John Udell: »A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I’m even more bullish on the concept today. If you’re managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative.«
Monthly Archive for March, 2003
The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian military intelligence reports.
This site posting reports that draws a different image than the US media. I have found one of the latest reports translated to English.
Joshua Micah Marshall: »Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario – it’s their plan.«
It seems my proposal for the Blogtalk conference in Vienna has been accepted. Very good. Hopefully there will be WLAN available so that people in the audience can blog while attending the conference. Looking forward to it.
Skimming the news about ground battle of the »coalition of the unwilling« I more and more come to the conclusion that there is no real plan for Baghdad.
People-Press.org:
»Anti-war sentiment and disapproval of President Bush’s international policies continue to erode America’s image among the publics of its allies. U.S. favorability ratings have plummeted in the past six months in countries actively opposing war – France, Germany and Russia – as well as in countries that are part of the “coalition of the willing.”…«
»Congratulations Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the junta! You have successfully pissed off most of the thinking population of this planet. If this doesn’t backfire on the USA I will eat all my history books…«
Lots of chatter going on about if the military strategy of the “house of cards” turns out to be right or wrong. What was wrong are the armchair so called “security advisors” that still don’t get why the »Ministery of Defense« is not called »Ministery of Offense«. Here is what Richard Perle said not too long ago:
As Perle told US News & World Report: “The Iraqi opposition is kind of like an MRE [meals ready to eat, a freeze-dried Army field ration]. The ingredients are there and you just have to add water, in this case U.S. support.” Testifying before Congress in 2000, Perle insisted, “We need not send substantial ground forces into Iraq when patriotic Iraqis are willing to fight to liberate their country.” Last year, he conceded that the US troop requirement might go as high as 40,000.
The problem with the current war is that any outcome is a bad one. No one can win. I have not heard of a political advisor in the White House that is a distinct expert in Middle East culture or has worked or lived there for a while. I think it is not the Iraqis that will primarily recieve freedom. That ‘freedom’ may release the hidden agendas of the ethnic minorities that have been surpressed over decades and potentially these agendas may not be about democracy at all. And whatever time it may take to defeat Saddam Hussein: the world has become a less safer place already.
I can receive MSNCB Europe and CNN Europe on my TV. Sometimes at nighttime there is FoxNews (which I don’t want to see at all). There has been talk about if the »embedded journalists« make sense.
I recognized it when I was in New York on 9/11: the majority of the US public does take “live on TV” for “authentic”. The idea of “real time” being more authentic because the image could not be post-processed by a journalist is fundamentally flawed. Of course you see “more” than you would without TV. But you see far less than required to make a judgment. Good journalism is about closing this gap. It seems there is no space left on TV for journalism in the US. Where are the reports? Where is the investigative journalism? Is this just happening in the newspapers most parts of the US public does not read anyway?
Most of what the so called journalists on CNN and MSNBC do is simply repeating of what has been said by someone. Everything is pledged to the persuasive power of images. Showing a live image of Baghdad, waiting for an explosion to hit is as perverted as television could be.
The former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned from his post as Leader of the House yesterday. He won an unprecedented standing ovation in the House of Commons. BBC is offering a recording of the speech in RealMedia format. [Kuro5hin.org]
»NetNewsWire is an easy-to-use RSS Web news reader for Mac OS X. Its familiar three-paned interface—similar to Apple Mail and Outlook Express—can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news.«
Cocoa Dev Central: »“I’ll walk you through some of the steps I’ve gone through to develop my current project: RemoteTunes. The application, when it’s done, will allow you to control iTunes on a remote computer. For now, let’s just let it control a local copy.”« [ranchero.com]
This is really cool: »This OmniGraffle palette can be used for general GUI design. I’ve tried to make it vanilla enough for platform independance although you can see some Mac OS X and Swing peeking out.«
Yesterday I had the first chance to examine the 12″ inch PowerBook. It is really very well designed. There are little glitches in the production of it (small gaps that are wider on one side than on the other), but generally it feels much more solid than my 1st generation 15″ inch PowerBook. I wonder if they will be able to keep this impression with the 17″ inch PowerBook.
Here is a user that thinks the 12″ inch PowerBook is a real desktop replacement with only two drawbacks: it is getting very hot and a lot of cable come out of the left side.
»What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else« (by Doc Searls and David Weinberger)
I don’t know for how long this document is online, but I just found out about it. Weinberger is the author of »Small pieces losely joined« and he will be a keynote speaker on the Blogtalk conference in Vienna.
This pic2icon tool turned out to be very useful. It add picture icons from image files so you can browse the images like thumbnails in the finder.
Wil Wheaton points to a survey of bloggers being conducted as part of a thesis investigation at Georgetown University. It appears to be a fairly well thought out survey with a good variety of demographic and behavioral questions about blogging.
Though I have a few criticisms of the survey (the caps on the choices numbers of daily and weekly visitors are really low, and the sample she’ll get will be nowhere near random), I still think that research on blogs is worthwhile and encourage you to visit the survey. [Jarrett House North]
I just checked out the new newsaggregator feature of Manila – and it seems I can’t make much use of it. The most important issue (somewhat typical for Userland): I can’t design the result page (no template) and it is English only. The site managers can’t extend the feeds they can subscribe to. I don’t want the server manager to deal with the requests of users to subscribe this or that feed.
After following a post from Dave Winer about NoteTaker I tried that application. It may be true that Scott Love is a capacity on outliners, but he does not seem to be a capacity on user interfaces. NoteTaker has a somewaht deterrent user interface.
»Flash remoting for PHP enables objects in PHP to become objects in actionscript, almost magically! AMF-PHP takes care of all the data-type conversions, serialization, and other client-server details. This provides a great way of connecting rich media clients with data and logic living on the server. While at the same time allowing designers to design and programmers to program.«