I spend most of my OpenLogic attention right now on Wazi, whether it be working with writers like Grant Smith and Dru Lavigne or our terrific internal team on what they might contribute, developing my own contributions, or researching what we might want to cover. Mornings before work I spend reading poetry. Lately Zbigniew Herbert, a Polish poet (I find Alissa Valles translation gorgeous, though it's controversial.) who performs virtuoso syntactic moves with practically no punctuation. Writes complex lists and compound sentences with no commas, for instance. I'm thinking about this phenomena — the way in which what's not there creates and informs, shapes and enhances what is  — called by poets and visual artists managing whitespace. And it occurs to me that Wazi, as a project, might be understood at least in part by what it's not, by what we don't want it to be or become, by what we've chosen to leave out.

To claim that Wazi isn't ultimately a lead generation and promotional tool for OpenLogic would be disingenuous. And that's the main thing we're leaving out: any pretense of being something other than what we are. However, it's also true that we're striving to leave out covert sales pitches, and marketing speak and wishful-thinking feature lists and anything, anything that remotely resembles padding. That leaves lots of room for Wazi to become a place to find substantive articles based on user experience with open source, about participating in the open source industry and making open source work in business.

Toward this end, in October, our researchers and legal team added an article on open source licensing, and a handy comparison tool of the most common open source licenses. Our engineers contributed tips and tutorials on a range of topics including working with Firefox and installing Apache on AIX. Rod Cope reported the results of some experimentation with open source reporting tools.

By the end of November, we'll have published an article that considers the numerous elements of what's being called 'governance' these days — scanning and open source policies and the like. We'll go in-depth laying out what a company might need to do to get a handle on the open source it uses, organize and manage their efforts and keep them organized going forward, while simultaneously meeting license obligations. Additionally, OpenLogic engineers will give you some tips on working with JBoss and Rails in both a development and production environment.

In December, we'll publish an article on getting started using open source for a Web application development project in an enterprise setting, and a comparison of all the available open source email servers. Both of these articles will include information on proprietary alternatives and pricing. January is still shaping up, but we know we'll add some information on stacks like servers and databases that play well together and expand our information on governance.

All this content is available at http://olex.openlogic.com/wazi free of charge; and most is available under a Creative Commons license, so free to use. If you like it (if you, like Mr. Cogito, believe a bird is a bird, and you adore tautologies and explanations), all we ask is that you talk about it. Subscribe to our RSS feed, Digg us, tell your friends. And, of course, if you really like it, if you like it enough to use the tools you're exposed to, keep in mind that OpenLogic keeps Wazi's lights on by selling support for open source (and much more) on hundreds of open source projects.

On a closing note, we're looking for writers and artists. If you'd like to work with us, or there's something particular you'd like to see, be impetuous and send us an email at wazi-at-openlogic.com. 

http://del.icio.us/ is touted as the premiere example of 'folksonomy' – users building a taxonomy. In other words, users creating categories, a classification system for content. In the case of this site, a folder, but you get to put the same bookmark in three or a dozen 'folders' if you'd like. This is tagging at work.

I arrive at this site by way of Wikipedia where I've looked up 'folksonomy'. It is, apparently, a venue for storing, sharing and, ostensibly, discovering new bookmarks. Here's where the tagging comes in. You put in a bookmark, and you tag it. Others can find it.

What about the potential of tagging for adding dimension to a doc set? Well, I could see a company leveraging this in their specific space, allowing users to share bookmarks to industry related information. This is particularly interesting in our space, open source.

In the case of Viddler, which I mentioned in my screencasting blog, the tags added to moments in a video become part of searchable content. Users could search the help system for, for instance, 'jboss gotchas' and pull in hits across the content. The indexing possibilities are greater because there are a greater number of users weighing in on what to call something. There's a way in which all of this is just about making content more accessible by search tools. This dovetails nicely with my other reading, Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery and Managing Enterprise Content.

From the another perspective, I can see how a user could zero in on people in the community who are 'like' themselves. In our case, other open source managers, other developers using open source, other enterprises using open source etc. In a social context, this worries me a bit. Though I don't know why it should given that that's how I make my decisions about who I'm going to spend my time with anyway. And I suppose this is what we're doing when we read the New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal. An interesting discussion of how this all could backfire in the greater scheme of things can be found in Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur.

I also wonder about the usefulness of sorting through all that unindexed messiness. Even I don't agree with me about what to call things sometimes, and I end up with the same content spread across two folders, literal or digital. I know this is one of the difficulties in the discipline of information retrieval: how often two users agree on what to call a thing.

Quickly in my research I begin to see a distinction between categories of communication tools. There are tools that will help us at OpenLogic not only communicate with our users, but allow a discussion between us and there are other tools we might make available in our community to enhance the ability of users to communicate with one another. The bidirectional and user-to-user pieces might be of particular interest to us given our Expert Community.

We'd like, for instance, to have sample projects and tutorials for the open source projects in our library. These might be created by our engineers on staff or by the open source project developers themselves. Folks are leveraging video to do this to very nice effect, like on the Ruby site. Most of the time this approach is called screencasting, sometimes it's just called video. Sometimes it's named for the technology used to make the recording, like 'Webinar'. Whatever the name, it seems to effectively remove a level of abstraction from 'documentation'.

Leveraging Viddler would allow us to take the video one step further: users could enhance it by adding timed tags and comments. (Interestingly, the tags in the video become searchable content) Developers could talk to each other and point out potential snafus in a series of steps installing or using a particular open source project. I can see opening this up to our Expert Community and having them add comments. For the best, most cohesive user experience, we'd probably want an editor to vet comments.

I also like the idea of using video and audio to aid accessibility. Video to demonstrate tasks that require both hands on the keyboard, for instance; audio to augment an experience for all of us, but especially the visually impaired. I think a good bit of thought would need to go into assessing the actual needs of special populations, we'd never cover that by accident, but it's good to have it on the radar. I wonder if the video doesn't have the added advantage of appealing to folks accustomed to t.v.

Some resources to research this further include a much referenced and dated but still helpful article on screencasting.

I've been researching the opportunities 'Web 2.0' or 'semantic Web' provides for creating 'content', content having become the catch-all term for a company's documented efforts to communicate with customers/users. It includes what we used to think of as 'documentation' or 'technical communication,' as well as marketing and sales materials and help, all pictures and instructional materials etc. I'm interested in the burgeoning disciplines of organizing (Information Architecture) and managing that content on a company-wide basis (Content Management), as well as the specifics of the technologies and strategies for communication that have opened up as a result of emerging technologies. Over the next few months, as I research and think about this, I'm going to post a bit about what I'm learning. Interspersed in these ruminations will be my thoughts on another topic I've recently had the good fortune to get involved with in a serious way, usability.

For a sense of where I started with the Web 2.0 business, I've spent the last year thinking about and learning other things (like XML and Linux and how to create effective docs for developers etc.). Until two weeks ago 'social networking' meant MySpace to me, which I thought of as a kid's version of LinkedIn. That other huge buzz word – 'tagging' – meant nothing much, and nothing relevant. 'Web 2.0' was the groovy little video that circulated a few months back and the topic of occasional growsing by the engineers.

The first site I visited was http://listal.com, a social networking site. I found it terrifically frustrating that the site made much of its ability to 'tag', and then explained it nowhere. To be fair, the site has only rudimentary help and I've since read up a great deal and realize that tagging is so common that what it is and how to use it goes without saying. For those of you who stumbled to this post as clueless as I was, I'll talk about tagging in a future effort, but start by looking it up on Wikipedia. Then look up folksonomy.

In the mid-1990's, I spent my days in a cube in Blue Bell, PA working as a member of a team of researchers for an EAP. We used the Web to answer questions like 'is it practical to cover my attic floor with sisal rugs?' and 'how would I go about getting a baseball signed by Ken Griffey Jr.?' – three or four a day each for several years. That we consistently produced answers seemed like magic to the social workers and therapists who interacted directly with the customers. The Web was such a mystery to them that we developed and taught a class to, ultimately, everyone in our division of the company – the therapists and social workers, the admin staff, the managers, the call center staff etc. Practically no one had ever 'logged on' or used a search engine. If they had, they certainly had never heard of Boolean logic and could rarely find what they wanted.

Google provides much better results than dogpile did in those days, and it's clear that most of what we're talking about when we're talking about information architecture and content management is how to ensure users can find our content – more fruitful searching. It is interesting and exciting and a bit daunting to wonder how the technologies coming into vogue right now might facilitate this, and whether tagged content will enhance or impede our efforts.

These are some of the questions I'm starting with. More about the specific stuff I'm looking at and finding to come, but a good place to start is with a presentation by Innodata Isogen: Web 2.0: Understanding the Semantic Web and Its Impact on Technical Communication. This presentation features Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and, while my follow-up research on the technologies and strategies Scott covers indicates that the field has changed even since he prepared this talk, it's a great overview for those of us noobs. Another good starting point is Web 2.0: the 24 Minute Documentary. It's an interview with CEO's of Web 2.0 companies talking about various aspects of this phenomena. It introduces the business model, the buzz words and includes some entertaining speculation.

I’m ambivalent about the value of blogs. Not the value of communication, certainly not the value of writing. I write everyday, and I write everything. Supervisors and colleagues notice (and query and tease). My partner says I make more notes than anyone else he’s ever known. I’ve written since I was 12 years old; it’s how I know what I think. Writing objectifies my experience, allowing me more, better perspective. And writing serves the function of best friend without having to bore my actual best friend with the tedious but necessary side trips between ordinary Monday curmudgeonlyness, and brilliance. Which is another way of saying – most of what I write, most of what I think, is crap. Crap processed becomes interesting, sometimes. That processing, for me, takes place in draft after draft, over years and years, that never gets seen. Consequently, most of my ideas never have a life outside my mind at all and that’s a good thing.

You might suspect an overzealous critical faculty, that surely I have more worthwhile ideas than make it past my trashcan. You might be right (that pesky editor). But, in a world full of solid thinkers, solid writers, I’m loathe to add something mediocre to the mix. You don't need to be particularly interested in information trends to note the terrible volume that needs to be digested in order to stay current in our varied roles. There’s too much coming from “official” sources for to keep track; honestly, I’m overwhelmed by the idea of keeping up with blogs as well. I resist: I don’t have time. Not to weed through all that each person that can hit send might have to say about It, whatever it is.

Now, in this argument with myself (and with my colleagues, no mean writers themselves), I go right to the myriad articles and news stories that have shown up recently on how blogging challenges conventional notions of journalism, the control of repressive, censoring governments and how corporate blogs provide insight into a corporation’s culture (This article, published by Intercom, is available to members only. E-mail me if you’re interested and I will obtain permission to give you a copy.). I’m sure the topic has arisen elsewhere and I’ve missed it.

And those are all good things. I especially like the idea of a less closed commercial publishing world, particularly right now when I’ve got to truck back into Denver to return a copy of a book I found unreadable despite the hype. I’m frustrated and suspicious when badly written books that happen to be written by fashionable critics get a lot of good press. I wonder if the critical community – yes, those same that I rely on to do some information filtering for me – are pandering, afraid getting the treatment Jonathon Franzen recently got. Maybe blogging, like self-publishing, provides a way for ambitious thinkers with interesting ideas to make it past Them and become available to Us.

But I’m not sure. This is only draft three, I’ll let you know where I get with these thoughts in a year. Or two. In the meantime, I’ve learned to use this technology. Check that off my list. Whew.