Last year on this day: "It's been not-correct for most of my life for Americans to say we love our country. That's a big bug. We're the world's greatest country and we know it. I love the USA. It gave me life, an education, role models and a philosophy. And if you think we're stupid or decadent, just try fucking with us." [Scripting News]

» Is he serious with this?

I agree with Ray.  I don't want pingback, trackback, or refererback.  I get enough feedback with comments, spam free e-mail, and links to IM.  If I wanted to host a discussion group, that is what I would have instead of a weblog.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» Quite frankly I do more than scan my referrer lists "once in a while" as Ray puts it.  I am always scanning them, looking for the breadcrumbs of someone or something interesting that has passed by.  Always on the lookout for that connection that could have value for me or my business.   I get as much spam as anyone, but I'll put up with a future of pingbots right now if it means I make the connections that helps my business to succeed.  Just like I put up with spam to use email today.  I can't afford to pull up the draw bridge.

PingBack may not be good for John, Ray, and others on the path well trodden.  But I think there are lots of people like myself who see things differently.  I want to know when someone is talking about what I am talking about and especially when they are talking about something I've written.

I don't know all the answers to the path I'm on, it's only through shared dialogue and the connections that I am making that I have a hope of moving forward.  I see PingBack as a valuable way of making those extra connections that I need, of closing the loops, and getting the feedback.   If Ray & John don't want to come to that party that's fine, but I hope that, their not turning up, doesn't mean that there isn't a party at all.

To put it another way my blog isn't the government emergency broadcast system, it's The Frasier Crane show.

So go ahead and ping me.

I'm listening.

What is it with Microsoft?  Do they have some special internal version where everything always work?

Every time you get an error in any application is pops up in a dialog box.  What do you do with it?  Well you copy it from the dialog and then paste it into an email, or support form or some such don't you?  Don't you?  That would be the easy thing to do wouldn't it.

So why on earth don't standard dialogs always allow copy of all visible text!!!

Note to self: Read the pingback spec. Form opinion. [Scripting News]

» Okay!  PingBack looks exactly like what I was implementing with an especially clever innovation, using a pointer in the website to indicate which PingBack server the ping should be sent to via XML-RPC.  When I have some time I will modify my code to follow the PingBack spec.

Still need a Frontier server to host it for testing though...

Bush to Arab world: Drop dead. Driven by right-wing ideologues and his own zeal, President Bush has taken Ariel Sharon's side in the Middle East even while plotting a war with Iraq. Foreign policy experts say that's a dangerous combination. [Salon.com]

» Shrub: n. a small bush.  But who knew how small.  (interestingly the German derivation is schrubben meaning "coarse, uneven" How eerily accurate!)

This administration makes plankton look smart.  But you can't blame Bush.  He's just the zealous little sock puppet that his lords & masters have been dreaming of having in the White House since Reagan used to nod off in meetings.

You guys should, however, be fucking ransacking the offices of your news organizations for letting you vote for this idiot.  Oh and all the unelected, unaccountable and plain dodgy stooges he's brought with him.

By contrast my voting for Blair seems almost rational (well the first time does anyway, I'm not sure how you can excuse me the second time around).

Ah, I feel my bile duct draining.  Thank you & goodnight.

IBM turns to social network analysis. A critical resource embedded within organizations is the knowledge that highly skilled workers bring to work on a day-to-day basis. However, aside from human resource policies targeted at the attraction, development and retention of skilled knowledge workers, there has been little effort put into systematic ways of leveraging knowledge that is embedded in people and relationships. Given the extent to which people rely on their own knowledge and the knowledge of their contacts to solve problems, this is a significant shortcoming. Social network analysis allows us to understand how a given network of people create and share knowledge, helping us to move beyond this approach. [Smart Mobs]

An important issue that would arise for me, if I were to work in an enterprise, would be to restrict my sharing to the organization. This would require a degree of corporate loyalty that I just might have some trouble with.

From a personal standpoint, it would be more useful for me to share all my knowledge publicly: it would enable me to build more relationships with outsiders, and establish a reputation that is not limited to my organization. When the time comes to move on, I'd probably be in a better position.

[Seb's Open Research]

» As in most human endeavours I think there's going to have to be a compromise.  I can imagine increasingly relaxed zones of control over blogged information.  Sharing layers if you like:

• My personal private blog (backup brain)
• Team / Project Group / Community blog (private sharing)
• Intranet blog (corporate sharing)
• Public blog (real sharing)

All of which could be done now using Radio category routing.  A simpler interface could be introduced in Radio so that people can specify how wide they want that post shared and Radio selects the right routing category itself.

I'd add that liveTopics (plug, plug) will soon support categories and less soon the idea of a corporate weblog directory.  This will group posts from different weblogs around shared topics.  Add theme support and you can cluster related topics to create a real navigable knowledge structure for each layer.

I haven't forgotten about BlogPlexes either...

[I do seem to have gone italic mad lately though]

Oh man this so rocks!

I'm now have Radio subscribed to a feed coming out of my liveTopics JIRA project.  I get an RSS item for each change that happens, i.e. someone adds a new issue, someone adds a comment, it's all there.  This is *so great* for project visibility.

Unfortunately it does kinda point out the weaknesses in the Radio aggregator interface.  It was probably fine when you only had a dozen or so feeds but I'm up to 58 and some of them are really big.  I need a tabbed interface that lets me organize feeds the way I want.  I need keyword prioritzation, I need the ability to delete all items from a specific feed at once.  I'd like them outlined to save screen real-estate.  [Actually John Robb's just pointed out that I can delete all the items at once, using the magnifying glass icon - must check that out]

Damnit I want aggregator Mark 2.