Seb's Open Research
|
Friday, September 05, 2003
|
|
| |
From "Taxi".
"The great thing about television is that if something important
happens anywhere in the world, day or night, you can always change the
channel." [Quotes of the Day]
 4:53:35 PM
|
|
Mapping out the neighborhood
Here are recent additions to my neighborhood tour:
Walter Chaw is writing the most entertaining and instructive series of movie reviews that I have seen.
Paul Cox brings mathematics and common sense together each month.
Jim McGee is one of the pioneers out in knowledge logging
land. He understands a lot about the individual experience of knowledge
work, about the interaction between people and organizations, and
regularly digs up or comes up with insights and wisdom on how change
happens in organizations.
Phil Wolff's brain is
obviously on hyperdrive. He spends a lot of time thinking about the
evolution of blogging, most often from a strategic standpoint. He also
keeps tabs on blog numbers.
- He can see far, and with a wide angle.
- I suspect Vision is his middle name.
- He's good at making up post titles.
- He's not that good at making up blog titles. ;-)
- He likes bullet lists a lot.
Andrew Odlyzko writes very well-documented and coherent papers on the evolution of communication.
He warned against the impending telecom bubble burst back when people
were claiming outrageous rates of Internet traffic growth. He's not
afraid of using historical precedent that dates back centuries to
reason about the implications of the current networking revolution. And
he wrote the memorable Content is Not King. He has the nagging habit of being right.
Steve Lawrence helped build the kickass CiteSeer (ResearchIndex) academic paper harvester/search engine/citation analyzer. Plus, he gave me a cool Google t-shirt.
Benjamin Franklin
was an American journalist, publisher, author, philanthropist, public
servant, scientist, diplomat, inventor, and revolutionary. He didn't
patent any of his inventions (which included bifocals and an efficient
stove), so that the most people would benefit from them.
4:53:15 PM
|
|
|
|
|
Thursday, September 04, 2003
|
|
| |
Second largest
At more than 150,000 pages, Wikipedia is now the largest wiki in the world, but did you know which is the second largest? The answer is Susning.nu, a Swedish wiki with no specific agenda other than helping participants "get a clue". Read more on Meatball.
4:48:39 PM
|
|
Waypath it!
Alf very positively reviews the Waypath blog indexing service.
I must confess I only tried it out once when it got out, and was
unimpressed at the time, but it seems like it's really good at some
things, such as finding similar pages. (I noticed Michael is using it
on all of his links, which is an excellent sign, too.)
Alf also links to rant by Waypath author Steve
deploring the lack of collaboration between the
technopathpopblogdexsters out there. Seems a big part of the fun is in
the building, rather than in offering the best service. Oh well, too
bad for the users. Still what we have is better than nothing.
1:49:17 PM
|
|
Now that's what I call an 'About' page!
It's a shame that so few weblogs have an about page. I'm sure it makes us look like some kind of secret handshake
clique to hapless outsider surfers. Stephen's new page is about as
complete as it can get. I especially like the first part, "Purpose and
Origin".
About Stephen's Web. I have revised, updated and greatly expanded
the 'About' page for my website, making clear its design
goals, technology, organization, features, and (some not so
humble statements about) impact. [...] [ OLDaily]
1:22:59 PM
|
|
Seeding the living web
Richard MacManus experiences the wonders of hyperlinked communication, chronicling how his blog helped grow his ideas:
Organic stories. [...] So my story Microcontent Wiki
did indeed grow and the idea of it is still floating around in
cyberspace. It's almost organic and the beautiful thing (to me) is that
everyone who linked to or commented on my story brought something new to the idea. Plus, even better, it led me to discover some interesting new people to add to my RSS Aggregator and blogroll! So by writing something and being lucky enough to be read by a small part of the blogosphere, I ended up reading stuff by people I hadn't come across before, who will further stimulate me to write more stuff. Now that's the Read/Write Web folks! [ Read/Write Web]
12:03:19 PM
|
|
Interlude
I love posts like this that cast a different light on a blogger's
personality than what their writing expresses. I should try something
similar sometime.
(On a related note (;->), I blogged earlier on Musician weblogs.)
11:53:18 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
|
|
| |
Good code and bad code
Peter Lindberg gives an nice and quick explanation of the difference.
[...] with some apps, you just know that they are well written. Those apps speak their quality loudly. They are coherent, they have integrity, their UIs make perfect sense, they behave as you expect, and so on.
Why is this a good sign of the code being clean? Because software can’t be planned. Software is always a dialogue with its users, with competing software, and with its programmers. Good software adapts, and for adaptations to take place gracefully, the code must be susceptible to changes. Bad code isn’t.
 By the way, if perchance you're looking for gift ideas for me (Allô papa!), anything that's on Peter's wishlist would be an excellent choice - except for Notes on the Synthesis of Form and The Glass Bead Game, which I already have.
12:45:04 PM
|
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
|
|
| |
Il est en feu!
If you read French and could use a guide to the wonderful world of weblogs, Michel Dumais has a killer series up on his own weblog that clearly deserves Google juice:
5:00:10 PM
|
|
Mountains and lakes
Don Park has exactly described the architecture for the Internet Topic Exchange that Phil and I built earlier this year. I really liked Don's metaphor - people originate a number of streams that contribute to different pools.
Linking Blogs and Wikis.
Imagine posts and comments flowing from blogs to wikis like the way streams feed into lakes. Got the picture yet? Now think of a blog category as a wiki page. The picture changes so that the blog becomes a mountain and categories become the streams running down the side of the mountain in all directions toward wikis into which streams from other mountains also feed into.
The resulting picture you have in your mind is the 10,000 feet view of how I think blogs and wikis should be connected.
Update #1: Here are some decorations to complete above picture:
- rain is the news that bombard us daily
- rocks that form the mountains are our experiences
- volcanic eruptions are our rants
- flash floods are sudden spikes of activitiy
- clouds are news generators like North Korea or Saddam Hussein
Silly, but I like to garnish mental images. [Don Park's Daily Habit]
The topic exchange associates a shared wiki page to each topic, in addition to managing the stream. Here's the TopicExchange stream on social software, and here's the corresponding wiki page.
11:12:21 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Monday, September 01, 2003
|
|
| |
Experimental philosophers vs. philosophical engineers
Social Meaning and the Cult of Tim
is an interesting discussion of some of the internal tensions among the
many bright people at the W3C who are dreaming up the Semantic Web. It
seems that, as it often happens in ambitious projects such as this,
there is a cultural split between the "thinkers" and "the builders";
the leader seems to belong to the latter camp, and a key question is
how much he can/should be criticized publicly by members of the former.
I'm sure lots of people are learning a lot about politics in the
process.
The debate about social meaning is in some ways a
debate between at least two distinct kinds of computer professional:
the software engineers (who make a legitimate claim to have built
the Web in the first place) and the knowledge representation
theorists (who make a legitimate claim to have built many knowledge
representation systems of a kind analogous to the one which the
Semantic Web is meant to become.)
Not only do these groups have
different methods, backgrounds, and modes of argument and
discourse, but they also have divergent expectations and standards
about formalisms, formal systems, and the like.
[...] One obvious point to make is that there are a lot of people trying
to help Berners-Lee realize his intuited vision and that he wields
more influence and authority over this complex process than any
other single person. Perhaps that is perfectly
appropriate. However, the problem arises when other people, who have
less moral authority, disagree with Berners-Lee. I have heard it
said several times, although few people seem willing to commit to
this view publicly, that Berners-Lee should be exempt from
public criticism because the realizability of the Semantic Web
rests upon Berners-Lee's reputation more than upon any other single
factor.
[...] Too many W3C groupies, hangers-on,
associates, employees, and peripheral figures act as if
Berners-Lee's "vision" is infallible or incorrigible. I have heard
W3C people react harshly to criticism of Berners-Lee on precisely
these terms. "After all", they suggest, "he did invent the
Web". Playing on that bit of institutional lore aforementioned, the
idea seems to be that "Tim did it once, only Tim can do it again".
If the success of the Semantic Web does indeed critically depend on a
single man's reputation, I think that is very bad news for the Semantic
Web.
4:40:29 PM
|
|
Subscribe to this thread
Richard MacManus (another great New Zealand find by the way):
Two bloggers that generate interesting comments from their readers are Don Park and Robert Scoble. But to track comments on their weblogs, I need to bookmark the post in my weblog browser (ie I have to go outside
my RSS Aggregator), and periodically click "Refresh" on that webpage to
see if any new comments have been written. This is a big time waster
for me. Wouldn't it be great if I could simply subscribe to an RSS feed
of that post's comments? For example when I click on the "Comments" URL
and view the comments, I'd love to see a simple "Subscribe to these comments"
button that generates an RSS file. Then I could add that to my RSS
Aggregator and bob's my uncle - all the comments from that weblog post
would automatically be streamed to me. Weblog authoring tools vendors - consider this a feature request ;-)
But I won't
voluntarily pile on top of an overloaded inbox. And since I don't have
time to manage a database of bookmarked discussions, I'll have to be
content with letting a few interesting comments slide through.
3:46:23 PM
|
|
Structured/semantic blogging: the road ahead
There's been increasing activity in the last half-year or so around the theme of structured/semantic blogging. Phil offers a very insightful post here, concisely capturing the motivation for getting this stuff up and running:
What's a structure-enhanced blog item?
Packages of structured data are becoming post components.
The virtue of blogs has been their simplicity. Each post only needs one field, and maybe a title and url.
Not everyone is served well by this lowest common denominator. Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time.
When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form. The form will have its own metadata and its own data model. Phil includes a link to the intriguing qlogger service, which I had not seen before. Qlogger already offers a number of structured blogging options (sexlogging being one of them - "Ah sex. You've gotta love it. Keep track of it with this log". Great, now you'll be thinking about blogging all the time.). And the still mysterious Lafayette project is apparently aiming at the same honeypot of distributed, collaboratively built databases.
Best of all, Phil gives a plausible scenario in which several different structured blogpost formats gradually spread across the net through autodiscovery. Future blogging tools may well allow us to manage a personalized set of formats that we can easily choose from with each new post. Ordinary, amorphous posts will remain the default for freeform content that doesn't fit a template.
I think this is spot on. My own thinking efforts in that direction can be found in the piece Towards Structured Blogging; Alf Eaton's neat Blaxm! reviews exchange brings some of those ideas into concrete form.
2:34:58 PM
|
|
Sensible
Halavais’s Corollary: "The value of a networked service is inversely proportionate to its cost."
Cost to end users, that is. Alex came up with this in the context of a
discussion of anti-spam measures, but it obviously applies in lots of
places.
12:24:23 PM
|
|
 Two
great nuggets I found in a post on 8BitJoystick.com discussing the merits and bias of the Wikipedia: this
little banner on the left, and the following quote: "You know the world is screwed
up when the anarchists are organized."
11:13:57 AM
|
|
10:49:58 AM
|
|
|
|
Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:13:18 PM.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves
| |
