Rude words. Improve your profanity with the aid of the guides and dictionaries in this Guardian compendium. As item 10 notes, the term zuffle is too crude to be described up front (and possibly NSFW, if your boss is looking over your shoulder), but it's a fascinating concept nonetheless. [MetaFilter] 
11:53:42 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Semantic Studios: International Information Architecture. The ways we categorize are rooted in language and culture. This creates unique challenges for information architects. For example, a web site targeted for a Japanese audience may require a completely different structure and organization than its German equivalent. Localization isn't limited to translation. [Tomalak's Realm] 
11:49:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Freenet 0.5.2 Released. FurbyXL writes "With the RIAA roaring to grab peer-to-peer users by their IP addresses, Freenet - fully anonymized production and consumption of content - is ... [Slashdot] 
11:44:05 PM      comment []   trackback []  



A Wordplay Blog. Here's a group blog with a twist.

Form a sentence from the acronym of the last word found on the latest post. Quirky, funny, nasty, silly, serious, whatever your post may be, the words are yours. Every correct entry gives you 1 point

(via Side Salad) Permalink Created Wed, 16 Jul 2003 [The J-Walk Blog] 
11:12:22 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Bulwer-Lytton contest results. The annual Bulwer-Lytton contest recognizes and awards the very worst opening sentences found in novels. The 2003 results are in (2002 results, 2001 results) and the winning entry begins "They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese..." [via girlhacker] [MetaFilter] 
7:33:52 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Information foraging and weblogs as snack-bars.

Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster by Jakob Nielsen

A bit of definition:

Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.

[Read the middle yourself] and then:

The patch-leaving model thus predicts that visits will become ever shorter. Google and always-on connections have changed the most fruitful design strategy to one with three components:

• Support short visits; be a snack
• Encourage users to return; use mechanisms such as newsletters as a reminder
• Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways of increasing frequent visits by addressing users' immediate needs

Next to the fact that it's a useful theory for my work, it also calls for some parallels with blogging:

• Weblogs are rather snack-bars then restaurants: you can come often, find something to eat and leave fast. They are even better: snacks are changing (there is always something new), but the cook is the same, so you can easily get a feeling of cooking style and quality.
• Weblogs use RSS feeds to notify you when something tasty is served (and you can even try it without going there).
• Google loves blogs and brings readers directly to snack they want.

From this perspective the only problem with blog-snack-bar is that once you are there you can hardly find anything beyond the front raw of snacks :)

I also wonder when Jakob Nielsen will write a bit more about weblogs (because there are only 4 pages with this word now and because his Alertbox was a role-model for me when I started my weblog).

[Mathemagenic] 
7:28:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Roundup list of websites that shorten urls for you. Spotted on Jason DeFillippo's (there! I spelled it correctly!) blog, via Feedster: a list of websites that shorten web urls. Includes a tool-by-tool feature set chart so you can compare how the url-shorteners stack up.

Link, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
7:25:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Cultural Assumptions in the Wiki World. The grandfather of all wikis on the terms of intercultural conversation. [Blogalization Community] 
7:24:13 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Publishing, permanence, and transparency.

A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another.

Under heavy surveillance (which has now ceased), Dave Winer reacted:

Now that people have set up a system to record everything on Scripting that I post within five minute intervals, I don't think I'll be writing any more of that stuff here. I guess it's time for weblogs to become like television. Polished and politically correct. Impersonal. Commercial. [Scripting News]

I understand and sympathize, but I think a bigger story is unfolding around us. Last year, I wrote an item entitled Walking the fault lines about my experiences with SOAP and WSDL. Scripting News picked up on it. (This was the same posting that began my serendipitous association with an Indian programmer named Nishant S. [1, 2].) Later that day, using the Meerkat aggregator, I noticed there were two versions of Dave's commentary, and I wrote: ... [Jon's Radio] 
7:10:57 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Marc of rotten.com running AIDS marathon -- donate!. Mark Powell from rotten really isn't all that rotten:

In June I began training for the Honolulu Marathon with the AIDS Marathon training program. The marathon takes place on December 14, 2003. The training program raises money for HIV services through sponsorships of volunteer runners like myself.

From June until December, I'll be logging nearly 500 miles in this six-month training program put on by the National AIDS Marathon. I train during the week, and have a 'big run' every Saturday at the crack of dawn in Golden Gate Park. This past weekend, I ran 8 miles, the longest I have ever run before in my life. Doing something I am not sure if I can do is a great thrill, almost as compelling as helping to combat the pandemic of HIV on this planet.

In San Francisco, 1 out of every 50 residents lives with HIV/AIDS. 40 million people worldwide are currently living with HIV. One million Americans are infected, and countless other lives are affected by HIV.

I would like to ask your support- I have personally committed to raise at least $3,000 by September 3, 2003. Any contribution you can make would mean a lot to me and to people who benefit from HIV service and prevention programs in the Bay Area. Contributions are tax deductible and can be made through the simple website listed below. By contributing, you will be making a huge difference in the lives of thousands of people you have never met, and you will help me to reach my goal of completing a marathon in the service of our fellow man.

Link to online donation page, or email [marc at rotten dot com] to arrange an offline donation. Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
7:00:31 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Between bloggers and their employers (2).

From notes of the Voxpolitics event on blogs and politics (I have no idea what it was, you can start digging in from here) [via Cindy Lemcke-Hoong], about Stephen Pollard, "first major journalist in the country to be running a weblog":

And he's not writing for free - people respond to his comments and inspire him to write pieces for which he gets paid.

This simple phrase gets the value of blogging for free - it inspires you to come up with other pieces (with more insight/analysis/depth/structure) to get paid for.

For me it would also draw a border for copyrights: I'd like to "own" my blog (to give it away under Creative Commons) even if it is related to my work, while my company owns more elaborate products (e.g. papers) that can be inspired by it (of course when a company pays me to work on these products :).

In fact I don't like to get paid to blog, because I want the freedom of doing it and I want to own the content. I'm also addicted to blogging enough to think that I would not be happy if I couldn't do it. And I have scary phrases in my contract to worry about these issues :(

[Related: What Does European Law Say About Blog Ownership? (thanks to Martin Roell), Between bloggers and their employers, Bloggers Gain Libel Protection, BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?]

[Mathemagenic] 
6:43:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



New campaign finance market mechanics.

The Dean Campaign's BlogForAmerica points this morning (without providing a link) to Carol C. Darr's USA Today editorial, Internet Donors Can Clean Up National Campaign Financing. She nails it:

Campaigns typically raise small donations, if they bother at all, from direct mail lists of their previous contributors, but costs usually consume 50 cents of every dollar raised. This means that average Americans, unless they have previously given a donation to a candidate, are not even solicited. That's one of the reasons more than 99% of Americans don't contribute.

This is what makes Dean's and Kucinich's success in raising money on the Internet so promising. For the first time, a presidential candidate, Dean, has catapulted into the top tier with small donations. The Internet now holds out the possibility that small donors might successfully fuel serious presidential campaigns [~] a sea change in American politics.

The way to minimize the corrosive effect of large contributions is to flood the political system with lots of small contributions. This will happen only if huge numbers of ordinary American citizens make modest contributions.

Small money is the only money that is reliably clean. The Internet is the best way to raise it [~] quickly, easily and cheaply.

According to the Dean Campaign, more than 80,000 people have contributed so far, with more than 62,000 in just the last quarter. The average donation was $88.11. Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi rightfully calls this "the greatest grassroots campaign of the modern era."

The mechanics, however, are radically different from all previous grassroots campaigns. They don't just depend on "The Internet." They depend on software that wasn't designed either to manage a campaign or to raise funds [~] successful as it may be so far at both.

Take the matter of comments.

That last post has 117 comments. Other comment piles below other posts number 40, 76, 101, 21, 71, 136, 156, 152, 98, 132 and so on. These are near-Slashdot numbers.

They are also unmoderated. In fact, there is no way to moderate them (in a Slashdot sense) on a Moveable Type blog. Or on any type of blog, far as I know. Other than by taking them down.

This apparently happened to a post by Richard Bennett to the comment list at a Dean blog entry on Monday. I was later told by email from a friend close to the Dean Campaign that the deletion was a mistake and that the Campaign has a no-censorship policy on the blog. (Also, presumably, over on the Lessig blog, where the largest comment pile currently numbers 183.)

Given that Dean's blog comment piles will only get larger, micro-editing of posts in them is bound to be a diminishing-return prospect in any case.

Clearly this is a learning experience for the Dean People. As Dr. Weinberger said yesterday,

It'd be easy to read the bluster and invective as a failure of the system. Nah. It is the system. Welcome to the Internet, Governor Dean! You're making history not just with the Lessig guest blogging but with the wild conversation it's ignited. And lots of people are going to love you for it.

This should be a learning experience for blogware designers too. Moveable Type (which Dean's and Lessig's blogs both use) is excellent (hence its popularity), but the absence of permalinks for individual comment posts [~] even for whole comments sections [~] is a huge problem that desperately needs to be corrected.

Meanwhile, if the Dean Campaign wants to encourage conversational participation of a moderated and linkable sort, I suggest they set up a Kuro5hin-like site built on Scoop, PHP-Nuke, Slash or the like.

In fact, if issues are going to be discussed (and not just stumped as "messages"), that would be the way to go. And not just for Dean. Any candidate wanting to get ahead of Dean in this Internet Thing would be wise to set up a slashsite of some kind.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
6:33:07 PM      comment []   trackback []  



One billion ends added.

Miles Yao has translated World of Ends to Chinese. Here it is.

Thanks, Miles!

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
6:29:13 PM      comment []   trackback []  



"Publish books for Free" [Daypop Top 40] 
6:23:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs vs. KnowledgeBoard (2).

Erik van Bekkum does a great job with bringing many Knowledge Board discussions into blogosphere. Recent links:

• Culture and communities of Practice
• Miguel Cornejo and the community-building tool overview 
• Coffee talk, a thousand miles away at Shell (btw, great example of coffee-table teleconferencing :)

[See also Blogs vs. KnowledgeBoard discussion]

[Mathemagenic] 
12:42:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Random Numbers Key to Encryption. How two math geeks with a lava lamp and a webcam are about to unleash chaos on the Internet. Tom McNichol from Wired magazine reports. [Wired News] 
12:40:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Steve Gillmor: "Nothing sways me from the notion that RSS is a transcendent technology." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
4:06:02 AM      comment []   trackback []  



All The Rave. livegoats writes "No self-respecting culture maven can deny their love affair with Napster. If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 ... [Slashdot] 
3:49:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Portuguese Parliament to government officials: start blogging. BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc from Paris says:

Xeni, I don't know if you've already heard about this, but a new law was just unanimously passed in Portugal by deputies (Projecto Deliberacao number 10/IX) which provides all deputies the option of having their own website or blog (the word weblog is mentioned in the law!). The deputies' blogs will be hosted on the Portuguese Parliament's webserver. The original piece of news, blogged in Portuguese, is here, from July 07, and and I wrote about it here in French.

I don't read Portuguese *or* French all that well, and I couldn't locate the law on the Portuguese government's website -- but if any readers have access to English language versions of the news, or care to provide a translation, please post in the Discuss forum! Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
3:42:00 AM      comment []   trackback []  



SCOTUS P2P. Oyez is a file-sharing network for distributing audio recording of argument and response before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
3:34:53 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Roll-Your-Own Net TV Takes Off. You don't have to be one of Hollywood's chosen few to be a TV star. The Internet is becoming a platform for individual and community television programming, and many commercial stations are making content available on the Web. By Manny Frishberg. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
3:22:37 AM      comment []   trackback []