Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, March 14, 2003

Update to Weblogs on the borderline of control and chaos -- Comment()
I edited and updated (to version 0.21) the story Weblogs on the borderline of control and chaos by clarifying the text flow, simplifying explanations, and adding material about control, chaos, islands, and weblog search tools. Have a look and comment! Thanks for the feedback, it has helped to focus on the key issues (I hope...).

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Office 2003 and XML: "Office 2003 beta's handling of the XML file format means that firms will not be able to tap the rich collaborative features of Open Office 2003 without resorting to proprietary Microsoft file formats. And to truly unlock its collaborative potential, firms will have to standardize on the Windows XP operating system [...] As for the file formats, he called Office 2003's XML "crippled," because it strips XML files of all presentation and formatting information when saving them in the XML file format. It does not do this when saving files in Microsoft's proprietary file formats." [Google Technology News]

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Physicists Solve Spherical Puzzle: "[...] how does nature organize electrons, cells or other particles onto the surface of a sphere? Now a study published today in the journal Science provides experimental evidence that particles organize into a crystalline network punctuated by predictable patterns of cracks and defects. And because many things in nature are spherical in shape, the potential applications of the findings are far reaching: from viral microbiology and chemical engineering to geology." [Scientific American > t e c h n o c u l t u r e]

The RSS Search Engine Formerly Known as Roogle -- Comment()
I Give you Feedster: "The site is up and working. Feel free to stop on by. [...] Search results are now subscribable via RSS. Lets say you want see daily results for a search on 'feedster' then just search for that on Feedster and then subscribe to the RSS icon at the bottom of the page. " [The FuzzyBlog! > Ralph Poole's Weblog]

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Erica Jong: "Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

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Organizing with NoteTaker: "My bias toward software increasingly goes like this: If it's not blatantly obvious in its user interaction, forget it. Occasionally, however, I run into something that appears sufficiently powerful to be worth the extra effort. [...] One such product may well be NoteTaker from Aquaminds, a small Silicon Valley software startup that reminds me of the days when the joy of innovation was so strong here. It runs on Mac OS X only, a rarity in these times. [...] The idea is that you take everything -- text, pictures, Web pages, audio files, PDFs, whatever -- and pour it all into a database, where you organize outlines and archive everything. NoteTaker automatically indexes the text as you enter it; that will come in handy later on. I especially like the Web clipping system, which uses OS X Services in a smart way." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

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Lessig Blog writes about Forbes on the Eldred Act: a "Patently Good Idea": "So I received a copy of the March 31 issue of Forbes [...] On page 27-28, Steve Forbes endorses the proposal of the Eldred Act. More good news about progress on that front soon, but I am proud to count Mr. Forbes as someone who gets it. Now if we could only find an equivalently prominent Democrat."

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Towards Structured Blogging: "Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily. [...] Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this. [...] What we're talking about is getting people to put more metadata on their content. Now allowing it is one thing, and fostering it is another. And I'd say the latter is the bigger challenge. Here are some ideas." [Seb's Open Research]