Monday, March 18, 2002

Rewriting history Now I'm faced with a dilemma; do I go back and edit my previous entries to reflect what I've learned about formatting and titling? That would make them easier to read. But it would also erase the "historical record"; some of the entries address the formatting problems I react to in later entries. I guess I'll leave them as-is. Mostly because I'm lazy. 5:30:34 PM

Titles considered helpful Yikes, I just scanned this page as it appears in the blog itself (as opposed to this slightly different desktop page). My interface shows much better discrimination between individual posts; the blog interface runs everything together into one long gray column. Titles are clearly called for, as well as (maybe) some changes to the template applied to each post. And my categories don't seem to have any effect on my blog itself; can they just be for outgoing syndication? I want to offer category views on the blog home page. There must be a way... I wonder if this is a problem with the template I chose? Boy, Blogger is sure easier to set up, and the templates are easier to manipulate. (I know, I know, Radio has ten times the features. But I find I prefer simple interfaces. Heck, I even prefer vi to emacs.) 5:27:13 PM

That wasn't too bad; I managed to post from a newsfeed, and enter my own reply. Apparently I'll need to apply some formatting manually, though; the default doesn't distinguish a quote from commentary. 5:09:32 PM

From WriteTheWeb comes this question: What is a k-log?. Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging ("knowledge-logging"). But will it catch on - will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps? [WriteTheWeb] I think the answer is no -- Lotus Notes and its ilk are still going to be used, but they'll gather different kinds of information. K-logs will have to learn how to fit into the info-environment of large organizations. 5:08:04 PM

Aha -- I found the "top 100" list of channels to subscribe to. But still, where is the canonical list of available channels, if there is such a thing? 4:28:25 PM

Here's a puzzle. How do I "run" the news aggregator manually so it will scan when I want it to scan? And how do I find the URL of a new "channel"? How do I know what I want to subscribe to without being able to see what's available? Hmmm...there must be some way to do these things. 4:18:49 PM

I've set up six categories, but I'd like to use a richer ontology of metadata to talk about what I'm talking about. This will be quite the work in progress; developing an ontology is not necessarily trivial, and I'm interested enough in it that I know I'll be poking around in all the dark little corners I find. The more fun I'm having, the slower I go. As Dorothy Parker said, "Curiousity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiousity." 4:15:46 PM

© Copyright 2002 Peter Harbeson.