Village shops in BlogSpace

It is my belief that people online, as in daily life, naturally want to form communities and that, where they do not/can not, it is because of a failure of available tools to help them.

Not everyone does want to form a community. A community is nice, when you start and you don't want to (re)discover by yourself all the small things that make the blogging life better, faster, stronger (blogtools, RSS, news aggregators, permalinks, archives, referers, backlinks, valid markup, pinging weblogs...) After a while, being out of a community is good, the same way the small bird is being kicked out of the nest: now do your own thing.

[Jemisa]

» Another viewpoint to my own.  I'm not quite sure I fully understand the point being made here, however...

I hadn't thought about it too much but I admit the possibility that there are people who don't want to form communities.  However I don't think the bird metaphor works -- birds leaving the nest don't usually go on to live a solitary life they are going on to build a new community.  Even more than this though, I believe that humans have an innate instinct for language.  Something that is profoundly useless unless one wants to communicate with others.

Unless you are just shouting at random strangers then you are looking for some kind of community with whom you want to communicate.

I'd like to discuss this further.

 

"The perfect network is perfectly plain, and perfectly extensible.  That means it is also the perfect capital repellant, [which] implies a guaranteed loss to network operators, but a boon to the services on the 'ends'."
- Roxane Googin's High Tech Observer as  cited in The Paradox of the Best Network

Take a moment to scan The Paradox of the Best Network. We've cited the piece before. The quote, which prompted the Paradox piece in the first place, suggests that the best network is the one that produces the best results for its users (the ends). The Paradox article and the quote are referring to telecom and internet networks. We wonder if it's true and if it has relevance for human networks.

[5th Constituency]

» It is a good piece to be sure.  To help you decide whether to follow the link and read it here is a 10% summary by Copernic Summarizer

• Just a few short months ago, it seemed that humanity stood on the edge of a communications revolution.
• New technology promised to topple barriers of space and time.
• Prospects of new connectedness recede as capital markets tighten, existing telephone companies back off on capital expenditures, established communications equipment suppliers falter, and ambitious new telecom companies fail.
• Despite the darkened outlook, new communications capabilities are within reach that will make the current Internet look like tin cans and string.
• Radically simplified technologies can blast bits a million times faster than the current network at a millionth of the cost.
• It's not even that the communications revolution has been derailed by inept or self-aggrandizing behavior by incumbent telephone companies and their government regulators.
• It provokes incumbent companies to mass lawyers and lobbyists to thwart the development of a competitive communications market.
• Communications networks have a more important job than generating return on investment --- their value comes from their connectivity and from the services they enable.
• Therefore, the best network delivers bits in the largest volumes at the fastest speeds.
• In addition, the best network is the most open to new communications services; it closes off the fewest futures and elicits the most innovation.
• As software engineers say, "Today's optimization is tomorrow's bottleneck."
• Thus, the best network is a "stupid" network that does nothing but move bits.2 Only then is the network truly open to any and all services that want to use it, no matter how innovative or how unexpected.
• They know that implementing the new commodity network threatens the very basis of their business.
• As a result of this simplicity, the Internet has proven to be the most scalable, most robust communications infrastructure humans have ever built.
• It will boost the economy, open global markets, and make us better informed citizens, customers and business people.

 

I'd like to point out that while I haven't invented anything quite so fabulous as war-chalking, I did come up with the blogger gang-sign. Hold out your left hand, palm up, then grab your left forearm and make a moue of pain as you massage away invisible RSI cramps -- dude, you're throwing signs! Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)
[Boing Boing Blog]

» Fantastic idea.   I've got my copy in my wallet now.

Does anyone know of an Wi-Fi network sniffer that runs on Win32 & supports the Prism/2 chipset?  (Netgear MA401)?

 

No Audience is Interested in Everything You Produce

XML gives Weblogs the capacity to be organized into categories. It's good news and bad. When authoring an article (or one of those littler bloglets), the author is confonted immediately with a series of usability questions like:

• If I put this piece in several categories, does that reduce the meaning of each category?
• If the piece is on the home page and in a category, why would anyone ever go to both?
• If the piece is only in a category and not on the home page, how does anyone know?
• If the piece is only on the home page, what are categories for?

[5th Constituency]

» Another interesting piece.  I heartilty concur.

My own take on categories is that they are difficult to use.  I currently define six categories including the Home Page.  They are:

• home page
• learning
• community
• personal
• technology
• tuning

My guess is that only "home page" and "tuning" are separably useful.  I do put items in the other categories but I suspect no-one would ever subscribe to them rather than the "home page."  (Assuming you wanted to subscribe at all!)

This was really my reason for developing the liveTopics tool.   My problem with categories is that they are not granular enough.  "tuning" works as a category because I only use that for discussing Radio development work which is, for the most part, orthoganol to what I'm talking about normally.

Using liveTopics I can associate a number of individual topic references to each post (as I have done with this one).  This can be used to determine what I'm talking about and by using the topic table of contents what else I've said about a particular topic.  Where this will really score though, to my mind, is when you and I can filter each others RSS feed based on the topics we reference.

Categories are dead!  Long live topics!

 

Embedded in most current blogging software is an odd notion. Because the systems are self-referential and the overall audience is in its early growth stages, there is an interesting assumption that one "blogs" for oneself or other bloggers. Conventions, like blogrolling (a cross linking scheme that builds traffic within the blogging community), have a nearly religious fervor associated with them.

Community building, as we've mentioned in other Blog Notes creates the essential social infrastructure on which the long term success of blogging rests. As the community voraciously consumes the product of other community members, a momentum develops. It's good for groundwork and subject to replacement at the beginning of the second phase of growth in the phenomenon.

[5th Constituency]

» I discovered 5th constituency yesterday via Ron Lusks weblog.  I'm working back through the stuff there, the blog notes are especially interesting.

I am not sure that I'm down with "making blogging a success" as an end in an of itself.  Although I haven't thought about it very hard I guess I see blogging as a part of a wider bootstraping process for online communities as a whole.   I guess this may be the second phase that is referred to here.

 

Windows Longhorn slips again, becomes megaproject. Gates holds forth on Microsoft's next Big One [The Register]

» I especially enjoyed the section:

Gates's list of what's planned for Longhorn is largely user's eye view, classic eye-candy of the sort that gets bolted on to the company's interim releases, but given that we're currently talking about a major overhaul, these ought to be more integral to the finished product than has often been the case in the past. Gates alludes to the database angle by asking of current operating systems: "Why are my document files stored one way, my contacts another way, and my e-mail and instant-messaging buddy list still another, and why aren't they related to my calendar or to one another and easy to search en masse?"

Sounds just like Radio.  I think UserLand should sue!

 

Roll Your Own IM-bot

"WiredBots: simple toolkits for making AIM and MSN Messenger IM bots." [Boing Boing]

This is too damn cool! If I was only a programmer, I would play around with it and create a library bot that patrons could query for bestseller lists, library hours, and eventually OPAC & database queries. Anybody else want to try until that day when pigs fly?

Alternatively, maybe Andy B. could provide some assistance on this one....

[The Shifted Librarian]

» This sounds like a neat idea.  Combined with something like AliceBot to provide dialogue/response I think it could be a very powerful tool packaged in a way lots of people will already find easy to access.

 

From StratFor strategic forecasting:

"It is difficult to see the strategy behind Palestinian tactics. Suicide bombing has clearly become a mainstream Palestinian tactic, one that makes the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip unlikely to the point of impossibility. It not only locks Israel into a war-fighting mode but also eases diplomatic pressure on Israel to make a settlement. The Palestinians know this. So why have the Palestinians adopted this tactic?

The answer lies in what must be a fundamental strategic shift on the part of the Palestinians. They no longer see the creation of a rump Palestinian state as a feasible or desirable end. Rather, despite the hardship of an extremely extended struggle, they have moved toward a strategy whose only goal must be the destruction of Israel. Since that is hardly likely to happen any time soon, the Palestinians must see forces at work in the Islamic world that make this goal conceivable and not just a fantasy."

» I found this a disturbing peice and, if it's analysis is to be believed, it redefines how I think about the struggle in the middle east.  It's all a lot more complicated than I wanted to believe.

 

Once again I'm neglecting all other interests in the rush to make liveTopics a workable tool for Radio listeners.  I'm learning what a struggle it is to debug problems on an unfamiliar OS over a 4,000 mile and 5 hours gap.  Maybe I should just write better code, it'll be easier in the long run!

The good news is that two people now seem able to use liveTopics and hopefully by the end of play tomorrow there will be four.  If we don't find any more serious bugs then I am on schedule to release version 1.0 at the end of the week.