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K-Boring By: Mark Morgan on 11/26/2001; 12:25 PM I am completely underwhelmed by Userland's K-Logs thing. Not only does it have the second worst product name to come out of them (Radio is the worst--the product has nothing at all to do with radios or music), everything he describes can easily be done by Conversant. Yawn.
Re: K-Boring By: Brian Carnell on 11/26/2001; 1:23 PM At 12:41 PM 11/26/2001 -0500, you wrote: I am completely underwhelmed by Userland's K-Logs (http://jrobb.userland.com/2001/11/26.html#685) thing. Not only does it have the second worst product name to come out of them (Radio is the worst--the product has nothing at all to do with radios or music), I like the term "knowledge logging" but agree that K-Log is not a good abbreviation. In fact, shades of Radio, it sounds like the call letters for some cheesy radio station ("Good morning, K-Log listeners...") everything he describes can easily be done by Conversant. The knowledge logging Yahoo! groups that Robb refers to is very interesting on this point. Namely, that Radio will be an awesome product if you have pretty much the same way of working as Userland does. If not, well, you're out in the cold. The discussion on metadata was fascinating -- nobody uses metadata because it takes too much time (and the metadata interface in most apps. stinks), so what's the point in supporting it? The solution is the sort of flexibility that Conversant has -- let organizations and, where possible, individuals, tailor the capture of metadata to their particular uses and you drastically cut down on the costs of adding metadata. I run several web sites, as you know, and if I was stuck with a one-size fits all metadata solution I probably wouldn't use it either. The sort of things I want to keep track of on one site are radically different from what I'm tracking on another site. (And the mini-document management system you've got set up here using custom fields is a very good example of that). Being able to customize the sort of metadata that is added makes it possible to add metadata at very low costs (mostly in time), because it's an elegant, custom fit rather than some clunky interface relying on what some programmer who doesn't know me thought I might want to capture about my data.
Re: K-Boring By: Mark Morgan on 11/27/2001; 10:32 AM Unless I miss my guess, all this automation requires the use of Userland's Radio. So to forward e-mails, for example, you need to write a Radio script. I usually don't bother spending time playing "whose software is better" with Userland. Their CEO, Dave Winer, has a hair-trigger temper. This K-Log thing is something else. I've got a bug up my butt about it. They built a Knowledge-Logging mailing list for the sole purpose of hyping the product. I thought my evangelism was transparent! How annoying. This stuff about requiring an outside tool (Radio) to do things is an interesting dilemna. Joel Spolsky spent some time recently attacking browser-based CMS's because of the crappy browser interface, but I think he missed his own point: "Despite the fact that these systems had web-based editing interfaces and advanced workflow, we kept hearing that in real life, reporters created their content in Microsoft Word, did the workflow the old way (email), and only at the very last minute, a secretary opened the Word file and cut and pasted it into the content management system. And, because every company on the planet has standardized on Word, and doesn't want to teach anyone to use a new piece of software and a new set of habits. I agree with him on the UI issue. I'd march through the snow in my underwear to have command+S do something valuable in my browser. I don't think the secret to success is introducing another piece of software into the mix. I think the real answer remains getting the existing software to work with one's server-based CMS. The first company to make "type it into Word, click the publish button" work will be the one to win the day. So I don't think requiring companies to buy Radio to get their K-Logs (still a dumb name) to work is the solution. You want universal acceptance for your product, get it to work with the universal word processor. One of the things I've really admired about the development cycle for Conversant is the company's apparent commitment to this idea. My chosen browser, my e-mail client, my newsreader. I just use whatever I have sitting around at my end, and they worry about their end. Elegant, simple, direct. This has been your Conversant evangelism moment.
Re: K-Boring By: Brian Carnell on 11/27/2001; 3:27 PM And, because every company on the planet has standardized on Word, and doesn't want to teach anyone to use a new piece of software and a new set of habits. I agree with him on the UI issue. I'd march through the snow in my underwear to have command+S do something valuable in my browser. I don't think the secret to success is introducing another piece of software into the mix. I think the real answer remains getting the existing software to work with one's server-based CMS. The first company to make "type it into Word, click the publish button" work will be the one to win the day. Do people actually get work done with Word? The main reason I don't use the browser to do most of my writing is due to the same reason I don't user Word -- usually the software is bloated and crash-prone to an absurd extent. Even using the latest technologies, Word and its imitators are really difficult to use for actually *writing* (they are good, however, as dumbed down page layout programs -- I edit a lot of books that are completely done in Word or WordPerfect). The only thing I really miss about Word is that I have yet to find a text editor that comes with a grammar checker. So I don't think requiring companies to buy Radio to get their K-Logs (still a dumb name) to work is the solution. You want universal acceptance for your product, get it to work with the universal word processor. One of the things I've really admired about the development cycle for Conversant is the company's apparent commitment to this idea. My chosen browser, my e-mail client, my newsreader. I just use whatever I have sitting around at my end, and they worry about their end. Elegant, simple, direct. The browser window's lack of functionality is also its chief asset -- I know lots of people who won't go near Word because it's so confusing, but I haven't met anyone yet who didn't instantly understand how to post a message using a web form (well, except one of my bosses who took several days just to learn how to doubleclick his mouse). Which is what I don't grok about Radio -- who is going to us it to post to a weblog? Geeks like me and you maybe, but people in the real world? Most of the people I work with are pretty tech. savvy, but there's no way Radio would be intuitive to them and absolutely no way they'd be able to take the time to learn it. I know very little about browsers, but I'm surprised nobody's ever just programmed a plugin so that I could just use my favorite text editor within the browser to edit text. The "Publish" button is a very good idea. The text editor I use already has an automatic FTP feature so you could write a document, hit a button, and send it to whatever FTP site and directory you've designated. Not very useful IMO, but transform that to a Publish button that would use an XML-RPC interface to send my data to my web site, and I'd be interested.
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