Blanche DuBois 

Somebody in the community asked me in e-mail if I'd put up a picture. I said there were no recent pictures because I wouldn't let there be because I don't look so well as I used to. But later I remembered I do have my drivers license, and it looks better than the last photos I tore up. I look like I'm up to something.

Wondering about widgets and OPML and collaboration 

I had no takers of my call for help in figuring out how to use the instant outliner as a workgroup collaboration tool. I suppose the universe of possible helpers is pretty small. Or maybe people are just tired of me whining "I don't get this little part of this little thing that I'm trying to make you take a lot of trouble to think about, even though there's nothing in it for you." LOL! Maybe I'd get more help if I helped more, but I don't know enough; I regretted answering a question on the newbie list last week or so that turned out to be wrong, and slapped my own hand and told me to keep my keyboard shut if I was not absolutely sure.

At any rate, sometimes just writing out a problem in a way that forces you to explain it, is self help. In doing this my view of the outliner as project status tool underwent a big evolution. At first I thought it would work better if colleagues could all edit the same outline, then I realized that for the traffic application I had in mind, you really only should have one traffic cop or contributor, with everybody else in the workgroup just looking on.

Then yesterday, I started wondering about making a widget for single project's status. Wouldn't it be neat if you wanted several people, some outside your workgroup, to know what the status of a project is, and you could send them a little baby application to put on their desktops, which would open and show them where things stand? Something like desktop weather. That way, I'd make the status report in the OPML editor, but consumers of the status report would not necessarily have to have the editor installed. I wonder if that's something I could learn to make myself. I guess I'd do it in Flash.

I've been interested in the idea of widgets for a long time. There's something terribly cute about them, and there are so many online things that don't have to happen in a browser, but we tend to be stuck thinking that everything must happen in a standard browser. It's refreshing to think about not using a browser. It's like when somebody says, "Oh, let's have that meeting outside!" and you think, yes yes yes, why don't we ever do that or even think to do it.

OPMLer roundup 

Where's Lisa? What's Kosso boinging about? Fran's back from Europe.

My podcast game 

Listen to passage #77. I'm not tired of it yet, but neither do I want to be, so I'm thinking of taking break from making new ones for a little while. Probably just a matter of weeks, we'll see. I started in late April, so that's an average of about one every other day. That a lot.

Tech tackles RSS explication for non tech types 

Texas Tech University's College of Education comes out with its third podcast. What is RSS? I'm not so sure about using a card catalog as the metaphor.