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November 30, 2004
Blogs vs. Reporting
I mentioned KSL Radio's blog yesterday. This afternoon, there was a brawl during the trial of some white supremacists in Salt Lake. Read this blogs entry by the KSL reporter, Ben Winslow, and then read and listen to his story as filed. In the blog, Ben is an eyewitness, but in the radio report Ben is a reporter. The blog entry is much more personal and real. Which one captures your interest more?
10:10 PM | Recommend This | Print This
JotSpot First Impressions
Playing with JotSpot was once of the things I'd put off until the book was done. Tonight, I grabbed the intro email (almost 2 months old) and signed in.
One of the first things I wanted to do, naturally enough, was change the machine generated password to something I thought I could remember, so I went searching for the usual "preferences" link and sure enough found it. What happened next, however, surprised me. When I clicked on it, I got just another wiki page with an edit button. When I edited the wiki page, I got a form instead of the usual freeform wiki entry box. The preferences forms are completely built inside the JotSpot form system. I liked that right off.
I worked through some of the examples in their cook book to get some experience with their forms. They're pretty slick, using the page metaphor to store data and create applications. I'v been intrigued for a while with this idea of pages as the basis for applications and this gives me some food for thought.
Overall, the execution is professional and things worked pretty well for a beta. There were a few times that I suspected it didn't like Safari (my browser), but I was able to work through the issues. For example, the default editing mode is "WYSIWYG" which requires IE. Seems like that would be easy enough to default to something else when someone is not using IE. Changing my default preferences to "Script Markup" fixed the problem.
The tool panel on the right hand side is context sensitive and customizable. I couldn't find out how to install what JotSpot calls "applications." Applications seem to be pre-packaged sets of forms and pages for a given task (like recruiting). There was a way to browse the gallery, but no way to install them on my Wiki even though some of them looked very cool.
All in all, I spent a fun hour playing around and seeing what Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer have been doing with their free time. I'm curious how JotSpot will be perceived by the market with respect to other wikis like SocialText or Twiki. (Bonus link: Analysis of JotSpot by the Twiki team.)
I think that regardless of feature set, JotSpot has a leg up because they're hosted. It feels like going to a Web site and starting to play around--something people are conditioned to do. JotSpot can thus sell to a marketing or sales person with a corporate credit card without the CIO or IT manager ever being involved. That's a huge win because it removes some significant friction from the transaction. If JotSpot is smart (and Joe and Graham are plenty smart) that's where they'll focus their marketing. Position JotSpot as the no hassle way to get things done that the IT department never seems to get to. They're well on their way with their CookBooks and pre-built applications.
08:49 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Done Writing
Yesterday, I turned in the final chapters for my upcoming O'Reilly book on digital identity. There's still plenty of work left with editing and what not, but its good to have the writing done. The book has three sections. Part I is about digital identity concepts. Part II is about digital identity technology, and Part III is about building an identity management architecture, or IMA. An IMA is aimed at creating flexible, interoperable identity infrastructure in loosely coupled organizations. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
03:28 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Principle of Least Privilege
Yesterday and Orem, Utah man was arrested for stealing names, addresses, and account numbers off of the checks that he processed at his job as a clerk at a convinience store and then selling them to would-be identity thieves. This case is not about digital identity, but its a good example of why the principle of least privilege is important. In general, whether online of off, we're asked to give up more identifying information than is strictly necessary. This clerk had access to more information than he needed, strickly speaking, to do his job. This is true when you use your drivers license to prove your age as well. The clerk can see you address and phone number, but they're irrelvant to the transaction at hand. One more reason to not use checks.
03:15 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Rural Utah: Split Personalities
Utah's Office of Rural Development has launched a new website: rural.utah.gov. I think its great to see these kinds of sites come up. One thing that struck me, however, is that this is very much a single agency site (just DCED). I think it would be more powerful if the Dept. of Agriculture were involved as well. This ought to be a joint site between at least those two agencies, maybe others as well.
Getting a single online focus from multiple agencies is one of the hardest things for government to do. The primary reason this is hard is because of how budgeting happens. DCED and Agriculture get separate budgets and the budgets create the silos. Utah has a great Web presence, but they've got to solve this split personality problem to get to the next level. Utah's done it before with sites like business.utah.gov, which bring together mutliple services from many agencies. This is the way is should be since not many people care about which programs are in which agencies. They just want help and information. A site like rural.utah.gov is a great opportunity to give them that single face, if its done right.