The folks over at Blogstreet have released an RSS-to-IMAP service called Info Aggregator, which is pretty slick. (link via Blogroots)

However, it’s unlikely that I’ll be moving from NewsGator even though using the IMAP protocol does provide some alternative client options as well as remote capabilities.

The fact is I’m always in Outlook and my experience using IMAP has never been stellar.

I’ll certainly give it a try though.

BTW, I just tried Blogstreet’s RSS Generator and it works very well!

In fact, I’m now subscribed to an RSS feed for NextDraft, which you can get here.

Tim Bray’s second installment on search…

“Every search engine has an “advanced search“ screen, and nobody (quantitatively, less than 0.5% of users) ever goes there. This drove us nuts back at Open Text, because our engine was very structurally savvy and could do compound/boolean queries that look like what today we’d call XPath. But nobody used it.”

I used it quite a bit. In fact, the advanced search pare was what I would bookmark on most search engines. However, indeed, I was certainly in the minority.

Cringely writes in his latest InfoWorld column:

“…one of my moles reported that Team Redmond might be looking to buy Accenture, the $11 billion consulting company. Apparently, Microsoft and Accenture have been engaged in some intense talks, with folks frequently flying back and forth between Redmond and New York, particularly during March and April. “

Steven Vore pulls out a great quote from George Gilder’s book Telecosm, which I think seems so relevant to the music industry — namely the RIAA. (link via McGee’s Musings)

“When your product is stolen by thieves, you have a police problem. When it is stolen by millions of honest customers, you have a marketing problem.”

Oh how I hope the music industry is listening. Unfortunately I highly doubt they would see the relevance.

PCWorld reports “Microsoft is on track to release its “refresh” of Office 2003 beta 2 to testers before the end of the month, a company spokesman said Friday.”

This is good news, because I’ve been having problems with Outlook 2003 freezing occasionally. Otherwise, the other apllications in the Office 2003 beta have been stable.

A quote from Tim Bray’s first in a series on search technology:

“All search engines work more or less the same, and offer more or less the same APIs, and provide more or less the same quality of result.”

Interesting. I can’t wait till the next installment.

Mike Gunderloy has written up an article that demonstrates how to use Word 2003 as an RSS viewer. Mike did this cool hack by transforming an RSS feed into into Words own XML flavor, WordML — Of course using XSLT and a little VBS. (via Lockergnome)

Catherine rants about Spike Lee’s suit against SpikeTV. I’ll have to add to Cat’s “Spike” list with Elvis Costello’s album Spike from 1989.

And what about all those dogs named Spike? What will we do?

I’m certainly feeling nostalgic with all the retro talk lately about early experiences with computing technology.

Given the reflective talk, it’s not surprising to see a mention of some of my favorite computing magazines like
Softside,
Antic and of course Creative Computing

In fact, I still have a few issues of Creative Computing and Softside from the late 70’s early 80’s. Perhaps when I post my “Newly Digital” experiences, I’ll include pictures of these zines.

It just occurred to me that Microsoft’s OneNote, the application “for capturing, organizing, and collaboratively sharing information”, would work well as a front-end to a Wiki.

For example: A Wiki server could act as repository for publishing shared OneNote pages that in turn can be collaborated on either via the browser (in the true Wiki sense) or within the OneNote application itself.

IMHO, this type of integration would push Wiki’s into corporate environments where knowledge management seems to involve too much post-processing work.

I believe this is in part because the tools don’t focus enough on the edges of knowledge gathering. Specifically, where and when knowledge is captured (e.g. ad hoc in meetings, email, blogs, the coffee maker et al)

Of course I’m simplifying the process and the technical hurdles, but there certainly seems to be synergy between a Wiki and OneNote. Perhaps even integration with SharePoint as a dashboard would suffice the corporate enterprise enough to make it viable.

However, the technical obstacles could be simplified if OneNote’s file format was XML-based, but unfortunately this is not the case, according to MS Office Group Program Manager Chris Pratley:

“The file format is not XML, but it’s a very structured binary format that can quickly become XML. We decided not to do XML on this release because it wasn’t core to the basic note-taking. But we architected it for the ability to do XML in our next release very easily.”

Although there’s hope for future releases of OneNote and there’s also the XML file format in Word 2003 (WordML) and other Office 2003 applications like InfoPath to consider, but my question to the LazyWeb is whether the opportunity to integrate OneNote with a Wiki is worth the effort today?