Online Video Punch writes about a new emerging job in the online video business: videographer. That’s TV reporter + Video photographer + Producer.

I tried out Digg the past weeks for social bookmarking - it’s much too slow! Why should I use such a service if it feels like 100 times slower compared to saving a bookmark in Firefox? The slow performance cannot be compensated by the nice features offered by Digg. Google’s services are always simple to use and fast. If your Web 2.0 site is not as fast as Google, forget it!

Although semantics in content management are being discussed and marketed for a long time already and always make up for a cool topic at conferences, they are rarely being used in real life. It is already hard enough for CMS users to get the content right and it is even harder to put it in the right context of a metadata set (especially if it is a large controlled vocabulary). This is where corporate “librarians” come into place, who control the use of controlled metadata - but they cost money…

Theresa Regli, principal with CMS Watch, published the article Human Touch, discussing today’s problems and solutions to motivate users of content management systems to annotate/tag/classify/etc. information with metadata. The currently preferred solution for the taxonomy dilemma is group-dynamic annotation (folksonomy), as the article states:

�??The best motivation for tagging is almost instantaneous feedback,�?� adds Busch. �??Things like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati�??the key to those is the instantaneous feedback�??the alerts, the feeds, the group tagging. That�??s why people get into it and get excited about it.�?�

It will be interesting to see, how large businesses and SMEs will adopt that strategy. They are not likely to communicate with the outside world to establish a swarm-intelligent taxonomy. Large enterprises might set up their own tagging infrastructure, while SMEs fall back to existing vocabularies, but don’t share the tagged information externally.

Additionally, there are different levels of confidentiality concerning corporate information: Some of it is for all employees, other only for the top management, certain teams, etc. This fragments the group-dynamics due to confidentiality gaps especially in large enterprises, who could actually profit from a broad collective intelligence when it comes to a high quality folksonomy.

The big hope concerning Social Tagging For The Enterprise is of course to optimize knowledge flows and to save money. Yet, it needs to be testified whether collaborative annotation can really live up to its expectations in firms. The larger and more complex the corporate environment, the more likely you will need dedicated and professional metadata reviewers. It would be an illusion for large enterprises that folksonomy translates into knowledge-management-for-free. SMEs on the other side could suffer from limited resources to ever have a useful folksonomy at hand. They might be blinded by a massive tag cloud.

On the other side, as with all data that becomes part of the public domain: in the end, all sorts of enterprises and organizations could profit from social annotation, simply because experiences are already being made by many people. Related Open Source software and publicly showcased approaches are being constantly refined, existing tag collections are readily available to be directly included or used for inspiration. That will in sum lift up all enterprises when it comes to how effectively they make use of their organizational knowledge with the help of a tagging staff.

The question is not, how much enterprises will profit from folksonomies, the question is how effectively they will make use of it by combining social software with a corporate culture where most of the employees are happy to share what they know by providing hints what their knowledge means to colleagues.

After some research, I decided to use the iG:Syntax Hiliter v3.5 plugin in my WordPress 2.0.5.

Installation and use are fairly easy. I only adjusted syntax_hilite_css.css which ships with the plugin to get an output compatible with my site's style.

Here's the CSS code and itself a demo of the plugin:

Read here about which other useful WordPress plugins I use.

Now that I migrated to WordPress for blogging, the permalinks of my previous blog entries have changed.

For example:

/article_php_5_enterprise_edition_available_online

changed to:

/2006/11/26/article-php-5-enterprise-edition-available-online/

My initial idea was to use mod_rewrite by adding a RewriteRule for each old link redirecting to the new location, but that looked like a lot of copy&paste to me and would not teach me anything new.

Instead, I chose to redirect requests for old links to the WordPress search page. Try it out yourself: Click on this old permalink /article_php_5_enterprise_edition_available_online and you will be redirected to the search page, which displays the blog entry to you as a search result. This looks like a more flexible solution to me, just in case that my permalinks might change again one day.

The implementation was simple. I added a few lines of PHP code to the 404.php page of my WordPress theme as described in the support topic 404 Search Function for WordPress. I also added a header redirect directive.

This is the full code:

Notice that for security reasons, I use urlencode() for the search page URL to avoid HTTP Response Splitting.

These are the WordPress and MediaWiki extension I use on my site:

WordPress Plugins

• Ultimate Tag Warrior: Very nice and powerful plugin which lets me add tags to my blog entries and display the tag cloud in the sidebar. It also allows me to retrieve tag suggestions from Yahoo! for a post - easy to install and configure and very helpful!
• WP-Leftycats: A mini patch which makes the feed icons display to the left side of a category name. I was just too lazy to hack it myself

MediaWiki Extensions

• GoogleMaps: This extension allows me to show where I am located on the page with my contact details.
• XFeed: Aggregates RSS feeds and displays them from within MediaWiki. Look at the startpage of my site to see it in action. There I show the 5 latest blog entries. I had to tweak the code a bit though, from $feedItems = array(); to $feed->items = array();. The author had it the right way initially, don't know why he changed it.

The getting fired for blogging discussion is highly interesting when seen from the Open Source perspective. The basic question then is: Does the Open Source collaborative model lead to a more sound relationship between Open Source companies and their employees?

I can whole heartedly answer with yes.

Independence

The key to a sound relationship between a company and its employees is independence - not only in the Open Source business. In general, any relationship between humans can only work if all parties can keep their independence.

The term independence, as I understand it, includes the ability for mutually beneficial consensus. Only individuals or organisations who are able to act independently, can find healthy solutions in a conflict situation.

Such an understanding of independence includes, paradoxically enough, that you are very much aware of your dependence. You simply know that nothing great can be achieved in life, if you are doing it solely on your own.

Freedom

The freedom of an individual or an organization to shape its future, leads to the afore described independence. Because freedom implies that the executing party is responsible for failures and successes. This inevitably leads to understanding independence as a result of responsibility and freedom, with the awareness of dependence.

Pride

From here on, it is simple to put together the pieces: When working in an Open Source project that appreciates your contributions, you gain self-confidence. Even if you'd never become a core-developer of the project, even little success can make you feel proud and aware of your abilities. This makes you more independent from others, because with knowing what you can achieve, you can better achieve what you want.

Respect

Business organizations who employ an Open Source developer, always have to respect that this person is being respected by the Open Source project's community. The employee's self-confidence is fueled by a community, not necessarily by the company that pays his salary. Although working in a company, especially if it is an Open Source company, can be very rewarding.

Open Relationships

Now ask yourself, how big problems with blogging can really become in an Open Source company like MySQL or eZ systems? I'd say that they tend towards zero, because any Open Source undertaking is based on the kind of independence and mutual respect laid out here.

Maybe, there's microbiotic life on Mars - but there's definitely life on Planet PHP: An aggregator of Weblogs of well-known PHP developers, including the ZZ/OSS Weblog. No need to browse every single Weblog, just visit Planet-PHP and you know what the PHP aliens are doing in PHP universe

Go to http://planet-php.org.

Now that I had a look at Zak's Weblog, I was surprised by his new and very inspired way of writing. He actually started to write down his impressions in a poetic way - and suddenly his Weblog gains more of a personal note and becomes more valuable to me. So what we can see here, is a change in Zak's blogging style, which is nicely documented in his Weblog, because we can compare previous postings to the new ones.

Oh yes, I like the way he writes now!

I wrote quite some reports to my Weblog about the UKUUG 2003 conference in Edinburgh. Some people might ask - and I asked myself: "Why does he give away his knowledge?". In fact, travelling to conferences is quite some fun, but also quite some work.

The reasons to go to conferences is meeting with and talking to people, doing "human networking". If you're a speaker, conferences are the platform for your project to let others understand what you are trying to achieve. Conferences don't pay out quickly in terms of new customer deals. Instead, they often pay out only in terms of "knowledge exchange". Thus, it might be a good idea to keep to yourself all the good contacts you made at the conference, and all the good talks you have heard.

Writing reports about any session that you've visited is even more work. Especially if the aim of the reports is to let other people assess the importance of the talk in terms of "did I learn something new?". Usually, this is done within companies - but I do it for the public of the Weblogging community.

Why? Because I am a saint? Definitely not! I do it for purpose and I want to "earn" something. Weblogging is about selling, brokering, and buying knowledge. The whole Internet is. By providing precious information to others, I hope to raise awareness of people and thus my share in the knowledge market. Being known to be knowledgeable can in fact pay out in real cash - or at least in Blogshares

Weblogs perfectly fit into the mechanisms of knowledge markets. They are a vehicle for selling, brokering, and buying knowledge. They offer the ability to individuals to invent themselves as a product in the knowledge market: to show what they know, how they deal with information, on what their decisions are based, which actions they take, which results those actions bring.

Saints? No. Egomanics? Maybe. Rather clients as well as servers of the knowledge market