Categories
Weblogging Writing

Won’t be reviewing Radio

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I was in the process of writing a review of Radio for O’Reilly Network when I was aghast to see the publication of a smallish review of Radio by Jon Udell within this publication on Friday. As happens sometimes in a publication that has many parts, one part did not know what the other part was doing.

Though my review was going to be more in-depth and technical than Jon’s, he did cover one aspect of Radio — the community engine — I had planned on covering, but from a strongly different point of view.

After discussion with the lead editor at O’Reilly Network, I will not be continuing with my review of Radio. My apologies to those of you who took the time to provide me your feedback on the product.

Categories
Technology

Radio and P2P – not

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a mood today, but there’s few things that tick me off more than this application of “P2P” to any old technology that comes along. And then this proud standing back as if all is explained.

Give me a break.

John throws this simple little sentence out as if the word comes from on high:

What’s the killer app for a desktop content management system?  P2P + Web Services + desktop CMS (Radio).  Killer combo.

I posted a comment to the note asking where the P2P was in this equation. I am not expecting a response.

There is no P2P with Radio. Period. Please don’t tell me “full peers” or any bullshit like that. If there is an assumption of a hard coded IP that is online 7×24 then that is a server. I don’t care what you call it.

Web services. Yes. Desktop content management. Yes. But Radio has no P2P element.

It is a good product and I enjoy using it, and I think it’s interesting that Userland has been able to get all these people to do all this work for no pay via the new publishing paradigm but there is no P2P element in Radio!!

Categories
Technology

Radio and P2P

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

John did respond, in his comments, to my query ,in his comments, about Radio and P2P:

I need a real P2P system to pull this off. Something that can go through firewalls and NATs. Unfortunately, most P2P systems are run by people that are only interested in Napster-style file transfer (essentially a file pile). There is more to this: apps and Web Services.

Appreciation for answering, but one request: don’t go there — don’t go with the limitations of P2P as an answer to the question of P2P expectations in Radio. I can point out more than one application that uses P2P based technologies and whose focus is not based on file manipulation, starting with a mainstream app John probably knows — Groove.

What does Userland want from P2P? Web services imply a server, which implies a traditional approach to serving application needs. Been there. Done that. Next page, please.

If you’re talking publish and subscribe, now we know we’ve been there and done that. Can anyone say “channels”? The technology is neat and seems to be coming into its own — again — but how P2P is this? Isn’t this dependent on a Radio cloud handling the intermittant connectivities of the individual Radio installations? Just as Groove does within its cloud?

Really, with clouds like these, I’ll never have iron-poor blood, will I?

The technology is neat and important and a real step in the right direction, but I don’t think this is what John was talking about. Or is it?

What do you need from a real P2P System, John? If you articulate this, you might find there are people out there with an answer. But we can’t take a shot if you don’t ask the question. Given the right information, we’d enjoy the opportunity, you’d enjoy the opportunity, we’d all learn from the experience, and we’d all have fun.

And we might even come up with some interesting ideas in the process.

Categories
Weblogging

My Thanks

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I forgot to extend my thanks to all the folks who are providing me with Radio 8.0 feedback. Phil Ringnalda went so far as to post his very in-depth review online. Another person who asked to be NAMELESS also spent considerable time pointing out gotchas and work arounds and other interesting tidbits. All of the efforts are an enormous help in my effort to provide a populist viewpoint in addition to my own of the product.

I’m finding that the News Aggregator was, by far, the biggest item of interest. I also found out that my habit of changing the name of my weblog every time I post to weblogs.com is causing problems with personal weblogs.com lists, as the list runs off of weblog name rather than the URI (naughty. no-no.) I’m now torn as to whether I should be consistent or have fun. My predilection is to have fun.

Documentation’s also another issue that has generated comments. If Radio 8.0 isn’t open source, the effort to document how it works and what people have done is. What’s needed, now, is a method of pulling these disparate pieces together into a unified whole.

During this whole process, I’ve been asked about my own personal RSS feed, which I don’t keep updated. As an example, a certain someone (Garth) went looking for Tim Tams in my RSS feed and didn’t find the term. Promise: On my to-do list. Really. Honest. Cross my heart.

Finally, I had some very good news about one of my current book efforts for O’Reilly. I don’t want to divulge the news just yet as I’m afraid I’ll jinx it. However, my publication date is moving up as a result, which means I may not post my usual 5-10 postings a day. I’ll probably have to settle for 2 or 3 times a day. Will you all miss me?

Again my thanks for the help with Radio 8.0. Webloggers are such great people.

Categories
Weblogging

Radio Blog Entry First Day

Posts from throughout the first day testing Userland’s Radio blogging tool on January 17th, 2002. Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

1:42pm

Sneak in a little test of Radio 8.0 while Dave’s at InfoWorld. Trying out the Windows-based version first, Mac OS X later.

1:54pm

Dave and Userland’s interpretation of a cloud is virtually identical to Ray Ozzie’s in his implementation of Groove.

1:56pm

Two-Way-Web: SOAP meets RSS. [Dave Winer: Radio UserLand]

RSS, but not RSS 1.0…

2:21pm

Maybe it’s handy I have a back up blog since my web server has just gone down…again. I am very unimpressed with Interland – nothing but problems since they bought out hostpro. My web sites only get about 3000 visitors a day; that’s not an overwhelming amount.

Frustrating.

2:52pm

This post was deleted — deletes and edits are VERY easy. Data backed up somewhere? Have to look.

3:11pm

John, Dave – you all need a button a person could push that means

I really didn’t mean to do that!!!

Luckily, uninstall and reinstall works rather nicely to solve certain problems.

3:48pm

Dave caught me screwing around

…with Radio 8 that is.

This is my Id. My superego is at the Burningbird Network. I’m not sure where my ego is yet.

What do you call a person posting to multiple weblogs at a time? One sad puppy in need of a life. Sigh.

6:54pm

Going to try changing the template next. I also want to see about adding comment capability. Hits are okay, but I prefer chatting with visitors.

8:37pm

Dave, all in all a pretty decent tool.

You done good.