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  • 1 min read

I used to have comments enabled on this blog until I got overrun by link spam. With comments my readers could post responses to my Blog musings. I've since turned of commenting on this site. What is link spam? Suddenly one day you realize that some of your Blog articles have a very long list of random comments attached to them, each including a link to some random site. Who does this? Link Spammers. Why do they do it? To drive up the page rank of PPR Sites. (PPR? Pills, Porn and Casinos). Here is one link spammers story.

  • 1 min read

Too much information!

It's one thing to be interested in blogs so you can read and learn and become aware of new ideas. But when it comes to joining into the discussions, watch out! No it's more than the well known problem of following discussion threads across blogs. It's just the ridiculous amount of stuff that gets written on any hot topic (like Folksonomies, for example.) If you want to contribute a half- intelligent idea to the debate, the number of links to follow and essays to read is very intimidating, and certainly the odds of uttering an original thought approach zero. So I'll stop here.

  • 1 min read

Tags, Meta Tags, Meta Data, Yada Yada

It is of course impossible to keep up with the avalanche of discussion about the topic of tags, folksonomies , tagonomies. David Weinberger points to a (beautifully designed : love those pictures!) essay on the topic from burningbird with lots of good quotes and pointers to other essays. Wow, a lot to read! In my mind the crucial thing about this new approach classification is that it gets around the achilles heel of the traditional approach of meta tagging or controlled vocabularies, which is, that most people just don 't do it. There are some special circumstances when a fixed list (or hierarchy) of categories or topics or tags will work for most people. But in the majority of cases, a fixed list of categories to apply to some item of information just causes frustration ("the category I am looking for isn't there") or confusion ("What does tag X even mean?") The end result is that information just gets mis-tagged or is left un-tagged. This is where so called folksonomies are so superior. Yes, often information will get misclassified. Whether this is so often as to render the whole system useless is an open question, which Technorati Tags, Del.icio.us and others will help us discover. p.s: One of the dangers to commenting on this discussion is that it is basically impossible to read all the essays and follow all the links and so you risk repeating what was already said. I believe that Clay Shirky has made essentially the same point. At least I am in good company.

  • 1 min read

Do Mac users have eye problems – Switcher’s Log – Part 2

It seems to me that all text and other Mac OS X user interface elements are a little bit bigger than their counterparts on the PC. Why is that? It seems like the same size screen fits less stuff when attached to a Mac OS X system than to a Win XP system. It's annoying - it makes you feel less productive. I am hunting for some tweak software to adjust this but I am starting to think it doesn't exist. Why?

  • 1 min read

[BlogBridge Tip] Activate your BlogBridge service account

(If you are not a BlogBridge you will not find this very interesting) We notice many of you have requested a BlogBridge account but not activated it. Here's the thing: once you ask for the account, you will receive an email with a link in it that you have to click. Until you click, your account will not be ready to us. (Our instructions need to be improved!) Why activate? Because until you do, the wonderful benefits of the BlogBridge service will not be available to you!

  • 1 min read

[BlogBridge Tip] Themes

Did you know that BlogBridge has 'themes' ? Well today there are only two, but soon there will be many. A Theme is just way to set all the fonts and colors and other UI settings in one fell swoop. For example, the "Big Theme" uses larger fonts making them easier to read. Enjoy!

  • 1 min read

Blogging, Journalism and Credibility – Harvard

I was lucky enough to be able to participate in a conference on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility at Harvard University. I am not myself an expert on this but found the discussions extremely instructive. And of course I see possibilities that our BlogBridge software might play a role in this space in the future. So I am vitally interested! Many many people have blogged in great detail on this conference, so I won't try to improve on that, except for this great little aha! tidbit : All the discussion in one way or another centered around the question of how blogging affect journalism and journalism might affect blogging. Will blogging be the CB radio of the 2000's, to be remembered as a curiosity of the times, gone and mostly forgotten? Or, will blogging instead render MSM (mainstream media) obsolete, putting even the New York Times out of business? The NYT? They are an institution. We all grew up with it. Everyone relies on it. They have a budget in the millions and revenues to match. Putting the NYT out of business is an outlandish exageration, that's what I think, and most of the room thought. So here was the aha!: Remember the Encyclopedia Britannica? Hmm. "They are an institution. We all grew up with it. Everyone relies on it. They have a budget in the millions and revenues to match." They weren't put away by blogs of course, but arguably by the internet writ large, the internet phenomenon. It could happen.

  • 1 min read

Day of reckoning coming for Microsoft?

You've heard this one before: there are more and more truly outstanding pieces of software coming out as Open Source. Everyone has heard about FireFox, right, the wonderful Web Browser from the Mozilla guys. I just came across news that Internet Explorer usage fell again for the 7th straight month, and it seems that FireFox is taking up the slack. Take a look at Thunderbird 1.0, another gem. Thunderbird is an email client and it's a very nice piece of work. You can see both of these apps here. I also recently read notice that there's a project starting to combine several Open Source projects into an email, calendaring, and address book behemoth. Might this challenge Microsoft Outlook? Sounds like an outlandish thought doesn't it? You might know that I am a big Microsoft fan. I've said that only they have the wherewithal to build, test and deliver massively complex software to huge user bases. Don't be fooled: simplicity is good, but good software is usually very complicated below the skin. My read is that with successful efforts like FireFox and Thunderbird things may be getting interesting for Microsoft. It will take years, but I think we are seeing some stormclouds on the horizon.