The weekend

Had a rather productive weekend. Finally got around to getting the license and install of VMWare that was part of my Christmas gift this year. Did a quick Red Hat install to make sure everything was working properly. Now I need to purchase some more RAM for the machine it’s running on at home. The 256MB in there now is enough to run the host OS and a Workstation OS like Red Hat, but when I want to try a trial edition of Small Business Server in a virtual machine, I don’t think that’s going to cut it.

Also, one of the folks I’ve come in contact with through Kevin’s Tech Chats was kind enough to allow me access to a SharePoint site to see what it was like. I must say, I can see a multitude of uses for it in the organization I work for, especially as it addresses one of our weakest points, IMHO, internal communication. It’s rather high on my list of tools I’d like to see us upgrade to, if and when we upgrade. Now I just need to figure out what that magic feature is that’s going to get management to see the value. Saying it’ll improve internal communication is a little vague. I need more concrete examples, and significant buy-in in terms of people who will actually use those features. Much work ahead on that front..

Of course I also spent some time reading the various reactions to the big RSS/copyright question. Scoble’s got the links and the lowdown. My take, as both a blogger and user of Bloglines is that there’s no question to me that if you don’t want your site included in Bloglines you have the legal right to demand that they don’t include it. On the other hand, is it a smart business decision to tell the 190 people using Bloglines currently to read your feed to, basically, find another tool or screw off? To me the whole idea of RSS is to let the individual reader decide how to get/read your content, whether that be offline in a desktop aggregator, online by going to the website, or online using a web-based aggregator (One with ads or without, it’s all the reader’s choice). If you want to control how people read your content, that’s your perogative and your right, and there are many avenues you can use to accomplish that, whether it be by legal threat or using technology to make your feed look a certain way, or include certain information. But don’t be surprised if some people who like to get their content delivered to them in a way that you aren’t going to allow anymore simply stop reading.

Update: We also took Finnegan, our Gnomad, out for a pint this weekend. 🙂

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