Gnodal

A while back I did a little online work for a guy on the other side of the Atlantic ... just helping him re-design the frontpage of his commercial site. Not rocket science, but not thumb-twiddling either.
Thing is, he had no means of paying me. I don't have credit card, so paypal is out.

Anyhow, he got me an account at DreamHost which I've been using to slowly develop my project.

I've been in "stealth mode" for years ... cat definitely in the bag.

Well, I just let the cat's head out:

"The Antenna is You" - GroundPlane.wordpress.com

There's been a flurry of discussion on the WP-Hackers mail list ... nothing like re-design to bring pet peeves to the surface!

One new resource to emerge from all of this is the WordPress Interface Guidelines.

Rummaging through the pages there brought a few fine resources to my attention:
* Yahoo!'s "Design Pattern Library"
* Apple Human Interface Guidelines
* "Human Interface Guidelines" at WikiPedia
* GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
* KDE User Interface Guidelines
* At User Interface Engineering, Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization and "Brain Sparks"
* Java "Look and Feel" Guidelines (Advanced Topics)

Also: Information Architecture Institute; Mark Boulton on Design Thinking

NYTimes Buy | Rent interactive Flash: ... /2007/04/10/business/2007_BUYRENT_GRAPHIC.html. And their "Naming Names" interactive on candidates' references to others.

Also of interest: "Users Decide First, Move After" ("mouseover" comes after navigation decision; subsequent information can confuse the user); UIE's "BrainsSparks" blog

For further reading: "The Roots of Sound Rational Thinking"

An awesome Flash-based homepage: Karten Design

*X-posted*

I just created / started work on "HomelessnessCohousing" on my wiki and, given my situation and the absolute lack of collaboration I've experienced over the past dozen years I've been on the web, I had to ask myself what you're doing.

Striving for gain, or getting done what need be done?

I've been facilitating communications for more than 3 decades. It's not about me being able to trouble-shoot NORAD/SAC's troposcatter system, or having installed industrial-scale Motorola radio networks. It's about me being there with the right tool ready when you turn around to ask. (Not making you ask is good for you but it's good for me, too. When you aren't busying me with menial chores I'm research best practices, so when I'm "at the ready" I get to suggest the tool or method or process or technique ... if you ask, likely you'll low-ball the solution. It's about being right on the dot, kinda like Radar in "M.A.S.H.")

Point is: any working person will know about office politics and the dynamics that drive it, such as "Imposter Syndrome", that creepy feeling that you're out of your depth and over-committed. That sort of under-tow works to create a situation where people are all just a little bit off balance ... reactive, oppositional, perhaps combative, likely defensive.
Bottom line is that when egos are involved and material resources are at stake folk become "risk averse" and more ... they play the game they've known the best, the rules they've played the longest ... and high-school personality politics take over.
I'm not there. I've paid the price of opting out of all that. (I had my run at careerism; I've had my jet-set hops to the next city for supper or the next state for the weekend. Thanks, but no thanks. I've got work to do.) The market may in the end make rational decisions concerning production and distribution, but personality politics (and the incompetence it spawns) is the thin edge of a wedge I call corruption.

Nobody derails me ... but nobody supports me. So, as a free lance, I'm vulnerable. If I happen to slip on the icy front-steps of my house and suffer a severe concussion (which I did) there's nobody there to secure my work and so I'm likely to loose my position and access to material resources (which is what happened). If I happen to suffer a criminal home invasion (which I did) there's nobody there to bail me out if my escape leaves me with two broken feet from the fall to the sidewalk (which is what happened).

And worst of all: the work I've done year after year is marginalized because (and here's the punchline) there are no A-list egos involved ... so they don't care ... and high-school politics demand that they set the agenda, not the likes of me.

So, really, it's fixed. And web-work for the public good gets throttled to maximize the gain of a few ... zero-sum game.

What's the tipping point? For some agile entity to step up ... B5, or SocialText, or CBC radio ... or one of the many university groups that congregate around the subject.

bentrem.sycks.net/gnodal/ ... no, I didn't spell it out. But please, tell me this: why does nobody respond to anything I've written there? Is it perhaps that you don't care? (But you maintain the persona of a sensitive and responsive person, don't you?) That you don't understand? (But you maintain the persona of someone who's up to speed on such as social software, don't you?)
Isn't it more as though you feel like responding to me would mark you as being a traitor ... to what? Wouldn't that signal your disloyalty ... to whom?

Knowledge is political. Control of knowledge is power. Tools are not inevitably neutral.

What controls innovation? What moves people, conditions them, directs their activity ... ambition, greed, resentment, fear ... the under-belly of mundane politics.

=== By Way of Context ===
Present:

Many2Many.wordpress.com

VibeWise.wordpress.com

Past:
Years ago when I was researching psychopathology (see my dusty old "Fallen Angels") I connected with a professor who'd just testified in front of a Senate sub-committee. His point was simple: establishing an Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children would abolish homelessness and even poverty itself. That was 1996 and 1997. Has anything much changed? --BenTremblay 15:02, 18 February 2008 (PST)

Poverty Is Poison" by Paul Krugman; Op-Ed Published: February 18, 2008

== Post Script ==

Hand-wringing About American Culture - "Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?"New York Times book review 14FEB08 (Susan Jacoby' "The Age of American Unreason", with mention of Lee Siegel’s "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob"

"[Jacoby] pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map."

What has informed my work is this set of numbers from cog-psych/discourse analysis: most people have strong opinions, but only about 60% can put forward arguments in support of those opinions. The kicker is that the majority of those arguments are logically flawed, either the data is wrong or the logic is specious. Democratic participatory deliberation anyone? I'm talking discourse, Socratic method, propositional hypothesis testing and evidence-based decision support ... but highschool-style personality politics rule.

"Don't be lucid and ironic. People will turn it against you saying, 'Ah-ha, you see? He isn't a nice person'."
--Albert Camus

Informavores' "Spark Mapping" for example ... really, very pretty.



And yet? They're applying the methods I turned away from / supplanted at least 5 years ago.

So my question becomes: how to deal with the fact that folk are committed to their particular tool rather than accomplishing the task?


If I have a favorite hammer and start using that in the kitchen I might be totally honest when I say that my intentions are to make supper. But that doesn't mean I'm going about it in an effective manner.
When personal egos and corporate assets are invested in that hammer, how can I insinuate an alternative method for tossing salad?

http://www.easierweb.info is aweful understated, but what it's about is pretty neat: http://www.hyperwords.net/demo.html (I got the Demo working, but only once ... and the HomePage crashes Firefox repeatedly; 'sup with that?!)
Some more Ajax/Web2.0 Goodness: jQueries nest/sortable tables at code.google, developed for WordPress plugins.

Also catching momentum is http://www.wikiwyg.net WYG is all about making text areas user-editable.

And always fine is SocialText, the "OpenSource Wiki"

A new one for me, this lovely and complex RSS reader from MacroStandard.com. And then there's this peculiar NYTimes RSS reader from OpenKapow.com.

Thin Wire, the "OpenSource Ajax RIA Framework"

Slightly related reading: the blog at SproutBuilder.com.

Updated 29JAN08 13:25MST:
My comment to Joseph Scott's "Prologue, A WordPress Theme" :

A couple oddities I hope to work on: I created a page and got page titles to display in the sidebar, but when I select one of those I don’t see any of the text that’s in it.
Also, and this is core to the functionality I’d like to see, a post submitted on a page doesn’t display any differently than a post entered on the mainpage.
So right now: neither About nor PlaceHolder display the text they were created with. So they, along with mainpage, display exactly the same.

Now: if pages could carry their own stream … know what I mean?
What I’m getting at is that the “most recent by each contributer” shouldn’t be universal.
Mainpage? yes, of course, that’s the point.
Separate pages? How about “most recent from each contributer on this page”?
Categories? I don’t know … maybe that should dump all posts.

I haven’t looked at the code, so don’t know how you implemented the logic; maybe I’m at counter-purposes with you."

My thinking is this: with minor changes, posts could be sorted a number of ways:
1) MainPage shows only "most recent by each contributor"
2) separate pages show "most recent by each contributor on page"
3) categories ... not sure ... maybe a dump of all contributions, sorted by date?

Another interesting wierdness (apart from the fact that page text isn't showing ... 'sup with that?): you can add a title in Edit, and the title shows up in Recent Posts, but you cannot add a title from the main post form.
RFE: don't change the post display function, but do change the submit form to allow the creation of a title.

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Original

<rant>Without prejudice: it comes down to the kidz who have the toys get to call out the rules of the game. If I trotted out a description of my stuff ... would that result in the resources needed for a launch? You see, this is where "discourse variance" kicks in: one moment we're talking like the world is all fun, then how it's a tough place with folk ready to mug you anytime, then back to the light and love delusion ... and that's what BluePill and "constant partial attention" allow; the people around me show all the integrity of pin-ball machines. If I could develop this stuff I know I'd have something really special. But I /can /not// ... think it's easy? Try it sometime. But no ... that's too much like work. Scoffing? Scoffing is easy.</rant> Indulge me: I get cranky/frustrated sometimes. Anyhow: WordPress has released a theme ... no big deal there ... but it creates something like a Twitter interface. I've applied it on http://42words.wordpress.com ... it's pretty neat. Anyhow, http://wordpress.com/blog/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/ and http://ma.tt/2008/01/twitter-theme/ tell the story. BTW: if you want to set it up on wordpress.com the theme is there to be selected, but you need to navigate to page 3 or 4 to find "Prologue" ... alphabetical. Anyhow, I've got the files from SVN ... I really really really think it needs a sidebar. (I've just started a stand-alone page as work-around.)

My comment to "The Web is Dynamic at InternetEvolution.com:

Something from the review of "The Exploit" really resonated with me; I've been saying that most folk (ADHD, "constant partial attention", etc etc etc) don't grok what I'm trying to say. Not that it's too complicated, far from it, but rather because it's too simple. (An example of "simple": chaos is not random ... chaos is information rich, and random is entropic ... like apples and oranges.) I figure it's because my approach to data rich environments ("somewhere in between painful boredome and helmet-fire") is orthogonal to what's present practice. I'm not sure that's the best term, but it's what I've come up with as a close approximation.

"Galloway and Thacker argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form, one that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network is in relation to hierarchy."

I think that's right. Doing "Web1.0" very, very well will only give us Web1.0.

Have a peek at "Viral + Monetizable = StartUp Magic Quadrant" ... it's like the guy's been reading my mind.

"My definition of Web 3.0 is:

“The combination of Web 2.0 mass collaboration with structured databases”.

If you can build a research tool that propagates virally and gets more useful with each person who uses it, you build a business with phenomenal power. "

Just what I realized fully 5 years ago!

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My comment to "The AppGap – A New Corante Blog on Portals and KM:

Such a pleasure; I just put my new Yahoo!Pipes aggregator to work in NetVibes (from which I had plucked a group of feeds, P&KM included) and "The AppGap" (TheAppGap.com) was one of the first things that I happened onto!

A lovely project. There's so much going on with regards to Web2.0, and not all of it just buzz; I came a cross a great concept yesterday in a comment to "The Web is Dynamic" (InternetEvolution.com) ... I have been saying that my discourse/evidence-based approach is "orthogonal" to conventional processes (Trying to explain why nobody gets it? *grin*) but now, having encounted "The Exploit" (Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker) I'm calling it "assymetrical". Straining to break out of the cliches in an exciting time!

cheers
ben

p.s. "sponsored by IntuitQuickBase" is clear and explicit in the project's "About" but, if you don't mind me asking, why/how "A New Corante Blog"? The way it came together I think would be in itself an interesting story.
p.s.2 My, that's disappointing; I put some time and effort into finding the URL for the links I created here ... and TypePad just blew them off? My goodness ... we cannot make links in our comments? So comments about interactivity cannot be interactive? My goodness ... the pages I created in 1995 were smarter than that.
I'll now triple the effort to append them. Colour me *cough* bemused.
[appended link-list deleted]

* WikiaSearch: "Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release."

* PowerSet | PowerSet blog:

"Our unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search. By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results."

* Lucene-hadoop Wiki:

"[WWW] Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion."

• Hbase: Bigtable-like structured storage for Hadoop HDFS
• Hbase/HbaseArchitecture:

  "This document gives a quick overview of HBase, the Hadoop simple database. It is extremely similar to Google's Bigtable, with a just a few differences. If you understand Bigtable, great. If not, you should still be able to understand this document."

* Papers Written by Googlers:

"Below is a partial list of publications by people after joining Google, organized by category."

• Google File System:

  "In this paper, we present file system interface extensions designed to support distributed applications, discuss many aspects of our design, and report measurements from both micro-benchmarks and real world use."

• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data:

  "Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers."

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By Way of Context:

"Deconstructing real Google searches - why Powerset matters<" (alternative version at ReadWriteWeb)blockquote>"Share I was looking at the log files for my blog today, as I regularly do, and I was suddenly struck by the variety of search queries in Google for which users were getting referred to my posts. I write often about the different flavors of search - including vertical search, parametric search, semantic search, and so on - so users with queries about Search often land here. But do they always find what they're looking for?"</blockquote>Also by Nitin Karandikar, at Software Abstractions : "17 Search Innovations" and "A Conceptual Architecture for Search"

"Search Engines are the Start Page for the Internet", Dan Dodge on "The Next Big Thing"

Also of interest:
By Anne Zelenka at GigaOm - "The GGG ["Giant Global Map]: For Plane Trips More than People":

"Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee uses the Social Graph meme to rebrand his semantic web efforts, writing in a blog post, “I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!” Berners-Lee thinks there could be big payoff in adding a layer of meaning atop the documents of the World Wide Web:"

Nova Spivack in response - Defining the Semantic Graph -- What is it Really?":

"I've been talking about the coming "semantic graph" for quite some time now, and it seems the meme has suddenly caught on thanks to a recent article by Tim Berners-Lee in which he speaks of an emerging "Giant Global Graph" or "GGG." But if the GGG emerges it may or may not be semantic. For example social networks are NOT semantic today, even though they contain various kinds of links between people and other things. So what makes a graph "semantic?" How is the semantic graph different from social networks like Facebook for example?"

TimbBL on "Giant Global Graph":

"In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself."

At "JD on EP" - Net, Web, Graph":

"Tim Berners-Lee essays that the term "Social Graph" may be more fitting than the term "Semantic Web", but also brought up an interesting way of looking at things: "The Net" was the network of computers; "The Web" was the web of hyperlinked documents; "The Graph" may be the set of connections between ideas/people/places/things described in those documents. Net, Web, Graph, each enfolding the other -- tidy. I'm not sure that a network of ideas is really comparable to networks of things -- computers and documents are measurable items, each with traits we can agree on, while ideas often seem to vary by the eye of the beholder -- but the "Net, Web, Graph" distinction does seem to clearly lay out that each layer is built atop the prior."

NB: Introducing Twine - "A revolutionary new way to share, organize, and find information. Use Twine to better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams. Twine ties it all together."

From ''Teachers'' at PBS: "Web 2.0 and Education: Hot or Not?" by Andy Carvin, 11JAN08

"Andrew Keen’s polemic on Web 2.0 culture, The Cult of the Amateur, has been riling the social media community for months now. It was probably just a matter of time before it came up in a big way within the edtech community, and now that just might be happening, thanks to a new blog by online safety advocate Anne Collier. It’s inspired her to ask a simple question to the education community: why do a growing number of educators like Web 2.0 in the first place? But I want to know something else as well - what don’t we like about Web 2.0, and is there anything we can do about it?"

From PerfectSpace blog, two items:
* "How Geeks Can Help In Disasters (San Diego Fire 2007)"

"A sad and yet hopeful few days. Even though I went through a “100-year flood” in Washington, going through the so-called “Firestorm 2007” in San Diego, I’ve learned more than I ever thought I would about disasters and what people need."

* "Using Twitter to Help Communities"

"My experiences in the San Diego fires of 2007 gave me an interesting outlook on how Twitter, as a tool, could be applied in different circumstances. Just a few months after (and some even during) the 2007 firestorm some agencies are scratching the surface of what’s possible with this service."

And recently joined: Digital Divide Network:

"The Digital Divide Network was launched in December 1999 as a response to the National Digital Divide Summit hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton. Originally developed by the Benton Foundation and the National Urban League, DDN was designed as an online clearinghouse of news and resources regarding the digital divide."

Following up on email from Danny Ayers put some wind under my wings.
Here's a bit of context:

* Weblog Kitchen: Graphical Ibis: "Kunz's Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS) provide a framework for collaborative understanding of the major issues and implications surrounding what are described as ``wicked problems'' (problems that lack a definitive formulation). Understanding is achieved by using hypertext components to create structured arguments surrounding the issues."

* Weblog Kitchen: Weblog Kitchen: "The Weblog Kitchen explores current research in weblogs, wikis, and other hypertext systems."

* "Best Practices for Managing Cross-Agency E-Government Initiatives"

* The IBIS Manual - A Short Course in IBIS Methodology"

"IBIS (pronounced "eye-bis") stands for Issue-Based Information System, and was developed by Horst Rittel and colleagues during the early 1970's. IBIS was developed to provide a simple yet formal structure for the discussion and exploration of "wicked" problems. Problems that are wicked, as opposed to tame, do not yield to the traditional "scientific" approach to problem solving, which is to gather data, analyze the data, formulate a solution and implement the solution. With a wicked problem your understanding of the problem is evolving as you work on a solution. One sure sign of a wicked problem is that there is no clear agreement about what the "real problem" is (see the section "How to Tell if a Problem is Wicked"). Wicked problems cannot be solved in the traditional sense, because one runs out of resources (time, money, energy, people, etc.) before a perfect solution can be implemented."

---

I'm crafting a reply to Mr. Ayers just now ... it reads in part:

"Problems that are wicked, as opposed to tame, do not yield to the traditional "scientific" approach to problem solving, which is to gather data, analyze the data, formulate a solution and implement the solution. With a wicked problem your understanding of the problem is evolving as you work on a solution. One sure sign of a wicked problem is that there is no clear agreement about what the "real problem" is ..."
"The IBIS Manual - A Short Course in IBIS Methodology"

I realize again how I have cut to the very root of this: the text above stands well, reasoned and based on experience. But I contradict it: the scientific method as understood here fails because the understanding is, not faulty or wrong, but partial.

A simple application of discourse theory with an appreciation of the dialectic and an appropriate valuation of subjective narrative (i.e. salience and valence; see "schema theory") will de-construct this apparent Gordian knot.

--bentrem 20:38Z 10JAN08

In response to "Do you know Clarence?"

*ponders*
... “granularity” … and “modulation”.
“Too much of a good thing”.

I ferr shurr don’t need to see avatars so often (Especially in RSS!!!).
And I like to keep connected to some folk w/o seeing everything they tweet.

Soooooo … a quick hack: mousever tweets on http://snipurl.com/1vud5 increases visibility of "second-tier" friends i.e. connections.

*DRAFT*

"Which of these is not the same?"

Peachpit

"For accessibility, structural markup is important because software can use structure to perform functions for the user and provide better access to page content."

Intelligent Enterprise

"To address the proliferation problem, organizations typically take one of two approaches: consolidate disparate search tools by choosing a single enterprise system, or aggregate the results of the various search engines within a federated search system (many so-called enterprise search systems include federation in their suites)."

Internet Evolution

"Cloud computing frees up the researcher or business from worrying about the complexity and politics of using a grid or local computing resource so they can instead focus on their core competencies. And now some researchers are also talking about “cloud routing” in a similar vein. Cloud routing will change the Internet in much the same way as cloud computing has changed computation and cyber-infrastructure."

XML.Coverpage legacy doc (April 4-6, 1995)

"Structured information is information that is analyzed. Not in the sense that a Sherlock Holmes should peer at it and discern hidden truth (although for some information, such as ancient texts, something much like that may happen), but rather in the sense that the information is divided into component parts, which in turn have components, and so on. Only when information has been divided up by such an analysis, and the parts and relationships have been identified, can computers process it in useful ways."

AskSam's

"Automatic Field Recognition enables you to turn information into an instant database. askSam can automatically identify words that provide structure in your information and use these words as fields."

At Myspace Themes

"you can search through our premade Myspace layouts for codes that will set your Myspace profile apart from everyone else's."

SAS "Integrating unstructured data into business intelligence"

"Using unstructured and semi-structured data for BI requires transforming the data into a structured format so the facts (address, complaints, parts) about key entities (customers, accounts, products) can be extracted and stored in a file or database. The real value in recognizing these variables is the ability to relate them with similar facts derived from transactions systems ..."

Hack Diary

"we judge that Margaret Thatcher links to James Callaghan and Tony Blair. Repeat this extraction and correlation process for each member of the list and you get the map we are looking for"

And, special just for those of us who might, from time to time, think that we work and act in a world that suffers neat contradistinctions: "Why HTML authoring is not programming"

"Considering the distinction between programs and data, where does HTML markup fall into the categorization? Since the markup applies to some textual data, isn't it program rather than data? The categorization, though often useful, can be misleading. Programs are just a special case of data - they can be processed in various ways, like copied onto diskettes, sent over the Internet, etc., just as other data can. But programs are data that can be executed as machine instructions, or executed in interpretive mode by an interpreter, or compiled into machine instructions by a compiler. (We can of course decide to use the word "data" in a limited meaning too, as 'any data which is not a program'.)"

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Unless / until you know what Douglas Adams meant by having his computer respond with "42" you ... you just don't get it.

Consequences of "don't get it"? Ummm ... digital divide and obscene disparity in incomes?
Lotsa completely clueless folk are driving new Beemerz. It's not a fatal disease. It's more like BluePill and autism than like ALS.

Wavy Gravy sez, "If you lose your sense of humour it's not funny."
I say/ask, "Even when you don't care, it still matters. What matters to you?

dog.food - http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/catalogue_offline.shtml

LiveSearch ''discourse'': academic | feeds

* Micah L. Sifry's blog at PersonalDemocracy.com
    * Sifry's "It's Time to Wikify Government" at TechPresident.com
* Powerset - "next-generation [natural language] search engine"; Powerset blog; Lorenzo Thione's blog
* Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2); see AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
* think pieces: Language Log, the blog
* "Best of 2007" by technosailor aka Aaron Brazell; see also his The Pervasive Web
    * gleaned from comments there: "10 ways to improve web 2.0 and move into an era of true interaction"; "Computing Is A Liberal Art, Part 3: Strategies for Reinforcing Loops and the Hive Mind"; "Why Verizon Went Open & What It Means"
* fresh off the press at ReadWriteWeb: "2007: The Year in RSS"
* http://www.spock.com for people search and http://aiderss.com for feeds analysis
* New for me at Codex.WordPress: References and external resources about "The Loop"

* PhotoMatt on commercial themes via WP.com
* "Streamline Your Process: RSS Feeds, Bookmarks, Frameworks, Design Resources" at DarrenHoyt.com
* "Semantic XHTML" at AlexKing.org
* Resources at BrianGardner.com
* Revolution Theme
* "24 ways to impress your friends" by Eric Meyer ... Eric's first article at 24Ways.org

* Relating to WebRunner aka Prism: "Using Adobe Air".
* Introducing "Weave" at MozLabs:

"As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information."

* Relating to Knol; "Encouraging people to contribute knowledge"

• KnolStuff.com on Ning; "Community site for Google's new Knol Content Encyclopedia"
"Google's Know-It-All Project" at Forbes.com</li>
• "Truthiness showdown: Google's "Knol" vs. Wikipedia" by Machinist at Salon.com
• TechCrunch's "Google Knol: A Step Too Far?"

http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/

Too much of a good thing? Keeping tabs on who you chat with, where you shop, what music you listen too, what books you've bought or plan to buy, where you've traveled ... or plan to travel to ... and, and, and ...

ReadWriteWeb posted about ubiquitous data collection in the realm of "social graphing:

"More than just who calls who, Pentland is also studying proximity, location and activity data using information like interactions recorded between Bluetooth devices. The result is a field Pentland has given the obnoxious name "reality mining."

I couldn't resist ... here's the comment I wrote, the reply from the author (Fair use, Marshall? I wouldn't poach the article, or full replies to 3rd parties, but I figure this is like a public communique to me personally.), and then my response to his reply:

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"it's quite an exciting idea with a whole lot of potential" ... something about that seems immediately self-evident, no? That makes me suspicious.

Call me perverse (go ahead ... call me) but I find myself having to ask (ok, so call me compulsive): given the set of "wonderful ultimate applications", if we remove the subset "marketing", are we not left with an empty set?

Unless stalking is your personal hobbie, what's the pragmatic foundation / rationale for tracking people that way? Ok fine, support ... as an extension of, ayup, marketing.

10 minutes ago I twittered "if I had been mercenary / without conscience I'd be designing UI for mobile devices" and that's how I feel about this bastard child of CS and social-psych.

--bentrem

Posted by: Ben Tremblay | December 21, 2007 7:50 PM

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Ben, you are compulsive and perverse [perky sorta guy, Marshall is! *grin*] - but you do bring up a good question. In addition to marketing, other possibilities that are more user-centric include: easier access to your own data and more sophisticated services from your mobile device, personalization of services and content/user recommendations. In other words, you could go to a party and have as an option meeting the person your phone told you had the most overlap with your interests and modus operandi. I wouldn't rush over the that person and speak to no one else, but I'd make sure that I did meet them.

Those are some of the possibilities off the top of my head.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick Author Profile Page | December 22, 2007 12:05 AM

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Marshall - A suggested refinement: maybe "oppositional personality disorder" fits the bill.
;-)

Neat concepts ... and those of who who blog about our personal lives have already let those cats out of the bag ... but I really wonder how that actualizes; interests? Like which games I play (purchased or shopped for), or which books and recordings I fabour (see above), or where I'd like to travel (again).

In an ideal world, ok.fine ... but in this one? where consumption so permeates our culture? where profit is such a ubiquitous motive? (see M. Scott Peck's book ... "Death of Civility" I think it's called. Easy to find it; the correct title is probably on my Amazon wishlist. *grin*) Don't we do image maintenance largely by flourishing our possession?

I wonder if anthropologists or sociologists would validate a profile that was comprised entirely of "stuff".

Anyhow, I'm not trying to beat you about the head and ears with this ... I'm sure that this will in some way enable non-profits, with the help of good entities like WildApricot (I saw their ad on your site) . Well, no, not sure ... but hope that becomes part of the reality. For more than just fund-raising.

cheers
and best of seasons greetings

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I won't bother you with data on my setup here ... I'm sure you're eyes would bug out.
But that gives me first hand experience: an increasing number of pages are very difficult to load and, when loaded, bog down with repeated "A Javascript is running slowly ... Stop script?" messages.
E.g. I'm very fond of NetVibes (very Web2.0), but when I run Thunderbird while it's loaded things slow noticably. If I then load something like WordPress admin (AJAX-heavy) and there's a real risk that my PC locks up hard.

see Digital Divide", Minnesota PublicRadio

p.s.1 Apparently hot boxes running WinVista are in the 400 - 600 watt power range. A box running some flavour of Linux is more likely 250 or 300.

p.s.2 On Amazon's S3 / EC2 and level playing field: blogged by CentralDesktop and from Dave Winer

*X-posted to Many2Many and MozDawg on DAV and Docs*

Context: I yesterday post a near-rant in my MozDawg blog; "Silo by any other name would be as ...

Give 1000 people 100 communications channels and everybody may have a whole lotta fun but, really, you aren't goint to get anything done. That ain't rocket science.

Blogspot (multiple blogs), WordPress (multiple blogs), LiveJournal (2 accounts), FaceBook, MySpace (also 2 accounts), LinkedIn, ITtoolbox, and of course Twitter ... I'm registered at more but those are the systems I used most often. What I see is a cloud of activity, 95% of which is buzz ... fun, perhaps, and entertaining, to some degree, but basically it's mostly dissipation.

How many blog comments are some variation on "That's really good?" ( and nothing more ... )

My bottom line? If you bring a group of people together and sit them down in a clump, likely you'll need something like a facilitator to get something going. As Robertson puts it:

"Left unmanaged, this will inevitably lead to the proliferation of hundreds or thousands of collaboration spaces each containing a small subset of corporate content. [...] This fragmentation makes it hard to find information published by other areas."

But take that same group and sit them down around a camp-fire and (Caveman TV rulz!) things seem to sort themselves out.

See also Wisdom of Crowds is Cowardice" at CentralDesktop; "Collaboration Tools - Are Information Silos a Problem?" and "Enterprise 2.0 Letting Hypertext out of its Box" at Traction Software; a think piece by Danah Boyd: "Choose Your Own Ethnography: In Search of (Un)Mediated Life"; "Social Media Meets the Corporation" at ConferenzaBlog; "Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing?" by James Robertson; "Putting Enterprise 2.0 In Perspective" by Mike Gotta; Ross Mayfield's blog

An afterthought: perhaps the web's churn would be more evident except for the fact that so much of the contents is actually in-formed along a single vector: sales and marketing. If you want to see how it's running on the IT equivalent of flat tires, try to use it for problem solving!