Jon's Radio (full-length descriptions)Jon Udell's Radio BlogData formats for digital democracy: XML vs CSV- December 13, 2006 As a first experiment I grabbed the DCStat reported-crime feed for November, sucked it into Excel 2003, consolidated incidents by day, pivoted them on type of offense (homicide, burglary), and exported them back out as a CSV (comma-separated value) file that Swivel could import. Full story at InfoWorld.com Here's one of those pivot tables in Swivel. The auto-generated charts don't do much for this style of dataset. But the point of this week's column is that just publishing a named dataset,..http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/13.html#a1578 AJAX and automation- December 12, 2006 Sean McGrath's latest column puts an AJAX spin on the age-old struggle between the human-accessible and machine-accessible aspects of software: Making an application easier to use almost always means making better use of the users ability to see; to hear; to click buttons; to access drop down menus and so on. Unfortunately, computers themselves cannot see or hear. This results in a most unfortunate inverse relationship. Namely, the more visual and interactive and compelling an application is..http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/12.html#a1577 Moderated 2nd-level domains- December 11, 2006 At the ICA conference in September I had a great talk with Edwin Bruce, who's responsible for New Zealand's e-government initiatives. Among many other things, he pointed out that New Zealand has an opportunity to do some interesting things with moderated second-level domains under the .nz top-level domain. There are five such domains now: .govt.nz (government), .mil.nz (military), .iwi.nz (Maori), .parliament.nz, (parliament) and .cri.nz (Crown Research Institute). Because New Zealand's...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/11.html#a1576 Bombshell aftermath- December 10, 2006 Reading through the comments attached to yesterday's announcement made it clear that I left a few critical questions unasked and unanswered. Rather than continue that thread here, I'm transplanting it to a new incarnation of my ancient personal website. It used to be udell.roninhouse.com. Now it's jonudell.net, where I display my past record for inspection, and this blog for new thoughts and dialogue. I hope you'll join me there because during my sabbatical, from Dec 15 to Jan 15, I'll be...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/09.html#a1575 A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft- December 8, 2006 For today's podcast I decided to interview myself about my upcoming new gig. It's a short episode, under six minutes, and the transcript follows. Note: I actually meant to push this to the server later today, to synchronize with a message that will be forthcoming from Jeff Sandquist. But a mis-click on my part pushed it sooner, which means Jeff will be a bit surprised when he wakes up. Trust me, though, this is something I've been thinking carefully about for a long time, and it's very...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/08.html#a1574 General-purpose intermediation- December 8, 2006 The solution I cobbled together speaks volumes about the fundamental openness of Web applications. To find out how Gmail creates a distribution list, I logged in, created a list interactively using Gmail's form, and captured the resulting HTTP transaction using one of the handiest tools in my Web developer's kit, Firefox's LiveHTTPHeaders extension. The next step was to replay that transaction outside of the browser. I rearranged its elements -- an URL, a chunk of HTTP POST data, and a...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/07.html#a1573 "We found the version control, collaboration and invite system outweighed the limited feature set"- December 5, 2006 Google got there first, but we're still in the early innings of this game. Google's office apps, while collaboratively adept, are functionally lame. Microsoft's apps are adept and lame in precisely the opposite ways. Everyone needs to converge on solutions that deliver the best of both. Full story at InfoWorld.com In last week's email I received a leading indicator of GDocGSheet adoption which, because I neglected to ask permission to quote, I'll anonymize: Just read your column on...http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/05.html#a1572 |