January 10, 2008

Contract Developer Needs: Moodle, Arbortext Editor

Two colleagues of mine are looking for some medium- to long-term help on projects.

One needs a Moodle developer. They would like to find someone to first do some quick consultation on whether their project is feasible to build with Moodle, and if so, they will then need help with creating the necessary extensions. The company is in greater Boston, and they would like the developer to be available to visit the office from time to time as the project progresses.

The other needs a developer who has experience customizing Arbortext Editor--developing DTDs or schemas, developing stylesheets, and supporting the overall implementation.

If you are experienced in either of these areas, please email me.


Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:15 PM

January 3, 2008

The Kindle Digital Text Platform

I was rooting around on Amazon the other day, seeing what other kind of (non-book) content was available for the Kindle when I discovered the Digital Text Platform Amazon has made available for publishing content in Kindle format. "DTP" is listed as Beta, but I found it functional and easy to use. Basically you create all the metadata for the title, including pricing information, and then upload the content for conversion to the Kindle format. To test it, I created an eBook out of a series of articles I have written on content management and XML. They seem to want HTML ("The preferred format for uploading content is as a single HTML file"), but I got impatient when I then read you needed to assemble linked images in a zip file using special instructions. So I went with a single Word .doc file ("standard .doc files will often convert without a hitch"). For the most part, it did convert without a hitch, though it did a woefully bad job with a small number of very simple tables. To work around that, I simplified a couple of the tables and deleted the others. In fairness to Amazon, I worked quickly, and could have experimented with HTML tables.

If you're a Kindle owner and happen to buy the title, I would love to hear from you about the experience. Since I don't own a Kindle yet, I had to rely on the preview capability in DTP, which basically gives you an HTML view of the content.

From the introduction to the eBook:

The following articles, white papers, and blog entries were written between 2000 and 2006. They appeared in one of several publications: The Gilbane Report, eContent Magazine, E-DOC Magazine, or Transform Magazine. Some appeared in my blog, www.billtrippe.com, or its predecessor blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing. I undertook this compilation as an experiment in working with the beta version of Amazon.com's Digital Text Platform for creating content for the Kindle eBook reader.

I only edited the material lightly, so the articles are showing their age in places. Some links are likely out of date, some product references may be to versions of products that have since been superseded, and at least one product, XMetaL, has changed corporate ownership at least once since first written about in one or more of these articles. However, I chose these articles from many, many others I could have chosen because the material is evergreen and still useful, I think. I stand by what has been written here, especially for the price!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:56 AM

December 19, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Facebook

I mentioned before that I have been trying the Facebook thing, but kind of don't get it. I am willing to chalk it up to a generational thing. But then Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic, posted this video to my wall, and it all makes sense now.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:54 AM

December 18, 2007

Call for Papers: Gilbane San Francisco 2008

They are now accepting proposals for panel participation and presentations for Gilbane San Francisco 2008, to be held at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008.

Join the content and information technology's leading analysts, IT strategists, and technologists at the industry's most popular and important conference this coming Spring. Share your expertise and experience, and network with the forward-thinking implementers and thought leaders.

How to be a speaker

Choose a topic area from the list below and see how to submit a proposal. The deadline is January 15, 2008. Topics to be covered in-depth include:

If you've never been to one of the Gilbane events and want see what we have been covering in our conferences, check-out the programs from the recent hugely successful Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:14 AM | Comments (1)

December 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

Tomorrow, I will be part of a webinar, What Every Publisher Needs to Know About Content Management. It's being put on by Book Business Magazine and sponsored by Follett Digital Resources. Matt Steinmetz, Special Projects Editor for Book Business will be moderating, and I will be joined on the virtual dais by Jabin White, Vice President for Product Management at Silverchair.

I'm going to be presenting a market overview, offer some definitions, and discuss some recent and emerging trends. I'm going to leave most of the heavy lifting to Jabin, though. He is truly one of the smart guys in the business and an excellent presenter, and I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

You can go right to the registration page here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:40 PM

November 30, 2007

Kindle Still "Sold Out"

I keep seeing references to Kindle being sold out, but I have yet to find a number of how many sold. The main Kindle page at Amazon now says you won't get one by Christmas. This seems like a problem to me--missing Christmas sales and also not even promising a specific ship date.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:04 PM

November 28, 2007

Social Networks

I am at the opening keynote at Gilbane. The speakers:

There is quite a bit of discussion on social networks.

I just passed 500 connections on LinkedIn. I mention this because I have found LinkedIn to be a valuable resource. It's a great way to keep in touch of colleagues, especially if they are also active users. I have found long-lost colleagues and friends, made useful connections, helped other people make useful connections, and even found projects and prospects there. I compare this with Facebook, which I joined more recently. Facebook is a powerhouse, no doubt, and there seems like an endless number of applications and activities there. But I guess I am an old fart. I don't get half of the apps, and I don't like the default behavior where every new app and even every action on every app is to ask your entire network to do the same thing with that app--take the same movie quiz, answer the same question, and so forth. It strikes me as the equivalent of forwarding the same email to every person in your contact list. Of course, you don't have to ask every contact to do something--you can select some or one or none. You can even do nothing with any of the applications, which is what I tend to do.

I don't know what the effect of Google's OpenSocial initiative will be. Conventional wisdom seems to be that it won't make a dent in Facebook, and, aside from LinkedIn, the founding members seem to be a who's who of failed social networks, including Google's own orkut. And, generally, I am deeply skeptical of anything Google does outside of consumer search and pay-per-click advertising. But assuming not everyone in the world will join precisely one social network, doesn't it make perfect sense for these networks to have a common API?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:46 AM | Comments (1)

November 19, 2007

Amazon Kindle

Amazon debuted Kindle, its eBook reader, today. I haven't seen it yet, of course, but I'm impressed by the number of titles they have available at launch. And the pricepoints--NYT's bestsellers at a standard price of $9.99.

Lots of interesting details about the feature set as well as the complementary content, like Wikipedia, newspapers, blogs. Another detail, reported by CNET, caught my eye:

Kindle, which was manufactured by an undisclosed Chinese original equipment manufacturer, connects to its specialized Amazon store via an EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) cellular network through "Amazon Whispernet," built atop Sprint's EV-DO network. No data plan or monthly bill is required. "We pay for all of that behind the scenes so that you can just read," Bezos said, adding that he estimated that it would take "less than a minute" to download a book.

If it is really that easy to use and keep up to date, they are on to something.

WSJ.com has a blog roundup (subscription), and proving that Kindle seems to be real news, it even made All Things Considered. And, last but not least, PW weighs in.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:52 PM

November 15, 2007

Microsoft SharePoint and ECM: Ready for Primetime?

If you are interested in SharePoint for ECM applications, the webinar I recently did for Gilbane is now recorded and available on the website of the sponsoring company, KnowledgeLake.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:27 PM

November 13, 2007

Adobe Management Changes

Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen steps down, and the market is reacting. But Adobe also said Monday that "fourth-quarter sales would be near the top end of its guidance of $860 million to $890 million."

Oh, for the record, I don't own any stock or have any other financial interest in Adobe. As a rule, I avoid investing in companies that I cover or might do business with--partly to avoid a conflict of interest but also because I am terrible at picking tech stocks. They either go bust, or I sell them at a small loss or profit the second before they take off like a rocket.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

November 7, 2007

What kind of computer do you have?

A white one.

You wonder if these are too good to be true, but they are still funny.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:44 AM | Comments (1)

November 6, 2007

Microsoft SharePoint and the Enterprise Content Management Market

On Thursday, I will be doing a webinar on SharePoint and ECM. I wrote a bit about the topic over at Gilbane (and we have a white paper on the topic coming out shortly). If you are interested in attending the Webinar, you can register over at KnowledgeLake, the company sponsoring the webinar.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:44 PM

November 1, 2007

XForms and Rich Text Editing

Over at Developerworks, Steve Speicher and Andy Smith show some approaches for adding rich text editing controls to an XForms application.

By following some of the integration rules defined by XForms, XBL, and a rich text editor, the end result is a simple and powerful addition to the XForms set of controls. This can further enable the application of XForms in a variety of applications, such as blogs, e-mails, social networking sites, and more. These can then leverage the built-in capabilities of XForms for validation, XML submission, declarative programming, and more.
This kind of thinking reminds me of some of my early thinking about XForms in particular and XML-based forms in general. When does a form end and a text editor begin?

 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:16 PM

October 24, 2007

Docmetrics Trial: Free $250 Credit

I've mentioned protectedpdf from Vitrium Systems in the past. I saw a demo and was impressed. They now have a companion technology, docmetrics, which allows you to measure reader behavior. They have a free docmetrics trial if you are interested.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:12 PM

October 19, 2007

Does XForms Technology Have Momentum?

I have a few Google news and blog alerts that help me keep track of some technologies of interest. One is for XForms, which I receive as a daily digest, and I always get something every day, usually four or five items, almost all from blogs. Almost every item is technical and fairly in-depth, usually about something the blogger is prototyping or developing. I compare this to my alert for InfoPath, which doesn't come every day, and the items that do trickle in are rarely technical. Usually they are PR about a product, where InfoPath is mentioned in a list of technologies that the product works with. In fairness to Microsoft, I just played with a search for "forms services" in blogs, and got more hits from that, so I will set up an alert. Interestingly though, in Google blog search, I get a total of 2,016 hits for "forms services" and 35,585 for XForms.

In today's XForms alert, John Boyer of IBM offers some ideas for talking to C-Level types about XForms. For John, the business value of XForms comes down to this:

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM

October 13, 2007

Here and There

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:08 PM

October 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

The sessions that I have been organizing on enterprise publishing technology have been coming together. For the session on DITA and related standards like S1000D, we have Bob Doyle of the Boston DITA Group and Don Bridges of Data Conversion Labs. We have another speaker from industry who will be talking about S1000D, but he is still awaiting the go-ahead from his corporate communications folks.

For the session on multi-channel publishing, John Parsons, Editorial Director of The Seybold Report will be moderating, and two speakers are on board, again with a third likely to be joining soon. Rich Pasewark, a former colleague of mine from XyEnterprise and more recently with Quark, is working independently now on some very interesting projects. The second speaker is Mark Laroche, who is Director of Production for Digital Media at Random House. He is going to be talking about some very forward-thinking work they have been doing withe the Fodor's travel guides.

Finally, for the metadata session we have two speakers, with a third to be announced shortly. We were very happy to talk our client Richard Ferrie from Pearson into speaking. Rick is Senior Vice President, Publishing Operations and Content Management for all of Pearson, and has some top-level lessons learned on what works and what doesn't in bringing metadata into publishing workflows and systems. Gilbane analyst Bill Rosenblatt will also be speaking, bringing his perspective on metadata efforts at some of the largest publishers and media companies out there.

Keep an eye on the conference session descriptions page and the Gilbane events blog as we add new speakers and elements to the conference.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:05 AM

October 3, 2007

Back, I Think

I had some problems with my Movable Type installation which led me to upgrade to MT 4, but only after I had migrated to a new server at my hosting company.

Fun, fun, fun!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:53 PM

August 31, 2007

DCL's DITA Test Drive

Over at The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel shares his enthusiasm for the "DITA Test Drive" offering from Data Conversion Labs.

Sometimes the sheer volume of information on the internet is overwhelming. Even with the help of Google Alerts and RSS feeds, it’s easy to miss interesting news. That’s likely the reason we failed to notice this especially interesting offer from the folks at Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL). It’s called the DITA Test Drive Challenge, a program that allows content-heavy organizations a shortcut to DITA. For $3000 (okay, $2995, technically), DCL will convert 500 pages of legacy content to DITA and perform a Content Reuse Analysis on 2500 pages of legacy content. Wow! That’s quite an offer. Why would you want to take advantage of this offer? Because there’s a dirty little secret in XML authoring land. It’s next to impossible to evaluate an XML authoring tool without actually using some of your own content in it. Testing an XML editor with your own content will help you avoid selecting the wrong authoring tool for your organization. Those who skip this step generally purchase software based on the opinions of others and sometimes after having downloaded a free trial version of the software (which is pretty useless without your own DTD and some real content).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:39 PM

August 20, 2007

Unicode and Microsoft Internet Explorer

A scientific publishing client writes:

"We are making great progress converting all our documents to HTML (from SGML). One challenge we are facing is how to convert Unicode character entities into characters displayable in Internet Explorer. It appears that Netscape and Firefox work much better than IE in displaying Unicode. One option is to create glyphs for all of the non displayable characters; but, there are hundreds of them and that is not realistic for us.

Do you know how other publishers are handling the display of these special characters? If the characters appear in display equations, we are creating gifs. Our challenge is for those characters that appear in text, which are now displaying as boxes in IE. For example, the entity bsime is used for similar or equal to. Unicode represents this as ⋍ and it should display as ⋍ (Editor's note: you are seeing this if you viewing this in Firefox or Netscape!)

Are there plug ins or sites that have all the glyphs or does Microsoft have special setups, etc? We have the same question out to a few of our vendors to see if they can help as well. This has become the critical path for us."

Thoughts?

UPDATE:

I forgot to post this awhile ago. My colleague Marc Dashevsky worked with the client and they came up with the following:

In short, the problem is solely with Internet Explorer V6.x. The Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer V7.x all display the same subset of Unicode. Following is a description of the testing.

He set up his system as follows:

* The font Arial Unicode MS was already installed on his system.
* He explicitly set, in Internet Explorer, Arial Unicode MS to be the Web Page Font (Tools->Internet Options->Fonts).
* He ensured that Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape were all using UTF-8 encoding.


He then visited a web page that lists many characters in ISO 8859-1.

Just as the client had experienced with with uncommon characters displayed in its HTML pages, on this page the Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer V7 displayed many characters not displayed by Internet Explorer V6. All browsers successfully displayed all characters listed in the Latin Extended-A block. However when he got to characters in the Minimum European Subset (a.k.a. the Multilingual European Subset No. 2), Internet Explorer V6 displayed open rectangles while Mozilla browsers displayed appropriate glyphs. (An open rectangle means that Internet Explorer knows what character it has encountered, but it cannot find a glyph to display it.)

There clearly is some problem with Internet Explorer V6, and it is not likely that there is a work-around for it. Microsoft fixed the problem in V7 and he is certain they have no interest in retrofitting it to V6.

Marc's solution is to have everyone switch to Firefox.

Makes sense to me.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM

August 11, 2007

Comcast Hates You: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts

Well, they do if you use their high-speed Internet service and want to send email.

I have Comcast at home for cable, Internet, and digital phone. I haven't been an unhappy customer by any means, though I have always found them expensive and Luddite. I got a kick out of it a few weeks ago when they called out of nowhere to announce a price drop, but this was on or about the day my city government approved Verizon to provide FIOS service here. Competition is a wonderful thing.

So anyway, yesterday I was working at home and I found my email was not sending successfully. I didn't fuss it with it much for a bit, as I was busy with some work. When I started to debug it, though, I was able to figure out it wasn't local to my machine. We have three machines on a secure wireless network hung off the cable modem, and none of the three was successfully sending email. So I got online to chat with Comcast.

This was the start of my fun. Here's the Reader's Digest version of a much longer and more frustrating conversation I had:

Clueless Comcast Support Person #1: Do you need help configuring Outlook Express (the only email client they officially support, as they distribute it)?

Still Agreeable Me: No, the problem is not with the client. I have several machines with different clients, and they are all having the same problem.

Clueless Comcast Support Person #1: Since you don't need help configuring Outlook Express, bye and have a nice day!

Still Agreeable Me: Wait! None of the email clients work and they have all worked fine for years. What is the difference?

Clueless Comcast Support Person #1: (Long delay, mumble, mumble.) Oh, you were sending too much email (more than 100!), so we blocked your access to port 25.

Still Sort-of-Agreeable Me: Oh? I suddenly became a spammer after several years of never having been one? I run up-to-date security software on all my machines. Which one caused the problem?

Clueless Comcast Support Person #1: Comcast values your security [Ed note: Clearly a cut and paste!] and we cannot tell you that. However, if you follow this 12-foot-long instruction and send an email from your Comcast email, it will direct you to a URL that will explain how to unblock port 25.

I don't use Comcast email, but I had set up a Comcast login, so, good little computer user that I am, I tried what he said.

It didn't work of course.

So I called this time.

Distressed Me: I was online, trying to get my email to work, port 25 is blocked, I tried his suggested fix, and it didn't work.

Clueless Comcast Support Person #2: Do you need help configuring Outlook Express?

Aggravated Me: No, it has nothing to do with my client. You blocked my access to port 25, and I can't send...

Clueless Comcast Support Person #2: Since you don't need help configuring Outlook Express, bye and have a nice day!

Infuriated Me: If you say the words "Outlook Express" one more time, I am going to kill you. You are blocking my outgoing port for alleged security problems. Your fix didn't work. What can be done?

Clueless Comcast Support Person #2: (Long delay, mumble, mumble.) Our security department is going to look into it and it will be fixed in 24 hours.

This morning, I got online again, new guy.

Tired-but-Somehow-Hopeful-Me: I was checking to see if the problem with my email has been resolved? And please don't mention Outlook Expr...

Clueless Comcast Support Person #3: Do you need help configuring Outlook Express?

Ready-to-be-Livid-Me: Please look up my account details for the history on this problem.

Clueless Comcast Support Person #3: Do you need help configuring Outlook Express?

Livid-Me: Are you going to unblock port 25 or not?

Suddenly Clueful Comcast Support Person: We do not lift blocks on port 25.

Cool-as-a-Cucumber-Me: Do you have the number for Verizon?

POSTSCRIPT: I ended up talking with someone in Comcast security. Despite what the first two support people told me, they do not selectively lift blocks on port 25. He did not have information about whether my connection was used to spam (I am virtually certain it has not been), but implied instead that they are doing this across the board.

The fix is challenging. Comcast's online help--and the tech support people--are only prepared to help you reconfigure a comcast.net email to use an alternate port, port 587. They do not tell you how to configure other email addresses. What I ended up doing was configuring my other emails to use smtp.comcast.net for the outgoing email server (port 587). This works from here, and I am hoping it will also work when I am using this laptop elsewhere.

I find a few things about this episode absolutely amazing.

-- If Comcast is doing this to more than a few people, they are astonishingly arrogant to roll something like this out without informing people. I found a number of other blogs discussing this.
-- Comcast hates their customers, but they also hate their tech support staff. Imagine having calls coming in about something you don't have a clue how to answer?
-- Is it a blanket change in using this port, as the security guy said, or was something happening on my connection? Who knows, but Comcast should have their story straight.

If Comcast is doing this, as the other blogs suggest, to combat spam, well, good for them. I hate spam. But if they are taking my money, they should spend some of it to roll out such changes in a thoughtful, well supported way. Their tech support folks should be better informed, and their online doc and Help should address the thousands of users like me who use non-comcast.net emails.

UPDATE: Another blogger says Comcast's port change will be ineffectual against spammers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My fix works at home, but not at my office, where I had to revert to the old port and the old SMTP server. So either I need to find a more general fix or toggle between the two sets of settings (I have four emails...). Fun, fun, fun!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:21 PM | Comments (4)

July 18, 2007

Mac OS X Leopard

If you have been waiting for Leopard, you can preorder it now at Amazon.com.

According to the article at Wikipedia, "Leopard contains over 300 changes and enhancements, according to Apple.[3] Some notable features include support for writing 64-bit graphical user interface applications, an automated backup utility called Time Machine, support for Spotlight searches across multiple machines, and large revisions to most core operating system components."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:52 AM

May 30, 2007

Excel and XML

Since so much metadata, and even editorial content, is often produced in Microsoft Excel, shouldn't publishers consider using SpreadsheetML for long-term uses of Microsoft Excel? A tutorial over at Brian Jones' blog got me thinking about it. If you are interested in a more in-depth look at SpreadsheetML, start here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:25 AM

May 26, 2007

DITA for Small Groups

Are you a sole proprietor, sole documentation person, or part of a small doc group? Check out Lone-DITA.

Speaking of DITA, if you haven't already, you should check out DITA Storm, a browser-based DITA editor.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:59 PM

May 21, 2007

Thinking about DITA vs S1000D?

Over at TheContentWrangler.com, Joel Amoussou has some thoughts:

The subject of interoperability between S1000D and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has received significant attention within the technical documentation community recently. This article discusses the following issues:

--Shall we create DITA specializations for S1000D data modules?
--How can we facilitate interoperability between DITA and S1000D, to enable round-tripping transforms for example?
--Is the DITA specialization mechanism the best way to make S1000D extensible?
--How can users leverage the strengths of both DITA and S1000D without introducing complexity?

As they say in the blogosphere, read the whole thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:31 PM

May 8, 2007

QuarkXPress Server 7 and new QPS Users

I would like to speak to people who are using the new versions of QuarkXPress Server and also the new QPS for some research and writing that I am doing. Please email me and I will follow up.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

XML and Globalization

SDL Warns Businesses to Think Global When Migrating to XML

SDL, one of the big players in globalization solutions, announced today the findings of a research project into the use of XML in delivering global content across multiple channels. This is something I have written about for Gilbane (here and here), and I am very interested in best practices that will emerge as more and more companies use XML in producing content for global audiences.

SDL appropriately notes that the global implications of moving to XML must be considered up-front, and is providing seven "golden rules" at www.sdlglobalxml.com to ensure successful implementation of XML projects for communicating with global audiences:

  1. XML alone does not solve the issue of global content
  2. Think global from the start of your XML strategy
  3. Automate the process of managing higher volumes of smaller chunks, being sent more frequently for translation
  4. Ensure translators can visualize the context of XML chunks
  5. Optimize the structure of your XML for localization
  6. Protect your XML code during localization
  7. Ensure terminology and style are consistent across dispersed chunks

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:44 PM | Comments (2)

April 28, 2007

Apollo Widget and Vista

That finetune.com Apollo widget I mentioned recently? Works like a charm on Windows XP, but not on Windows Vista. I downloaded it, installed it, and launched it. Weirdly, the process runs on Vista, but the GUI simply never appears. On XP, it is a nice little app from what I can see.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:03 PM

MathML 3.0 Working Draft Published

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0: Working Draft

2007-04-27: The Math Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0. MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text.

In related news, the W3C has also published a MathML for CSS profile.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:33 PM

April 11, 2007

Can Blogs Persist in the Way Scholarly Information Does?

Jon Udell interviews Geoffrey Builder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, and a veteran in the scholarly technology world. They discuss CrossRef's critical role in the scholarly information world, how Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) work, and what this kind of technology means for blogs and other content.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:16 PM

April 6, 2007

eBooks No, But ePaper Yes?

"Electronic paper" edging toward reality

"Electronic paper" has long been hyped as the future of newspapers and books, but products like e-books have been slow to take off. That may soon change, say executives involved in the pioneering technology. While Internet companies are scanning libraries of books and making them available online, E Ink Corp., which emerged out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago, is seeing a surge in orders for its portable, foldable displays that mimic conventional paper to carry such books. Nine different companies launched products last year based on the technology," said Russell Wilcox, E Ink president. "In the last nine months we've gone from manufacturing tens of thousands of parts to millions of parts."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:03 PM | TrackBack

April 5, 2007

DRM-Free EMI: Microsoft Joins Apple

Over at DRMWatch, Bill Rosenblatt weighs in on DRM-Free music, EMI, Microsoft, and Apple.

As far as EMI is concerned, the deal was shortsighted, risky, and possibly irresponsible to the company's shareholders. EMI is the smallest of the four majors, enjoys no synergies with corporate siblings, and is undergoing financial hard times. This move with Apple was a lunge for near-term revenue, at the quite possible expense of longer term revenue for EMI and the rest of the industry. EMI gets a cash advance of US $5 Million from Apple. It should enjoy a short-term revenue spurt as some consumers respond to the hype and purchase DRM-free tracks for $1.29 (in the US market).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:23 PM

April 2, 2007

Currently Reading

One of the takeaways, er, giveaways from the Adobe Analyst Meetings last week was a nice little book, Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide. I read most of it on the train ride home (the narrative parts anyway, a chunk of it is reference), and it made sense, though I am not a Flex developer. Note that it is indeed specifically for Flex developers, and it is indeed a pocket guide.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:06 AM

March 30, 2007

Adobe Analyst Meetings

Back from a couple of days in New York, where I attended the Adobe Analyst meetings. Impressive stuff, as I relate over at the Gilbane Group blog.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:11 PM

March 21, 2007

And a Busy Year it Was

The 2006 Year in Review for DITA

by Don Day, Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect

The OASIS DITA standard:
The current standard is at DITA 1.0.  During 2006, committee work was focused on developing the proposed DITA 1.1 features (see "Roadmap for DITA development.). Just last month, the committee released a Public Review draft for DITA 1.1, which is expected to be approved later this year.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:35 PM

March 19, 2007

Grazr

An article in Mass High Tech about RSS startup Grazr caught my eye, so I went to the Web site and played around with their widget.

It seems pretty cool. You can build your own here if you have an OPML files to start with.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2007

Brilliant

Hat tip to my Gilbane colleague Leonor Ciarlone.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:51 AM | TrackBack

February 14, 2007

WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis

Writing for IBM developerWorks, Elliotte Rusty Harold offers Ten Predictions for XML in 2007. I've always liked Elliotte's work. When SGML was giving way to XML, Elliotte wrote the first good book about XML, and he has gone on to write several more. His XML in a Nutshell is the book I always recommend to people looking for a solid overview and authoritative first reference, so his predictions mean something. He weighs in on a number of topics you would expect to hear about (XQuery, XForms, open document formats), and some that are less well known (the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP)). But the thing that really caught my eye was his skepticism about Web Services. The money quote: "Enterprises have absorbed as much Web services machinery as they're able to stomach. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and SOAP 1.2 are the end of the line. Many enterprises won't even get that far. WS-Choreography, WS-Transport, WS-Reliability, WS-Security, WS-Resource, WS-ServiceGroup, WS-BaseFaults, WS-Messaging, WS-KitchenSink, and WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis won't leave the station."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:47 AM

February 12, 2007

EMC Retrospect Extends Support for Microsoft Windows Vista

But maybe a week too late for me...

I was using the Retrospect software to back up my Windows XP notebook, which started to die an unceremonious death a week or so ago. So I ran out and bought a new machine, and found myself stuck with Microsoft Vista because 10 of the 11 notebooks at Best Buy were already running Vista. Then I discovered that my backups, faithfully created with the Retrospect software, had no way of getting to my new Vista machine, since Retrospect wasn't working on Vista. How delightful!

So how does a major hardware and software vendor like EMC not have software updated at the same time a new version of the dominant OS comes out? I have no idea. Will Retrospect restore the backups from my Windows XP machine onto my Windows Vista machine? I will let you know.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:26 PM

February 4, 2007

Vista, Schmista

Too often, it seems, I find myself building a new system for myself, my small office, or for family use. Building one for the family is actually pretty easy. Windows, Office, and away we go. My office machine is a little trickier, as I have to account for things like Quickbooks, and that is difficult because somewhere along the line I put myself on this treadmill of having bought one full version followed by upgrades. So I end up installing the original software, then a couple of upgrades, and then I have to go to the Intuit Web site for a patch--blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Really, it should all be easier.

The toughest job is building a new system for myself. Windows, Office, Acrobat, my HTML editor, some XML tools, Firefox, my backup system, and then a bunch of small things that I have grown to use and like--incuding Google Desktop and the Onfolio tool (which unfortunately is now only part of the Windows Live toolbar--oy). Then there are all the settings--network accounts, email accounts, ftp accounts, RSS settings. The details drive me crazy, and I don't want to count the hours I have spent tinkering with the new machine I bought Thursday evening that is still not 100% "mine."

The new machine has Windows Vista, by the way. And while I have not done much exploring, Vista is, well, to be polite, underwhelming. I am sure someone with some knowledge could spell out some of the improvements, but it fails the "doh!" test. In other words, it still does poorly what it has always done poorly. It still takes forever for the system to boot and to shut down, and the performance seems, incredibly, worse than my two-year old Model T of a machine, despite the fact that the new machine has four times as much memory and a much, much faster chip. How is this possible?

I am sure that I can improve on the performance. (Well, I assume I can, if I spend some time looking at my power settings, and at what is launched during startup, and how big the paging file is, blah, blah, blah, blah.) But this is exactly my point. It shouldn't be so hard. We are 20-something years into the personal computer era; why do we still have to baby and tweak and cajole and troubleshoot these systems like they are a whole new invention?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:17 PM | TrackBack

February 3, 2007

XForms Tutorial

New Orbeon Forms Tutorial

Hierarchical Menu

After lots of promises over the past few months, the new Orbeon Forms tutorial is finally available! You can read it online or get it with any recent builds of Orbeon Forms.

The tutorial specifically targets the upcoming Orbeon Forms 3.5, of which you can find nightly builds here. The tutorial covers:

Installing and configuring Orbeon Forms.


Understanding the simple XForms Hello application.


Building from scratch the Bookcast application, which allows you to keep track of the books you have read...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:28 PM

January 18, 2007

eBooks in the K-12 Classroom?

TeleRead offers some thoughts on a WiFied eInk machine and perhaps a K-12 push for the Sony eReader.

Spurred by the threat of the rumored Kindle E Ink machine from Amazon, Sony is considering a WiFi-enhanced successor to the Sony Reader, as well as a push to get E Ink machines into the classroom.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:02 PM

January 7, 2007

Adobe Acrobat 8

I have my copy of Acrobat 8, but have been too busy to install it. But I was spending some time updating by eForms Resources page, and started looking at the list of new books about Acrobat 8. Not surprisingly, you could start a small library with them. So I decided to put together an Amazon aStore with Acrobat-8-related products. Shop early and often!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:14 PM | TrackBack

January 6, 2007

Someone is Bullish about eReaders

E-Paper Display Company Plastic Logic Receives $100 Million Funding

In one of the biggest venture capital rounds ever in Europe, UK electronic paper display technology company Plastic Logic has received $100 million in venture funding. The new round was led by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment Corporation.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:06 AM | Comments (1)

January 3, 2007

XForms for UBL

Micah Dubinko highlights a new XForms for UBL project at SourceForge.

The Universal Business Language (UBL) provides standard XML formats for business documents. This project is to provide XForms which allow creation, processing and editing of UBL documents and XLST stylesheets to generate such forms.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:02 PM

December 28, 2006

Speaking of My Resource Pages...

... I also spent some time updating my eForms resources page.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:36 PM

December 27, 2006

Under the Christmas Tree

My teenage sons were very happy with their high-tech Christmas. Presents included an iPod Nano and Family Guy, Vol. 3 (Season 4, Part 1) for my younger son, while my older son has spent every waking moment with his Motorola Q Phone, taking time out to watch Pulp Fiction (Collector's Edition).

Meanwhile, I had a decidely low-tech Christmas, highlighted by the Get Fuzzy 2007 Page a Day Daily Boxed Calendar. Satchel Pooch is my man.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 24, 2006

Relational database integration with RDF/OWL

Bob DuCharme, one of the smartest guys in the business, reports that his XML 2006 paper is done and available. You can download the paper here and the PowerPoint slides here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:43 AM | Comments (1)

December 19, 2006

SVG is Dead; Long Live SVG?

Every time I decide SVG has lost all of its traction, I read something like this that makes me at least consider that SVG still has legs.

From the article:

The NeuART II software works from these CDs, checking copyright and also making sure that the user has a valid copy of Adobe illustrator, and then using a JavaScript program converting the files into a standard vector graphic (SVG) format. The SVG images are stored on the users system and organized using the software, which works on Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating system computers.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:58 PM | Comments (3)

Stumbling Upon

I mentioned having some fun with StumbleUpon. Then today I found a delightful site called WordPerhect. Check it out. The startup tips are a hoot.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 AM

December 14, 2006

Drupal with Ad Serving and Web Analytics

A client is interested in adopting Drupal, but is simultaneously looking at Web analytics and ad serving software, mainly commercial packages. I would like to put together a snapshot of some Drupal sites that use different analytics and ad serving packages, including Drupal modules. Would anyone be willing to share what they are currently using? You can post here or email me. Thanks.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

IBM, Yahoo Partner on Free Enterprise Search for SMBs

This strikes me as an interesting challenge to Google appliance, and a nice way for Yahoo to penetrate the enterprise with a well-regarded partner.

The free search package allows small and midsize businesses to search corporate file servers and databases as well as the public Web.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:35 AM | TrackBack

December 2, 2006

A Chapter for the Ladies

The joys of Project Gutenberg: baseball, as viewed in 1888.

On account of the associations by which a professional game of base-ball was supposed to be surrounded, it was for a long time thought not a proper sport for the patronage of ladies. Gradually, however, this illusion has been dispelled, until now at every principal contest they are found present in large numbers. One game is generally enough to interest the novice; she had expected to find it so difficult to understand and she soon discovers that she knows all about it; she is able to criticize plays and even find fault with the umpire; she is surprised and flattered by the wonderful grasp of her own understanding, and she begins to like the game. As with everything else that she likes at all, she likes it with all her might, and it is only a question of a few more games till she becomes an enthusiast. It is a fact that the sport has no more ardent admirers than are to be found among its lady attendants throughout the country.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:10 PM | TrackBack

November 22, 2006

Mixing MathML and SGML

Do you have any experience, or know of any instances, of mixing MathML within an SGML document instance? I have a client who is beginning the process of converting an extensive collection of SGML documents, and would like to go ahead and convert the equations first, into MathML, and then insert the equations back into the SGML document instances. One of their services providers is concerned about this. They are citing the SGML character entities in the current document instances versus the need--as they see it--to use Unicode in the MathML. However, as I read the MathML specification, you can still use SGML character entity references as long as you are using the MathML DTD and not the MathML XML Schema (see this section of the MathML recommendation).

Am I reading this correctly? Any experience with this?

I realize there are likely some other issues too, but this one came up in the first discussion...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:41 PM | TrackBack

November 21, 2006

Web Analytics Packages

A client is looking at web analytics software for a fairly complicated operation. They would like to track behavior from a number of domains (~40), and produce custom reports for both internal audiences and for advertisers. To complicate things, of course, the systems are heterogeneous (mainly Windows and Linux, but some Macintosh sprinkled in). They will be migrating to a common platform (TBD) in the foreseeable future, but may want to put the new analytics package in place before the migration.

They have started with the following list of packages to examine:

ClickTracks
CoreMetrics
WebSideStory
Sage Analytics
WebTrends
Omniture

Does this look the right list? Any others they should be looking at?

Any and all comments welcome, and feel free to contact me off the list as well (though no sales calls please).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Mashups

Every now and then I get buzzword fatigue, and I got it almost immediately upon hearing the word "mashup." (And it doesn't help that the Wikipedia definition has the word "seamlessly" in the first sentence.) Still, I am sure the word is useful for some people, and I am sure there are some good mashups out there. Then today I found one that combines maps and flickr photos really nicely, and I decided that maybe I like the word after all.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 24, 2006

Adobe Digital Editions

Adobe announced Digital Editions today (press release here). Digital Editions is billed as a rich internet application for digital publishing, enabling users to acquire, read, and manage a variety of digital content. There is an obvious match here for eBooks, but the platform also has significance for digital editions of magazines, for example, and other content that would benefit from digital rights management (DRM) support.

Ryan Stewart already has a close look at ZDNet, and considers it "extremely compelling for both content providers and users on a number of fronts." Alan Safford has some more thoughts at PC World. David Utter of Webpronews.com discusses some of the hosting and distribution issues, and highlights that Digital Editions is the first Adobe product based on Flex 2 (a point Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch also mentioned this morning).

UPDATE: Publishers Weekly has more, focusing on the reader interface.

I saw it today, and it looked good. It is a Beta, but the interface is attractive and the performance is terrific. I didn't dig in too much, but what I saw was a set of books with an attractive point-and-click navigation and very quick retrieval and display of the titles in Acrobat and in XHTML. You can download it here. I did, and it installs very quickly and easily.

FURTHER UPDATE: Don Fluckinger has a great overview at PDFZone.com.

AND YET ONE MORE: Bill Rosenblatt has some thoughts on the DRM implications of the new offering.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:40 PM | Comments (1)

Blogging Has Been Light

I have been heads down with some project work and writing, so blogging has been light. I am at Adobe Max for a couple of days, and just saw a very cool demo of more integrated Web publishing beginning in Photoshop and extending through Fireworks and Dreamweaver. It was a "future," but I will find out more in a press briefing later today with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch.

UPDATE: There is a beta program for Fireworks 9 if you are interested in applying.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:40 PM

October 6, 2006

RFP: Document Management

Jim Rapoza of eWeek Labs offers a sample RFP for Document Management.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:05 PM

October 3, 2006

CrossRef Indicators

I remember when I first heard about Digital Object Identifiers DOIs and thinking, "great idea... needs critical mass." Well, according to the latest CrossRef Indicators, they have long since passed critical mass.

CROSSREF INDICATORS (September 29, 2006)

Total no. participating publishers & societies 1,683
% of non-profit publishers 64%
Total no. participating libraries 1,107
No. journals covered 15,215
No. DOIs registered to date 22,584,497
No. DOIs deposited in previous month 294,257
No. DOIs retrieved (matched references) in previous month 4,503,094
DOI resolutions (end-user clicks) in previous month 11,007,980

The 11 million plus DOI resolutions is staggering really. That is 11 million clicks on specialized, authoritative content in one month.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:57 PM

October 2, 2006

There's Fraud in Online Advertising?

Over at MarketingProfs, John Jantsch wonders if the click fraud problem is overhyped. Especially since the current issue of Business "Week screams across its cover" Click Fraud - The Dark Side of Online Advertising....

I enjoy this kind of perspective--Jantsch discusses the "analog" analogue to pay-per-click and wisely suggests people not overreact. At the same time, I think the democratization of PPC advertising puts more people at risk than, say, the phantom billboard example Jantsch suggests. Hence the need for the key parties to be vigilant, and also provide open, accountable, and measurable ways for buyers to know that their investment is being well spent.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 29, 2006

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

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 19, 2006

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 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?

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

August 31, 2006

Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

Ron Gustavson writes with a great link, Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. It includes all manner of tools, targeted at developers and super users, and has a very good section on XML tools.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:07 PM

August 29, 2006

XML Schema Book

Someone asked me to recommend a book about XML Schema, and I didn't hesitate to point to Priscilla Walmsley's fine book, Definitive XML Schema.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:44 PM

August 24, 2006

DRM Vendor Market Consolidates, but Deployments Seem to Be on Rise

Writing for DRM Watch, Brett Sheppard has a brief roundup of recent Enteprise DRM deployments.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:45 PM

August 23, 2006

Eliot Kimber Meets MarkLogic

Eliot Kimber gets his first look at MarkLogic and likes what he sees.

UPDATE: Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg was relieved to find out that Eliot liked the software despite Eliot's blog subtitle, "All tooks suck. Some suck less than others."

NOTE: Yes, if you are reading closely, "Mark Logic" is the company but the product is called "MarkLogic Server." I have no idea why there is a space in the company name but no space in the product name.

WHICH REMINDS ME: If you are interested in exploring XQuery, Mark Logic's Stephen Buxton has co-authored an excellent book, Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in Context.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:42 AM | TrackBack

Eliot Kimber Meets MarkLogic

Eliot Kimber gets his first look at MarkLogic and likes what he sees.

UPDATE: Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg was relieved to find out that Eliot liked the software despite Eliot's blog subtitle, "All tooks suck. Some suck less than others."

NOTE: Yes, if you are reading closely, "Mark Logic" is the company but the product is called "MarkLogic Server." I have no idea why there is a space in the company name but no space in the product name.

WHICH REMINDS ME: If you are interested in exploring XQuery, Mark Logic's Stephen Buxton has co-authored an excellent book, Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in Context.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:42 AM | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

SEO and Content Management

Writing for CMS Watch, Randy Woods and Julie Batten offer some excellent, detailed advice about SEO and content technology.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:54 AM

August 16, 2006

Exploding Laptops and Other Nuisances

According to The New York Times, a Dell notebook computer in Thomas Forqueran’s pickup truck caught fire in July, "igniting ammunition in the glove box and then the gas tanks." (Emphasis added.)

I can see keeping ammunition in your glove box, but in the gas tanks too?

Of course, the real tragedy is that he may never get to read Instapundit again.

UPDATE: Click on the picture for a closer view. Do you suppose he was smoking a cigarette when he put the ammunition in the gas tanks?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:58 AM | Comments (1)

Cracking PDF

Over at PDFZone, Don Fluckinger has a great piece about the re-emergence of ElcomSoft as one of the good guys--or not.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:50 AM

August 13, 2006

Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane...

If you have a keen interest in eBook markets and technology, you really should follow the TeleRead blog. This weekend it has a number of fine entries, including Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane about your eBabel problem—if you want to woo romance readers. The advice applies to all kinds of readers, including romance readers.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:38 PM

August 12, 2006

Publishing Technology Survey

IDEAlliance is conducting a survey of publishing technology, and will be sharing the results. According to the Web site:

This IDEAlliance Publishing Technologies Survey is being conducted to assess the state of publishing technologies and standards in the industry today. First we ask for general information about your organization and your role. You do not have to reveal your name, company or position. However note that we provide survey results to any one who is interested. Next we focus on digital media assets both for archive and for product delivery. We hope to assess current media formats and identify trends for the next two years. We then move our focus to systems. Here we hope to assess the current systems that are installed and in use as well as the wish-list for the next 2 years. Other areas of inquiry include technology standards, both awareness and adoption.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:24 PM

August 11, 2006

eMail RIP, Redux

Everyone knows email is hopelessly broken. For example, note this excellent article, written three years ago, and the situation has only worsened. Indeed, if you google "email broken" the first several hits are from 2003. It is as if everyone has simply accepted it.

But should we? Every now and then I look at my own spam problem. In the last 10 hours, for example, I received 195 emails, and 134 of them were spam. 113 of the spam were successfully trapped in my Outlook spam folder, leaving me to clean up 21 of them from my Inbox. This is in addition to a spam filter that one of my ISPs provides; that filter traps about 200 spam a day. At one point, I was diligent about reviewing the spam to see if any real email was incorrectly trapped, but now I rarely do. Last night I cleaned about 7400 spam from my Outlook spam folder after a perfunctory search for a few keywords ("XML," "content," "Melrose" (my hometown)) and saving a half-dozen or so noncritical emails.

Shouldn't there be more of a solution to this problem?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

Wise advice to Amazon

Adobe's Bill McCoy and TeleRead's Michael Banks weigh in on Amazon's new push to have publishers use the bookseller's Mobipocket format.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:15 PM

protectedpdf

On behalf of a client, I sat through a demo yesterday of a DRM technology, protectedpdf, from Vitrium Systems. I was impressed. It embeds the client right in the PDF file, eliminating the requirement for a separate plug-in or client download. It also showed an impressive flexibility about the types of business and use models you could implement. For example, one use showed a marketing white paper where you could view the first few pages of the PDF, but then had to enter personal information (name, address, email, etc) in order to view the rest of the white paper. I didn't dig in too much, but I liked what I saw.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:18 PM

August 6, 2006

Improving eBook Reading

Jon Udell has a practical suggestion for improving the reading experience with eBooks.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 PM

July 27, 2006

What is RDF?

Over at XML.com, Joshua Tauberer has updated a very useful article, "What is RDF."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:27 PM

July 25, 2006

Sony Breaks Its Silence

Sony has been very quiet about their new eBook reader since an initial spate of publicity. But just today I received an email with a few details (not many really). I am reproducing the email here.

I continue to be underwhelmed by their marketing efforts. I contacted their PR folks after the initial announcements last December, and again a month or two ago. Still no word from them.

=================================================================

PICK A NICE SPOT FOR YOUR LIBRARY.

=================================================================

Thank you for your patience and for requesting updates on the
Sony(R) Reader, coming this fall, in time for the holidays.
It holds about 80 electronic books, is as easy to carry as a slim paperback and thanks to electronic paper, just as easy to read. Just load it up with tons of great electronic books from CONNECT(TM) eBooks, and you'll never read the same way again.

Explore the portable reader here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

EASY READING

Breakthrough technology provides clarity that's almost paper- like. View from nearly any angle and adjust text size to your
preference.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

PERFECTLY PORTABLE

It's lightweight, thin, and holds about 80 books. More with optional memory cards. So take your own mini-library wherever
you go.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

LONG BATTERY LIFE

The rechargeable battery allows you to turn up to 7,500
continuous pages on a single charge (when not providing audio).

-----------------------------------------------------------------

CONNECT EBOOKS

Designed with variety in mind, CONNECT eBooks will have over 10,000 titles online. You'll find many of the latest bestsellers and a deep catalog including more than 15 categories and over 100 subcategories. From mystery to history, sci-fi to self-help
and more, you're sure to find something to fit your taste.

- Sample titles that will be available at launch.

At Risk
by Patricia Cornwell from Putnam.
Number 9 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction best seller list.*

Freakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner from PerfectBound and Harper Collins.
Number 2 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction best seller list.

The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown from Anchor and Random House.
Number 7 on the New York Times Paperback Fiction best seller list.

Digging to America
by Anne Tyler from Knopf Publishing.
Number 23 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction best seller list.


- Categories that will be available.

Biography
Business
Entertainment
Fiction and Literature
Games
Graphics
Health, Mind and Body
Mystery and Thrillers
Nature
Politics and Government
Resources and Reference
Self Help and Improvement
Science Fiction
Technology
Thrillers

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:22 PM

June 24, 2006

If You Had 20,000 Image Files...

One of my clients is interested in converting 20,000 or so images that are in perpetual use. They get published in very long-living documents that are under continuous review and get republished every few years on average. Currently, the documents are distributed in print and PDF only, so the client has been content to maintain the images as bitmaps--high-resolution TIFFs. This works fine for print, though it is cumbersome for ongoing review and changes, as most of the images are line art.

So now they are thinking about distributing the documents in other formats besides print and PDF. Candidate formats include HTML, various wireless formats, XML, and so on. This has led some of us to think about converting the line drawings images to SVG. But here is where I pause, despite my interest in SVG. SVG makes a lot of sense--it is standards-based, rich enough for their drawings, convertible to other necessary formats, and displayable directly on many devices. Still, I fret about the lack of overall adoption and momentum. These drawings will be used for years--decades in many cases. Does SVG have those kinds of legs?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

More Progress on Digital Publishing Standards

I've discovered a blog, written by Bill McCoy, who is General Manager, ePublishing Business, at Adobe, and therefore keenly interested in the eBook business. He weighs in on some recent announcements from the IDPF.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:48 AM

June 9, 2006

'Viper' Bites at Last

Writing for eWeek, Lisa Vaas has an early look at IBM's Viper upgrade to DB2 and its "breakthrough XML handling."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:56 PM

June 7, 2006

Publishing to iTunes

Via PaidContent.org, news of PDF Magazine Downloads in iTunes. I have been hearing rumblings about publishing books and magazines to iTunes and, by extension, iPods. Obviously the screen size is an issue right now, but perhaps this suggests some future directions for iPods and other, similar, devices.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM

Does Implementing a CMS Help Search Engine Optimization?

Randy Woods of Toronto-based non-linear creations emails with a very solid white paper about this question. I think a new CMS implementation, done well, naturally lends itself to search engine optimization strategies. The mere fact that you are templating the pages encourages you to normalize markup, and that alone can go a long way toward helping the search engines. The white paper has lots of good detail about markup, navigation, site structure, and other issues, and concludes with an interesting case study.

You can download the white paper here (simple registration required).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 PM

May 25, 2006

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 u