January 31, 2006
Joining Newstex
I have signed on with Newstex, a content aggregator. This is my first formal agreeement for my blog content, and I am looking forward to working with them. I am also very interested in the evolving business models for blog content and other kinds of micro or niche publishing. Newstex's own explanation summarizes their offering really well:
Newstex offers Content On Demand, including tailored, real-time news and commentary from thousands of branded newswires, newspapers, magazines, financial and business sources, official government feeds and weblogs. Newstex collects full-text digital news and commentary feeds, standardizes the content format, adds stock ticker symbols, people tickers and categories, and instantly delivers the result as easy-to-integrate XML or RSS newsfeeds.
They have signed up a long list of publishers, large and small. For a complete and current list, follow this link.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:04 PM
The Expanding World of XML Authoring
I have a new article in Intelligent Enterprise, XML Content Authoring For the Rest of Us. To quote from the intro:
XML authoring has long been viewed as difficult and arcane, and best left to specialists using complex thick-client software. Indeed, in some markets and applications, such as developing technical documentation for aircraft or automobiles, today's preferred XML tools look and act much like the SGML authoring tools of 1992. The same products, including Adobe FrameMaker, Arbortext Epic and Blast Radius XMetaL, still dominate.
But the world is changing, with browser-based apps, XML-enabled eForms, and the XML capabilities in Microsoft Word. The article provides a brief survery of some of these changes.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:27 PM | Comments (1)
DRM: Enforce or Educate
I am giving the DRM presentation at SPAB in the morning. If you are interested in the slides you can download them here (PDF).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:13 AM
January 30, 2006
Slow Blogging
I have been slow blogging for a few days, and have a small backlog of things I wanted to post about. Part of it is my travel schedule. I am in Denver at SPAB, and then am off to a client meeting in Orlando.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:33 PM
January 27, 2006
Mongrel Heart
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series. I don't mind saying that this poem reminds me of a wonderful mutt in my life.
American Life in Poetry: Column 043
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Unlike the calculated expressions of feeling common to its human masters, there is nothing disingenuous about the way a dog praises, celebrates, frets or mourns. In this poem David Baker gives us just such an endearing mutt.
Mongrel Heart
Up the dog bounds to the window, baying
like a basset his doleful, tearing sounds
from the belly, as if mourning a dead king,
and now he's howling like a beagle -- yips, brays,
gagging growls -- and scratching the sill paintless,
that's how much he's missed you, the two of you,
both of you, mother and daughter, my wife
and child. All week he's curled at my feet,
warming himself and me watching more TV,
or wandered the lonely rooms, my dog shadow,
who like a poodle now hops, amped-up windup
maniac yo-yo with matted curls and snot nose
smearing the panes, having heard another car
like yours taking its grinding turn down
our block, or a school bus, or bird-squawk,
that's how much he's missed you, good dog,
companion dog, dog-of-all-types, most excellent dog
I told you once and for all we should never get.
******************************
Reprinted from "The Southeast Review," Vol. 23, No. 2, 2005, by permission of the author, whose newest book of poetry is "Midwest Eclogue," W. W. Norton (2005). Copyright (c) 2005 by David Baker. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:13 AM
January 26, 2006
New White Paper on DITA
I wrote a new white paper on DITA for The Gilbane Report, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies: Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). The paper focuses on the (very) successful use of DITA at two companies, Adobe and Autodesk. To quote briefly from the Executive Summary:
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has seen rapid adoption and implementation. This is especially true when you compare the adoption of DITA with other standards-based approaches to content creation and distribution. Here we are less than a year after DITA 1.0 has been approved and major companies are shipping large multi-language documentation and Help sets that have been created using DITA. We can also point to DITA-specific user groups and conferences, and a myriad of vendors who are now touting DITA support in their products. All of this activity is over and above the use of DITA at IBM, the company that developed DITA originally and has been actively promoting it through the OASIS standards body.
This rapid adoption speaks to the usefulness, generality, and extensibility of DITA—and also to the clear recognition of the need for this kind of solution among major companies. Why is DITA finding success? Some consistent details emerged from the research.
- It’s available, well thought out, and comprehensive.
- Users “get it”—the tagging makes sense and accurately models their work.
- The ready style sheets and tools are a very solid starting point for implementation.
- As a result, DITA encourages repurposing of content into many required formats.
- The topic orientation encourages reuse, and aligns well with current thinking about information development.
- The reuse model in DITA is strong enough to support robust content management, including applications such as personalization and localization.
- There is evidence that DITA interest reaches beyond technical publications and online Help systems. We are seeing use of DITA-encoded content in applications such as call center support and Web publishing.
Together, these aspects of DITA combine to provide significant business value for organizations, including lower content development costs, lower localization costs, faster time to market, improved quality, and improved usability. This paper looks in detail at two major companies—Adobe and Autodesk—who have adopted DITA and are using it for major projects. It discusses the content development problems these companies faced, how they identified DITA as part of the solution, what solution they implemented, and how they have fared in using this solution.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:14 PM
January 24, 2006
On the Road Again
I am off to New York for a client visit again. Next week I will be off to Denver to speak at meeting, the Standards Publishing Advisory Board. I will be speaking about DRM, and the theme will be, "Educate or Enforce?" which I think is the right question to ask. Standards bodies, like ISO and ASTM, have an interesting set of issues around DRM. Their standards are their reason for being, to begin with, and often are their primary source of revenue. The standards also, of course, represent a wonderful collection of intellectual effort and property.
At the same time, standards bodies are facing increasing pressure to conduct their business in as open and transparent a means as possible. So how to balance the need to protect intellectual property with the need for openness and transparency? It's a good question, and one I plan to answer next week. I will post my slides after the talk.
My perspective for this audience is heavily influenced by ASTM. I have worked with their publishing and IT folks for a long time, and, on the matter of DRM, they keep arriving at a really firm “maybe.” Yet they do some other very clever things, including watermarking, and they continue to think long and hard about this.
I also think the standards groups have an interesting issue around DRM and the entire lifecycle of these documents. What about DRM for the standards as work in progress, when transparency is important but the content still needs to be protected? What about DRM when the standard goes out of date? With standards bodies, a member may have complex rights associated with a given standard—they may be an author of the work in progress who has also purchased the current standard. And so on. Not to make this crazily complicated, but I think this audience has DRM issues well beyond the simpler question of protection of finished goods.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:29 PM
January 23, 2006
Safari's Rough Cuts
Via Joe Wikert, I learned about a new offering from O'Reilly's Safari service, where readers can get an advanced look at manuscripts in process. According to the press release, "Readers who buy a Rough Cuts title get immediate access to an evolving manuscript. They can read the book online or download and print a PDF version. The initial version of a Rough Cuts book will not be fully edited, subjected to final technical review, or completely formatted." Joe likes the idea, but wonders whether enough early adopters will want to pay for it.
I think it is a great way for O'Reilly to get people to pay for the privilege of editing their books. Also noted in the press release, "Using the Rough Cuts service’s built-in Notes feature, readers can send feedback, suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editor."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:56 AM
Ping Recommendations
I am having a problem with pinging other people's entries when I want to. I get the following error (by example):
Ping 'http://gilbane.com/blog/mt-tb.cgi/173' failed: HTTP error: 403 Throttled
So I poked around a little, and I discovered there are some undocumented settings in mt.cfg, OneHourMaxPings and OneDayMaxPings, but I can't find specific syntax for editing the mt.cfg file and I am loathe to make a change without the specific settings. Any help out there?
Also, I wonder if I am ping happy. For each post, I ping the following:
blo.gs
weblogs.com
technorati.com
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
Maybe I can cut back on these? Any suggestions would be welcome. Feel free to email me if you don't want to post a comment.
Thanks,
Bill
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:35 AM
What a Difference a Day Makes
Well, two days actually. Saturday we had Springtime in January here in Boston, and this morning I woke up to this.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:29 AM
January 22, 2006
Coco Crisp, Redux
So the Red Sox might get Coco Crisp, whom I have written about in the past as a member of my all-time Major League Baseball Food Team.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:51 AM
January 21, 2006
Springtime in January
Just like the other day, we have unseasonably warm weather for a January day in Boston. If you read my last entry on this, the weather then turned for the worse. I took the picture below about noon today. The thermometer is outside my kitchen window. That looks like 57 Fahrenheit to me (about 14 for you Celsius folks out there). But now it's 5:45 p.m. and the winds are whipping as a cold front moves back in. By tomorrow, it should be 39.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:42 PM
January 20, 2006
Wikipedia
There has been a great deal of turmoil over Wikipedia lately, but I have not followed it all that closely. I use it, and often cite it. But tonight, reviewing some possible additions to my CMS Resources Page, I decided to read the Wikipedia entry on content management systems and it is really lame.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:32 PM
New England Learning Association Blog
I read recently that there are 80,000 new blogs a day. As Dorothy Parker might say, "What fresh hell is this?" But I am confident that, just as the early days of Web "home pages" gave way to better and more organized directories and portals like Yahoo, the current noise of the blogosphere will be replaced by more and better ways to find, understand, and read high-quality new blogs.
In the meantime, we have fine new blogs being launched amid the "daily 80,000," and the one I learned about today is from The New England Learning Association (NELA). NELA is a fine organization, which has been doing top-tier events around Boston for several years. If my memory serves me correctly, it grew out of some ad hoc meetings among like-minded professionals several years ago, and then became a more formal organization. Allan Cole founded it and remains as Executive Director.
Association blogs have an important place among blogs. Associations already represent a community of interest, obviously, and a well-run association listens to its members, helps build consensus where it can, and gives its members platforms for expressing the important issues and themes of the community (through journals, meetings, and other events). Blogs are a natural product of this kind of community building, and the NELA blog is off to a strong start.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:33 PM | Comments (2)
Enterprise DRM Conference
Colleague and friend Bill Rosenblatt will be chairing the Conference on Enterprise Digital Rights Management that will be part of Gilbane San Francisco. Bill is now accepting speaking proposals, which you should email to him directly. As Bill mentioned recently on DRM Watch, "decisions on speaking proposals are made jointly by the program chair and the moderator of the panel in question. Priority will be given to proposals from Enterprise DRM users who are interested in sharing their experiences. Product sales pitches from vendors will not be accepted."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:37 AM
January 19, 2006
To Play Pianissimo
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 043
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Lola Haskins, who lives in Florida, has written a number of poems about musical terms, entitled "Adagio," "Allegrissimo," "Staccato," and so on. Here is just one of those, presenting the gentleness of pianissimo playing through a series of comparisons.
To Play Pianissimo
Does not mean silence.
The absence of moon in the day sky
for example.
Does not mean barely to speak,
the way a child's whisper
makes only warm air
on his mother's right ear.
To play pianissimo
is to carry sweet words
to the old woman in the last dark row
who cannot hear anything else,
and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.
>From "Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems," BOA Editions, Rochester, NY. Copyright (c) 2004 by Lola Haskins and reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:16 PM
January 18, 2006
Web Marketing for Manufacturers
I will be attending this event tomorrow as part of my ongoing research into the topic of how much manufacturers rely on their Web sites--and really the content on their Web sites--to drive sales and marketing. I have written about this in the past for the Gilbane Report.
UPDATE: I am live blogging the event over at the Gilbane Blog.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:19 PM
Four Words
Here are four words I don't mind using together in a sentence: "unseasonably," "warm," "January," and "Boston." It is supposed to hit 50 (Fahrenheit) today.
UPDATE: On second thought, maybe the warm weather wasn't so great after all.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:25 AM
January 17, 2006
Open Content Alliance
The Open Content Alliance has posted its work plan for 2006. It certainly looks like a lot of work.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:40 PM
January 16, 2006
That Sony eBook Device
I mentioned some speculation about a new Sony eBook reader that was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. There are some details out on the Sony Web site, but apparently it will not be available until Spring. I sent a note to the Sony PR person to inquire about a review copy.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:07 PM
A British Take on eBooks
You can find some very bullish views about eBooks in this article.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:56 PM
January 14, 2006
I Was the Internet Once
Via PaidContent.org, I learn that the Chicago Tribune is the lastest major newspaper to stop printing the pages and pages of closing stock and mutual fund prices that have long been a staple of daily newspapers. They will still run the comprehensive tables on Sundays, and the daily papers will tabulate highlights from the day--most active stocks, local stocks, etc.
This probably strikes many people as a no-brainer. I probably last looked up a closing stock price in a newspaper in 1999 or so, and the Web is lush with financial information. But there are certainly some readers who--whether because of age or habit or temperament--still go to their daily newspaper for this kind of information. So I am sure some small percentage of the Tribune's readers will not be happy with the change.
And this is certainly more evidence of how the game is changing for print newspapers. Boston is now a two-newspaper town, but it had three dailies when I was a kid, and at least two of them had evening editions. Evening editions started disappearing as local television stations began producing more local news, and there are few evening papers anymore (if any?).
My first paying jobs were in newspapers. When I was 12, I started a paper route, and would eventually deliver about 60 newspapers a day to my neighborhood. I made about $15 a week, which was a small fortune in those days. I could buy all my essentials--baseball gloves, hockey equipment, and all the candy bars I could possibly eat. I also began working at a corner drug store, where I would deliver telegrams and prescriptions around the neighborhood. I also had the job of delivering four evening newspapers--one to a shut-in across the street and the others to the three brothers who ran the corner grocery store on the opposite corner. The brothers, I would learn later, were in the stock market, and the evening edition, which came out about 6:00 PM, would somehow--miraculously to my thinking--have the closing stock prices from when the market closed at 4:00.
I was the last link in this amazing information chain--from the markets in New York, to the presses somewhere in downtown Boston, by truck to the corner drugstore just outside Boston, and then into my hands. The driver would throw the bundle of papers from the truck onto the drugstore step. The clerk--a few years older than me and full of secret knowledge--would produce a boxcutter from his pocket and slice the twine from around the papers. I would grab the top four papers and negotiate the busy intersection. There were no walk signals in those days, and the traffic barely paused. At the first break in the traffic I would sprint across the street and through the door of the busy market. The brothers would be around the counter. Charlie, the butcher, in his long bloody apron was always the one to take the papers from me, slipping me a quarter--15 cents for the three newspapers and the remaining dime for me. Before I was back out the door they would have the papers open, scanning the closing prices to see how they had done that day.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:03 AM
January 12, 2006
Raising Cain
I'm watching the documentary Raising Cain, about the trouble with American boys. It's really good, and a number of the kids profiled are right here from my home town, Melrose, Massachusetts, so it has an extra poignancy.
The documentary is available on DVD. Of course, you could also read the book.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:48 PM | Comments (2)
What Calls Us
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 42
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Here is a poem by David Bengtson, a Minnesotan, about the simple pleasure of walking through deep snow to the mailbox to see what's arrived. But, of course, the pleasure is not only in picking up the mail with its surprises, but in the complete experience--being fully alive to the clean cold air and the sound of the wind around the mailbox door.
What Calls Us
In winter, it is what calls us
from seclusion, through endless snow
to the end of a long driveway
where, we hope, it waits--
this letter, this package, this
singing of wind around an opened door.
Reprinted from "What Calls Us," a Dacotah Territory Chapbook, 2003, by permission of the author, whose most recent book is "Broken Lines: Prose Poems," from Juniper Press, St. Paul, MN, 2003. Poem copyright (c) 2003 by David Bengtson. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:06 PM
Go Figure
So who said print was dead? TV Guide redesigns their magazine and increases newsstand sales by 38%. I've never been a subscriber, so I don't know what the redesign does for their existing readers, but clearly there is some appeal to the newly designed product. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of print were greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the equations of print vs online are more complicated than merely "print will shrink as online grows."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:03 PM
January 10, 2006
Google Books: The Other Shoe Drops?
This article seems to suggest yes and, um, no. If they do go into the online bookstore business, they need to do a better job than they have with Google Video. And, once again, a major company manages to misstep on DRM.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:22 PM
January 9, 2006
Upcoming Webinar on DITA
Over at the Gilbane blog, I have an entry on a Webinar I will be doing on Wednesday. These DITA webinars have been really well attended, so if you are interested, I would suggest signing up sooner rather than later.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:09 PM
New York, New York
I am off to New York for a couple of days, visiting a client. I always find myself wishing to write about New York--there is so much there to capture and discuss and mull over. I have tried here and there, but, really, the city deserves more. I'll be taking an evening Amtrak train, which gives me a nice block of time to read and write.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:28 AM | Comments (2)
January 8, 2006
The Long Tail
OK, I'm slow sometimes. I finally got around to reading Chris Anderson's article, "The Long Tail," some fifteen months after it first appeared and 10 months after Frank Gilbane commented on its relevence to enterprise software. It had caught on enough that I understood the basic idea, but the article is definitely worth reading, as is Anderson's blog. I find myself agreeing with the overall premise and a lot of his ideas, but he is enamored of some things that I am not terribly impressed with. Google Print comes up again and again, and all I can conclude about Google Print is that the search is only decent, the navigation frustrating, and the page rendering is often abysmal (see here, here, and here for examples I found in a couple of minutes of random searching, and I have seen worse). I look at Google Print as a potential model that can exploit the long tail, but a crude and early attempt at something that will be done much better in the future--either by a later version of this product or an entirely different product. Of course, Yahoo and others are in the game too, and publishers such as Random House and Harper Collins seem to want to take things into their own hands. And while the details of these books-on-demand models get worked out, I am sure Anderson will be most directly pleased if you simply buy his upcoming book.
Apart from my nitpicks about some of Anderson's examples, the ideas are important--and I think very important for publishers. Anderson says it best himself in the original article (bolded emphasis mine):
What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."
I hear this in different ways all the time from publishers who are ahead of the curve in electronic distribution of their content. Journal publishers who provide sales of single articles have found customers who would never have bought an entire subscription. Speciality publishers who have digitized old manuscripts and back issues of publications are finding small but whole new audiences for their content. The examples--and Anderson's ideas--are compelling and instructive.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:00 PM
January 7, 2006
The World Wide Web
Do you remember the first time you saw the World Wide Web through a browser? I do. I am a little hazy on the date, but it was thanks to my friend Bill Stewart, who was then an Associate Dean at Boston University's College of Engineering. He had helped one of the professors set up a lab, and invited me by at lunch one day. He sat me in front of a browser and showed me a few sites. It seems to me the University of Hawaii was one of the sites, along with a couple of other academic and scientific ones.
I was tickled, and knew I was looking at a Great New Thing. The Internet was not new to me. I had worked at Mitre in the early 1980s, and we had Usenet and email access as early as I can remember. But the Web, of course, was graphical. Here were photographs and variable fonts, colors and backgrounds. I was looking at recent pictures from geological experiments thousands of miles away and reading things that had posted in the last few days, hours, and minutes. Attractive, low-cost publishing that reaches users around the world, instantaneously.
Sometimes I still marvel at this basic truth about the World Wide Web--this instantaneous reach around the globe. Reading my site activity logs for the last week, I see that I have had visitors from almost 50 different countries. The geographical span starts out as you might expect--the United States far ahead of any other country, and then a few hundred visitors from the UK. There are a few dozen each from Germany, Candada, the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, and the Czech Republic. And then there is a long tail, and that is the piece that fascinates me--Iceland, Russia, Latvia, Morocco, Samoa, Singapore, Pakistan, and Iran. A warm hello to all of you out there.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:03 PM
January 5, 2006
Publishing Blogs
Scanning my log files, I tracked down a blog that was new to me: Joe Wikert's Book Publisher Blog, with the subtitle Book Writing, Publishing and Technology Perspectives. It looks like Joe is an editor at Wiley, and his blog is full of great material on the publishing business. The author's tips alone are worth it, but he also has some valuable posts on the various roles in a publishing company. Small world department: Joe's blog led me to another publishing blog, that of Chris Webb, who edited the DRM book that I helped write.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:27 PM
January 4, 2006
Ambient Findability
If you've been hearing about Peter Morville and Ambient Findability, he has a very readable introductory article in the November/December issue of Online. Peter blogs at findability.org, which includes a link to his interview this week on NPR's OnPoint. Of course, you can also just buy the book.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:47 PM
Central Square, Redux
I wrote about Central Square recently, and fussed over which photo to include. I ended up choosing one that, I thought, captured the mix of themes I wrote about. I had been tempted to use this one, which, of course, is only one slice of Central Square. I figured it would be precisely what Red State voters imagine the whole of Cambridge to be, but I decided it was better to not tease them.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:55 PM
eBook Fare: Bestsellers, SciFi, Reference, and More
The International Digital Publishing Forum has announced their eBook best seller list for 2005. It's an interesting mix, including traditional bestsellers (Dan Brown dominates the list), SciFi and Fantasy (Star Wars Episode III topped the charts), and staples like bibles and dictionaries. Here's the top ten, with their retail price.
- Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith by George Lucas (Del Rey, $7.99)
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Doubleday, $14.95)
- Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (Pocket Books, $6.99)
- State of Fear by Michael Crichton (HarperCollins, $7.99)
- Digital Fortress by Dan Brown (St. Martin's Press, $5.99)
- Embers Falling on Dry Grass by Robert Jordan (Simon & Schuster, Inc., $3.50)
- Deception Point by Dan Brown (Pocket Books, $6.99)
- Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (Merriam-Webster, $25.95)
- Holy Bible, New International Version (Zondervan, $14.99)
- The Narrows by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown, $5.95)
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:22 AM
CM Pros Balloting
I just cast my ballots for the CM Pros Board of Directors and Management Committee. There are ten excellent candidates for four available slots, so it was a very tough choice for me. I know several of the candidates personally, and have the highest regard for them. And then I read the bios and position statements of the other candidates and was equally impressed. The organization will be well served by any of the candidates.
What's really impressive here is the number and quality of the candidates. It is a sign of vitality for the organization, and bodes well for the future.
Not a member yet? No time like the present to join.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:45 AM
January 3, 2006
Udell and Tufte
I really enjoy Jon Udell's writing, and he has a great new entry today using some of Tufte's thinking to pick apart some Washington Post infographics.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:27 PM
January 2, 2006
2006: Another Good Year for Content Management?
I don't do or have much access to quantitative research, but many people (here, here, and here) pointed to 2005 as a growth year for content management. One of the drivers was the whole, dreary compliance thing, but I think there was more to it. The other contributing factors included:
- The increasingly inexpensive cost of digitizing legacy assets
- The increasingly inexpensive cost of adding significant structure to those assets while digitizing them
- The fact that we are several years into most (really, nearly all) content being born digital
- The fact that even unstructured content such as Microsoft Word and PDF files have some structure (read: XML) behind the scenes
- The growth in the use and usefulness of RSS
- The maturity of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), and thus the ability to bring more content-rich applications out to thin clients, Intranets and the Internet
- The growing number of programmers who can do SOAs, XML, content management, and content transformation well
- The growth in the use of transformation and rendering technologies such as XSLT and XSL-FO
- A growing recognition among line of business managers that these factors are all combining to make useful content management applications less expensive, easier, and more effective to deploy.
If I were to rank the relative importance of these factors, I would probably put the last one first. I had a number of conversations in 2005 where senior managers said to me, "Content management technology is more useful now." When I first heard this, I didn't really buy it. To me, the technology of content has been relatively stable for about 3 years anyway, maybe more. But the more I heard people say this, the more I had to reflect on it, and the more I realized they were right. If you look at my bulleted list (and you could think of more), a lot of good things have come together over the past several years. The result has been that content applications are easier and less expensive to deploy. And the rising skill sets have combined with a recognition from management to create more projects, more applications, and more growth for the overall industry.
2005 was indeed a good year for the content management industry, and I expect 2006 to be as well.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:40 AM
January 1, 2006
Rhododendron
In Winter, the Rhododendron next to my house is a great natural thermometer. The colder it is, the more the leaves droop and curl back. This is from yesterday, when it was probably in the mid 30s (Fahrenheit).
Here it is today, when it was 28 and snowing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:26 PM
Baseball Cards
Baseball cards are so much cooler now than when I was a kid. Take this one, for example, which is of Moises Alou, a minor star in my book. It starts with a "throwback" graphic design, based on a set of cards that Cracker Jack first issued in 1915. Topps came out with a set of cards for 2004 that used the old design with some new twists. This card then includes a "game worn" Jersey swatch. They take an actual Jersey he wore in some game, and cut it up into tiny pieces and include little swatches in the cards. The one shown here, owned by my son, has a nice swatch because it shows a small piece of pinstripe. For a collector, this card is modestly attractive, worth $3-8 according to Beckett's, the publisher that tracks such things.
My older son is a fairly serious collector, and does some buying and selling on eBay. For a complete listing of all the cards my son is currently selling on eBay, click here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:30 PM
