Archive for June, 2004
June 24, 2004
Earth Shaking RSS
The U.S. Geological Survey publishes an RSS feed of the recent quakes the register greater than 2.5 magnitude. Excellent use of RSS! I was amazed at how many quakes happen each day around the world after I subscribed to this feed.
Spotted via WorldChanging blog.
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June 24, 2004
Associations: Social Network Concierge
I had a conversation yesterday that sparked an idea for me of one possible direction associations could move in to remain relevant with their members.
Associations have often served as the social network for a profession, research community, or other group of like-minded individuals and/or organizations. Much effort has been and continues to be put into creating vehicles such as member directories to encourage networking. However, those efforts almost always rely on members proactively providing data via paper and web-based forms and exposing that data to them with anemic search interfaces. Many members choose not to participate or do not provide enough information to create meaningful links.
What if an association focused much of its energy and resources on enhancing the quality of the metadata about each member, their professional activities and work, and the connection of all of those elements to the greater community of members? That web of data could then be made available to members via effective search tools targeted at enhancing professional networking. The association could also develop targeted networking products such as events and meetings that leverage that data.
I’m imagining something like LinkedIn combined with PubMed and your typical association management system data, with a cadre of indexers constantly expanding and maintaining the data. (PubMed being a metadata repository for health care research. Only relevant as a healthcare association example.)
Ultimately the association would serve as a sort of social network concierge, facilitating meaningful and productive connections by working hard to capture and contextualize data about their members.
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June 24, 2004
The Role of Technology in a CMS Selection Process
James Robertson has published a briefing on Specifying technology in a CMS tender. I agree with his overall premise but have a few comments on some of the specifics. First a quote:
In short, by focusing on the technology aspects, these tenders often fail to select the best product, and don’t deliver the desired business benefits.
For this reason, we encourage those developing tenders to concentrate on the business requirements, and minimise the technical details.
That being said, there is a legitimate need to specify specific technology issues. This briefing presents some guidelines for doing so, in a way that will generate the best outcomes.
The main point, that the technology is irrelevant if you don’t have criteria that will support your overall business objectives, is right on the money. Assuming you have that part down, I think it is very important to play to your IT strengths if at all possible.
One factor not mentioned specifically in the article is that CMS’ are typically high-maintenance beasts (in my experience). If it is running on a platform for which you already have experienced admins, your life will be much easier. There are a lot of not very well documented tweaks and tricks to keep servers and systems running optimally. You’ll need knowledgable admins for a CMS that bears significant load.
Also, staff expertise in the CMS coding language is more important than given here, I think. Without it you are completely at the mercy of contractors to make modifications, no matter how minor. If you have one or more staff who know the language you can make the minor adjustments that tend to come up pretty frequently without having to spend consulting money nor take the time to secure the resources. You can be more nimble by making those small adjustments yourself and save the cash for major development and integration projects.
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June 23, 2004
Doc Searls’ IT Garage
Check out Doc Searls’ IT Garage | News, ideas and real world stories about how IT folks solve their own problems. This is a community site started by Doc Searls recently for the hands-on IT community. Looks like some good stuff for your typical association IT shop.
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June 22, 2004
License Expired! Pop-up Error with Zend Demo and Apache/PHP on Windows
This thread has the answer to why a pop-up window suddently began to appear when I booted up my Windows XP box at home. I had installed Apache and a demo of the Zend PHP editor. The pop-up error began once the demo license expired yet it gave no indication of what system was causing the error. I thought I had gotten infested with a virus until a little googling turned up that thread above. Zend needs to improve that error to something meaningful.
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June 10, 2004
Tour of Firefox 0.9
Neil Turner has posted a review of the latest version of Firefox: Firefox 0.9 Tour. Firefox is my browser of choice. I’m looking forward to patching up once 0.9 is released.
Spotted via RC3.
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June 9, 2004
The State of Syndication
Sean Gallagher has published a nice summary of where RSS and ATOM standards and politics are currently
Found via CMSWatch.
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June 5, 2004
Nancy White’s Blog
Nancy White recently launched the Full Circle Associates Online Interaction & Community Blog. Nancy is an excellent resource on online community and its intersection with knowledge management. Her blog is definitely worth checking out.
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June 3, 2004
phpMyAdmin Book
Gadgetopia has posted a a review of Mastering phpMyAdmin, a book on how to use the excellent MySQL administration tool, phpMyAdmin. I used an early incarnation of it back in ‘99 for my first PHP project. It has been a regular part of my LAMP toolkit ever since. Definitely check it out if you need to manage MySQL databases and have a PHP box on the same network (which you probably do if you are using MySQL).
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