription lists, and community features).  Sure, weblogging up to now has been highly personal, stylized, and out-of-control -- that is about to change.  We can't constrain this tool to just one use.   There are very exciting corporate applications of this technology.  Their addition to the mix will make the weblogging world a more interesting space. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Maybe there are two different possible ways to do "corporate weblogging".

One is letting employees of a company own a public weblog, the other is using internal weblogs as an additional communication tool.

While I think that the first kind of use can be very interesting and a powerful marketing tool, I can see very clearly the kind of problems that it could possibly cause and why companies, especially large ones, will stay away from it at least for a while.

As far as internal weblogging (uh... k-logging?) is concerned, meaning weblogs hosted on an intranet and accessible only inside a company's firewall, well, I believe that there's huge potential and that there will be more as these tools will evolve.

Welcome to Tara Sue's new weblog. It's a Manila site, so we can work on the templates while she's posting. It also has membership, you can join the site, and get bulletins, and participate in the discussion group. Of course since it's a website, it's still a work in progress, but it's a lot more functional than the original site. [Scripting News]

I think that this is a great idea. Some time ago I started discussing with a few friends the project to give a weblog to each Italian politician. It would make a lot of sense.

Chatting with another Italian weblogger this morning he reminded me of this idea.

So I'm starting my campaign now with this post (it's in Italian). If you are an Italian politician, you can have a copy of the soon to be available Italian version of Radio, a nice domain name and all instructions to get going for 49.00 Euros.

And now... let's see what happens.

Milosevic Trial Resumes Today. In the witness chair at the United Nations war crimes tribunal, Bosko Radojkovic described his own role in a gruesome cover-up. By Marlise Simons. [New York Times: International]

Same tribunal as below...

There are a lot of very interesting opinions and suggestions about it in the two posts' comments. I also learned that some people are not using bookmarks anymore.

Personally, I did change the way I use bookmarks. I'm not bookmarking sites I read anymore (I use a news aggregator to read them), but I'm using bookmarks to navigate all the applications that use a browser as their interface. In other words, I do use the news aggregator to read my contents, but I have a bookmark to my news aggregator on the navigation bar of my browser, just like I have bookmarks for all other local Radio pages, for stats pages of all my sites and for other "service" pages.

So, I still need a way to manage my bookmarks.

I particulary like Mikel's idea to manage bookmarks as opml files, it makes a lot of sense.

Anyway, no volunteers to write this tool yet .

Krzysztof Kowalczyk: I think that we should go beyond RSS. The idea is very sketchy, but the gist of it is: RSS should only be one source of information. What would other sources be? I don't know. Maybe periodically re-run Google query that alerts you to new pages for your query?

What should probably be defined is if RSS can be expanded to manage contents different from news, or if there should be other protocols to get stuff into aggregators (which will then become simply "aggregators" and not "news aggregators").

A very interesting step in this direction has been taken by Mikel Maron with his excellent myRadio tool.

I believe that Mikel's is definetly a step in the right direction, this is why I would really like to work with him.

(but the really beatuful part here is that I can have exchange of ideas with someone living in Italy. Awesome.)

It's a small world, uh? Btw, this is approximately where I am now.

The Bush administration has warned European nations that the American role in NATO will change if the European Union refuses the United States' request for agreements to keep Americans out of the reach of the new International Criminal Court.

This new court is located in The Hague, in the Netherlands, where this news doesn't sit too well. The general vibe here in the lowlands is that the US can and will invade to free any US citizens held in tribunal custody.

Pretty unnerving, considering the Netherlands just recently agreed to invest 800 million dollars in Joint Strike Fighter development funding.

Perhaps that decision should be revisited? [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

The International Criminal Court is where the trial against Slobodan Milosevic is currently held. The statute for the court has already been signed by many countries. The U.S. want to keep Americans out of reach of this Court, and they would invade the Netherlands to free a US citizen?

It's indeed pretty unnerving...

Ever heard of phantom limbs? Well, this is nothing as serious, but I keep turning to the empty part of my desktop where my PowerBook usually sits...

To Michael Rogers who asks how frequently a person writing a weblog should update. My answer is As frequently as something happens and you have the time or inclination to write it up... [Scripting News]

It's true, a weblog should be updated very frequently. But sometimes I just don't know what to write, just like in the last few days (well, I'm also supposed to be on vacation, so I wasn't always on-line). Anyway, there's nothing I feel like writing about so I don't post anything, so nobody links, so traffic goes down, so I feel alone in this big world, so I must think about something, anything, to write to get back into the loop.

Weblogging does make you think, this is the beauty of it! .

Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog: Aggregation is not enough.The way you define problem determines how you'll approach solving it. Sometimes that makes a big difference. Let me give you an example: writing RSS aggregators is now en vogue (I see a new one every day). But those programs never go out beyond solving "I want easily aggregate RSS feeds". But is getting RSS feeds really a core problem? No. The problem is bigger (and less well defined): we want to get new information on topics of interest to us. RSS feeds are a partial solution, but it has weaknesses. You have to actively look for feeds that match your interests. RSS feeds usually cover more topics than you're really interested in but the burden of filtering uninteresting news is on you. What would happen if people tried to write "news gathering/filtering software" instead of "RSS feeds readers"? In my opinion we would get better software.

Practical tip: before solving a problem think a bit to find out if there isn't a larger problem wanting to be solved.

Partially I agree, this kind of application can still be significantly improved, but I'm not expecting any breakthrough in the field of automatically filtering relevant contents, and I think that news aggregators offer a huge advantage today. Here's why.

• Steven Vore:Unfortionately, on Windows IE doesn't keep favorites in a single file. Instead it uses a special folder full of .url files (and nested folders)
• Chris Janton: Works well for Mozilla on Mac OS X. Similar procedure with Bookmarks.html found in ~/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/...
• Adam Curry has taken a step further, sharing also the history file.

Sharing the history file is a good idea, but I'm afraid that doing it the way I did with the bookmarks file would cause Radio to trigger an upstream each time a page is visited with IE. It would probably be relatively easy to write a Radio tool to take care of uploading the history file once every 10 minutes. This same tool could also synch local bookmarks files across different computers and different browsers... hmmm... anyone out there willing to write this tool?

One of the problems of moving from one computer to the other (or having more than one computer) is that my bookmarks are always stored on the "other" computer or another browser on the same computer.

Here's what I've just done to solve this (these instructions are for Explorer/MacOS X users, but I'm sure the same can be done on MacOS 9 and Windows and other browsers, if you know how to do this post the instructions on your weblog and I'll link them here):

1. Quit Explorer if it's running
2. Move the favorities file (/Users/username/Library/Preferences/Explorer/Favorities.html) to your Radio UserLand/www/ folder, renaming it Favorities.txt
3. Create an alias of the file you have just moved into the www folder into the original Preferences/Explorer folder, renaming it back Favorities.html.
4. Open Explorer

Done, now every time you will add a bookmark in Explorer, Radio will upstream to your weblog a page containing all your bookmarks (in a nice page using your theme) that you can access from any computer just going to your blog address adding /Favorities.html to the url.

Consider that doing this will expose your bookmarks to everybody, so if you have any confidential stuff there don't do this (I published my bookmarks on my internal blog which is password protectes).

So I backed up everything on a FireWire drive, and now I'm posting from my home's iMac. So far everything seems to work properly, but also if my TiBook is still here, I already miss it.

I'm learning a few new tricks from this experience, I'll share them here.

No, it's not another new customer, it's a wedding :-).

Useit.Com: Let Users Control Font Size. Another example of harmful Web technology comes with the increasing use of style sheets, which let web designers specify the exact size of text down to the pixel. Unfortunately, many designers are using this ability, leading to reduced readability of an increasing number of websites. [Via Tomalak's Realm]

Pretty much what Scott has been asking recently.

I agree that web pages should first be readable by users but, boy, as a web designer when I first was able to precisely determine font sizes and be sure that weird browsers configuration could not break my layouts it was great.

The challange is always the same: mixing vector based contents (text) with rasterized stuff (gif and jpeg images). If you are using a high resolution monitor you want to be able to increase font size in order to read at least text. Yes, at least, because anyway you won't be able to increase images size, so you will still be missing something. Besides, increasing font size will break some fixed width pages.

Solutions? Not many at the moment. Flash does support screen scaling, but it's still too hardwired to really be usable. The wide deployment of content management system could probably allow dynamically generated Flash sites, but at least so far I've not seen real applications of this.

Another soultion? Change browser: Opera lets you scale whole pages, including pictures.

I guess that for some time we'll have to follow the rules and be friendly with users: no more "px" in your css files, change everything to "pt".

Another ThemeTool customer, Dog News: 'Paws' to enjoy current dog news. Weird, wonderful, and educational dog news for the post 9-11 world.

Apparently there's much more interest about ThemeTool than RssDistiller, people want to personalize their blogs, good.

As far as our tools are concerned, I think that we'll use the new IM code for sharedOuline as soon as we'll start working again on the tool. Also our teamTasks tool will probably improve thanks to IM. Thanks UserLand!

Radio Free Blogistan compares Radio UserLand and Movable Type. No mention of Radio's news aggregator.

...

Radio is the result of constant development in weblog software since 1996. The depth is there for you to use. [Scripting News]

I humbly disagree with Dave. Radio is not the result of development of bloggin software since 1996, it's the result of the constant development of a platform since what, 1990?

People keep forgetting about the other features, maybe not strictly blogging related, of Radio. I mean, it's ok, weblogs are the current hype, but Radio could also be positioned as "the application that lets you retreive news and information from hundreds of sources and collect them in a simple and usable page, and then lets you share and comment these contents with others. It's a plug-in for your mind and your points of view"

I found out that there are Radio users out there who don't even know about the news aggregator. Hey, Radio users, click here. Cool, uh?

Dan Brickling on Small business blogging.

Very interesting. This is why we are building a very simple blogging module of IdeaTools: it's because we want small businesses to be able to simply add a weblog to their site (there are now hundreds of small business sites hosted on IdeaTools servers).

I don't want to compete with other blogging tools, there already are many and a lot of them are very good. But for everybody who's already using IdeaTools the new module will be easy, especially considering that the new tool will be using the same GUI that IdeaTools uses.

Soon with IdeaTools you'll be able to manage your e-commerce site, your company brochure-ware site and your weblog from within the same control panel.

Second sale of ThemeTool this morning and really a lot of great feedback from lots of new users who are starting to use the tools. A few glitches here and there, but nothing I wasn't expecting.

Btw, check out here what you can do with ThemeTool

I just received from the bank the first transaction confirmation, we have the first customer, now we are really in business.

Can you imagine Jeff Bezos thanking each Amazon's customer on his weblog? Well, I'm not Jeff Bezos, this is not Amazon and, most of all, I have a weblog!

So most probably I will keep thanking each new customer .

Can I Kiss You, Paolo? Dave says via Scripting News "Hey hey hey, Paolo is opening his store. Here's the intro. Maybe I'll do a couple of tools, just for a little Tuesday lunch money, and to help bootstrap Paolo's store."

I just went to check out Paolo's store site-- I'm in love! His THEME TOOL is the product I've been praying for! (No offense Dave, but building a theme in Radio is a PITA.) Theme Tool is supposed to allow me to use my WYSIWYG editor to set up themes for Radio! (APPLAUSE!!!!) I'll be downloading it this afternoon. So save me a seat, please? As soon as Paolo gets Paypal or something set up to take US dollars, I'll be happy to pay for it! [Mary Wehmeier]

Well... I guess that love is better than money, so I should be happy with just this post . However we do take US Dollars! Just click on the "add to you shopping basket" link and, after filling a form, you will be taken on our bank's site where you can make your payment (secure connection, we will actually never see your credit card number: you are giving it directly to a major bank). The transaction is going to be done in Euros, but your credit card company will manage the currency conversion for you, so you won't have to bother about it. Currently Euros and Dollars are about 1:1, meaning that 29 Euros in this very moment equal $28.38.

Literally minutes after I blogged about our new store (well, actually minutes after Dave blogged about it) I received an e-mail from somebody at PayPal asking if I had considered using PayPal to accept payments on the site.

Wow, this is good marketing!

I did consider PayPal, but at the moment there's no way to transfer funds to an Italian bank account, meaning that I could accept money but then there would be no ways to actually get that money. In a very quick email conversation he said that they are working on it. So, hopefully we'll be able to accept PayPal payments soon.

Maybe I'll do a couple of tools, just for a little Tuesday lunch money, and to help bootstrap Paolo's store. [Scripting News]

Thanks, boostrapping is exactly what we need, everybody's welcome, we're always open .

1) The demand for low cost, user-driven, content management is growing quickly.  98% of sites on the Internet (and organizational Intranets) are static flat files that need to move to an end-user driven content management framework.  This will help them shave costs,  improve flexibility, and keep end-users happy.

2) Companies and Universities are starting to deploy K-Logs networks.  Ground up knowledge sharing via K-Logs is turning into an increasingly powerful counter-weight to big vendor top-down integrated portals.  Why?  K-Logs provide a low cost of entry, organic growth, higher rates of participation, and observable results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

This is very all very true, the demand for this kind of services has been not only growing but also evolving visibly in the last months.

While not much time ago most of prestentation to possible customers were mostly focused on explaining the advantages of using a content management system for their internet or intranet sites, now we find ourself more and more explaining the advantages of IdeaTools (our CMS, a Frontier application) against competing products, our main advantages being the scalability and price/quality ratio.