Gnodal Journal

I’ve been putting this off for a long time, waiting for the shake-out in blogging clients.

/me peeks at “Windows Live” sitting on the desktop

Til now I haven’t found any I truly trust.

#SocialMedia
“Social Media Revolution 2” (Refresh) YouTube video

Verified as Empire Avenue ITGEEK (EAVB_YBJKHHWRJX)

*X-posted from my blog on http://GlobalSenseMaking.net*

Micah Sifry quoted this in his post about the IntenseDebate deployment on Change.Gov:

“I just wanted to say thank you for giving us a place to make our thoughts and comment heard. It’s about time the government provide a centralized place for citizens to express their opinions where they feel they will be heard.” [Emphasis added by him there.]

My response to him on Twitter was this:
“With 3.7K / 53 pages of comments (and the thread closed), you say ID on Change.Gov is a place people can go to be heard?! #koolaid”
In effect, this says that standing in a crowd with 3,699 other people and holding up a placard is a brave step forward for engaged democracy.
That’s non-sense … and worse: it leads to complacent self-delusion, entirely antithetical to the drive for innovation.

Sidebar: I noticed that Sifry has blocked me on Twitter …
… to that, I tweeted this: ” Well, after years of cold-shoulder I finally got a reaction: blocked by none other than @Mlsif, the high-priest of democracy. #borg #matrix ”

The ironies are ripe … and entirely keeping with what might seem a cynical appraisal on my part: those who are charged with the responsibility of applauding the Emperor’s new clothes are doing just that.
Such behavior has consequences.

*I’ve been in “stealth mode” for years … cat definitely in the bag.*

A while back I did a little online work for a guy on the other side of the Atlantic … just helping him re-design the frontpage of his commercial site. Not rocket science, but not thumb-twiddling either.
Thing is, he had no means of paying me. I don’t have credit card, so paypal is out.

So I decided to start the implementation phase of my project and arranged for him to get me an account at DreamHost. And that’s where things stand.
But now the time has come for me to renew that account and secure my domain name.

Well, I just let the cat’s head out:

“The Antenna is You” – GroundPlane.wordpress.com

Re-posting August 04, 2005 which I deleted due to constant Russian spamming.

*I’m on my second laptop and so don’t want to add these sites to bookmarks*

http://www.understandingxml.com/

http://www.xulplanet.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3 XULPlanet and its http://www.xulplanet.com/forum/ Forum
http://www.xulplanet.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=4 General, http://www.xulplanet.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=1 XUL, http://www.xulplanet.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3 XBL, and http://www.xulplanet.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3″ XPCOM .

http://www.xulplanet.com/ndeakin/ aka ”Neil’s Place” (XUL blog)

“It’s not easy to make something easy.“

I just Dugg Paul Glazowski’s “Web 2.0: How Hard Could It Be?” over at Mashable.com:

“It ’s not easy to make something easy. … The focus of the story … is to uncover the true tale of start-to-finish process. That taking something from an idea conjured during time spent in gridlock traffic … to something you can hold in your hand … is a process that is almost always longer than one might expect.”

The comment I posted there was about the underlying dynamics

“It’s not easy to make something easy” and making things simple is really complicated. (GEOS, the GUI for C=64, was hackable at assembly level with GEOProgrammer … those were great days!)
I’ve been using the phrase “cognitive ergonomics” more often recently. (It was in current usage back in the mid-80s, around the time SGML was coming out.) The tools and techniques we’re rolling out give us the sort of capabilities that stress our imaginations!
What I’m seeing is something like “When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail” … pages are being lumbered with elaborate AJAX functionality but the user experience isn’t being complimented with effective functionality … the interfaces are entertaining, so it’s fun to play with them, but come time to do heavy lifting and things get bogged down. That, for me, is the acid test: enhancing work flow.

(Somebody wanna give me a hand AJAXifying TRAC and/or subversion? Can’t ya just see it? all gridded up and popping with interactivity?)”

The article that got Paul moving on this is from the NewYorkTimes’ Janet Rae-Dupree, “Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work“, documenting Jim Marggraff work to bring a few products to completion. It reads, reads in part:

“We’ve all heard the tales of the apple falling on Newton’s head and Archimedes leaping naked from his bath shrieking “Eureka!” Many of us have even heard that eBay was created by a guy who realized that he could help his fiancée sell Pez dispensers online.
The fact that all three of these epiphany stories are pure fiction stops us short.”

“Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.”

I can date my “Eureka moment” precisely … Dalhousie’s Killam Library, February 2003, 3rd floor, corner table, John Willinsky’s OpenAccess text “If Only We Knew; Increasing the public value of social science research” open and sitting /there/ with Jürgen Habermas’ “Discourse Ethics” also open, sitting just /there/; the penny dropped and my re-conceptualization of dialectical concept-mapping came clear … it was that easy!
Yaa, sure, it really was just that easy … and I had started on that project in late May 1975. Do the arithmetic. *grin*

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