John Robb: "Radio is a fully decentralized system. Even better, it provides you with a complete back-up of your weblog on your desktop and the ability to add to your weblog while disconnected. Given that it is decentralized, you can opt to self-host your weblog at your ISP or on your corporate Intranet in under a minute."...

It's not only about centralization vs. decentralization, is about freedom and Content Management Systems.

With a single copy of Radio I'm updating this weblog (which is hosted on a linux server), 3 company k-logs (hosted on another linux server), and weblog I use for a teaching program (hosted on an iMac with RCS). Sure, I could use three different programs to manage all these weblogs (btw: we also develop a CMS that is centralized!) an different servers but, in this case I would not have a Content Management System, but a Totally Messed Up Content System. Try to get this: this very post is appearing at the same time on three different weblogs. This can happen because the CMS is centralized, but it is centralized on my own PowerBook, not on some remote server.

The server on which pages are sitting is not the center of the system, it is just the front end, the center is where the core of the contents is.

Besides, with Radio I can manage my InstantOutline, can collect news and run several useful other tools.

In this wonderful brand new web services world, we have the freedom to run code and store contents just where it's better, and the content management system for my weblogs is better run from my desktop.

Now, it's late, let me take my iPod and go home... but this is another story.

A few days ago I wrote about the benefits of weblogging, here's today's example.

In these days are working on the second stage of beta testing of our new Shared Outlines Radio tool. What we are realizing is that while outlines are a great writing environment, they might not the the best reading environment, especially if several people are writing in the same outline at the same time.

A solution to this might be coloring the text in the outlines (blue text = new stuff, or each user one different color). So far text coloring is not supported in a Radio UserLand, so the alternative could be to make outlines readable in a browser, while using Radio only to edit them.

As you have probably heard by now, Marc Barrot has been doing an excellent job recently with ActiveRenderer, a tool to render cool dynamic outlines in any browser.

I had already got in touch with Marc since he created the espressoCup macro. Just a quick exchange of email messages and within minutes we got an agreement, now SharedOutlines is going to be a much better tool thanks to Marc's code.

Cool, uh?