Tag: blogs

Blog networking

  1. professionals value knowledge. they have a lot of it to manage and track.
  2. their professional survival depends on name recognition. a blog can help provide visibility and recognition.
  3. they are used to writing; many of them can write well.
  4. professionals are geographically disparate. they need to nurture relationships with people that they seldom meet in person.
  5. they need to interlink in a person-to-person fashion.
  6. they already rely heavily on interpersonal trust and direct communication to determine what new stuff is worth looking at. such filtering is one of the central functions weblog communities excel at.
  7. for many, the best collaborations come about when they find someone who shares their values and goals. the personal output that is reflected in one’s weblog makes it much easier to check for such a match than work that is published through other channels.
  8. professionals recognize the value of serendipity. serendipity can come pretty quickly through weblogging.
  9. every professional must strive to be a knowledge hub in his niche, and an expert in related areas. a blog is a good medium for this, as it is a way of letting knowledge flow through you while adding your personal spin.
  10. professionals pride themselves on being independent thinkers. blogs epitomize independent thought.

extinction or hypergrowth?

Picture the following scenario: Microsoft has created a weblog tool that is designed to run inside the firewall at a company. It’s browser-accessible from any 4.0 or higher web browser and doesn’t require Windows on the client. It leverages their strengths by integrating with Office, and there’s no per-user client access fee. Then imagine if this weblogging tool were deployed to millions of users, all before anyone in the weblog community took notice. That scenario is real.

anil dash thinks that microsoft is dipping a toe in the weblog market, and i have it confirmed that there are internal blogging tools at microsoft too. this could be a huge boost to the weblog ecosystem, or it could kill it. the current infrastructure does not scale to 10s of millions of authors with ease, and the culture that has formed around weblogs even less. as with other geek toys before, blogs will have to be made ready for newbies, and will lose much of their chic in the process. the efficiency improvements for society will outweigh these downsides (which are only gripes of the elite, anyway)

Blogging beyond text

some people are experimenting with audio or video blogs. while totally a venue to explore for expression, i’m not sure about longer term viability. both audio and video are just too opaque, and until we have decent search algorithms that can penetrate into these files they are pretty much a 1-way street. a cool way to expand on this would be to SMIL-enable weblogs. (interesting fact: MMS, the next-generation SMS, is based on a subset of SMIL. convergence?) this could also be a very interesting topic for OSCOM IV in Tokyo.

Sexy librarians

if i hadn’t become a computer scientist, i might have become a librarian. information is my drug, and librarians are the gatekeepers to the global brain. librarians worried about information architecture, metadata, semantics and hypertext before it became fashionable to do so. there are a couple good librarian blogs: jenny, jessamyn, matthew. my dream date might be a librarian.

Life Blogging

i have always been reluctant to talk about personal stuff on this weblog. mostly i post what i find interesting, sometimes what i’m working on. maybe it’s time to blog some more 🙂 i found this interview with justin hall.

I would recommend this to anyone — if you see someone who you like through the smoke and noise online, and you can saunter over and stand at a slight distance and watch them to see how they carry themselves, to read their tone of voice, to observe their links and interests. In a way, personal websites are like personal advertisements, or a way to circumvent the matchmaker.

i’m having a bad hangover today, and i’m kinda anxious about the conference. also i’m a bit tired of getting project x off the ground. it takes so much effort to get anything done. it’s definitely a downside of projects where you don’t see your coworkers in the lobby.

there seem to be very few weblogs in zurich, kinda disappointing. although i’m exploring some right now. more later.

Politics with a clue

tara sue grubb is running for the us congress elections in november.

There is much to learn and much to discuss before November. I have put myself in the bullseye to stand up for our rights as free thinking citizens. I tell you now, I am no perfect being. I may be young, but I have learned much and have the scars to prove it. I am jumping head first into this fire for many reasons. Once thing is certain. I am losing my personal life and privacy, subjecting myself to men and institutions of money, power and greed. I have no shame. My personal privacy is worth the sacrifice if it means preserving the privacy that is OURS.

What about a 26 year old female running against an aged, 18 year career politician? We are polar opposites in many ways. Despite the odds, whatever they be, I am as serious as a heart attack. You don’t have to be a senior politician to understand the concepts of liberty, laissez-faire and justice. You don’t have to be a mastermind to see the people of this nation have been pushed into estrangement. Finally, you don’t have to be a suit to change the way things are.

politicians that actually talk to their constituency? what a welcome change. tara, lets hope you can pull it off.