Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, January 17, 2004
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Friday, January 16, 2004
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"Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive
urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without
distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real
revolution in culture."
 4:03:05 PM
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Tim Berners-Lee: the fractal web
Richard MacManus has summarized Chris Lydon's interview with Sir Tim,
in which he explains the (sensible, in my opinion) idea of the fractal
Web. In the fractal Web, different parts of our output are targeted to
groups at different scales, ranging from the individual to humanity as
a whole. Reminded me of the ecosystem of networks
and got me thinking about how discourse often has to become less
idiosyncratic when it is intended to reach a large audience, because
less common ground / shared language can be assumed.
In their original form, audio interviews like this take a long time to absorb, so double thanks to Richard for writing this up.
3:07:52 PM
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Jim Morrison virtual comeback
This from Modern Humorist. The non-flash version is almost as enjoyable.
THIRTY YEARS AGO
last week, Doors frontman Jim Morrison mixed drugs, alcohol and asthma
to ascend to the big Whisky A Go-Go in the sky. Here in the virtual
world, though, Modern Humorist has reanimated him in the form of lines
and lines of programming code.
10:52:18 AM
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Thursday, January 15, 2004
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Linking up
Clay points to Ben Hyde's reflections on ways to change the slope of the power law curve or to shuffle the blogs that live under it.
One way to fight the old-boys-club effect is to avoid linking up - Clay cites as an example the common behavior of blogrolling
"popular weblogs as a shout-out". As a thought experiment, imagine
everyone suddenly decided to only blogroll people who have fewer links
than they have. Things would surely bounce around violently at first,
and we'd end up oscillating around a flat distribution. I wonder what
that would do to the blogsurfing experience... would it feel much more
noisy? (Note that systems like LiveJournal and YASNSes that implement centrally managed networking are in a position to actually make the experiment by enforcing the rule)
When I look at the Technorati profile for an interesting-looking new
blog that I've just discovered, I'll sometimes glance at its list of
outbound links (here's mine).
When most of those are to highly linked blogs, it's an indication that
I probably won't learn a lot from that blog, because the reading I'm
already doing usually makes me aware of what the "A-list" is up to
(even though I don't directly read most A-listers).
So I guess I've revealed one way you can get my continued attention
(and links): dig up good stuff that I can't find elsewhere. Common
sense, really.
11:14:46 AM
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Ming: has New Age gotten old?
Flemming Funch:
I have meditated. I've done Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Kung Fu, DahnHak, Pranic
Healing, Tensegrity and Access. I've been healed, acupuncturized,
massaged, rebirthed, exorcised and hypnotized. [...] I've gone to hundreds of rituals and danced, chanted, drummed and
prayed. I've gone to sacred sites, feng shuied my house. I've gotten my
horoscope analyzed many times, my numerology has been done, my palms
read. The tarot has given me valuable insights, and I know what shape
my chakras are in. And there's probably a lot more I'm forgetting.
[...] my new agey friends, or friends from specific metaphysical traditions,
might well be puzzled that I wrap things up more than they would expect
me to under other circumstances. I.e. I write a lot more conservatively
and tentatively than I might otherwise. Referring sort of distantly to
news items and books with interesting but theoretical subjects. Where I
could just as well provide the straight dope. It is just that I don't
necessarily think the dope is quite so straight as it might have
seemed. And I no longer claim to know exactly what it is.
To me, Flemming (in his current incarnation, perhaps :-) sets an
example for combining open-mindedness and critical thinking. His mind
has gone far but his feet are on the ground - that's pretty rare. But
most
of all I appreciate how he manages to write with simplicity while
pondering the deep and complex.
10:13:27 AM
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Precise pointing to particular paragraphs
Spike Hall describes PurpleSlurple, which enables paragraph addressing on almost any page on the web by inserting purple numbers
in it. I've used it a few times already to point to specific places
inside long articles and like it very much. My only worry is that my
PurpleSlurple URLs will break if the service becomes unavailable (or
worse, shut down).
The home page provides a handy bookmarklet (see also Matt's anchor revealer):
Want one-click Purple numbers? Right-click on this link, PurpleSlurple Bookmarklet,
and bookmark it, or drag and drop this bookmark onto your browser's
personal toolbar. Now when you are viewing a page on which you would
like Purple numbers just click the bookmarklet. (Javascript must be
enabled).
9:49:15 AM
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Harnessing the network form to make money
Ton and others are trying to figure out a business model for klognets. This followup cracked me up. And Gary's comment is thought-provoking.
The scenario you describe is viable and works, I can attest to this
first hand, although I found it only worked in one specific scenario:
The Client must have nothing to hide.
As soon as they fall for the pompous absurdity of the NDA(Non
Disclosure Agreement), they cut their own throats and seal their own
fates. Sorry for the blunt analogy, but it's been invariant in every
NDA-attended contract I had over 23 years, and after that much
reliability over that much time, you begin to suspect there may be a
pattern.
[...]
With Free Software, there is no threat to the so-called
"Intellectual Property" because no one will get the edge. Open Source
is what the cold war once called detante, it is assurance of a balance
in commercial power among peers. Because the code is open and free, you
can discuss your client's project on the mailing lists, in Usenet, at
LUG meetings, even with other clients, and invariably someone would have at least partial solutions that could be strung together to get the work done.
Maybe it's an America-at-war thing, but sadly, increasingly, on this
side of the pond and in the past two years especially, all my clients
have turned their back on this collaborative advantage. All have become
obsessed with owning the means far above achieving any ends, almost as
if the success of the project doesn't even really matter anymore. Even
where closed ownership is completely irrational (why does a national
broadcaster need competitive advantage in news-story data-entry
software?) in their paranoid delusions of greed, they have erected
inpenetrable IP Curtains, dug deep lawyer-infested moats around their
business plans, veiled everything in a cloak of secrecy, and invariably
every last one has lost their shirt or simply failed to deliver any
product --- they all learn the hard and painful way how creating good software is astonishingly expensive, but creating bad software is even more so.
9:18:51 AM
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Localogging
Lisa Williams: "strange, but it's easier for me to find out what's going on in Indonesia than
what's going on next door. Blogs are a perfect remedy for this problem (see http://www.westportnow.com)."
Throw in an ounce of GeoURL and localfeeds and we can perhaps start making sense of our neighborhoods again.
Update: local information is not just neat, it's necessary, and it's disappearing from old media - I just found this tidbit from Harper's thanks to Chris Corrigan:
8:30:35 AM
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
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We Media report on participatory journalism
I'm joining the parade a little late - should have blogged this eons ago. In last September the excellent duo of Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis of Hypergene wrote a thorough report on participatory journalism called "We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information.". (Dan Gillmor wrote the foreword.)
This is an excellent piece of work, surely the most well-researched
around at this point. Meticulous footnotes and all. These guys don't
just "really get it", they're documenting what's going on at the
intersection of social software and journalism in a very thorough and
useful manner.
I especially recommend Chapter 4 which dissects the "why we do it" question in detail - I feel they're hitting the nail on the head there. As Stephen observed,
many of the report's observations and conclusions are fairly general
and carry over to other communication-intensive areas such as academic
research and education.
(There's a 4 Mb pdf version in case you want to print it out.)
4:46:25 PM
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Tim O'Reilly's wishlist for 2004
focuses on what big players such as Amazon could do to foster
innovation and generally make Good Things happen. It all makes good
sense, but I'd throw in a wish that small players find ways to work together even better and keep on delighting us with daring stuff.
1:57:01 PM
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Jenkins blogs
MIT Media Studies' Henry Jenkins is now coblogging at the Technology Review, along with Rodney Brooks, Simson Garfinkel, and David Kushner. The blog is comments-enabled.
1:31:14 PM
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Monday, January 12, 2004
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Free Web hosting
My colleague Todd and I just got 3 free years of hosting from 1and1.com. (Mad props to Alf for the tip.) They don't even ask for a credit card number. Still 10 days left to sign up if you're in the U.S. or Canada.
Update: Julian throws a little cold water from the other side of the ocean. (I think those comments are from paying customers.)
Update 2: Colin Wong and a few others had positive experiences on this side. Perhaps paying nothing changes expectations? And here's an unofficial peer-to-peer support site for 1and1.com.
3:33:47 PM
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Microcontent software pieces loosely joined
Eugene Eric Kim maintains both a personal (Blosxom-powered) weblog and a personal wiki (of the PurpleWiki variety). He and others have modified both pieces of software as follows:
- CamelCase words from the blog point to corresponding wiki pages;
- Backlink pages in the wiki show not only inbound links from other wiki pages, but also from the blog.
Sounds confusing? Just look at this backlinks page for the expression "DougEngelbart".
The links under "blosxom" are out of the wiki and into the blog. Follow
one of them and look for words that start with a Capital letter. These
link back into the wiki.
Pretty neat. If there were a way to wipe just a little more
geekiness off from it, I reckon this kind of setup could become popular.
Notice the parallel with the relationship that exists between blogs and
the Internet Topic Exchange, which is a community-oriented version of
the idea of elevating the status of stable topics in the
constantly-shifting world of weblogs. When you link to a topic channel
(say, the channel about the TopicExchange itself)
in a post from a TrackBack-enabled blogging tool (like Movable Type or
Radio), a rich pointer to that post is automagically posted over on the
channel. Implementing this actually did not require modification of
existing blog tools. And because TrackBack is an open, documented mechanism, other blogging tools can jump in simply by implementing support for (outbound) TrackBack.
3:07:07 PM
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Sunday, January 11, 2004
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