Recently in Weblogs Category
I am struggling through an install of the Microsoft Office System and I learned that I could post from Word, so I am trying it out. Joe Friend’s blog is a great help. He has written about lots of new features. Ok, so let’s see if this works.
Lunch over IP recommends Comment is free, new blog started by the Guardian:
"The British newspaper The Guardian one week ago started a new collective blog, called Comment is free.
For it they recruited more than 100 smart people across the political spectrum, who post when they want about the subjects of their choice writing as many words as they like. There is an editor in charge, to get some coordination and some "hierarchy" - and help out those of the 100 that didn't have previous blogging experience - but copyediting is limited to checking for libel. Comments by regular columnists from the Guardian and its Sunday sibling Observer are also posted on this "open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement", as the "about" page puts it. The quality of the contributions is impressive.
Georgina Henry is the editor, who made the switch to blogging after 16 years spent on the print side, and she posted today her lessons-learned-in-the-first-week dispatch".
I think that this is an excellent argument for business blogging.
A Learning Circuits Blog post titled “Blogs as knowledge management” speculates that “Blogs are knowledge objects that can make bottom-up (i.e. useful) knowledge management a reality.” To explain the point the post inserts the following quote from David Weinberger’s blog:
I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to write down what they know and to share it widely. A project blog or a department blog not only surfaces and shares knowledge, it also makes it searchable and archives it. And once a company gets used to internal blogs, it's only natural (if anything about a corporation can be said to be natural) to open up some blogs to trusted customers and partners, bringing them into the intellectual bloodstream of the organization. And then why not open some blogs more widely? Thus companies inch their way into the blogosphere.[Smart Mobs]
I had over 2000 emails in my Outlook in-box this morning and while I am a big fan of GTD, I lost my resolve several months ago in the midst of a massive crunch. So today, I spent the day filing my emails, updating my task lists, and processing my massive backlog. I am very proud of myself and I am sure that others who take choose this path would be proud of me.
Tonight, at midnight, my in-box is entirely empty, nada. It is scary; it is too clean.
And so, I am confronted by anxiety. Will I be better organized tomorrow? When will I break my resolve? What crisis will begin the doom loop towards a mega-full in-box? They say that virtuous people can control their email and I am firmly resolved to be better behaved. I am looking forward to hyper productivity. In fact, I understand my IQ will go up if I refuse to let myself get interrupted by the random flow of emails. I am looking forward to that.
Congratulations to Chris Lydon who, today, just started to broadcast his new talk show, Open Source, on National Public Radio. I have missed Chris Lydon for years and "The Connection" on WBUR has not taken the place of Chris's insight and enthusiasm for ideas. What is so interesting about "Open Source" is that Chris and his team are asking people to participate with programming ideas. So now, you can participate before, during and after the show on the web. The "Open Source" blog gives a good description of the site and show's objectives and provides a place to interact with other listeners. I am really looking forward to this experiment.
Mobile media technology developer WINKsite has launched the Creative Commons Library for mobile users. The Library puts a variety of CC-licensed texts two clicks away from browser-enabled mobile devices.
Mobile books, or "WINKbooks" are texts designed to be read on a web-enabled mobile phone.
Mobile publishing is a concept still in its relative infancy - partly due to the technology barrier that needs to be overcome by many prospective users. The idea that paper and ink should be forsaken for mobile phones is enough to make readers give an almost Luddite shudder. How can any mobile device approach the ergonomics and durability of a good quality book or reading the text on a PC or notebook? Who will read a book on a phone? Replacement however, is not the point. It's all about distribution.
You see, there is a revolution going on all over the world. People from Japan to India to Europe to the United States and South America are engaging content on mobile devices in record numbers - in fact mobile access to the Internet has already surpassed desktop access. For tens of millions their mobile phone is their one and only pipeline onto the Internet, to knowledge it contains, and to each other. Their entire "connected" world is what they can publish and consume directly on their phone. Let's connect everyone to all the great content and thoughts bouncing around the Internet. Don't leave anyone out or behind or without a voice.
Thanks to Dave for the heads-up!
[Smart Mobs]
From Gnomedex 4.0, Maximizing Your Blogging Strategies, a panel of well-known bloggers: Adam Kalsey, Robert Scoble, Nick Bradbury, Ross Rader, Jason Shellen, Dave Taylor
[IT Conversations]
Userplane's best-of-breed applications power more than 300,000 online communities, ranging from small niche sites to large social networks. Every product in our growing application suite is designed to promote interaction, retention and revenue for site owners. No wonder more than 5,000 new publishers join Userplane every week.
The leading social networks rely on Userplane technology for their chat rooms, IM applications and more. In addition, Fortune 500 companies and major brands have tapped into our vast social advertising network for precision-targeted campaigns.
Founded in 2001 by Michael Jones, Nate Thelen and Javier Hall, Userplane is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The company became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL LLC in August 2006.
Whenever a media-using habit becomes obsessive-compulsive fun, I know something is happening that might change the way I do everything. I remember the first Macintosh I got my hands on, and the hours that were lost in Macpaint -- almost all of it using Fatbits, an artistic capability that no instrument had provided before. I remember when the first thing I did online every morning was check the NCSA Mosaic site to see what wild, wonderful, and useful websites had been created the night before. Virtual communities. Instant messaging. Blogging. Now I find myself drawn to the del.icio.us home page, just to see what people have bookmarked. Even more fun is checking out what has been added to the smartmobs or cooperation collections of juicy finds. Who ARE these people? And what ELSE are they bookmarking? Social bookmarking, folksonomy -- I even like the jargon people use before any of us really knows what shape this critter will take when it grows up. If you come across any sites that would interest others who are tracking smart mobs or cooperation -- bookmark them to those tags. Some day in the not too distant future, I'll post the best of what turns up.
[Smart Mobs]
"in the [attention based economy] of blogs, credit for discovering and filtering information is potent currency. Many blogs when posting links, will also include a link to the site that lead them to the link. This practice, bordering on a...
[Robin Good's Latest News]
I noticed today as I looked at my blog's front page that I switched from Radio Userland to Typepad on August 2, 2003. I am now starting my thirteenth month as a typepad user. Before typepad, I blogged for a year at "Ralph Poole'sWeblog" which is still being hosted, for some reason, by Radio Userland. My last post on RU was on August 5th, 2003 explaining that I had changed vendors.
I started blogging after I got laid off from Capgemini, at the end of October 2002. I suspect that the downturn in technology employment had a lot to do with the rapid adoption of blogs. Originally, I thought that I would keep a log of my job search and its frustrations, and my first several months of posts reflect that. In fact, finding a job was too frustrating!. Because of the economy, I did not find a job, so logging my search only exacerbated my feelings of inadequacy. So I switched,I started my own business. For my blog, I decided to follow my interests and write primarily about technology and business, but include some personal detail and posts that reflect a bit more about myself. For example, we visited Northwest Ireland,County Mayo, in July which is recorded in the photoblog. (I still have more pictures to add)
I don't write long essays, but I am very intrigued with some of the blogs I have been reading on story-telling in business. I agree that it can be a powerful mechanism to share knowledge and insight. I am considering using the technique more in my own blog, so stay tuned.
Distributed KM (via Steven): "Improving the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the most important challenges for companies that face the transition from the industrial economy to an economy based on information and knowledge (Drucker, 1999). However, most "knowledge management" efforts have failed to address this problem and focused on information management instead.
This paper briefly explores the failure of traditional knowledge management to adress the problem of knowledge worker productivity and argues that a deeper understanding of knowledge work is necessary to improve it. It then explores knowledge work and how it is supported with information technology tools today, focussing specially on the email client as a knowledge work tool."
[elearnspace]
James Farmer is on a wiki run: What do I want in a wiki?, choosing a wiki, and more wikis. Good resources to bookmark.
[elearnspace]
Posting your email address on a website is a sure-fire way to get an Inbox full of unsolicited email advertisements. The Enkoder protects email addresses by converting them into encrypted JavaScript code, hiding them from email-harvesting robots while revealing them...
[Robin Good's Latest News]
What they said: On the weblog Liloia.com, Tara has a great list of bloggers who blogged Bloggercon II. I still have the best intentions to post some wrap-up thoughts on the day, but am too busy today dodging the whips of a demanding editor on deadline.
[Feedster.com Results For: bloggercon]
Here is the way an Iron Chef program is described:
"The concept of the show is that a flamboyant, eccentric gourmet, portrayed by Kaga Takeshi, lives in his castle with his "Iron Chefs." These Iron Chefs are the top chefs in the culinary fields of Japanese, Chinese, French and Italian cooking. Each week, Kaga will choose a challenger chef (from anywhere on the planet) to "do battle" against his Iron Chefs. Kaga will present a theme ingredient and each chef will then be charged with preparing a multi-course meal that utilizes the theme ingredient in each course. The chefs have one hour to cook. Then, Kaga and four judges taste the food and pronounce winner. Sometimes there are ties and a 30 minute cook-off battle, with its own theme ingredient, will need to be held. Every now and again, there will be shows with no theme ingredient or tag team chefs cooking.The great appeal of the show is its meld of sports commentary with a cooking show. There is a sidelines announcer, Ota Shinichiro, who provides a play by play commentary on the dishes as they are prepared. There are also two announcers, Fukui Kenji, who provides most of the announcements and Hattori Yukio, who is the "color" man and fills in the viewers with tidbits of culinary knowledge."
This idea came up in Jeff Jarvis' session on the Business of Blogs. I think it has some merit.
Who do you think would be the best matchups? What do think the topics should be?
Channel 9: The two Microsoft guys who came to Bloggercon
On Saturday, at Bloggercon, I had the good fortune to meet and have lunch with two of the guys responsible for Channel 9. Lenn Pryor (C 9), Jeff Sandquist, (C 9) Scott Johnson (Feedster), Betsy Devine (Feedster), Seth Finkelstein, and Gregory Narain, and I all had lunch together at the Cambridge Common. I told them that I was one of the thousands of registered user of Channel 9 and that I had been reading their posts and following the conversations. It was great to get a bit of the inside story about starting Channel 9 at Microsoft and how their efforts, despite being controversial, have been such a success. Both Lenn and Jeff commented that they really liked to engage customers rather than only listening to other developers within Microsoft. So, this is a bold experiment. A small group of people can really make a difference in a large company, it takes courage, but, who can argue with understanding your customers better.After sitting with these guys for a bit I was reminded of John Kotter and some of his books and lectures about leadership and change management. Here is a quote from an interview he did with the Leader to Leader Institute:
“L2L: In your new book with Dan Cohen, The Heart of Change, you say that the single biggest challenge in the change process is not strategy, structure, culture, or anything like that, but just getting people to change their behavior. Why is that so difficult?I hope people in Microsoft are listening and watching what the Channel 9 guys are doing.John Kotter: All through our lives we have been taught to over-rely on what you might call the memo approach -- the 19 logical reasons to change -- and we've under-relied on what Dan Cohen and I found is much more effective, which is presenting something that is emotionally compelling. People change their behavior when they are motivated to do so, and that happens when you speak to their feelings. Nineteen logical reasons don't necessarily do it. You need something, often visual, that helps produce the emotions that motivate people to move more than one inch to the left or one inch to the right. Great leaders are brilliant at this. They tell the kind of stories that create pictures in your mind and have emotional impact. Imagine, someone once told me, if Martin Luther King Jr. had stood up there in front of the Lincoln Memorial and said, "I have a business strategy." King didn't do that. He said, "I have a dream," and he showed us what his dream was, his picture of the future. You get people to change less by giving them an analysis that changes their thinking than by showing them something that affects their feelings.
L2L: Intellectually, then, people may realize the need for change, but still not do anything differently.
John Kotter: Yes, because they don't have the passion to break out of their habits. It's tough to break habits. Ask smokers. The momentum from history -- from how we've always done things -- can end up making our future look like our history.
Overcoming complacency is crucial at the start of any change process, and it often requires a little bit of surprise, something that grabs attention at more than an intellectual level. You need to surprise people with something that disturbs their view that everything is perfect. Take one story we have in the book, the "Videotape of the Angry Customer." People who saw that video were caught off guard. Their mouths dropped open in surprise. Successful change leaders show people what the problems are and how to resolve the problems. They use things that people can see, hear, or touch. This may mean showing a video of an angry customer rather than a report of a customer survey. Change leaders make their points in ways that are as emotionally engaging and compelling as possible. They rely on vivid stories that are told and retold. You don't have to spend a million dollars and six months to prepare for a change effort. You do have to make sure that you touch people emotionally.” Copyright © 2003 by John P. Kotter
Dave Winer and the organizers of Bloggercon created a discussion format in which participants in the sessions engaged in “hyper-commenting”. Although the moderators facilitated the discussions, comments from everyone accreted into an understanding of subjects like “What is Journalism?” and “Presidential Blogging”. The overall effect was that focused answers emerged out of each group session. The audience was energetic, fun and obviously responded well to this format, which was, oddly similar to blogging. I took lots of notes and will continue to describe who I met and what I learned in subsequent posts.
- Eugene Eric Kim: A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools. This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it.
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
I am always exited when I find a new voice writing and thinking about KM. Jack Vinson, from Knowledge Jolt with Jack, pointed out that Ton Zijlstra writes about information overload in a long post in his blog. He talks about the volume of information and how to distinguish between a signal and noise. Blogs provide a good filter and allow sense making individuals to make sense of the noise and tell us when it is a signal. I, have a very tight seive, but I read lots of RSS feeds. I find I only comment when the signal resonates with me.
SocialText Demo
I had a demo of the SocialText application today. I was impressed by the functionality and the difference between this and many other collaborative applications.
The presentation layer is an elegantly simple text based presentation of functions that combine the best of weblogs and wikis. More like a wiki, the application encourages collaboration and iterative thinking by allowing users to edit and build on pages written by others. Posts are presented in reverse chronological order, like a blog, but participants in a collaborative project can augment and edit anything they want. An idea can easily be extended in an ad-hoc way by creating a new page with content that enriches the idea or discussion.
Implementation of the application would consist of some easy adaptation of the interface to personalize it a bit with logos and colors. User adoption would require some training, but not a lot, and a commitment among a distributed team that they would contribute to this collaborative environment rather than continue to send point to point or broadcast emails. The application is flexible enough, however, to fit the way busy people work, and users can select to post to the SocialText application by email, and can receive updates sent from the application in an RSS feed or via summary emails, like a listserv.
All in all, a very impressive app. I look forward to find a use for it with a client.
This article was clipped from the February 2, 2004 copy of the New York Times, technology section. I agree with the assertion that new software is allowing people to adapt more quickly to changing business situations. Collaborative technologies and social software allow fast problem solving and innovation in distributed teams.
"...John Seely Brown, former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, says he believes that recent changes in software technology could allow big gains in productivity and innovation. The opportunity, he says, is to move beyond the limitations of centralized systems for automating business operations, like enterprise resource systems. "Those systems are prisons," said Mr. Brown, who is scheduled to speak at today's conference.
The software plumbing of computing, Mr. Brown explains, is evolving, and so is Internet-based software for individual workers. Software systems built on Web standards, he said, can be used as pick-and-place building blocks, instead of the more formal hierarchical systems of the past.
Mr. Brown also points to the rapid development of what he calls "social software" like instant messaging, Weblogs, wikis (multi-user Weblogs) and peer-to-peer tools - all of which make it easier for workers to communicate and collaborate online, almost instantaneously.
The combined result, Mr. Brown said, is information technology that can amplify social interaction and enhance workers' understanding of what is happening around them. The benefit, he added, could be to increase their ability to "collectively improvise and innovate."
That is a key to productivity and peak performance, according to Mr. Brown. Business, he said, is a lot like soccer. In soccer, there are some set plays, but the best teams also display a wealth of effective improvisation based on the players' deep knowledge of one another. "It's the same in the best corporations or start-ups," he said.
Mr. Brown insists that the relentless pressure of global competition and the migration of skilled jobs abroad adds urgency to the pursuit of technology-enhanced productivity gains. "We can get a lot more out of people here if we really tap into them as new sources of innovation and productivity," he said. "And we're getting the right kinds of technology tools to move this along.
"It's the only way we can compete."
Richard Eckel has started an official Groove Networks Company Weblog. A discussion about this new weblog is taking place on Vowe.net
TrackBack (0) | Comments (0) via [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]
I like the concept of a company weblog, but I agree with the posters in Vowe.net discussion; the site should allow comments. Groove makes an excellent product and has always been open about what they are doing. This would be a good way to have a constant dialog with their customer group. More communication rather than less is positive, a two-way forum would be better. Hopefully this is just an oversight.
Today, after reading Dave Pollard’s post on TrackBack, I commented on my lack of understanding of the concept. I tried it earlier, now I understand, and I will use it more frequently. Later as I read my RSS feeds through NewGator, I found this post on Weblogging tools. I’ve tried many of them, but found my Radio experience less than satisfactory, because much of the functionality was hard to implement and instead of fiddling with my blog software, I would rather be writing. This post lists a lot of good tools, with explanations for their use.
Weblogging can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make it. I hope that the technology will become more and more transparen as it evolves. allowing greater access to all knowledge-sharing, knowledge-accessing features to people in an underserved category (i.e, those who have substantive interest but low technical interest/skill).
In this entry I share with other webloggers, some of them new to the enterprise, a partial listing of the kit of tools that I am presently using. I list and explain, speak of my own present uses of each tool and project possible other uses. I hope that in so doing I help others use their own weblogs more fully. <p>
[Warning: this is a "brand specific" and, to a lesser degree "purpose specific" write-up. Since I use Radio Userland's Weblogging software (almost exclusively), this entry will be about what I do and/or think can be done with Radio to forward the knowledge-making, knowledge-disseminating enterprise. Further, it's a changeable, evolving "work in progress";depending on my interest and experience any given facet that I discuss below may, or may not, get further attention. Responses and/or questions would tend to encourage further attention to a given feature :o] ! Whether there is much or little discussion with readers I will have served an important personal purpose; writing this entry it will remind me of all the tools I have for achieving my weblogging goals].
Tool
General Purpose of Tool
My Present Usage
Other Possibilities
Blog Itself
By itself: journaling with others -- the centerpiece of a complex of powerful knowledge-building tools
As a journal (a little) as a small (growing?) public, yet personal, workspace to develop and make known thoughts in areas of my concern and/or interest.
As an interface to a fuller individual or group knowledge making set-up. For example, a plone site with included zwiki wiki as workspace for one or more coworkers. The weblog, in this case, would be a space in which more finished products are summarized. Public criticism and or idea support would be drawn to the organized group space where it would affect the quality, the fullsomeness of the end result.
Trackback
Gets you a record of when a blog entry has been used (by you or another). Enables follow-up
Read other entries (if trackback not mine). Respond directly or incorporate into a blog item.
More systematic use of trackback as a means of enchaining related developments as per interests of developers.
Comments
Allows readers to engage you in conversation over one or more of the points you have made.
Source of Critical/ Developmental Input. Process involves read and thinking: ultimately some amount of rethinking occurs followed by a written response draft, and some level of editing. (Must admit, when faced with quality of product other bloggers put out, that I have to do better copy-editing).
Still within the more comprehensive group/individual knowledge development enterprise, comments would remain technically the same but would now be one of several means for giving feedback to germinating knowledge artifacts.
Blogstreet/ Technorati etc
Web applications, two amongst many, which track web traffic to your site.
Gives me a chance to find sense in my web readers preferences amongst my writings.
Not sure where I will take this as a further step
News (Rss) Aggregator
Collects entries from webloggers and news sources and puts them in one place for your review.
I used my aggregator to collect entries in one place, as stated to the left.
Over time--as I have developed knowledge of my own repeatedly demonstrated (as opposed to theoretical) interests the aggregator collection has been modified, at least as I use it, to reflect the changing (hopefully more focused and sequential) focus of my own knowledge-making enterprise.
Will try to get aggregations to be categorical so that I may focus my readings on only one category at a time.
Right now my reading experience has me reading all weblogs in the several of my categories of interest at the same time. Much mental sorting needs to be done and information is lost.Radio Outliner
While outlines themselves are seen as a great personal thought/ knowledge organizer, the Radio Userland outliner is an underused ( Or so it seems in the set of Radio bloggers that I read.) online knowledge-building, knowledge-disseminating tool .
(There is also Radio's Instant Outliner. This has the potential for being used by members of a common workgroup. Each member working on different aspects of a task and subscribes to the outlines of other group members. AIM or Jabber can be used to instantly notify subscribers to the fact that your outline has been updated.)
In general terms: I use the outliner to create and publish an articulated complex of ideas and use blog, email or a static site to point out (and link to) it's existence.
I have not yet deployed the Instant Outliner with fellow workers on a common task.
At this point I write/edit/update various outlines.. save in my outlines folder and they are published as html via Marc Barrot's activeRenderer (see below)
Subsequently, its changes can be pointed out--probably automatically--though I don't know how to do that-- to those signaling interest. Example: I keep an outline of major ecological principles in my outlines folder (translated into html by activeRenderer-described on next row) changes in outline are automatically published because part of my Radio site. Rss aggregators could collect the full outline if date of content is within, say, past week.
activeRenderer
A set of subprograms and routines that translate a Radio outline into various forms of html.
Author: Marc Barrot
I'm really attached to this feature-- for nonsubstantive reasons. Marc's formatting of the outline allows people to consume content as their level of interest and knowledge dictates.
In the case of activeRenderer in html form.. The user clicks on any given heading to get an expanded presentation. A simple explanation can be expanded to a full-fledged training manual (or anything in between)--at the discretion of the reader.
My present uses: class notes, syllabi, links etc., and any other idea sets that I consider important and or 'evolving'. Others-- link sets by category, ecological protection hypotheses, system theory statements and hypotheses, etc.
For an explicator (e.g., writer of training manuals for complicted consumer products) or an educator.. this can be a the difference between huge success and more of the same (i.e., the manual is not lost in some pile of nonused items... and crucial use skills aren't developed).
Create a few usage conventions (e.g., high level headings have the least complicated, yet still useful, explanations . The lower the level the fuller [and more complex] the explanation) and you have the possibility of a knowledge access device that is one size fits all.
Omnioutliner
A multipowered outliner with great interface (however, for Mac only). Can be used to make outlines for publication and to edit those already in your outlines file. Will save in html format for those using other blogging tools which don't have outlining built in. Once saved in html format can be used in similar fashion to that I have described for Radio outlines (See Inspiration and/or Pivit for Windows systems.)
Wonderful expansion of my knowledge-making, knowledge-disseminating, etc. software.
Why? Works with Word, works with Radio.
Will also save directly to html.
Because it allows full-screen and attractive interface I have come to prefer editing and composing outline material here (as opposed to using Radio's bare bones outliner interface).
liveTopics
An on the fly topic generating and sorting engine for Radio's weblog.
Auther: Matt Mower
Allows me to generate 1 or more categories or, even, tohave the software suggest categories based on content of the entry.
I will occasionally have to recategorize entries based on developments that I couldn't predict. Also, I may end up consolidating categories when I see that I've put generated duplicates of categories under a synonymous label.
I would like to move to a more general universal category generator. i would be willing to consider some variation, for example, on the Library of Congress, the Dewey Decimal or other premade category system. I am willing to add new categories but want my search of web material, and others' search of mine, to have more hits than, I think, will be produced by an on the fly system with only one individual generating extemporaneous categories.
BBEdit
While definitely not Word, Nisus or Word Perfect, etc. BBEdit is a capable partner in the weblog writing process: a)allows big window for work., b)will check or provide common standards-compliant html, c) has a spelling checker.
BBEdit comes in several forms. BBEdit lite is free. But it doesn't check your html for you.
BBEdit -- full version--also allows edits (even on separate servers)of site materials fetching, editing and replacing painlessly. Thus you have saved the price of 'Fetch' or 'Transport' in the process of acquiring the full BBEdit
I will do more as I learn more html.
BBEdit is a natural companion for Dreamweaver(see below); the linkage has been built-in.
Dreamweaver
A major piece of software at considerable expense. Interfaces well with all browers and with BBEdit (above). His built in access to the multiple programming languages, scripts, etc. for making professional grade material for publication on the web.
Expensive
When I want to work on a complex table or position a graphic "just so", etc. This will leave less to chance than trying to do it in Radio or Radio + BBEdit.
Did I mention expensive? I don't know if I would purchase even with its extreme capabilities if I were only weblogging
Since I use Dreamweaver for non-weblogging activity anyway (part of instruction online) I will use.
I will extend my control over the look and feel of my weblog pages via a slow and gradual enhancement of html skills.
This growth is considerably enhanced with the help of Dreamweaver
Omnigraffle
All purpose graphics program. Re weblogging: allows the production and insertion of pictures in weblog(however, for Mac only - see Inspiration for Windows systems). Subitems in picture can link from portion of picture to ANY meaningful web content [with an address- see box to right]. (e.g., ideas to which you refer in your entry).
I now use Omnigraffle to illustrate processes in my weblog and/or to capture and then add to (i.e., lable, annotate)illustrations found elsewhere on the web
Better drawing skill seems to be developing.
Am looking forward to some adaptation of <a href="http://www.mind-map.com/images/larser1.gif";>mind mapping</a> with links to develop/explain ideas
