Gnodal Journal

You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone …

My recent loss of internet connection and my temporary resumption forebodes what is to come unless I connect with the “punchline” of the “economic conversation” pretty damned quickly.

But, to make hay while the sun shines … transparent inference has seduced me entirely. (The last time I was swept away so completely was when a cognitive psychology project got me into historiography. [Can there be universally communicable meaning without absolutes?]) … so, returning to the challenge of indexing document sets, I’m nibbling away at pages such as these:
XML and Search: SearchTools Report … Lou Rosenfeld’s “XML: Text & Context” (accompanied by “Data Does Not Equal Information” is nice, but boy … Feb ’99 … I’ll be hunting down fresh versions of this material. Similarly with “XML and Semantic Transparency” by Robin Cover, which dates from late ’98.

Expect to see me posting about my new discourse system [working title: Miss Peebles] real soon now. In the meantime, peek at these two sites, and ponder how we create knowledge, exchange knowledge, and what happens if corporate entities dictate those processes.

• Nupedia is an free, ever-expanding, open content general encyclopedia … public peer-reviewed … created by volunteer scholars the world over.
• Wikipedia is an international, open content, collaboratively developed encyclopedia. As of January 2003, it covers a vast spectrum of subjects and has over 106,000 articles in English as well as about 37,000 articles in other languages.

How WikiPedia and NuPedia relate.

A funny thing happened while I was comparison shopping habrashi

(if you don’t ask why, I promise not to tell. Deal?)

“MS02-068 was released Wednesday. Fixing the “external” object caching flaw. Strangely though, the vulnerability is rated “moderate”. It allows reading of any cookie on any site you visit, reading of any file on your system and the execution of arbitrary commands, yet, somehow, it is rated “moderate”, the second lowest possible rating.”

Makes me want to go back to browsing tooth-brushes in Japanese, that does.

David Weinberger’s JoHO pointed me to Dan Gillmor‘s article at Columbia Journalism Review, “Here Comes ‘We Media’; Tech-Savvy Readers Want In on the Conversation, which ends “We Media is coming. Check that: It’s here.”

“Readerware Features“, the page recounts: “Simply enter a list of ISBN numbers, select the web sites you want to search and hit Run. Readerware does the rest, it will search the sites, extract the data and import it into your local database. It gets even easier …” Easier? Easier yet? Hard to imagine!

Gillmor’s eJournal – Dan Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time … woww!
“I couldn’t be more excited about this,” said Evan Williams, founder of Pyra, a company that has had its share of struggles. He wouldn’t discuss terms of the deal, which he said was signed on Thursday, when we spoke Saturday. But he did say it gives Pyra the “resources to build on the vision I’ve been working on for years.”