Category Archives: Articles

Twitter Lists: Defeat from the Beak of Victory

I wanted Twitter lists about five seconds after I clicked my second “follow”. My life is about categories and contexts: I follow people for different reasons, and I want to group those people and their tweets around similarities. Search and hash tags helped a little, but full-text search and uncontrolled tag vocabularies come with a host [...]

Twitter Misses the Mark with Mentions

When Twitter changed their reply functionality, now called mentions, my initial reaction was unmentionable.  After a few weeks to ponder and play with it, I still think they made a big mistake.  A reply was originally a message that began with a twitter username, like this:
@zorak No, really?
Replies were public, but Twitter added a link [...]

Word to XML, Then and Now

I was lucky that last month’s XML Philly meeting didn’t trigger my post-traumatic stress syndrome. Quark’s presentation on their XML Author product took me back to the front lines, having done something similar with Word and SGML over a dozen years ago.  Quark says it always produces valid XML for any schema.  I can testify [...]