Yuk.  I spent some time on the Documentum site today to have a look as eRoom and some other products.  What a mess.  I ran into missing pages (linked to from the front page), downloads that didn't work, and a requirement to keep signing in (or reregistering) everytime I went to a new are of the site.  If this is enterprise class content management and collaboration (translated:  the big $$ systems) as demonstrated by the company that has developed the tools, then count me out.  What a mess.

It's clear to me, as someone that has experience interacting with "enterprise class" CMS', that the site is run by technologists and not by the marketing team.  I suspect (translate:  know) that the marketing team can't directly edit functionality on the site, otherwise these confusing glitches would have been cleaned up.  The user interface for doing this is too complex for a non-technical user to operate.  Why do companies punish themselves this way (both financially by buying expensive systems like this and in terms of lost revenue growth through lost sales due to Website glitches)? [John Robb's Weblog]

Now, even of this only solves 1/60th of my problems, it's still something and I'd better think about something smart to post in order to get some flow going and a few more clicks.

Hmmm... I could insult somebody... I could come out with some new weird standard... I could trash some technology or bigCo...

Or, better, I could start planning about sharing some more about what we are doing. Matt is spending the week here in Italy working with Simone. I do think that we're going to have some pretty cool new stuff really soon. Stay tuned.

Italy warns of power blackouts. Italy faces the risk of power cuts as a heat wave causes a surge in demand for air conditioners. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

No power cuts today. Not sure about tomorrow. Just like in California a couple of years ago. Tomorrow I'm flying to London. I will charge all my batteries before coming back.

Dave Winer: On Tuesday, July 15, UserLand Software transferred its copyright in the RSS 2.0 spec to Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Imho is really a great move. A significant step in the direction of putting RSS in the hands it belongs to: users'.

Utilizing blogs and newsfeeds, HELP!blog is a vehicle to connect people with needs with people with solutions. It might as be as simple as an easy answer to a question or it might be more significant help to someone's desparate situation.

Either way, HELP!blog is there to put out the word of needs to folks listening who might have answers.

• Some Nigerian weirdo invents something about Nigerian selling Uranium to Iraq (must be in the same group of those sending you spam asking if they can move $4M to your bank account)
• then he sells the news to the Italian secret service
• they think appropriate to report to the British secret services
• who will then pass the news to the CIA
• who will send it over at the White House
• just in time to get it included in the President's address to the nation.

And somebody is accusing bloggers of not checking facts before posting?

Scott Johnson: what I'd recommend to aggregator vendors is that they standardize on an <a href="aggregator://">aggregator:// protocol so that other tools which produce RSS can easily embed that into applications.  I'd gladly add a generic Aggregator button to Feedster in a heartbeat so that this could work with any tool that handles the <a href="aggregator://">aggregator:// protocol.  [The FuzzyBlog!]

Sounds like a good idea to me. We'd happily support it too within our current and future applications.

Westminster is to hold a world-first tonight, when around 120 bloggers descend on parliament for a discussion on how politicians can best use the "blogosphere" to further policy and public interaction. [Guardian Unlimited]

How come my very British friend and partner Matt was not invited?

Longhorn the dump truck.

There's one flaw in Bray's latest rant, something like 99.99 percent of the people who use PCs use Windows PCs. That forces developers to opt for the trunk, to plow the mastah's field, if they like to be where the people are. Yes they like browser-based software, me too, but if they were editing their website for any length of time in the browser, they'd yearn for the good old days of WYSIWYG and spell-checkers (I spell really well, and would trade off wizzy for an outliner, and have). This is what the anti-trust trial was really about. Microsoft won't upgrade the browser the way Don Park says they will (see above) because that would help a free product cannibalize a for-pay product. They own both. We're about to yearn for the good old days of developing in a locked trunk, because we are now developing for a platform that's in the dumpster, and soon will be in the dump. At least the locked trunk was going somewhere. Of course, developers, idiots that they are, are fighting over bullshit instead of building something that's too big to fit in the dump truck.

[Scripting News]

I don't like writing in a browser too. Everytime I'm writing anything longer than a post, I use a text editor (usually BBEdit) and the cut and paste to the browser. It's sick.

For some time I've been using NetNewsWire to edit my weblog. Even without wysiwyg it was a better experience than the browser. NetNewsWire was connecting to my blogging tool (Radio) via some standard API.

I had to switch back to browser editing when I started using addtional tools on Radio, such as the k-collector client (which allows me to add topics to my posts) and recently a new trackback tool. We are trying to develop new software and right now the only infrastructure that allows us to create a GUI for it is the browser.

So here I am back in a text area, because current standards and software don't support new features as easily as a browser. But browsers are dead, there has not been any significant advance in browser technology for years.

The browser is comfortable for developers because it solved a lot of GUI problems. You can easliy add and remove stuff from your application and it will keep working looking relatively well. Current API and editors don't allow that (and I'm not sure that future ones will). The whole complexity of the world can be simplified to a title, a description and a link. We need new standards flexible enough to allow us to go further than weblogs, actually we need them to allow us to go wherever we want, in places we have not even started dreaming of.

But here we are, on one side a few huge companies, with lots of resources, controlling most of the environment, and on the other side a bunch of smart developers who are too small, too focused on their own agendas and probably too short sighted to get out from this situation.

It doesn't look very promising at the moment, uh?

LOL! This windows senior programmer, 20 years of experience, tells me he does know the mac as well. Doesn't seem to know OSX though, so I tell him about the BSD nature of it and show him some quicktimes of the interface (I don't own a mac). After some seconds of unreal silence, he says: "How the hell can they do that using a Motorola 68000?!?" [Cristian Vidmar: CRISTIAN VIDMAR: M y P u b l i c W e b l o g]

Many bloggers and content producers today are using the Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial Creative Common License. It basically means: you can use what I made but not sell it or make any profit on it.

Usually this doesn't mean that an author is not interested in selling his work, it only means that nobody is authorized to do this by default.

Now, what if there could be some authorization embedded in the content we create?

We are working on a draft of an RSS namespace which would allow authors to specify how they would allow others to use their content and also an easy way to pay for it. Ideally a journalist reading a piece in an aggregator (or a picture or a video clip) would be able to click on the "Pay" button and purchase a license to use that content.

Lulop has a big experience in dealing with such transactions and they want to be one of the first "hubs" for these transactions, but at the same time the RSS namespace is going to be open and anybody will be able to join the party.

Thoughts?

Hint: it start from sales.

For example, this is the RSS feed of the RSS Aggregators topic.

A next step should be allowing users to generate feeds from lists of topics they are interested to.

Of course, now that I'm using the term "pay per click" in a post, the google search engine will be even more convinced that this is appropriate, and there's no way for me to change that. I don't like it.

If this is going to continue, I guess that I'll get rid of these ads pretty soon...

Ric Ford: Future of MacInTouch.

Technically speaking Macintouch is probably not a weblog. It has been for a long time my main source of information for the whole Macintosh business.

Today it looks like indipendent news sources like Macintouch are struggling to stay afloat: advertising is not enough: most budgets end up on the big search engines anyway.

We all love this kind of sites but we need to find a way to support them economically. Subscriptions could be a solution. Any other ideas?

Berlusconi in EU 'Nazi' slur. The Italian PM lashes out at a German MEP, appearing to compare him to a Nazi camp guard. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Being Italian in these days is embarassing...

A couple of notes so far:

• Google seems to think that on this weblog is relevant as far as collaboration software and in some cases weblogging applications are concerned.

• From the control panel I can decide which ads I don't want on my site (for example competitors). I can't decide which ads I do want on my site.

• I have an high clicktrough rate because *I* am clicking on those ads: no, I'm not cheating, I do find some of those ads interesting... In fact it makes sense: considering that google "reads" my weblog, it should be able to guess what kind of ads appeal not only my readers but also myself. Weblogs are the ultimate profiling system.

During the long drive back, talking with Matt, we imagined a service where any blogger could pick the banners of companies he really cares about or talk about on his weblog. It would make much more sense than the current AdSense where ads are placed on your site according to what google thinks you like, not what you really like. It's what Don Park is saying today.

Nonetheless, AdSense seems to work. I am subscribing and see what happens, even in case of bad ads, if it could mean money at the moment I'm interested.

Given the kind of traffic that this (and most other blogs) get, getting linked from top bloggers will suddenly become a matter of money. Only a couple of days ago, Dave wrote about Scripting.com:

What would it be worth to you, not in monetary terms, but in support terms, to keep this going.

Putting ads on your blog would suddenly make the monetary terms important as well. Will this influence the relationship between bloggers?