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This is the weblog of Matt Mower: a man in a high castle, a man who believes a Smith & Wesson beats four aces, and a man who looks upward.
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This just in from our sources at [Bob McGhee's Radio Weblog]
"Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the chief executives were first spotted last night along the Rio Grande River near Quemado, where they bought each of the town's 320 residents by borrowing against pension fund gains. By late this morning, the CEOnistas had arbitrarily inflated Quemado's population to 960, and declared a 200 percent profit for the fiscal second quarter."
» Fantastic!
Dale Pike writes:
I want to be able to designate a category and have that post sent as an email message to a pre-determined address. This would allow me to further consolidate my communications and have a more streamlined "write once" approach to my messaging.
» I need exactly the same thing to keep legacy people in the loop. I'm trying to knock up something very quickly as a tool in Radio.
Basic features:
- preferences per- subscriber email
- filter by category & by liveTopic
- immediately, hourly or daily feedings
- send either complete post or permalink+title
I had originally thought about making it a program that subscribed to an RSS feed and emailed it out. However this seemed like a lot of work and a way of re-inventing my.userland. I'm trying to KISS!
I've just been watching The West Wing and enjoying it immensely, I'm completely immersed. Then it's over and the realisation dawns that instead of President Bartlett you guys have the Shrub. Jeez what a come down...
How does klogging avoid the quagmire?
» Excellent piece. Recommended.
I dug around on Snopes and the About.com Urban Legends database and it appears that these folks are on the up-and-up. I think it's a rotten idea to publicize this with a chain letter (the original note asks you to tell ten friends and ask them to do the same), but the principle is sound. I just went and did my clicks; if you like this idea, why don't you do it, too? Link Discuss (Thanks, Meg!) [Boing Boing Blog]
» I'm a convert to BackFlip's daily routine service. I've just added this site to go with The Hunger Site (see left). Make's doing worthy clicking too easy to forget!
Phil Wolff has some insightful observations on how writing a weblog could benefit your career.
» This was timely, I'd already thought about putting my weblog address into my resume in a prominent position.
My other reaction was "will anyone read it?" For the kind of jobs I've been going for in the past I have a hunch the answer is probably no.
However I've recently (like in the last 3 or 4 days) come to the conclusion that employment must match my core values. I think for that to happen I need an employer who would read my blog!
I'm really excited by the TrackBack feature that has been implemented for MovableType. I'd really love to see something similar for Radio.
My first thoughts were to implement an RCS extension that uses XML-RPC calls. The idea is that whenever you post to your blog, an upstream callback extracts the links from the text and sends them to the RCS server. RCS would then keep a per-site record of all such pings. Another XML-RPC call would allow Radio to get information about all pings to any pages relating to your site. Working in the same ways as referrer information does now.
The one major disadvantage I see to this approach is that it isn't how MT's system works.
Found this link (via a Wired article on NPR's linking policy) to some writing Tim Berners-Lee did about the nature of links:
Normal hypertext links do not of themselves imply that the document linked to is part of, is endorsed by, or endorses, or has related ownership or distribution terms as the document linked from.
So why call it a link? I wonder if this tendancy for the unclued to imply copyright violation or some other tangible impact by hyperlinking comes from the very word itself. To link, in the traditional sense, implies some physical connection or tie. From my copy of Websters:
link vt: To couple or connect by or as if by a link.
If hyperlinks had been called hyperreferences (which is what they are) from the start perhaps the widespread misunderstanding about the nature of linking would be a little less pervasive.
[High Context]Within our team, we have been surprised at how well the team klog has helped us to have a better understanding of what each of us is currently working on. [HighContext] via [ColumnTwo].
» I shall definitely be suggesting this approach in future.
Bringing metadata back into RSS with subject taxonomies. I hope to be able to spend time experimenting with XML again after a few projects I'm working on settle down. First on my plate will be to read more about how to bring subject-headings/topics into RSS. Specifically, I think XTM for Topic Maps, the RSS taxonomy and Dublin Core modules, and Peter's XFML are where I am going to be spending my time at first. [ia/ - news for information architects]
» Serendipity!
I'm also interested in how to add topic-based metadata to RSS feeds. I'd come across XTM a while back but not had an immediate use for it. Time to start reading I guess.
Dylan Tweney: Broken trust. The problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don't get to decide what runs on your computer -- Microsoft does. You can't even open files unless you've been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party. [Tomalak's Realm]
» Definitely a case where the cure is worse than the disease.
- Spam : there is some evidence to suggest that P2P filtering will effectively reduce the spam problem down to manageable levels. Developments in this direction can start providing benefits now and without costing investment in hardware & OS.
- Virii : I run Norton Anti-virus in the background. I use auto-update to keep NAV current. So far, I've not had a problem. I don't open attachments unless they are scanned. I trust that virus defence systems will continue to advance and provide greater and more seamless protection.
Palladium's safety mechanism sounds a lot like "pull the plug out of the wall." You'll be protected, because there will be no software to run on your shiny new computer except that from the Pravda like M$crosoft and it's allies.
Remember the pedigree of who we're dealing with here. If you're an ISV will you be happy to pay Microsoft to have your software certified for Palladium? Each time you release? Even for a patch? And what if your playing on Microsoft's turf or turf they have their beady eyes on, Think your customers might have just the odd extra problem that doesn't happen with Microsoft's possibly inferior entry? Want to take that risk? Remember who we're dealing with.
It's only Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and Intel & AMD's lock on the CPU market that allows this kind of applied stupidity. In a healthy market for chips & OS's there would be too many options for one vendor to create a lock-in like this. Of course, trust Microsoft to manage to spin this carbuncle in a way that could appeal to people.
Remember the original MSN? Customers flocked to Microsofts new and improved internet in their... dozens. That's because they had a choice and the internet didn't suck ass. Between now and LongHorn we need Linux to establish itself on the desktop to provide some kind of realistic alternative. We need to be able to let M$crosoft and Disney go their way, hand-in-hand, whilst we go ours.
We need a choice.
"Movable Type launches TrackBack, a framework to allow weblogs to ping each other when one blog references another. The idea is that when, say, a Boing Boing entry links to, say, a Scripting News entry, that Scripting News will get a ping that gives it the URL of the referencing Boing Boing post. So in addition to the Discuss link at the end of the story, Scripting could also have a link to page with all the blog entries that have picked up that link. Meta-tools like Daypop can scour these pages and build meme-charts, showing the interconnectedness of all blogs." [Boing Boing Blog]
» I'm not sure I understand the difference between TrackBack and a referrer. I've tried to follow some of the references to see a fuller explanation but I'm still a bit in the dark.
How is the "ping" any different to the web bug that tracks referrer information?
Here is a list of tips for reducing stress that I came across whilst Googling for something entirely unrelated:
If you make quarter-on-quarter revenue growth the key measure of corporate success, so important that you run the risk of losing your job if you don't deliver, is it any suprise that executives will attempt to optimize this at any cost?
Classification schemes. I've just stumbled across a paper on faceted classification of information, which talks about applying multiple sets of indexes to [Column Two]
» Note to self: Read this paper.
Google is a wonderful box of tricks. Something else that's new to me:
Google Zeitgeist - Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google
Discovered via overstated.net the blog by Cameron Marlow, creator of BlogDex.
It is my belief that people online, as in daily life, naturally want to form communities and that, where they do not/can not, it is because of a failure of available tools to help them.
Not everyone does want to form a community. A community is nice, when you start and you don't want to (re)discover by yourself all the small things that make the blogging life better, faster, stronger (blogtools, RSS, news aggregators, permalinks, archives, referers, backlinks, valid markup, pinging weblogs...) After a while, being out of a community is good, the same way the small bird is being kicked out of the nest: now do your own thing.
[Jemisa]
» Another viewpoint to my own. I'm not quite sure I fully understand the point being made here, however...
I hadn't thought about it too much but I admit the possibility that there are people who don't want to form communities. However I don't think the bird metaphor works -- birds leaving the nest don't usually go on to live a solitary life they are going on to build a new community. Even more than this though, I believe that humans have an innate instinct for language. Something that is profoundly useless unless one wants to communicate with others.
Unless you are just shouting at random strangers then you are looking for some kind of community with whom you want to communicate.
I'd like to discuss this further.
"The perfect network is perfectly plain, and perfectly extensible. That means it is also the perfect capital repellant, [which] implies a guaranteed loss to network operators, but a boon to the services on the 'ends'."
- Roxane Googin's High Tech Observer as cited in The Paradox of the Best Network
Take a moment to scan The Paradox of the Best Network. We've cited the piece before. The quote, which prompted the Paradox piece in the first place, suggests that the best network is the one that produces the best results for its users (the ends). The Paradox article and the quote are referring to telecom and internet networks. We wonder if it's true and if it has relevance for human networks.
[5th Constituency]» It is a good piece to be sure. To help you decide whether to follow the link and read it here is a 10% summary by Copernic Summarizer
Matt Jones, inventor of "war-chalking" -- hobo-runes that WiFi activists chalk on the sidewalk when they encouter a wireless netwok -- proposes a set of simple symbols.
I'd like to point out that while I haven't invented anything quite so fabulous as war-chalking, I did come up with the blogger gang-sign. Hold out your left hand, palm up, then grab your left forearm and make a moue of pain as you massage away invisible RSI cramps -- dude, you're throwing signs! Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)
[Boing Boing Blog]
» Fantastic idea. I've got my copy in my wallet now.
Does anyone know of an Wi-Fi network sniffer that runs on Win32 & supports the Prism/2 chipset? (Netgear MA401)?
No Audience is Interested in Everything You Produce
XML gives Weblogs the capacity to be organized into categories. It's good news and bad. When authoring an article (or one of those littler bloglets), the author is confonted immediately with a series of usability questions like:
» Another interesting piece. I heartilty concur.
My own take on categories is that they are difficult to use. I currently define six categories including the Home Page. They are:
- home page
- learning
- community
- personal
- technology
- tuning
My guess is that only "home page" and "tuning" are separably useful. I do put items in the other categories but I suspect no-one would ever subscribe to them rather than the "home page." (Assuming you wanted to subscribe at all!)
This was really my reason for developing the liveTopics tool. My problem with categories is that they are not granular enough. "tuning" works as a category because I only use that for discussing Radio development work which is, for the most part, orthoganol to what I'm talking about normally.
Using liveTopics I can associate a number of individual topic references to each post (as I have done with this one). This can be used to determine what I'm talking about and by using the topic table of contents what else I've said about a particular topic. Where this will really score though, to my mind, is when you and I can filter each others RSS feed based on the topics we reference.
Categories are dead! Long live topics!
Embedded in most current blogging software is an odd notion. Because the systems are self-referential and the overall audience is in its early growth stages, there is an interesting assumption that one "blogs" for oneself or other bloggers. Conventions, like blogrolling (a cross linking scheme that builds traffic within the blogging community), have a nearly religious fervor associated with them.
Community building, as we've mentioned in other Blog Notes creates the essential social infrastructure on which the long term success of blogging rests. As the community voraciously consumes the product of other community members, a momentum develops. It's good for groundwork and subject to replacement at the beginning of the second phase of growth in the phenomenon.
» I discovered 5th constituency yesterday via Ron Lusks weblog. I'm working back through the stuff there, the blog notes are especially interesting.
I am not sure that I'm down with "making blogging a success" as an end in an of itself. Although I haven't thought about it very hard I guess I see blogging as a part of a wider bootstraping process for online communities as a whole. I guess this may be the second phase that is referred to here.
Windows Longhorn slips again, becomes megaproject. Gates holds forth on Microsoft's next Big One [The Register]
» I especially enjoyed the section:
Gates's list of what's planned for Longhorn is largely user's eye view, classic eye-candy of the sort that gets bolted on to the company's interim releases, but given that we're currently talking about a major overhaul, these ought to be more integral to the finished product than has often been the case in the past. Gates alludes to the database angle by asking of current operating systems: "Why are my document files stored one way, my contacts another way, and my e-mail and instant-messaging buddy list still another, and why aren't they related to my calendar or to one another and easy to search en masse?"
Sounds just like Radio. I think UserLand should sue!
"WiredBots: simple toolkits for making AIM and MSN Messenger IM bots." [Boing Boing]
This is too damn cool! If I was only a programmer, I would play around with it and create a library bot that patrons could query for bestseller lists, library hours, and eventually OPAC & database queries. Anybody else want to try until that day when pigs fly?
Alternatively, maybe Andy B. could provide some assistance on this one....
» This sounds like a neat idea. Combined with something like AliceBot to provide dialogue/response I think it could be a very powerful tool packaged in a way lots of people will already find easy to access.
From StratFor strategic forecasting:
"It is difficult to see the strategy behind Palestinian tactics. Suicide bombing has clearly become a mainstream Palestinian tactic, one that makes the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip unlikely to the point of impossibility. It not only locks Israel into a war-fighting mode but also eases diplomatic pressure on Israel to make a settlement. The Palestinians know this. So why have the Palestinians adopted this tactic?
The answer lies in what must be a fundamental strategic shift on the part of the Palestinians. They no longer see the creation of a rump Palestinian state as a feasible or desirable end. Rather, despite the hardship of an extremely extended struggle, they have moved toward a strategy whose only goal must be the destruction of Israel. Since that is hardly likely to happen any time soon, the Palestinians must see forces at work in the Islamic world that make this goal conceivable and not just a fantasy."
» I found this a disturbing peice and, if it's analysis is to be believed, it redefines how I think about the struggle in the middle east. It's all a lot more complicated than I wanted to believe.
Once again I'm neglecting all other interests in the rush to make liveTopics a workable tool for Radio listeners. I'm learning what a struggle it is to debug problems on an unfamiliar OS over a 4,000 mile and 5 hours gap. Maybe I should just write better code, it'll be easier in the long run!
The good news is that two people now seem able to use liveTopics and hopefully by the end of play tomorrow there will be four. If we don't find any more serious bugs then I am on schedule to release version 1.0 at the end of the week.
Semant-O-Matic may be just the thing. Its author, Maciej Ceglowski, calls it a Blog semantic search engine. [Scripting News]
» Cool
Now that postings can be annotated with topics to describe what they are about it would be interesting to be able to put those topics into the RSS feed somehow. This would allow clever aggregators to offer filtering tools to their users.
Steve Yost on ubiquitous collaboration tools. Steve Yost, inventor and proprietor of QuickTopic, disagrees with David Weinberger's assertion that collaborative software fails to thrive because companies are afraid to "hyperlink the hierarchy." The real problem is more mundane, Steve says: ... [Jon's Radio]
An intriguing hypothesis on the challenges of getting new technology ideas to take root in organizations
» Interesting. From a quick scan I'm not sure how QuickTopic differs from, say, using a Yahoo group where participants can either use it as a list (with single & digest options) or a web forum. I have switched from reading radio-dev as a list to using it as a web forum. But that's because I use Outlook for most of my email and it just sucks, sucks, sucks!
But beyond that I would be looking for radio-dev to arrive as an RSS feed. In fact much of the stuff I currently receive as email would be better arriving in my Radio news aggregator. Of course, at that point my aggregator is going to have to become a lot smarter and work much harder for me.
The other technology that could do for email is Instant Outlining (IO). Radio is getting interesting in this regard. It's going to take a lot of work to make it a killer app, but it's certainly on that track.
As someone else has said, Radio: the best $40 I ever spent on software!
I haven't posted much the last couple of days because I've been working hard on my latest Radio tool. It's called liveTopics and you can see the results on this page. Some of the postings have a new Topics: section under them with links from various topics that the postings are related to.
Each link goes to a central Topic Table of Contents for my weblog. Where you can see all the postings related to a particular topic grouped together.
The tool also provides automatic generation of META tags with keywords and a "what i'm talking about" banner showing the topics associated with recent postings.
It should start being tested in the next couple of days and, if all goes well, I hope to release it next week.
John Robb. How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator. [klogs]
A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday. That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand. Applied across a company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year. The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department.
Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
» John Robb's right on the money again. I'm really starting to love reading John's blogging (via my aggregator of course)
I'm looking at everything I do now in terms of whether it can be output as OPML for instant outlining, or as RSS for aggregation, or both.
Start-up wants your help to fight spam. Wow - this is a really neat idea. It's basically a P2P spam filter. A free Outlook plugin (hopefully other mail clients will be added soon) that any user can click "This is spam" on a message. Then based on trust metrics, and how many users deem it spam - the message is marked as spam for all users of the system. P2P at it's best!
» An interesting example of a company trying to get a community to come together to contribute on a project of greath worth! I wish them well.
I feel very happy to have gotten involved in the fight against the extension of RIPA. Not so much because we won but because it is the first time that I cut through my inherent apathy and fight it tomorrow mentality and took direct political action when it mattered.
In fact, as those who've been reading about it recently will know, we haven't won at all.
RIPA was not being extended as a means to extend the authority of a whole group of people (such as local councils and the FSA), but to regulate and legitimize the processes by which they are already getting this information. As a home minister let slip on the Radio, many officials are already getting this kind of information via informal channels - the extension to RIPA really was the governments attempt to regulate it.
Of course the fact that the government is attempting to legitimize this is just another sign of their inherently anti-democratic leanings. I wouldn't feel so agrieved if this legislation was going hand in hand with an effective Freedom of Information bill. This government seems to have very similar tendencies to the secretive and power grabbing administration of the Shrub.
We should be looking closely at the powers we have already granted the police and secret services. We should be reigning in access to information by officials, not licensing it. I could stomach the requirement for police and the security services to do domestic snooping if and only if they were regulated by (and forced to justify their actions to) an oversight committee made up of judges, MP's, privacy advocates and lay people.
The secret services are supposedly there to protect us - or at least British interests. I for one would sleep much happier knowing that there were people capable of checking on that, and in whom I had at least a small amount of faith.
I think the recent leaks by the Stephens enquiry about collusion between the security services and paramilitaries in the killing of Irish catholics should tell us everything we need to know about allowing unchecked and unsupervised powers to be granted to anyone in authority.
Bah!
JRo essay: Telecommunications Implosion [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
» John has some interesting & depressing things to say about the state of broad-band and how vested interests are strangling any chance for things to change.
I don't know if the situation is better here in the UK. I guess it probably is, for now, with strong competition between DSL and cable vendors. But nobody is talking about fibre to the home here either.
I'm hoping to find some other stuff, more interesting to me, on Stratfor's website but I suspect it will be a goldmine for warbloggers.
[From the RedRockEater]
This one is from Lawrence and describes how to view the contents of the page table as well as some tricks for exploiting it. There are useful links in there too.
Digging around for stuff written by Jake Savin I found something useful. I had been thinking that I didn't want my RSS feed to contain whopping great blocks of text (I haven't learned to blog in small pieces yet) and wondered how others were doing this.
UserLand introduced a callback that allows you to modify the description, to go in to the RSS feed, of each item being posted.
Yesterday as I was battling with the string verbs to extract some links from a page I found myself musing "Wouldn't it be great if Radio had regular expressions, that would make this easy..."
Well, you'll be pleased to learn that it does. Check out system.extensions.regex and in particular the README (you need to perform a simple step to initialize the package, I guess because it's an extension).
In my limited testing so far I've found them to be fast and easy to use.
Good stuff.
Stephen Downes on Edublogs. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
» Lots of interesting edublog information and links.
This Modern World. In defense of all that is decent and good. [Salon.com]
» Is it just me? This one isn't funny. He's not satirising, he's reporting. And what he's reporting isn't funny.
Jake Savin has released details of new callbacks for adding sections to the weblog post form. This allows you to request new pieces of data and process them when the posting is submitted.
I asked this at one time, I'm sure that most people probably do:
"How do I change the size of the editor in Radio?"
The answer should be to go to the prefs page, but unfortunately this one didn't make it. So here are the instructions:
One thing about Radio that I lament is that I cannot 'hold items' for future publication. You can mark them as not being in a category but somehow that is unsatisfactory.
I've been looking to use the Instant Outliner for collaborating on a project and it suddently occurred to me that the answer is staring me in the face. I can write these items in a private outline (i.e. one that I don't put in the www/ folder where it will get upstreamed) and then transfer them to a blog posting when I am ready.
I like Radio more and more...
Meetup is an interesting site that I discovered via CamWorld [with thanks to James Robertson @ ColumnTwo for the link]
The idea is that they help to organize real meetings between people all over the world. They hand pick locations (coffee shops, bar, parks and so on) in various cities then provide the infrastructure for you to arrange to vote on where you want to meet and when.
I wonder if this will complement something like the NYCBloggers site..?
Strategy Letter V is another great piece from Joel. He really does a good job of mashing usually disparate concepts (here basic economics with recent technology news) to create intelligent end results, which often seem so simple you wonder why you didn't see it already. That's the power of good writing.
» I understand next to nothing about economics but I understood Joel. I thought his explanation of the power of commoditizing the complement of your product was excellent. It's certainly making me think!
We've got until June 20th to get the government to listen!
 The UK police, the secret service, and the tax man can find out where you're surfing. In August, so will the Post Office. |
You are using Radio, blogging a posting from the Radio desktop website. You post and as the page reloads BlogPlex floats a note on the screen telling you that there are three new people for you to explore. You click in the note and are presented with an aggregation of some of their recent postings (with various filters and options for the advanced user) related to the interests in your profile.
You decide to subscribe to one of them via the button provided. One of the others you widen the filter to see everything they have written recently and decide that the signal/noise ratio is probably not high enough for you.
In the background the BlogPlex service has summarized your new posting and used it to update your profile. Maybe this will lead to new people being added to your watch list, or to you being added to someone else's list.
Just come across a great site The Phrase Finder which has meanings and origins of lots of well (and less well) known phrases. We were after the definition of the whole nine yards. Turns out this is a tricky one...
Daniel Chan very kindly pointed out to me that DayPop can provide results formatted as an RSS stream. This should be pretty cool for integrating searches. I'd still be keen to see a web services API appear though.
I've just been searching DayPop to see if it has a Google like web services API. I was hoping to be able to write blog macros to reference the daypop searches & citations but I can't see one. Have I missed it?
I'm still trying to grok Activewords. Having Buzz there to demo the tool in action certainly goes a long way to helping that process. At the same time, Courtney's initial reactions provide some insight into the marketing challenges Buzz faces.
Certainly, a central aspect of Activewords's value is that it works across all applications. Instead of tailoring each application to your needs and idiosyncracies, you invest in one tool that spans them all (wasn't this the initial logic behind the first incarnation of Usertalk?). It does present the challenge and the opportunity of paying attention to how you work and where you might go about eliminating friction. In that sense, Buzz is on a mission that is quite similar to what Kris Hammond and his team is doing at the Intelligent Information Lab.
» I'm trying to grok ActiveWords as well. I've just downloaded it but am wondering what to do with it really.
Something I was interested in though was Jim's comment about Usertalk original mission - an application that can span other applications and add value to them. This still seems like an interesting mission to me.
I really like Radio as a blogging tool (although I confess it's the only one I've used for more than an hour) however it would be immeasurably more useful to me if it could also insert menu's into and control other windows applications on my desktop.
The Observe, Orient, Decide, Act loop is a methodology developed by Colonel John Boyd. I'd not come across it before and am glad to have seen it now.
»From John Udell
I think I'm homing in on one very important community. The kloggers. I hear a lot of talk of tech blogging and war blogging. I don't think I'm either of those.
But blogging as an aspect of KM? That I can relate to. I'm not alone in thinking that KM and notions of community are deeply intertwined. The success or failure of KM projects are, I guess, rarely failures of technology. The fail on the soft issues, they fail because they don't engage the communities, on whose efforts their success depends.
So for now, I'll consider myself a proto-klogger and see where I go from here.
European Digital Rights launches. Civil rights campaign for the Net [The Register]
Worth knowing about.
I've a feeling we're all going to have to learn how to protect our freedoms before this decade is out.
For some time now I've wanted a way to insert characters (and one character in particular) into blog postings without resorting to charmap every time.
I've ammended the code for the wysiwyg editor to add this facility. It required finding it, then learning enough about the DHTML editor to figure out how to add text without blowing it up.
My modified wysiwyg outline (it lives in html.editor.wysiwyg) is here.
To install it:
you should have a new "character" drop down.
If anyone needs any help installing this just let me know. Also it only has 2 characters in it right now. I'll have a go at adding more when I know someone else needs them!
There are a lot of great ideas going around and I look forward to the tools and discussion this will generate. However, I think of this issue in a slightly different way, while linking neighborhoods, syndications, etc. all highlight the mechanical connections between related weblogs what interests me most are the conceptual threads of conversation that cross through many weblogs. This means extracting the relevant portions of many conversations, organizing the responses, editorializing the content, etc.
Everyone talks about wanting to create communities, but it seems most of the proposals really address how to create collections. To me, a community is about discourse and participation, not just relationships. I don't only want to know who's like me, I want to interact with them to create great ideas and products drawing from our shared experience. What's more, I want to filter or focus on real analysis, not just the link parroting that Blogdex and Daypop tend to highlight.
[rjsjr :: Robert J. Seymour, Jr.]
Robert is a new voice to me but I'm glad to have met him as he has a great perspective.
So far I've been concentrating on the tools to collect together the members of a disparate community in a dynamic fashion (it's the problem that drove me to think about this in the first place) but Robert highlights that the business of community is really about discourse and exchange.
Part of the BlogPlex manifesto (in progress) is that a BlogPlexa should actually be able to offer you useful services. The first service being of course, that it introduces you to other people in a wider community. Hopefully we can
I think we need a discussion about the services/facilities that we can provide to people.
If chat, threaded discussion and file sharing were not important to people I think that newer mediums such as Groove and organic mediums such as SlashDot wouldn't have them at their heart.
However I think we also need new tools that fit the medium of blogging. In this message on k-log Phil Wainewright discusses the possibility of shared aggregators:
"The key point I'm making is one that I feel would be of immense value in
networks of k-logs: being able to read an RSS feed of someone else's RSS
aggregation:"
I agree and I think it would be interesting to consider how a BlogPlex might offer a shared (& digested) aggregation of the RSS feeds of each the current membership (remember it's dynamic).
I've modified the way the default news view works.
The way I always wanted this view to work was that it should open a new window whenever you click a link within the body of a story. Or if you click the globe icon for a site.
The recommended approach is a modification to %RadioHome%/www/system/pages/news.txt which adds as the first line #meta "
This works, the links open in a new window, with the unfortunate side-effect that it also affects all the options from the editor menu and the delete button as well. This leads to a profusion of unwanted new windows that is quite irritating.
My solution is a modified version of the function radio.html.viewNewsItems() that addes the target='_blank' attribute to each link found within the body of a story. It also updates the links for the globe icon and the XML RSS feed as well.
Whilst I'm loath to modify an internal function since this will obviously not be much use if UserLand modify the function itself. I'm hoping that I can persuade UserLand to add this code as an option and make the patch unnecessary. (Note that no code is overwritten and you can switch back to the default functionality very easily).
To install get a copy of my function workspace.viewNewsItems() and install it in your own workspace table. Then open the news.txt file found in the folder /www/system/pages. Ammend the call to radio.html.viewNewsItems() to workspace.viewNewsItems() and you're done.
I am familiar with the Livelink knowledge management system from OpenText having implemented it a few years back. They already generate feeds of both news (in the conventional sense of bulletins) and also "what's changed" reports. Both of these could be easily exported from the system in RSS format making it easy for project users with an aggregator to keep up with current events in their project.
As someone on the K-Logs mailing list pointed out it would be quite easy to make blogging part of your "project journal" posting items aggregated from project applications and sources and appending your own ideas, notes and comments (to be aggregated and read by others).
Additionally if a tool such as Livelink was capable of reading and indexing an RSS feed it could then close the loop and bring these "project journals" back into the system for archiving and searching by the wider audience.
Just a bit of speculation....
Lots of good info on the K-Log group. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
» I've just subscribed to this. Looks like a very interesting group. They bring a different perspective to the idea of community that is probably more in line with the "Communities of Practice" philosophy. Looking at weblogging as a tool for enabling projects and other focused groups.
Snoops a go-go: UK gov goes mad on privacy invasion. Earlier repressive powers to be extended to more or less everybody [The Register]
Since it has been, gently, pointed out to me that much of what I write is incoherent, rambling and hard to follow I guess a link to an article titled "How to write a better blog" was timely.
--Link provided by Jon "I don't have a blog yet" Alsbury.
I'm writing a macro that processes the posting's in weblogData.posts and wanted to do something with the permalinks which are not encoded in the postings themselves. With thanks to Dave Winer I know have the official method:
radio.weblog.getUrlForPost()
This function returns true if it was able to generate the Url. I'm not clear on the reasons why this function might fail.
You call it by passing
I'm sure I'm being naive but it is my viewpoint that the primary responsibility of government should be public interest.
I am in the UK but we seem to get everything from the US, good and bad, sooner or later so this worries me. Especially since we have no 1st ammendment rights to protect.
Ouch! That looks horrible when I actually write it down but it's so damn true I can't help myself. Here's the reality, at least for me:
The classical business approach is go deep and focus in one area. I totally agree -- but how do you pick an area. What I am really doing is applying lighweight parallelism and using that to test the waters. When something gets a lot of interest then I go back and focus on it. So, am I whacked? Or does this make sense to anyone?
[The FuzzyBlog!]I haven't found a function to compare dates in UserTalk yet so I'm doing something fairly simple like:
local( targetDate = clock.now() - ( numberOfDaysBack * 24 * 60 * 60 )
if( comparisonDate >= targetDate ) {
// do something
}
Which so far seems to work okay.
I found this just now, it is a follow-up to a posting on Jon Udells blog:
"And yet we need to respect the uniqueness and power of this new mode, in which groups are defined fuzzily and coupled loosely."
Gordon Weakliem responds:
"To me, the great thing about the medium is the loose coupling. I'm not sure about the more explicit mechanisms for clustering & grouping. As my interests shift and I discover new sites, I think you'll see my subscription list change a great deal. One other final point that others (Brad Wilson comes to mind) have brought up recently is the crying need for RSS as the glue for this coupling. David Mc Cusker is about the only person without an RSS feed who I remember to read regularly, and clearly, RSS is the enabling technology for Jon's entire experiment."
» Again this seems to point the way towards dynamic community building and away from (a majority of) managed subscription lists. As I envisage BlogPlexes you would drift in and out of them as your own interests changed. Because they are based around concepts and not keywords you "get nearer" or "further" from them in a natural rhythm that mirrors your own interest level (along with preferences you set in the tools).
Just been looking through some of the very interesting stuff Jon Udell has written.
In his piece Hives, swarming, scale, and connectedness he discusses how, if you look at blogrolls, people seem to be primarily "a member of the Radio community" or "a member of the Blogger community."
"Once swarming can occur, the publish/subscribe RSS machinery can really start to shine. Things are, honestly, a bit incestuous in the blogrolling world, at least so far. "Tell me who you read, and I'll tell you who you are," I saw somewhere recently. Problem is, the blogrolls all look a lot alike. Being a member of the Radio community, or the Blogger community, shouldn't ultimately be a primary affiliation. People are software developers, or musicians, or knitters, or ... well, lots of things, often more than one. "
This seems to be describing something quite familiar to me. The idea of BlogPlexing would be to allow you to get in touch with the communities of software developers, musicians or knitters without really having to do anything much, other than be interested in things those kind of communities talk about (expressing that interest by writing some of those things yourself).
At the moment there is a very manual process involved just in becoming part of the Radio community. Creating a blogroll, harvesting interesting RSS links, subscribing and so forth. Although there are clever ways emerging to make this easier I think that they the less interesting problem.
From jill/txt:
"Mailing lists are different to blogs. I love the differences between individual blogs, the autonomy of each and the sometimes unpredictable emergence of clusters and conversations that may shift as groupings change or ideas converge. Mark's artificial life experiments suit this genre perfectly. Mailing lists are pre-defined spaces, where everyone's words are made to look identical and the audience is known though changeable. In mailing lists I often feel intimidated by the weight of other peoples' words. So I remain silent. In my blog my audience is both potentially wider and pragmatically more limited. I'm completely confident that bored or uninterested readers will not stay. I love that. For me, blogs are so much more liberating of free discussions than mailing lists. I imagine some others feel oppositely?"
I'm tentatively definining Blog Affinity as the degree of convergence of meaning of the content of two or more blogs. Hence two blogs currently discussing exactly the same thing will have very high affinity and blogs discussing divergent topics should have low or zero affinity.
A tool that creates BlogPlexes to allow people to find out about other bloggers with whom they share common interests should allow those users to set thresholds which determine how high the affinity between their blogs would need to be before they were considered.
Where a blog was discussing many different topics it might be necessary to allow tuning of thresholds for each different train of thought. What might a simple interface for this kind of behaviour look like?
LiveJournal now offers RSS feeds for all their journals; as of today, that means all 584,777 of them. Just add /rss/ to the end of a journal's URL to get an RSS 0.91-style feed with titles and post links. And each journal now has the updated link tag pointing to the feed. (Initially they were using the old standard, but I told their developers about the updated standard and they were very nice about it and fixed it within 24 hours. Thanks!)
Half a million new RSS feeds overnight. The mind boggles.
» Truly!
As I've posted before, I'm not at all happy with the way I'm generating HTML in my Radio macros. Littering each function with add() methods and htmlText variables doesn't seem right. I'm so used to OO ways now that without a system of classes to fall back on i've been a bit stumped about what to do.
What I'm presenting here is something of a hack, please, please somebody improve on it! I've called it PageAssistant and it is a Radio tool although it provides no functionality directly, it is effectively just a library for other tools to use.
To install download the PageAssistant tool into your Radio/Tools/ folder.
Any macro that wants to generate an HTML page should get access to the functions provided by the PageAssistant using:
local( pa = pageAssistantSuite.html )
Then in order to create a new page invoke:
pa.create()
This associates a page context with the current thread. The upshot is that you don't have to manage any variables, the downside is that you can only build one page per thread. So far I haven't found this to be an issue. I'd welcome any thoughts about that.
To add HTML use
pa.add( string, terminator, indentNext )
where terminator defaults to 'cr' and indentNext default to true.
To have the next section of HTML follow on without a carraige return specify the empty string as the terminator. To avoid the next section being indented pass false for indentNext.
To indent & dedent use:
as appropriate.
Finally to return the content of the page that has been built call
string = pa.finalize()
which returns the content and deletes the page context (although this is not strictly necessary since it will be overwritten on the next call to create()).
Slashdot has added still more inventive features. A simple but effective reputation management system is in operation now, allowing members to list each other as a friend or foe. The ratings are even public, so you can see who's list you're on. And even better, you can apply a filter to your lists, rating all your friend's comments up, and your foes' down. It's now possible to make it so you never have to see a particular user's posts again: just list them as a foe, and set all foe posts to "-5." In a few clicks, they'll be off your radar forever.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!) [Boing Boing Blog]
» This was an interesting article. In particular when he goes on to discuss gaming and community and introduces a term, new to me, social capital...
"Let's talk about social capital. That's the buzzword for what we gain when we participate in community spaces. Usually, when I participate in a community, I earn something intangible, yet valuable. So what happens when I also earn something tangible? How does that change the process?"
This is an interesting new dimension for me in how communities behave. Good stuff.
RabbleRouser: "RabbleRouser allows organizations to identify, prioritize, and vote on IT projects in their pipeline. The tool runs on the company's Intranet infrastructure and is a simple, yet powerful, application using all four dimensions of the Quovix approach. You can read more about the "Four Dimensions of Collaboration" here. "
Looks interesting. I'll have to try it out - it's Java based as well.
» I agree with Mike. Oh and it's free! Their Four Dimensions of Collaboration and Networked Organizations is worth a read too.
Meta Linker from ThinkBlank is an interesting idea. It uses a clever piece of DOM + JavaScript to annotate each link on your page with a new link to BlogDex referencing your original link. BlogDex then shows you other pages it knows about that use the same link. Clever.
I've made one modification to the Meta Linker script to fit better with how I want it to work. Although they provide the ability to restrict Meta Linker to a specific section I wanted it to work only on the body text of each posting. This required a little work and learning about DOM on my part.
You can find my modified script here and see the results on this page.
What do you think of Meta Linker?
Is this old news? I only found out about it at the weekend. If you don't already have the GoogleBar for IE go get it now!
