Category Archives: Emerging

emerging technologies & trends related thereto

ECM, Emerging

RSS as a Radically Simple Suggestion

As some of you may recall, The Portable Consultant is presently assisting with the implementation of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System for a Canadian financial company. The vendor has now been selected and the project PM is scheduling the vendor’s training courses. One of the course descriptions mentions management of “content subscription” and the PM asked me what this was.

IluvRSSÂ

As it turns out, the course description may be referring to the system of email alerts sent out when there are changes to content in the repository to which a user has “subscribed”. Being immersed in Web 2.0 and related technologies, however, I immediately launched into a presentation of RSS subscriptions complete with a demo of FeedReader and descriptions of the benefits of RSS for updating staff and partners via intranet and extranet RSS feeds.

Of course, the ECM vendor does have full support for RSS too. So my explanation wasn’t wasted, but I have been struck by how little people in the general IT world do know about RSS. Our project is sponsored by the company’s Sales & Marketing group and they also know nothing of RSS. For my client the benefits of RSS are simple to explain… a radically simple suggestion, actually.

Since my professional life is in perfect synch with the podcasts I listen to on my daily commutes, I recalled that the February 13th. episode of Todd Cochrane’s Geek News Central Podcast contained a pointer to Why Do You Care About RSSÂ by Sue Polinsky. Check out the comments below the article for more useful links.

Cheers,
-pmh

Emerging, netcasting, Open Source

net@nite interviews Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales

My morning commute today featured the net@nite podcast netcast interview with Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. He had some interesting points about software design supporting communities such as Wikipedia. He draws the obvious connections between the Wikipedia community and those that produce open source software. His commercial initiatives are building on the expertise on community management gained with Wikipedia and it seemed to me that this is the direction that the Internet seems to be taking.

It continues to blow me away how a small group (a half-dozen, in Wikipedia’s case) can create and manage a resource the size and popularity of Wikipedia.

The interview was interesting for its social rather than its technical content. (My question to Jimmy would have been about Wikipedia infrastructure… see how shallow I can be?) 🙂

Cheers,
-pmh

Multimedia, New Media, New Paradigms

DRM days numbered

Steve Jobs’ already famous Thoughts on Music probably marks the end of DRM.

Certainly it will take time, but when a major force like Apple iTunes’ boss suggests that the world would be better off without DRM you can be sure they are also working behind the scenes to promote this vision.

The statistics on the percent of DRM protected content found on the average iPod are a strong argument for the futility of the DRM approach. Apple iTunes has done everything by the book, as the media industry demanded, and DRM has been a spectacular failure, to judge from the figures Jobs quotes.

Jobs musings are entitled Thoughts on Music, but with a video iPod and videos available through the iTunes store it seems clear that the lessons learned about music DRM will also carry over to video DRM; same lessons, but I would guess it will take longer for the MPAA and similar industry groups to learn them.

The features incorporated in Microsoft’s Vista to protect so-called “premium content” have been said to threaten the new OS’s stability – and they certainly will raise the cost of many computer components, according to Peter Gutmann’s Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.

Gradually the industry will realise that there is no ROI to justify these measures.

-pmh