“Ask anyone who works on the editorial or design side of a media Web site what the worst part of their job is. After they exhaust themselves on the number of hours they work and how little their options are now worth, talk often turns to the publishing tools they use to manage their site and how much they hate them.”
“Tribune Interactive, which runs chicagotribune.com, is in the process of moving off Vignette to a home-grown platform, as is CNet itself. Similarly, washingtonpost.com is said to be walking away from a reported seven-figure investment in customizing the FutureTense product (now owned by OpenMarket) in favor of a system its employees and contractors are building. ”We couldn’t wait for them to fix all the problems anymore,” says one person familiar with the washingtonpost.com decision to build its own system. ”There are profound holes in their system, like workflow, which is the most important part of a
content-management system. I mean, come on already.”
The head of product development at one New York-based media site who has supervised development on both homegrown and packaged systems says: ”These programs are huge, expensive and about as useless and clumsy as you can imagine. Never again, I promise you.”
oh, well, there was that one helpful ceo that was willing to bang the drums for vignette :
“”We’re extremely committed to the Vignette platform,” says an Internet CEO to me a year ago who had
recently signed a large six-figure check for the system. ”What does the Vignette platform do?” I asked him. After an uncomfortable 10 seconds, he moved his hands in circles and said, ”You know, puts the stuff up.'”‘
it’s funny, a friend and myself were joking around about p2p this weekend. and now i find out that some are actually trying to push it in a pathetic attempt at creating a new buzzword for the bingo bin:
“Despite the dot-com downturn, Silicon Valley is embarking on one of its favorite pastimes: investing in a full-blown technology fad. This one, called “peer-to-peer” computing, is inspired by the controversial music-sharingservice Napster Inc.”
salon chimes in with an equally snarky commentary:
“Attention Napster fans: Are you aware that when you trade songs on computers you’re engaged in the hottest new business model to pique venture capitalists’ interest? Yep, according to the Wall Street Journal, the “latest tech fad” turned buzzword is P-to-P, or peer-to-peer. You know, your computer talks to my computer and we share information without going through a middleman server anywhere. OK, we dumped the middleman, but God, don’t let us lose anything else: You wouldn’t want to be a participant in this “hot space” and be referred to as “just another PP.””
i can see this flaming out quickly (the whole letter-to-letter naming thing, not peer-to-peer computing) – i’m betting we get one more honest attempt ( i actually saw b-to-a (business to anyone) yesterday, which deserves to die a horrible death quickly) before the next big meme comes on the scene. i wonder what it’ll be.
on top of an already statistically disappointing situation – it looks like those of us born under 2 pounds have yet another bit of unfortunate news:
“Babies born weighing less than five and a half pounds are almost four times less likely to graduate from high school by age 19 than their normal-birthweight siblings, according to a study in the June issue of the American Sociological Review.”
i think this should win some kind of award for poor, poor, poor decision-making:
“The Scottish company behind Dolly the sheep has been criticised for inserting a woman’s DNA into thousands of sheep without her knowledge.”
“Dr Sue Mayer, director of GeneWatch, said: “People give blood and organs thinking they will be shared freely with other people. They are given as a gift.
“Certainly most donors do not think their DNA will be patented, inserted into animals or bacteria and used to boost the profits of some company.”
a variety of factors have conspired lately to keep me from making regular updates. some fun [extended weekend r&r] and some not-so-fun [funky home computer problems]. access is likely to be spotty for the next couple of days. stay tuned for updates.
there really are far too many perfect juxtopositions in the online auction of a copy of the u.s. declaration of independence:
“”What price liberty? A copy of the Declaration of Independence that was printed in 1776 and discovered behind a $4 flea-market painting in 1989 was sold yesterday for $7.4 million, 23 percent more than Sotheby’s highest preauction estimate and a record for a copy of the document.
It was also one of the highest prices paid for a document sold over the Internet.””
it could only have been more perfect if the auction had been fully ‘democratized’ a la ebay
i’m not one to go googoo over wacky interface navigation tricks. but i think the recent release of jazz would be fun to play with as a visualization method for the dynamic topical index that i rambled on about yesterday. it’s far too perfect that this type of application appears to be just what the designers of jazz had in mind [and there’s the added bonus that it’s released under the gpl]:
“The “Jazz” platform is a Java-based zooming user interface (ZUI) development toolkit. Applications implemented in Jazz can easily zoom, pan, and transform graphical and text objects organized into a scenegraph of hierarchical cameras, nodes and objects. The views offer smooth, animated transitions throughout an infinite plane of information. With Jazz’s close integration with Java and Swing, all Jazz applications are platform independent and run in any browser with a Java 2 Run-time Engine (JRE)”
“In the future, Bederson says the Jazz Band also expects to see Jazz being used to rescue users from information overload, even where applications don’t yet exist. For example, applications built on top of Jazz could maintain your surfing trail on the Web so you can find your way back; could organize your email and documents; and could help you find what you need through e-commerce storefronts or search engines.”