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Michael Fraase: "Personal computers infiltrated organizations through the back door. Someone brought one in to make his or her job easier and the notion spread, like a virus. RCS is going to infiltrate organizations the same way."  2/13/01: "Dell Computer started in Michael's dorm room." News.Com: HP declares victory in Compaq merger. Megnut: Attendee-Centered Conference Design. Newsweek: Silicon Valley Reboots.  I've been trying in vain to drop hints about tomorrow's bomblet and keep drawing blanks. No one is expecting it. It's coming from left field. I have failed to tease! OK. It's connected to part of Radio that hasn't changed much. It's not the new outlining stuff. You'll think differently about UserLand after you know. It's not very technical. It will raise the bar in online journalism. It's for people who like poetry, books, movies, art, education, food, fashion, health, travel and technology. Never in a million years will anyone figure it out. This is so frustrating!  Scottish Lass: "Dave, it's supposed to be us girlies that are the teases." Hehe. Radio Community Server is now #1 on Daypop. Mac Net Journal: Outliners for OS X. Macrobyte is adding security to UserLand's Web server. André Radke: "Version 1.0a10 of my PostgreSQL extension for Frontier and Radio is ready for download." Stephen Tallent: "The new version of the ODBC Extension has been released!" Russ Lipton: How to Place Pictures in your Weblog. Thomas Madsen-Mygdal: "It's a great bottom-up play that only people of a caliber as Dave and his team can pull off." Carlos Granier translated the RCS home page into Spanish. Ben Hammersley: Personal PubSub 1.0. Euro.Weblogs.Com is springing to life. In Europe of course. Last year on this day HailStorm was the buzz of the weblog world. What became of HailStorm? Did the buzz matter? NY Times: "'We're always willing to try something new and out of the box,' said Sue Fleming-Holland, vice president and marketing director for the adult trade division at Simon & Schuster in New York." James Gosling: "I don't know of anybody who's actually been deploying Web services at all." Ouch. Maybe Gosling will live up to his billing as a hero to programmers everywhere, and will roll up his sleeves and share in the fun. The strategy of Radio Community Server  I'm sure there's some confusion about what Radio Community Server is, and why we released it for $0, and what the next steps are. I think that's because we did something new, and probably unexpected. First, for all the bored pseudo-hooplah about web services, Radio Community Server is fully web services, built on open specifications, all of which have been around for a while, in one easy to install package. The press are only looking for web services from the BigCo's so they probably won't cover it, but I want you all to know, this is a tour de force of web services.  Some people have said it's clonable in open source, and that's true, and it would be okay with us if people did that. Some have said they can do it in a week, and that's of course not true. Sure they won't have to do some of the work we did, like design it and bootstrap it and create a community of users, but it's still a lot more work than it may appear to be, at first glance. But if you have a few months and want to do a cool piece of software, and can make it run faster or cheaper or in places we don't reach, go for it.Modulo glitches and bugs, which we will work out, we now have a server product that can be installed on private networks, so people can use Radio for workgroups. Weblogs and knowledge management. We've broken through where no other blogging software has. Any workgroup can have weblogs and aggregators, people narrate their work, gain efficiencies and make connections that weren't possible before. But it's more than private networks that we want to enable -- there's a deep feature in Radio Community Server that allows an ISP to fully brand the user experience with their own look and feel. We've been quietly upgrading the workstation software so that it doesn't care which community its tethered to. When Radio boots up for the first time it connects to the cloud, gets the templates and themes and initial aggregator channels, as designed by the service provider. It's kind of like the AOL client software, where you can be AOL if you want. As often is the case, Adam Curry is the guinea pig for this. He's launching his Blog News Network, as both a radio show and a Radio show. There are other deals in the pipe now, but first we have to do one more release of Radio, version 8.0.7, and this little bootstrap will be complete.  Now, why $0? Have we lost our minds? I hope not. We still need to make money to make payroll. We gave this a lot of thought of course, it took years to arrive at RCS 1.0, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. But we figured that we'd do better financially if we let this out at no cost, so everyone who was interested could try it out, and since it drives Radio and Frontier sales, we'll make it up that way. Like a lot of other tech companies these days, UserLand needs cash. We want to work in a world where lots of people are running their own communities. So please accept our generosity, but if possible, return it. Buy a few copies of Radio for your workgroup or school. It's a bargain at $39.95. If you want a really powerful back-end, go for Frontier. We still have to make this work as a business so we can keep pushing the leading edge and bootstrapping the Two-Way-Web. |
 
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