Craig Burton

I was watching CNN this morning. Perhaps that was the mistake. John King was interviewing Ex-vice president Dick Cheney. John King asked a loaded question: “Do you believe that President Obama’s policies put the United States in jeopardy of being attacked by terrorists?”

Cheney responded: “Yes I do. The press and people do not understand that we won the war in Iraq.”

All my life I have worked hard to stay out of politics, but this guy gives one reason to change.

Let me see here, I seem to recall Mr. Cheney telling us about the incredible dangers of Weapons Of Mass Destruction that were be amassed in Iraq.

Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives wasted in a lie.

I am not sure why I don’t trust him. Somehow I think he has an agenda that doesn’t match mine.

#followfriday The Twitter-based Endorsement System—not just for Fridays anymore

Micah Baldwin started a brilliant phenomena known as Follow Fridays. Follow Fridays has become the first Twitter-based endorsement system. Here is the premise, every Friday, endorse another tweetist  by tweeting the hash “#followfriday” followed by tweetist reply tag. So the tweet “#followfriday @micah” results in the tweetist making an endorsement of @micah.

This is a good idea. As Scott Lemon recalls, Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) of Forrest research twittered something like “It would be interesting to see who the most recommended people are on #followfriday.” Another good idea. My good friend Scott Lemon (@humancell) jumped on the idea and proceeded to pump out the code over the weekend to do just that. Thus http://topfollowfriday.com was born. Topfollowfriday.com is a statistics engine that gathers stats on #followfriday. Sweet little implementation Scott!

Scott called me up on Skype to tell me about his stat engine. We proceeded to have a little brainstorm about how to extend the #followfriday syntax. Without putting too much pressure on Scott to deliver, I will give you a hint. Drummond Reed (@drummondreed) was involved.

I love how this stuff happens.

So I will say it. You read it here first. Wouldn’t it be cool if besides giving an endorsement, you could give some “context” to the endorsement. I mean context like actually saying what the you are endorsing the person for in a format that can be searched and indexed? Hey, I know, let’s call it microtagging.

That’s it, a microtag-based endorsement system with classifications and ratings using standard syntax. Hmmmm. Now that’s a good idea.

Can it be abused? Probably. Good questions. I put this on my wiki, go make comments and suggestions. You can also make comments here of course.

The Advent of Microtagging

Wouldn’t be cool if instead of creating a syntax out of the blue for microtagging, we used an existing, vetted, well thought out syntax? Say maybe XRI?  Thank you Drummond.

Hey, I’m not saying this has all happened yet. But what fun to think about and watch the beginnings.

I have updated the blog to support Disqus comments. You no longer have to subscribe to leave a comment.

Thanks for doing all my work for me Jesse.

Kynetx Inc. has a new white paper out today. The Advent of Next Generation Browsing. I love these guys. This vision is brilliant. This is the first writings I have seen that actually show the real value of Infocards. Single-sign on is interesting, structured browsing is mind-blowing. Kim Cameron—my bestest friend—pay attention to this.

Steve, Phil, you have nailed this vision. Congratulations.

cb

It all started from a twitter converstation. (Like so many things these days)

Rob Paterson posted a note that after yesterday’s google fiasco, that he is worried about his blog. He tweeted to see if anyone knew a good service for backing up his blog. He then went on to say that he uses typepad for his main blog and that he really likes typepad.

I  did some quick research, typepad has some fundamental problems. Here are some experts of the typepad support page:

Exporting your weblog content does not backup any of the templates associated with your account or files inserted into your posts. There is not a way to backup Basic templates currently, but users with Advanced Templates may want to copy and paste their existing templates into new text files.

Backing Up Your TypeLists

As with posts, you can also export your TypeList content to an OPML file. You are able to export notes from Links, People, Albums and Books TypeLists. The exception in this case is Notes TypeLists. There is not a way to export your items at this time but it may be helpful to copy and paste all notes into a text file for future reference. You can find more information under Exporting TypeList Content.

Backing Up Your Photo Albums

Currently there is not a way to easily backup your Photo Albums. To work around this, view each page in your browser and from the browser menu go to File > Save As > Web Page Complete to save copies of each page to your computer. The best option right now is to keep copies on your computer of photos you upload so that you can upload them again if need be.

You cannot create an archive from which to rebuild your site without A LOT of work, if at all. What the support page doesn’t tell you is that you don’t have a backup of the database that Typepad uses for your blog. Typepad “renders” a page from its database everytime a page is requested. You can only back up that text from renders. This sucks.

In my opinion, this makes typepad unusable.

The wordpress.org site says they make backups. I assume they do. But you have no access to those backups and cannot make off-line backups of the data found in your blog.

If you want to make sure that your wordpress blog is archived, you need to put your blog on a hosted service provider that will backup your database and let you do an off-line backup. I use Dreamhost. Here is the backup screen from their dashboard. I consider this an adequate approach. But you must stay on top of this. You could loose up to thirty days of data.

To do a bit more on this excersize, I checked out blogger.com. Here is what the support page says.

How do I create a backup of my entire blog?

Blogger does not have an export or download function. However, you can use the following instructions to create a single file with all your posts which you may publish and then copy to your own computer for use as desired.

In other words, blogger.com does not let you create an archive of your blog either. Just the data. Recreating your blogger.com blog should something happen would be difficult if not impossible.

Summary

I strongly recommend you find out if your blog is in jeopordy. I am still reeling from the transition to wordpress. I lost years of data, links, discussions. No thanks to Dave Winer. Dave, I love you, but I think you left a ton of us locked into your silo with no way out.

I don’t want this to happen again.

If you use the wordpress.org site. You are vulnerable. If you use the typepad.com or vox.com blogging services, you are vulnerable. If you use blogger.com, you are very vulnerable.

The best solution I have seen so far is to find a service provider that will host your wordpress blog and archive the database for you. You must also do an off-line backup and store backups of the database—not just the posts and pages—of your blog.

Recreating a wordpress blog would still take work, but at least  you can do it.

PS. I scared myself writing this post. The state of blogging really sucks.

I am downloading the Windows 7 beta. I don’t plan to use it in production obviously but I am hearing good things so I thought is was time to take a look. It still has a few more hours of download time. I will let you know how it goes.

I have talked about one of my favorite books several times, recently I brought it up in the podcast interview with Phil Windley at Technometria. The book is by Peter Drucker and is titled Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I read this book some time ago and I recently decided to buy a replacement copy, I found it on Amazon for .73 cents. The shipping was significantly more than the book. The book—however is invaluable. Here is an intro to one of the chapters to just whet your appetite:

The Practice of Innovation

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms and indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.

Read this carefully. Very carefully. Innovation as a practice? This is uncommon thinking. He even blows away any traditional notion of entrepreneurship. I have added a lot to it but I strongly recommend it to anyone doing development. Gee, I think that would include a few of us eh?

innovation,technology,entrepreneurship,bussiness

I just noticed that Novell announced the cancellation of Brainshare 2009.

With all of the layoffs and musical chairs happening at Novell, this can hardly come as a surprise. It has been a long time since Brainshare has really been a "developers" conference. Novell has failed miserably at every effort to create a developer community.

So here is my take. Brainshare is an excellent forum for Novell to get some ink. Since Novell has shrunk to such irrelevancy, it is very hard for it to get any press otherwise. Since the current regime has yet to articulate at all what its strategy is, another Brainshare that exposes that weakness isn’t really necessary. However, cancelling the main event is just another indicator of the disarray that Novell is in.

Blaming it on the economy is rather brilliant. "Yeah, it’s the economy, that’s the ticket."

brainshare,cancel,Novell

We had a long twitter session about Infocards and OpenID. Look at my time line.

http://twitter.com/craigburton

You may have noticed some glitches over the weekend. We are moving my blog. Lost a few entries. But I am so happy to be moved!