HeadCloud
is a Napster-style service, where people connect to a central hub, send a list of the thoughts they want to share, and search the database
of other people's thoughts to see who they want to connect to. It's called
HeadCloud after the original vision - being able to walk down the street and see
little clouds above people's heads that showed what they were
thinking.
I
haven't gotten around to using it, as I have yet to embrace Instant
Messaging. (Gosh I feel old.) I could see it being useful for a
tribe-sized cluster of users who already know one another, though. For
instance, it lets you think out loud about a movie that just came out
and that you're
curious about; if someone else happens to also care (e.g. has seen
it/is
thinking about seeing it), the two of you can connect easily using the
title as a bridge. Hey, this might come in handy for Skypers (paging Stuart...)
The Perseus sampling [via Dave Winer]
suggests upwards of 1.4 million weblogs are active, and at least 2.7
million have been abandoned (i.e. not updated in the last 2 months). Phil summarizes.
Update: it doesn't get updated as quickly as the world as a blog, which limits the interest a bit; I take it back. It won't catch fire now, but it's got potential.
end of an era here folks. Open blog comments: 1997-2003.
He and dragoon are thinking about schemes to counter comment spambots
(these automated scripts that scatter droppings everywhere and anywhere
in weblog comment sections). The challenge here is to build a
validation system that is painless to use but hard to game. Gary's
proposal might break spambots but will do little to get in the way of human spammers who smell PageRank from afar.
One thing that's relatively hard - though not impossible - to game is one's Technorati inbound link count, which serves as a reputation system of sorts for weblogs. My earlier suggestion of using Technorati data to rank or selectively cull comments might be appropriate to bring up again as the barbarians are quickly closing in...
Of course this would have to go hand-in-hand with the previous comment logging (comlogging?) suggestion, as forging signatures is trivial in current systems.
I work at Cognition
and Brain Sciences Unit, in Cambridge, UK, a Medical
Research Council unit that includes a large group investigating how the
brain processes language. If there's a new piece of research on reading that's
been conducted in Cambridge, I thought I should have heard of it before...
I've written this page, to try to explain the science behind this meme. There
are elements of truth in this, but also some things which scientists studying
the psychology of language (psycholinguists) know to be incorrect.
I notice Michael has given up on the heroic endeavor of logging every comment he posted on other sites.
But as I wrote earlier, this is something that should really be
automated. I see four advantages to having a local log of the comments
you posted on remote sites:
It authentifies the origin your comments;
It provides wider exposure, both to your writing and to the sites you're commenting on;
It makes more of your content accessible from your site;
It makes it easier for you to follow ongoing discussions you're
participating in, or to revisit past discussions that are scattered God
knows where.
Next question is, can we hack this together out of commonly available
parts? Here's one rough idea that might work with systems that support
TrackBack.
I post a comment on a remote site, leaving my weblog's URL.
The remote site immediately TrackBack-pings that URL with the permalink to the comment I just made.
My blog receives the ping and stacks the permalink on top of my comments blog, which is displayed in a sidebar.
