Sapere Aude
Tag: blogs
Serendipity is all about making fortunate discoveries by accident. You can’t automate accidental discoveries, but you can manufacture the conditions in which such events are more likely to occur. Conferences are a great place for doing this. So to now are weblogs.
although my web traffic could stand some improvement, serendipity is definitely happening. gonna own some terms on google too, watch out for them 🙂
damn roger makes me jealous. first off he is in paris (which rocks), second he is at a nice conference, and third he can take pictures on the road and update his blog in real time.
almost makes me reconsider my vow of abstinence from mobiles..jpg)
Various forms of apparatus for a new kind of wiki or blog (weblog) are described. In particular, ways of bringing together a collective deconsciousness are presented. The systems works with CyborgLogs (cyborglogs or “glogs”) from a community of portable computer users, or it can also be used with a mixture of portable (handheld or wearable), mobile (automotive, boat, van, or utility vehicle), or base-station (home, office, public space, etc.) systems. The system enables a community to exist without conscious thought or effort on the part of the individual participants. Because of the participants’ ability to constantly experience the world through the apparatus, the apparatus can behave as a true extension of the participants’ mind and body, giving rise to a new kind of collective experience. In other embodiments, the system may operate without the need for participants to bear any kind of technological prosthesis.
wow. this paper argues that moblogging and other technologies will allow for a state of thought, that is neither conscious, unconscious, nor subconscious, but, rather, a shared stream of thought, that evolves into something greater than its constituent parts. one step closer to the hive mind, or to collective consciousness? you decide.
This is why I go to Foresight gatherings and Nanoschmooze events, feeding my craving for the unfolding patterns that I will live through. Once in while I uncover sites like Edge.org, people like Gregor J. Rothfuss, and ideas like the Singularity that reshuffle my expectations.
And then I sigh.
apparently my little “how much can you take” test of futurology has been read 🙂
AOL is getting into weblogs?
Weblogs, over the last several years, have migrated to replace, in some cases, people’s home pages. It’s natural that the blog and the home page would combine. And when you remember that AOL has the largest collection of home pages in the world, it kinda gets interesting.
should we be afraid? will the relevance / discovery fabric be strong enough to withstand such an influx? does rss scale that much? are aol users a good demography for creative self-expression?
Clearly there is a higher purpose to these discursive ruminations. In describing in great detail the new dog his next-door neighbor just got or by writing about how he was tired and just drank 3 cups of coffee from the vending machine down the hall, Eric is seeking to rescue these moments from the clutches of the past. Proust had the same obsession with the inexorable passage of time. I really have to hand it to Eric, how he elevates the importance of certain events in his life while simultaneously revealing their essential hollowness.
reading some blogs, you can totally find this quality. whether it adds value to the global discourse besides being an outlet for the blogging person, who knows. more reflection and less sup, dude? might lift quite a few of them above the irrelevance threshold.
my new toy is now online. i will be having heaps of fun in the weeks to come as we ramp up our new blog hosting service. sweetness. no url for you yet, sorry 🙂
63% of blogs are written by women. this is consistent with findings that women use their whole brain for language (men only use one half). i get the distinct feeling that women are more articulate and eloquent on average. fun to be a minority, both in having a blog and in reading skills. i read at 600 words per minute, making me 3 times faster than average at a comprehension rate of 82%. i didn’t realize that the difference would be that large. apparently, the sound barrier (speech) is at 400 words per minute. with some training, it should be possible to break 1000 wpm or more. some bogus? company claims that their product allows you to achieve 25000 wpm.
as for writing, i never learned touch typing really well which sets me back. i need to test later. apparently its possible to reach 170 wpm if you are REALLY good.
It’s healthy to see some criticism on a friends blog. Discourse invariably involves dissent, and having friends take you up on your writings is a nice change from blogging into the void, “dear diary” style. I would expect to have more and more conversations over the blog instead of email. blog death matches as spectator sport? Deciding issues by a public poll? Spreading memes?
2002-12-20:
Quite a list for someone with major depression isn’t it. I missed out on a lot more than that party for someone who really wasn’t good for me! I read a lot more than I listen to music. I read a lot of diarists who also read my toothbrush chronicles and I find such comfort in that 😦 I didn’t want to do this because it seems to cut-and-dry but this is for people who don’t know me or haven’t read a lot of this diary so they know what’s going on : I didn’t want to give because it could all be taken. I didn’t want to buy any of them but that didn’t stop me from staring at em and wondering who the heck thought up this stuff. It didn’t stop me from getting this wacky record player.
There seems to be nothing that will stop me from protecting the earth and my furry friends. There seems to have been some confusion about my probation 😉 There’d have been some serious fisticuffs if he had done that. I’m so glad i wasn’t there i would have told her lady you have some serious issues and need help. But you didn’t and i would have rather you walked away than destroy every last memory even the good ones they’ll be tainted now like our marriage was it just this once dillon. Normally i would have felt really bad but he looked like he had been hit before.
I tested the new smartphones last night. I had to check into this site, of course, and it rendered not bad at all. I’m inclined to do a simpler, one column layout without the sidebars if I ever decide to buy one of those. I still think their GUI sucks ass (its based on tiny buttons with illogical function mapping). I’d much rather have a phone with a touch screen, but they are very bulky. So I guess I will skip this generation of mobiles. The picture is almost original size. It’s highly alarming that every mobile device is demoed with sports scores. Who gives a fuck about sports scores?
2002-11-05: Xaraya is now public. Initial reactions are very positive. I’m glad we didn’t do any forums, because forums attract scum. In other news I did an interview with internet intern, a german mass market internet rag (some 400k circulation). I talked about the reasons behind Xaraya and why Xaraya will succeed where other php cms will fail:
The article should be up in 2 weeks.
2002-11-09: I opened a whoopass can’o’worms when I outlined my plans to implement workflow for Xaraya early next year. I want to start very simple (actually the work would be done for a client project) because I knew from preparing the web services talks that workflows are a very complex topic. Gary suggested I look into wfmc which is the industry standard for workflows. Very nice, but I guess implementing it would keep me busy for a year. Workflows might be a topic for oscom too. Both wyona and zope already implement some support for xml-defined workflows.
2002-11-28: I created my first WSDL file today, with the help of some tools. I’m pretty sure my WSDL is invalid. Scripting languages with their weak type systems and WSDL don’t exactly mix well. I hope to eventually enable web services to call into the APIs that Xaraya offers. At this stage, it is merely a nice idea, but I’m slowly making progress.
2003-01-25: I took the plunge, and am now running a current Xaraya snapshot again. Lots of new toys to play with 🙂
Yeah I know I have been slow with updates, but a) live has been hectic b) Xaraya is not yet very convenient for blogging.
On the bright side, comments should now be fully functional, with a nice tree view.
2003-02-12: Another one joins the MT love. Marcel is a buddy from the Xaraya PMC, and the 2 of us should really be using our own dogfood, but alas it is not there yet re: blogging comfort. One day soon, though.
2003-02-12: Xaraya Usability Recommendations is probably one of the more extensive studies about usability in the open source field. And we are not even at 1.0 yet. Kudos to Doug and Drew for this fine doc. If we follow through with this one, good things are in store for the web layman.
2003-02-21: This feed validates as RSS. I took the plunge, and fixed the RSS feed for Xaraya. Unlike postnuke, Xaraya will ship with a rich feed that makes use of the 2.0 format. We now also have SOAP support. Mike pushed a changeset that enables to call Xaraya API methods over SOAP. Here is the relevant part from the WSDL.
<wsdl:arrayType=”xsd:string[]” />
<xsd:complexType name=”wsModAPIFuncRequest”>
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name=”module” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”func” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”type” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”args” type=”xsd:xsdl:myelement0″ />
</xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>
2003-02-27: Aye, Kevin, we will work extra hard on usability.
The PN user registration process is plain silly. It is one of the things that I was hoping to see the last of in eventually moving to Xaraya. I have a suggestion for anyone working on the end-user (non-admin) aspects of the core modules. Pretend that the typical user is my mother who gets very flustered when web site processes aren’t as easy and straightforward as possible. And Mom cries when she gets flustered. Please folks … don’t make my Mom cry.
2003-04-21: congrats team.
It is my pleasure to announce the first Beta Release of Xaraya (.900). This release is the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of hard work and undying dedication to creating. All of the developers on the project have devoted many hours to reach where we are today. The first Beta release for Xaraya is intended to capture a baseline of what needs to be accomplished before the final release. This is merely another step in the long journey that began with PHP Nuke, and then PostNuke for many of us.
2003-06-25: My friend John Cox is being interviewed about Xaraya:
With the articles system combined with the dynamic data system (both written by Michel), a webmaster no longer has to wait for developers to dream up new modules. All a webmaster has to do is dream up what they want to display, and from there it’s just a matter of adding 2 templates into the system and creating a new publication type to gather the data.
I just installed Xaraya again after neglecting it for a while, and I must say, very impressive. Time to mop up the nuke market with their silly systems.
2003-06-30: Looks like everyone and his dog is converging on XML pipeline processors these days. With more powerful XSLT editors, maybe the time for these technologies to appeal to a more mainstream audience has come.
2003-07-02:
2003-07-20: Xaraya goes new ways again. They now use phing, a php clone of ant, to maintain build files for the distribution. Very neat. The more standardization, the better. Apache Lenya is using ant more and more for various scripting tasks too. This nicely leverages the very good ant documentation and literature, and means you have to learn fewer concepts.
2003-08-02: Xaraya is now bitkeeper project #6 by number of change sets.
2003-11-04:
Trolling through the Bitkeeper tree on the site, looking at the change sets, the different names, the comments, it just sort of occurred to me this is beginning to look like a factory, chugging merrily along I’m noticing more and more people on the public mailing lists wanting to take the bk plunge. The collective consciousness has apparently reached a critical mass conclusion and internalized that this is the normal way of life around here. Quick rewind to 8 months ago, when most everyone (me especially) were still trying to figure out how to do a merge… You’ve come a long way, baby.Marc
I am very happy that we made the decision to establish sound processes, use bitkeeper instead of cvs, and aim for quality. It took longer than the usual crappy php project, but then again it is of much higher quality. We are now the number 3 user of bitkeeper, only surpassed by MySQL and the Linux kernel. Amazing.
2003-12-12: This post led to an avalanche. Wow, 19 months later, the repercussions are still working its way through the php cms community 🙂
2007-06-20: linux.com is now running on Xaraya, a CMS I co-founded
Gregor J. Rothfuss 