Technorati interview
Streaming MP3 interview with David Sifry, creator of Technorati.
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 
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Zen and The Art of Nano Publishing.. Time is an illusion. You and I think we have a year, or a month, or a day in which to accomplish something. Yet, is it not a fact that you never have a day! All you have is a moment, this moment, and this moment. There is nothing more than a moment you have that we call now. The present moment is all you ever have. In a similar vein of thought, we must also see that software is an illusion. Microsoft create nice packages, and print books and print pretty shiny patterns on CD disks and we are told we are purchasing sofware - a thing. Really, software is an illusion. It does not really exist. [Microdoc News] 
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Krishnamurti

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

[Quotes of the Day] 
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What Blog Tools Build Better Google-indexed Blogs?..
Numbers of people have sought my advice on which blogging tool to use. Quite frankly, I did not really know what to tell them. I have been a Radio Userland for more than a year and I had always had good success in getting my Radio Userland site indexed in Google.
[Microdoc News] 
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Organizing Your Digital Detritus:. From John Robb's Weblog, I'm learning a little — enough to scratch my head about whether this is interesting at all — about this new class of apps that promise, as Robb describes it, to "provide a PC-based organizational system for all the digital data a person accumulates during a lifetime... (to) make sense of the gobs of information we are going to store in our 1 Tb computers in 2006..." There's MyLifeBits, for PCs, which is from Microsoft and which Robb suggests will be seriously flawed by being inflexible and monolithic. DevonThink, so far only for OSX, is a "freeform database with a browser interface that organizes your local data by similarity" and looks pretty interesting to him. And then there's Dashboard, about which all the recent buzz is about.

I'll surely investigate this phenomenon further, but for now I'm dubious about their usefulness to me. Maybe I need to get the terabyte hard drive first or progress further along the continuum to benign senescent forgetfulness (in which case a terabyte-range handheld PC will be more useful to me than a desktop, of course). Robb suggests these will be great for webloggers but I suspect he doesn't mean my style of weblogging.

As Robb asks, "what do we call this category of software" anyway? And, other than the amount of their muscle, how is it different from the heavily-indexed freeform databases (like Ask Sam) or the index-based PC explorers (like Lotus Magellan) I've made use of in my remote past? Here are Dashboard's stabs at answers to both of those questions:

The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.

While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your friends on IM, dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way.

We call the dashboard an "association engine."

Part of my hesitancy is about that "friendly way". I'd be relieved if I didn't find it intrusive and annoying, even if my machine's performance didn't take a hit. I sound like the computerist version of a luddite, I realize, but I'm reminded of that old Twilight Zone episode in which the aliens arrive promising all sorts of boons to humanity. At the end, just as the world's leaders are about to place their fate entirely in the hands of the aliens, our hero runs up breathlessly to announce that he has just finished translating the aliens' handbook, To Serve Man. "It's a cookbook!!" he stammers. [Follow Me Here...] 
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Savings
Here's the TLC (Technorati link cosmos) for Saving the Net. Impressive.
[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
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Evan deconstructs a "Google is being spammed by weblogs" example. [John Robb's Weblog] 
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Web Zen: Graffitti Zen. (1) banksy
(2) vandal squad
(3) wooster collective
(4) laussanne
(5) stencil revolution
(6) guerilla parenting
(plus, a bonus link from me to you: my favorite tag, above left).
web zen home, web zen store, Discuss (Thanks, Frank) [Boing Boing Blog] 
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Chris Pirillo... "Gnomedex is gonna be the most blogged conference... ever." [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
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GeoPing [Daypop Top 40] 
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Read On.

I was about to address this post to anyone visiting from today's ABA Journal eReport article on lawyer blogs, then remembered that eReport articles supply no hyperlinks...

No matter, if you went to the extra effort of finding Bag and Baggage through a search engine (or if you followed an inbound link from a Web page that by definition would have somewhat less on the eBall than a bona fide eReport), and are curious to read what people much smarter than I have to say about relationships between the Web, organizations, individuals, and society, then by all means please visit, buy, and/or sign up for:

• World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else
• Cluetrain, the Manifesto
• Cluetrain, the Book
• Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web
• Up2Speed
• Up2Speed's Business Weblogs—The Big List, and the weblogs there referenced
• BloggingWorks
• John Lawlor
• And just to wake you up and blow your mind, the first interview since May '02 with the "gentle person with a piercing vision" and Cluetrain co-author who started me down this rosy path, including the outline for his book-in-process, and more allusions and illusions—literary, psychosocial, philosophical and I'm leaving some out—than you can shake a Dali at.
• [Update] Bad on me for initially omitting Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto too.

[Bag and Baggage] 
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Things They've Learned: Why bother figuring out universal truths for yourself when someone else has already done it for you. Find out how a neurotic comedian, a sausage magnate, a genome decoder, and the world's most famous nuclear power plant safety inspector distill life's truths into twenty or so insightful and humorous statements. [MetaFilter] 
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Scott Rosenberg: "The only thing I could reasonably predict, going into this project, was how thoroughly unpredictable the range of bloggers and blogging would be." [Scripting News] 
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Amazon is offering an RSS interface. Not sure how to find all the feeds. They have an example feed for top-selling DVDs. [Scripting News] 
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Crimson: Harvard to House Blog Standards. [Scripting News] 
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The coming wonderworld - Technorati: Christopher Lydon in introducing his interview with Dave Sifry: "Technorati is for me the simplest clearest sketch we have of the coming wonderworld..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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Stacy Cowley on Blogathon: "This year, 545 participants have enlisted, with US$56,000 pledged so far. At 6 a.m. Pacific time Saturday, they'll embark upon 24 hours of blogging..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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Clare Booth Luce. "Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there." [Quotes of the Day] 
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