Notes from Prof. Oliver Wrede on Interface, Interaction and Information Design & more
Jeff Bozo strikes again: Two days ago the Amazon CEO recieved a patent:
A method and system for conducting an electronic discussion relating to a topic.
And here is another one that stinks:
A method and apparatus are provided for dynamically organizing and tracking website content during its deployment
This is ridiculous!
Former German Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher said: »We are entering an new era of world order. We will only be able to design the 21st century peacfully if the third world states recognize the agenda as evenhanded. [...] We need diplomacy that translates between different schools of thought.« [tagesschau Newsticker]
It seems Google starts to implement first prototypes of something that explains the Pyra interest. WebQuotes seems to show who is quoting who and how. [WebDEV]
Nicholas Jon seems be struggling about advocating weblogs in academic contexts. But reviewing when paradigm shifts happen he thinks it is just a matter of time:
»I’ve found the adoption of weblogs, the sharing of information they allow, and the community building they foster to be difficult to push to critical mass – at least in my academic circle. [...] If I were able to demonstrate the true power of the movement and get people to change the way they communicate their research by adopting weblogs and pushing the limits personal publishing / personal knowledge management, it would represent my triggering of a Kuhnian paradigm shift – and that’s definately not something I’m capable of doing alone. Such change requires bottom up forces that move the whole system. [...] I truely believe using weblogs as knowledge management for scientific endeavours will become the norm for researchers in the future.«
Dennis G. Jerz wrote an article for »Dichtung Digital«, which could light up the questions about what Google might want with Blogger. Quote:
»Google initially began as a tool for rating annotations, according to Larry Page (inventor of Google’s eponymous PageRank): “We wanted to annotate the web–build a system so that after you’d viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it…. We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank. Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation…” (source)«
»Can we run a foreign policy in the absence of trust? The administration apparently thinks it can use threats as a substitute. Officials have said that they expect undecided Security Council members to come around out of fear of being on the “wrong” side. And Mr. Bush may yet get the U.N. to acquiesce, grudgingly, in his war.«
There’s a new version of ZOE – that indexing E-Mail client – that supports RSS (including 2.0) as well as the Blogger APi and MetaWeblog API. I don’tyet fully understand what this means, but it sounds like I should consider ZOE once more.
I just corrected the RSS link in the membership box. (Thanks to Marian)
By the way, Marian: The RSS client I talked about is Syndirella. Maybe that is better than FeedReader.
»Courtesy Typographi.ca, a pointer to Victor Gaultney’s Gentium project. Purpose: to build a free multilingual font to bring better typography to thousands of languages around the globe. I can think of no higher calling.« [Jarrett House North]
I don’t know what the Google people had in mind when buying Pyra/Blogger. But I can say what I have in mind: a system that integrates meta-structures blogdex, blogtree, myelin, geourl with publishing.
Of course Google could use the weblogs to improve ranking. Of course Google could have done this without buying Blogger, couldn’t it?
Todays best search engines:
My german weblog took quite a number of hits. And I first thought this the system had an error. For some reason the post about the fabulous Bush & Blair persiflage made it onto the homepage of TheNewMexicoChannel.com in the »As seen on 7« list.
Strange.
Bruce Tognazzini: »The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. Of late, many web applications have reflected a lack of understanding of many of these principles of design, to their great detriment. Because an application or service appears on the web, the principles do not change. If anything, applying these principles become even more important.« [WebDEV]
I have been working on a new release of the hierarchyTemplates Plug-In – version 0.5. The two main new features are a) JavaScript objects and b) Theme compatibility (the settings of this Plug-In will be exported with a Manila theme).
I am looking for people who are willing to test this one. I used it without problems on our main server. Send an e-mail to me if you are interested.
»Most people, though, get their news from TV — and there the difference is immense. The coverage of Saturday’s antiwar rallies was a reminder of the extent to which U.S. cable news, in particular, seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media.
What would someone watching cable news have seen? On Saturday, news anchors on Fox described the demonstrators in New York as “the usual protesters” or “serial protesters.” CNN wasn’t quite so dismissive, but on Sunday morning the headline on the network’s Web site read “Antiwar rallies delight Iraq,” and the accompanying picture showed marchers in Baghdad, not London or New York.«
That’s a deja-vu. I wouldn’t say news media in US are biased – but they just seem to be accurate while in fact they are a desaster from a journalist perspective. This should bother everyone.
I observed this when I was trapped in New York after 9/11:
»Almost all US news channels I saw were stunningly superficial, manipulative, out-of-context presentation of news, full of unverified facts, shortening essential details in a unsustainbable manner.
[...]
The problem is not obvious. I do not want to suggest active disinformation. It is more about subtext, what is left out, what is considered important and what not, how things are contextualized and backed up with sources.«
Now that Dave Winer found a reason to turn to Manila again for his Harvard Law School weblog server, I wonder if Userland will improve Manila some more. There hasn’t been much news about Frontier/Manila. There has been a lot of ideas from the community (even a Plug-Ins wish list).
I was wondering if I should look at some kind of Textism Plug-In that mimicks the ASCII-to-HTML conversion of a Movable Type Plug-In with than name. It seems it would make editing in a Textarea much easier – most people I know either don’t like the HTML formatting tool bar and also don’t want to buy Radio Userland to have a more convenient editing experience.
There was few movement in the Manila Plug-In area – and I think mostly the reason for that is that Frontier didn’t really take off when it went commercial in 1998. There were too many developers not working professionally with Frontier that contributed to the community – you couldn’t make a living from being a Frontier developer. Actually that is a pity because Frontier has set so many standards in the area of web application.
metaRenderer status
I was looking at my Manila plug-ins that haven’t changed much for a while. Internally I have some improved versions: the metaRender Plug-In has a complete OPML rendering framework that allows you to define HTML templates for conversion of OPML (screenshot). It does custom caching – so you can render OPML from different sources (Msg# or URL) in any number of messages or templates without having Manila rendering that HTML again and again. Currently it is not very newbie-resistant, because the rules are not validated.
And if not clear from the screenshot: you will be able to define seperate behaviors for each nodetype/attributes. In the “Add nodetype(s)” section you will also be able to add own nodetypes or teach your template nodetypes/attributes from a OPML source.
hieraryTemplates plug-in status
One of the next issues of the hierarchyTemplates plug-in is to make it compatible with the theme mechanism of Manila. To achieve this I’d need to store the plug-in data in a table that will be included in a theme. I did not yet look into that but I bet the hardest part of it is to make it bullet proof for those who upgrade.
Upcoming…
Another completely new plug-in will be the meetingMaker plug-in. I have no idea when that will be finished – but the idea is to manage invitation to meetings where people actually answer a poll about which of the suggested meetings they probably attend. Here is a screenshot of the current prototype showing how to create an announcment (which is just the initial step before polling and actually inviting/cancelling). I think many people -especially at larger institutions- will like this plug-in.
NoteTaker 2003 v1.1 does OPML!
»NoteTaker 2003 is a very groovy outliner that does lots of cool things like publish to the web, voice annotation and all kinds of other things that I haven’t figured out yet. I griped about the fact that it didn’t do OPML, before when I tried the previous release. Maybe this will be the “missing link” in my personal information management struggle.« [Der Schockwellenreiter]
»QuarkXPress software users can look forward to many powerful new features in QuarkXPress 6 including enhanced undo functionality, full-resolution previews, and an intriguing way to manage complex projects, which will be described in a future update.«
Hooray! The latest beta of NetNewsWire Pro solves the XML-RPC issue with Manila sites that use german umlauts! Now I can see and edit all those news items and post directly to departments! Perfect!