Writing is an act of humanity. Behind every writings, there is a human being.

The work of George Orwell tainted our imaginary. His work, 1984, let us with the impression that bureaucracy is a big inhuman monster that is alive by the force of things. In the whole story, we see the castle –the image of bureaucracy– as a thing in itself; not an aggregation of small ones. We can’t imagine that humans are working and building it: it’s unbelievable.

This image, the Big Brother, follow us since. We can’t see mega-corporations as human: they are all inhuman monsters. We can’t believe that behind every business, there are humans being. Humans being that created them with their time and passions. Humans being that are working to make them alive.

This image is probably the result of 100 years of industrialization and his pompous formal language.

Mega-corporations need to change the situation. A good way, I think, is the one took by Microsoft. Since some years, they let their employees blog. They wrote about their passions, their families. They explain you on which Microsoft project they are working on. They explain you how these technologies work. Is there a better person than the developer of a technology to explain it to you? They write about them, about their work and their vision of things. It only can give humanity to the corporation he belong to.

These writings give humanity to Microsoft. We can have a direct contact with the wizards behind each developed softwares or services. We can talk with them. We can comment their ideas. We can know in which mood he is. We now know that mega-corporations are build by and for humans.

Behind every human creation, there are a human being with passions, fascinations, family and a history.

Business like Microsoft could just benefit from this.

Technoratie: [blogs] [business] [writing] [Microsoft] [human]

Ten reasons why blogging is good for you career by Tim Bray. This list is the result of a common sense author. Not out of the track and not totally conservative. The points are clear and make sense to me.

I have been particularly attracted by the point 4:

“No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.”

It’s the exact reason why I started blogging. I wanted to practice my English communication skills. The more I blogged, the more I discovered the importance of writing communication. I saw the power that some bloggers got with their only little webpage, their blog.

People, without any connection with the writing communication world, with their off-track education, had been able to be read, days after days, by thousands of people around the world. More than this, their voices are listened, appreciated, and accepted.

They got the point. They practiced and mastered the art of writing communication over the Internet. They practiced with their blogs and they are now part of talk shows and conferences. They practiced and they mastered; they worked. It’s probably the key word in this post: working and keep working.

Technoratie: [blogs] [blogging] [communication] [work] [career]

Blogging is good for anyone. It’s an ease to use publication platform. Everybody can easily create and maintain their blog. Blogsphere is an environment where people can talk about what they thing, without restrictions. They wrote about what they really think.

This special conversation environment is a gold mine for businesses. Why? Because they can know what their customers really think about their products; in good or in bad. This is possible because bloggers are also customers; not normal ones but customers that talk about what they really think.

Jet Brains, the Russian enterprise that created Omea Reader, seem to be one of these companies. Every time I wrote “Omea” in a post, I always see incoming Russian connections from Feedster or Technorati, with intellij.net as domain; with “Omea” as query string.

What’s this tell me? It’s telling me that Jet Brains care about what people say about their products. It’s probably a way to upgrade them with features their clients’ whish to use. They probably have a client-centric vision of application development. They will not put features for fun. They will put features their users whish to have. They will upgrade already existing features their users uses.

I’m probably right or possibly wrong by writing this but ‘s what the situation look like. True or not, I think every enterprise should do it. It’s a gold mine for them. They have the unbiased opinions of thousands of clients, users and customers.

Technoratie: [business] [client] [omea] [blogs]

Tagging is the action of annotate words to a resource (a document, an image, etc). It’s a way to categories and organizes these resources.

You can perform this tagging action for your own, while using Gmail by attaching tags to your incoming message, or use it in a social network by tagging bookmark entries in Del.icio.us for example.

Basically tags are only separate words linked to a resource. The author can put words with or without a semantic meaning one between another. He can put words in semantic relation with or without the tagged resource. The entire tagging job is done at the discretion of the author.

The action of tagging will be an operand of the whole formula that describe the success or the failure of a system using these tags.

The second factor will be how a system will use these tags. A basic system will bind and show all resources with the same tag, wrote with the same letters. Then, “blog” and “blogs” are not the same tags. Resources with “blog” as a tag will not be bound and shown with resources tagged with the word “blogs”.

Given this problem, some systems using tags will suggest a list of related tags. Some systems perform well at this task, like Technorati who seem to suggest tags with related semantic.

Others perform poorly because they only suggest tags that contain the tag?s word. By example, if I search for the “blog” tag, such a system will suggest me categories like “blogs”, “anablog”, “tierryisblog”, etc. This method is clearly ineffective and probably useless.

I think that this feature proposed by systems using tags is just a plug-in implemented to try to cope with this problem.

How could we upgrade the tagging idea to get rid of such feature and remove a part of the responsibility of the tagging authors in the whole process? I think that the principles of the semantic web would help us to upgrade the tagging idea.

How would this work? Intuitively it would work like this:

1. Consider the group of tags that describe a resource as a resource in itself.
2. Systems like Technorati would scan posts to extract these “tag resource”.
3. After the system would semantically link all these “tag resource” according to an ontology to relate, semantically, each “tag resources”.
4. Finally when a user would make a tag search query, results would not only be the resources with the specific tag but also all the other resources according to the semantic of the tag(s) searched.

In this post I’m talking of a new way to see tags; tags as resources with a semantic meaning; not about words that, theoretically, describe a resource.

Technoratie: [tag] [folksonomy] [web] [semantic]

It seems that there are two problems with blog discussions that use comments:

1. People who start a discussion by commenting a post didn’t seem to check back for new comments on the message.
2. If the post is older than some days, nobody will comment on it.

Some will say that this is normal because blogs are used to publish thoughts of the moment and old thoughts didn’t worth commenting. If they see blogs as this, they are probably right.

The thing is that I don?t see blogs this way. Blogs seems to be a really interesting knowledge management tool. In this optic, it would be healthy to comment old posts: to upgrade the idea behind it with the new knowledge people have at this time.

The problem is that nobody will see these changes because the posts will be lost in all other new posts.

If we take as premise that comments are integral part of a post, with the same information value, would it be interesting to change his position in the lifeline of the blog with an updated date? A good way to do this would probably to include an “update” section that relate the last changes performed on posts. A change would be an update in the post?s body or a new comment posted on it by a reader.

Think about Wikis; it would be a good and elegant way to give life back to old posts (ideas, knowledge).

Few blogs had implemented comments feed. The idea is good but are they increasing the life span of blog’s discussions? Take Scoble?s comment blog (are you reading all “scoble” words of the Blogsphere’s posts? 😉 ). Is it increasing the life span of his posts? I don’t perceive it. If the post is the sixth of the day, comments attached to it will fade out and the post will be leaved for death.

In this case, would a solution be to include comments in the main feed of the blog? Have in mind that we are thinking with the assumption that comments are integral part of a post, with the same information value. Personally I think that it would be a solution but it wouldn?t be applicable with the current RSS specification; it just not specified for this purpose.

Finally, I don’t think that current blogs’ structure is well built to give a respectable life span to posts. It just can’t work well with the current structure.

Technoratie: [blog] [comment] [knowledge] [feed] [wiki]