When bookmarking or link posting, it’s proper etiquette to put in a “via” that indicates where you got the link from. I do this a lot in my own bookmarks in the descriptions, e.g., “(via mray)” or “(via sog)”. That great wunderkammer, boingboing is the prime example of this behavior, they’re really good at doing it.

For quite sometime, I’ve been fretting over whether I should do vias in del.icio.us as tags instead of parenthetical stuff in the descriptions: if I got a link from Matt Ray, I’d use the tag via:mray.

Uses

• I could more easily see a list of links I’d gotten from people. I could even make a tag bundle out of it. (This is where smart tag bundles would be nice, so I could just say “put all tags that start with via: in this bundle.) Of course, it’d mean I’d want to do a tag search like via:* for all tags that start with via:. I’m not sure if the del.icio.us search syntax allows for this.
• It’d be a cheap networking/link spelunking thing. If I used the same text in in the via tags as the person’s del.icio.us ID, you code something up to layer on a link between the two of them. That is, you could offer the feature: “If you liked this link, check out more links from the person who sent this to Coté”.
• I can get an idea for who sends me the most links by counting up how many via:mray’s, fro example, I have.
• People could subscribe to all links suggested by mray, scoped down to my bookmarks, or everyone’s bookmarks. That’s sort of like reverse bookmarking…or something.
• People who send me links can track the effectiveness of sending me links. That is, if I like the link enough, I’ll bookmark it, slapping on the via: tag. So, folks who send me links can answer the question “which links that I sent Coté did he really like: like enough to go through the effort of bookmarking?”

How’s That Sound?

Yeah…. So…. Maybe I’ll start doing that. Anyone else do this? Have any thoughts?

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, tags, web2.0

If you haven’t checked out the Ozzie Microsoft strategy memo, you should put aside the few minutes to read through it. It’s valuable in several ways:

1. It’s an example of exactly the kinds of technical leadership and communication you’d expect at a software company. A software company lives and dies by it’s developers (medium- to long-term at least: you can always vaporware some short-term cash), so it’s obvious that those are the people your most important communications should cater to and address.
2. There’s a start of the “be the infrastructure, not the end product” strategy I talked about a few days ago. That is, in a more DIY/good enough programming/ecosystems culture, for a large company that needs a steady revenue stream, selling the tools is more stable than selling the actual artifacts of those tools.
3. The fact that it’s out shows — intentional or not — a willingness to engage in very
   Cluetrain
   -ish PR. In this new development mentality, the more info you share, the more cred you get: secrecy is for the old foggies of technology. (There are still some issues to be ironed out with non-developers, but the PR for only developers is looking sound.)
4. It has a summary of Web 2.0 development (or “contemporary web-as-platform programming” for all you curmudgeons), in just 7 words: “treat[ing] the ‘raw’ internet as their platform.” The fact that a high-level exec [or his staff, etc.... whatever] can and is articulating it is significant: not to the lucky people already doing it, but to all the BigCo coders who wish they were doing it but can’t get their management chain on board.

Those are just a few highlights, there’s more to be had from it. The most significant thing, of course, is that it’s coming from Microsoft: a huge name that people who make decisions can, and will, take guidance from.

As the last point addresses, BigCo management chains rarely listen to their own highly paid developers; instead they look for outside validation of new technology directions. On that issue in particular, if you’re up on your internal marketing theory, this memo is a big arrow in your quiver. Now go shoot it.

Update: some of the ideas I outlined in another post, “The Disappearing SysAdmin and Enterprise Software Vendors” fit well with the SaaS stuff in this memo, with the change that the ideas in the memo at hand are more consumer software than enterprise software centric.

Tags: biz, ecosystems, enterprise, msft, programming, software, web2.0.

Mr. Twiggs came by to talk to me about a way to put a sort of “here’s all the links to my online self” service together. The idea is that someone such as himself (and definitly such as myself) have all sorts of different content strewn through out the web — flickr, del.icio.us, Amazon reviews, eBay reputations, static web pages, podcasts, Netflix rentals and reviews, etc. — and we want some page to point to that lists all of that stuff, that answers the question, “can I see all of Glenn Twigg’s online life?”

That is, you want a site map, but not just restricted to one site, a site-map that spans the entire web.

I don’t really know of successful system that does this yet…otherwise I’d probably be using it.

The Roach Motel

The metaphor of The Roach Motel (started by Steve Gillmor, I believe) is that all these online services tend to lock your data up in them. For example, you can’t extract and use the reputation data about you from eBay; you can only use that data in the context of eBay. Like roaches to a roach motel, once your data gets into eBay, it can’t ever leave. (Check out this edition of The Gillmor Gang from last year for an exquisite grilling of eBay’s Jeff McManus on this point.)

So, in my mind, what Mr. Twiggs is looking for is a roach motel buster: something that will layer on-top of all the websites and roach motels out there and aggregate the data into a centralized place, or, at least, view.

Roach Motel Busters

While there’s no ultimate Roach Motel Buster, there are what we’d in the enterprise software world call “best of breed” roach motel busters. For the benefit of Mr. Twiggs, here’s the ones I can think of:

• Google Sitemaps – providing a way of helping crawlers understand the important links in your site. Also see this article.
• FOAF – capturing your social networks. Among some blog software, livejournal widely uses FOAF.
• attention.xml – multi-year winner of the Will It Ever Cross the Chasm Award in Excellence…. glibness aside, it unlocks the clamp-down on keeping up with your friend’s (and own) interests. (I favor a less formal approach.)
• Erik Benson’s Megablog – Erik’s put together some scripts (I’m guessing) to centralize much of his online activity into one blog, erikbenson.com. Essentially, it pulls content from a bunch of sites (check out the “Getting Stuff From” sidebar) he puts content into, and “cross posts” that content to the megablog. It’s pretty damn cool, and I’m sure it gets info-wonks like myself all hot and heavy.

So, we can only hope that Mr. Twiggs will figure it all out for us and provide this service and/or format. It doesn’t exist yet, but it’d be a lot cooler if it did.

Technorati Tags: blogs, collab, ideas, infoglut, web2.0

I’ve been borrowing one of the ITIL books, Service Support, from work. As someone who gets jazzed about devices that have SNMP agents on them, it’s an exciting read. So far — on pg. 43 in the service desk section — it’s been great at the simple, but rarely done, task of simply defining all the tasks and motivation that you’d expect IT to perform.

Knowledge Ain’t Cheap

The problem with these books is they’re so damn expensive. I could make my car payment with the amount I’d spend buying all the ITIL books. Unfortunitly, it doesn’t seem like there are free downloads from the OGC: I guess the UK doesn’t have the same “anything the government produces will be free” policy that the US has. Or, more than likely, they’ve figured out a loop-hole with this one.

Manual Meta-Info

The deal with me and books is that I like to write all in them, dog-ear them, and otherwise add in meta-information. On many occasions, I’ve been known to use the blank pages to write letters and other notes. I work books like pairs of jeans: I’m not satisfied with then until they’re broken and worn. When you borrow a book, this isn’t possible, and I keep feeling like I’m only half expieriencing the borrowed book.

Not to mention the fact that these ITIL books would be great references, which is only possible if you own the book. Need to know 18 things to consider when putting together a service/help desk? As they used to say in those Time Life commercials, read the book.

Got Any Cheap Books for Me?

So, if anyone knows where I can get some cheap versions of these books, I’d appreciate it. It could be hard-copy or PDF, I don’t really care.

Technorati Tags: book, itil, sysmgmt