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Monday, August 12, 2002 |
Monday's Topics: e-Accessibility; Computer Architecture; e-Tools; Great Links; Personal To Dos; Radio Education; Science Fiction Speculation; Tidal Wave of News to absorb; UPS.
Thanks to Don Strickland's Radio FAQ for this connection to A Klog Apart's collection of directories of glossaries of weblogging terminology.
9:59:29 PM 
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I just had to see if I could cut and paste a story with an image.
2:20:01 PM
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Thanks to Dave Winer [Scripting News] QUOTE Thanks to genehack for the link to The Time Travel Fund. Well worth a read, if not a deposit. Give them $10 now, and in 500 years, they pay to transport you to the future from your deathbed. Think about it. UNQUOTE [Scripting News]
- No guarantees.
- Time Travel might not be invented.
- Once Time Travel is generally known to have been invented, the government will have to regulate how it is used.
- The religions of the world will not want non-believers going back to the times of their saviors and miracle workers to contaminate anything.
- Evolutionists will not want non-believers going back to rescue the Dinosaurs and undo the evolution of mankind.
- The political systems of the world will not want non-believers going back and undoing the invention of Democracy, and other forms of government.
- The list of reasons to hire a lawyer to sue the inventor of Time Travel are endless.
- The temptation to keep it secret and use the money for other purposes seems overwhelming.
2:07:18 PM
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I have recently rediscovered some stuff we can do with Radio News Aggregation (subscribing to other web sites whose traffic particularly interests us). Oh yes, I had read the documentation and struggled to understand what it all means. But sometimes the DOING is educational.
Thanks to Dave Winer [Scripting News] link to Ray Ozzie on why weblogs are good for discourse. Yes. Flames don't attract. New ideas do. Weblogs can have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Powerful statements are possible in this medium, where powerlessness rules in discussion fora. In this medium everyone can have the last word. UNQUOTE [Scripting News]
I agree with Ray that architecture can be critical. We see in the Computer Security debate that people are trying the impossible. We have software out there that did not have security considered in the original design, so it is like putting a padlock on a tent, or a house of cards, to make the results secure after the fact, when it is discovered that security should have been there all along.
The power of a network are the number of people connected to it. The value of a fax machine is the fact that millions of other businesses are networked to that technology. With many architectures we have unwanted participants: flames; spam; intruders; other dysfunctional human behavior, that we label as noise getting in the way of useful signal content. Ray is absolutely correct that the signal to noise ratio is extremely high with Blogging. Plus, he does a great job of explaining how the architecture of Blogging makes that a reality.
One downside of this is the risk that Blogging will eat excessive amounts of our time that could be more constructively expended. Just as earlier generations of technological enthusiasts became TV couch potatoes, or in my case I used to spend hours every day dealing with e-mail, because there were hundreds of interesting posts I wanted to read, but I had to wade through a high ratio of spam and virus forwardings to get at the good stuff.
By moving from AOL to Eudora, my e-mail is automatically categorized into that which I can look at any old time, and the more urgent categories. I can always go to the directory of mailboxes and highlighted are which boxes contain e-mail not yet opened.
News Aggregation of Web Site subscriptions has something similar. It comes in, but I do not need to look at it right away, and even if archives from weeks ago get lost, there is a continual stream of new fascinating material for my perusal.
Personal 2 do list ... the last time I backed up my Radio was beginning of July, and since then I have increased my Web Subscriptions to 15, and made some alterations to my Template, let alone the posts here. My desk top dynamics also have changed. My Screen Saver's unused CPU seconds are now working on finding a cure for cancer http://members.ud.com/about/
1:03:49 PM
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Thanks to Patrick with http://www.sysmod.com for forwarding to me some random links to help accessibility for the blind and visually impaired users.
The Royal National Institute for the Blind video
on how to produce accessible web sites and why they
are important for blind and visually impaired Internet users.
The video is free, can be ordered from Julie Howell, telephone: 0044 171 391 2191
you might try the RNIB accessible web design pages on for a quick overview of the issues:
In addition to their own publications the RNIB recommends use of WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
For a technical view of what the US government is demanding look at: Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities
Sun runs a site for Java developers that looks at accessiblity issues
12:29:55 PM
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Sometimes when I share links, I also tell the place that I am linking to that I am doing it. This is both common courtesy and an opportunity to be corrected on any misconceptions before they are more widely shared. In one of my notifications I said that I had not yet learned how to do the little Icons that show that some name is trademarked etc. My respondent tried to guide me to how to do it in HTML, but I am using WYSIWYG to edit this site, and not yet hardly delved into the underlying software that makes it all work. I want to figure out what is doable by ordinary non-technical home computer users, so we can help spread the joy of this to a larger audience.
So here Patrick is the results of me cutting and pasting your suggestions into my web site.
Symbol font: Ô
HTML: ™
Graphic:
It is apparent that your Graphic did not translate. Now that might not be a problem with Radio. It might be because I have not yet explored the Image capabilities of this software, and some aspects of what it can do might still be turned off for me.
12:26:23 PM
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QUOTING from National Journal and Jenny Levine
Creatures From the Web Lagoon: The Blogs
"MSNBC.com, consistently ranked among the top news destinations on the Web, is about to invest a chunk of important virtual real estate into the blog concept. MSNBC.com has killed its discussion boards, with their 18 million posts per month, and instead plans to establish by the end of August what it will call "Weblog Central," a portal of regularly updated lists of blogs from throughout the Web, arranged by subject. It will include links to MSNBC.com's own blogs as well." [National Journal]
Wow - portal of regularly updated blogs arranged by subject. I sure hope they brought in some librarians and information architects to help build it. [The Shifted Librarian]
Unquote
While many bloggers and other e-friends seem to swear by Google, I like Tecoma's search engine with drill down assistance. But of course there is already Eaton Web search engine for weblog topics. The vast number of people here whose blogs have not been indexed shows that we all could stand to learn how to adjust our sites so the search engines connect with good perceptions of what we are about.
3:23:33 AM
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Jenny Levine had a PC outage (I am catching up with some sites I have not looked at in over a week, then when I went back again looks like she deleted the details so it must have been fixed), which I can identify with. The Battery on the UPS at work went bad, after having run perfectly since we bought it May 1996, and by some fluke the error messages did not volunteer that the problem was due to the UPS battery being dead. My home PC in a work area long overdue for tidying, had the UPS hidden behind piles of containers of papers, so I was not seeing the warning lights when it was dying. My new UPS is like the one at work, there is a software side to it. The icon on my PC for my UPS right now is green, and it should let me know when and if it has problem. I do not yet have the guts to try the test we did at work, of pulling the plug between the UPS and the wall, to verify that the UPS is working properly to support the computer in an outage.
By the acronym UPS, in this context, I do not mean United Parcel Service, but Universal Power Supply, which is a gadget between our computer and the public utility electrical supply. Think of it like a surge protector on steroids. While a surge protector is good for spikes in the power supply, the UPS is great for the brownouts. Don't expect it to protect you if your house is hit by lightning. The price on this is coming way down. I paid less than $200.00 for my latest. I can remember when they cost thousands of dollars.
2:59:43 AM
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It is too easy for me to get carried away by an infinity of topics that are interesting to me.
I need to periodically review the guide to sane blogging.
- "Is this important?"
- In the eyes of the beholder.
- "Why Is This Important?"
- I guess when I get fully going on Categories I should have an ABOUT statement.
- "Who Cares?"
- "What Does It Mean?"
- "Is it worth explaining?"
2:49:29 AM
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Thanks to Amy Wohl for link to Information Week Blogging story of the impact on business, that starts off a bit thumbs down on understanding its appeal, then talks about different kinds of Blogs. I might have seen another link to this earlier and forgot where. I don't think this article is anything like as good as Steve Outing's Taxonomy of Blogging. But then I am more interested in what can be done, and how to do it. Other readers might be closer to wanting an introduction to the subject.
Compendium of Weblog Tools, Education, Definitions, and other good stuff.
2:27:17 AM
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Radio will not let me subscribe to http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ by a Professor of Computer Science, so this goes into my collection of Blogs worth visiting by more direct links. I found out about this great site at Boing Boing, which Radio did let me subscribe to, even though neither of these sites has the Radio coffee cup. I don't care why some things work sometimes and not others, just that I figure out how to navigate.
1:27:43 AM
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Radio is not letting me go back a month to add Today's Topics on top of past posts. I was trying to identify Categories that I might later use for better Knowledge Management. Perhaps I need to adjust some Preferenence settings.
1:11:30 AM
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I learned something else about Radio. The way to delete a post is not to blank it out. Rather do the click box and scroll to the Delete button. Can't post to weblog because the text of the post is empty.
1:01:08 AM
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Well I just learned something else that we can do with Radio. Clicking on the Coffee Cup Icon gets the neccessary links so that one Radio site can subscribe to another Radio site, and read the interesting stuff that it broadcasts, then clicking on Post at side of what we see let's us share selected info with other people. I guess Adam Brand was the first to share these Instructions, then I got them from my Bag o'Knowledge subscription. Using a spell checker here has been on my to-do list.
Cool Internet-Explorer Spell Checker. This tool is free and lets you spell-check any text entered in text boxes in Internet Explorer (i.e., the Post box in Radio and Manila). [Adam Brand: Radio Instructions] [Bag o' Knowledge Klog]
12:19:03 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.
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Estonia has amazing national WiFi coverage and they don't need warchalkers -- the gubbmint puts up these nifty signs to tell you where you can hop online.