Sunday, February 09, 2003

OPML Directories. Marc Barrot, reviving outliners again! [Brain Off] 1:27:39 PM    comment []

A collection of links and thoughts, somewhat comprising an essay on visions of my future works. Recombinant growth refers to reassembling existing technologies into something novel, innovative, and ultimately greater than the sum of its parts. Recombinant growth needs to be activated at the user level. Tools and Services flexible and powerful enough to reassemble into new applications, without deep technical knowledge. Aggregation tools attach, understand, and use SOAP, xml-rpc, REST, HTML, ODBC, as well as accessing users own library of writings and multimedia. Publishing tools stitch these together into apps (using the eventually standard for web service coordation, or maybe this X#?), for personal use (traditional personalization like My Yahoo) and distribution, a domain currently limited to techies. Recombinant growth sounds like engineered Emergence. Spring Does this promise any of the above? I'm looking forward to testing it out. It seems to show Services wrapped in constraints, to guide the Tool to permit certain combinations of actions. Connections are made visually and through menus, at the user level. I agree that HyperCard was way ahead ahead of its time, and still is in many aspects. No environment has put the power of programming into so many otherwise unprepared hands. I know little of Hypercard, would like to know more. From this description, the vision could be summed as "Hypercard for the Web". Put the power of the web into unprepared hands. How does hypercard do it? Can its model be updating for online, distributed apps? That's a mini google zeitgeist timeline. Timeline is one of a fewgreat viewpoints on data. Tools should enable users to build their own zeitgeist timeline, by attaching references to dynamic web services and their own diaries. Or, how bout attaching a discussion, from egroups to weblogs to newspapers, stretched properly along a timeline, with referred with resources attached. Shift effortlessly to another viewpoint. Pieces of the timeline are made world writable, for others to build apon. From XML-RPC to SOAP: A Migration Guide Well the Web Services stack grows and solidifies, hopefully in the next couple years. What about legacy? With a demonstration of shoehorning xml-rpc into soap, it's conceivable to build soap wrappers for other legacy protocols, like screen scraping, to fully utilise coordination protocols. Well some conception is taking shape at least! [Brain Off] 1:26:50 PM    comment []

Sociology of the Mobile Phone. The most general function of cell phones is to lessen the degree to which social relationships and social systems are anchored in space, and they increase the degree to which they are anchored in particular persons. From the point of view of individual users, the cell phone provides opportunities: to enlarge the number of potential communication partners available at any specific place and moment to distance oneself from current collocal interaction fields by directing attention to remote partners to expand the peripheral layers of social relationships by cultivating weak ties to partners one is not ready to meet to shield oneself from new and unpredictable contacts by signaling unavailability and by maintaining more frequent interaction with familiar partners (e.g. friends and kin) to maintain contact with any other individuals (or organizations) irrespective of movement and changing spatial locations to combine divergent roles which would otherwise necessitate one's presence at different places at the same time to switch rapidly between highly different (and usually segregated) roles and situational contexts, so that there is more discretion as to how they should be separated or combined to take over “boundary roles” in any social system: e.g. in order to get information about the external environment or to participate in processes of external interaction and adaptation to fill empty waiting periods with vicarious remote interactions to reduce the reliance on one’s own inner judgment by asking others for advice to occupy highly diffuse roles which demand involvement at any hour of the day (e.g. care-giving functions etc.); or “standby” roles which demand permanent readiness (e.g. in emergencies) to live more "spontaneously": without strictly scheduled agendas, because meeting hours can easily be rearranged. From the point of view of social systems the cell phone will: decrease the positive impact of spatial proximity on social interaction and integration increase the functional viability of very small groups and single individuals, because they have increased opportunities to mobilize additional resources from outside actors, or to include additional remote members on an ad hoc basis when needed ease the penetration of bilateral interpersonal microsystems into multilateral groupings, formalized social collectivities as well as public spheres. increase the capacity of organizations to fully integrate spatially remote and moving subunits and to relate to customers whose location is changing and not known increase the functional capacity of collectivities and organizations on the move: e.g. military or police units, ambulances, refugee groups etc. privilege collectivities constituted on the basis of particular members rather than particular places or territories (e.g. families and ethnic groupings rather than cities, parishes or schools) encourage emphasis on highly segregated bilateral relationships - while larger multilateral allegiances are losing ground facilitate swiftly constituted, ad hoc gatherings with highly variable composition, so that social system structures can be flexibly adapted to rapidly changing situational conditions facilitate the shift from rigidly programmed bureaucratic organizations to "adhocracies" where timetables and cooperation patterns are constantly reshaped lessen the need for central “communication hubs” within groups and organizations because each member can directly receive (and send out) his/her own calls minimize the “spill over” of communications to unintended third parties because messages can be precisely targeted to intended individual receivers increase intersystemic permeabilities, blendings and interpenetrations, while lowering the capacities to keep such contacts under centralized and regularized control. [Smart Mobs] 1:10:48 PM    comment []

myway Boy this looks familiar! It looks good. How did they get all the content, set up the personalization, out of no where? Nice feature on myway :: import your yahoo bookmarks :) Glad I got that y! bookmarks export feature pushed out And now I understand... iWon.com picked up all excite's assets for just $10 million (down from 7.8 billion) iWon is myway. My Excite was the major competitor to My Yahoo, back in the day. It was a personalization arms race. The sunrise/sunset/tides/moonrise modules were my favorite envy. But there are just so many small ui things on myway, borrowed from my yahoo, that we sweated over to create. Well that's the way it goes. The no-ads idea should go far. I've moved on from Yahoo, so no matter. It's up to Yahoo to start the arms race again with some technical dazzling [Brain Off] 1:02:00 PM    comment []