Just for the record:
Why We Know Iraq Is Lying (by Condolezza Rice, Jan. 23rd 2003)
Monthly Archive for July, 2004
My ISP moved his server farm from town to town today. During transfer the servers were not available. There also was an update in the domain name system – so even after the machines came back online after many hours, there are still problems with DNS pointing to the old IP number.
One of the most challenging issues for software user interface design is to provide a 2D surface to a 3D design space. SketchUp is some kind of sketching tool that seems to be full of ideas of how to solve this problem (at least it appears to be from the training videos).
I started working on a list of Internet hypes. Do you remember any Internet hypes? Please add yours to the Wiki page.
Michael Angeles (UrlGreyHot.com) has published a presentation called “Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap”. (Slides [4.6 MB PDF], Slides with notes [4.6 MB PDF]). It was presented at the Computers in Libraries 2004 conference in Washington:
My talk proposed a roadmap for providing weblog-related information services and suggested approaches for dealing with the problem of making weblog output of use to the organization. The idea is that the library can position itself to support individuals and communities of practice that express the need to use grass-roots tools for knowledge capture and dissemination such as weblogs and wikis. I talked briefly about the benefits of using weblogs for individual knowledge creation as opposed to using larger KM solutions selected from the top down, and the implications for IT of an information ecology with a diverse set of people using different technologies for publishing data in a distributed manner all over the intranet. In the near term I suggested first steps towards supporting knowledge creation with RSS. I suggested methods for providing access to aggregated blog output as next steps. And as a far off goal, I discussed the integration of output from sources such as blogs with other enterprise information using social software and social network analysis.
I ask myself if native English speakers ever wonder that it costs non-native speakers quite some effort to run an english weblog. Peter Baumgartner just posted some thoughts about this. He would prefer to write in German only because most of his readers seem to be German speaking.
I also run a german weblog that I do neglect in preference for my english weblog (but then I run a whole pack (attention: page takes long time to load!)). I don’t know who is reading my weblog regularily. So here are some reasons for me running an English weblog:
- I want to be open to non-german speakers (and I think English ist a must in the design community)
- I practice my English while writing (but I’d need a coach that corrects my mistakes)
- I have an easier time to incorporate blog posts from other blogs that happen to be mostly English (but then I have a hard time doing so with german blog posts)
I also wonder how English speakers characterize the language difficulties they see in English weblogs (and articles) of non-native speakers. I usually regard the quality of language a lot in German texts and I can’t meet my own quality measures in my English writing. It’s really a problem, but the only option I see to overcome it is to write even more (bad) English hoping that it will magically improve in the long run.
Update: There is a Topic-Exchange channel about multilingual blogging.
DB Research has issued a paper that claims software patents block innovation:
A growing number of R&D-intensive businesses realises that licencing out their IP (intellectual property) can constitute a substantial share or their revenues, which in turn encourages innovation efforts. Bearing this in mind, one could be tempted to consider ever stricter IP protection regimes to provide ever more stimuli for innovation.
This conclusion is wrong, however. A prime example is patents on software, which might at first sight be seen as a logical expansion of the classic technology patent. But creating software differs markedly from creating machinery and the like: MIT researchers Bessen and Maskin argue that innovation in software is both strongly sequential (one invention building on a previous one) and complementary (thriving on parallel approaches to the same problem), far more so than in other technology fields. In fact, they found empirical evidence that software patenting substitutes R&D activity, rather than encouraging it, and conclude: “For industries like software or computer, there is actually good reason to believe that imitation becomes a spur to innovation, while strong patents become an impediment” 2. In accordance with other academics, they strongly favour copyright over patent protection for software. Copyrighting provides both adequate leeway for sequential innovation and enough protection for marketable software products.
Update: Siegfried Hirsch posted a german translation of this passage.
What if you invent a web site creation and maintenance system that permits distributed control and centralized management of a web site? What if the physical implementation of the web site resides on a database maintained by a database administratorand the web site system permits a site administrator to construct the overall structure, design and style of the web site?
Well, you would be in violation with Patent #6,745,238 (which was filed in March 2000 by Oracle).
Welcome to the world of software patents.
Many independ music composers circumvent the labels completely. But publishing their music online is just one part. They need to become a hot tip also.
And there are many that help by running weblogs about this music and that link to the MP3 files and videos of these artists.
There are some examples collected in this MetaFilter post and its comments. There is also a long list at thom:weblog.
Groove Networks released version 3.0 of its application suite. Unfortunatly it only runs on Windows. Concerning the Mac version their FAQ says
Right now, the vast majority of our customer and prospect base is Windows based.
No wonder. When there is no version for Mac available there will be no Mac customers. But the issue is not to have a Mac version or not. The issue is that Groove is depending on an OS platform. But a collaboration system that’s supposed to feature a “easy invitation” the OS dependence is a show stopper. I can’t risk to use Groove even I would run on Windows myself. And I can’t imagine anyone in charge for e-learning initiatives at a university seriously could demand everybody to buy and work on a PC because of Groove.
In other words: Even if 95% of my university runs on PC, Groove would not be able to take advantage of that 90% because it would require university officials to bail out 5% of the university members. So Groove Networks decision not to address these 5% of the user base will result in a 100% loss. Unless they comit to an OS-independent suite it is pretty much a dead platform in education.
When I was in New York on 9/11/2001 I was stunned by the news program FoxNews. US people know that program: I didn’t at that time. The only US program we see here is CNN Europe (which is very different from the US as I learned that time).
Now it seems (some) Americans start to acutally learn what media are needed for and that making “good profit” in broadcasting doens’t mean having “good journalism”.
What I get from the Outfoxed DVD is, that there is definitively a problem with the news media in the US if the claims of these “journalists” are news to anyone.
I had a chance to see Farenheit 9/11. Most of the story was no news to me: there wasn’t so much possibilities left how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. I got some details that I didn’t have the chance to see or hear about (like the soldiers talking about what kind of music they put on their communication system during battle). But it is clear that Michael Moore is manipulative as well. So Moore is on the side of those saying “I’d rather be manipulative for the sake of good instead of giving the cake away without a fight to the bad guys!”. So he is trying to fight fire with fire? It really depends on if he can solidify the claims.
Yesterday Moore has published some web pages that try to back up the facts he claimed in the movie. It is extremely important for him to do this. It is OK for him to be happy about the success of his film, but I don’t think it is wise to claim victory already. But if the repubilcans decide to disqualify Moore instead of his claims they will just help his cause.
And by the way: Michael Moore started to run a weblog.
Stephanie Booth is reflecting on the experiment with writing a summary of a conference session as a group in SubEthaEdit (which allows users connected to one host to write together on a single text file; it looks like this -each user has a seperate color- and when finished the result can be published on a wiki). She writes:
Discipline is needed to separate the actual notes (ie, “what the conferencer said”) from the note-taker comments (ie, extra links, commentary, questions, remarks). This isn’t a big issue when a unique person is taking notes for his or her private use, but it becomes really important when more people are involved. I think that although we did do this to some extent, we were a bit sloppy about it.
What instantly popped into my head when reading this was the list of strategies for knowledge tool users I jotted down one day. SubEthaEdit is a pretty raw editor – so it may be hard to correlate the intentions. It’s like a jazz combo, where you need to listen closely and feel the right moment to give signals to your counterparts.
There is no point in trying to summarize the paper or being just adding more links. But is some value in contextualizing and reflecting a presentation. But the most important thing when taking notes is to try to connect it to own thinking.
Now, is a collaborative reflection by writing in a raw editor with rudimentary formatting really clarifying anything for each author? The results appear pretty unorganized and I feel that there is a lot to learn about this practice. And there will probably someone coming up with a tool that is optimized for this “group thinking by group writing” task. Without going further into details, some would argue that there is no such thing like “group thinking”.
I have some GMail invitations left. Comment if you want to have one (by clicking on the date above).
In response to the top ten obscure java projects list someone (who does not have an about page) replies with an obscure but useful list. I like this a lot – there aree so many gems hidden on the net that deserve more attention.
I remember when there was a discussion about “Notebook universities” in and around some universities in my area. They were supposed to conceptualize how they would utilize notebooks. These concepts were evaluated to decide which universities get funding for WLAN and Laptop equipment. If I remember correctly the concepts were usually not very inspired. Few people actually had ideas beyond a more mobile access to learning management systems a.s.o.
Now with that in mind read this report by Flemming Funch from the BlogTalk conference:
Now, those of you don’t go to tech conferences, or who haven’t recently, might not be aware of how it works nowadays. In a conference that has a significant number of bloggers present it would now be completely unheard of if there weren’t an open WiFi network in the conference room. Which means, essentially, you open your laptop and you’re on the net. Which means that about one out of two people there has a laptop running. The lucky people who manage to grab a seat at the two rows of tables at the front can actually sit at a desk and are most likely to be able to plug in. And now, this is suddenly a different kind of audience. They look up people’s URLs right away, they browse the scheduled program, reference materials, check the validity of what people are saying, and share maps for the suggested lunch locatioin. There’s a wiki with information about participants, which anybody can update. There’s an IRC chat channel, so one can talk to each other, both people who’re there, and those who watch the live feed at home. People on macs (more than 1/2) automatically see other people there on iChat, and can collaborate on writing notes in SubEthaEdit. If people are bored with the presentation, they check their e-mail or browse the web for totally unrelated things. A bunch of people blog live right there. I.e. they write about what they hear, and have often posted about a talk before it even is done. Based on the trackback mechanism, others can see which weblog postings have happened that refer to the conference, right away, and will most likely have read it shortly after it appears.
And there is another report from Suw Charman on this:
Initially, it struck me that multitasking whilst at a conference is really bad for your concentration. You simply cannot IRC, Rendevouz, check links, edit a wiki and SubEthaEdit whilst also listening to what were some very information-dense presentations. You cannot simultanously process so many conflicting streams of data.
What’s clear from watching Steph and the others, particulary prodigious note-taker Lee, is that that doesn’t matter. By collaborating in a SubEthaEdit note-taking session you become part of the hivemind, so if you miss something, someone else will fill in the gap before you even realise that you have missed something.
Can you see my notebook university?
There is a company trying to make a business out of provinding tools for conference attendees: CoVision Inc. offers a system called Council. What happens at BlogTalk is a bunch of tech savvy adopters that just need a URL to get started with a cascade of interactions.
It is important to note that weblogging seems as much about writing as it is about checking out things and trying to improve the effect of your effort. Last year there was critizism by some, that people stare at their screens intead of listening to the speakers. I thought this was missing the point. I’d suggest to rethink the role of the speaker as being the origin of these cascades. As Thomas Burg wrote there have been 1000 users trying to watch the live stream in the morning (with just 130 attendees). Many more may even just observe the topic exchange channel or the BlogTalk Wiki.
By the way: There is a technology preview of Rendezvous for Windows. But of course without applications that use this functionality this will not help much.
I am trying to get the best out of the net about BlogTalk. Currently there is the Q & A session of the first panel. I missed the presentations because of the streaming issues noted before.
See: BlogTalk topic exchange channel
Good coverage from
Dave Hyatt – the core developer for Apples WebCore that drives the HTML rendering engine of Safari – is leaking some details:
The new WebCore also supports HTML editing. You can specify editable regions in a page using the contenteditable attribute (which maps to a CSS property behind the scenes, so you can even set that property in your user stylesheets if you want to get crazy). …
The support for the contenteditable attribute was available in Internet Explorer for Windows since version 5.5. It was never part of the W3C HTML specification. So Mozilla developers rejected to implement it (here is an article by Tim Powell on that matter; also Scott Andrew comments).
Anyway, if Apple is going to adopt the contenteditable attribute this is going to revive the discussions. I think Apple decided for this step because their upcoming release of OS X has an application called DashBoard that offers little applications based on WebCore (so HTML+CSS+JavaScript). Editable content elements is more than useful for this.
There was a long discussion about TTW (“Through The Web” editing) and there have been numerous attempts to solve this issue. The adoption rate has been very low. I don’t know the reason for it, but judging from my own experiences with these applications most of them are clumsy and the resulting HTML code is ugly and hard to debug.
I understand the Mozilla developers insisting on the standards. But I’m also tired of waiting for features that everyone needs (it’s not a marquee tag!).
BlogTalk 2.0 is just about to begin. I regret I couldn’t make it this year to the conference although I would be happy to contribute to the discourse and meet Mark Bernstein and the Trotts.
So I was happy to see that there was a live stream prepared, but unfortunatly even the modem stream doesn’t really offer anything but sporadic image updates and dull audio fragments. Probably the organizers did not expect so many people trying to watch live.
It’s is not possible to understand what the speaker is saying. And – oh dear – most of the image also shows the audience and not the speaker with the slides (Why wouldn’t they just zoom in? I don’t get it. This is kind of useless anyway…):
And apparently the light circumstances in the room make it even hard for the people there to see the slides.
If the transmission quality is so bad I think it would be better to switch to an audio live stream and/or consider taking the video from the beamer directly. And if all this doesn’t help then there shouldn’t be a stream at all, so that the bandwidth can be used by attending bloggers to update their pages.
Update 1: The DSL stream now works (needed to remove the cache!) and it is better than the modem stream! But the audio is still really bad (and it’s coming from one speaker only – so is there a mono input encoded as stereo?)
Update 2: The inhouse sound system is striking! So maybe there will be better sound soon as well!
Update 3: The DSL stream is working much better on the second half of the day. But audio is still very bad.
Mark Bernstein posts a thumbnail of the way he takes notes on conferences. I was at last years BlogTalk trying to use my weblog to report. It didn’t really work: there was too much hassle fiddling with the software and not thinking about the words.
I am using Tinderbox for some time now and it has changed the way I blog: I try to get more out of my blogging in the long run: Tinderbox is about relations. Sporadically I try to link to other posts. Jeremy Cherfas was the one weblogger I remember at BlogTalk 1.0 who was interested in talking about Tinderbox.
Looking at Marks sample today I am determined to use Tinderbox at the next conference. I wonder how Mark is working with his map later.
I tried to use it at the university when listening to lectures of collegues, but my success was limited: there is some exercise required to take notes with such a tool, so that you end up with something useful when the session stops.
I sometimes stumble across a weblog that has a wonderful name. Do you know a weblog with a cool or funny name? Help me to collect these here.