Errata, monologue and dialogue
I was thinking just yesterday about the whole topic of errata in publishing, and then one appeared in my email for me to deal with. There's a whole page of errata for my latest book, and occasionally I get emails from my publisher telling me about new problems that people have found in the book. Some of them aren't errors at all; some of them are minor typos and mistakes; some are suggested improvements, how I could have done things better; some of them are major problems, either where my understanding was wrong or where the topic that I was writing about has changed under me and what I've said no longer applies. But the point is that anyone can submit errors and suggestions, I can interact with them, and everyone can see the results.
It got me thinking that I'd like to see this extended to, say, Christian publishing as well as technical publishing. I realise this morning that I think I will see that, and it's part of a wider shift in culture.
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Advocacy and Evangelism
I've thought on a few occasions that there's a big crossover between what I used to do in Open Source and what I now do in Church work. As a really good example, I'm currently taking a course in "building transformational communities"; meanwhile, Skud is writing a series of blog posts on the craft of community and putting together a community management wiki. If we can get past the "weird geeks" and "annoying Jesus freaks" stereotypes, I'm positive there's a lot of good stuff we can be teaching each other.
Another example comes from evangelism. There's a whole group of people who describe themselves - sometimes their employers describe them - as "open source evangelists". Jim Grisanzio would be one. Now, we've been doing the "evangelism" thing for quite a while, and we happen to have some ideas about what works well and what doesn't. (Actually these days, we seem to have lost the plot, and maybe we can learn a lot from the open source evangelists.)
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Mail learning 2: Thunderbird and Postbox
Since writing my post the other day on mail learning, I've had a few people contact me to say "how about my product?" So for completeness, here's a look at two more competitors in the arena, Postbox and Mozilla Thunderbird 3.
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Mail learning: the what and the how
Since about 2002 I've had a passion for mining data and relationships information from email. I organise my life around my email, as I'm sure that many people do, treating it as a big datastore. I'm convinced that your mail contains everything you need to know - appointments, addresses, phone numbers, URLs, documents, relationships... The trouble is, how to find it all.
(As an aside, since 2002 I've called all these things "assets", so I use the same terminology here.)
I worked for a year for a company in Belfast with the same vision - build something to index, search and retrieve key data from email. Things never took off, and then along came Google Mail and we were sure they were going to solve the problem. It's now seven years later, an age in Internet time, and they haven't. There are now - finally - a few players in the arena but (once again) none of them quite gets it. Let's look at what they're doing, what needs to be done and, much more importantly, how to do it.
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I finally get PSGI and Plack!
For the past few months I've been meaning to get around to understanding PSGI and Plack; for various reasons, I guess. First, because it's always good to keep abreast of what's going on in the programming world; second, because they're by Miyagawa, and really, anything by Miyagawa is worth looking into; third, because I've been writing a bunch of different web applications recently and wanted to know what the state of the art was.
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Christians can't do computers
So, here's a thought: Anyone got (or know of) a church, mission organisation or other Christian organisation whose IT strategy and implementation they're particularly proud of? Something that's making use of the state of the art, that could serve as a model for others. In fact, I'll be happy with "doesn't suck". Because I honestly can't think of any. Bonus points if you'd agree to be interviewed by email about it.
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"Missional IT": A strategy for churches
I did a report a while back for a major church about how they could be and should be using IT in their mission. Politics took over and they rejected the report, so I feel free to publish it here, anonymised and with some of the more specifics removed. I'm focussing on the bits I wrote about external communication rather than improving internal communication
Technology, computing and the Internet has gone from changing the way we work to changing the way we think.
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Your New Media marketing strategy sucks
Not yours, of course; your competitors'. Their strategy sucks. You got yours right, because you followed the advice in this post. (Seriously, if you recognise yourself in this post, I wasn't thinking of you directly ... but you need to change anyway.)
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Internationalised Domain Names: Urgh
There's a big hoo-ha about the new IDNs - Internationalised Domain Names. We've had some form of IDNs for a while, but the change here is that now we can have Unicode top-letter domains. Instead of having foo.jp, I can now have ほげ.日本
Now I'm not going to say that this is never going to catch on, because the Internet is home to a lot of very easily-led people, but I can see an obvious problem.
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Announcing Era Eight!
For the past week I've been working on an improvement to our library catalogue's online search engine, and today I have confirmation that it works for other institutions rather than just ours. If your institution, Bible college or mission agency uses the Heritage library system, you will almost certainly be interested in Era Eight!
Era Eight is a free OPAC (Open Public Access Catalogue) add-on to the
Heritage library management software. It is not based on the Heritage
Online system, but provides a number of improvements over Heritage
Online:
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