September 29, 2006
A Master's in Content Management?
Over at Gadgetopia, Deane Barker tells us he wants a master's in content management, and wonders why one doesn't exist.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:03 PM | Comments (2)
Speaking of DITA
I wrote an article about DITA for the magazine, Multilingual Computing. Unfortunately, the article is available by subscription only. (Also, unfortunately, I am having trouble reaching their site right now...) But I have four certificates entitling readers to a one-year subscription to the magazine. It's an excellent magazine. Email me with your contact information, and I will mail you one of the certificates. First come, first served.
UPDATE: Corrected "one-ear subscription" to "one-year subscription." No one wonder they have been going slowly! I still have a couple left, so e-mail me if you are interested.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:12 AM
DITA Open Toolkit Release 1.3
Release 1.3 of the DITA Open Toolkit is now available. I have written about the rapid adoption of DITA (for example, here and here). One of the big reasons for the rapid adoption is the toolkit, which provides users with, among other things, a ready means of publishing DITA-encoded content in common formats such as PDF and Help.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:51 AM
So Much for the Death of Print
I roll my eyes (well, not really, but figuratively) when I hear people crow too much about the death of print publishing. Clearly, a great deal of publishing is transitioning to electronic distribution, and--just as clearly--publishers are finding slower growth in print products, faster growth in electronic, and improving margins in electronic. But this headline, among others, reminds us that print is not dead.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:40 AM
September 27, 2006
Sony Reader Roundup
TeleRead has a good roundup of reviews on the Sony eReader.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:24 PM
September 26, 2006
Sony eReader Available
The Sony Portable Reader System PRS-500 is now available. TeleRead has a very thoughtful article about some of the challenges Sony faces. Meanwhile, I keep offering to review the thing, but no word from Sony.
More here from paidContent.org.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:54 PM
September 21, 2006
Welcome Back, Peter Gammons
Peter Gammons returned to action for ESPN last night. Gammons, the Hall of Fame baseball writer, had a brain aneurysm in June, and the baseball season hasn't been the same without him. Gammons was the baseball beat writer for the Boston Globe when I was a kid and up through the time I flirted with the idea of being a sportswriter. I covered sports for my college newspaper and was a stringer for the New Bedford Standard-Times during a time when the Globe had an amazing array of sportswriting talent, including Gammons, Bob Ryan, Leigh Montville, and Ray Fitzgerald. Even among them, Gammons was in a class by himself. He created a feature that is now a staple of many sports pages, a weekend "notebook" of short items that runs a full page in the broadside Globe to this day (now written by the Globe's current beat writer, Gordon Edes). I can draw a line from that kind of short-form collection to today's blog. Gammons' blog (for ESPN Insider subscribers unfortunately) has been dormant since his illness, but he does have a new column up (and it's free!).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:21 AM
September 19, 2006
Bookshare.org Founder Awarded Genius Grant
Jim Fruchterman, CEO of The Benetech Initiative, has been awarded a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each of this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows learned this week that they will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” funding over the next five years.
Jim Fruchterman, 47, is an electrical engineer turned social entrepreneur who adapts cutting-edge technology into affordable tools for the visually impaired and other underserved communities. In 1989, Fruchterman founded the nonprofit company Arkenstone to develop and manufacture a reading machine for the blind using optical character recognition technology. He delivered the reading tool in a dozen languages to 35,000 people in 60 countries.
In 2000, Fruchterman founded another nonprofit company, The Benetech Initiative, to create innovative technology solutions that address social needs. Benetech’s first project, Bookshare.org created the world’s largest accessible library of scanned books and periodicals providing people with visual or print disabilities access to a dramatically increased volume of print materials.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:45 PM
Russian Math Professor Bypasses Establishment Publishing to Share Breakthrough
Meanwhile, TeleRead shares some news about why hundreds-year old societies may not be the sole arbiter of scientific breakthroughs anymore.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM
Coming to a Browser Near You: 340 Years of Science, For Free
The complete archive of the England's Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is freely available electronically for a two month period that began on September 14th.
The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday's groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking.
The Society's online collection, which until now only extended back to 1997, contains every paper published in the Royal Society journals from the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions in 1665, to the most recent addition, Interface.
I picked one article at random, from 1784. Would you be shocked to learn that the scanning and rendering are far superior to Google Books?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:22 PM
Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane
The Gilbane Group announced they have launched a blog for Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) who are involved in enterprise content applications, whether vendor, integrator, or enterprise implementer. The content technology CTO Blog is hosted by the Gilbane Group as a service to the content and information technology community. The purpose of the blog is to facilitate ongoing discussion and debate on technologies, approaches and architectures relevant to enterprise content applications. CTOs have a wealth of critical information about technologies that is not always accessible to enterprise customers. CTOs also have demanding jobs, and have limited time available to meet with each other with customers, or with other industry influencers. This blog is intended to encourage communication both between vendor CTOs and between enterprise customer CTOs and vendor CTOs. All CTOs are invited to participate as an author, and to comment. Two CTO Blog charter authors have already contributed posts during the pre-launch testing. John Newton, a Documentum founder and now founder and CTO of Alfresco, provides a provocative take on "content management 2.0". Vern Imrich, CTO of Percussion Software, shares insights into the apparent contradiction of content management technology moving up and down the technology infrastructure stack at the same time. Additional charter authors of the Content Technology CTO Blog include: Bill Cava, Ektron; James Gonthier, Refresh; Jason Hunter, Mark Logic; Vern Imrich, Percussion; John Newton, Alfresco; Bjrn Olstad, FAST; Eric Severson, Flatirons Solutions; and Carl Sutter, CrownPeak.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:15 AM
September 17, 2006
Monetizing that Content, Baby!
I have always done a few things to make a little money off this blog. I do the Amazon Associates thing, run Pheedo ads, am an affiliate of MarketingSherpa, and syndicate my content through Newstex. The results have been modest--no, make that paltry. Then today I got my first royalty statement from Newstex and found out that my first month's royalties totaled... drum roll please... $1.78.
So much for early retirement.
But I enjoy writing the blog, and I have learned that how much I get paid for a piece of writing does not necessarily equate to how good the writing is or how much I enjoyed the project. For instance I still think one of the best things I ever wrote (co-wrote actually) was a chapter in The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing. And, for that, I have earned about $54 in royalties.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:54 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Currently Reading
Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success by Jim Sterne. While the book is a few years old now (published in June 2002), the book is still selling well and I can see why. It is very readable, and it references a lot of good consumer research that still holds up today. Plus, as my post Friday on "functional web analytics" suggested, this is still a nascent arena in terms of real business impact, with lots of basic work still to be accomplished on many Web sites.
Any other books or resources on Web analytics you would recommend?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:54 PM | TrackBack
September 15, 2006
Functional Web Analytics
Writing at iMedia Connection, SEMphonics CEO Gary Angel asks some refreshingly direct questions about what companies actually do with web analytics:
Can you answer yes to all of these questions?
- Are the changes my web design team makes actually in response to measured web behavior?
- Has my web measurement ever suggested directions, products, services or systems that significantly changed my business approach?
- Do findings about visitor behavior on the website ever influence other media strategies and messages?
- Does anyone really read or do anything with the web measurement reports they receive?
I especially like the last one. This is not to say I think people are lazy, but that if a report isn't relevant or actionable, people will simply discared or ignore them.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:31 AM | TrackBack
September 14, 2006
MarketingSherpa Publishes Two New Search Marketing Buyer's Guides
Warren RI -- September 14, 2006 -- MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing Case Studies and benchmark data for marketers, released today two new reports for 2007: the Buyer's Guide to Paid Search Advertising (PPC) Agencies and the Buyer's Guide to …
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:31 PM
Web Publishing at Stanford
Web Publishing: A Stanford Workshop for Magazine, Association, and Corporate Publishing Professionals. Great subject, smart people, and it's in Monterey. Sounds like the makings of a fine event to me. And even better, it doesn't conflict with Gilbane Boston.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:41 AM
September 13, 2006
New Version of The CMS Report
CMS Watch has published the tenth version of its CMS Report. My how time flies when you are having fun. I have the highest regard for CMS Watch. Tony Byrne is simply one of the smartest people in the business, and the enterprise was only strengthened when Theresa Regli joined earlier this year. If you are in the market for CMS technology and you want independent analysis of the vendors, the CMS Report is a one-of-a-kind resource right now.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:04 PM
Britannica v Wikipedia
Dave Winer points to an an interesting back and forth between the leaders of Britannica and Wikipedia, and offers some thoughts. The direct link to the article is here.
Which reminds me of the journal Nature's article on the accuracy of the two works when it comes to science.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:26 PM
September 8, 2006
Note to Google Books
When you scan a page that has an illustration with an overlay, lift the overlay up so the illustration is actually visible. Oh, and make the book square on the scanner bed so the page is not crooked. Oh yeah, and decide whether to scan the whole book in color or in black and white. Of course, you should also be sure there isn't some bizarre problem with the scanner first. And, needless to say, if the scan you end up with is completely nonsensical, you might not want to include it.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 PM
Here and There
Slow blogging lately, as I have been heads down with some work. But here are some things for your consideration.
- Gilbane's fall conference in Boston is now open for registration. I am going to be repeating my DITA tutorial, Working with DITA: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture
- I am going to be attending Adobe's User Group Meeting, Adobe MAX this October. I am curious what the combined Adobe and Macromedia efforts look like, I am curious about Flex, and, in general, am curious what Adobe starts to look like as it moves from a heavy dependence on its print-centric creative tools to a wider mix of client and server offerings.
- Adobe has posted FrameMaker Applications Packs for DITA and S1000D. It looks like they are compatible with 7.2 only, but you can check them out here.
- I may have cited this elsewhere, but some research took me to an interesting case study of XML-based eForms at the US Army. It's pretty high-level, but interesting.
- I tried the new Firefox Beta on one of my XP machines, but no luck. It worked on the initial install, and failed to initialize after that. I removed it. Too bad, as I was hoping for a solution to the memory leak problem.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:07 PM
September 2, 2006
Google Books Allowing Downloads: Blah, Blah, Blah
There was quite a buzz about Google allowing people to download PDFs of public domain books as of this week. Almost everything I read was incomplete, or wrong, and there was plenty of irrational exuberance. To me, any discussion of downloadable public domain books has to include Project Gutenberg, but few of the articles mentioned it. So much of the coverage is fawning, which means the project is doomed. It really is the dot.bomb era all over again. I suggest the cheerleaders start here and see how shoddy and incompetent the work is.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 PM
September 1, 2006
Manhattan
I might hate the Yankees, but I still love New York, and Woody Allen's Manhattan makes the city look absolutely beautiful. I happened to catch it on cable last weekend, and I forgot how much I liked it.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:15 PM
E-dictionary Studies
Does learning change when kids use electronic dictionaries instead of paper ones? TeleRead highlights some recent research.
“We can be very optimistic of the potential of these students proving that there will be no detriment to learning using eBooks. This optimism obviously begs continuing research.” - Prof. Richard Ballaver and Nicole Adams, Ball State University
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:07 PM
