Jerry Michalski, my friend and mentor, has gone back to basics to evaluate communications technology in his recent wiki post.
All the communication technologies we use -- telephones, newspapers, radio, IM, e-mail, mailing lists, TV, books -- are mired in historical cruft that keeps us from seeing clearly what to build next. It is useful to go to first principles, then reexamine whatever communication task you have at hand.
Jerry & I had dinner last week and discussed a number of challenging topics including my obsession with Japan's fate and Jerry's new ventures and interests.
I also shared with Jerry my friend Richard's new testbed of technologies. Richard is working to integrate a weblog, a photo gallery, a bulletin board, and a wiki all underneath the umbrella of a content management system.
CMS- PostNuke
Photo gallery - Gallery
Bulletin Board - phpBB
wiki - phpWiki
weblog - PostNuke
The best thing about all of this is that it is all open-source software (also all php-based) so there's no cost and lots of flexibility. I hope to migrate my blog to something like this in the not-so-distant future. The cool thing is that the security for all the parts are all managed through PostNuke- so it's more integrated than you might think.
