Changing Way is Moving On
This is my first post to this blog for almost a week. That’s mainly because weblogs.us has once again been down a lot.
I’m going ahead with the plan I mused about a couple of months ago. For the forseeable future, I’ll do most of my blogging at WordPress.com. I’ll do so using the URL changingway.org. I’ll leave changingway.net pointing here.
Many, many thanks to JD and his friends for their efforts on weblogs.us. But, despite these efforts, there has been a lot of downtime. I fear that there will be more. I hope I’m wrong.
Tween 2.0
So, how would you use social media to turn 10-year-olds into viral marketers? This question creeps me out. On the other hand, perhaps 10-year-olds are viral marketers, and it’s best if they are marketing “upbeat and wholesome” books and related stuff.
But mostly I’m creeped out, and disappointed that this question appears in a book-related blog to which I recently linked with interest and approval.
Quote and Quiz
Public access equals government censorship. Is this:
- From 1984.
- A warm-up for April Fools’ day.
- A quote from a PR consultant hired by publishers of scientific journals.
If you follow the link, you’ll know which answer is correct, and that I would also have accepted: an argument for open access. Thanks for the link to Xeni, among others.
Drawn Again, With Behm
Drawn! is back, after the move to a new server. One of the artists featured right after the return is Mark Behm. This sketch of his baby girl is from his blog.
Blogging and Business Course
I will be teaching a Blogging and Business mini-course. It’s an elective for the MBA students here at Northeastern U. Here’s the syllablog, and here’s an apology for that horrible term: sorry!
N800
I want one, even more so since reading the MobileCrunch review and the Read/Write Web account of the development platform. From the review:
All in all I love this device. I love the convenience, I love the size, I love the instant on/off capability. I think it does many things well and the excitement that I feel when engaged with the development community that has gravitated to this platform has convinced me that the best is certainly yet to come and dramatic innovations in software are on the horizon.
Good Works, Drawn
The post title refers to the art of Ric Stultz, to the recent post on Drawn! about it, and to the fact that there are a couple of sites at which you can buy a print from Ric and contribute to a good cause at the same time. In each case, the price of a print is $20, some of which goes to the Wisconsin Humane Society.
The sites are:
- Tiny Showcase, where Rocking Us Gently (the image used in this post) is available.
- pretty:darn:swell, where “Calling the Cephalopods” was all too briefly available. (Edited later to remove stale link.)
My Ric-related Googling led to me to Robot Walrus: A Blog about Posters and Art Prints, to which I have subscribed.
Paying Charlie in Boston
I rode the T, Boston’s underground/subway/metro, today, for the first time in a few months. The system has switched from metal tokens (one per ride) to a plastic card. So I had to buy one of these “Charlie card” things. I did so from a machine, albeit with guidance from a human, who gave me a blank Charlie card to start with.
This was harder than it should have been. I expected to have to put the card in one of the machine’s slots, whereas I had to flash it in front of the machine’s scanner. This took place outdoors, in single-digit (F) temperatures, so my hands and brain weren’t functioning well, and so I was looking to put a $5 bill into a machine that would take payment only in plastic. The touch-screen on the first machine I tried didn’t work.
Once I got my card, I needed to use it to get to the platform. It took me a while to work out that I needed to scan it, rather than feed it through the ticket slot.
Now that I have the card, and know how to use it, I think that I’ll come to prefer it to the old metal token system. But it wasn’t the smoothest of starts to my relationship with Charlie.
Silence on Scrybe
A few months ago, Scrybe was all the rage among the kind of blogger who writes about the online productivity suite I’m dying to try. Although I didn’t go quite that far, I was pleased to get an invite to the beta, and noted signs of Scrybe’s trendiness.
Since those heady days, Scrybe seems to have lost momentum and gained resentment. Despite the recent rollout of Phase 2 (of 3) of the beta, there are very few blog posts about Scrybe, and not much activity in the Scrybe forums. Some of the activity, and some of the comments in the Scrybe blog post announcing Phase 2, arises from resentment about the way the beta is being run.
I was glad to see a comment from Faizan of Scrybe that: “We definitely intend to have a free version that is not crippled but is useful to the vast majority of users.”
Despite that, my current impressions of Scrybe are that the beta launch video did a better job of setting expectations than the organization has done of meeting them, that it is only one feature (PaperSync) ahead of its competition as far as my requirements go, and hence that it has lost almost all of its early momentum.
I’m not alone in this. Jason Clarke of Download Squad, whose enthusiastic quote I included in the first sentence of this post, has downgraded Scrybe from “can’t wait to try” to the status of Worthy Productivity Application, but just not for me.
Aras in the CodePlex and in the News
Aras is a software firm currently getting ink… pixels… press coverage, to use a medium-neutral term. It is open-sourcing its Aras Innovator product, according to CNET News, eWeek, and InfoWorld.
This is newsworthy because Aras Innovator is open source application software that runs only on proprietary Microsoft software. The code can be downloaded from Microsoft’s CodePlex.
This prompted me to visit CodePlex, which currently hosts 755 projects. I’d be interested to see a breakdown of CodePlex-hosted projects by license. Aras is using the Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL). CodePlex provides links to Creative Commons and to the Open Source Initiative, as well as to Microsoft, for information in licensing options. Aras apparently considered the GPL, but found that customers considered it confusing.
The business model is similar to that used by Red Hat: make the code free of charge, and charge for services. A difference is that Red Hat uses the GPL, this making the code free in the sense in which the Free Software Foundation uses free.
Aras apparently is cutting costs by eliminating its sales force. But there’s still selling to do. There’s also marketing and public relations to do, and perhaps moving to open source and getting press is one way of doing those things.
I should at least mention what the software actually does: Aras solutions drive a process-oriented approach to manage, measure, and improve new product introduction and quality compliance from concept through development, launch, and operations. I should also mention that I found out about Aras and its excellent open adventure via Don Dodge.
