Gnodal Journal

*X-posted from MozDawg on DAV and Docs*

see my homepage: AlphaDawg AT DreamHost

In my previous post “ Birthing the Ultimate Feed Reader” I mentioned the “river” versus “folder” RSS discussion in the Scobleizer blog and wrote, “what something is worth depends on how much of it there is and how fast it’s moving”. In what I do I’m challenged to manage whole families of technical documents (herding cats, yes?) while attending to minute details, even while things are in flux (hence “nailing jello to the wall”). So finding axes of differentiation / categorization (semantic web anyone?) is something I worked on before WWW came into being.

So the notion of a quality metric that manifests as ?what? longevity … seems to me that has face validity. TailRank.com operates on such a supposition: that the number of branches springing from a post represents some quality. I’ll buy that.

I just spliced some TailRank output into my frankenstein homepage (see the link above) … turns out to be good reading!

From my list of something over 200 blogs I’ve requested that TailRank filters out those that have more than 25 ?what? spawned threads. Koolio. Really.

 

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This just in: “IT Gets Drafted to Babysit the Blogs, by David L. Margulius at InfoWorld.

“I don’t have time to read Weblogs. There, I said it. I’m not saying the blogosphere’s emperor has no clothes. I’m just trying to be realistic about how much time I can spend in life reading other people’s musings. According to the latest Jupiter Research study, however, I may be bucking an unstoppable trend.
Nearly 70 percent of all large companies will have deployed a Weblog authoring system by the end of this year […]
The immediate upshot, says Jupiter, is that IT needs to “figure out how to leverage existing Web content management best practices and functionality […]” These best practices include workflow, single-source content repositories, security and permissions, and content auditing and analytics.
But on another level, I wonder whether there’s a bigger picture that IT should be thinking about.”

Good that the InfoWorld crew is wondering about it … very timely!

I’m obviously going to have to add to this item … I just stopped by ”Gopher still going strong” on Kottke.org to post this comment:

“Gopher still hot? Dang right! I’m still getting hits in my blog from this post. Can we say that it (gopher) is paradigmatic of “long tail”?

K … what’s going on here? I know a) I get fed up with just how bloated FF is and b) it’s sometimes a perk to use telnet and/or pine. Maybe some of us really appreciate sleek / parsimonious?

p.s. Thinking about the interface I’m cobbling together for my “Participatory Deliberation” is where sleek/parsimonious came up. When I slip into that mode I see Web2.0 as spring-loaded and self-evident. A series/collection/suite of single-page apps?”

X-posted to Togo at LiveJournal

You know about WWW-browsers (obviously), and you very likely know about FTP … and maybe about IRC, too.

Do you know about “gopher”? Gopher pre-dates WWW, like IRC and newsgroups (NNTP), and email … it was a way of allowing folk to access other people’s files, kinda like a web browser, but it didn’t rely on HTML pages.

Here’s a blast from the past that’s still appropriate today: “ A Practical Guide to Defeating The Radical Right” and “Directory: Cyberpunk and Postmodern Culture“

Some of the documents in there date back to 1994 … around the time I started publishing web pages.

*touched 15JULY06 1245MDT: “You should allow imagination to be opportunistic and not shackle it to earning wealth or producing profit on the short term because that independence is at the base of scientific creativity.” —John C. Polanyi on CBC Radio’s “Quirks and Quarks”*

I finally got around to looking through Information Week magazine of 26JUNE06. Thomas Claburn’s “Is Centralized IT Killing Tech Innovation?; A Culture of ‘No’” caught my eye; the cover slug read “The apparatchiks in the IT org are stifling innovation. Here’s where to draw the line on central control.” Woa … I can’t recall the last time I saw someone else use the term apparatchik.

The article itself was just as entertaining: “IT pros worry about the security and management headaches of renegade apps. They should worry more about stifling innovation” Right on!

“Internet activist and entrepreneur John Gilmore once declared, ”The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.” [[FFII should use this as one of their slogans! bdt] Today that’s how many employees view their IT departments.” [emph. added – bdt]

‘Scuze me? today?! Well, that might be true, strictly speaking … but only becuase IT depts haven’t been around all that long. But mahn I don’t recall ever encountering anything but friction, with the exception of a few stering individuals. Hence the need for the unholy triumverate of wizard, guru, and hero. From what I can see the rhetoric has changed but it’s still opportunistic carreerists (who pre-date yuppies) and power games … sophistry and plausible deniability.

Anytime someone wants to talk turkey I’m ready, able, and willing. But no (with all due respects to TimBL) I can’t just “build it in the garage and see if it works” … those days are passed for me … that’s why I’m writing on a 300MHz box on a scavenged WiFi connection!

“Business is a conversation and money is the punchline.” … yaaaa right. And there’s nothing more condescending than a dot-bomb bourgie. The clever robber has his victims stand and deliver at the point of a pen. Entrepreneurship is just another aspect of culture … as go society and community, so goes activity. (Has anybody read M. Scott Peck’s book on the death of civility?)

What’s in a word? ”Peer Production” and ”CrowdSourcing” and …

 posted Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 1:29 PM MST

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“A rose, by any other name …” Yaa, right, heh … Firefox 1.5 or 1.8, or Bon Echo, or Bon Echo 2.01b1 … or 2.01b2 …

Anyhow, I just started using ”crowdsourcing” as a del.icio.ur tag, alongside opensource and collaboration. (There are less than 100 items at del.icio.us with that tag.)

Who was the originator? Jeff How in Wired 14.06 with “The Rise of Crowdsourcing“?

“Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”

or Ben Garfinkel and Kevin Broome in their ”We’re not wired right” blog with “Buzzing with the Digital Crowd at Vidfest 2006, viz.:”

“Terry McBride, head of Nettwerk Records made no new friends during his Keynote Speech […] when he introduced the following buzzword to the design-centric audience: crowd sourcing.”

Check those dates against this technorati graph of posts using “crowdsourcing”:

Get your own chart!

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see also: Jeff Howe’s ”Rise of the Amateur” blog; Cote’s “The Fine Line Between Crowd-Sourcing and Crap-Sourcing” in his “One foot in the muck, the other in utopia” (also a blog); two CS manufacturers: cambrianhouse.com, a CS company (a variety of products), and threadless.com (swag).

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Listening to: Jesse Brown on CBC Radio with his “Contrarians“. (Why doesn’t he get his show a reasonable website??! *C’mon Maffin, chip in!*)

… ohhhhh yes it is!

Marc Eisenstadt’s Blog at KMI (EisenBlog) popped up in my technorati faves and, well, PeopleAggregator looked so good I gave it a spin. Two spins, actually: I searched for “structured blogging” and found a recent post, then searched for “synth” and huh huh found another recent post, this one mentionning Moog circa 1971 … I bought my first Korg synth in 1974.

Count me in!

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Also of note: FSF’s GPL3 work is making use of the dad-gummest comment function I’ve seen yet … and I’ve been busying myself with this stuff since 1994. (And yes, I was using Mosaic at the time! *grin*)

see this: Active commentary on GPLv3

Be sure to check out their ”process definition”. (I just started my version; documents like this move me to develop proper usage … call me perverse!)

from “Eyetracking and Images of People“:

“Visitors tend not to look at big, block images, so don’t put interactive elements, such as navigation in these images.

People don’t look intensely at images, but seem to use images as ‘anchors,’ which act as starting points for a scanning pattern.

Images of people draw attention more than images. The more personal the image, the more powerful. Photos of employees do better than spokesmodel types. Sometimes, however, human images can distract from more important page elements, so testing is important.”

And in “Eye tracking Web usability” (which reports Jakob Nielsen’s eye-tracking study) Nielsen is quoted (in part) with this:

“The real highlight [of the study] is that peoples’ eyes flitter fast across pages. Very little time is allocated to each page element, so you have to be brief and concise in communicating online,” Nielsen said. “They don’t look in on, across the lines of a page, and often fixate on something, such as the first few words of a headline, for only a tenth of second. The right-hand side is often never in view of the eyes. People look down the pages in an ‘F’ pattern [see example on the left], with a few stripes at top–the first one longer than the second–and then down the long vertical stripe to see if is any else. Sometime the track turns into an ‘E’ pattern but it’s usually an F.”

Gotta work with it … cognitive ergonomics … no court of appeal here!

*thanks to Michael Surtees’ ”Web Eyetracking” for the brick upside the head.*

In his “Say what?” Jon Udell responds to a comment about his writing style. (He self-deprecatingly called it a “dope slap” … Jon’s the sorta fellow who knows the benefits arise from proper user of a clue stick or clue by 4.) BTW “Say what?” is an allusion to Ami Hendrickson’s blog, ”Muse Ink”.

Later in the piece Jon describes a system users Eureka moment … “we bought the wrong kind of software” … yaa, that! (Out of the mouths of illiterati?). That moved me to this reply:

With allusion ot “vague queries” and social software: the person may not have said what they meant (lacking the qualities and training to do appropriately precise failure mode identification) but they meant what they said!

p.s. I was pondering how sophistry ham-strings development … because we are fallible and our knowledge is limited we have a righteous need for explanations; excuses distract and mis-lead.”

But really … elsewhere I essayed a bit on sophistry at a political level (as a comment to “Blair’s Moral Barbarism“).

“I was wondering about how sophistry (“excuses”) so frequently has a sour, caustic, bitter tone to it. Perhaps because the individual is a) dreading being exposed as a coward, and b) in denial concerning having actually and really made a choice.

We can produce explanations. We can, otherwise, produce rationalizations. But really, don’t you think it’s very sad (tragic?) that most folk are geared up to make good use of excuses?”

Rhetoric is useful … when your intention is to land a man on the moon and get him back safely you need to pick one plan from the short list. Getting all hands to haul along that line takes skilfull use of language. But sophistry … that would endanger the entire project, along with peoples’ lives. Sophistry ham-strings development; because we are fallible and our knowledge is limited we have a righteous need for explanations; excuses distract and mis-lead.

It’s always hard to say what we mean … but we’re morally bound to mean what we say; otherwise is corruption of one sort or another.

Cynicism concerning human nature and pessimism concerning our future … pure poison.