#Open

Some very cool open source news just to round up.

OpenOffice 2.0[http://openoffice.org] with full support for the OpenDocument format and (IMHO) a very worthy replacement for Microsoft Office for the vast majority of people who use Word, Excel and Powerpoint in anything under uber-expert mode.

It now includes a quite cool MS Access database replacement as well as a good drawing package. Sadly, a native OSX port still lags but the Linux and Windows versions should keep everyone happy. Also, it’s free, open source and virtually future proof format-wise.

I mentioned the quick Applescript I hacked together](http://blog.wakatara.com/2005/10/10/vienna-rss-reader-and-news-aggregator-for-osx/ ) the other day to allow the superb and free Vienna rss reader and aggregator by Steve Palmer to work with my fave blogging app, MarsEdit.

Steve posted it up and in no time flat Graeme West tweaked it a bit and made it even better with attribution and block quoting. You can find his tweak here (nicely done Graeme).

I made a super minor mod to them to fit my style and am using it already myself.

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the software ecosystem on OSX, so I’m always surprised when someone points me at a program I’ve never heard about before, particularly when it’s better than what I’m already using.

Vienna 2.0 , the free, open source news aggregator and rss reader from Steve Palmer is fantastic. I’ve said how much I like Ranchero’s NewsGator’s NetNewsWire before, but it has been bogging down with the volume of news I’ve been looking at lately and getting slow, particularly using functions like “Mark All as Read” which sends my hard drive spinning and slows down the rest of the system. It is also commercial, and while reasonably priced for the professional version (particularly when bundled with the MarsEdit blogging program), I still prefer my programs open source and free in principle whenever possible.

But mostly just about the Word2DokuWiki macro.

Part of the interesting thing about working with a group I’m working with is that many of the users are substantively non-technical. In order to allow people to collaborate together I had installed a wiki and in fact, had chosen the most feature robust one I could think of, MediaWiki< - the same software that runs the mighty, mighty Wikipedia .

Not smart. Basically, even though a wiki is a pretty simple concept the interface and software and extra features were a little too much for the team(s). Concepts like watchlists and a need to have flexible ACL and easily administered security as well as occasionally restructure the wiki made MediaWiki, for all its power, a mistake. So, I looked for the most stripped down, pure wiki I could find and stumbled across Dokuwiki . Less is more. DokuWiki uses simple text files and directory structure and a simple ACL and security structure to provide a robust minimum of wiki features and does it well. It also allows quite easy restructuring of the wiki since you’re not using a database (ie. simple moving of pages between directories). Very, very handy and easy to understand and hack. Quite taken with it actually. Oh yeah, and backups are a simple tar and gzip of the root directory. Put that on a cron job and you’re set. Sweet.

I’ve been doing some pro bono work lately for (what I’m going to call for the sake of their stealth) a campaigning/advocacy organization which is trying to get off the ground and giving them some advice as to how to set up IT systems to make sure they can leverage their rather sparse human resources. It’s been interesting. Some choices have already been made at other levels as to what things should and shouldn’t be used and I have to admit that I’m not always in agreement that the best of breed things are being used.

SimplyMEPIS is a masterpiece of desktop usability. I have to say I am very impressed with it as a simple, immediately useful, and rock solid desktop Linux system that “just works.”

One of the reasons I switched to OSX was because I was constantly fiddling with Linux desktops on various distros and forever attempting to get them to work to the point where a lay person like my family members who are not computer literate could be installed and up and running with little difficulty. Until I’d encountered SimplyMEPIS it was like hunting the Grail.

Fascinating essay from the always insightful Danah Boyd on generational differences between rss, blog and IM. Particularly interesting after the Web 2.0 conference’s vision of the future of syndication.

apophenia: a culture of feeds

The difference, as she points out too near the end (I really, really wish she’d continued on with those ideas rather than obsessing on youth IM/LJ use), is really about content versus community. Resolving that issue is really the tension that syndication needs to deal with in order to leap into the business mainstream. People only being peripherally aware of a conversation without participating are really only eavesdropping on the train. Unless they participate the usefulness is really only about newsfeed neuroses (or take and use it in other ways). The point about youth culture using feeds is that they are more involved with the conversation. IM is their community. Because communities are conversations.

Since my plane buddies from the other night and I talked at length about what could be done to stop this slow, terrible erosion of democracy we all seemed to see and help resurrect public discourse about real issues :

Adbusters, the anti-consumerism culturejammers , have launched a legal challenge against the major Canadian media outlets which refuse to let Adbusters buy airtime on Canadian networks for airing their ads.

How important is this case? For a generation of people, and a growing social movement that sees the media as its main battleground, a victory here will change everything. Without media democracy - which means genuine public access to the most powerful forms of communication - we can’t raise healthy children, create good public policy or hold elections that are legitimate or that matter. We lose power to shape our consciousness, our culture and our future. We even lose the power to imagine what that future should look like.

Quick followup on the wikipedia authority challenge .

Ed Felten did a quick smackdown comparison ; the mighty Wikipedia vs Brittanica cage deathmatch.

Very interesting actually. Wikipedia seems to do very well against Brittanica when it goes toe to toe. Would be interested in seeing how far that actually goes though for a representative statistically significant comparison of entries.

Overall verdict: Wikipedia’s advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren’t for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica’s advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.

Several very highly qualified bloggers Mike of techdirt , Joi Ito , Cory Doctorow recently lambasted Al Fastoldt’s article where he says that a librarian said the Wikipedia is not authoritative and that it should not be used as a knowledge source.

Much more than a proof of concept, I think the wikipedia is fascinating as on the surface it does appear a very fragile way to generate knowledge. Allowing anyone, anywhere to edit and alter an article page on something or create new knowledge appropriate is a revolutionary idea and I can definitely see why a librarian would have a problem with this.