Dear K-Loggers,

This is an expansion on yesterdays post to the group. It reflects my
thinking on how to extend K-Logging to include much of the functionality
currently be touted by expensive corporate portal solutions. Further, given
its decentralized organic approach, it is much more likely to result in
usage and success.

Here is how to build an RSS digital dashboard using your K-Log tool (I am
using Manila and Radio as examples). The concept is simple. In addition to
getting new posts from news sites and other weblogs, RSS feeds can contain
machine generated data from corporate systems. Sales data, financial data,
supply data, data from partner systems, data from suppliers, etc. Using
this method, employees could get up to the minute data from multiple
applications on a single webpage -- a personal digital dashboard.

So, for example, I could be a sales manager at a Fortune 500 company. I
want to track information available to me from multiple corporate
applications, and I don't want to run the client software for each app on my
desktop. I only want the data. So, in order to offer employees better
access to data, the IT department is convinced to spend a couple of days to
create granular RSS feeds for the main corporate apps (CRM, ERP, financial,
etc.). Here is what the feed could look like:

Sale: Customer name: Proctor and Gamble, Date: June 12, 2002, Amount:
$2.3 m, Made by: Tom Durst, E-mail: tdurst@..., K-Log:
http://tdurst.widget.com , Product: Widget XYZ

Using Radio I merely subscribe to the feeds I want to monitor form a list on
the Intranet (using the news subscription page). Every hour I get all the
latest data from each of the apps. Further, I can take any of this data,
add an annotation/comment/POV, and publish it to my K-Log. Sweet. I could
also create published views of this data using the Multi-author tool (
http://radio.userland.com/multiAuthorWeblogTool ) for Radio (this tool lets
me select the feeds I want to group and publish them to category specific
weblog).

Manila works in a similar fashion. I can publish feeds I want to subscribe
to using a simple macro. Using Manila, create a new page for your site (a
story), place the macro below in the "source view" of the editing box. Here
is the macro:

{viewRssBox
("http://www.nanotechnews.com/nano/rdf",
boxTitle:"Nanotech News", align:"center", width:200,
frameColor:"#000000", titleBarTextColor:"#ADD8E6",
titleBarColor:"#FFFFFF", boxFillColor:"#FFFFFF", timeZone:"PST",
hspace:0, vspace:0, maxItems:20)}

Note: replace the URL for the RSS feed I have in the above macro with the
feed you want to monitor, change the name, hit post and presto. You now
have a page on your site with the data from the RSS feed. In fact, using
Manila you could build a complete portal of aggregated newsfeeds without
much technical knowledge.

If I was really motivated, I could use Radio's outliner to build a directory
( http://radio.outliners.com/directoryOutliner ) of views of aggregated
feeds.

Digital dashboards should be something anybody can create, customize, and
control. Don't let your IT department launch into a multi-million $$
universal application portal when a simple approach like this could be
accomplished in days for short dollars.

Sincerely,
John Robb
http://jrobb.userland.com