Monday, June 30, 2003

The Emerging Network Era. No question about it. The Network Era is emerging. I call it the xWeb Era but its the same thing. And blogging is an amazing example of it. For example, I go to Jon Udel's blog for some reason I forget now, and run across the whole RSS vs. Echo debate. So I then go to John's RSS section and run across a reference to Ray Ozzie's piece on Tyranny, Terror, and Technology. Lo and behold, who does Ray refer to on my favorite subject-modularity? My favoerite economist Richard Langlois and his piece on Modularity in Technology and Organizations! Blogging and Google both manifest this stream of consciousness style connectedness among concepts. This is truly the utility of the emerging Semantic Web. But how do you demonstrate such an hard to describe concept? 9:59:06 AM

Brett Simmons at inessential.com observes that weblogs are ten years old. Two commentators point out even older examples, including the first web site: info.cern.ch. This led me to the follow observations. Blogs are just a continuation of an Online/Internet tradition that can be traced back to bulletin board systems (BBSs) and newsgroups.   If one wishes to draw distinctions, I would distinguish the beginning of blogging with the first "popular" blog-specific software tool. Any claims as to which tool that is?   IMO the essence of blogging is in one's approach to creating blog content, not whether the content is chronologically ordered. Otherwise, any website with a list of chronological events qualifies as a blog.   What distinguishes blogging from web site development generally is its emphasis on generating periodic (daily) observational/commentary content with minimial technical knowledge required. Thus, the mere fact that someone posted her observations to her web site on a daily basis, still wouldn't fit the paradigm of blogging, if she used general purpose web site development tools to do so.   What has made blogging the mass market phenonomenon that it is, is the non-technical ease of use of its tools. 7:11:19 AM

It seems Radio has a bug/feature regarding updates to the Weblog Title/Description. The Stories Page and the individual stories pages do not update to the new title/desc, unless they are edited after the change. Minor annoyance, since I don't plan to change them often. 6:37:21 AM

The rise of the Internet and the Web, the dot-com bubble burst, and the subsequent IT recession have all contributed to a fundamental shift in the economics of the IT industry. For example, the dramatic increase in emphasis in outsourcing—from software development to data center operations—is a reflection of this economic change. I see this fundamental economic shift manifested in four dimensions: ·        Commoditization o       Standardization o       Specialization ·        Virtualization o       Minimization/Miniaturization o       Massification ·        Interoperation/Integration o       Extension o       Federation ·        Innovation o       Sustaining o       Disruptive 6:29:28 AM

Let me explain my weblog's description: "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity." It's from the title of a book by a philosopher named Richard Rorty. I think of Rorty as a post-modern pragmatist--a disciple of Dewey and Pierce, but very much a reinventor of their concepts. I consider myself an ironist as Rorty defines the term. Hence the description of the weblog. 5:57:50 AM

Strange. I tried to rename my Weblog from "Nick Gall's Radio Weblog" to "Nick Gall's Weblog," and it took on my desktop but not in the cloud. Even stranger is the fact that my Weblog description "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" in the cloud is out of sync as well. It shows my very first description, which was a disclaimer. Perhaps posting this entry will help sync things up. 5:45:38 AM