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  • 1 min read

Podcasting less important than “IT Conversations”

I was working out, listening an IT Conversations interview with Joel Spolsky. It was interesting and passed the time.

It's wonderful that Doug Kaye interviewed Joel Spolsky, and it's wonderful that Joel was fun to listen to, it was wonderful that this MP3 was available on the internet, and that I had iPodder to automatically download it to me iPod, and of course, my iPod is wonderful.

But I realized this: I had been doing this "by hand" before Podcasting or iPodder existed. The far bigger deal then and now is that IT Conversations are making these great recordings and making them available to me. Podcasting is just a neat new distribution medium.

For all the talk and excitement around podcasting, there should have been at least as much devoted to sites like IT Conversation, which as far as I know is the only one of its kind.

  • 2 min read

[OOPSLA] Where Wikis come from

I was lucky enough to meet and spend some time with Ward Cunninghamat OOPSLA this year. I also heard him present in a big hall. If you are a Wiki fan then you know that Ward is the one who invented the concept.

What seems to be a little less well known is how the idea evolved, where it came from. I am sure it's written up somewhere. but I thought I'd write down my own idiosynchratic understanding of the story.

Ward was involved in the early days of the Design Patterns movement, which seems to have it's own roots in the OOPSLA conference. So here's the story.

At some gathering it was noted that there ought to be a central repository of all the patterns that had been invented to date and a way for new ones to be added.

Ward kindly voluteered to build and maintain this repository. This was in the early days of the Web, and it seemed like the logical medium to do this in. So Ward set out to create a web site to be the repository. It still exists!

The problem was that no one really knew HTML at the time. So they would send Ward emails with ideas for Patterns to be added to the repository and Ward would then be editing those emails into HTML and then posting the pages. This didn 't scale too well.

Because the agreed upon form of a Pattern description was fairly consistent, Ward decided to write a script to process the text he received automatically into HTML. In fact he added some helpful formalisms like a '" for a bullet and so on. He asked people to follow this to make his life of adding the new pages to the repository easier. See where this is headed*?

Ward was able to run his script and process the properly formatted Pattern descriptions and turn them into HTML pages. This saved a lot of time maintaining the web site with all the patterns.

It occurred to Ward that he could automate this even further if he had a page on his site where someone could submit their nicely formatted text. The site would then automatically run the script, generate the html and store it in the right place.

And so proto-wiki was born. Of course this Wiki-markup is only one of the three (IMHO) seminal features of Wikis. The other two are: the total lack of access control and the ability to refer to something before it exists.More on those later.

So that's the story, as I heard it. I thought it might be of interest to you.

  • 1 min read

Red Sox Moon

In honor of the Red Sox , the moon will turn red tonight. It will start melting into the dark sky around 9.15. Between 10.23 and 11.44, it will be some shade of red, like Curt Schilling 's sock.

After that, with the Red Sox hopefully having achieved their mission, the moon will regain its composure and return to light up the sky, just as these players have lightened up our Fall.

Take a look: about due South, about 45 degrees up.

(from Ben Gomes-Casseres)

  • 1 min read

You have an MP3 and I have an IPod

You have an MP3 and I have an IPod. I want to listen to that MP3 while driving, walking, or working out. Anything that will facilitate and make it more convenient for me to achieve that is valuable. End of story.

Before anyone coined the term Podcasting , and before there were enclosures in RSS, this real-life problem existed and was seeking a solution. Substitute any portable player for IPod, substitute any digital media type for MP3, and you can see that this is a far broader problem than is being argued about and discussed.

The technical approach will not make people want my mp3 any less or more. And people who don't have a need to consume their digital media while disconnected from the net won't care. And certainly there may be more efficient approaches for getting the media from here to there (BitTorrent).

But I don't see how anyone can argue Podcasting is not a great step forward.

  • 1 min read

[OOPSLA] Watching the World Series in a mirror

Just got to Vancouver for OOPSLA. Just checked into my hotel room, and am doing email while watching baseball. Because of the way the room is set up, I am able to watch the game through a mirror.

You know what's weird? Runners seem to be running from home to third to second to first. Left field is right field. The world is upside down! Well actually leftside right.

Watching baseball through a mirror. Funny.

  • 1 min read

Best Red Sox Headline

Isn 't it sweet! Did you know you could get a big collection of front pages of newspapers at the Newseum?

Here 's by far the funniest I saw:

Late update -- Additional funny headlines:
**
" The Empire Strikes Out!"

"Yank This!"**

  • 3 min read

Some arcana about how BlogStarz! work

Believe me when I say that this will only be interesting to you if you are curious about the thinking about the Starz rating system that we've built into BlogBridge. If you don't have a burning curiosity, trust me, it will put you to sleep 🙂

The basic idea for the BlogStarz! mechanism is simple but the UI at this point is still confusing practically everyone. I will explain it here and describe changes we are planning.

The idea is that the BlogStarz! are generated by BlogBridge and are meant to be a summary rating that ought to match how interesting this particular blog would be to the user, based on several factors.

Currently 4 factors are implemented: your personal rating (thumbs up/down); how 'authorotative' this blog is (based on Technorati rating); how 'active' the blog is; and how many of your keywords hit in the blog. If you look in BlogBridge/Preferences/BlogStarz you'll see 4 sliders that allow you to customize the weight you'd like to put to each of those factors towards the overall one to 5 star rating.

Now, more on each of the factors. Thumbs Up/Down is today implemented inconsistently. While the menu says thumbs up and down, the corresponding indicator is the little icon in the top right of the blog's entry in the Channels pane. Clicking on it you can see that it goes through 3 states: grey box (for neutral), heart (for positive) and bomb (for negative.) Obviously these are temporary icons. In the future this will change to a 4 state icon in the shape of a thumb pointing up. It will go like this: greyed out, thumbs up, two thumbs up and three thumbs up. It will have the same effect - allowing you to give your own personal rating on the blog.

We can determine how authoritative a certain blog is via the Technorati service. For now, you have to get a free Technorati key from them by going to www.technorati.com and requesting an API key. And then in BlogBridge, under Preferences/Advanced you can enter the key (cut/paste but be careful of a trailing space which will throw it off.) Once you do that, BlogBridge will, in the background, ask Technorati how many inbound blog links there are in a certain blog, and use that number as an indication of how authoritative the blog is.

Activity of a blog is simply how many posts have been added since you started subscribing to it, divided by time. So a rough average of number of posts per day.

In the BlogBridge/Preferences/Highlights tab (should be called Keywords tab) you can enter a list of words and phrases which are important to you. BlogBridge will use those in many ways. It will highlight those words wherever it sees them. It will also count them and rate a blog higher if there are a lot of hits.

You can see that this is a pretty elaborate, and overly configurable scheme. That's because we are still trying to learn which of these factors (or others) are the best predictor of the subjective "how interesting will you find this blog" question, which the Starz are meant to convey.

  • 1 min read

Am I cranky today?

Here I go again, picking a out quote from a blogger who I really like and dissecting it. I don't know, maybe I am cranky. Robert Scoble, of Microsoft and Scobelizer fame, reports on a conversation he had with Kim Polese. All in all a fascinating bit, and I hope Kim realized that Scoble was going to blog the whole dang thing. Buried somewhere in the middle, Scoble says:

"It was not possible until there was friction free collaboration(blogs, RSS, Wikis, IRC chat), and a large number of open source components."

Maybe it's because I come from the world of collaboration, but I hate seeing people's fascination and even infatuation with theh new stuff that's no better than the old stuff, or sometimes way worse.

I won't pick on Wiki's again (although I still feel the same…), but how about IRC? I mean calling IRC 'friction free'? Puleeez. I would call it maximum friction! Anyway, just cranky I guess.

  • 1 min read

Talking points memo: who’s obsessed now?

I'm a huge fan of Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall's blog. In fact it's my exhibit #1 for people who ask me for a good blog to read (assuming they are "liberal." If they are not I point them to Instapundit.)

Anyway just a few words about Josh Marshall's complaint about how the spinmeisters positioned Kerry's comment about Cheney's daughter the other night. They called it "A crass, below-the-belt political strategy to attach the president's daughter."

Well, my reaction was the same as Mr. Marshall's - how can they call what Kerry said an attack? You can call it a lot of things but not an attack. But I was amused by this comment in Josh Marshall's blog:

"And 'below-the-belt'? Like 'cheap and tawdry', why are all the criticisms coded in sexual language?"

Hmm. Below the belt actually is a boxing term not sexual language at all. Now who is being cheap and tawdry! And by the way, in his last paragraph:

"It's a telling example of how the heavy-weights on the cable nets, the gilded and the gelded , …"

Heavy-weights is another boxing term, I think. But gilded and gelded? I don't know, the whole thing struck me as funny!