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January 13, 2003
Archie-Like Indexing for the Web
Dan Bricklin, from whom I first heard about weblogs in February of 2001, has begun a project that is similar to WSIL, but aimed at small and medium sized businesses called SMBmeta. This (and WSIL) are strikingly similar in design to ALIWEB, or Archie-Like Indexing for the Web which was designed to provide the same functionality for the web that Archie provided for anonymous FTP. This, of course was all well ahead of Google or even Excite and Yahoo!. In 2002, when Excite shut down the eCommerce services that they'd bought when they purchased iMALL (my company), there was still a module called "aliweb" running on the systems.
10:35 PM | Recommend This | Print This
More on NOC Blogs
In response to my recent article on NOC blogs, Gordon Weakliem asked about the security aspects. In particular, it seems that there can be (and perhaps is) information that you might want a NOC blog, but not want public. In light of that and some other thoughts, a few comments:
- A NOC blog should probably be built using a system that allows multiple authors. Manilla, Movable Type, and Slashcode would all seem to meet this requirement. It would be unusual for single person to be familiar with all aspects of the NOC. It would be more convinient for everyone to post as necessary.
- The NOC blog should have public and private parts. Each should have its own RSS feed. The private area should be used for more sensative information like suspected hacks, network configuration posts, and the like. If possible, the system should be configured so that the public feed is a filtered view of the private feed so that people with access don't need to subscribe to both. In some cases, it might work to just keep the private area behind the firewall. In others authentication might be necessary.
- Depending on how sophisticated the network and systems are, I think that the more categorization that the NOC personnel can do the better. For example, I might want to only receive a feed of status information for just a single system.
- In an ideal world, all of this is driven in some way from the trouble ticket system to avoid double entry by the NOC personnel.
All in all, I think a blog and especially any associated RSS feeds is a great addition to a NOC. If you've read my paper on Tiered Support you'll see right where this can fit in. Given the organization in that paper, I think that the product operations engineers ought to be running one for each product that they manage as well.
10:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
eGovernment Maturity
Alan Mather writes frequently about eGovernment in general and particularly in the UK. Today he points to an article on eGovernment in the online section of the Guardian. The article also mentions Alan's blog. Alan has a pretty chart on eGovernment evolution that is analogous to the chart I use for talking about eGovernment maturity. The conclusion that I always make from the chart is that cross agency applications are the thing that governments have to start working on now to reach the next stage. This is the foundation of the message on web services that I'll be taking to the Universal Collaboration workshop tomorrow in DC (traveling today).