Today, News Logs 12 comments

19 Mar 2002 @ 01:13, by Flemming Funch It is interesting how different environments inspire different kinds of things to go on in them. Now, I'm particularly thinking about that in terms of online programs. Like, this News Log program is structured so that when one posts something it is a bit of an event. That is, one has an article or a poem or something, or at least a link to it somewhere else. And one posts it and everybody notices it, and a bunch of people comment on it, etc. You know, that is contrasted to an environment where it makes more sense to post many little items. I'm comparing with some of the other programs in the class that the News Log program is in: Web Log programs. Logs made with tools by Userland or Blogger are more suited to mentioning many little tidbits that one might be interested in during the day, without any of them having to be any very big item. This News Log program is modeled somewhat after programs like Slashdot which is more suitable for actual news items than any of those other log programs are. Anyway, I'm saying that I'm sometimes missing that angle on it - the more continous diary, containing many little tidbits. Like, today I've been busy with various things during the day, which potentially might be of interest to others, but I might not have an actual article in me. Some of the other web logs I read often are by techies, kind of like myself, who're working on different things and often referring to what other people are working on. And many of those little references are very useful to their readers, but most of it would be rather cryptic to people who aren't that kind of Internet programmer types, and who wouldn't know what they're talking about at all. And because they write to the same kind of people as themselves, they don't really have to waste much time explaining what they're talking about. Anyway, I'm considering adding features to the News Log program that might facilitate that way of working with it, as an option. Some of these other programs are structured as a diary, where there's one major entry for each day, and one can fill many little items into that. Now a few other things ... I'm playing with different instant messenger programs. The one I use all the time and which is invaluable for me in work is ICQ. But I also have accounts with AIM, Yahoo and MSN, as I occasionally have people I need to speak with on those. And it is a bit silly to have 4 different instant messager programs running all the time. So, I'm looking at things that can tie that together. There are some programs that will access multiple of these services in the same program. On my Mac laptop I use one called Fire. And right now I'm trying one out on my Windows desktop called Rival, which does both ICQ, AIM, MSN and Yahoo. And it does that through Jabber, which is an open source instant messenger scheme. The service doesn't seem to be super-reliable, though, possibly because there are too many people on their server. So I'm considering installing the Jabber server program on the NCN server. Which opens up other possibilities, such as integrating instant messenger functionality into the member area here somehow. You know, like being able to get an instant message when somebody enters your favorite chat room or when somebody answered your message or whatever. That's all quite possible. Btw, the company doing Jabber was started by Andre Durand who started the company doing CommunityWare, which is a conferencing environment I previously had quite some experience with. One thought: I'm looking for the tools that will best show our unique stories, and the story of all our intertwining stories.

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