Day: June 8, 2002

Talk About People Without Ethics

Dave Winer’s been going on and on about journalistic ethics, but how about getting some ethics of his own? Winer has a habit of talking about things that he doesn’t understand, but why was he dissing a site that he apparently didn’t even read?

In this post he disses the so-called warbloggers, apparently jealous of the attention they’ve been getting from the media,

While we do bash egos from time to time in TechBlogLand, we’re getting a lot more work done these days, using weblogs as the venue for sharing stuff. I like to tell the reporters that SOAP and XML-RPC, RSS and OPML could never have happened without weblogs. I asked the reporter if they could ask Glenn Reynolds to tell them when Hollywood is screwing computer users, or if they ever come up with a solution to the Microsoft antitrust case. And by the way, whose software do you think they use and do they even know how to use it? Andrew Sullivan just discovered permalinks a few days ago. Heh. Believe me there’s more work to do, and it’s going to be programmers and information mavens that lead the way.

BTW, I have something of an advantage, in that my blog predates the media rage that centered on the Pyra crowd, so I’ve been through this before. Someday Glenn Reynolds will be shocked to find out that he’s not the darling of the bigpubs anymore, then someone else will be blustering how they made him obsolete. It won’t be any more true then than it is now. This is meta-news. Boring.

At the time I thought the line about Hollywood and Microsoft was odd since Reynolds has indeed talked about intellectual property issues in the past, but I didn’t post because I’d filled my anti-Winer posts quotient for the month. But Winer’s post today is really outrageous,

OK, I admit it — I’m clueless.

No kidding!

What exactly is a warblogger?

I’ve been reading Glenn’s site every time it updates for the last few days. I don’t see a warrior. I see a mediator.

He links to differing points of view. He cuts through the rage and says “That’s not anti-Semitism, Jason. It’s just opposition to Israel’s policies.”

Is Glenn a warblogger?

If so — where’s the war?

So, Winer insulted Reynolds, Sullivan and other warbloggers without bothering to even read their sites. And he’s criticizing Dan Gillmor’s committment to journalistic ideals? Please.

Knowledge Logging and E-Mail

Seth Dillingham posted a response today to this post by John Robb about whether or not e-mail is an appropriate tool for waht Robb calls “knowledge logging.”

Robb has a lot of excellent insights about knowledge management and I try to follow his posts pretty closely, but Robb also has a habit of ignoring or denigrating worthwhile tools that do not fit into Userland’s plans (i.e., half the time his posts are excellent, half the time they’re just Userland marketing drivel).

One of his ongoing projects is dismissing e-mail as an effective component of knowledge management, but his claims make no sense at all. According to Robb, e-mail is:

1. Too time consuming — Robb claims it takes him 3-4 hours to go through 200 e-mails where he can scan 500 weblog posts in just 20 minutes. This can’t be serious. From my experience, e-mail is much faster to go through, especially if you have an e-mail client with decent filtering.

My Animal Rights site gets 50-60 posts a day. All of those posts are sent to me via e-mail, filtered into a folder, and I can go through them all very quickly — far more quickly than I could by reading them on the web site.

And I know I’m not alone in this. Many of the people who access my web sites do so only via e-mail. They never actually visit the web version because e-mail is so much easier to deal with.

I suppose Robb might reply that they could go even quicker by using an RSS aggregator tool like Radio, but a) nobody outside of a (growing) handful of geeks knows what RSS is, and b) few people want to learn yet another application. Everybody has e-mail these days, however.

2. Not Archived and Horrible Search Features — I have about 400 megabytes of archived e-mails, so I’m not so sure what Robb is talking about here. Most e-mail lists I’m subscribed to have some external list archive as well, so if my local archive is destroyed there is always a public archive.

I use Eudora and can search my local archives very quickly. I needed to find a friend’s phone number last night, and it took just a couple minutes to find the relevant e-mail I was looking for. And the reason it took that long was the real problem with search functions, which is figuring out how to generate a request that will return the desired results.

Robb sums up by saying,

For sharing knowledge with a large group of constantly
shifting individuals; K-Logs win hands down.

I couldn’t disagree more. E-mail wins hands down for this purpose.

But beyond that, I want my knowledge management tools to be largely independent of the particular way that users want to access the information. I prefer e-mail. Others prefer their browser. Some folks might want to use Radio. Others might want to use a newsreader. Design tools such that users can get to the information however they want. Macrobyte has this philosophy exactly right in their documentation for Conversant,

Although most people see a Conversant conversation primarily through the web, it’s important to understand that Conversant is not, in and of it’s self, a web application. As much as possible, Conversant is ignorant of what Input/Output method is used to bring information in and out of the application.

. . .

The advantage of this design is that at anytime additional I/O modules may be written to provide alternate means of access a conversation without requiring any changes to the modules already in place.

That’s just beautiful, man.