DITA - Darwin Information Typing Architecture: March 2008 Archives

Jabin White from Silverchair was interviewing me the other day for their newsletter, and one of the questions was about which blogs I read. Of course, I read a lot--a quick count of my RSS reader shows me about 50 blogs under "content management" and "XML." I also have a few RSS feeds for vendor press releases (and a note to vendors--I vastly prefer RSS delivery of press releases over email delivery, so if you have an RSS feed, please email me).

I need to do some housework in my blog list. Out of those 50 or so blogs, at least 10 seem to be completely dormant, and a number are very rarely updated. But there are some I read regularly. These include:

• General CMS blogs like Trendwatch at CMS Watch and the blog Conquering Information Chaos by AIIM's John Mancini


• Two titans of the general technology blogosphere, Dave Winer and Jon Udell.


• The DITA blogs at XML.org.


• The blog by Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg.


• The amazing eBook blog at TeleRead, maybe the most in-depth technology blog on a single subject out there.


• The blog by Brian Jones at Microsoft, who is fronting a lot of their work with Microsoft Office file formats at ISO.


• For DRM, the one and only source, Bill Rosenblatt's DRM Watch.

Aside from blogs, I read XML.com of course, and Robin Cover's Cover Pages. (You have XML pretty much covered if you read these two things--and Gilbane.com of course!)

One other thing I do is use Google news and blog alerts, though sparingly, as you can really get overwhelmed. I get a daily Google Alert on XForms, for example, that is usually very good.

Note that I didn't mention email. I do get a lot of things in my inbox, and read some, but I spend more time pruning my email than I do reading it. I also periodically unsubscribe to email lists and then curse myself for joining them in the first place. I read a few yahoo groups regularly (notably dita-users, now 1824 members strong!), but use the browser interface for that more and more.

So that's my bag of tricks. Any thing else I should be reading?

• Apropos of nothing: when I hear people talking about "tagging" songs in a radio ad, I know that the average person understands markup and metadata even if they don't necessarily use those words.
• Over at CMSWatch, Shawn Shell has a report on last week's SharePoint conference. Shawn notes that SharePoint has now excelled a billion in revenue and 100 million licenses.
• Jeff Potts has some thoughts on the clash of cultures with the recent co-location of AIIM and DrupalCon.
• CM Pros has just put out their call for papers for their spring conference, to be co-located with Gilbane San Francisco in June.
• Bob Ducharme has a new tutorial about DITA specialization over at IBM's developerWorks site.