Tim Bray

Along with Microsoft’s Robert Scoble as well as the team from Macromedia, Tim Bray is one of the highest profile bloggers in the tech community, both for the quality of his commentary and the size of the organization he works for: Sun Microsystems, where his title is technology director. Bray, who has been blogging for a few years, just joined Sun two months ago (as of this post). He is a long-time Internet technology pioneer, having co-created XML and previously ran Antarctica, a maker of business intelligence visualization software.

Like many prominent bloggers with prominent jobs, Bray disclaims on his blog, "The opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them." At the same time, however, he recently helped craft the Sun Policy on Public Discourse, which, in fact, lives on Bray’s blog.

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Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche is a consultant specialized in helping organizations improve performance efficiency through combination of technology and education. He started blogging earlier this year on topics (recently) including tele-education, human performance analysis and university course management systems.

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One of the things about the whole blog trend that I find so exciting for business is effectiveness and power of these simple publishing tools to accomplish a great degree of what “content management systems” such as Interwoven and Vignette have required tens of thousands of dollars and months of training to match. Of course, give us an inch and we’ll take a mile, and with that in mind, I am taking notes on a long list of features I’d like to see introduced to the next generation of blog tools to make them that much more effective (risking contradicting, perhaps, the beauty of their simplicity today, but I’m willing to take that risk).

Meanwhile, the movement towards powerfully simple and cheap tools continues apace. The folks from 37Signals have now released Basecamp, a web-based project management tool with “blog simplicity” that includes features such as scheduling, to-do lists, file sharing, RSS, iCal, and Mozilla Calendar integration, among other features. Priced at $19/month.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

37Signals, a fantastic web-dev company, has produced a new project-management app called Basecamp that looks like a winner. Not only is it extremely pretty and easy-to-follow — I’d expect no less from the usability wonks at 37Signals — but it’s also open: information flows out of the app as RSS and can be bulk-exported in XML, so none of your precious project-management material becomes a lever to lock you into paying the (surprisingly reasonable) monthly rates.

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I know that blogs and XML syndication are not synonymous, but let’s face it, bloggers are leading the charge on adoption of RSS, Atom and related XML syndication protocols. This article by Wired suggests that there may be too much of a good thing in this regard, and that if XML syndication were to really catch on big (e.g., Microsoft is planning on releasing its own XML syndication reader built into its upcoming overhaul of the Windows operating system), the resultant demands on traffic may overwhelm the Net. Seems to me this could be overcome with some smart use of proxy servers or other work-arounds, but I’m not really a technical guy, so what do I know.

Wired: Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?

Robert Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA, has been blogging for a little over a month. The ANA is one of premier industry trade associations for marketing industry. I have to say, I’m surprised that “a suit” seems to really get blogging as well as Loidice demonstrates. For example, he links to Wikipedia to clarify concepts in his posts, which is a smart blogger thing to do. Not surprisingly, he uses the blog to boost for the industry (e.g., “Great (Not Just Good) Times Are Ahead for Marketers”), but he also uses it to comment on an initiative of another industry association (“NAB Responsible Programming Taskforce”) as well as to respond to how the press is clarifying ANA initiatives (“NUDG: What Really Happened”). A great example of why every industry association should adopt this handy communication tool.

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It has been quite surprising that Google has not yet started blogging, given their acquisition last year of Blogger.com, and all, not to mention their perfectly aligned sensibilities with blog culture, or at least one would assume.

Well, it looks like we’ll see something interesting soon. As of this writing, the google.com/blog page says only “test,” but it’s certainly cause for hope.

[UPDATE 5/6/04: This page now comes up as an error. Someone is obviously playing around with something, though. Stay tuned…]

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