Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
From Blogging to Publishing
 
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What did you do in the electoral wars of 2004, Daddy?
 
Dave's Welcome to Rain City

From Blogging to Publishing

Over on Tom Peters' Dispatches from the New World of Work blog, Tom's associate Erik Hansen asks what we'd like to see done with the first 20 of Tom's 100 Ways to Succeed that he is pounding out, one promised item per day.  The invitation wording set up people to think about choosing between Microsoft Word and PowerPoint downloads.  Based on the comments, it seems that everyone is diving into the solution space that was opened by that leading question.

Always the contrarian, I thought about this overnight and decided it was worthy of comment even in the face of my collapsing school schedule and M.Sc dissertation startup (and I can't talk about that now, and I will find a way).

After writing a wordy comment (#41) on the end of a lengthy list, I decided that it belongs here for two reasons (ok, three): I am a bit pleased with how it turned out; it allows me to emphasize once again the power of considering the problem space and how solutions impact (and can even inspire) the problem space; and it expresses some of the things I think that blended, composable tools will allow for us once we figure out how to make that something users can play with and not break their toes on.  (Think wikipedia with blended blogging, for one.)

Here is what I had to say over there [with a little tweaking -- I can't help myself]:

Well, I notice that by invitation we are having fun swimming in the solution space.  I have some thoughts about that, but this would also be a fun way to practice identifying the problem space and how solutions might impact it. With that in mind, I have two recommendations:

1. Use Hypertext.  The advantage of hypertext should be obvious.  Here I mean something like static web pages.  Organization into chapters is fine, as is offering downloadable Word (editable), PDF, and PowerPoint versions.  There is more that can be done with Hypertext documents by siphoning and distillation of blogs, and now blogs can refer into the material too.  The hypertext can link to new material and more discussions, it can be revised over time, as necessary, and new thinking can be linked to the old thinking (and vice versa) for people who thrive on context like that and to reveal the journey.  Hypertext is also appropriate for CD-ROM and other presentation forms that might even show up on the back cover of a book, and so on.  It can be persistent, organized, and versionable.  And the blog lives on.  I am going to practice what I preach here.
    
2. Use active web pages.  That is, start out having the hypertext be in .asp, or .php or some other server-side format.  The content doesn't have to be active at once or even on all pages.  The HTML might just pass through passively, but now the URL is set right for adding active and adaptive processing, and people's bookmarks always work from the get-go.  This will give you the option of publishing translations that satisfy the language preferences of the browser, accomodating new and exciting media, and providing for possible multi-media elaboration (Tom Peters speaks!) while always, always, having a simple but nice plain version for people who don't want the fancy stuff across their bandwidth and into their access device.  Oh, slap my hand:  now you can deal with accessibility and inclusiveness too.  Please pretend I put that first.  I am very careless about that and I must keep training myself to put that in.
    
3. Always have a way to travel light. Heh. Remember that readers want that option.  It's a "your dog food" thing, I suspect. For Tom, I think that means buying smaller luggage [;<).
       (Uhh, there are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can't.)

OK, so I did a little dance that at least shows some problem-space/solution-space boundary considerations. What are yours?

For the traveling-light insider gag, you may want to look here.

listening to:

Mark Knopfler Shangri-La.  I was looking for something to take my DVD order over $25 and get free shipping, when this new album crossed my radar.  Vicki loves Mark Knopfler.  When it arrived I popped it into the CD-ROM drive of her computer when she wasn't looking, cranking it up so we could have it for dinner music.

watching:

Walt Disney's Aladdin on just-released DVD, and another surprise for Vicki who had never seen it.  I pretended to have set up Elton John's One Night Only - The Greatest Hits DVD which she knew I'd purchases, and then had Aladdin cued-up and paused.  Then I punched all of the wrong keyboard buttons in the darkened room and had to restart.  "Aladdin!  Are you messing with me?" she wonders.  "Must be a trailer on the front of the DVD," I mumble.  I was messin' with her.  She got over it and loved the movie.  There are so many gags, including scenes aped from other Disney features, that I know there are many I missed and will watch it again.
   ... and my weight, thanks to the inspiration of Jeff Sandquist.  Vicki is giving me meal plans and I had her adapt Jeff's spreadsheet in supporting me in reversing the 10-pound gain per year that I'm unwilling to continue.

reading:

P. M. Forni, Choosing Civility, gifted by my friends Bill and Susan Anderson, replacing one I passed on to a mutual friend for Bill.  This time, I am reading one chapter every morning after breakfast.  Today we begin with a quote from Lucius Annaes Seneca, "Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness."

posted by orcmid at 10/21/2004 10:50:08 AM