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Updated: 19-12-2005; 9:34:29
Paolo's Weblog.
 Martedì, 30 settembre 2003
KABLOG is a tool for mobile phones and PDAs that allows you to post new blog entries to blog servers such as
Movable Type,
blogger,
B2,
Blog-City,
UserLand (Radio),
Roller,
SnipSnap, and other blog servers that support either the simple
blogger xmlrpc interface
or the extended
metaWeblog interface. In addition, KABLOG provides extended support for posting entries to Movable Type.
Domenica, 28 settembre 2003
Dan Gillmor: The Internet has become a grossly commercialized Wild West in so many
ways. But the community spirit on which it was founded is alive and
well. The Net depends on the same spirit that motivates volunteers in
the physical world: a commitment to solve problems and make life better
for those who might otherwise not have the resources or expertise. [...more]
 Waking up at 7 this morning we found out that there was no power. The
house main switches seemed to be okay. The church tower clock we see
from our windows was stopped at 3:25.
A few phone calls later we discovered that the whole country was in the
dark. Apparently both lines importing power from France failed. The
situation is slowly recovering.
We sat in the car listening to the news (must get one of these), until
the power came back at 8:05. Almost 5 hours with no energy.
Now it's time to check our servers situation.
From my aggregator:
Massive power cut hits Italy. Italy suffers a major electricity failure with unexplained blackouts from Turin to Sicily. [ BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]
Power Goes Out Across Italy.
Power went out across Italy before dawn Sunday, plunging the nation
into darkness, police and news reports said. By The Associated Press. [ New York Times: International]
Venerdì, 26 settembre 2003
iBlog. Interesting (to Mac users anyway) to see that apple are giving iBlog away to .Mac users who renew their accounts.... [The Obvious?]
Here's my iBlog test blog on .Mac. The application is nice. The cool feature is the integration with Apple's iLife apps: I can add a picture straight from my iPhoto archive, and it's resized on the fly.
I use instant messaging a lot. I have accounts on Yahoo!, ICQ,
AOL/iChat, MSN and Jabber. I use two clients: iChat AV (because it
allows me to do high quality video conferencing with other Mac users)
and Proteus, a muli-protocol IM client.
I don't have all these accounts because it's cool, I do because there's
people I work with that use these different protocols and thanks to my
multi-protocol client this was not a problem. Until now.
Recently Yahoo and MSN have announced "improvements" in their services
which apparently will not allow third party clients to connect to their
servers. Yesterday my Yahoo account stopped working with Proteus.
I read several posts on Scoble's blog about Microsoft's infrastructure
costs, and why they are doing this. I do understand the problem, I
don't like the solution.
I am a power user. I have a powerful machine with a pretty large
1600x1200 screen. Still, this is how my screen would look like with all
IM clients open:
See? No more room to work.
Frankly I don't think that this is about privacy or safety. I don't
even think that Microsoft or Yahoo care particulary about pushing a
banner which I will never click from time to time to my client.
It's not about money. I would pay for my account
to be able to use the client I prefer, but I have not even been offered
this option.
It's about marketshare.
Since most users will not be allowed to use several clients, they hope
to force customers to move to one service. If I'm a MSN (or Yahoo, or AOL) user, I will ask people
I work with to move to MSN to be able to communicate with me.
In other words, they are trying to drive the market by controlling protocols.
Meanwhile they are breaking the system and making our life miserable,
but they don't care. The IM war has started and we are all prisoners. Giovedì, 25 settembre 2003
We are pushing harder on the development of k-collector. Murphy willing we should reach version 1.0 in a few more days.
There's a new feature we are testing which seems quite promising: auto topic matching.
Until now RSS feeds being aggregated needed to use ENT to transport
topics to the server to be properly categorized. Now we can subscribe
regular RSS feeds and the new topic matching code parses the posts to
find topics already created by other users in the cloud.
Topics are still created by users of a cloud via their topic management
tool in their weblogs while writing posts, all topics end up in the
OPML topicRoll and the topicRoll is used to categorize posts coming
from other sources.
I think that this is an interesting approach: only posts containing
topics that have been used by active users of the cloud are aggregated.
The topic matching code is not only parsing words but also considering
their context, especially links. While the word "Paolo" will give no
result, the linked word " Paolo" will be identified with the " Paolo Valdemarin" topic thanks to the url.
It's not 100% accurate at the moment, but we think we'll be able to improve it significantly shortly. Venerdì, 19 settembre 2003
John Gruber: IBM Compatible
For some reason I always find these old war stories fascinating. I do
remember good old Apple vs. IBM times. There was a lot of passion
(well... at least on our side ;-). Giovedì, 18 settembre 2003
Thanks Dina for bringing it in. headshift moments on Excellent presentation on supporting K-logging within a large organisation: Lucent's Michael Angeles has posted the slides from his presentation to the (US) Usability Professional Association's "Blogging in Corporate America" event in New York. His talk was called Making intranet weblog data usable.
The presentation, which is actully called "Making sense of weblogs in the intranet: What they are, why people are using them, making them useful for knowledge management", is must read. It gives a good example of talking about weblogs in a corporate world, tells a lot about intranet in Lucent and describes Lucent's approach to internal weblog support (strategy, which is not implemented yet). [Mathemagenic]
A very interesting presentation, definetly a must read.
This is exactly the kind of environment we are developing K-Collector for. Mercoledì, 17 settembre 2003
We have just received our first Xserve.
We'll use this server to host k-collector sites. It will only be here
for a couple of days and then leave for its final desitination at the web farm
in Milano. So far all I can say is that it's thin, large, heavy and the
blinking blue lights are extremely cool. Too bad that nobody will see
it for most of its life.
My Laszlo OPML Viewer.
Sitting in the left hand column of my blog (otherwise known as a
BlogRoll) - you will notice a dynamic, sexy user interface object built
with Laszlo Systems LPS technology. For those of you who only view this info via aggregators - you'll have to come on over to http://blogs.it/0100198 to see it. It's totally cool.
It supports OPML - which is what our WebOutliner imports and exports and we're now gonna glue it into the work that Phil Pearson has been doing over at the TopicExchange. Watch this process transpire in front of your faces - and then watch THAT get plugged into the PeopleAggregator.
[Marc's Voice]
Quite cool. Martedì, 16 settembre 2003
It's interesting to read some of the comments to my post about free weblogs.
I'm seeing the same trend also here in Italy where the most popular
provider of free weblogging tools does not provide some basic features
such as ping to weblogs.com, RSS feed or trackback.
People is asking "Why should we care? We don't even understand what you
are talking about!". New features are often perceived as unnecessary
"bells and whistles".
I think that there's still plenty of room to improve todays' tools, but
with the audience growing every day at a steady pace and consequently
having a lower average technical culture, it becomes very important to
effectively communicate what these improvements are about and why they
are needed. We must be able to explain why something is important (if
it is).
Otherwise we can all sit back, relax, move to a free blogging app and wait for the next wave because this game is over. Lunedì, 15 settembre 2003
Giovedì, 11 settembre 2003
News.com is reporting that BloggerPro is now free, because Google thinks that weblogs are good for the internet.
Of course, I do agree that weblogs are good for the Internet, but I'm
not sure that free weblogs are that good. The scenario that seems to
come out is that there are two different kind of blogging tools
"vendors": companies charging for their tools (such as UserLand or Six
Apart) and companies offering free blogs because their core business
relies on something else (traffic, advertising, registered users,
etc.), so they can afford to offer free service.
Now, my doubt is that companies offering free tools are not compelled
to improve their offering because they already have a very strong
"selling" point: they are free.
So far we have seen most of the innovation coming from small players
and very often innovation is related to defining new standards. If free
tools vendors don't support these new standards, given the huge number
of users they have (because they are free), they can stop or
significantly delay the adoption of these standards thus slowing down
innovation. Mercoledì, 10 settembre 2003
BloggerCon is
gaining momentum. Every day a new good reason to go there, every day a
new good reason to be sad about not being able to go there.
Congratulations to Dave and the rest of the staff.
I won't be able to attend, flying and hotel would make it too
expensive, but I expect it to be the best covered event of the
blogosphere, so I have it on my calendar.
Back in May I went to BlogTalk in Vienna which was very good and tonight I'm having dinner with Thomas Burg and his family who is on vacation in this area from Vienna.
Venerdì, 5 settembre 2003
It's probably old news, but I have just found out via Lockergnome RSS Resource that myYahoo now supports RSS. Cool, it looks like RSS is going mainstream.
Now... I think that we urgently need to find a better way to subscribe to RSS feeds.
Copying and pasting links just doesn't work for a large majority of
users: most of them are already confused because the click on the
orange XML icon and get gibberish code in their browser. I don't know
what the solution could be, it cannot be adding and endless series of
icons for each different aggregator.
I spent most of the week visiting small and large companies. The more I
talk with "real people working in real companies" (meaning: not nerds
spending their whole days hacking), the more convinced I am that a news
aggregator is the ideal center for any Intranet.
The basic idea is merge to the same server contents coming from:
- internal sources (accounting, trouble ticketing, exiting document
management applications, other data bases: we should be able to get a
feed from any internal app)
- k-logs (every member of the group has one)
- external news sources (general news, weblogs, specialized sources, scraped pages)
The output of the aggregator should be
both html that people can browser with their browser and more feeds
which could end up in personal aggregators or funneled in other
applications.
Centralized aggregators should not necessarily mean that every user has
to read all feeds. There should be both the kind of personalization
allowed by personal aggregators (deciding which feeds to subscribe to)
but also added vaue services that would allow users to discover
additional sources of information and anyway give different relevance
to different kind of information snippets that are displayed on the
page.
Mercoledì, 3 settembre 2003
Dave: I'm asking people with weblogs to point to yesterday's DaveNet piece. I'd like to see it rise on Daypop, Blogdex and Technorati, so it has a chance to influence campaigns, not just the presidential campaign, but local ones too. I spoke last night with Matt Gross, who blogs for the Dean campaign. Nice guy. I recommended he read the piece.  [Scripting News]
Given that weblogs are a very America thing, I hope that an Italian link will help as well.
We all need better politics...
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