A hot topic in the blogging world recently has been: is Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser dead? Ironically, most of the good stuff to read has been via "Comments" forms - ie readers writing back to a weblog post. Robert Scoble from Microsoft said "The right question is: 'is the Web dead in Longhorn?' " and he got over 30 comments written to his weblog. Some were the usual bleatings about fixing CSS and why can't IE have tabs like Mozilla, etc. I posted a comment myself, which said: "How about converting IE into a browser/editor, so we can read and write the web at the same time??" I put no justification into this remark, as I was just curious to see if I got any bites. Well Robert himself replied, saying yes he'd like that too. But he also said something about not wanting to upset weblog vendors. This response was deleted from the Comments section soon after, as I can't find any trace of it now. But never mind about that, I liked hearing that the concept of a browser/editor is being kicked around in the Microsoft world.
Weblog tools have come close to achieving the 2-way web dream of allowing people to both browse and edit the Web. But I don't believe there is an existing tool that bundles (dangerous word) the browsing-writing-aggregating functionalities into 1 product. I use Radio Userland as my web writing tool, Feedreader as my RSS aggregator, and (you guessed it) IE as my browser. It would make sense to have an all-in-one tool that does all 3 of those things, not to mention also being a PIM (Personal Information Manager) a la Chandler or Haystack.
A few bloggers believe Microsoft's plans go even further - that the browser will be integrated (a nicer way of saying bundled?) into Microsoft's next-generation Longhorn OS. Or as DonXML nicely put it: "Longhorn has become the first major step towards a Web Based OS". If you throw writing and pub-sub functionality into this new web-based OS, then weblog vendors would have reason to be afraid. Or do they? Maybe it will come down to who innovates the best, who has the most functionality you require, whose dream you buy into (think Open Source ideology).
The web browser as a product may well be as good as shelved by Microsoft. But as Tim Bray points out: "...what program, I ask, do most users spend most of their time in? The web browser." Ergo, if Microsoft's most used product is being obsoleted, you can bet there will be a replacement that does what the browser did and much more.
After a few late nights, I've successfully implemented Easy News Topics (ENT) tags to my Radio Userland RSS feed. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. It involved rooting around in the Radio.root file of my weblog and upskilling myself in UserTalk, Radio Userland's scripting language. But mostly I stood on the shoulders of giants to get this done - Dave Winer and Matt Mower in particular.
ENT is an extension of the RSS2.0 spec. Its aim is to enable categorization of RSS items into topics. After reading about ENT and writing one of my first articles about RSS topics, I decided I wanted to actually implement ENT into my weblog. After some initial searching, I came across an article by Dave Winer called "How to extend Radio's RSS generator". This introduced me to 3 new "callbacks" which enable Radio developers to modify their RSS feeds. The callbacks are: writeRssNamespace, writeRssChannelElement, writeRssItemElement. The first one I successfully implemented was the namespace. I did this as follows:
1. Open up your Radio.root file.
2. Drill down to user.radio.callbacks.
3. Double-click on writeRssNamespace, then re-name "item #1" to "ent".
4. Enter the script linked here.
5. Click "Compile".
That was relatively easy. Implementing the item elements turned out to be trickier - particularly as the elements have attributes and are nested. It took me a while to get to grips with the UserTalk syntax, not being a programmer by trade. I bumbled around a bit and got to a stage where I juuuust about had the script right. Then I happened upon Matt Mower's conversation with Dave Winer and finally things fell into place. Here now is my code for the writeRssItemElement script - same process as above.
But wait, there's more. Because the ENT tags are nested, there is one more piece of scripting you need to do - modify writeRssFile. But luckily Matt Mower, one of the authors of ENT, has already done the work - right-click here to download the script. Open this in your Radio app, and it will automatically save itself in the workspace area of Radio.root. Then you need to copy it across to the following location:
system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssfile
btw as a sidenote, writeRssfile is just one of many very clever scripts built-in to Radio. It's amazing how much data there is in Radio.root, once you have a good poke around. It's a testament to the amount of work Dave Winer must have put in to build Radio Userland, so I do sympathise with his recent posts about software developers gettin' paid.
Anyway that's basically it for stage 1 of implementing ENT into my Radio RSS feed. Stage 2 is to actually put some worthwhile data into my topic tags - currently I've just got dummy data in there. Ideally I want to dynamically generate a topic word or phrase for each weblog post, based on the contents of the post and/or the title. But I guess this is where k-collector comes in. So that's my next project, to find out about k-collector and put some meaningful data into my shiny new ENT tags :-)
D. Keith Robinson has written an interesting article about the future of Intranets. He writes:
"...a company's Intranet would be better served as more of an enterprise-wide, network-enabled application than anything resembling a Web site or Web application."
It seems likely that content management systems will over time integrate with office systems. Products like Microsoft's upcoming Office 11 promise to be fully XML-compatible. You will be able to save any Office document (Word, Excel, etc) as an XML file, which will add structure and portability to office data. These days Content Management systems are usually based on XML, so it could be said that office systems are just beginning to catch up. However the main difference between most CM systems today and what Office 11 will offer, is that CM systems are web-based.
So will Intranets become more of an office application than a web one? Needs more thought...but right now I like to think Intranets will remain web-based. We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of web publishing. Weblogs, RSS syndication, XML technologies such as XSLT, and web services are just some of the exciting things that can be implemented on a web-based Intranet. Plus browsers aren't dead yet - they haven't even got to the read/write stage yet ;-)
I posted a question onto the Radio Userland discussion list. I asked why updates to my OPML blogroll don't automatically update my weblog menu. Nobody had an answer. A Google search came up empty too. But from my own checks it does seem that when you update your blogroll.opml file in your Gems folder, the ompl file itself upstreams automatically. However you have to manually push the updates to your menu - either by posting a new weblog entry or by playing around with the homepage templates (described below).
I've been re-reading Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. As inventer of the World Wide Web in 1990 and current director of the W3C, Berners-Lee is a visionary and innovator. His current obsession, the Semantic Web, is not yet widely understood or appreciated. Just like the Web 10 years ago.
Indeed one of Berners-Lee's earliest Web innovations has still not been widely implemented, more than 10 years after he created it along with the World Wide Web. This invention was intended to be one of the foundation products of the Web, but it never took off. In 2003 the need for this product is more relevant than ever, at a time when "social software" and "collaboration" are the buzzwords of the Web. I'm talking about the Read/Write web browser, or the "web browser/editor" as Berners-Lee refers to it in his book.
The original web in 1990 was made up of a server at CERN (info.cern.ch) , and the 3 protocols URIs, HTTP and HTML. Berners-Lee also created a browser/editor with which to both view the web and create content for it. His browser/editor was actually called WorldWideWeb. As Berners-Lee described it - "the browser would decode URIs, and let me read, write, or edit Web pages in HTML". However during that period, 1990-93, Berners-Lee was frustrated that nobody else seemed willing to create a browser/editor. At best existing browsers were read-only and mostly text-only too.
Then in 1993 the Mosiac web browser was released - its graphical interface was its defining feature. Succeeding generations of web browsers, Netscape and Microsoft in particular, introduced new graphical and interactive features like tables, forms, and stylesheets. However writing and editing functionality for the browser were overlooked.
Berners-Lee's dream for a read/write browser remains unfulfilled to this day, although the advent of weblogs has lowered the barrier for people to write to the web. The open-source Mozilla browser has some interactive editing functionality. But Microsoft, with over 90% of the browser market, is showing little sign of further browser innovation. There has also been talk of a non-browser environment for the Web - co-called Rich Internet Applications or microcontent clients. But right here right now, most of us still surf the web with a web browser that is read-only.
Browsing is only half the fun. Contributing something new to the Web, to the world, is where the real rewards are. Berners-Lee of course sums it up best: "I have always imagined the information space (the Web) as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create."
Over the next week, I'll explore what few web browser/editor tools there are available. First of all I'll check out Amaya, which is the W3C's browser/editor. Stay tuned...
There appears to be a problem upstreaming changes to my opml blogroll. The XML file updates, but the blogroll on my menu doesn't. I got around this by manually deleting the blogroll from my homepage template, publishing, then adding the blogroll back in - i.e. in a roundabout way I re-published the blogroll in my menu.
Wouldn't you know it, I came across a Userland macro today that lists recent titled blog posts. Where was this macro when I needed it yesterday? :-) Anyway, I'm playing around with this macro now. Still getting used to Radio Userland's dev environment...
...Got this working OK and I now have my 10 most recent entries displayed in my menu. ps if like me you wondered how to change the fonts, check out this page on the Userland discussion list.
Tonight I added an OPML blogroll to my menu - easy thanks to Jake Savin's instructions. Then I set about trying to implement a "Last 10 Entries" script into my weblog menu. Because I tend to write long-ish articles, I'd like to have a dynamic menu that lists my 10 most recent articles. I looked around the web for a feature like this, but found that most webloggers don't list their weblog entries in their menu. Most people rely on a calendar as a navigation tool, or they use categories. Eventually I did find a relevant script by Jon Udell called StoryList. It provides a list of all articles in reverse chronological order. There's also a script by Marc Barrot called RadioScan which extends the concept, but I decided I'll stick with Jon's script at this point. I then spent a bit of time messing around in Radio until I got it right. So now I have a list of my articles. That's cool, but I still want to put this in my menu and truncate it to the 10 most recent entries. But since it's nearly 1am, I think I'll tackle that another time!
In his article "Google Aggregation Strategy", Elwyn Jenkins from Microdot News reviews three Google "information aggregations" and asks which one will be moved from beta to live first - Blogger, Froogle or Google News. Microdot News argues that aggregation is at the heart of Google's business and that Google will build on the success of their search engine by offering similar aggregation services for weblogs, shopping and news - and more.
I will take that argument one step further, because I think that Google will start to provide syndication services as well as aggregation. The current crop of Google's aggregation services are "pull" rather than "push". People still need to go to Google's websites in order to find information. I suggest that Google will adopt a publish-subscribe model. People will subscribe to information and it will be automatically delivered to them on a regular basis.
The aggregation of information is the base for Google's success. But the value-add is to enable people to tap into Google's aggregated information base and create personalised "feeds". These feeds won't be the same as the results from traditional search queries. Instead of inputting a wide-ranging query, people will enter a somewhat more constrained "topic". For example rather than entering an esoteric query like "Dave Winer XML-RPC spicy noodles in Boston RSS sunset", a person will need to enter something that can be converted into a reasonably generic topic. A "topic" in this sense will be something between a Google search query and a Yahoo category. That is, it will be automatically generated but within a manually-defined framework (such as ENT perhaps).
