[daisy] Daisy Summary/Overview/Why-You-Want-It Information

[Steven Noels]

On 13 Apr 2008, at 23:59, Eric Armstrong wrote:

> I just posted the following entry at my blog. I think the
> information needs to migrate to the website, somewhere.
> After visiting the site twice, I had no idea of what it
> was truly capable of. It's a story that deserves wider
> circulation...
>
> Daisy: WYSIWYG Wiki for PDF Books
> http://blogs.sun.com/coolstuff/entry/daisy_wysiwyg_wiki_for_pdf
> If you need the collaborative aspects of a Wiki combined with  
> DITA's modular topics and publishing capabilities, then DAISY might  
> just be the system you need--and it's free. DAISY provides WYSIWYG  
> editing for Wiki pages that can be combined to publish books,  
> either in a PDF or as a single HTML page.


Eric,

cool post, thanks. And yes, you're right. We really need to spice up  
the Daisy landing page as people obviously don't get what it's about.  
OTOH, your perception might still be too limiting for others - in the  
sense that we're falling prey to the Flexibility Syndrome: there's  
simply too many scenarios we could address with Daisy, thus we fall  
back to a safe "reference" list of technical features rather than  
showing how Daisy can solve problems instead.

I think anyone would love to hear more about your perception of  
Daisy, especially should you start using it in earnest.

Indeed, I definitely sense a path of specialisation towards "DITA"- 
like contexts, while at the same time we have been building quite  
some nice website applications with Daisy, without ever feeling we  
were abusing the concepts of the system.

Equally important might be providing a number of Daisy appliances:  
one for knowledge management, one for manual production, etc etc. I  
figure it's pretty much a chicken and egg problem for us: if we build  
these things, maybe people will come and generate revenue one way or  
another. However, it's non-trivial to postpone cash-generating  
activities in favor of this more "marketing"-oriented work.

Contrastingly, I know that quite a few companies are using Daisy  
however don't share the burden of getting the word around (let alone  
share insights with this community). In an ideal world, people would  
be proud of sharing the same platform, and also be aware of the fact  
that free labour doesn't exist. I'm always hoping that a more design/ 
marketing-oriented group or person would suddenly appear on the Daisy  
scene, but clearly that hasn't been the case so far.

Let's continue this conversation and see where it leads us to.

</Steven>
-- 
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought                              Open Source Java & XML
stevenn at outerthought.org              Makers of the Daisy CMS