Evolving Web

Windows Live Writer is Out of ICU

I received this comment in my post about Windows Live Writer being in a coma:

Hey- I'm the dev lead for Writer- I bit my tongue when I saw this post go by since I needed to keep my mouth shut, but I'm happy to report that there is a new beta available for download now- check it out!

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com

That said, your point about the silence on our blog is well taken- we're going to work on that!

-charles

So I have it and am using this post as an opportunity to review it.

Already, there are some specific elements that are very welcome.  The first is in-line spell check, which you can see the uncapitalized "charles" has triggered.

The next obvious one is editing a table which I'll play with below.

Monkeys	Fish	Jerry Lewis Noise
Rhesus	No	Whaaaaa
Spider	No	Errrrrrr
Normal Monkey	Yes	Heeooooooo

Okay, so that's getting there.  I can't shade specific cells, which makes it kinda hard to really call out specific table elements, but I can resize the cells easily - in the previous plug-in it was impossible.

The rapid access to Typepad stuff is likely to be a handy feature and, I should note, very welcome from Microsoft.  One of the things I've always liked about Live Writer is that it does work with things other that Microsoft-held applications. 

So, from left to right, we have stats, comments and layout for the blog.  Clicking these launches the appropriate Typepad page.  It's a nice addition, very convenient.  (Note also that they even have the Typepad logo up there). 

I really like that.

Another nice new feature is the ability to add categories.  Oh, rats, apparently you can't do that with Typepad.  I believe their release page is showing that capability with WordPress.

Windows Live Writer still handles plug-ins well.  Painless to install, easier to find, and fairly numerous.  I will take a look at the Insert Video one later in this trip.  I just picked up a new Flip video camera for interviews.  It's an impressive little thing so there'll likely be a review of it fairly soon as well. 

Lastly, here's the new version of the Firefox integration.  I like it, but I kinda liked the right click functionality the last rev had.

If you haven't tried Windows Live Writer yet, you should.  It's useful, small, and does only what you want it to and when you want it to.

Technorati tags: windows live writer, microsoft, blogging

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

Bigger attachments in Gmail, More Water to the Drowning

Thank you Google.  After years of me trying to teach people that e-mail is not a suitable vehicle to send transfer large objects, you have now gone and made it acceptable to send ... very large ... objects.

They say:

It can be frustrating to find out that the photos you're trying to share, or the presentations you're trying to send at the last minute, are too large for your email's attachment limit. Some of you have pointed out that we recently increased the allowable attachment size in Gmail from 10MB to 20MB.

The problem?  People have megapixel cameras and can't be bothered not to send 20 megs of pictures in one e-mail.

Well, this is what Picassa web is for.  There are plenty of more suitable tools out there for people to transfer large files - e-mail is the single worst way.

The one possible explanation I can see for this is that Gmail wanted to reward people for sending bigger files.  Why?  Because they want to kill Microsoft Outlook which saves all your mail data (including attachments) in one huge file called outlook.pst.

Most people don't realize that those files gather in your e-mail and take up space forever and ever until deletion.  This also means that as time goes on, Outlook becomes slower and slower - both in loading and in operation.

Gmail never has this problem.  Gmail couldn't care less how much e-mail you have stored (so long as you don't go over your personal limit).  It always runs efficiently - fast searches, ease of operation.  And best of all, when my computer crashed last week my e-mail was not even a concern.

Also, most other e-mail gateways won't allow the transfer of a 20 meg file over e-mail.  This frustration, they hope, might lead to more market capture when other people become annoyed at the 1 to 4 meg file restrictions on their own accounts.

I'd rather see "File Transfer Google" (FTG) where you upload your files to a location and then can give out permissions to download those files to e-mail recipients.  You could even make that an FTG dashboard that includes Picassa Web and You Tube, to make an integrated digital object management system (DMOS) that may make Google's alleged search for an actual operating system (OS) irrelevant.

 

Technorati tags: gmail, google, picassa, outlook, microsoft

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

How Quickly the Glimmer Fades

Last week, after the Facebook Platform Launch, Techmeme was awash with agog.  Everyone loved it.

As I sat in the audience watching the keynote and then later watching the widget awards at the end of the Hackathon, I was confused.  Sure, the Facebook Platform is fun to mess around with - but is it really compelling?

Paul Kedrosky hit the nail on the head by calling it "The Microsoft Office of Social Apps."  Others have called it Prodigy or AOL - all of which fit - but Office seems to really capture it for me.

Office and Facebook apps are mediocre but convenient.  If they continue to capture the networking infrastructure of the masses, they will also be ubiquitous.

Paul says that people:

... just want their social software all in one place, all from the same interface, and then they want to move on and get their (social/presence) work done.

This is a huge point.  When I load up Firefox in the morning, I click on the "JimKit" bookmarks folder and tell it to launch-in-tabs.  Instantly I have well over a dozen sites that require my attention every day.  Having my web presence in one cohesive application (no matter how mediocre) would be of great benefit.

The fright is ... will we end up losing more than we gain?  There were things I could do in EasyWriter in 1988 that I still can't do in Word.  Outlook is perhaps the most bloated, poorly thought out program in history - yet you cannot escape it.  Everything syncs with Outlook because it's the only game in town (Google Calendar, please improve your syncing!). 

The AOL / Prodigy argument is not lost on me either.  One person described it as "Oh no! It's the personalized web!"  And that it would be.  It would be AOL's lowest-common-denomiator design patterns and so-simple-a-monkey-could-understand-it assumptions.

Which, pretty much, is also true of Office.

The good news is that, without major improvements, Facebook is still a substandard way to manage your social networks.  Office has been able to remain powerful and substandard because their waterfall development processes have ruled the market.  In other words, Office has remained powerful because it gained its power pre-web.

This includes release cycles of 18 months to 2 years.  People don't have patience for that any more.  If Facebook doesn't show constant improvement, their audience will stray and their competitors will take over.

 

Technorati tags: Facebook, Facebook Platform, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, AOL, Prodigy, Paul Kedrosky

Blogged at The Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington using Windows Live Writer.

Where Do You Get Your Energy?

Last week, at Gray Hill Solutions, we had an all-hands where we wrote out and discussed our personal goals for the next several years and how we saw those goals intersecting with the company.  How can we, as a group, grow Gray Hill in ways that not only support, but even encourage our future goals?  What are our common goals, ethics, and culture?

I've always been pretty goal oriented and my list had specific things I want to achieve by the close of 2010.  These goals were professional, artistic, academic and personal.  My degree of specificity didn't surprise my colleagues, but the number and complexity of them did.

So my business partner William said to me, "Where do you get your energy?"   Which is something people ask me all the time.

Since my self-concept is as a fairly inactive person, that question always amuses and confuses me.  I have recently become comfortable with the understanding that my self-concept is baggage I'm still carrying around from the 80s.  I've done my best to cast it aside.

But why is it there?

I'm reading Chris Noxon's Rejuvenile.  (Rejuvenile Blog) I'm only about 40 pages into it, but it's already launched an epiphany.  This is an epiphany that may support Noxon's hypothesis and explain the existence of baggage itself.

Rejuvinile explores the growing common occurrence of seeing middle-agesters like myself dancing at rock concerts, playing video games, or at skateparks. 

As a kid I was always ostracized by my peers because I was a bit too "grown up".  Everyone always talked about how mature I was for my age.  They saw me reading Watership Down and War and Peace and The Haj, but they conveniently overlooked the massive Lego collections, the air hockey til 3 AM, the piles of comic books, and other obvious clues that I wasn't quite "grown up."

When I entered the "adult" world of consulting engineering and urban planning, I rose quickly through the ranks and was well compensated.  However, I was often (like weekly) criticized for being "immature".  Overly silly, overly demonstrative, overly talkative, and worst of all, overly familiar.  Add to this the fact that I looked young (carded even at 38!), and it was no different than school.  I was ostracized, for the same reason as in junior high, but in reverse. 

But the thing is, I like being overly silly, demonstrative and most of all, familiar.  It's a key, if not the key, to my response to William.

I get my strength from specifically doing things that don't drain my strength.  If you watch kids on weekends home from the standardized-test-factory, they can go from 6 am to midnight with hardly a break.  This is because they do things that they like.

As a kid, this is often a frenzy.  Running from one toy to the next, only sometimes stopping for specific focus.  For adults, we can do the same thing, but we also have some things called responsibilities.  And if we're smart, we can make responsibilities a game.

So for me, I know I should exercise a lot, but I don't get the chance.  So I went and got the pedometer that regular readers are sick of hearing about.  It let me game exercise.  That gave me impetus to exercise and a means to evaluate my progress.

For other things the modern adult doesn't like to do, we find ways of outsourcing.  Personal accountants are downright cheap now.  Those things off our plates means that those things are no longer a worry.  Worries drain energy.  Others doing the work means that we can focus on those things that energize us.  Not only do you save the energy drain, but you get more energy!

Pipe that into your cost benefit analysis.

So what's baggage then?  Why do I think of myself as slothful when everyone around me gapes open-mouthed at my apparent nuclear-powered to-do list?  I think that baggage is something that so thoroughly stole your energy at one point, that it continues to suck energy away long after the event has happened.

This is why "adult" often means "serious".  Because "adults" go through the first quarter century or so collecting existential freeweights that they never put down. 

It's a lot harder to walk a mile of the present when you're carrying 500 pounds of past.  Why do ya think they call it baggage? 

 

Technorati tags: chris noxon, noxon, christopher noxon, rejuvenile, baggage, goals, gray hill solutions

Blogged at The Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington using Windows Live Writer.  Check out the deer with triplets in our yard last night!

The Act of Recontexting

Context is a human construct that the brain uses to make sense of one thing or situation in relation to another.   Context can become very complex, but it always relates back to human participation or interpretation.

In light of this, nothing we create is free of "recontexting".  I have an item and it has context in relation to me.  Someone else can see that same thing and not only give it its own context - but use that context to communicate it to others in different ways.

Here we have a portion of my Hopeful Connoisseur map from Platial.  In this we have a few Jim-specific contexts, I eat at restaurants, I've eaten in California, and this is the chronological progression of my California eating. 

We see in there that I had Dinner at Lucques in West Hollywood, which I highly, highly recommend to anyone even remotely close to West Hollywood.

So that's great, I had some stories and I told those stories in that context.  It's the only context I meant.  My content, my context.  This week I was spending some time with Platial advisor Rama Aysola who showed me one of his maps which showed places he's been and places he wants to go.

 Up there at the top, above Volubilis and Medina of Fez is ... my post on Lucques.  So, Rama read my post and specifically mapped out Lucques as a place he needed to go and included it in a context that had very little to do with me.  My content, HIS context.

I guarantee you when I wrote about it I was not thinking of Meknes.  Totally irrelevant.  But now, suddenly, it is.  Simply because it went through Rama's existential filters.

But it gets better.  Lucques existed before I went there.  It was even in the Platial place database before I went there.  Almost everything on earth is discovered already.

So why did Lucques jump from my context to Rama's when there's a smattering of great restaurants in my geoblog?  Why did he choose this one and not the others?

Something I wrote in that post touched Rama.  I don't know what it was.  But whatever it was had enough force to jump into his context.  It amused me to see my context mashed up with his.  My Lucques over his Volubilis.  To see something created in my context, recontexted.

 

Technorati tags: context, recontexting, platial, rama aysola, lucques, volubilis

Blogged at The Alaska Airlines Board Room at SeaTac Airport in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

When Business is Living

I've had quite a week and I wanted to blog about it.  It was difficult to figure out where to start...  My computer exploding?  My wife going mental on me for five days straight? My cat peeing on the Matelasse left of the floor in front of the washer?  The constant changing of the colors that the painter will paint our house on Tuesday?  The flight to San Jose in front of the loud, obnoxious guy from Brooklyn?  The $60 cab ride to Menlo Park?

Wow, what a crappy start to the week.  And by the time I got to leaving for the Bay Area, I was having a grade-A bad week.

But then I came down to the Bay Area and things strangely immediately got better. 

I came down at the invitation of the folks from Platial.  A while ago, I was doing some testing for Platial. A build that they launched one week blew one of my apparently easily-blown gaskets.  My concerns were being discussed, but it was a game of telephone and the theory behind them was obscure.

So I wrote a post called "How Platial is Hiding the Context".  Lucky for me, when I get really annoyed, I largely express it through usually pretty funny sarcasm.  So the post, which I worried would really piss off the folks at Platial, ended up being a topic of prolonged discussion and debate (and they appreciated the humor).

After they were through debating, they invited me to their offices in Portland to talk about the issues in that post and my post on human understanding.  So this was planned but then it ended up that on that week the whole Platial crew was going to be in San Francisco.

So they flew me down to the Bay Area.

There was no agenda for me other than to hang out and talk about their software.  The workday was described to me as a working session, somewhere in Palo Alto. 

That totally didn't happen.  I arrived on Wednesday night and met with Platial CEO Di-Ann Eisnor and advisor Rama Aysola for a late dinner in Menlo Park.  I took a taxi to Menlo Park, which meant that I needed to walk the 15 minutes down to the restaurant.  The night was perfect for a walk and after the flight felt really great.

Dinner was nice and started the trip out on the right foot.  So far as expected.  We discussed my blog posts, my theories on how people convey meaning, and why Platial was uniquely suited to be the platform to realize this vision.  We chatted until well after the restaurant was closed and then went back to the hotel.  At the hotel, I talked to my wife, who was agitated about painting the house, but calmer than before.

The next morning, Rama picked Di-Ann and me up and we drove into San Francisco to meet with various tech-heads and potential Platial business partners.  Granted these weren't high stress meetings, but for Di-Ann and the people at Platial it seemed totally natural that I was there.  Like you are meeting friends for dinner and would say, "Oh, we have a friend visiting and we're going to bring him along."

An amusing point in one meeting was when one group of business partners asked what our roles were.  My role as "Platial's Buddy" was fun to spin.

After those meetings, we went to the Facebook Platform Launch & Hackathon which was a lot of fun.  It's been seriously hyped on Techmeme for the last day or so.  It shows some interesting promise.

Arrington went ga-ga:

Facebook is giving an unprecedented amount of access to developers. The API would allow, for example, a third party to recreate Facebook Photos, the most used photo application on the web. Users could then remove the default Facebook Photos and install the third party version instead.

Applications can serve their own ads and/or conduct transactions with users. Ads can basically be shown anywhere that Microsoft ads are not currently shown.

Platial has some very nice integration with the new Facebook platform that, if you give a rip about Facebook, you should check out.

After the event, I worked a bit (little bit) with Platial developers on what they might do for the hackathon, but then dragged Rama and Di-Ann out for dinner.  As gracious hosts, they bent to my will but weren't really into it. 

When we arrived at Crustacean we were at once struck by the nice decor.  When the food arrived any reluctance or lack of excitement on Rama and Di-Ann's part disappeared.  The food was amazing.  It was nice to be able to give something back to my hosts (and lucky the restaurant turned out to be as good as described).

What was interesting in all this was we discussed "business" a lot of the time, but the trip never for a minute felt like a business trip.  It was business as if business could actually be always conducted in relaxed friendship.

I basically "worked" non stop for two solid days and feel like I've just had a vacation.  And that's a glorious gift.

So ... how did this happen?

Beyond me being bitchy and writing a couple of crazy blog posts, it happened because it's part of Platial's corporate architecture.  Tracy is Platial's full-time, paid, and effective, community advocate.  She trolls for the interesting and the active.  She makes sure they are acknowledged.  She makes sure Platial knows what value people are getting and that Platial uses (or at least discusses) that value.

This is easier said than done.  You gotta look at a lot of crap, you have to see people with mundane ideas doing mundane things, and you need to be able to spot even slight glimmers of inspiration.

The system apparently works.  I had a great time, feel more connection with the product, am writing a drippy-sappy blog post, and gave hours of "free" consulting.  In the end, my discussions with the Platial team were far more compelling than the Facebook launch.  But ... I did get a nice luggage tag from Facebook.

 

 

Technorati tags: Platial, facebook, customer involvement, community, social software, social media

Blogged at San Jose Airport waiting for my very delayed flight using Windows Live Writer

The Extension of Identity

 Last October a certain person I keep mentioning in my blog came out to Seattle to visit.  Right before he left Michigan, his computer blew up.  It took with it Ed's daily routine.  I believe our routine becomes our identity.

Ed lamented that he didn't have part of his memory because he relied so heavily on the computer and I think it's tempting to equate that feeling with losing the computer and the applications it provides.  I'm wondering though, if this is just general habit and tool use.

What was utterly disconcerting for me this week was ... my computer blew up.  Okay, they do that.  And I felt like Ed did.  But I got to go one step further.

When Ed arrived without a laptop, I loaned him one of our spares.  He immediately started to recreate his habits on the laptop.  Apart from testing a few apps, it's lain dormant since he left.

Until this week, I picked it up.  I turned it on and started launching what might be seen as identity-apps.  These are apps that we integrate deeply into our routine.

Suddenly, I was Ed Vielmetti.  I loaded Google Talk and Ed had it set up to auto load.  So it logged on.  I was Ed Vielmetti.  Boy he has lots of friends.  And I tried to find where I could log off. 

It's actually kinda hard to log off Google Talk.  But Google Talk was convinced I was Ed and wouldn't take no for an answer.  I had this issue with del.icio.us and a few other apps.

The tool was that personalized.  That not having it made me feel grounded.  Having it misconfigured made me feel like someone else.

When I finally got my laptop in working order, I immediately went to the task of rebuilding it to my configuration.  This involved applications, bookmarks, start up procedures, security settings, colors, account log-ins, tab sets, communications technologies, etc.  I was shocked to notice how deep that customization went and how many applications it involved.

What really surprised me though, was Microsoft Office irrelevance.  Our Office 2007 DVD from our Microsoft Action Pack was not available to me today.  This meant I'd need to fly to San Jose without having Office.  And I didn't really care.

Trillian, Freemind, Skype, Plazer were more important to me than Word!  And why is this?  Because we gave Outlook the boot at the beginning of 2007 and went to a Google platform.  Oddly, when Outlook was no longer needed, the rest of Office became far less compelling.

Outlook, then, was an extension of my identity, but Word was not.  It's likely that it never really was.  This was actually a shock.  I've found that recently, Office's useful apps to me have been Excel, OneNote, Groove, and Visio.  Excel and Visio have been rapidly declining.  OneNote and Groove are excellent and I do need them back.

Peer compatibility is the only real reason to get the rest of the suite.

So, again, it's interesting to see what I felt alienated not having, what was inconvenient and what I needed simply because peers demanded it.  Which portions of the computer (my pictures, my tab sets, my bookmarks) I considered fully integrated into my self.  Which were merely not available for a short time.

My hard drive is due to come back from the shop early next week. The doctors say they can extract my data from it.  And then things will settle back into normalcy.

 

Technorati tags: identity, technology, tools, microsoft, del.icio.us, freemind, skype, trillian, plazer, loss, confusion, fear, uncertainty, doubt

Blogged at The Alaska Airlines Board Room at SeaTac Airport in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

Microsoft Live Writer is in a Coma

I love Microsoft Live Writer.  I've said it before and will say it again.  But they haven't posted an update to their own blog since November 2006.  This would certainly lead one to guess that it is a dead project.

To date, it's still the best generic blog authoring tool I've found.  But it appears the project has been abandoned.  I would guess that in one of the Live re-orgs, this team was disbanded.  You can still download the app from the Windows Live Writer blog page.

But other than that, it's static.  Performancing continues to improve, and I just started experimenting with the new tools in Flock.  As of yet, neither of them beat the ease-of-use of Live Writer, but they are getting there.  So, don't be surprised when you see my tag line below note that I'm no longer using Microsoft Live Writer.

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

Technorati tags: microsoft live writer, flock, performancing, blogging tools, dead

It 'Sploded

Well, bloody hell, my hard drive controller in my laptop blew up and now I have neither my laptop nor my data.  So I've been quiet the last few days.

I've set up a temporary laptop and will likely start blogging again after I've calmed down. 

I lost a lot of work and photos in that event ... so I'm not really gung-ho for blogging at the moment.

But this week I am going down to pow-wow with the Platial people in Palo Alto, I think that'll re-energize me.

When is One Wilfully Excluded?

I understand that the Internet is not for everyone.  Some things are not for me (lawn darts, professional wrestling, and glue sniffing jump to mind).   So I fully understand that one is not always up on everything.

Judges, however, I hold to a higher standard.  If you are a judge you could be hearing a case on emotional abuse, extortion, brain surgery malpractice or terrorism.  You need to be able to research very complex issues and understand briefs on those issues.

So Reuters comes along and tells me that a judge in England, who is hearing a terrorism case, had to stop the case to have the term "web site" explained to him.

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is," he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms "Web site" and "forum." An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: "I haven't quite grasped the concepts."

One truly would expect that 15 years of hype and mainstreaming would be adequate to impart the meaning of "web site" to even the least conversant members of society. 

Therefore, I have to believe that an educated man who is in the business of understanding society and ruling on its activities - and who can't even define "web site" - is wilfully excluding himself.

It is more than a little disheartening when you spend a lot of your time trying to work out ways for people to cooperate, communicate and exchange information and there is a group of influential people who directly impact society and specifically avoid observing the world in which they live.

 

Technorati tags: law, legal, barristers, judges, brain surgery, social media

Blogged at Econolite Colorado Springs Using Windows Live Writer