Wednesday, April 10, 2002

I'm seeing more "instant outlines" (or whatever you call them) on Radio blogs. Sean Gallagher and John Robb have posted them, and I could have sworn Dave Winer posted one too, but I can't find it again (see why we need RDF metadata in blogs?). I don't know about you, but I find these annoying and useless. An outline is missing all sorts of contextual information, semantic connotations, and any number of other dimensions of meaning that language has evolved to convey. Sure, use outlines as a writing tool if it works for you, but don't publish your outlines; try to put a little effort into it whydontcha? I sincerely hope attempting to communicate via outline doesn't catch on; we already have to suffer through interminable and excruciating PowerPoint presentations. 9:08:49 PM

Tuesday, April 9, 2002

Books of books I post some notes on three different weblogs, including this one, and maintain three other websites as well. On all of them I've been writing short and medium-length pieces for some time. I also have a collection of similar pieces I've written since I started using computers. (The only ones that have survived have been plain ASCII files, by the way.) I've decided I'd like to have a way to keep track of all this stuff, but I want to do as little work as possible. For example, I don't particularly want to reread everything all at once, and I really don't want to insert metadata in each document, nor do I want to insert them all in to some kind of database. So what are my choices? Not sure yet, but it seems like an interesting question. 10:33:42 PM

Saturday, March 23, 2002

Semantic web from on high Eric Hanson posted this brief overview of the Semantic Web. Excellent piece; it makes the Semantic Web simple, which it really is, at the bottom. One of the things that makes the Semantic Web seem complex is that RDF, its "language", is defined in not one but two specification documents, the Model and Syntax spec and the RDF Schema spec. Each spec is harder to follow than it should be because essential information is contained in the other. Instead of reading one, then the other, you really have to read them at the same time, sort of. But imagine this: think about a set of blogs that use the Semantic Web approach. 10:13:23 PM

Monday, March 18, 2002

Rewriting history Now I'm faced with a dilemma; do I go back and edit my previous entries to reflect what I've learned about formatting and titling? That would make them easier to read. But it would also erase the "historical record"; some of the entries address the formatting problems I react to in later entries. I guess I'll leave them as-is. Mostly because I'm lazy. 5:30:34 PM

Titles considered helpful Yikes, I just scanned this page as it appears in the blog itself (as opposed to this slightly different desktop page). My interface shows much better discrimination between individual posts; the blog interface runs everything together into one long gray column. Titles are clearly called for, as well as (maybe) some changes to the template applied to each post. And my categories don't seem to have any effect on my blog itself; can they just be for outgoing syndication? I want to offer category views on the blog home page. There must be a way... I wonder if this is a problem with the template I chose? Boy, Blogger is sure easier to set up, and the templates are easier to manipulate. (I know, I know, Radio has ten times the features. But I find I prefer simple interfaces. Heck, I even prefer vi to emacs.) 5:27:13 PM

I've written some illustrated letters, although not in a long time. I started, I think, when I was in California and my daughters were in Connecticut. The exhibition below shows that (to nobody's surprise) some illustrated letters vastly exceed my abilities. But while they focus on the letters themselves, I'm remembering how engrossing and fun was the process of creating the letters. Perhaps I haven't written any like that in so long because of the time it took...but it was great. Probably better than getting one of my letters! Getting The Picture: The Art Of The Illustrated Letter. Often the expression of joy or affection, illustrated letters represent an irrepressible urge to picture language... [xBlog: Visual thinking linking | XPLANE] 5:19:05 PM

© Copyright 2002 Peter Harbeson.