Blogarithms
Doug Kaye's thoughts on web services, web hosting and managed services.
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National Priorities "National priorities and the allocation of resources might be a little out of whack. For those of you keeping score -- on the commercial front, suicidal jihadians with explosives in their shoes and armed journalists apparently can find their way past airport security and onto passenger and fuel-laden (yes, we're aware of the spelling) aircraft. At the same time, an aged congressmen with a metal hip and an armed Secret Service agent are, respectively, strip-searched and simply not allowed to board. On the GA front, as proven late last week, anyone with the intelligence and foresight of a 15-year-old child apparently can steal a light aircraft, fly it through some of the most critical military airspace in the country and slam it into an office building. All of this while the motivation for the most destructive of these actions remains oddly elusive to anyone with "common" sense. Therein, perhaps, lies the problem -- it is simply a very tricky business to create rules and regulations that effectively constrain the actions of those with no regard for said rules and regulations." Source: Avweb
Posted Wednesday, January 09, 2002 10:21:19 PM 
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Kiss this Guy. In the Beatles song, I Saw Her Standing There, did you ever hear "I'll never dance with her mother" instead of "I'll never dance with another?" If you want to read over 2,300 such mistaken lyrics, this is the site for you.
Posted Wednesday, January 09, 2002 10:02:30 PM
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Radio UserLand 8.0. For the past few months I've been using beta releases of Radio as my principal weblog reading and authoring tools. UserLand is about to ship Radio with a single-user price of $39.95. The company made a last-minute decision to call it 8.0 as opposed to 7.1, and there's no question it's a major revision. The product is great.
I recently installed Radio for a client to use as an intranet/collaboration tool, and I realized how difficult it is to explain what Radio really is. There's so much behind the curtain because it's based on UserLand's older Frontier and Manila content management products. In some ways there's more functionality in Radio than in Manila that costs $899. For instance, Radio includes a complete desktop server and a fully-automated content publishing system. I even got sucked into Radio's awesome development environment and built my own add-on Tool called news2mail. (It's the first real code I've written in at least five years.)
The beta process was fascinating. The developers (and there aren't many of them) were extremely responsive to feedback from the testers. It wasn't at all unusual to suggest an improvement at 2am and download the enhancment an hour later. That's due in no small part to Radio's automated update capability. Although they had to stop adding goodies to ship 8.0, the product will continue to improve continuously.
I won't attempt to further describe here what Radio does. Rather, I suggest you download the 30-day free trial. Even if you don't keep it, you'll learn how far the world of weblogs and RSS have come, and you'll get an idea of where they're going. [Discuss]
Posted Wednesday, January 09, 2002 8:41:15 PM
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A Web-Hosting Agent. Most of us wouldn't think of buying or selling a house without a real-estate agent, and we increasingly turn to mortgage brokers to find the best home loan. But have you ever thought of using an agent to find the best colocation or managed-services vendor? That's the business model of CanXCentral, a year-old Toronto firm.
I had the chance to speak today with Chris Ridabock Jr., CEO of CanXCentral, and to learn more about his business. Like a commercial real-estate agent, CanXCentral is paid a commission by the vendor, so as a web-hosting customer it costs you nothing. It makes sense for the vendor as well, since the commission paid to CanXCentral is in lieu of the commission that would be paid to in-house sales staff. Chris reports that the idea has been very well received by the vendors, so CanXCentral can offer a wide range of hosting choices--probably more than buyers can research on their own. There's another twist: Because the Canadian dollar is valued at only 2/3 of the U.S. dollar, CanXCentral can offer Canadian-based hosting to U.S. companies at a 30% savings. Are Canadian vendors as good as their U.S. counterparts? I can't say first-hand, but as a group, the U.S. vendors aren't all that great, and some good ones like IBM, have Canadian data centers.
Posted Wednesday, January 09, 2002 6:13:38 PM
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