Conversations are different from publishing, they require listening
to others, require investment of attention and energy. My morning check
is my way to find out who is talking to me and what they are saying. I
don't do it to find our how famous I am, this is just a very human
thirst for a feedback and my respect to those who spend time answering
my questions, finding flaws in my arguments or developing my ideas in
new directions...
I don't feel like it's a conversation. Conversations are restrained,
they're based on language, they're communicative, designed for a
purpose. I feel more like I am immersing myself in an environment. I
reach out and touch many things. [...] The blogs tell a story that is non-linguistic. They are like the tracks
in the mud, the sounds of birds in the trees, the rustle of a large
animal in the underbrush - each a different aspect, a different sign.
I really like Stephen's idea that the essence of what we do in weblogs
resides between the lines and cannot be articulated in words. I feel
that way much of the time. Very often I feel like I'm this close to
being able to verbalize "what I'm about" and am awfully tempted to go
and do it, only to feel moments later that any attempt at capturing it
in writing would inevitably come short of the real thing, and that I'd
probably better simply focus on "being myself", letting it unfold,
rather than on "describing myself".
And yet at other times, I sense some kind of therapeutic value in being
able to describe myself, even if only approximatively. There are
identifiable patterns to what I think and do, most of which remain
tacit until I decide to dig them out. Knowing them, identifying them
and naming them might allow me to reinforce the good ones and escape
the bad ones. As if drawing the box I was in made it easier to move
outside of it.
Readers of Many-to-Many my recall a post I wrote in January about the issue of giving link discovery credit. Now, thanks to Simon Willison's new bookmarklet, there's one less excuse not to give credit for your links.
When you click it while viewing a page, Simon's bookmarklet shows you
where you were just before you landed there. As with other bookmarklets, all you have to do is drag the link to your links toolbar -- it works right out of the box. Try it on this page! Writes Simon:
One problem that I used to have with attributing interesting links, described here
by Meri, is that when you browse with multiple tabs or browser windows
it's easy to lose track of how you got to a certain page thanks to a
"broken" back button. Thankfully there's a simple solution to this: the
show referrer bookmarklet (adapted from a similar bookmarklet by Jesse Ruderman) which shows the page that referred you to the current page in an easily copy-and-pastable Javascript prompt.
The concepts of Open Source and Free Software represent international movements in the collective
development of knowledge media. Open Source is the practice of sharing the source code of software and
other knowledge media with a community that is encouraged and empowered to read, comment, amend and
augment it. Free Software is the belief that software should be open and must remain open when
redistributed, which tends to imply that only related services and not the software itself should cost
money.
These two intertwined movements are arguably two of the most important forces shaping today's knowledge
media industries. They relate to artifacts as diverse as computer software, educational content, and
digital music, but also social practices, institutions, and infrastructures of our knowledge-based
economy. Because they threaten the boundaries between production and consumption, these movements
challenge established economic interests and often encounter serious opposition. This can be seen in
recent events such as the decision by the City of Munich to go open source and the lawsuit against IBM
by SCO.
The University of Toronto's Knowledge Media Design Institute
is therefore hosting a major symposium to address the critical issues surrounding the Free and Open
Source initiatives. The symposium will be webcast worldwide over the Internet, and the living record of
the event will be available through the web archives for a limited time thereafter.
UToronto's 
