Yet another reason to upgrade my Manila back end

UserLand Blog: Another Manila 9.6 Teaser. Finally multiple category support. What’s cool about that is that I can really see using categories as something closer to tags now. I also like Jake Savin’s comment on Scott Greiff’s blog that there will also be support for no category at all on news items, even after categories have been defined. Coooool. Hope that the “no category” thing is carried forward into the XML API. I always hated having to enforce a default category in my Manila-related posting apps.

Closing chapters

BuzzMachine: No more AO-Hell. An elegant, well-written elegy… well, not really, what’s the opposite of an elegy?—anyway, Jeff Jarvis kisses AOL goodbye as he kicks it to the curb and in the process writes a really nice summary of the Internet experience pre-Mosaic.

For the record, I was lucky enough to avoid getting hooked into any of the walled gardens, primarily because I went online first through my school and the Unix shell, then through Mosaic at the end of my fourth year. Never looked back.

I become a case study: Business Blogs

I keep forgetting to mention that I have two case studies in Bill Ives and Amanda Watlington’s new Business Blogs: A Practical Guide, one about me as a general blogger and one about the work we did at Microsoft on the Blog Portal. The book is full of practical advice about using blogs in the enterprise for reasons ranging from knowledge management to product management. Thanks to Bill and Amanda for including my experiences. (It’s kind of funny being in the same book, in the same section, as Robert Scoble.)