The Sixth Layer: A Business Blog

Building an example of how to build a churning queue for blog posting bandits on the internet... this Blogger blog on blogspot.com is a good example of a content channel, the basic "news output," the first step to recognition in any sort of publishing company. The most you can ask for in the realm of consumable content (here we're talking newspaper articles, not video games) is a content author who provides content in text, audio, video, and URL formats.

Visit the Posts (Atom) feed link on the bottom of the front page and find the FeedBurner RSS frontend which shows the content in this blog: I am generally not posting MP3 or Video content, but the capability is there between Blogger and FeedBurner to add media files for a rich feed viewer such as iTunes to recognize and retrieve. You can include podcast content in your blog postings!

Text articles with embedded content can be viewed in a web browser and podcasts can be scanned in a podcast aggregator. Now, what about those URL-based posts with titles, text summaries and tag data: they're all coming from a particular account on the del.icio.us service, and if you have the account name you can request the set of tags by URL. But, what if you want to edit these tags?

What if you want to collect a group of posts, and tag them all a certain way? What if you want to drill down inside a large set of already tagged posts, and update the tags for a subset? The interface to handle this behavior has already been developed with tagging for gmail, but the feature described here is not available on this database... yet.

I'm on a mission to build this feature into my workflow. Anybody want to stop me? Please, I'm begging you, tell me this feature already exists before I write it myself!

No Pants Friday!

OK, this friday is No Pants Day and also the cable guy is coming to juice me up. I'm having a No-Pants Party at my place, from morning until night (depending on the timing of the cable guy) to celebrate the installation of the Internet. More news will follow as I know more; RSVP while you can!

Rest assured this still fits into my "don't trust a computer" philosophy; I see a future where we are heavily dependent on social networking sites to organize and communicate, which paints a pretty grim picture for security professionals in small business! Nobody seems to get the group administration thing quite right; Facebook has it down pretty well, but the utility of a facebook group is heavily dependent on the personality of the members. Every groupware system should be as flexible to administer as an IRC channel, and no more complicated to manipulate than an Explorer or Finder window.

I would say the next runner up behind Facebook is Google Groups and Google's beta Domain Hosting services. This is certainly more focused on providing infrastructure for an organization as opposed to informal or ad-hoc groups. Either way, I like nailing things down; the goal for Friday is a multi-point no pants video conference that you can visit through a simple web interface. It would be nice to integrate a jabber server so we can keep notes (?) but any sort of text chat interface will be plenty good for the purposes I have in mind.

Working with Windows machines and TinCam software (~$30), and so far not having very much luck. TinCam sends an .html and a .wvx file over ftp to my web server no problem. The website is accessible at http://nerdland.org/~kingdon/cam/webcam.html, but so far no dice receiving from the two computers I'm using to test. I've left this up streaming and I'm going to go grab my laptop, maybe I'll have more luck working on a machine with a publicly addressible IP. If the webcam works for you or if you have experience with what I'm trying to do, please do leave a note.

Tchues for now!