Curiouser and Curiouser!

Wanna know how it works?

K-collector. Matt has already written about k-collector today here and here. What can I add? Maybe a little drawing? [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Yeah!  That's how it works.

Communal topics and super-blogs

Something we've just got working today (okay Simone got it working, but I did a valuable job cheering him on) is one of the final pieces in the k-collector puzzle.  The server now sends the client a URL corresponding to each topic in the cloud.  This enables the client to create on-the-fly links back to the server referring browsers to a live page about the topic.

liveTopics had the concept of the table of contents, a local directory of your topics and what posts they related to.  All very well in it's way but a far cry from the super-blogs I wrote about last July.  Specifically it wasn't live (you couldn't do anything with that data) and it wasn't shared, MY topics MY posts, bleugh!

If you click a topic name on my weblog now you don't get a local page but, instead, the dynamic k-collector page for that topic.  At the moment this is an aggregation of all the posts about that topic from anyone subscribing to the cloud.  Soon it will be much more.  k-collector has become my super blog and pretty soon we aim to have many more people subscribing.  We also hope to see other people creating clouds and boostrapping their own topic communities.

International Blog Aggregator

Blog Aggregator Intl. My good friend Giuseppe Granieri has opened an international version of his blog aggregator I described back in March. It's a very experimental and totally manual aggregator (meaning that you have to visit a page to notify each post) but I must say that the Italian version has so far been very successful and useful. In some way it proves that if there is a good motivation (in this case visibility and participating to an interesting community), people do add useful metadata to their posts. What is now totally manual will soon become automagic using ENT and a topicroll for Radio and Movable Type users. You can also subscribe to the RSS summary feed. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Blog Aggregator is a wonderful example of a social application at work.

Authors notify the system of items they have created that they wish to share with the group.  These posts are further annotated with metadata like "this is an ironic comment" allowing them to be categorized.

You can also promote an item if you feel it especially important.  Promoted items are placed in a higher profile position on the site.  The catch?  There is a currency that you spend to promote items so you can't abuse the system.

Up to now the Blog Aggregator has been based around a tight knit community of Italian bloggers.  It will be interesting to see how it copes with a much larger and more diverse constituency.  I have a feeling we may see a number of different communities emerge, each with their own interests and directions.

CSS based Tabs (and simple too by gum)

Tabs with CSS.

Joshua Kaufman - CSS Tabs. How to create tabbed navigation with CSS.

I really need to make a CSS category.

[High Context]

Excellent.  I had just been wondering about this very thing this morning.

k-collector goes live

Paolo and I are now subscribed to a single shared cloud (called WWWW) of topics using the k-collector server and client for Radio.

This means that our posts will be aggregated together by k-collector on the basis of the topics we use.  The demo interface shows a simple hierarchical view but we have lots of other things planned.

Another poweful feature of this setup is the shared topic roll.  Because we are both subscribed to the WWWW topic roll we use the same topics and any topics we create are automatically made available to other subscribers.

For example I am creating a topic 'Paolo Valdemarin' to attach to this post.  In a little while Paolo's client will automatically have this new topic available for those moments when he wishes to talk about himself!

Nanomemory

On ultra-fast carbon memory. Nanotubes [The Register]

I read about this in the MIT technology magazine a little over a year ago.  It sounds like Nantero have make astounding progress since then (assuming they can back up their claim of delivering sample chips this year).

Nanotube memory has huge advantages over silicon.  Chiefly in size, access times & non-volatility.  Imagine a computer with a 10Gb memory that is always on.  Hard-disk manufacturers beware.  Nanotube based CPU's also offer a raft of advantages over silicon.

They have our best interests at heart

[Reprinted with the kind permission of Tom Tomorrow]

90 degrees. How passé.

Forget the Angles

 

I have a preacher friend who lives in an old farmhouse that he is restoring himself. He's one of those "do everything" guys. Gardening, carpentry, repair work, he does it all.

 

Robert is not a bullshit, pantywaist, white-collar preacher with soft theology and a degree in marketing. His faith and knowledge are deep and wide. He started his real learning after seminary.

 

The best thing I can say about him is this: His heart is soft enough to be broken, and his hands are strong enough to mend your shed.

 

A few months ago Robert hosted a retreat at his farm for misfit pastors. There were four of us, all slightly irregular, all in danger of not passing inspection. Hell, a couple of us have already been rejected and are now on the discount table.

 

I was wandering through the rooms, admiring the old farmhouse, when Robert said, "You know what I love most about this place?"

 

"What?"

 

"You won't find a 90-degree angle anywhere."

 

I ran my hand up and down the nearest corner and looked at it closely. He was right. The angle was acute by about ten degrees. The next corner was an obtuse mirror of the first. Euclid says I didn’t need to check the other corners, but you know I did. And yes, they were all irregular.

 

"Robert, how can the angles be this off? Was the guy who built it a spectacularly bad carpenter, or has it shifted over the years?"

 

Robert didn't look at me when he replied. He was looking at the wall and running his hand back and forth over it, like you'd run your hand down a horse's flank. "It was built this way, and the man was a wonderful carpenter. He just didn't care about 90-degree angles."

 

I was confused. How can you be a good carpenter and not care about right angles? I shook my head, not understanding. "Is it safe? Why hasn't it fallen apart? How does it hold together?"

 

He smiled. "How indeed? And yet, here it stands, apparently doing quite well for itself these last 125 years. There's nothing sacred about 90 degrees. You're worshipping at the wrong altar. What you want are straight walls and good joints. You connect four straight walls, and the angles will take care of themselves. They will always come out to a perfect 360 degrees. Why worry about it? God’s got your back!”

 

I experienced a moment of mental slippage. 90-degree angles meant craftsmanship and solidity to me, and I resisted letting this go. My mind flashed with visions of strange, Seuss-like houses with weird walls jutting out at odd angles.

 

And then the scales fell from my eyes, and I could see. In my mind I saw an imaginary floor plan. The interior walls were not perpendicular to the exterior walls, but all the angles were snuggling. Every acute was spooning with its obtuse mate.

 

I saw the truth of it, and I loved the truth.

 

All I could say was "Holy Shit!"

 

Robert jerked his head toward the kitchen. The coffee was ready, and the other guys were gathering. I followed him, rolling this new thought around in my head and loving the feel of it. Four connected, straight walls will always have angles that total 360 degrees. What have we been worrying about? 

 

“Rob, I don't know if it's God or geometry, but something's definitely watching out for us.”

 

We took our seats with the other misfits, and there we were. Four irregulars joined perfectly around a sacred wooden table. Robert poured himself a cup of coffee and had his last say on the matter.

 

“God. Geometry. What's the difference? Be straight, and make good connections. Don't feel like you have to know all the angles. Let things work themselves out.”

 

“As for the carpenter who built this house, I think he was a lot like another carpenter I've read about."

 

 

Postscript: I had no idea how badly I would need this wisdom. Now, more than ever, I need to write straight, make good connections, and quit trying to figure out all the angles.

 

P.

 

[Real Live Preacher]

I'm lazy but that's not the reason

I haven't been posting much over the last week.  This is largely because i've been hard at work developing the k-collector client and switching over from liveTopics.  That switch is very nearly complete and hopefully from the end of today Paolo and I will be working from the same cloud of topics hosted on our k-collector demo site.

Serving T, D and Q

Choosing Words with Care.

Zack Lynch offers 3 types of blog readers:

On reading side, there is a whole other set of categorizations to describe the different way people read blogs: 

• T-people: Title readers, rarely follow links, make quick opinions, probably RSS too many feeds
• D-people: Deep readers, follow all links, think carefully about the blog, rarely comment
• Q-people: Questioners, read quickly, follow most links, assimilate information, and comment frequently

I am sure there are many more, but you get my point. 

And offers the advice to choose words carefully, but not to spoil the fun we are having. 

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

It seems to me that any enterprise blogging software (and indeed any KM software) has to recognise these archetypes and find the best way to serve each of them.

Try this simple experiment

• Four short breaths in through the nose (in-in-in-in)
• Four quick breaths out through the mouth (out-out-out-out)

After a short while I began to smile and within about 2 or 3 minutes I found myself giggling.

Be careful what filters you use

DR PHIL'S TIP ON FILTERS

When you and I engage in conversation, I can't control how well you communicate; I can only control how well I receive what you're telling me. I can go on the alert to things that may distort the messages you're sending me - I call them filters. To be a good listener, you've got to know what you filters are. Maybe you're coming into a given conversation with an agenda. Maybe you're judging the speaker and don't trust him at all. Maybe you're angry. Anyone of these psychological filters can distort what you hear.

Filters cause you to decide things ahead of time. You may have prejudged your partner and decided that he's a hound dog and that he doesn't love you anymore. Result: No matter what he says to you, you're going to distort it to conform to what you're already thinking, feeling and believing.

Take an inventory of your filters. If you're not aware of them, you can defeat the best communicator in the world because you'll distort the message, regardless of how well it is sent.

Source: Dr. Phillip C. McGraw, The Oprah Magazine,March 2003

More Monday morning wisdom from the Listening Leader.  Haven't you subscribed yet?

More about k-collector

A little bit of background about the k-collector client.

k-collector client for Radio Userland is really a totally stripped down version of liveTopics.  Out go tables of contents, local databases of topics, lots of macros, XFML, XTM and a raft of other stuff i'm like.

What you end up with is a simple client designed to bootstrap itself from an online cloud of topics.  For an example of such a cloud is here.  Topics created on the local system are exported via the RSS feed using ENT and from there appear on the k-collector server.  Each k-collector client regularly polls the cloud looking for new topics and makes them available locally.

It's a nice, simple, dynamic system for publishing using shared topics.

What k-collector doesn't have most people probably won't miss (especially if they are using a k-collector server) and as a result k-collector is much smaller, lighter and more stable than liveTopics.  liveTopics is a complicated application and the combination of Radio & Usertalk don't really support complexity very well.  k-collector should suffer from far less problems than it's bigger counterpart.

More later.

Testing the k-collector client

Testing the new k-collector client for Radio.  This is a cut down version of liveTopics that works with the k-collector server.

The k-collector client, unlike liveTopics, is dynamic and based upon a shared topic roll held on the k-collector server.  Compared to liveTopics k-collector is stripped down, however it is also smaller, lighter and more stable.

I myself am switching over from using liveTopics to using k-collector so that we can test the new server properly.  I'm not sure what will happen to the liveTopics client at this point.

Baking KM

They LIE!.

As I posted a few days ago, I finally achieved the essence of bagelocity; that chewy, stick-to-your-teeth quality of a good bagel and the degree to which it is present in my further pursuits is now under my control. Under no circumstances am I going to give up the ship and reveal the answer in the back of the book. If I handed it to you then you would make no progress as a baker and I certainly wouldn't respect you any more. But to come to the techniques yourself? That becomes a different story.

I will not, however, contribute to the massive disinformation on the subject.

I've been baking bread for close to 2 years now. In that time I have come a greater distance than I'd planned or perhaps even intended. Yet, as is true in all worthwhile endeavors, the more I know the more I don't know. So the choice to get the baking of bagels "down" was sourced strictly in naive arrogance.

When I pick a foodstuff to hone my skills on I follow a fairly straightforward procedure. Collect several recipes (or several dozen), distill them down to a few variations (they rarely differ in any meaningful manner), try a few then tweak away. Throughout the process I keep notes on what worked, what didn't, etc.

For most breads this worked fine. I was able to narrow in on what I was looking for by interpolating the strangely abstract descriptions of how dough should feel, what may or may not be happening at certain points in the process, the types of flour, etc. Most of the sources provide some meaningful insight (if usually by negative space) and send me along the path to my ever progressing goals.

HOWEVER. This is not universally true.

Until a week ago, if you asked me about recipes on line I would have launched into a tirade worse than any political rant (no matter how well or ill informed) I've embarked on in several years. Recipes online and in a great many "well respected works on baking" LIE. I find it as inexcusable as it is incomprehensible. But one thing it is, is true.

I have multiple oven thermometers. I measure ingredients by weight, not volume (essential!) I take notes on my successes and failures and repeat experiments until I get reproducible results. Then I will change one variable at a time (insofar as my neophyte skills allow me to) and remeasure. So I can say, with some measure of certainty that if you follow the recipes you find you will end up with, at best, little doughnut shaped pieces of bread.

They will most likely be perfectly edible. But you won't have bagels. Not until you do your homework.

Doing your homework in baking means burying yourself in books on gluten development, the differences between grades of flour, kneading, proofing and fermentation, preferments, and enough other aspects on the art and chemistry of baking as to make you quite mad.

And it means failing. Failing over and over again, commiting to the fact that until you get it right, most of your results will end up as breadcrumbs or pigeon food. There is no "waste" when you've got another factlet to put in your notebook. Those failures are successes.

Because you can't learn how to knead out of a book any more than you know how dough smells or behaves when it's "just right" for what you're making. It's a fundamentally experiential learning process.

Because the answers aren't magic. Well... not in that sense anyway. It's there to be discovered by people who are willing to do their homework.

I'm not a master baker. I'm not even a particularly good baker. I can't make a baguette to save my life. I have virtually no control over the quality of the crust in most of my work and more often than not I resort to cheap tricks to make people's eyes roll back in their head upon eating the fruits of my labors (i.e. cheesebread.)

So what's my damn point? Yeah, fair question. I suppose I've got a couple:

As Bjarne Stroustrup says: "Don't believe in magic". People will tell you that there's a mystical secret to baking bagels (or to anything.) They're almost always trying to cover for the fact that they have no idea how to do it.

The solution is out there. It doesn't take much more than patience and perseverance.

Reinvent the wheel. It's worth it.

[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

There is so much in here about KM and I didn't realise it until I had read it twice.

Mike describes the process of learning how to bake:  Taking notes.  The failed experiments.  Perseverence.  Collecting from sources.  Weighing & distilling the information.  Revelations.  Progress.  Results.

He has probably accumulated a vast amount of knowledge about baking in general and baking bakels in this instance.  And he won't share it :)

Sounds like KM to me!

Time flies like an arrow, Fruit flies like a bananna.

Curiouser & curiouser is one year old today.

It's hard to believe that only a year has passed since I first picked up this very addictive habit.  What started as an interesting diversion has become my passion, my voice.  The interaction with so many people has broadened my perspectives, as well as interesting and enterertaining me.   I'm grateful to you all.

My special thanks go to Paolo, partly for hosting my blog, but mostly for his daily kindess, wit and vision.

Untitled bagel

Booyah!.

"Brooklyn, we have achieved bagelocity."

My 5th attempt at bagel baking concluded about a half hour ago. It was very successful.

Want the secret? Excellent. It's good to want. It's what keeps us humble.

Do your own damn homework. I'm gonna have another bagel.

[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

You mean I'm not an enigma?

I was reading something today about how bloggers quite often don't offer the reader any information about themselves at all.  I guess it's true, although I don't hide my biases it's probably hard to judge what sort of person I am.  So i've added a little bit of biography via the "About Me" button in my right hand link panel.  It's a work in progress but hopefully gives more of the flavour (I won't ask which one).

I wouldn't trust him to tie his own shoelaces

Plan to Protect USA Patriot Act. Interesting view, by Andrew Glass of The Hill, on Ashcroft's politically astute plan to keep USA Patriot alive, hidden, and safe from exposure. Hill says Ashcroft, sensing a real problem with his heavy-handed use of USA Patriot, did the following (some background on Sensenbrenner):

Ashcroft has been in Congress and politics a long time. He's a sneaky SOB, grown adept at hiding his political motives and actions from his constituents, and he now has the benefit of an unelected position with no answerability to voters. If Ashcroft gets his way and the (already marginal) sunset provisions of Patriot are killed we are in for a long, sad period in US history.

thehill.com - We're watching you: national security and privacy issues.

[...] Last summer, Sensenbrenner and committee's ranking Democrat, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, asked the department for basic statistical data about how it was using its powerful new surveillance tools.

The department stalled for so long that Sensenbrenner threatened to subpoena Attorney General John Ashcroft and to oppose renewing the act.

Sensenbrenner reported to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had told Ashcroft: "If you want to play I've got a secret, good luck getting the PATRIOT Act extended. Because if you've got bipartisan anger in the Congress, the sunset will come and go and the PATRIOT Act disappears."

Beating a tactical retreat, Ashcroft thereupon launched a three-pronged damage-control effort.

[Privacy Digest]

[b.cognosco]

If you guys know what's good for you, you'll keep a watchful eye on John Ashcroft and his henchgoons and keep lobbying your representatives to end the Patriot Act as soon as possible.

Semantic arguments

Is there any agreed way to define & measure the semantic distance between two words?

Can knowledge be captured?

Thinking about capturing knowledge.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Matt - Does your well thought through and elegant  diagram suggest that knowledge can be "captured" by some system?

If so I prefer the BP approach where they reject some form of "capture" and see instead that knowledge is most deep and useful in tacit form embedded in a person. So instead of capturing knowledge, BP make it easy to find the person who has the know how.

For instance in my case as a novice blogger, Critt Jarvis has kindly given me the code to set up a category section and a blogroll. Now Richard Gayle is helping me automate the blogroll. This quite different fro  say a FAQ which would be the knowledge in "capture" form. For me the novice, being mentored by a person is 10 times better than reading about the technique.

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

Interest points Robert.  I would have to say that my opinion is not well-formed right now.  I guess I do believe that knowledge (at least some knowledge) can be captured.

Let me turn it around a second and ask this:  For BP to be able to "find" the person who knows something don't you have to know:

• what it is they know
• who they are

aren't these kinds of knowledge?  And doesn't making them available in a system mean capturing them first?

Whose screwing who..?

Ben Shiller.

"Nothing makes someone more unlikable than their unawareness of what makes them unlikable. That's the main reason why people don't like Los Angeles. It's not surprising, then, that Hollywood's answer to the advent of DVD burners and Internet piracy is a clueless public service announcement in which Ben Affleck, Lucy Liu, and 'Titanic' director James Cameron ask you not to steal from them. Next they'll produce a PSA about how small trailers can cause claustrophobia.

In May, Affleck's 1-minute-12-second plea will unspool on movie screens nationwide; it'll be the Will Rogers Institute can-rattle of our time. But this appeal is for the fair treatment of movie stars, not the compassionate support of sick kids -- or sick horses, or sick kids who ride horses....

But Affleck's point, on second viewing, wasn't that he's Benny from the Block and in need of scratch. It's that the less well-paid are in jeopardy if piracy blunts studios' profits. 'The movie you're about to see is the work of hundreds of people,' says Affleck in the PSA. 'Not just the stars you see on screen,' but writers, cameramen, costumers, and countless others. Apparently, there is a world in which the proletariat includes the guy who penned 'Point Break....'

Also, I can't figure out why they would show this PSA to people who've just paid full price for admission, instead of shoving it at the front end of a DVD, where actual criminals might see it, since the only people Internet pirates truly put out of business are the in-theater camcorder crooks.

When I asked Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti whether the director of the highest-grossing movie of all time was the ideal spokesperson against petty theft, he tap-danced. 'I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs,' said Valenti of the PSA, 'the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that,' he said, vastly overestimating the U.S. poverty level and what I get paid for this column. I vowed right then not only to pirate a movie but also to find a way to use the Internet to steal directly from Jack Valenti's home....

I'll still rent DVDs and see movies in theaters. But I'll download them too. And after watching that PSA, I'm especially going to steal Affleck flicks. As soon as he makes one worth stealing." [Entertainment Weekly, available to subscribers only]

[The Shifted Librarian]

LOL

Of course Valenti doesn't seem to appreciate the irony that it is he and his buddies that ensure that the "working stiffs" make only $75-$100K of the vast fortunes that get made from these movies.  The words "That's not much to live on" should choke him but like all these poisonous bastards he is immune.  Probably Afflecks too busy being rich & famous to worry about that either.

Remind me again, Whose screwing who..?

What on earth are you listening to?

 ¡Ay caramba! Clear Channel goes latino

In an insightful and scary article on Salon.com, Eric Boehlert recently discussed a plan now before the FCC to dominate the US Latino airwaves. The proposed merger is one between the Hispanic Broadcasting Company (HBC), the leading Spanish-language radio network in the United States with 63 stations, and Univision Communications, the leading Spanish-language television broadcast company and a major Latino music label. The combined company would control almost 70% of the Spanish language advertising in the United States. Since Hispanics represent 14% of the US population and growing, you do the math.

[Oligopoly Watch]

Good grief! Does anybody still turn the Radio on in America?  How can you bear it?  I got used to taking a whole bunch of CD's whenever I was there.

Thinking about capturing knowledge

No spam in this tin

REDUCE Spam Act. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren today introduced her REDUCE Spam Act. That Act is in part based upon the idea that I have bet my job on. This has led some friends to write that they hope the law is not passed -- some because they believe it won't work, some because they don't like this or any regulation. To the first group, I appreciate the concern, but remain unworried. To the second, I understand the concerns, but remain convinced. The general idea of the statute is that spammers must label UCE, and if they don't, then the law enables a bounty system to pay people who hunt down those who fail properly to label. I've been getting lots of questions about how this would work, and as many are similar, it would obviously help to post a FAQ. It would be great to get more questions beyond the first wave, and a FAQ would certainly help. This final draft does have a nice modification that was suggested by a particularly skeptical friend. The label requirement initially is a simple ADV: in the subject line. There are obvious problems with mandated protocols, and so the modification requires either an ADV: or "an identification that complies with the standards adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force for identification of unsolicited commercial electronic mail messages." This is a nice modification that both creates an incentive for the development of other protocols, but vests that process within a body that so far has resisted capture. I was originally worried that any industry standards group would be open to capture. But I have lots of confidence that the IETF will be able to suss out spammers. The key to this idea is, as Congresswoman Lofgren puts it, that the Act would enlist a bunch of 18 year olds in the battle against non-complying spammers. "Between the 18 year olds and the spamsters," as she puts it, "I'll bet on the 18 year olds." Me too. [Lessig Blog]

Sounds like a good idea and, most importantly, progress in the right direction.   How will this work if spam originates outside the US though?  A good follow-up step will be to drum up support in the UK and Europe generally.

Ringing the changes

Top 10 E-mail Marketing Mistakes. You could do a lot worse than read this: Optin News: Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes Companies Make [MarketingFix: Worst Practices in Email Marketing]... [Dangerous thinking]

I'd highly recommend subscribing to David's newsletter Changes.  Good common-sense advice about good marketing.  Before I met David I didn't really believe there was such a thing!

MovableType & ENT

My friend and former colleague Paul Walk has implemented a MovableType template for generating an ENT 1.0 feed.  Cool! Well done Paul.

Cast off your discreteness

A note about blogs. I just posted this in a private space, but thought it was worth reposting here:

Some of us are seeing weblogs as an early step in the evolution of the web (or, some say, a revolution in the way the web is used), and the general label for the stuff we're talking about is "social software." Social software supports group forming, an activity that wasn't necessarily in the heads of the folks who created the first blog systems as simple content management, emphasizing individual publication. Blogs are evolving, though, as nodes in social networks, and bloggers are drawn to group-forming activities and software developments that emphasize the connections as well as the nodes. It's possible to see blogs as a bunch of discrete publications that order random posts in reverse chronological order, but you get away from that pretty quickly when you get into the space and se what people are actually doing with their weblogs.

Discuss A note about blogs [weblogsky]

Interesting.  The work that Paolo and I are doing is about elevating blogs from their discreteness and into a world of connections made through topics!