I was interviewed a while back for an article in PM Network magazine about using blogs and wikis for project management. The article is out in the August issue and you can read a PDF version of it on their web site. The magazine goes out to the Project Management Institute‘s 200,000 members located in 125 countries around the world.
Do you know how your site looks and functions in IE7? No? Better get testing: IEBlog : IE7 to be distributed via Automatic Updates!
To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates (AU) shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP, planned for the fourth quarter of this year.
Emphasis added. Based on this, I would expect IE7 to be adopted pretty quickly even though users will have the option not to install it when it downloads via Automatic Updates.
(Via Gadgetopia.)
Socialtext has released an open source version of their wiki product. The open source version is missing some enterprise features that they reserve for the commercial product.
I responded to a question earlier this week about how you can judge the quality of a web application’s code. The question was from someone who would be receiving the source code for the app in question once it was finished and they would be responsible for maintaining it after launch. How can you tell if the code is of high quality and easily maintainable if you are not a programmer yourself?
Here are a few things I would look for in this situation:
Some of those obviously require a coder to asses for you but at least you know some questions to ask that will get at whether the developers in question have good practices in writing code. It is no guarantee but will weed out the poorest candidates.
Here are a few books you may want to review if you want to learn more about good development practices:
(had an issue with my amazon links, list to be reposted later)
Also see Joel Spolsky’s reading list.
It’s not every day that a large building in your town sprouts fins, tail and head full of very sharp teeth. This is a pic of the Discovery Channel HQ building in Silver Spring, MD. They are using the shark to promote shark week on their channel.
I think this qualified as a Purple Cow, except it is a Big Shark.
Here is a nice tool for comparing various wikis, both open source and commercial/hosted: WikiMatrix.
I’ve been hearing lots of interest in wikis lately in conversations with clients and at events. If you are interested too, check out WikiMatrix.
(Via Nancy White.)
ASAE just posted the sign-up form for using their networking application for the Annual meeting in Boston this summer. This is a pretty cool little application from IntroNetworks that maps the social network of attendees, attempting to facilitate more contacts.
However. There is a rather unfriendly disclaimer posted above the join button, which includes this paragraph (emphasis added):
Attendee acknowledges through use of the System that ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership are not in the business of creating or managing online communities and it is the sole responsibility of the attendee to adhere to recommended terms of use provided by ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership.
Really? ASAE isn’t in the online community business? I don’t agree with that statement, so I guess I shouldn’t enter the network.
This is what happens when a lawyer, who is paid to play defense, is given too much sway over what goes onto your site. What a horrible message for any association to put in front their most committed and active members.
I would delete the entire statement and replace it with this: We are in the business of facilitating your member community. We welcome you to our network and encourage you to use it to maximize the value of your Annual meeting experience!
Update: Peter Hutchins from ASAE posted in the comments that they are working on updating the page and have removed the paragraph I mentioned as a first step. Thanks for listening and acting, Peter!
John Robb posted last week about how he thought that a lot of these Web 2.0 companies are taking advantage of their most active users by not providing the ability to invest beyond their participation in the social services. My guess is that John feels they are not compensated with enough value from the services themselves compared to the value they are contributing to these companies.
This made me think that associations are uniquely positioned to address this issue. They don’t have shareholders, so value created for the organization can be channeled into creating more value for the members. This is something we should explore and talk about with our members. Sharing via your association can return more value to you and your field than it will via commercial services.
Here is an informative post on how one person can create billions of pages, get them listed in Google and then plaster it with pay per click advertising to make serious money. This is the kind of thing much of the spam comments and trackbacks to blogs are attempting to create links to.
As promised, here is the podcast that Ben and I recorded this morning. It runs just shy of 17 minutes.
One note: In the recording we mention that the Attention Trust sells attention data. I believe this is incorrect in that they offer a service for storing your own attention data online but do not sell that data. What benefit this offers to the individual is unclear to me. Maybe Ed Batista can chime in here on the comments on what benefit you would receive from loading your data into one of their providers.
C. David Gammel, CAE 