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Monday, March 04, 2002 |
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Reading books online
Reading books online
"I don't get to read books very often anymore." [A Shifted Reading List]
Uh oh. That's a scary thing to hear from a librarian. :-) There is, of course, an emerging middle ground between print books and blogspace: online books. When O'Reilly created Safari [disclosure: I was heavily involved in the project, and am still peripherally connected to it], we imagined a bimodal pattern of use, whereby people would read print books in their leisure time, to enlarge their worldview, and use online reference libraries for tactical research.
While I think that's generally true, my own use of Safari is somewhat contrary. Here are some of the books I've recently read online.
Java and XML, 2nd ed.
COM and .NET Component Services
.NET Framework Essentials, 2nd ed.
Programming Web Services with SOAP
I was very grateful to the authors and editors of all these books, each of which did just what a good book should: enlarge my worldview on a topic. Granted, these are programming books, so it was especially useful to go through them online, cutting/pasting/testing code fragments as I went. But I am rethinking, to some degree, the assumption that people "won't read books online." I find that I do, and it helps me to stay current. Note that .NET Framework Essentials, 2nd ed., just came out last month.
It's tempting, from the perspective of blogspace, to undervalue books and magazine articles. But the slower, more reflective process they embody, and their more ambitious aims, still matter -- arguably more than ever. Amidst an often bewildering flux, we need anchors and touchstones.
There is no doubt in my mind that the process of writing books will change for the better as the publishing world increasingly reckons with, and adapts to, what is happening here. I hope to be involved, somehow, in making that happen.
What has already changed is the means of access to (some) books. When you find out about a book that's in Safari, you don't have to wait for Amazon to ship it, you can read it right now. I hope there's a business model here that will help authors, editors, and publishers continue to be able to do what they do.
8:36:22 PM 
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Hashtables, structs, XML-RPC, and SOAP
Hashtables, structs, XML-RPC, SOAP
It is a darn shame. XML-RPC does define a struct which reasonably maps to a hash table. If only SOAP had done the same in section 5, then Jon's adventure would have been a rather short one. [Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog]
Certainly that would have helped, and I'm hopeful it will yet happen. I suspect there's more going on here, though. Sam and I both believe that the dynamic nature of scripting languages is not the root cause of WSDL pain. Scripting culture, however, does play a role. Hashtables are popular with scripters because we can build up data structures without having to name all of their parts. This is a major convenience that speeds up development quite a lot. It also has a cost both to us, in terms of future readability, and to others, in terms of maintenance and (when we go over the wire) interop. How to weigh the benefits and costs of anonymous versus named data? And, how to join programming cultures that prefer things one way with cultures that prefer things the other way?
7:29:10 PM
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Using people as filters
Using people as filters
Rael Dornfest: "The result is that when I wake up in the morning, I get to see a lot of the stories that come through Slashdot or from the New York Times that are interesting to me, without having to wade through Slashdot to find them." [ORN interview with Steven Johnson]
Rael's comment goes to the heart of what's happening here. As individuals become both producers and consumers of RSS feeds, they can use one another as filters. Today, Rael reminded me of some non-Radio RSS aggregators -- including his own Peerkat, and Carmen's Headline Viewer. Historically there wasn't a huge demand for these, since the centralized aggregators do a fine job with the canonical set of available channels. When channels proliferate, and when they inhabit spaces that the centralized aggregators can't see, it becomes clearer why a desktop aggregator is useful.
5:05:39 PM
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Sam's encounter with manufactured serendipity
Sam's encounter with manufactured serendipity
Jon is right that Radio is a lab for group-forming, but one thing he apparently missed is that there is enough data out there for Google to be a part of the equation. [Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog]
Absolutely. The fact that blogs are exposed to public search engines is a key ingredient. I tend to take this for granted, though it bears repeated mention.
The tricky thing, looking forward, is keeping the manufactured serendipity going when you start to cleave off private or semi-private spaces. Years ago Netscape's Collabra handled this nicely. All your private newsgroups were indexed, but search results were appropriately filtered on user credentials. Even so, there were subtleties. When you play the game of information hiding, it's easy to forget what has been hidden from whom, and why. And since information sources are never homogenous, you also have to think about federating different search engines.
It's lovely when we can all share a common, open, and relatively flat infrastructure, as we do here. When we get to a world of overlapping and federated zones of collaboration, with differing policies about access and sharing, there will be hard problems to solve. In solving these kinds of problems, it will become much more obvious what all the SOAP/WSDL/UDDI plumbing was for. There will also be fascinating UI challenges.
2:58:20 PM
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WSDL interop adventures
Given the range of business interests and programming models stirring the pot, I don't know what the outcome will be. But let's get it settled sooner rather than later. What we need is working applications, not cosmic architectures. [from today's BYTE.com column]
As John Robb notes, subscription sharing is one of those shoes that's been waiting to drop. In this column, I explored a more realistic web-services version of the widget now seen on my homepage. Predictably, things weren't seamless. But my point is that they can only become so when people are bootstrapping real apps. In a world of heterogenous community servers, where story flow has to negotiate personal and institutional trust boundaries, a lot of what now seems like academic debate will become very real.
2:41:42 PM
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Oops, broke the News page
Steven Vore pointed out that the previous item breaks the News page. I removed the angle brackets surrounding the word "title" as a workaround. If you've already received the feed containing that item, though, you should probably unsub/resub. And, I guess, avoid using amp-lt-semi until this gets sorted out.
Mark Pilgrim ran into the same thing.
10:54:42 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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