Jeremy Mazner is asking some great questions:
Q: Does a quick blog entry meet the same standards and go through the same background and vetting process as a "real" story?
A: Many (though not all) of the items I post here are as carefully written as what goes into print. None are is 1 edited by anybody but me. None are vetted by anyone at InfoWorld, but all can be vetted by everybody who chooses to comment.
Q: Is a blog entry equally as obligated to represent both sides of a controversy, or is it expected to only represent the journalist's point of view?
A: For the magazine, I write features and reviews and columns. All are expected to be fair. The story types exist along a spectrum ranging from less to more personal. The blog lives at the personal end of the spectrum.
Q: Are blogs supposed to be more of a conversation -- and if so, should they always have comments enabled?
A: I think blogs can't help but be a conversation. As to comments, after years of doing Web forums and discussions, I'm experimenting with taking a break from flames and spam. I'd like to think that the blogosphere's less tightly-coupled "discussions" -- mediated by logs and search engines -- delivers better signal-to-noise with less psychic strain. That said, I do miss direct comments, I do use them selectively, and I may try renabling them.
Jeremy's questions were motivated by a series of questions I've been asking about Longhorn. This is part of a strategy I've been using -- since the pre-blog era, in fact, when my medium of choice was NNTP -- to deepen the stories I research for magazines. When the subject is not a secret, I find it extremely helpful to raise some issues publicly and invite a range of interested parties to react to them. A recent example was this entry in support of this story.
In that spirit, I owe Jeremy a response to his questions about my take on WinFS. He asks: "What is an 'XML-centric database' anyway?" A good example of the basic idea -- and the one I've been working with -- is Berkeley DB XML (which has also been adopted by the Chandler project). DB XML supports indexed XPath search, a poweful capability that's now being woven into both RDBMSs with XML support, and "native" XML databases. An even more powerful standard is XQuery, which though not a final recommendation is implemented provisionally in both conventional RDBMSs and native-XML dbs.
We have standard query languages (XPath, XQuery), and standard ways of writing schemas (XSD, Relax), and applications (Office 2003) that with herculean effort have been adapted to work with these query and schema languages, and free-text search further enhancing all this goodness. Strategically, why not build directly on top of these foundations?
Tactically, why do I want to write code like this:
public class Person
{
[XmlAttribute()] public string Title;
[XmlAttribute()] public string FirstName;
[XmlAttribute()] public string MiddleName;
[XmlAttribute()] public string LastName;
....
in order to consume data like this?
<People>
<Person
DisplayName="Woodgrove Bank"
IMAddress="Support@woodgrovebank.com"
UserTile=".\user_tiles\Adventure Works.jpg">
<EmailAddresses>
<EmailAddress
Type="Work"
Address="mortgage@woodgrovebank.com"/>
<EmailAddress
Type="Primary"
Address="Support@woodgrovebank.com"/>
</EmailAddresses>
I believe two things to be true. First, we have some great XML-oriented data management technologies. Second, the ambitious goals of WinFS cannot be met solely with those technologies. I'm trying to spell out where the line is being drawn between interop and functionality, and why, and what that will mean for users, developers, and enterprises.
1 David Clarke, of CapeClear, points out that "this statement, precisely by virtue of its obvious lack of sub-editing ('are', not 'is'), re-inforces the very point it seeks to make!" Delightful! As David mentioned to me in email, there ought to be a word for this reflexive case.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/06/15.html#a1023