Tag: blogs

Blogger blight

Terry Frazier:

I was at the first AC conference in 2003. I attended on a lark and had a great time. I went again to AC2004, and again had a very good experience. But I’ll miss the conference this year, and I wonder – can the close-knit, community atmosphere of the past 2 years survive the arrival of the traveling Techno-Circus?

so will i. accelerating change 2003 was the best conference i have ever been to. a program that took no prisoners attracted a most excellent crowd. where else can you have discussions with people from the immortality institute? and now, for some unknown reason, the conference has sold out to speakers that have nothing to do with accelerating change. who cares about blogging, or even worse, podcasting? now we get “tutorials”, pitches about investing, and the admission price has increased.

caustic tech

the tech industry and the people involved in it have a made a mockery of themselves in so many ways, it’s kind of hard to pick some arbitrary starting point. i mean, there is j2ee vs. .net, open source vs. proprietary, richard stallman making sure that EVERYBODY knows the difference between the linux kernel and the gnu applications on top of it, which company makes the most flattering khakis for men 10 kg overweight…jesus, where do you start with all this shit???

so begins caustic tech. subscribed.

Obsession

NYT writer katie hafner interviewed me about my blogging habits. the article doesn’t say, but it is talking about a period in early 2001 when i was very bored at KPMG..

The constant search for bloggable moments is what led Gregor J. Rothfuss, a programmer in Zurich, to blog to the point of near-despair. Bored by his job, Mr. Rothfuss, 27, started a blog that focused on technical topics.
“I was trying to record all thoughts and speculations I deemed interesting. Sort of creating a digital alter ego. The obsession came from trying to capture as much as possible of the good stuff in my head in as high fidelity as possible.”
For months, Mr. Rothfuss said, he blogged at work, at home, late into the night, day in and day out until it all became a blur – all the while knowing, he added, “that no one was necessarily reading it, except for myself.”
When traffic to the blog, greg.abstract.ch started to rise, he began devoting half a day every day and much of the weekend to it. Mr. Rothfuss said he has few memories of that period in his life aside from the compulsive blogging.
He was saved from the rut of his online chronicle when he traveled to Asia. The blog became more of a travelogue. Then Mr. Rothfuss switched jobs, finding one he enjoyed, and his blogging grew more moderate.
He still has the blog, but posts to it just twice a week, he said, “as opposed to twice an hour.” He feels healthier now. “It’s part of what I do now, it’s not what I do”.

nooface

i finally found the feed for nooface, a site which purpose is

to support the exchange of ideas about next-generation user interfaces, focusing on approaches that go beyond the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing Device) method on which most current user interfaces are based. The goal is to promote out-of-the-box thinking on how user interfaces might evolve to accommodate new classes of users and devices outside of the traditional PC domain.