Tuesday, September 21, 1999

The Global Glossary is a lookup table that filters all content on all UserLand.Com servers.

I did a quick Glossary Browser so you can see what's there.

And there's an XML version you can download to suck into your content management system. It's updated whenever we change our global glossary. Open is better!

According to Google.Com, MailToTheFuture.Com is related to Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Excellent!

News.Com on Desktop Websites. They all have APIs. I want to know more about this now! Let's get a look at those APIs. Help me help me.

News.Com: Microsoft Hatching Online Plans for Office. "Microsoft finds itself in the same position Netscape encountered a few years ago as it attempts to sell software that others are giving away."

Red Herring: Guy Kawasaki, Venture Matchmaker. "Garage.com had just secured a $12 million round of financing, adding some heavyweight partners as part of the deal."

Still no word from Red Herring on the location of their RSS file.

Desktop.Com has a developer program. Interesting. Would someone like to sign up and report on what they're doing??

Tucker Goodrich: "Bill Gates is rumored to be using this as a demonstration of why Scott McNealy is out of his mind."

MSNBC: IBM Gets OS Religion. "The phenomenon of the Internet has made the world safe for multiple OSes," says IBM Software Group GM Steve Mills. "Customers feel comfortable buying systems running more than one OS because of advances in the Internet, open standards and cross-platform middleware."

9/12/99: An End to the Uber-Operating System. "The purpose of XML-RPC is to erase the lines that separate applications, to allow developers to bring the power of the Internet to the desktop and in the connections between back-end applications, no matter what operating system they run on."

If you ever doubted that Don Box loves SOAP, here's proof.

Internet Publisher: The Works of Mark Twain. A Java applet that implements a book-style interface in a web browser.

Jakob Nielsen: User-Supportive Internet Architecture. "One interesting unification is the Edit This Page feature in the Web authoring platform from UserLand Software. There is simply no distinction between the website and the writing interface: authors navigate the live website just like other users, and when they want to change the text on a page, they click a special Edit This Page button (that is not visible to regular visitors without authoring privileges)." Thanks!

5/24/99: Edit This Page. "A few years from now we'll talk about FTP the same way our ancestors talk about punch cards. "Remember the old days when we had to FTP our files up to the server?" Oh we had it tough! Just like the people who used spreadsheets and word processors that didn't have Undo."

Jakob also talks about how the original architecture of the Internet, by design, gives equal voice to all. It's been interesting to see how the Open Source communities deal with this. Some are hierarchies, in fact, I think all the successful ones are, it's reputation flow, as Jakob talks about it, but with less formality than you see on Eopinion, for example.