May 31, 2006
Imagine
Dave Winer Imagine[s]™ what™ the™ world™ would™ be™ like™if™ everyone™ trademarked™ every™ word™ that™ was™ ever™ added™ to™ the™ language.™ It™ would™ get™ pretty™ tiresome™ really™ fast.™ He is referring to this, but it is also worth reading this.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:39 PM
May 25, 2006
The Changing Face of Content
I will be speaking next Friday, June 2, at an NFAIS event, The Changing Face of Content: Creating Innovative Information Services for the 21st Century. My topic will be user-contributed content. Per the abstract:
A broad range of content is now being created by individuals as a result of readily accessible web tools. While this class of published information is not usually held to the more strict traditional publication process associated with books and journals, it nevertheless often constitutes material worthy of distribution and preservation. This session will focus on the challenges in enhancing the visibility of this new form of content and how such content can be incorporated into digital collections, products and services.
It's a day-long event, right in center city Philadelphia, and registration is still open.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:44 PM
Reading the MadCap Tea Leaves
Over at Palimpsest, Sarah O'Keefe has some interesting speculation about the authoring tool MadCap software is developing. I like her idea for a new MadCap slogan, "Annoying Adobe since 2005."
Sarah's thoughts are a nice counterpoint to what I am saying over at Gilbane about Quark. MadCap is moving in on FrameMaker, an established and successful product that has languished under uninterested management at Adobe. Meanwhile, Adobe moved in on and overtook QuarkXPress, an established and successful product that languished under arrogant management at Quark. Obviously, there is no telling what MadCap's tool will be like--it is only an announcement--but the useful lesson from Quark's loss of market share is that no product is immune from competition.
(Well, maybe Microsoft Word is, but, then again, maybe not.)
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 24, 2006
Quark 7.0 is Out, But Does Anyone Care?
Over at the Gilbane blog, I ask and answer the question, Quark 7.0 is Out, But Does Anyone Care?
UPDATE: Thad McIlroy thinks you should.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:52 PM
May 22, 2006
Folkways Recordings
According to paidContent.org, this wonderful collection of music will soon be digitized and made widely available.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:05 AM
Publisher Agonistes
AP reporter Hillel Italie gives us a view into angst at Book Expo America. As much as I love the technology of publishing, one phrase caught my eye--"the shrinkage of reading time." That is something we should all worry about, if true. But are people reading less, or are they reading differently?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:45 AM
May 20, 2006
MySpace Hallucinations
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has a great piece on irrational exuberance over MySpace.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 AM
May 18, 2006
What I Learned From My Mother
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 60
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Most of us have taken at least a moment or two to reflect upon what we have learned from our mothers. Through a catalog of meaningful actions that range from spiritual to domestic, Pennsylvanian Julia Kasdorf evokes the imprint of her mother's life on her own. As the poem closes, the speaker invites us to learn these actions of compassion.
What I Learned From My Mother
I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewing even if I didn't know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another's suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
Reprinted from "Sleeping Preacher," University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, by permission of the publisher. First printed in "West Branch," Vol. 30, 1992. Copyright (c) 1992 by Julia Kasdorf. 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.
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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 6:08 PM
Final Thought on the Flooding
Things are back to normal in most parts of Massachusetts, though people are now assessing the damage. The mayor of my small city was interviewed today on NPR.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:06 PM
XTech Conference Proceedings Online
Erik Bruchez has posted his X-Tech 2006 paper on XForms and Ajax. It's very readable and very good.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:04 PM
That Google Appliance Again
Count Tony Byrne among the people who are not wowed by the Google appliance.
UPDATE: Neither is Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg. He wrote an in-depth entry about it, and wondered if it were worth missing a Dunkin' Donut for. That's a question I ask myself all the time.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:51 AM
Duty Calls
Here's a great story, about a World War II vet who was determined to do the right thing for some soldiers returning from Iraq. "I feel it's my duty. There were people there to greet me when I returned home," said Charles Nichols, a twice-wounded 80-year-old veteran of the Pacific Theater.
My dad was a veteran of the Second World War, also fought in the South Pacific, and also would have been 80 this year. My late father-in-law also fought in the Pacific, but would have been a little older this year (82 I think? will check...). This was a fine generation of men, the greatest generation according to some, and Mr. Nichols touched my heart with his gracious gesture to these fine young men and women returning home from Iraq.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:38 AM
May 17, 2006
Proceed Calmly to the Nearest Exit
A confession. I don't own an iPod or any other kind of MP3 player. Clearly, the whole music download business has been doing fine without me. But I have been interested in podcasts, so I decided to download iTunes and start playing around.
This led me to the Podcast directory on Apple's Music Store. There, among the "New and Notable" podcasts was "Pajamas Media: Blog Week in Review"--thirty minute hairballs featuring the likes of Glenn Reynolds and Tammy Bruce.
I have stayed away from the political blogs, which only make my blood boil. Pajamas Media was coming into being as I was signing off from political blogging. I looked at it once, and fell asleep. As James Wolcott has said, the site is the Web's first Edsel, and that is being really, really kind. So, faced with the prospect of listening to these Karl Rove automotons prattle on, I decided to do something much more interesting and productive and got my teeth cleaned.
I mention all this not to lapse back into the political realm--not going there--but to observe that the new media technologies allow anyone to publish anything, anytime. Sometimes this is a good thing--indeed it can be a great thing--but sometimes it means wading through the dross to find something good.
UPDATE: Those Pajamas Media investors can't be very happy. More thoughts on that here.
The politics of the various sites aside, the difference in popularity is simple to explain. The writing on the Huffington Post is simply better. Most of the Pajamas Media authors are mediocre at best, and some of them are really dreadful (check out this bizarro one for an example). A worthwhile publishing project starts with good writing, if you ask me. This is why Slate has done well. The writing is uniformly very good and often excellent. Maybe they use editors. Maybe their investors had a clue.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:57 PM
XSLT 2.0 vs. XQuery
Over at IBM's developerWorks, Benoit Marchal has an article, Comparing XSLT 2.0 and XQuery. Quoting briefly from the intro:
Since it was introduced in November 1999, I have found that XSLT, the XSL Transformations language, is one of the most useful (if not the most useful) tools you can use to manipulate XML documents. Many available APIs and tools work with XML documents from Java or other languages, and I have used many of them in different projects, but cannot recall an XML project that did not use at least some XSLT.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I have followed the development of XSLT 2.0 with great interest. XSLT is a powerful language, sophisticated enough to handle even the most complex manipulation, but it is also very verbose and that makes it more difficult to debug and maintain large stylesheets. The W3C hopes to address this, and other problems, when it releases two languages: XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0. This article compares the two upcoming languages and provides some pointers on how best to use them.
One of the great things about the Web, of course, is the abundance of technical information available in the clear and free of charge. I have always liked IBM's sites, in particular, though, because they seem to have the most vendor-neutral and useful content on important, emerging technologies.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:08 PM
InfoPath Client Not Needed Going Forward?
One of the email lists I read is the InfoPath group at Yahoo. A question came up about using SharePoint Forms as an alternative to InfoPath, since the current version of InfoPath requires the Windows client be present on each user's desktop. In response, Gray Knowlton, who indentified himself as a Senior Product Manager for InfoPath 2007, said the next version of SharePoint will "include InfoPath Forms Services, which will render InfoPath forms to browsers and html-enabled mobile devices, and this will not require InfoPath on the form fillers' desktop, nor will it require any advance download on the part of the person completing the form."
This sounds like good news to me, and significant.
UPDATE: XForms guru Micah Dubinko agrees that it is significant, but also asks a pertinent question.
FURTHER THOUGHT: I wonder what this evolution in InfoPath means for companies like SharePoint Forms, which "provide out-of-the-box web forms for SharePoint... and [allow] organizations to deploy powerful yet simple electronic forms solutions with SharePoint without the need to deploy InfoPath on every desktop." What does their value proposition become?
I opened comments and trackback on this entry in case anyone wants to weigh in.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 16, 2006
XTech 2006 Week
Allesandro Vernet is reporting from XTech 2006 Week in Amsterdam. He kindly alerted folks to an excellent presentation on XHTML2 and XForms given by Steven Pemberton. Check out the CSS Zen Garden examples.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:21 PM
News from AIIM
Doug Henschen from Intelligent Enterprise is reporting from AIIM, where he offers an early look at SharePoint Server 2007 as well as a look at new releases from Ektron and Stellent.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:12 PM
May 15, 2006
Got the Pump
The basement is drying; I reached the far corners of it just now. Except for one large framed picture by Cartier-Bresson (this one, actually, though in black and white), everything survived. We have had water before, so most things are up on platforms.
Oh well, enough complaining. Compared to what some people have gone through, this is nothing of course.
Besides, the Sox are winning and the Yankees are losing. No complaints here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:27 PM
7500 Words and Nothing's On
What happens when you write 7500 words about digitizing books without mentioning the words "markup" or "XML"? You get a breathless conclusion that, "the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge."
Why do so many people who discuss this issue ignore the fact that there are better ways to develop digital text, and that the approach of Google, et al, could reasonably be judged to be mediocre at best? All you have to do is look at the average journal publisher today to see much better, more flexible, and more powerful ways to do this job.
And, by the way, this is old news. In fact, it is really old news.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM | TrackBack
OK, Enough Already
Massachusetts braces for more rain and major river flooding
Really, this is a bit much now.
I called my hardware store this morning asking about pumps. Interestingly, he quizzed me on how bad my problem was before answering. I have about 2 inches of water across my basement, so he recommended I wait until this afternoon and pick up something called a skimmer (they are getting a bunch more in this afternoon). They called back a little later and asked again about what I needed, and recommended again that I wait and get a skimmer. He didn't come out and say it, but I got the impression they are triaging things as they get calls, and saving the real pumps for the people who actually need them. Some people have serious flooding, with several feet of water.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:24 PM
New England hit by Heaviest Rains in a Decade
New England hit by heaviest rains in a decade
The Boston Globe is reporting that the heaviest rains since 1996 have been hitting New England. One of the local stations reported tonight that the town next to me (Stoneham) already had 10.5 inches of rain by dinner time tonight, with another 2-4 inches expected. I don't think I have seen rain like this before. I spent most of today dealing with a flooded basement. At one point, the whole family was bailing while I was running the wet vac.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:42 AM
May 13, 2006
Rain Out
The Boston area is awash with rain today, and through tomorrow apparently. They are expecting up to six inches of rain today and tomorrow where I live, north of the city. The Sox game is already called off, and I am sure there is water in my basement, but I have a cold and don't have the energy to look right now.
UPDATE: The basement is dry so far, but, apparently, Smudgie has decided it is not too soon to head for higher ground.
Some of you might remember that Smudgie enjoyed her fifteen minutes of fame on the Web a few months ago. For details on that and a picture of her highness up close, see this entry.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:10 PM
May 12, 2006
InfoPath Books
I made a number of updates to my eForms Resources page today, including the addition of several new books on InfoPath.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:57 PM
May 11, 2006
Stock Voting Rights Plan Hits Brick Wall at Google
I don't understand a lot of things about Google, but one of the main things is how the stockholders tolerate not having a fair share of the voting rights in the stock. Apparently, some of the actual stockholders feel this way, too, but eWeek reports that a proposal to change the status quo was recently voted down.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:15 PM
At Twenty-Eight
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 59
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Contrary to the glamorized accounts we often read about the lives of single women, Amy Fleury, a native of Kansas, presents us with a realistic, affirmative picture. Her poem playfully presents her life as serendipitous, yet she doesn't shy away from acknowledging loneliness.
At Twenty-Eight
It seems I get by on more luck than sense, not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood, breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.
I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude she counts as daylight virtue and muted evenings, the inventory of absence.
But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.
Sometimes I don't care if I will marry.
I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights, singing like only a lucky girl can.
"At Twenty-Eight" by Amy Fleury is reprinted from "Beautiful Trouble," Southern Illinois University Press, 2004, by permission of the author. The poem was originally published in Southern Poetry Review, Volume 41:2, Fall/Winter 2002. 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.
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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 9:06 PM
May 9, 2006
So My Cab Driver Says...
Stuck in traffic in midtown Manhattan today, my cab driver says, "There's a big convention in town."
"Oh yeah?" I said. "Which one?"
"The Idiot Convention!"
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:17 PM
May 8, 2006
Dewey Did It
So it was on this date in 1873 that Dewey proposed his classification system for libraries. It has since been superseded in the US, largely, by the Library of Congress Classification System, but my local library still uses it. Dewey has his critics, of course, and the contemporary world of online information has much different requirements than Dewey could have imagined. But here's to Melvil Dewey, and his inclination to bring order to an otherwise chaotic world.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:02 PM
May 6, 2006
There is Another Way
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 58
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
A worm in an apple, a maggot in a bone, a person in the world. What might seem an odd assortment of creatures is beautifully interrelated by the Massachusetts poet Pat Schneider. Her poem suggests that each living thing is richly awake to its own particular, limited world.
There Is Another Way
There is another way to enter an apple:
a worm's way.
The small, round door
closes behind her. The world
and all its necessities
ripen around her like a room.
In the sweet marrow of a bone,
the maggot does not remember
the wingspread
of the mother, the green
shine of her body, nor even
the last breath of the dying deer.
I, too, have forgotten
how I came here, breathing
this sweet wind, drinking rain,
encased by the limits
of what I can imagine
and by a husk of stars.
Reprinted from "Another River: New and Selected Poems," Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2005, by permission of the author. First printed in "Kalliope", Vol. XII, No. 1, 1989. Copyright (c) 2004 by Pat Schneider. 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.
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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 12:24 PM
Busy, Busy
I have been traveling a lot, including out to San Francisco for the Gilbane Conference, but also to client visits in New York, Philadelphia, Tampa, and DC. The travel should quiet down the next few weeks, though I will still be very busy.
For those of you who attended my DITA tutorial at Gilbane, they will be posting my slides shortly on this page.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:03 PM
