b.cognosco

Scary Google. 1. Go to google.com 2. Type in your phone number, in quotation marks 3. When it finds your name and address, click on "Maps" 4. You are here. [ Source: JOHO the Blog]

Thinking more about P2P companies. There's a guy crawling over my house with a power saw. I heard a lot of thumping and banging outside, went to see what was going on and there he was -- with his beat-up pickup truck, scruffy toboggan hat, and a Get Phunky t-shirt. Definitely not your corporate type.

He's a contractor -- here to do a little repair to my window frames and soffet boards before the painter comes out. Last week another guy was here with a power washer. Tomorrow yet another will be here to putty nail holes and prime the new woodwork.

All of these guys have been younger than 30. They're all contractors working for another under-30 guy -- the painter. He's contracted to paint my house from yet another under-30 guy that runs a small HVAC and remodeling service. This looks like a P2P company to me.

It's not the holistic model Seb describes, or even the more capitalistic version about which I wrote.

They're grounded by geography -- not virtual. They work with their hands -- not knowledge work. But they are inarguably a P2P organization -- a structured group of independent operators working together on a project-by-project basis.

Seb asks rhetorically, "... do we really still need companies?" The answer is yes, but they need not necessarily be the monolithic structures of Worldcom or Microsoft or 3M. They can instead be much more agile, much more adaptable -- someone to get the work, someone to organize the work, and someone to do the work, with all parties able to perform any or all of the functions.

I sometimes wonder if we don't become so absorbed in our virtual environments and collaborative technologies we forget that the physical world can still teach us lessons:

Five guys
Hand tools
Each going their own way
Each augmenting the others' efforts
Being a company

Hmm...

Beta: RSS Explorer

3:05:41 PM

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Long DG thread on the nifty new RSS Explorer. Winer has been up late again.

From the RSS Explorer page you can view lists of subscriptions from other Radio users. Each channel or "feed" has a checkbox to the left of its name. If it's checked, you're already subscribed. You can choose to subscribe or unsubscribe by clicking on the Subscribe button to the right. To see a different list, choose a name from the popup menu, below, and click on the View button. [...]

Phil Wolff has already posted a Wish List.

This could be very cool, but I'll let some of the brighter lights sort the beta issues before I dive in.

myRadio Updated for Redirection

2:58:26 PM

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Mikel announces an important update to myRadio to handle the RSS Redirection feature.

myRadio is a nice tool. I still bounce back and forth between it and Mark Paschal's Kit.

Get the myRadio update.

Bootstrap: How To Redirect an RSS Feed

2:52:10 PM

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I'll be moving this weblog in the near future -- to www.terryfrazier.com -- so matters of redirection are important to me.

Dave Winer has been working on making Radio's News Aggregator automagically recognize the redirect command and has posted these instructions to the Userland DG.

Surfing with tightVNC

8:55:58 AM

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Thanks to Brent Ashley, I'm now using an OpenSource alternative to GoToMyPC.com, and finding it to be quite satisfactory.

A few weeks ago Brent sent me e-mail about tightVNC, an OpenSource virtual networking suite, after reading of my ongoing quest for remote access nirvana. GoToMyPC.com is pretty good, but I had been struggling with some connection and support issues that had me once again looking for alternatives.

I finally got around to installing it the other day and have to say it looks pretty good. The install was easy enough for a pseudo-geek like me to get it running in just a few minutes -- the docs are short and most of its functions easily grasped. There are two ways to access it -- using the VNCViewer app or through a web browser.

I'll be trying out the browser access this weekend, but I've already tried the VNCViewer and it seems to work just as well as GoToMyPC. It may be faster given the terrible mouse performance I sometimes got with GTMPC.

Many thanks to Brent for pointing me to this. With free software this good and this easy it will be hard (but not impossible) for companies like GTMPC to justify their ongoing cost -- especially for independent users like me.

Why PDF Sucks

12:43:51 AM

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Dorothea has got her britches frosted over some PDF stuff. She don't like it. Nosiree.

I say PDF isn't really all that good (not much at all, really) for paper/print production, but it's becoming the defacto standard for a number of bad reasons. She says it's no good for eBooks.

Who's right? If we're both right just where does PDF fit? Mostly in places where highly designed items -- or strictly formatted ones like forms -- need to be presented online. It has lots of nifty features for things like that. But it has little to recommend it over other formats in other areas.

Dorothea makes some good points. Go read for yourself.

Why PDF sucks. Kevin pointed me at a recent ebook apologia and asked my opinion. I’ll give it, naturally, but before I do I want to address the apologia’s author’s words on PDF. I wish PDF-for-ebooks would fold up and die, but it won’t. Therefore I need to explain why, except in certain... [ Source: Caveat Lector]

Metaphorical Eyes

12:08:56 AM

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Nifty little eye-puzzler and another KM metaphor.

The illusion of knowledge. This optical illusion is a great way to visualise one of the most common problems facing the sharing of knowledge. That is, depending on where we 'stand' we see different things - even if they are the same.
I've scrutinzed this optical illusion. I verified the hexadecimal values of the colors with Adobe Photoshop. I even cut both squares out of the original image and pasted them next to each other. And still I can't make my brain believe it. Very impressive. I need to read the explanation again...(from curious frog)
And just to be sure, I did it as well. [ Source: thought?horizon :: non inferiora secutus]