Radio as Infrastructure
Ernie’s post the other day about how he’ll be using Radio to update his firm’s News page got me thinking about how flexible Radio really is. Here’s how I use Radio today:
- As a weblog application. Radio runs on my desktop and uploads new posts to my weblog TINS (just in case you hadn’t figured it out, it’s an acronym: There Is No Spoon, from a certain movie…).
- As an aggregator. I monitor over 80 web sites – Radio downloads new content from them hourly and presents them in my aggregator page, saving me at least a half hour a day and making me aware of countless things that would otherwise never hit my radar.
- As an outliner. I have become an outline junkie, using Radio’s built-in outliner to organize many of my most critical job-related activities.
- As a conduit from my Treo to our intranet. An outgrowth of my outlining habit is the need to have quick access to my outlines. I use Natara Bonsai as my Palm-based outliner, and wrote a quick hack to automatically export all Bonsai outlines from my Treo to a directory in Radio. Once in that directory, Radio automatically converts the outline to HTML and uploads it to our intranet – making my information immediately available to the rest of my company. (Note: the conversion to HTML is possible thanks to an outstanding plug-in for Radio called ActiveRenderer.)
- As a promotional web site for my book. Along with my two co-authors, I manage a group weblog in support of our book about marketing on the Internet. Posts are aggregated by Radio and uploaded to bookblogs.com (a domain I own).
- As a subject matter backup. I maintain a separate category in Radio for posts relating to Knowledge Management. These posts are then aggregated by David Gurteen in the UK, who maintains a “Knowledge-log” of various contributors on KM topics. (Apology in advance to David – I’ve been a bit slack in contributing lately. I’ll get better, I promise.)
To sum up, Radio currently uploads content from my desktop to four unique web sites on three separate domains. Some content is automatically generated, some is converted and uploaded, other content is simply mirrored from my desktop up to the web. Radio has become a critical piece of my desktop.
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