Good news on a Monday
Good news always seems to come in pairs. I wish to talk today about a book I saw and about an e-mail from Cyril, both wish brought good news my way...
I was at Barnes & Nobles bookstore in the Castleston/Keystone area on Friday. It's a usual routine for my wife and I to get dinner and spend some time reading any number of things at B&N. Sometimes I find something useful, sometimes not. (Often I pickup 'mindless' reads like some of the gossip magazines or a Star Wars novel... they're good for relaxing the mind after a long week) This week was a productive one.
Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers is a book by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble, with a foreword by Tom Peters. I went back to my CICS days to do a good, quick grad student read on it. It looks like an interesting work not on the tools, but on the sea change within the business society being brought about by blogging.
This book also guided me to look into an earlier work from 2000 titled the Cluetrain Manifesto, which Israel and Scoble call a bible to bloggers. Written at the cusp of what became the blogging revolution, Cluetrain hints at the changes to come from the tools we have come to know as distributive collaborative community tools. Cluetrain is an interesting work from a copyright perspective (interesting to you '642 geeks') as the work is available in its entirety online (and is not just online, but is in multiple formats... check it out). Of course, if you prefer the traditional, hard copy version, find it on Amazon.
As an aside, not to get too far off topic, take a peek at how Amazon's net incomes fell in 4Q05.
Another book (and I'm afraid I didn't catch the name of it) was all about iPods and iTunes. Nothing Earth-shattering there, other than an interesting tidbit... News to me... iTunes allows you to embed "Album Art" into mp3 files. Of course, "album art" could be on any mp3 file, not specifically an album-rip. So... I'm going to play with putting imagery into my various Podcasts, including CICS: The Podcast. This is an interesting development.
So, that trip to Barnes and Noble was one source of good news. What was the other? An e-mail.... and rarely does an e-mail make me happy (as there is so much spam to fight most days). Cyril Dangerville had written to tell me that had found a potential answer to my long-standing boggle of how to cross-post to multiple blogs on multiple servers. See what he told me...
I know it has been a long time, but just in case you haven't got any reply on your CrossBlog issue or you have not given up yet, I have an answer at least to one of your questions...
The URL to the right mt-xmlrpc.cgi that you should use for your proxy parameter sould be:
http://cicsworld.org/cgi-bin/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
It is NOT like in the example shown on the MT page or on the author's page...
The author of the plugin strongly advise to have the HighWater plugin installed as well on your personal blog...
Good luck.
I can only say, excellent! I will be experimenting with the and will post as I find if it works.
Oh and by the way... tonight is my presentation to Ball State undergrads in the Excellence in Leadership program. If you want to learn my take on Leadership and Technology issues, come to the Student Center (Multipurpose Room) at 7 PM tonight.
Best -- Tony