Archives for 2001

Poking around at

March 14, 2001 by Michael Boyle

the O’Reilly Network and associated sites this morning. Bopping around from politics to introductions to things I’m starting to play with and stuff. So far, I’ve come across the following interesting new (and no so new) stuff: The CSS Anarchist Strikes Again!; Is Open Source Un-American?; a bunch of OnLamp PHP articles; and Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig.

What the Hell is Blogger?

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

What the Hell is Blogger?

I’ve been kicking around in my brain: it’s irresponsible to develop a web project that doesn’t feature integrated content management. Doing a site without it means that the site is, essentially, a bolt-on to an existing business, rather than being properly integrated. To me, a bolt-on site is already a failure, traffic figures be damned.

The trick is that the kind of content management that I’m thinking of (accessible to small businesses, to sites that get very low but specialized traffic, and to particular departments within larger organizations) is the opposite of what Vignette or Interwoven offer. It must be low-cost, easily deployed in new situations, and accessible to non-specialists. And it’s not really a technical question to implement such a system – the technical side of things is the least of the problems.

There’s an interesting

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

blog entry and following discussion at Robert Scoble‘s site today. There is a divide between marketing folk and other web folks – and it’s a divide that isn’t closing as quickly as some of the others in the industry. I think a part of it may be related to the distinction (made several months ago by Meg Hourihan and others) between web people and dot-com people – with the added category of merketing folks who are neither.

It’s pretty boring of me

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

to link to a Feed article – I do it all the time – but that’s only because, to me, it is the most interesting magazine going, in any medium. Anyhow, tonight’s object of my attention is the excellent, refreshing article, This Is Planet Earth. Mitchell Stephens has begun a long journey to report on the state of globalization around the world.

His first stop was to meet with the inestimable Clifford Geertz and his second, Wichita KS, where he found Laotion food among other things.

It’s personally interesting to me to read that because it mirrors my own experience in a way. In the early 90s I had this insane job in which I travelled to every city in Canada (pretty much). In my travels I was shocked, quite literally, to find a completely legitimate Thai restaurant in Prince Albert SK, to meet Indian (i.e., from India) businessmen (they were invariably men) in all sorts of cities, no matter how small and remote, and generally put the lie to the standard Canadian dogma: immigrants live in the big cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, etc.) and the rest is still very white and protestant. In my experience 10 years ago, that is simply not true.

I grew up at University in an environment in which very different issues were at the front of everyone’s mind – a very similar world as was described by Naomi Klein in No Logo (in fact if I’m not mistaken we overlapped at McGill). But I studied political theory, so even then the idea of globalization was kicking around – but at that time the whole edifice relied (at least casually) on the bedrock principle that cities=diversity, towns=whitebread. In Canada that’s an even deeper idea that permeates our entire canon of literature until 1990 or so. And it was, and is, wrong.

All this by way of saying that this sort of fresh, novel approach to the question of globalization is long overdue.