Online communities: remembering things past.

Teal Sunglasses: Weblog Communities viewed from the perspective of a long-time USENET user who is fascinated by community building.

"I think bloggers ought to realize there's nothing really new under the sun -- and some of what they're inventing has existed in very similar forms for 70 years. Which isn't bad -- but I think it gives the community an opportunity to understand those predecessors and perhaps avoid some of the mistakes or problems."

I always feel it's important to think about the parallels between what we're doing now and what people did then. Much of it boils down to the same thing, if you look beneath the surface. The basic needs we're trying to satisfy are the same. Come to think of it, community building probably dates back to the invention of language. 

My first outliner

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100115/outlines/firstone.html

http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=71

8:31:07 PM | # |  |

http://www.exploratorium.edu/guidebook/

http://web.mit.edu/is/discovery/pda-support/index.html

8:30:02 PM | # |  |

• How did we get here? Two circles: HTML & OO/RPC. No overlap.
• Two more circles; REST & SOAP, with some overlap (a question mark, a friction point, where the pain comes from: RESTful SOAP)
• REST is an architectural style (the style embodied by web apps), not a standard:
  • network of web pages as a state machine
  • progression by following links
  • next page==next state
  • Web is not REST; Web is REST-style
• Peter gives an example of REST and the HTML web:
  • View list of books (resources)
  • View book details
  • Order book
• REST offers generic operations (CRUD: PUT, GET, POST, DELETE)
• RESTful SOAP guidelines:
  • Model your system as a set of resources
  • Assign logical URIs to resources
  • Define schemas for resource representations
  • Enable discoverability of resources
  • Provide appropriate operations to manipulate resources

http://www.maketechnologies.com/

2:25:24 PM | # |  |

Harvest Road:

http://www2.harvestroad.com.au/cgi-bin/hr/loadframes.cgi?hive

chased this down from Erasmus: http://e-learning.surf.nl/e-learning/nieuws/360

2:20:40 PM | # |  |

Dealing with Spam -- anyone have any luck?.

This morning, after having to delete about twenty pieces of spam just after waking up, I finally decided to try a spam-fighting program:  Mailwasher.  Why Mailwasher and not one of the dozens of other possibilities?  Mostly because of the strong endorsement from Rebecca Blood, blogger extraordinaire.  Also the idea of bouncing the message back to the sender to simulate the invalidity of my email address sounded liked a good strategy to pursue.  I'm sure that the spammers are already working on countermeasures in this MAD (mutually assured deluge) of email...

Anyone have luck with other solutions?