'We're gettin the band back together' 

David Wilkinson added jazz flute to the Hoisting Blues! He's pretty good. I especially admire that flooty stuff at the end. Nice job, David! This is fun. 

Anybody else feel the call to get on this mission from God? Add on your voice or instrument. Give it a little more of an intro. Write another verse. For heaven's sake don't worry about messing it up, just drown me out a little more! And don't you worry none about being "good." That's not what it's about.

Comments, and OPML in the enterprise, and the presentation tool 

I haven't implemented any (either?) of the comments hacks, partly because:

- I figure everybody in this beta can just as well talk on the mailing lists, and partly because

- I'm sitting and waiting to see what shakes out. I'm not so anxious to have comments on this thing that I'll go with an external commenting system because I'm pretty sure that's not going to be the answer in the end. Then I'd just have to change to the built-in system.

Thinking about the newbie list as a temporary place to have some interchange made me wonder something. Maybe it would be smart to have comments for a number of blogs in the same community relate to each other in some way, and live in the same place, accessible from one page. Maybe each server could have an fixed community aggregator that displays all the comments from all the blogs, with each blog's comments being a separate RSS feed. Or maybe it only displays comments from blogs whose authors are your outline buddies.

OPML in the enterprise.   This would foster a community feeling, which would be good for organizations with dedicated OPML servers. I have a feeling that the outliner has an attractive future on corporate intranets, because of the collaboration possibilities. Probably not every employee who used the outliner (or was made to use it) would have a blog, but some would want to, if they were allowed to do it as a semi-social thing.

Or maybe the blogs would be all business, with the bloggers acting as report writers. They would sum up the results of work aided by the outliner, but in a more narrative form. Maybe each workgroup, whether it's a department or cross-functional team, would have a blog as a part of a corporate collaboration package. The package could be free if a company wanted to futz with it, or very very expensive so the company could be sure it would do as much as other expensive "solutions." ;-) Have you noticed there are no products or services anymore when it comes to B2B? Only "solutions."

A collective comments page for those blogs could become a sort of message board. Only this might be an intranet forum that actually works, because each of the bloggers would be a leader. I've seen so many inside forums fail due to lack of spontaneous volunteer community leaders. Employees wait around and only post polite answers to questions posed by managers.

Presentation tool.   I might try out Luca's presentation tool today. I'd think that would be another key piece in making OPML useful in the enterprise. Lisa says she hates Powerpoint. I do too. (I made a web site called The Powerpoint Loathing Society once.) I'm not sure if Lisa also loathes the way slide shows make you behave. I do, but I know that "decks," as the consultants call them, are not going away.

At least a light tool like this might cause the presentations not to take up so much space when you put them online. People do stupid things like just scale down photos taken at high rez without resizing them. Then the PPT bloats up to 26 megs and 25 megs of it is from this one picture, which, if printed out would be about as big as a car.

But the main reason I want to check out the presentation tool is because I think it might work very well for elearning. The output already looks just like what you get with most quick online course authoring tools.