funnily, i’m knee-deep in politics on this trip. between helping my friend henri who is in charge of IT for kucinich and advising chris who is running for office in palo alto, i’m getting a good idea of how the campaigning works around here. tobias mentions swiss politicians and weblogs. i’m not very hopeful that they will get a clue any time soon, but there are some political weblogs in switzerland. of course they only pay lip service. i mean, what’s up with not updating since december 2002?
Tag: blogs
Blogger dinner
I’m having dinner tonight 18:00 at Max Diner, at Folsom / 3rd in SOMA. Confirmed so far:
If you want to join, feel free.
Phil has a nice writeup.
intrablogs more efficient?
The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information hunt and peck that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work.
i experience the hunt and peck with several mailing lists i’m on. they are about as inefficient for finding information as it gets. need to get my coworkers into blogs.
Girls are pretty
- Dead Birds In The Corporate Plaza Fountain Day!
- Go To Your Roof And Watch The Girls In Their Party Dresses Wait For Their Taxis On The Street Down Below Day!
- Assume You Dreamt It Day!
- Where The Fuck Is My Dagger? said the man in the cloak Day!
blogs vs mailing lists
one of the crucial questions i want to explore in the remainder of 2003 is whether blogs are better than mailing lists for collaboration. i believe they are, but need to try it to be sure. some data points:
- persons with inadequate email archives are no longer crippled
- categorization beats subject prefixes
- linkability: prior art (older posts) are first class citizens as opposed to vanishing in the archives / trash
- trackback: get more brains to attack the problems
- it is easier to filter out “me too” posts
the klog mailing list (ahem!) has very good thinking on the issues.
related issues: blogs vs wikis. mailing lists vs wikis
Breeders to feeders
elke remarked yesterday that the meta trend underlying all the (mo)blog, social software, PIM, geodata pushes is the desire of people to rebuild their existence online, piece by piece. digital immortality? breeders becoming feeders of their digital selves?
i hope she will pick up this line of thought in her thesis.
Kaywa launches
It feels good to end our self-inflicted NDA. Kaywa Ltd. are the result of a collaboration of switzerland’s weblog pioneers to create the best Weblog tool anywhere, and bring (mo)blogging to the masses. Roger will unveil our tool at the first International Moblogging Conference in Tokyo, and will of course provide coverage with the help of his picturephone.
Meanwhile, we are getting ready with the public beta of our new product. We will waive fees for all participants in the public beta for 2003, so sign up today, and help us to make our product even better.
Kaywa are:
- Roger Fischer
- Chregu Stocker
- miss monorom
- Gregor J. Rothfuss
- Urs Gehrig
- Lukas Bosshard
- Doma Smoljo
- Silvan Zurbruegg
- Silvan Leuthold
- Patrick Luescher
ps. yes we will eat our own dogfood shortly 🙂
de-contriving political speech
henri poole wrote me today to alert me to the new blog of denis kucinich, presidential candidate. as i wrote in august 2002, politicians talking to their constituency are a welcome change.
denis’ first post concerns concentration of media ownership, and spectrum licensing. while i personally think selling off spectrum is so 20th century, it’s still an important topic.
Falling behind
Quite a few feeds i’m subscribed to don’t ping weblogs.com when they update. I regard this as a crucial feature. the following tools seem to lack it:
- postnuke
- xaraya
- blogX
if you use one of these tools, either pester the developers to implement the feature, or switch to a better alternative.
furthermore, some of my friends obviously haven’t configured their blogs correctly, because their blog tools would support it. lets fix that andreas, clarisa, daniel, frank, marcel, monorom, picturephoning..
bahrainBlog
The typical television commercials we get to watch on the now 10s of satellite channels and ALL of the terrestrial channels in the Gulf I think are so low in creative quality, that they verge on the obscene. Add to the fact that most if not all seem to be targeted to “sub-intelligent” viewers – meaning the Gulf Arabs in particular – that they are downright demeaning.
finally, a voice from the middle east. welcome, mahmood. it seems that the rss feed in xaraya beta is broken, what better incentive to fix it than to enable a friend to reach the world. consider it fixed 🙂
Gregor J. Rothfuss 